the last book I read

Sing Backwards And Weep by Mark Lanegan.

Just to set the scene, for those not in the know, Mark Lanegan was the lead singer of the band Screaming Trees, usually grouped under the grunge banner as they were a rock band based in Seattle in the early 1990s. He later had an extensive solo career and was a prolific collaborator in a variety of styles. But hey, that stuff is literally what the book is about, along with a bunch of other non-music-related stuff.

Lanegan was born in 1964 in Ellensburg, smack in the middle of Washington state. "Smack" is appropriate here too (and later, too, as it happens, in a different context) because his upbringing was harsh, his mother in particular favouring the spare-the-rod approach to child-rearing. As a consequence the young Lanegan jumped at the opportunity to go and live with his father after their marriage ended, but certain habits had become ingrained by this time, or perhaps were just hard-wired regardless of circumstances - a general distaste for being told what to do, an instinct for petty theft, an early drink habit (mirroring his father's) and a general misanthropy, and mistrust of other people.

Ellensburg was not the most promising place for a bright but wild and directionless teenager and the young Lanegan built up an impressive rap sheet of petty crime, mostly fuelled by drink and drugs. Salvation of a sort arrived in the larger-than-life figure of Van Conner, whose parents ran a TV/VCR store and gave Lanegan a job. Van and his older brother Lee had a band in which Van played the bass and Lee played the guitar and wrote most of the material; Lanegan was soon on board, initially as drummer, and, later, once his minimal drumming skills had become apparent, as lead singer. 

Screaming Trees signed to SST Records in the late 1980s and released a few albums to fairly lukewarm interest, before being signed to Epic at the start of the grunge boom and releasing their major-label debut Uncle Anaesthesia; everything up to and including Uncle Anaesthesia is now disowned by Lanegan, who only started making music he felt comfortable with when he insisted on being involved in the songwriting process and constructing songs that suited his vocal range. So in his mind Screaming Trees' legacy rests on their last two albums, 1993's Sweet Oblivion and 1996's Dust. And in this he is almost certainly correct. During this time he was constructing a body of solo work as well, starting with 1990's The Winding Sheet.

One of his collaborators on that album was a young Kurt Cobain, and the other thing that both Lanegan and Cobain were both doing around this time was really getting into heroin in a big way. By the time of Dust Cobain, like many of Lanegan's friends, was dead and Lanegan was a full-time junkie, cooking up crack in his squalid apartment, scouring the streets for heroin, getting arrested and beaten up on a regular basis. After enduring an utterly miserable time on Screaming Trees' late-1996 European tour in support of Dust, schlepping from city to city desperately trying to score enough gear to be able to function for the next show, more and more haggard and emaciated, Lanegan returned to the USA and eventually accepted an offer of a place in a rehab centre courtesy of, of all people, Courtney Love. The book ends with his lengthy stint in rehab and an offer of work and accommodation on his release from -  again, slightly bizarrely - Duff McKagan of Guns'n'Roses. 

The overwhelming sense you get from the sections of Sing Backwards And Weep devoted to unsparing descriptions of the business of heroin addiction (and a lot of the second half of the book is devoted to it) is how utterly, grindingly miserable it all is. I've never dabbled, but by jiminy the highs must be pretty amazing for people to endure the downsides. Those more well-versed in the nature of addiction than me would no doubt say, well, that's the whole point, isn't it; it doesn't start like that, but once you're in you can't get out, and I expect they're right. The other thing that comes across is what an ox-like constitution Lanegan must have had to survive what he subjected himself to, still less be able to function as a rock singer, even if only intermittently, but simultaneously how extraordinarily lucky he was to survive when so many of his friends - Cobain, Jeffrey Lee Pierce of The Gun Club, Layne Staley of Alice In Chains, Kristen Pfaff of Hole - did not. 

The book, despite being published in 2020, ends around the turn of the millennium when Lanegan was completing the process of getting clean, and therefore omits some of the really interesting bits of the second, post-Trees, half of his career, including his stint with Queens Of The Stone Age and his early-2000s albums Field Songs and Bubblegum which are my favourites of his solo work. Perhaps a second volume covering that period was intended, but what we got instead was a brief memoir of Lanegan's brush with death during the COVID-19 pandemic, Devil In A Coma, before his actual death at the age of 57 in 2022. 

It's quite interesting, having read the book, to revisit some of the video material available in the light of knowledge of when Lanegan was clean, or not: for instance compare the fit-looking, animated (by his own laconic standards anyway) Lanegan from this interview with Josh Homme in 2001 with the cadaverous, unshaven, black-eyed, emaciated junkie who you can almost smell through the screen from Screaming Trees' appearance on Later With Jools Holland in 1996. 

Anyway, the book is excellent, if unsparing and harrowing. The whole point, though, as interesting as the details of Lanegan's life are, is the music, and there is an exceptionally wide and varied body of work to get into, Lanegan's raspy baritone being just about the only common factor. Sweet Oblivion and Dust are essential, obviously, and the Last Words compilation of stuff that would have gone onto a subsequent Trees album had they been able to find a label to release it is quite interesting. Field Songs and Bubblegum are my favourites from his solo material (though I certainly haven't heard all of it), though some of the more electronic/industrial stuff on the later albums like Blues Funeral is interesting too. The collaborative stuff is too varied to do justice to here: I quite liked the first album he did with Isobel Campbell, but one was probably enough (they eventually did three) and I very much liked the Black Pudding album he did with guitarist Duke Garwood. I haven't listened in full to the pair of albums he did with Soulsavers, but the two cover versions I have heard off the second album (Broken) - Gene Clark's Some Misunderstanding and Will Oldham's You Will Miss Me When I Burn - are excellent. 

the last book I read

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn.

Ah, the south of France. Some nice coffee and a pain au chocolat on the verandah for breakfast, a stroll around the grounds before lunch, maybe some pâté and some crusty bread for lunch, a nice salad, a nice crisp bottle of white, lovely. You could while away pretty much a whole summer like that, with some minor variations, but that probably wouldn't make for a very interesting novel, but for the addition of one vital extra ingredient: EXTREME MENTAL DERANGEMENT.

The specific south of France location we're in, by the way, is the home of David and Eleanor Melrose and their five-year-old son Patrick. Eleanor's family have money (the house is theirs) and this has enabled David, despite qualifying as a doctor, never actually to have to practise as one. So what does he do all day? Good question: mainly it seems to be eating and drinking, occasionally entertaining visitors (which of course is really just a pretext for more eating and drinking) and devising ways of mentally tormenting and manipulating people. The people in question are mainly his wife Eleanor, who he occasionally asserts his power over by making her perform bizarre demeaning tasks like crawling around eating food off the floor, and his five-year-old son Patrick. Eleanor's situation is not helped by her being a raging alcoholic and half-cut all the time. 

On the day the book starts David is warming up with a bit of light sadism by killing some ants and considering terrorising their French maid by forcing her to have a conversation with him while carrying a heavy and awkward basket of laundry. He then moves on to inflicting pain on Patrick by picking him up by his ears, before later summoning him to his room for a beating, the reasons for which Patrick is unclear about, but which culminates in his being raped by his father. Refreshed by this brisk physical activity, David proceeds downstairs for some lunch and a bottle of wine from the cellar. 

Eleanor, meanwhile, has gone to meet some of the Melroses' weekend guests from the airport, picking up her friend Anne, an American ex-journalist who lives nearby with her philosopher husband Victor, on the way. Eleanor has supped deeply from the various reviving bottles of cognac she keeps in the car in a bid to quell the hangover and nausea after the previous night's indulgence, so by the time she gets to Anne's house she is absolutely smashed, and Anne persuades her to let her drive. Eventually everyone arrives safely back at the Melroses' - Eleanor, Victor, Anne and David's old friend Nicholas and his young, newly-acquired girlfriend Bridget.

Everyone arrives, gets on the booze (naturally) and retires to their rooms to freshen up and get ready for dinner, which follows a standard pattern of upper-middle-class bitchiness: firstly about people of their mutual acquaintance who aren't there and later, as the drink takes hold, about each other, probing known lines of weakness. David is the acknowledged master at this, picking on Nicholas' tendency to pick up young women who fall for his handsomeness and minor aristocratic title but then find him middle-aged and boring, Victor's consciousness of being not quite as posh as David and Nicholas, and Anne's liberal views that mark her as an outlier within the group. 

Patrick, meanwhile, waits on the stairs, having tried vainly to attract his mother's attention after falling down and breaking a glass earlier. Often required to construct a rich internal fantasy life to fill the periods of complete neglect by his parents and the lack of anyone of his own age to associate with, he dreams of escape and revenging himself on those who have wronged him.

Context is all with a book like this, on the face of it an oddly structured one where the pivotal event - the rape of a small child by his father - happens almost exactly at the halfway point, and where the end of the book, where some climactic event might be expected to occur, is occupied by a dinner party where some entertaining verbal sparring happens and two of the less insufferable attendees decide to leave early. It all makes a bit more sense when you understand that this is the first in a series of novels featuring the central character of Patrick Melrose (well, central over the course of the series, presumably; he's quite a peripheral character here) and, moreover, that the events depicted are closely based on the author's own life - including, unfortunately for him, the sexual abuse bits. 

It's quite a short book (less than 200 pages, large, widely-spaced text) in which St Aubyn manages to set up a cast of characters, round them out concisely so we feel as if we know who they are, and mercilessly skewer their shortcomings and pretensions (and, in David's case, their borderline-psychopathic monstrousness). Aside from Patrick, who is only five and therefore largely blameless (although you do get a sense of some stored-up Issues that might be troublesome in later life), Anne is about the only vaguely likable character. In an odd way I thought it was reminiscent of Penelope Fitzgerald in the sort of literary TARDIS effect of rich characterisation crammed into a small number of words and pages, though with added bumrape of course.

Posh people, without anything pressing to occupy their time like a need to earn a living, mooching around drinking like fish and being Just Awful is a possible recipe for a story that's just annoying and hard to care about, and the writing has to be very good to avoid all of that happening. Luckily it is, and the reader's knowledge that Patrick is stuck in the middle of all of this, soaking it up and filing it all away for later, tethers the story to something the reader might actually care about.

The original Patrick Melrose novels were published as a trilogy between 1992 and 1994; St Aubyn later revisited the series and wrote another two several years later. The whole five-novel series was adapted for television in 2018, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the adult Patrick Melrose. I'm not going to make any rash promises here and now about reading all of the books, but I'll certainly be seeking out the next one (Bad News).

the second-last book I read

Random Acts Of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack.

Lola Hart is a pretty regular twelve-year-old, worried about all the usual things: school, her Mum and Dad, her younger sister Cheryl (known to all as Boob), troublesome feelings, you know, down there. Oh, and the incipient total collapse of society, as well. 

Lola attends a private school in New York City, but her parents aren't exactly rich, and their financial position isn't especially secure - her father works as a screenwriter trying to sell scripts to Hollywood directors and her mother has recently been laid off from a teaching post and is trying to find another one. But there is civil unrest both in Los Angeles where Lola's Dad is trying to sell his scripts and closer to home in New York, and no-one's bothered about buying film scripts.

So Lola's Dad gets a fairly menial job in a bookstore in New York, under the borderline psychopathic Mister Mossbacher, and Lola's Mum gets some occasional freelance editing and proofreading work, but it's not enough to pay the school fees and the rent. So the family ups and moves from their nice suburban residence to a smaller apartment in the less desirable surroundings of the Lower East Side, and by less desirable I mean nearer to the bits of the city that are literally on fire with roving street gangs attacking passers-by and making castanets out of their testicles already.

You can't stay indoors the whole time, though, and Lola ventures out and meets some of the other residents of the area, including some girls of roughly her own age, in particular African-American Iz and her friends Jude and Weezie. Iz seems to have an actual home and at least one parent, but Jude and Weezie seem to exist on the edge of "normal" society and straddle the boundary between it and the lawless areas, places Lola is afraid but also slightly excited to venture into. Iz and Lola's friendship develops into a tentative romance with a bit of innocent(ish) fumbling during sleepovers, and some friction develops with Jude and Weezie about their group expanding to admit a fourth member; eventually Weezie and Lola have a full-blown fight and Lola discovers a previously-unimagined talent for physical violence.

Society continues to crumble, Presidents come on the TV to issue calming advice, or to announce further military crackdowns in troubled areas, and are assassinated on a monthly schedule. Dad, worked to exhaustion at the bookshop by Mister Mossbacher, quietly has a heart attack and dies at the kitchen table, and Boob goes to live with her aunt in California, itself troubled by violence but probably safer than New York. Lola and her group of friends ease into a routine of occasional petty crime, usually pickpocketing on the subway, and some of the proceeds help keep Lola and her Mum's heads above water, although it's debatable how much Mum knows about any of it given the size of her prescription tranquiliser habit.

With Dad dead and Mum unable to work Lola has to decide what she's going to do to survive, which basically boils own to a choice of crimes: underage prostitution or violence. Lola, having already displayed an aptitude for it, chooses violence and decides to get some practice in by brutalising Mister Mossbacher in the stairwell of his apartment block with a baseball bat. It turns out that this puts her beyond the pale even with Iz and her group of friends, and Lola closes the narrative by reflecting on the completion of her journey to the dark side. 

The whole of Random Acts Of Senseless Violence is presented as entries in Lola's diary, and part of the story, as well as the stuff explicitly described in the text, is the gradual transition (over just short of five months) from little-girl excitement about toys and her new bedroom to a dark manifesto of her violent intentions delivered in a rich street slang (images below are extracts from the first and last pages of the book, just to illustrate the point). This sort of stretchy future-English carries echoes of Nadsat from A Clockwork Orange, and of Riddley Walker and Feersum Endjinn from this list.

As with a few other books on this list (Lanark, True Grit, Stoner and The Queen's Gambit plus maybe others I haven't spotted) Random Acts Of Senseless Violence carries a foreword by another author on this list, in this case multiple featuree William Gibson, who recommends it regularly and whose quote you can see on the front cover (though it's not from the foreword). 

My paperback edition is another book in the excellent Gollancz SF Masterworks series, in common with quite a few other books on this list (most recently Grass); it's also another where you might question what the "science fiction" categorisation even means: no death rays or spaceships here, nor even anything much resembling the internet. It's probably not quite what I expected from reading the recommendations and the cover blurb but I enjoyed it very much; in common with a few other people I do think the title is ill-chosen, misleading (i.e. in terms of the actual content) and probably repels quite a few potential readers who would otherwise read and enjoy it. 

the third-last book I read

Longitude by Dava Sobel.

I'll tell you what I hate, right - there you are, an early-18th-century ship's captain and supposedly competent navigator, leading a crew of experienced seamen (no, stop it) and supposedly competent navigators, confidently under full sail returning from Gibraltar to London; you've just sat back and lit up a pipe when the entire fleet dashes itself to pieces on some rocks you didn't even know were there. A bit embarrassing for you, or at least it would be if you hadn't been drowned along with a couple of thousand of your men, or, possibly, depending on which version of the legend you believe, nearly drowned, washed up on a remote shore and then promptly murdered for some of the shiny trinkets on your person.

Anyway, this was far from an isolated incident and by the early 18th century the Navy and various other bodies overseeing military and commercial sea travel were getting pretty sick of it. The principal problem they identified was an inability to determine longitude with an acceptable degree of accuracy - the sort of degree of accuracy that prevents you accidentally crashing into a collection of islands and jagged bits of rock several miles wide. 

This is not the place for a detailed lecture on maritime navigation, nor do I have the expertise or inclination to deliver one, but the main point is that to know your position on the earth's surface you need two co-ordinates, latitude and longitude; latitude is pretty easy to calculate and longitude is surprisingly hard in comparison. Many methods were used over the years, from the scientifically-sound but unbelievably complicated in practice such as observing the transits of the various satellites of Jupiter, to the simpler but also bonkers such as stabbing a dog and then dipping the knife in some magic powder at set intervals. 

The simplest solution is just to have two clocks, one set to the time of whatever fixed point you're using as a meridian (nowadays this would be Greenwich but there have been a a few rival ones in use over the centuries, notably Paris) and one set to whatever the local time is at your location. It is a simple matter to then convert this time difference into a longitude. The bit that is far from simple is to produce a clock that is accurate enough for a long enough period of time and in a variety of challenging conditions - wide fluctuations in temperature and humidity, constant unpredictable motion, occasionally being eaten by a giant squid - something that up to the 18th century had been beyond even the most skilful clockmakers.

But *voice-over-guy voice* into this world of approximate timekeeping one man must walk alone, and that man's name is ... John Fashanu. No, wait *checks notes* John Harrison. A carpenter rather than a clockmaker by trade, he dabbles with clocks in his spare time, eventually moving on to making them, originally with the workings being made primarily of wood. Intrigued by the public challenge issued by the Longitude Board (and perhaps a bit by the generous financial reward for a workable solution), he starts working on clocks specifically designed to work at sea, first some large and spectacular steampunk-looking beasts and then, eventually, after more than twenty years of work, the pocket-watch-sized H4, in the process of all this work casually inventing a whole host of technological and engineering innovations like the bimetallic strip. 

Despite H4 and some of its larger predecessors performing well in excess of the accuracy requirements set out by the Board of Longitude, Harrison and his son William never received the full sum promised by the terms of the challenge - this is partly down to Harrison's own perfectionism and the great length of time it took to produce the prototypes, but also perhaps some skullduggery by those with something to gain from promoting the other astronomical methods, in particular Harrison's nemesis and Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne. 

Of course a good story requires heroes and villains, and Sobel makes no secret of Harrison being the hero here, plucky no-nonsense Northern lad pitted against the pompous stuffed shirts at Navigation Central and coming out on top thanks to pluck and grit. The role of villain is played by Nevil Maskelyne (more like Evil Maskelyne, amirite), wielding his royally-appointed power to promote his own impractical methods and doing his best to discredit the results of the marine chronometer tests and even "accidentally" dropping bits of the mechanism on the floor in the course of "inspecting" them. 

I daresay Maskelyne was a more nuanced character than the one portrayed here, but a bit of a broad-brush approach is inevitable in a popular science book, and moreover a pretty short one - my Harper Perennial paperback edition is a large-print 175 pages with quite a lot of chapter breaks. I suppose I'd have preferred a bit more meat on the bones, as it's an interesting story, but it gets the job done pretty effectively. Longitude won several science and general non-fiction awards when it was published in 1996, and was made into a TV series starring lots of famous names including Michael Gambon as Harrison, where I'd imagine further liberties were taken with historical facts in order to provide a bit of narrative drive. 

the fourth-last book I read

Gabriel's Moon by William Boyd.

Gabriel Dax has his life pretty well-worked-out: a reasonably lucrative career as a writer of travel-related books which allows him to just swan off to places that interest him, as long as he can persuade his publisher that there's a book in it, a nice easy-going relationship with his girlfriend Lorraine based mainly around vigorous and mutually-fulfilling sex with refreshingly few demands for commitment being made, and a cordial but arm's-length relationship with his older brother Sefton involving occasional visits to Sefton's family home for Sunday lunch and equally occasional errands run by Gabriel on Sefton's behalf, often coinciding with one of Gabriel's research trips, and usually involving the delivery and handover of some seemingly innocuous package to some seemingly random individual. 

The only cloud on Gabriel's horizon is his troublesome insomnia, something that seems to be related to a traumatic event in his early childhood: the death of his mother in a house fire, a fire which Gabriel himself - six years old at the time - barely escaped (Sefton was safely off at boarding school at the time). 

As part of one of his research trips Gabriel finds himself in Léopoldville, the Belgian colonial capital of Congo (nowadays Kinshasa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo respectively). While he is there (in mid-1960) he reconnects with an old university friend who is now working in the newly-established post-colonial government and who offers him an intriguing opportunity: interview the new Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. Gabriel does this and comes away with some tapes featuring some exclusive material including some intriguing speculation from Lumumba himself about shady foreign influences who want him dead, even to the extent of naming names - none of which mean anything much to Gabriel. 

On his return to England, Gabriel delivers a draft article to a newspaper, expecting to be in possession of a lucrative scoop, but finds that the piece gets spiked for ill-defined reasons. Something to do with sensitive material in the article, something to do also with the coup that's happened since and controversially removed Lumumba from office. Whatever, the article isn't getting published and Gabriel isn't getting paid. 

Perhaps, as a result of this, Gabriel is slightly more receptive to an offer of alternative earnings than he might otherwise be, or perhaps it's just something about Faith Green, who approaches him a few days later with a revelation - she was on the flight back from Léopoldville with him and seems very well-informed about Congolese politics - and an offer: go to Spain, buy a pencil sketch from a Spanish artist and deliver it to an agreed contact, get paid, job done. Faith makes no secret of knowing Sefton, nor of them both working for some murky outpost of the Foreign Office, and of this "errand" being of the same variety that Gabriel has already been doing without giving it much thought.

Gabriel, after some token resistance, agrees and carries out the mission, which he finds interesting and stimulating and seems to have gone well. He decides to stay on in Spain for a few days and meets a young American girl, strikes up a tentative romance and agrees to transport a parcel for her to an address in Cambridge, and it's only when he's at the airport that an instinct makes him look inside the parcel and find a couple of packets of heroin. 

Having dodged - possibly literally - a bullet there Gabriel decides the old espionage game is too dangerous and attempts to settle back into his old life, while also trying to exorcise some of the ghosts of his past (and cure his insomnia) by doing some digging into the circumstances of the fire that killed his mother. But his new life won't be shrugged off that easily. Firstly it becomes apparent that the CIA have taken an interest in him and may have been responsible for the attempt to frame him with the heroin; this interest seems to be linked to the Lumumba tapes and what they may reveal about US involvement with the coup that removed Lumumba and installed Joseph Mobutu in his place. Secondly, Faith Green would like another drawing acquired from the Spanish artist and delivered, and Gabriel seems oddly unable to say no to her. Is it because he wants to get her into bed? Well, partly, yes. Anyway, Gabriel carries out the mission with similar results to the last one - the drawing is acquired and delivered to its recipient, Kit Caldwell, in Cádiz. But this time the drawing comes with information: Caldwell is a Russian spy and planning to defect, taking all he knows with him. Gabriel is preparing to return home, his mission complete, when he happens to call at Faith's hotel and see her in conversation with his brother Sefton. Realising he's been manipulated, he decides in a fit of pique to tip off Caldwell and facilitate his defection before returning home. 

His fascination with Faith Green having by this time curdled into mild obsession, he employs an acquaintance to tail her and find out where she lives. Not only does he do this but he finds out that she is currently taking a holiday in Southwold, so Gabriel, having nothing better to do, decides to make his way there for some light stalking. Tracking her down by spotting her distinctive Mercedes, he stakes out the house where she is staying, apparently with another man, and spies on her for a few days before she corners him in a pub and demands to know what he's up to. Taking a commendably forgiving view of his antics, she then brings him back to the house and allows him to stay the night - no funny business, just full sex. The gentleman friend is away for a few days, fortunately. 

Once everyone has returned to London, Faith is back in touch with another mission, this time a bit more dangerous, over behind the Iron Curtain, in Warsaw, and once again involving Caldwell, who, it turns out, is at least a double agent, and possibly a triple or even quintuple one. Gabriel demands that this time if he's going to be doing proper grown-up spying that he be issued with a gun and the means to conceal it while travelling, which Faith and her organisation (some murky offshoot of MI6, but - hey - aren't they all) agree to surprisingly readily. And just as well, it turns out, because after Gabriel decides to spurn the standard plane home and cover his tracks by getting a ferry from Hamburg instead, he is confronted by the CIA guy who's been on his tail since Gabriel's first trip to Spain and is keen to tidy up a few, hem hem, loose ends. Gabriel is obliged to pop a cap in his ass and tip his body overboard into the North Sea, thus completing his journey from Just Some Guy to International Superspy And Unstoppable Killing Machine. 

I glossed over a few bits of plot there, but as you can see there's still a lot of it, especially in a book of only (in my Penguin paperback edition) 263 pages. The main trunk of the plot is obviously the spying stuff and some of the peripheral stuff like Gabriel's childhood trauma (i.e. the house fire), his investigation of it and his visits to a psychoanalyst to explore it seem a bit inconsequential in comparison. Some of this can be accounted for when you realise that this is the first book of a trilogy featuring the same central character (The Predicament and Cold Sunset are the other two) - maybe some of these themes are being developed in order to be resolved in later books. 

This is (it hardly needs to be said) a book in Boyd's espionage thriller genre which also includes Restless and Waiting For Sunrise, and actually Gabriel's character arc isn't that different from Lysander Rief's in Waiting For Sunrise - young man with odd psychological affliction (insomnia here, anorgasmia there) drawn into murky activities which he gradually realises he has a natural aptitude for. As all of Boyd's books, regardless of theme, are it's relentlessly readable, Gabriel is an engaging central character and Faith is an intriguing and enigmatic foil for him who we want to know more about. There's so much going on in a relatively short space of time that some of it feels a bit breathless, though with this sort of book that's not a bad thing as it scoots the reader past some of the more glaring plot implausibilities without having too much time to dwell on them. 

Oddly, the other book it put me in mind of was Dick Francis' For Kicks, the first book of his I ever read back when I was a teenager and also featuring a young man thrown into undercover activity (to expose a horse-related crime ring in this case - pretty much the plot of every Dick Francis book, to be fair), discovering a natural talent for it and transitioning into it as a full-time job. Gabriel's Moon is also the second book on this list to feature Patrice Lumumba and the early days of Congolese independence as a sub-plot, the first being The Poisonwood Bible. There is also a more tenuous link with Brazzaville Beach, still my favourite Boyd of all, in that Brazzaville, capital of the smaller neighbouring state of Republic of the Congo, sits just a couple of miles across the Congo river from Léopoldville/Kinshasa. 

dropping a satisfying backlog

The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed the slightly non-standard title of the last post and wondered: what's going on there then? Well, it's a combination of things: firstly I've just been on holiday for a week and had a really good stint of book-reading, helped by all three kids now being at an age where they're keen to do the same (and by my keen coaching of all of them over the years to be voracious readers, one of my proudest achievements as a parent), secondly all the books I read on holiday were fairly short (in the 200-ish-pages range), and thirdly I finished Under The Banner Of Heaven a day or two before we left and didn't have time to blog it at the time. 

If you're wondering, yes, this is - thanks to the combination of factors described above - the first time that modified title has ever included the word "fifth". A quick scan suggests quite a few occurrences of "second", probably also mostly holiday reading but plausibly occasionally just laxness at getting round to writing a review. I think I've got as far as "third" three times, all associated with holidays significant enough that I can remember them without having to check: 

• our Austrian holiday in September 2008 (relevant title was Norwegian Wood, other two were The Promise Of Happiness and A Small Death In Lisbon)
• our Turkish holiday in October 2010 (relevant title was Falling Man, other two were The Girl Who Played With Fire and Chatterton)
• our honeymoon in Canada in July 2011, here we scaled the (until now) unique heights of "fourth" as well (relevant title was The Little Friend, other three were Hotel Du Lac, The Tortilla Curtain and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest)

the fifth-last book I read

Under The Banner Of Heaven by Jon Krakauer.

Imagine, if you will, the set of circumstances that would have led you, yourself a husband and father, to enter the house of a family personally known to you and to brutally murder a young woman (your sister-in-law) and her one-year-old daughter by cutting their throats with a razor-sharp kitchen knife. And not in an uncontrollable crime-of-passion kind of way, either - slowly, even apologetically, just doing what must be done. 

I would hope, unless you are literally some sort of professional assassin or psychopath, that you would find it difficult to imagine what set of circumstances would motivate you to such a course of action, and you might throw your hands up and say, well, I would literally have to have LOST MY FREAKIN' MIND in some way. 

Ron and Dan Lafferty had a slightly different explanation for carrying out the crime described above, and the background underlying that motivation, and a more detailed description of the crime and its aftermath, are the primary subjects of this book.

At this point we need, as the book does at about the same point in its narrative, to do a deep dive into the origins of the Mormon religion or, more properly, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. No disrespect but you can see why people use the shorter form, which derives from the name of a key prophet and supposed author of some of the religion's early sacred texts which were later dictated to Joseph Smith in the 1820s. 

As I've said elsewhere, Mormonism provides a fascinating insight into how religions develop, occupying as it does a sort of sweet spot between the two-thousand-years-ago respectability of mainstream Christianity and the fairly-obviously-loony (to most, anyway) ultra-modern stuff like Scientology. One of the obvious things that Mormonism and Scientology have in common is a foundational figure (Joseph Smith and L Ron Hubbard respectively) claiming a series of personal revelations via a sort of hotline to God, and in possession of enough personal magnetism and charisma to persuade an early group of adherents of the truth of his revelations.

I'm very conscious of not wanting to re-mount an old hobby-horse here in regard to religion (though my views on it have changed very little from when I used to post about it more frequently), but I think the quote generally attributed to physicist Steven Weinberg is relevant here: 

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

One of the things it also takes, or, to put it another way, one of the things a religion requires to really take hold, is a foundational figure with enough charisma and persuasiveness to tip people past their normal self-imposed moral limits and do stuff like the Mountain Meadows Massacre and, subsequently, use it as a means of cementing a tribal them-against-us mentality among the converted. 

The other thing Joseph Smith brought to the table in the early days of Mormonism was an intense desire for young women and a general inability to keep it in his britches. In an entirely coincidental and unrelated development, around this time Smith received some further divine revelations including an unequivocal thumbs-up for the practice of polygamy; Smith himself selflessly volunteered to set an example in this regard and is generally reckoned to have had between 30 and 40 wives by the time of his death in 1844. 

The polygamy business, which the mainstream Mormon church keeps trying to disavow and distance itself from, and various fundamentalist Mormon sects (including the one the Lafferty brothers were adherents of) keep reviving, is probably the main thing that keeps Mormonism a fringe concern except in certain hot-spots in the USA, the other being the inherent ludicrousness of the foundational texts and their method of being brought into being. Now as a non-judgmental utilitarian liberal type you'd have to say well, look there's nothing actually wrong with polyamory or polygamy per se if that's what everyone involved wants, everyone involved has a clear picture of what's going on and no-one's getting hurt, unless of course that's specifically what they want. The trouble with the Mormon version is that it's tied up with a bunch of other much less palatable stuff, firstly a fairly grim set of attitudes to women in general and secondly a disturbing penchant for older men marrying extremely young girls. 

A case in point - Warren Jeffs features as a fairly peripheral character in Under The Banner Of Heaven, having only recently (on the book's publication in 2003) become the head of the FLDS, the largest of the fundamentalist polygamy-endorsing splinter groups. Only a year or so later, in 2004, a series of lurid allegations started to emerge and (and I'm skipping quite a lot of detail here) Jeffs is currently in prison in Texas serving a life sentence for a series of sex abuse charges against underage girls.

Back to the Lafferty case, though - once the law caught up with the Lafferty brothers a key consideration in the ensuing trial was this: could they plead insanity? Devoid of any other context you would think there'd be a strong argument: hearing voices in your head telling you to go and off and murder your sister-in-law (Brenda Lafferty was married to Ron & Dan's younger brother Allen) for no actual real-life crime other than being a bit more feisty and outspoken than your religious upbringing would have liked her to be, and her daughter for no real-life reason whatsoever (what possible reason could there be, after all). 

Once you yoke that imaginary friend telling you to KILL stuff to an actual religion, it all gets a bit more tricky, though; after all, while most people don't slit anyone's throat as a result many religions claim some or all of their adherents have a personal hotline to God down which messages may occasionally be transmitted, and we don't say all religious adherents are by definition insane, do we? Hahahahaha my goodness no. 

The slightly paradoxical effect of this special pleading for religion is that as a result Ron & Dan Lafferty received harsher sentences than they would have if their lawyers had been able to make an insanity plea stick, something neither brother seemed especially bothered about, both taking the view that they'd done their appointed task and that some misguided real-world punishment by Godless heathens was an inconsequential price to pay in comparison with an eternity at God's right hand with Joseph Smith beaming down approvingly while they marry as many twelve-year-olds as they liked.

Jon Krakauer is probably best known for his book Into Thin Air (mentioned here), which recounts his involvement in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. Under The Banner Of Heaven can't hope to be anywhere near as viscerally thrilling as that, and some of the deep dive into the early days of Mormonism, as essential as it is, meanders a bit when what the reader really wants is to know what made the Laffertys tick and why they did the unthinkable things they did. Of course none of that is really forthcoming, their motivations being bafflingly opaque right to the end; none of that is the author's fault of course. 

Speaking of bafflingly opaque motivations, Krakauer's earlier book Into The Wild was filmed in 2007 and tells the true story of the last days of Chris McCandless. Despite being much less obvious material Under The Banner Of Heaven was also adapted into a loosely-fictionalised TV mini-series in 2022.

oh for fox sake

I'd started writing the previous post a few days before I eventually hit the "publish" button, but if I'd been paying more attention when I eventually did so I'd have noticed that there were goings-on at the Open Championship on that day that warranted my attention, in particular the rounds of Lucas Herbert and Sam Burns, completed within about half an hour of each other on Friday afternoon.

There is something to be said for a pause for reflection before steaming in with the old size nines and whacking out a blog post, though, because if I'd done one there and then, or tacked that stuff onto the end of the other post, I'd have found myself having to do another one only a day or so later when eventual champion Ryan Fox posted his own round of 62 on Saturday. 

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Branden Grace	Open	2017	third	tied 6th	Jordan Spieth
Rickie Fowler	US Open	2023	first	tied 5th	Wyndham Clark
Xander Schauffele	US Open	2023	first	tied 10th	Wyndham Clark
Xander Schauffele	USPGA	2024	first	WON	Xander Schauffele
Shane Lowry	USPGA	2024	third	tied 6th	Xander Schauffele
Lucas Herbert	Open	2026	second	tied 6th	Ryan Fox
Sam Burns	Open	2026	second	3rd	Ryan Fox
Ryan Fox	Open	2026	third	WON	Ryan Fox

A few supplementary notes: the three 62s were achieved in three different ways: Herbert had a five-footer for a par and a 61 which he missed, Burns holed out from a bunker for a birdie, and Fox had a putt from 50 feet or so for a birdie and a 61 which he missed but knocked in the subsequent one for a par. Fox's last-hole birdie for victory the following day means that two of the eight 62s have resulted in a victory (the other being Xander Schauffele at the USPGA in 2024); that win ratio of 25% is very slightly higher than the equivalent number for the old table of 63s, as that yielded 7 wins out of 31, i.e. 22.58%.