the last book I read

Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith. 

Meet Tom Ripley, Oh, wait, we've met him before, four times in fact.

And what is Tom up to these days? Oh, well, the usual stuff - a bit of facilitating of the sale of forged art, a few odd jobs for his underworld contact Reeves Minot, but mainly just hanging out at Belle Ombre, his rambling country house just south of Paris, with his lovely and uncurious wife Héloïse, bimbling down to the local bar-tabac occasionally for a demi-pression, and keeping an eye out for anyone who might be in the vicinity of the village asking awkward questions about the series of mysterious disappearances and deaths that have happened in Tom's vicinity over the years. 

And so when Tom gets wind of an American couple, David and Janice Pritchard, who've recently rented a house in the area, his crime-dar starts pinging. What do they want? What are they up to? The sub-text here, obvious to anyone who's read the preceding four Ripley novels, is that if they reach a point of unacceptable awkwardness Ripley might be forced to do a bit of the old murdering, something he only does when absolutely necessary but is extremely efficient at.

David Pritchard soon makes contact with Ripley and makes it pretty clear that he is indeed here because of Ripley, and alludes to some contact with some people on the periphery of the complex web of deceit associated with the art forgery scam, in particular the wife of Thomas Murchison, the art collector who Ripley was unfortunately obliged to bludgeon to death with a bottle of vintage wine lest he blow the whole scheme wide open. Murchison is the victim Ripley is most concerned about, as he dumped his body in a canal only a few miles up the road. 

Héloïse, having nothing as tedious as earning a living to do to occupy her time, decides to swan off to Morocco for a few weeks, and Tom joins her for the first part of the trip, only to find, somewhat bizarrely, that Pritchard has followed them, seemingly just with the intention of causing mischief. Tom is not really a man to be trifled with like this and attempts to warn Pritchard off by beating him up.

Ripley returns to France, with Héloïse still exploring Morocco with a friend, and decides to take advantage of her absence by attending to the Pritchard situation. And not before time, as Pritchard has now chartered a boat and is dragging the local canals looking for Murchison. Tom enlists the help of one of his English art forgery sidekicks, Ed Banbury, who travels out to the house to assist. Shortly after this a wet rope-tied canvas package is left at the gates of Tom's house, and when he and Ed examine it it turns out to be mainly human bones with a few gobbets of jellified flesh still attached. Ripley identifies it as Murchison by a distinctive ring, which he pockets, and then attends to the business of disposing of the remains. And what better way to dispose of them than by sneaking round to the Pritchards' house in the dead of night and dropping the bundle into the large pond in their front garden?

It's a pretty simple plan, but it pays off in ways Ripley couldn't have foreseen when the Pritchards, alerted by the big SPLOSH from the front garden, come outside, try to hook whatever's been dropped into the pond, and in the process fall in and drown. 

Pretty convenient for Tom, non? He's not completely in the clear, though, as Pritchard had informed the police that he'd deposited a package at Tom's house. Luckily, since no-one else (apart from Ed, who's saying nothing) saw it, Tom can just affect a baffled ignorance, ply the local flics with a glass of vin rouge when they come round asking questions, do some mutual tutting about crazy foreigners with their crazy ways, and then send them on their way. 

And so, as we knew he would be, Tom is in the clear, with, as before, a faint whiff of suspicion around him but nothing concrete. Héloïse, by now returned from Morocco, is a bit vexed at the police coming to her house but is also very disinclined to ask too many questions of Tom and very happy to resume their comfortable life. 

This is the fifth and last book in the Ripley series, published in 1991; it's also the last novel published during Patricia Highsmith's lifetime (she died in 1995 and one further novel was published posthumously). What I would say about the series is that the first three books are much better than the last two, and there's a suspicion that she returned to the series the last two times out of either a shortage of other creative ideas or a knowledge that Ripley books were sure to sell. This is never less than entertaining, though, and it's fun just to spend time in Tom's company in the knowledge that he will never suffer harm or consequences for his actions, still less experience any regret or remorse as a result of them. All of those actions in this book are historical ones, specifically the murder of Thomas Murchison in Ripley Under Ground; while Tom might be somewhat morally culpable for the deaths of the Pritchards no-one would expect a charge of murder to stick. 

A few obvious criticisms: Pritchard's motivations are never satisfactorily explained, Ed Banbury seems remarkably sanguine about getting directly involved in the direct consequences of Tom's murderous activities (actual human remains and all), and the Pritchards' manner of death is wholly implausible (how could they both fall in? how deep can a garden pond be?). But it all bowls along very entertainingly, even when not very much is happening (which is most of the time).

This completes my reading of the Ripley series, over the course of almost exactly fifteen years since the first book. As mentioned here, that means it joins a select group of novel sequences which appear in their entirety on this blog. Incomplete ones which may join the list in future are Peter Matthiessen's Watson trilogy (one to go) and the just-started Patrick Melrose sequence by Edward St. Aubyn. I suspect it's less likely that I'll ever complete either Anthony Powell's A Dance To The Music Of Time sequence or Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. But hey, give it a few years and I might be looking for things to do during my retirement, so you never know.

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. 

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.

the last book I read

A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles.

It's a tricky time to be an aristocrat in Russia, the early 1920s. Admittedly if you've got as far as the 1920s then you've at least survived being brutally purged in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 revolution, but still, if you've chosen to stay in Russia rather than taking the easy way out and swanning off to Paris to live out your days then you may find things less easy than they used to be, what with the peasants having ideas above their station like, you know, running the country and all that.

So here's Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, former heir to a country estate near Nizhny Novgorod, an estate now obviously requisitioned by the new government. The Count himself is still around, though, and swanning around Moscow being a fabulously urbane socialite in a way that grinds the gears of the new governing regime somewhat. So much so, in fact, that they concoct a show-trial at which the Count is accused of being a parasite, an anachronism, an idle, dawdling flâneur who represents the last vestige of a corrupt regime that must be swept aside for the greater good. But he's quite charming and everyone quite likes him, despite themselves, so instead of ordering him out the back to be summarily shot they instead subject him to house arrest in the Hotel Metropol. Not so terrible, you might say, especially since he has made a third-floor suite at the Metropol his residence for a few years now anyway. But the sentence comes with a few extra strings attached - firstly no nice comfy suite but a boxy attic room, and secondly a reminder that if he should breach the terms of his house arrest it'll be No More Mr. Nice Communist and he will be the recipient of a hot lead sandwich.

For all that he has never been obliged to do anything as coarse and proletarian as actually work for a living, the Count likes to keep busy, and he soon finds things to do: firstly knocking though the boarded-up connecting doors between his room and the empty one next to it to afford himself a bit more space, and secondly taking on the job of head waiter at the hotel, a job which requires that he attend regular planning meetings with the hotel's maître d' and the head chef, who soon become his close friends.

Other people also come into the Count's orbit and become friends, or in the case of film star Anna Urbanova, a regular at the hotel, a bit more than friends, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. There's also Nina, a young girl with a keen sense of curiosity and a hotel pass key which allows her access to various parts of the hotel off-limits to normal guests. There are also a couple of representatives of the Communist regime, which continues to keep half an eye on what the Count is up to, and, mainly after the Second World War, some Americans, who appear to be brash types throwing money around drunkenly but who the Count soon clocks as spies. 

Years pass, and Nina grows into a young woman and gets involved, along with her husband, in some activities inimical to the current regime, and there comes a day when Nina has to head off to try and get her husband released from some remote gulag. Before doing so she entrusts her daughter, Sofia, to the Count, who is thus - approaching fifty and with no children of his own - thrust into effective fatherhood. 

Sofia grows up into an intelligent and feisty young woman, but there are inevitably a few bumps in the road, notably when she falls down the stairs and fractures her skull. This entails a dash to hospital in a cab and, as a matter of necessity, the Count's first venture outside of the hotel in twenty-plus years. Fortunately - again - people he knows inside the Communist regime view his plight with some sympathy and arrange to have him spirited back into the hotel once Sofia is safely in the hospital before some jobsworth spots him and pops a cap in his ass.

Sofia shows an aptitude for music, the piano in particular, and soon starts picking up gigs with youth orchestras which entail travel, including outside Russia. This gives the Count an idea for a scheme which will allow Sofia to escape the regime (with a bit of help from the Count's American contacts) and for the Count and Anna to live out the rest of their lives together without having to do so within the confines of the hotel he's spent the last thirty years in.

A Gentleman In Moscow was donated to me by my mother after she'd read it with her book group. It's hard for me to describe it as a "book group book" without sounding snottily, snobbily dismissive, but, well, I'm going to anyway. That's not to say it wasn't an engaging and enjoyable read, but there's a genre of books with a historical setting, wide time-span (usually many years), slightly whimsical in tone, very little sense of the characters being in any physical peril or of anything too experimental or metafictional happening like not ending up with a nice neat tying-up of loose ends that I tend to lump together as "book group books". That probably doesn't make any sense, but whatever. The lack of peril is jarring in this case because Stalinist Russia was pretty good at ruthlessly eliminating anyone who was even a mild inconvenience to the smooth running of the state. 

It's also quite meandering and episodic plot-wise, especially since the Count's situation at the end of each episode except the last is the same, i.e. still in the hotel, and the Count himself is a man of great personal charm, erudition and saintly patience who starts to seem a bit of a Maryovski Sueovich by the end.

Needless to say as befits a book group book it's been adapted as a Netflix series, starring Ewan McGregor who seems to be leaning into the slightly magical charming twinkliness of the character in a way I daresay I would find a bit annoying if I ever watched more than five minutes of it. But I won't, so that's fine. The character also seems to retain his luxuriant moustache throughout the timeline, whereas a major plot point in the book is his loss of it pretty early on. 

Anyway, the book is perfectly fine and highly readable, with just a hint of "if you like that sort of thing" attached. I will also add, as a final thought, that if you were to be in a position of being stuck in the same hotel for thirty years or more, "AMOR TOWLES" is the sort of thing you might find yourself bellowing down the phone to room service fairly regularly.

the last book I read

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin.

David is an American in Paris in the 1950s, just mooching around doing not very much, and with no apparent need to earn a living thanks to occasional handouts from his father. His girlfriend Hella, a feisty modern liberated type of girl, has headed off to Spain on her own to do some exploring and plans to return to Paris in a few weeks, whereupon she and David have some vague plans culminating in probably returning to the USA, getting married, squeezing out a few babies, the usual stuff.

Having borrowed some money from his friend Jacques (who is older, clearly gay, and clearly has some designs on David which David is dimly aware of and not above exploiting) David agrees to accompany him to a bar run by Jacques' friend Guillaume. Here David meets handsome Italian barman Giovanni and experiences some troubling turmoil, you know, down there.

But actually we already know some of this, and also that something catastrophic has occurred since which has resulted in Giovanni being under sentence of death by guillotine. We know this because of the framing device, written from David's perspective some time later as he stays in a hotel somewhere outside Paris; this framing device also makes reference to some formative homosexual experiences in David's teenage years where some harmless boyish rough-and-tumble and play-fighting high-jinks and a brisk shower and rub-down afterwards led inexorably to some furious cock-gobbling, all subsequently shrugged off and forgotten about.

So there is a general sense that David's sexuality might be a bit fluid and ill-defined, even (perhaps especially) to himself. It's not surprising, therefore, when after a night at the bar, some more drinking elsewhere and a group excursion to Les Halles (this is back when it was still a market) for a breakfast of white wine and oysters, David and Giovanni end the night by heading off to Giovanni's place for a portion of Italian salami. 

And so a relationship is established, mainly conducted in various bars (including Guillaume's) and in Giovanni's room in a house near Place de la Nation. Giovanni's initial twinkly Italian charm has morphed into some slightly needy clinginess, and David is trying to maintain some arm's-length detachment in the knowledge that Hella will return at some indeterminate date in the nearish future, at which point the merde will presumably hit the ventilateur. But, armed with some newly-acquired self-knowledge, are David's previous plans with Hella for a future life together what he really wants any more anyway?

Hella eventually returns, David heads down to the railway station to meet her (without telling Giovanni where he's going, of course), and they resume their previous life of swanning round Paris together and having nice God-fearing vanilla heterosexual sex. Eventually the inevitable happens and they run into Jacques and Giovanni in a bookshop. Rather surprisingly, given Giovanni's theatrical relief at David's reappearance and dismay at his having abandoned him and not told him where he was going, and Jacques' furious eyebrow-raising and Kenneth Williams noises, Hella shrugs the whole thing off as a disagreement between friends and Giovanni being stereotypically Italian and demonstrative, rather than as evidence of something rum going on. 

David subsequently returns to Giovanni's room to see him and explain to him that they can't have a future together; even in relatively bohemian 1950s Paris any official public acknowledgement of a gay relationship would be impossible. Later, while David is back with Hella, news comes through that Guillaume has been murdered and that Giovanni is the prime suspect. After a brief period on the run Giovanni is captured and sentenced to death. Hella is sympathetic to David's dismay at this, believing that the two were nothing more than close friends, but eventually David decides he can't live a lie any more and must embrace his true identity, which he does by going to nearby Nice and hooking up with a whole battalion of sailors; while winding down with a refreshing drink after a gruelling session of being recreationally spit-roasted by the entire crew of the French Ark Royal (L'Arche Royale, if you must), who should walk into the bar but Hella, and the jig is up. She has always known, it seems, on some level at least. 

And so the collapse of David's life is complete: Hella returns to America, and sentence of death is carried out on Giovanni.

This was James Baldwin's second novel, published in 1956, and differs from his first, Go Tell It On The Mountain, in that all the major characters are white. Baldwin's stated reason for doing this was that he specifically wanted to write a novel about sexuality and didn't want another axis of oppression and struggle getting in the way. Obviously there's no reason why you have to centre black characters if you, the author, are black (as Baldwin was), any more than you can only write about gay characters if you are yourself gay (as Baldwin was). Equally there's no reason why a straight person (me, for instance) of whatever skin colour living in the early 21st century can't enjoy a book about gay life in 1950s Paris - which, as it happens, I did. Some of this stuff is universal even if some of it is also quite specific, and it is in any case possible to imagine yourself living a different life to the one you actually have; that, arguably, is the whole point of fiction. 

Anyway, Giovanni's Room is widely acknowledged as a classic of gay literature and I wouldn't disagree with that assessment; other books on this list to have featured gay relationships as a central plot point include A Stone Boat, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Days Without End and not many others that I can see on a quick scan through the archives.

One thought you might have on reading the bits in the framing sections about Giovanni's impending execution is: wait a minute, surely they weren't still guillotining people in the 1950s? It turns out they very much still were: the last person to be executed by guillotine in France (or anywhere else for that matter, if we're talking about state-sanctioned judicial killings) was Hamida Djandoubi as recently as September 1977, and the last person to be executed publicly in this way was Eugen Weidmann in June 1939, recently enough for the event to be filmed and, needless to say, available on YouTube (that video isn't particularly graphic, but does feature someone's head being cut off, so caution is advised). Execution by the literal detaching of someone's head from their body does seem more visceral and startling than, say, shooting someone, but is almost certainly quicker and more painless (albeit a bit more messy) than some of the methods still used today, mainly in the USA, like electrocution, gassing and lethal injection.

the last book I read

The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. 

Subtitled Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, this is a book primarily concerned with *checks notes* sex, and the evolution of human nature. "Sex" is a slightly problematic term here for several reasons, not least because it refers to two separate but related things - the binary separation of the human species into male and female (I can sense you shifting nervously in your chair, but we'll come back to that later), but also the physical act of love, coitus, jiggy jiggy. etc. 

The whole business of combining two sets of chromosomal material - zipping each one in half, sticking them together again, ensuring all the bits line up - is quite an overhead, though, and that's before you get into the overhead of taking a lady out to dinner, maybe a movie, some dimmed lights, scented candles etc., to get her in the mood for little bit of chromosomal combining, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Compare this with just splitting yourself in half and ending up with two genetically identical clones (as some species have done perfectly happily for a gajillion years) - possibly slightly painful, but quick, efficient and no-one has to argue over who picks up the taxi fare or has to sleep in the wet patch. 

I'm being slightly flippant here, obviously, but the point is that it really is a major overhead in energy terms and would clearly be selected against by evolution were it not for the benefit that it must confer. But what is that benefit? Essentially the first half(ish) of the book addresses that question, and the second half(again, ish) explores some of the sometimes counter-intuitive ramifications of choosing to do things this way. Some of the first half of the book covers similar themes to those covered (in more detail) in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, specifically all the stuff about the gene being the principal unit of selection and reproduction, and therefore responsible for some behaviour that would otherwise seem inexplicable, like altruism in favour of close relatives (who carry a similar set of genetic material). In the interests of full disclosure I should add that I read somewhere between a third and a half of The Selfish Gene, probably 20+ years ago, but never finished it, not because it wasn't an interesting read but more than likely because some shiny and tempting volume of fiction hove into view and distracted me. 

The main benefit of sexual reproduction, it seems, in large and complex organisms in particular, is that the regular mixing of genetic material into new and unique patterns provides a means of flushing out undesirable genetic mutations, and also staying one step ahead of the massed ranks of crazed and homicidal micro-organisms (viruses, parasites, etc.) that are out to invade our bodies, kill us and then feast on our rancid liquefied remains. It's more difficult for them to get into your house, steal your stuff and shit on the carpet if you keep changing the locks.

Hoary old phrases like "survival of the fittest" encourage the assumption that it's the organisms with the "best" genetic material that get first dibs on reproducing and populating future generations, and there is a very basic sense in which this is true - those with really disastrous genetic mutations are highly likely to die before they can reproduce. But this disregards sexual selection, i.e. how organisms decide which organisms of the opposite sex to mate and reproduce with. To put it another way, how would they know who had the "best" genetic material without running extensive genetic tests as part of the courtship process? One answer is for the candidates (and it's almost always the males, it being the females doing the selecting for the obvious reason that they carry the young) to display some physical adornment that advertises the good health and vigour necessary to produce, say, absurdly long or decorative tail feathers, but also the strength to overcome the physical handicap imposed by such things and survive to robust adulthood. Indeed, the more absurd and cumbersome the decoration, the more impressive the individual's achievement in thriving despite it, and so a sort of escalating feedback loop is created. 

So in fact the organisms that do best at passing their genes on to the next generation are those who are the most successful at attracting mates, not necessarily those with the "best" genetic material, assuming that term even means anything.

That's all very well for peacocks, you'll be saying, but I don't have a massive multi-coloured fan sticking out of my arse to attract the ladies. What have I got going for me? Well, in addition to all the obvious stuff like being fairly tall, reasonably symmetrical features, relative youth, solvency, good prospects, there is a theory that part of the reason humans evolved these gargantuan brains is as a result of sexual selection. This is in conflict with the usual explanations around needing the big brains for things like tool use and most obviously language and its uses for constructing large-scale societies, situation comedies and complex hire purchase agreements. What if the large brain and its function as a generator of charm, wit and poetry was itself a sort of virtual peacock's tail? That would explain its being larger than even dealing with language would seem to require, a sort of runaway feedback mechanism limited only by the female body's capacity to give birth to large-headed babies without needing impractically large hips, and as a consequence impractically expensive trousers.

I'm not sure I completely buy that theory, but it's an interesting idea. The difficulty with all this is avoiding the charge of concocting plausible-sounding just-so stories that fit the data without hard evidence that these supposed mechanisms actually exist. To pre-empt this charge Ridley does offer a blizzard of citations in the 30-page bibliography at the end, although I have no way of distinguishing between Professor George Eminent of the University of Science and A. Dimwit from the Academy of Dubious Claims, or at least not without doing a lot of legwork I'm not prepared to do.

It's interesting while reading a science-y book like this written by someone with an obvious regard for data and evidence and try to tease out their own biases - in Ridley's case the clearest one is a general dislike for anyone who leans (in his view) too far towards the nurture side of the nature/nurture argument, in particular the pioneers of social science such as Émile Durkheim, but also some more regular science-y people like BF Skinner and the behaviourists. I'm fairly sympathetic to Ridley's views here but it is interesting to note that in the 30-odd years since The Red Queen's publication in 1993 the "everything is culture" school of thought seems to have become more prevalent.

I couldn't say whether this is a view inherently linked to what you might (inaccurately) call the "everything is genetics" viewpoint, but the other thing you occasionally get a whiff of when Ridley strays into more general non-sciencey musings about society is a slightly unpalatable right-leaning free-market libertarianism. The relevance of this is to Ridley's ill-fated tenure as chairman of Northern Rock during its time as an early victim (in late 2007) of what's become known as the 2008 financial crisis. It's highly debatable how much Ridley's own role as non-executive chairman allowed him to dictate policy but it's certainly true that statements like this (from this 2007 George Monbiot article in the Guardian and therefore second-hand, so I have to trust that it's genuine) have a bum-clenchingly Ayn Rand-ish sound to them:

Bureaucracy, he argued, is "a self-seeking flea on the backs of the more productive people of this world ... governments do not run countries, they parasitise them".

The elephant in the room that I have failed to acknowledge thus far is that the unstated premise of the whole book - i.e. that biological sex exists, is a highly-robust genetic mechanism and results in two sub-categories of Homo sapiens which have identifiably different physical bodies and attributes, some of which extend to behaviour - is now controversial in some quarters. This is a problem not solved by substituting the word "gender" for the word "sex", although Ridley does this to solve the different problem of confusion between the two different meanings of the word "sex" as mentioned above.

There was a time not that long ago when doing this (i.e. conflating "sex" and "gender") would have got you scolded/abused/cancelled, the idea being that "gender" was more about your self-presentation and even self-identification, in some individuals (i.e. transgender people) differing from your biological sex. More recently there has been a move towards the scolding/abuse/cancellation stuff switching to being directed at those who insist that they're different things (and maybe even that "gender" is just a slightly woolly and artificial sub-category of the more general group of things which could be called "what you're like"), and towards the ideologically pure position being that they're the same thing. 

Expressing any sort of a dissenting opinion about this stuff is liable to have you dismissed as basically Hitler, or, worse, JK Rowling, but for what it's worth I can see, from a strictly ideological/political standpoint, why people might do this (i.e. insist that they're the same thing and both equally social constructs - "everything is culture" again, I guess), since acknowledging that biological sex exists opens the way for the establishment of female-only categories in, for example, sports, and female-only spaces elsewhere, e.g. rape crisis centres. I do think denial of clearly demonstrable reality is unhelpful and unlikely to be sustainable, though.

Anyway, back to the book - not much more to say except it was an enjoyable and thought-provoking read, and of course significant in the context of this blog in that it represents my first blog foray into the non-fiction genre. I'm pretty happy with the decision, overall, though I'm not going to continue with the practice of trailing in advance what genre my next book is from; you'll have to wait and see. 

the last book I read

Lost Man's River by Peter Matthiessen.

We're back in Florida. Not this guy, but instead the south-easternmost state of the USA, dangling pendulously into the north-eastern reaches of the Gulf of Mexico like, well, a dangly pendulous thing. In particular we're back in the south-western corner of the state where the events of Killing Mister Watson took place, events that included, as you'll know if you were paying attention at the time or are capable of reading the book's title, the killing of Edgar "EJ" Watson by a ragged posse of his fellow dwellers in the loose gaggle of islands at the outflow where most of the water in the Everglades - which is really just a sixty-mile-wide, shallow, slow-moving river - meets the sea and where there is a complex and ever-changing landscape. 

But why did they shoot him? Well, part of the answer to that question is: go and read the first book. But many questions remain, and by the time the narrative here starts at least four decades have passed - it's never completely clear what date this all happens, but the best bet seems to be late 1940s or early 1950s. Many people have found their subsequent lives defined and haunted by the events of 1910 (i.e. the murder of EJ Watson), especially those who were there on the day and who may or may not have fired some of the shots that took Watson down, but also Watson's own children, of whom there were at least ten by at least five different women.

Our principal business here is with Lucius Watson, youngest child of Watson's second wife Jane, and around twenty-one when Watson was killed. He's been various things over the years, from a fisherman to a respected academic historian, and is now back in the area stirring up unwelcome memories. This is partly for research purposes for a book he's preparing about the Watson murder (in the hope of rehabilitating his father's murderous reputation), partly because it's come to his attention that the National Parks organisation that now oversees the Everglades is considering knocking down The Watson Place, his father's old house at Chatham Bend in the islands, and partly because his long-lost older brother Rob Watson has reappeared after many years, somewhat the worse for many years of drink and gnawing guilt about his association with some of his father's murkier deeds. 

Hardly surprisingly, most of the natives of the area who have any knowledge about the events of 1910 are a bit cagey about coughing it up, particularly to the son of the murder victim who might have his own motives for getting a clear picture of who was at the dock and the order of who shot whom and when. And the order is obviously important here, since the early shots will have been the ones that did the damage; anyone who shot later would have basically been pumping lead into a corpse - somewhat less culpable, morally speaking. Moreover, Lucius' evident desire to include a visit to The Watson Place in his trip makes certain individuals nervous, the house now being used for other slightly shady purposes that those individuals don't want him, still less the Park authorities or the police, knowing about.

Lucius is a cautious and circumspect type, but the same cannot be said of his brother Rob, and after some unwise shooting his mouth off and some actual shooting of firearms (thankfully not resulting in any casualties) he is kidnapped by some of the locals now making use of The Watson Place for nefarious purposes, including, slightly awkwardly, the father of Lucius' research assistant and very occasional lover Sally Brown. 

Lucius, Sally, local man Andy House (whose father may or may not have been one of EJ Watson's executioners) and Sally's intermittently estranged husband Whidden Harden take a boat out into the Ten Thousand Islands archipelago to visit The Watson Place and try to rescue Rob. Lucius has come into possession of a letter from Rob which appears to be a confession of his involvement, at his father's instigation, in the murders of Wally and Bet Tucker in 1901, and an explanation for the restless and tormented life he has led since, and appears also to have been written as a final confession in the expectation of his own imminent death.

Lucius and his party head for the Watson Place, where there is a showdown with some of the smugglers who have been using it and the place eventually burns down with Rob inside, partly at his own instigation. Returning to the mainland, Lucius learns that his old friend Henry Short, one of the few black men in the area in the early twentieth century, is in hospital and not expected to survive. Their brief deathbed conversation seems to resolve the vexed question of who shot first (it would have been Watson had his damp shotgun not misfired, and then Henry shot him) and answer most of Lucius' questions. His plan of restoring his father's reputation having been scuppered by Rob's letter and its depiction of cold-blooded murder, Lucius abandons his project. 

This is the second book in the Watson trilogy - the third, Bone By Bone, offers the events of the first book from Watson's own perspective in a Rashomon/Alexandria Quartet/Gilead style. The trilogy was later reworked into a single book, Shadow Country, which won the National Book Award in 2008 (Lost Man's River was originally published in 1997). Much of the eventual trimming that was required to whittle the original trilogy down to single-book length apparently came from Lost Man's River, and it's easy to see why - there's a lot of talking here with various extended family members, including reminiscences of who was cousin to whom and the like (much of which prompts keeping a finger in the family tree section at the front of the book just to keep track of who's who) that doesn't have any direct bearing on the murder of EJ Watson and, while interesting in its own right, doesn't really drive the narrative along with any urgency. 

There is a sense, though, in which that's not really what the book (and the trilogy as a whole) is about; instead it's about the place in which the story happens, its remoteness and desolation and the sense of everything being temporary at best and subject to being rearranged or obliterated by one good cathartic hurricane. Although Matthiessen primarily thought of himself as a novelist, he published many books about travel and nature and those concerns evidently bled through into his fiction writing. 

So while it has much to commend it it's probably not as good as the first book, and it's quite slow and therefore probably not for everyone. It's a blunt tool as it ignores outside influences that may have affected my reading opportunities, but the fact that it's taken me two months almost to the day to read it tells its own story.