It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible


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Comanche Moon, Larry McMurtry

This is the fourth and final book set in the world of Lonesome Dove, but is actually the second prequel, predating the events in the original novel. The series in publication order is: Lonesome Dove (1985, USA), Streets of Laredo (1993, USA), Dead Man’s Walk (1994, USA), Comanche Moon (1997, USA). But the stories chronologically are: Dead Man’s Walk, Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo. It’s worth noting that Lonesome Dove was adapted as a successful television miniseries in 1989, and a sequel TV series was broadcast in 1993… which may or may not have prompted McMurtry to write an actual sequel himself, and its subsequent success may have then led to the prequels…

Certainly, Lonesome Dove was a fun novel, surprisingly funny, and while brutal in parts, mostly optimistic. Streets of Laredo closed off some of the characters’s stories, and added a little more brutality. The first prequel, Dead Man’s Walk, was unremittingly grim, with little of the humour or optimism of Lonesome Dove. And so it is with Comanche Moon, a direct sequel to Dead Man’s Walk.

So we have three books, of which Comanche Moon is the last written, likely only produced to capitalise on the success of the first, and while they feature the same cast they have lost the humour and enjoyment of the original.

Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae are still members of the Texas Rangers. Buffalo Hump (whose actual Comanche name apparently translated as “erection that won’t go down”) is still a thorn in their side. As is superlative Comanche horse thief, Kicking Wolf. McCrae and Call are members of Colonel Scull’s troop. When Scull’s Shire horse is stolen by Kicking Wolf, Scull sets off on his own in pursuit. Which leads to him being captured by psychopath Mayan bandit Ahumado.

McCrae and Call become captains in the Texas Rangers. They rescue Scull. Buffalo Hump is killed by his son, Blue Duck, another psychopath, who appeared in Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo. A lot of the narrative dwells on the tortures and violence inflicted by Blue Duck and Ahumado. The Comanche slowly disappear as the whites drive them from their lands. The American Civil War takes place but it doesn’t impact Call or McCrae much.

I really didn’t care for Comanche Moon – this is a series with diminishing returns – even though it finishes before Lonesome Dove begins. The first book I’d happily recommend, but I’d also recommend stopping there. The treatment of the Comanche and Apache and Mexicans in all four books is pretty racist. Everyone except the whites, and the one black character, are also complete psychopaths. Yet the myth of white colonisation of North America is built on the backs of sociopaths and psychopaths. It’s why US culture valorises such people. It’s why the US is like it is now.


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Uncommon Danger, Eric Ambler

I first saw mention of Eric Ambler on Paul Kincaid’s blog. He praised him as a superior writer of thrillers. For some reason, I had the impression he was a 1960s and 1970s writer like, say, Hammond Innes. In fact, Ambler is from an earlier generation, published chiefly in the 1930s and 1940s. And the plots of his novels reflect that period. At least, Uncommon Danger (1937, UK), his second novel, certainly does so.

Kenton is a freelance journalist in Europe, based mainly in Germany. After losing money in a game of poker-dice, he catches the train to Vienna to borrow money from a friend. Enroute, he’s asked to carry suspicious documents across the Austrian border, which he does for money. But then the owner of the documents is murdered and Kenton is the chief suspect.

The documents are copies of a Soviet plan to invade Bessarabia (now part of Moldova) and take over its oil fields. (History fans will already know Stalin led the Soviet annexation of Azerbaijan, which was famous at the time for its oil fields.) The Soviet plan is actually speculative, rather than intended, but a UK oil company plans to use it to hoist a right-wing government into power in Romania, which will then give them majority rights to Romanian oil.

None of which helps Kenton, who is wanted for murder in Austria. He’s helped by Zamenhoff, a Soviet agent, and Zamenhoff’s sister, and the three team up to retrieve the stolen documents and scupper the oil company’s plan, as managed by “political saboteur” Colonel Robinson and his sadistic sidekick Captain Mailler.

The end result is a solid thriller, like early Graham Greene, and very much of its time. There are telephones, but they’re not ubiquitous (no mobiles, of course). Long distance travel is chiefly by train. Kenton eludes capture by the police simply by eluding individual police officers. There’s no way the plot could be transposed to the present day – Kenton wouldn’t last a minute.

Which is not a complaint. The book was published in 1937 and that’s what the 1930s were like. The politics may not have changed much, but technology and infrastructure certainly have. Ambler’s prose is good, with an interesting tendency to delve into detail. The story is surprisingly violent for its time – more so than Greene, from what I remember of his books. Perhaps the characters are a little broad brush-stroke, and the story a little predictable – although explaining the underlying plot in a prologue is unusual.

Nonetheless, a good read. And for what it is, a between-the-wars political thriller, a good example of its type. I’ve another Ambler on the TBR, which I’ll read – but I’m not sure I’d describe him as a must-read author.


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Chronicles of the Kencyrath 4: To Ride a Rathorn, PC Hodgell

To Ride a Rathorn (2006, USA) is the fourth book in Hodgell’s, to date, ten book series, the Chronicles of the Kencyrath. This is heartland fantasy, so heartland it reads like a dramatised supplement for a fantasy role-playing game. And while main character Jame flips between Goth Mary Sue and emo superhero, collecting power tokens as the narrative progresses, there’s still much to like here. The world-building, for one.

Robert E Howard does this thing in some of his Conan stories where he hints at much greater historical depth than his Hyperborea can realistically carry. I’m not convinced it’s deliberate, but it gives some of his stories an added dimension which offsets their illogical mash-ups of historical periods. Hodgell does something similar – the historical depth, that is, not the mash-up.

The Kencyrath have lived on many worlds since being forced from their home world by Perimal Darkling. Rathillien is just the latest. Jame is a Highborn, and the twin sister of Torisen, lord of the Knorth, one of the Kencyrath houses. Jame was introduced as a thief in the first book, discovered her brother and assisted him in a great battle in the second book, tried to discover her role in the third book, and now, in the fourth book in the series, she’s been made Torisen’s heir and enrolled at Tentir, which seems to be some sort of training school for elite soldiers. Jame is not expected to succeed, nor is her presence appreciated.

Despite this, she muddles through, and even manages to resolve a few issues, some relating specifically to her house, Knorth, and its history, and some related to Tentir’s own history. Such as the rathorn colt – a sort of horse with armour and horns. which has been hunting Jame and which she turns into a reluctant ally. The title To Ride a Rathorn is actually a pun – because the phrase means something like “to grab the tail of a tiger” but there’s also this rathorn which Jame might end up actually riding…

Jame’s specialness gets a bit wearying at times – being the centre of a narrative is one thing, having the entire world revolve around a Mary Sue is another. It also means there’s not much jeopardy – no matter what Hodgell throws at Jame, she’s going to win through. There are, after all, seven more books to go. But the details are fun, the world-building is interesting, and the plot rolls forward with the relentlessness of a, er, charging rathorn.

I’m not a big fan of epic fantasy, or sword & sorcery, or whatever this sort of commercial fantasy is currently called. It’s mostly badly-written, derivative and lacking in originality. The basic template may have moved away from mediaeval Europe in recent years, but that hasn’t made it any more original. Hodgell’s Chronicles of the Kencyrath are no less derivative than a fantasy role-playing game from the industry’s heyday back in the 1970s, but I still think there’s enough of a sideways spin in these books to make them stand out from the rest.

Judged against the whole genre of science fiction and fantasy, they’re perhaps not much. But within the specific space they occupy, commercial European-inspired fantasy, they’re actually not bad, and worth reading.


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The Public Image, Muriel Spark

I read Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means (1953, UK) back in 2010, and judging by the review I wrote on my blog at the time, I didn’t like it very much. I can now add The Public Image (1968, UK) to the list of novels by Muriel Spark I don’t like very much.

It was nominated for the first ever Booker Award in 1969, which is why I read it. The story is relatively straightforward: Annabel Christopher stars in a film by an Italian director and becomes an international star – or perhaps European, given she never makes it to Hollywood. Annabel moves to Rome, with her semi-successful screenwriter husband. She has a baby. Shortly afterwards, her husband commits suicide and in his suicide notes (he wrote several) he accuses Annabel of promiscuity and throwing orgiastic parties. None of which is true. Annabel tries to control the narrative around her husband’s death before the Italian press destroys her career.

And, er, that’s it.

I have watched many 1960s Italian films, not just giallo or poliziotteschi, but also movies by Antonioni, Fellini, Pasolini, de Sica, Rossellini and so on. I’m a fan of the first three directors. So Spark’s depiction of Annabel’s career in Italian cinema never really convinced me. Neither did her husband’s suicide – there was nothing in the narrative to suggest he might take his life. There were clues he resented his wife’s success – but it’s a leap from there to suicide.

Then there’s the writing. Spark was nominated twice for the Booker Prize, and was much lauded critically – she was made an OBE in 1967 and a dame in 1993, for services to literature, and ranked number eight in the fifty greatest British writers since 1945 by the Times in 2008. But The Public Image reads more like reportage than fiction, and over-uses one of my pet hates in writing – the construction “was to be”. There are several auxiliary verbs which can be used in English, there are even grammatical moods available. So many different ways to add nuance and meaning instead of “was to be”. It’s no different to using “get” as a catch-all verb.

So, a lack of authenticity and too much passive voice using weak constructions, especially “was to be”. Not impressed. Annabel may have been reasonably well characterised, but the rest of the cast were ciphers. The Public Image is not a book I can recommend.


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On the Calculation of Volume II, Solvej Balle

Tara Selter woke up one day, and it was the previous day. In fact, for reasons unexplained, she is reliving 18 November over and over again, much like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day. In the first book – seven are planned – Tara explored the limits of her condition, spending time in Paris in a hotel, where she had slept the night before, repeatedly visiting the same friends – antiquarian booksellers like herself – again and again, even attempting to explain to them what was happening to her. She returned home, and tried the same with her husband. But she discovered the resources she used, food particularly, vanished from 18 November if she used them, and objects would disappear into 19 November if she did not keep them close to her.

In this second book, Tara decides to try and live a year on the same day. She does this by moving around Europe so that the climate matches what it would be, approximately, on each day of the year had she stayed home in her village outside Paris. It’s a neat conceit, but for it to work Balle needs to get her details absolutely spot-on and, unfortunately, in a few places they didn’t ring true.

But that’s a minor quibble. Balle commits hard to her structure, and is rigorous in working out the details of living the same day again and again, even when it comes to travelling about Europe in search of the right climate for each calendar day of the year. The travel stretches Tara’s resources and ingenuity, as she has no knowledge of the previous day wherever she ends up, and Balle considers all the pitfalls and ramifications that might result.

There is something deeply satisfying in Balle’s careful working out of her central premise, and even after only two books in of a planned seven, the series promises interesting explorations of Tara’s situation. 


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The Soft Machine, William S Burroughs

I read the recently-published “restored text” – and the history of the novel and its manuscripts is as barking mad as its story. Burroughs submitted the original novel to Olympia Press in Paris, which promptly published it. But he decided to rewrite chunks for the US edition a couple of years later, but not all of the changes were delivered in time. But they were in time for the UK publication a couple of years after that. So there are three major, and different, editions of The Soft Machine (1966, USA) – and this version is based on the second, with variations from both the first and third versions. All of which are documented in several appendices.

Story-wise… The Soft Machine is the first book of the Cut-Up Trilogy… because Burroughs took the text of many chapters, cut it into pieces and re-arranged it. You would think this would make it almost impossible to read, but it’s surprisingly easier than you’d expect. The plot is part science fiction, part autobiography, part thriller. There’s a secret agent, and time travel, and Mayans, and bits and pieces from the earlier Naked Lunch (1959, USA). It reads mostly like episodes from Burroughs’s life, with science fiction interludes. While the cut-up narrative is not as difficult to parse as I’d expected, the plot of the novel is less easy to follow. To be fair, it doesn’t really matter – the narrative jumps all over the place, and seems to end up somewhere that follows more or less from where it began. 

The Soft Machine is surprisingly funny in places. It’s also very graphic. Burroughs was gay and promiscuous, and so too are his characters. Most of the encounters are fleeting and rough. There’s also lots of science-fictional ideas – some of which are mentioned in passing, but with pay-offs that appear later in the narrative. The cut-up chapters make them a little harder to track, however.

I’ve been a fan of William S Burroughs as, well, as a concept for several years, and I’ve dipped a couple of times into his fiction. I’d read bits of The Soft Machine before, but not the full novel – and I have to admit the “restored text” improved the reading experience, since the footnotes and appendices add a fascinating dimension to the novel.

Restored text editions of The Ticket That Exploded (1967, USA) and Nova Express (1964, USA) are also available.


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Right Ho, Jeeves, PG Wodehouse

These are a lot of fun, but my reading of them has been, and will forever be, coloured by the 1980s TV series starring Stephen Fry as Jeeves and Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster. To Brits, it was perfect casting (Americans, knowing Laurie from House, may feel differently).

As I was reading Right Ho, Jeeves (1934, UK), I was sure I’d read it before, even though some of the details were new to me. It’s probably because it’s a plot Wodehouse used several times – I came across it first, I think, in The Code of the Woosters (1938, UK), which is actually a later novel. Friends of Wooster are engaged but then the engagement is broken for the slightest of reasons, and Wooster decides to intervene and reunite the two broken hearts. Chiefly because he might be forced to marry the girl. But often because the break-up might impact Wooster’s enjoyment of the meals prepared by Anatole, Aunt Dahlia’s much-feted cook. I mean, certainly Aunt Dahlia appears in The Code of the Woosters (which may be the third Jeeves & Wooster novel but appears in the first Jeeves Collection omnibus, for reasons best known to Penguin), and I definitely remember reading a Wooster novel in which he attempts to repair relationships between one or more couples…

None of which really matters, because these are comic novels and funny ones at that. Even if they’re set among the same people both Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh satirised in their novels – she because she was part of that world, and he because he wanted to be part of that world. (Waugh was good, but Mitford was just as good and much less racist.)

Gussie Fink-Nottle is in love with Madeline Bassett but does not have the courage to tell her. He asks Jeeves for help, But Bertie steps in, offended that his butler’s advice would be preferred over his own. Bertie invites Gussie to Brinkley Court, to stay with his Aunt Dahlia, where Madeline is also a house-guest. He also volunteers Gussie to give the prizes at the local school, a task Aunt Dahlia had originally blackmailed Bertie into undertaking.

There are further problems. Aunt Dahlia spent all her money at the casinos in Cannes, and needs more cash to keep her ladies magazine afloat – but is afraid to ask her husband. Also, Aunt Dahlia’s daughter, Angela, is at Brinkley Court, with her betrothed, Tuppy. And then they decide to break their engagement.

When Bertie arrives at Brinkley Court, he has to: persuade Gussie to declare his undying love to Madeline, fix Angela and Tuppy’s relationship, figure out a way for Aunt Dahlia to get cash out of her husband, and prevent all the upsets from prompting chef Anatole from resigning, which he does several times. Of course, everything Bertie does only makes the situation worse… but Jeeves is there to subtly direct things to the proper conclusions.

I think the reason these books work is because even though Bertie is a dimwit, and Jeeves is supercilious, Wodehouse treats them both with the same level of affection. If anything, their personalities are treated as scaffolding for the story, much as the settings and situations are. It’s a form of humour that can easily turn cruel, but in Wodehouse’s hands it never does.

There are five Jeeves omnibuses. All five were on offer for 99p on Kindle during 2025, so I have them. I’m looking forward to reading them.


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Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi

Very little science fiction has been translated from Arabic into English – in fact, I knew of only one other author, Emirati Noura Al Noman, and she hasn’t been published since 2014. Ahmed Khaled Tawfik wrote several sf novels, most notably Utopia (2008, Egypt), and a little hunting revealed it had been translated into English – but with his name spelt Towfik. There’s been plenty of fantasy translated from Arabic, however, from Alf Laylat wa Layla to Naguib Mahfouz, and a number of contemporary writers. Having said that, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013, Iraq) was not published as category sf, and likely only deserves the label because its central conceit references Mary Shelley’s novel, a proto-sf novel. (The English title, incidentally, is a direct translation of the original Arabic title.) It was nominated for both the Arthur C Clarke Award and the International Booker Prize.

The central conceit of Frankenstein in Baghdad is actually not at all rigorous as science fiction. It’s a neat twist on the original – the monster (because of course Frankenstein is the doctor) in Saadawi’s novel is made from the body parts of victims of IEDs in post-invasion Iraq, and the monster’s mission is to avenge those deaths. But Saadawi seems more interested in telling a more general story about life in present-day Baghdad, as seen through the eyes of a handful of characters. Chief among these are the junk dealer Hadi, who originally creates the monster in some sort of fever dream; Mahmud, a young journalist, who takes Hadi’s tales of a monster semi-seriously, but is more interested in becoming like his rich and powerful editor; Elishva, an old Armenian woman who mistakes the monster for her long-dead son; and General Majid, who runs a secret police bureau of astrologers and magicians who predict bomb attacks in the city.

The novel bounces around between these characters, and a handful of others, mostly centred around the area of Bataween, and occasionally focusing on the monster. Who has discovered that once it avenges the death of one of the people whose parts make up its body, that body part rots and falls off. So the monster needs new parts – and it reaches the point where, with its own small army of followers, it too begins murdering people to keep itself together (so to speak).

The monster is a great invention, and there’s so much commentary that could be attached to the concept, but Frankenstein in Baghdad doesn’t seem all that interested in it. It’s more like an introduction, or a framing narrative, to the personal stories of the book’s cast. Which is a shame. It’s a good novel, don’t get me wrong, and its descriptions of life in post-invasion Baghdad are both heart-breaking and enraging.

A good novel, but one that feels like it failed to capitalise on its central idea.


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A Legacy of Spies, John le Carré

After a gap of 17 years, le Carré returns to George Smiley, although A Legacy of Spies (2017, UK) is actually a retrospective look at the events it describes, most of which centre around the stories of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963, UK) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974, UK).

Peter Guillam has retired to Brittany, to the farm which has belonged to his family for generations. He is visited by an officer from the Circus. At the end of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, agent Leamas and his girlfriend, Liz Gold, attempted to escape over the Berlin Wall, but were both shot and killed. Now Leamas’s son and Gold’s daughter are suing the British government for compensation. And the Circus paperwork detailing the affair is not as complete as it should be.

Which, of course, is as was intended. Because Smiley kept the details of the operation from everyone, given it was a double bluff, and he hadn’t wanted the mole in the Circus, Haydon, to warn the Soviets and the East Germans.

Guillam wasn’t aware of all the operational details involving Leamas, but as he tries to prevent the current Service leadership from learning about the operation, so he discovers more about it himself. There was, for example, the East German woman Guillam helped defect, and with whom he fell in love – only for her to apparently commit suicide a handful of days after arriving in the UK. Not to mention numerous other details about the operation – all carefully concealed so Haydon would not know of them.

Guillam manages to deflect suspicion from himself, although not until after several threats by those involved, and tracks Smiley down in Germany. Who promises to clear Guillam’s name. I was, I admit, surprised Smiley was still alive – he seemed middle-aged in the first novel, Call for the Dead (1961, UK), so by the late 2000s or early 2010s, he would be in his eighties or nineties. But still active. As an indication, Alec Guinness was 60 when he played George Smiley in the 1974 TV adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, so even in 2000, years before Guillam recounts the events of A Legacy of Spies – an assumption, but not unlikely – Smiley would be 86. All perfectly believable – and Guillam’s disinclination to name the actual year makes it plausible.

Le Carré apparently wanted to write a novel about the stupidity that was the Brexit Referendum, and indeed Brexit itself. We all know it has failed, and has cost the UK more than the UK actually paid the EU in all the decades it was a member state. The only people still championing it are moronic racists and those grifters who profited from it – which is most of the Conservative Party, and the leadership of Reform UK. I’m not sure A Legacy of Spies makes this message clear, or that it actually adds anything worthwhile to the literary conversation around Brexit – but then neither does Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016, UK), which was written in direct response to Brexit, and may have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, but had little impact on public discourse about the referendum. Preaching to the choir, no doubt.

Despite all that I’m not wholly convinced A Legacy of Spies adds anything to the plots of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I mean, don’t get me wrong, A Legacy of Spies is a good book – le Carré was an excellent writer and all of his books are worth reading. But it’s not even a pendant; it fills out a few details but offers no substantial changes.

A Legacy of Spies may have been written for the right reasons, but it doesn’t feel like it adds anything worthwhile to the Smiley series. Read it because it’s a le Carré novel rather than because it’s a capstone to the Smiley series.


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Creation Node, Stephen Baxter

Back in the late 1990s, a friend complained that deciding to collect books by Stephen Baxter was proving more expensive than expected because he was so prolific. Baxter is still going. I’m not sure my friend’s collection is. But never mind. I later made the same mistake – and I’m still going: I buy Baxter’s books in hardback on publication. I have rather a lot of them. But I have also read rather a lot of them.

Creation Node (2023, UK) is, if I’ve counted correctly, Baxter’s forty-eighth novel (including three YA novels, one co-written with Alastair Reynolds, four with Arthur C Clarke, and five with Terry Pratchett). And then there are the collections and novellas. Creation Node is much like his other more recent novels – an exploration of some cosmological puzzle by people not far removed from ourselves, and a tendency to feel a little juvenile in places.

After a climate crash, Earth has partially colonised the solar system. There are three political blocs – Earth, the most powerful and mostly conservationist; the Lunar Consortium, which believes in exploiting whatever natural resources are available in the solar system; and the Conservers, who are hardline conservationists and refuse to use any resource that is not immediately renewable, such as sunlight. The Conservers sent a spacecraft, propelled by a solar sail, to the ninth planet, a journey which took 35 years. And they discovered the planet was actually a black hole. And it was emitting Hawking radiation that was… structured.

So they sent a message into the black hole. Which promptly expanded. Until its outer shell had a surface gravity of 1G and a 15C surface temperature. And a weird sarcophagus containing a living teenage birdlike alien…

Earth sends a ship out to Planet Nine – with a brief stopover, and much excitement, at a station orbiting Saturn, where the ship converts from a slow fission drive to a fast fusion drive. Over a decade has passed by the time representatives from Earth – and one from the Lunar Consortium, plus the Conserver’s chief legal counsel – reach Planet Nine. Which prompts the discoverers to attempt sending another message…

This triggers the appearance of an enigmatic black globe, which calls itself Terminus. It proves to be a Boltzmann Brain from the quantum substrate in which all universes are created. It gives the human ambassadors a brief lesson in speculative cosmology, and then offers the human race eternity, ie, continued existence after the heat death of our universe. For a price. It’s how Baxter’s novels tend to work – a story based around a big idea, a plot with a payload, if you will. Which often prompts a momentous decision on the part of the cast.

Baxter does his homework, and the ideas he bases his novels on are fascinating. If Creation Node’s extended timescale results in a number of longeurs, there’s still plenty to like here. Creation Node may suffer from Baxter’s typical weaknesses – that tendency to use teenage protagonists, which often drops the narrative into YA territory – but it also displays his strengths: making huge mind-expanding ideas easily palatable. Lots of sense of wonder, but the human dimension may be a little flat. On the other hand, Baxter is nothing if not consistent – which is why I probably keep on buying his books…

Incidentally, I should point out my takes on the books I review on this blog (and my other blog) are not always typical. My views may be individual, but that doesn’t mean they’re not open to question. So I welcome conversation about what I write. Feel free to leave a comment, or start a discussion.