Bournville – Jonathan Coe

On 8 May 1945, eleven-year-old Mary Clarke sits with her family to listen to Winston Churchill proclaiming Victory in Europe. She lives in Bournville, midlands home of the Cadbury chocolate factory where many of family work. The snapshot of the day gives a flavour of the times and introduces the family whose life will be followed over the next eight decades.

Not so much followed as periodically visited to join them on a further six days of national celebration or significance: the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II; the 1966 World Cup final; the investiture in 1969 of the Prince of Wales, his wedding in 1981 to Diana, and her funeral in 1997; ending with the COVID-laden 75^th anniversary of that VE Day in 2020.

The theme, of course, is change. Change in society, its material context and more importantly its attitudes. But through all that change the thread of family runs strong even when events and differences stretch relationships to breaking point.

Coe’s prose is easy on the eye but very effective in getting over the subtleties of relationships and developing characters whom we see born, grow, age, and die as the generations pass. Bournville remains the spiritual home to the family and the book ends there as it started, fittingly and quite movingly, with Mary, now 86, socially distancing and reduced to communicating with her family via Skype.

Great Circle – Maggie Shipstead

This is an epic novel (all but defying a concise review) narrating the life story of Marian Graves from an inauspicious beginning to her tilt at circumnavigation of the world by flying a longitudinal ‘great circle’ over both poles.

Marian and her twin brother Jamie are born in 1914 to a self-destructive mother and a taciturn father who captains a transatlantic liner. The whole family is on board when a German shell cripples the ship. Mrs Graves goes down willingly with the boat, but Captain Graves, defying convention and inviting opprobrium, gathers his babes in arms and jumps aboard a lifeboat. That leads to a prison sentence and an end to his career. Meanwhile, Marian and Jamie are dumped into the care of an uncle living in rural Montana. They grow up in benign neglect, forming a friendship with local Huckleberry Finn type, Caleb.

A chance encounter with the Flying Brayfogles, a barnstorming aerobatic duo, gives young Marian an urge, a lust, a compulsion to fly aeroplanes. The book goes on to cover her against-the-odds battles to fly. Sacrifices need to be made as her life lurches from bad decision to crisis to disaster while still making progress in her ambition. Smuggling, freighting in Alaska, and delivering WW2 warplanes in Europe lead eventually to the attempt on the great circle.

Interspersed in the historical tale is a first person narrative from Hadley Baxter, a young out of favour actress, who is cast to play the lead in a movie of Marian’s life story, albeit based on the fragments and misinformation available to the scriptwriters. This false perspective, moving in parallel to the main story adds depth and enables a clever denouement, almost providing alternative endings to the story.

The epic scale (600 pages) allows Shipstead to wander off-piste to provide light touch information about early aviation, and to follow episodes in Jamie’s, Caleb’s, and Hadley’s lives, before homing back on to Marian. Hadley Baxter’s delivery may grate, while being ‘in character’, but this is outweighed by the main narrative style which breezes along nicely.

Reservoir 13 – Jon McGregor

A teenage girl goes missing in Northern England while out walking on the moor with her family. They have been holidaying over New Year at a village, and the locals inevitably join in the search. But she cannot be found.

In the aftermath, once the police and media (but not the girl’s family) have left, feelings and emotions in the locals remain high – anxiety, fear, sympathy, curiosity, mistrust, and suspicion. McGregor gives snapshot observations of, and conversations between, the villagers. There are no introductions to these characters, they pop up in context then the narrative cuts away to another resident in another part of the village, or to the natural environment around it, which continues oblivious to the human drama.

The year progresses, marked by its traditional milestones – Spring, Easter, the well-dressing, an annual cricket match, midsummer, mischief night, the bonfire, Christmas, and back to New Year. In parallel, the natural world marks time – migrating birds returning, fox cubs are born, vegetation blooms, badgers mate, leaves fall, weather happens.

McGregor takes us through the next year in the same vein, then the next, and the subsequent ten or so in the same style. The centrality of the missing girl fades, but our familiarity and understanding of the village life grows. The fly on the wall point of view is surprisingly effective. We soon feel as involved in village life as is the publican, vicar, potter, newspaper editor, farmers, gamekeeper, school caretaker, and the rest. Then there are the children, contemporaries of the missing girl who, unlike her, grow up into young adults under our watch.

It is a beautifully written, engrossing account of a village, and of lives lived in rhythm with the beat of the natural world around it.

Killers of the Flower Moon – David Grann

If the title is odd, the subtitle is more telling – Oil, Money, Murder, and the Birth of the FBI.

The oil comes from beneath the land owned by the Osage tribe. The American Indians, shunted from state to state to make room for the white settlers, in 1870 ended up in this rocky, sterile, and unwanted region of what became Oklahoma.

As for the money, in a shrewd or lucky move, the rights to any subterranean minerals on the reservation were retained collectively by the tribe, to be distributed via ‘headrights’ that could not be bought or sold, only inherited. It turned out there was oil under those sterile soils, and as the volume and price of oil increased in the early 1900s, the headright owners became some of the wealthiest citizens of the United States. Except they were not really full citizens, many designated as financially incompetent to manage their own wealth and placed by the paternalistic federal government under the financial guardianship of mainly white, professional, men. Good intentions maybe, but the result was exploitation on an industrial scale, with many making a good living from the ‘Indian Business’.

But for some this was not enough. A combination of rampant greed and racist resentment led to a trail of killings as a way to funnel the headright income away from the Osage. Execution style shootings, poisoning, a couple even blown up in their house, but no culprits, only inadequate inquests, sketchy investigations, and spurious explanations.

Law enforcement was patchy in those days, less so in the Indian reservations, and largely left in the hands of the local worthies – lawyers, doctors, businessmen – who were most at benefit from the old Indian Business and now from the new rash of dying Osage. When some Osage used their money to bring in private investigators, any who got close to the truth were warned off or died in mysterious circumstances, including falling from a moving train.

Eventually the federal government took notice and J Edgar Hoover, who was establishing a federal bureau of investigation, saw the opportunity to bolster its credentials. A Texan named Tom White was brought in along with a host of undercover agents, and eventually under his persistence the grizzly truth (or part of it) was laid bare.

David Grann skilfully picks through the sorry tale. Tom White’s piecing together of the evidence and unmasking the network of conspirators is contextualised with interesting historical asides and Grann’s own recently researched information, to provide a gripping, if socially uncomfortable, read.

Exit Music – Ian Rankin

There is a week and a half to go before DI Rebus takes his pension and bows out of the Lothian and Borders Police. His session with DS Siobahn Clarke handing over unfinished business is interrupted by a call to Raeburn Wynd and a dead body.

It is an exiled dissident Russian poet in the city to launch a new collection. Is the murder political, or just another mugging gone too far? Once Rebus gets involved more possibilities emerge as he sees (or imagines) connections to the Edinburgh overworld and underworld he knows so well. There are Russian investors in town, high-rolling bankers looking for profit, and politicians in the Scottish Parliament happy to facilitate where it suits their cause. With money and sleaze around, who better to insinuate himself into the mix than big Ger Cafferty, Rebus’s criminal nemesis.

Rebus’s (soon to be Clarke’s?) team is augmented by an ambitious but green PC eager to get a taste of life in CID. Problem is that he is from a criminal family – Rebus put away his granddad, and his brother is a drug dealing acolyte of Cafferty. Watch your back, John.

Rebus and Clarke build theories on the inter-connections. Clarke investigates conventionally, while Rebus, as ever, just pokes important people with a stick until something incriminating pops out.

Ian Rankin is comfortable in this skin. The prose rolls off the page with characteristic mixture of fluency and grit peppered with trademark references to Edinburgh geography, history, and culture both high and low.

As a finale, it is a worthy exit; case closed though some personal issues remain unresolved at retirement. We know now that Rebus returns for more, but for me this seventeenth, the planned end, will suffice, and ticks one off the book-et list.

The Satsuma Complex – Bob Mortimer

 Gary, 30, a legal assistant, living in a one-bed London flat, is a bit of a loner, though by circumstances rather than by choice. For months, his neighbour was simply ‘dog woman’ – not that she resembles one, but because she has a pooch. But recently she has become Grace, the dog Lassoo, and Gary happily runs errands for her - getting pies, toileting Lassoo – and pops in for a chat.

His only other confidante is a squirrel on the estate with which he has imaginary conversations when he has something on his mind.

Gary’s mundane life changes one evening when a work contact, Brendon of ‘Cityside Investigations’ invites him out for a pint at his local. Before they can finish one drink, Brendon takes a phone call and says he has to rush off on business. Also in the bar, sat alone reading a book, is an attractive brunette. She and Gary exchange pleasantries at the bar, then he joins her at her table. They get on well, have a few more drinks, then after a trip to the bar Gary returns to find her gone, though her book remains. It is called, The Satsuma Complex.

The story spirals out with disappearances, reappearances, deaths, policemen, and gangsters. Gary and Grace stumble through clues and crises trying to make sense of events. Gary is a low key hero, torn between his attraction for the brunette and his natural desire not to get involved in anything unpleasant or dangerous.

It is an easy read. Bob Mortimer’s familiar voice comes through strongly in Gary, but also permeates the narrative and to some extent the other characters, who all seem to share his distinctive conversational style. But the plot works, the characters are engaging, and interest is maintained to the end.

Colditz – Ben Macintyre

Colditz Castle was used, as most people know, by Hitler’s Germany to house Allied prisoners of war in the Second World War. And not just any prisoners, those who were serial escapers or were considered to be prize specimens due to their social connections, were gathered here, all the bad eggs in one basket.

This account, published 2022, takes a holistic look at the place and all those in it – prisoners, guards, and even the residents of the adjacent town. It also takes the opportunity afforded by a distance of seventy years to take a refreshingly independent view free from the shadow cast by the conflict, and for that matter the 1970s television series.

Though other ranks and nationalities get a mention, inevitably it is the British officers who feature most. After all, these are the people who kept diaries, wrote letters home, and penned memoirs afterwards. Their escape attempts, opportunistic or meticulously planned, done from a sense of duty or from personal desperation, are faithfully related along with the German countermeasures led by the anglophile Reinhold Eggers who moved up the ranks to become head of security at the camp. That the camp was under the auspices of the German Army rather than the SS or Gestapo, made such a game of cat and mouse possible.

Macintyre’s style is very readable, and he skilfully uses the chronological structure to show the changing mood in the camp from the bad boy club and jolly japes in 1941 fuelled by red cross parcels, through growing futility and boredom, to the underfed tension and desperation in 1945 as the German army retreated in the face of the Allied advance. Both prisoners and guards feared for their fate as the crazed Nazis in control the uncontrollable made life and death decisions on a whim.

All in all a well-balanced account of one of the oddities of World War Two.