I’ve read more than a thousand books since I started this book blog back in 2011. By now, I’ve forgotten what I wrote in most of the reviews and am left only with an residual emotional memory of the books, like cooking smells clinging to my clothes after a meal. So, I’ve decided to do a little time travelling by book blog and re-read some of the reviews I’ve posted.

This month, I’m travelling back thirteen years to September 2012. In most ways, 2012 had been a pretty good year. The business I’d helped found and build had been sold to a big corporation. The integration was going more smoothly than I’d expected. I had new opportunities in my work life. I was starting to take some time off. My wife and I had been to Córdoba for the first time over the summer. BUT, I was fifty-five, the previous few years had been challenging and I wasn’t happy with my own behaviour. I’d just discovered that the way I felt had a label ‘Irritable Male Syndrome’, A name which, perversely, made me laugh, mostly because it was such a self-serving idea – I’m irritable but it’s not my fault’ – and partly because the science sounded bogus. Here’s a post I wrote at the end of August 2012 that shows my state of mind

Trying to live a life less irritable

I didn’t have a lot of time to read. When I did read, I wanted books that would absorb me, make me think, maybe even make me angry or sad. I was fortunate enough to find three remarkable books that month. I’ve recommended them to people many times since.

One was Jo Walton’s reflection on how fascism might manifest in the UK, told in the form of an alternate history where Britain made peace with Hitler. One was an atypical Charlaine Harris book about rape. One was a Science Fiction thriller from Neal Stephenson, which considered how our actions in cyberspace might reshape our physical world.

I’ve shared my impressions of them below. If you’d like to time travel with me, follow the links to the original reviews.

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One summer weekend in 1949 – but not our 1949 – the well-connected “Farthing set”, a group of upper-crust English families, enjoy a country retreat. Lucy is a minor daughter in one of those families; her parents were both leading figures in the group that overthrew Churchill and negotiated peace with Herr Hitler eight years before. Despite her parents’ evident disapproval, Lucy is married – happily – to a London Jew. It was therefore quite a surprise to Lucy when she and her husband, David, found themselves invited to the retreat. It’s even more startling when, on the retreat’s first night, a major politician of the Farthing set is found gruesomely murdered, with abundant signs that the killing was ritualistic. 

It quickly becomes clear to Lucy that she and David were brought to the retreat in order to pin the murder on him. Major political machinations are at stake, including an initiative in Parliament, supported by the Farthing set, to limit the right to vote to university graduates. But whoever’s behind the murder, and the frame-up, didn’t reckon on the principal investigator from Scotland Yard being a man with very private reasons for sympathizing with outcasts and looking beyond the obvious. As the trap slowly shuts on Lucy and David, they begin to see a way out – a way fraught with peril in a darkening world.

‘Farthing‘ is alternate history at its best. It imagines how Britain might have been if a single decision had changed. It also delivers an engaging country house murder mystery and a reflection on how fascism corrodes freedom and corrupts the powerful.

In this version of history, 1949 sees the ruling Conservative Party dominated by the “Farthing Set”, a clique of high Tories credited with negotiating “Peace with Honour” between the Third Reich and the British Empire in response to Hess’s overture on behalf of Hitler in 1941. On the eve of an important vote in the Commons, the Farthing Set is gathered at the house after which it is named, the country seat of Viscount Eversley, when Sir James Thirkie, chief negotiator of the peace, is murdered.

Walton tells the story through the eyes of two protagonists: Lucy Eversley Kahn, daughter of Viscount Eversley and Inspector Peter Carmichael of Scotland Yard. These characters are inspired choices that humanise what might have turned into a political rant, give an insight into the choices made by “decent” people confronted with Fascism at home, and make the world that Walton has drawn much more chilling by being much more credible.

At the time I wrote:

“I found her alternate history very credible. In my view, modern Britain was fundamentally shaped by the decision of the British people in the “Khaki Election” of 1945, the first election in ten years, held on the heels of Victory in Europe Day, to put their trust in the Labour Party, rather than the Conservatives, to rebuild Britain. By imagining a Britain in which this choice was never made and where Fascism in Europe was colluded with rather than challenged and defeated, Walton reminds us that the freedoms we enjoy today were hard-won and could be easily lost.”

Jo Walton published ‘Farthing’ in 2006. Now, almost twenty years later, it reads like a warning that we should have headed. A warning that says that the richest and most powerful members of our English ruling class have never been opposed to fascism and would happily allow its dominance here.

To read my 2012 review, click on the link below.

“Farthing” by Jo Walton – a chilling mystery set in an alternate 1949 Britain

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Dropped by her agent, New York City model Nickie Callahan decides to start over—moving back to the South to finish school at Houghton College in Knolls, Tennessee. But Knolls isn’t the quiet town Nickie remembers from her youth. A rapist is targeting the women of Houghton, growing bolder and more vicious with each brutal attack, leaving the community gripped by fear.

When the violence affects Nickie personally, she moves from fear to fury—resolving to catch the rapist at any cost. After joining forces with another survivor, Nickie discovers that the attacks are not random—the rapist knows his victims. With that small clue, and an ironclad determination to stop him from striking again, Nickie begins the grim search for the relentless assailant hiding in plain sight.

‘A Secret Rage‘ is one of my favourite Charlaine Harris novels. It’s a hard-hitting, unflinching look at what rape is, what it does to the people it is inflicted on and to the people around them.

The rape scene is brutal and vivid without being exploitative. The descriptions of the impact of the rape, of the rage it produces, of the scars it leaves, of the bravery needed to face it and the love needed to respond to it are emotionally hard-hitting because they feel authentic and unfiltered.

This is a novel with an agenda: no woman deserves to be raped and no rapist should be allowed to go unpunished.

It is also a story about how women can help and support each other or how they can inflict more pain through shame and blame.

I think it’s a shame that this book seems to be slipping into obscurity. In an age when a convicted rapist can be president and the minds of boys are being twisted by the misogyny of Andrew Tate and the manosphere, this book deserves an audience.

To read my 2012 review, click on the link below.

” A Secret Rage” by Charlaine Harris – A brave, unflinching confrontation of rape

Across the globe, millions of computer screens flicker with the artfully coded world of T’Rain – an addictive internet role-playing game of fantasy and adventure. But backstreet hackers in China have just unleashed a contagious virus called Reamde, and as it rampages through the gaming world spreading from player to player – holding hard drives hostage in the process – the computer of one powerful and dangerous man is infected, causing the carefully mediated violence of the on-line world to spill over into reality.

A fast-talking, internet-addicted mafia accountant is brutally silenced by his Russian employers, and Zula – a talented young T’Rain computer programmer – is abducted and bundled on to a private jet. As she is flown across the skies in the company of the terrified boyfriend she broke up with hours before, and a brilliant Hungarian hacker who may be her only hope, she finds herself sucked into a whirl of Chinese Secret Service agents and gun-toting American Survivalists; the Russian criminal underground and an al-Qaeda cell led by a charismatic Welshman; each a strand of a connected world that devastatingly converges in T’Rain.

An inimitable and compelling thriller that careers from British Columbia to South-West China via Russia and the fantasy world of T’Rain, Reamde is an irresistible epic from the unique imagination of one of today’s most individual writers.

‘Reamde’ is over a thousand pages long. The audiobook takes thirty-four hours. Books that long rarely keep my attention. This one gripped me, left me sad that it was over already and colonised my imagination.

It’s well-written, has a twisty thriller plot with a global scope, lots of action and some fascinating insights into both near-future technology and the fracture points of global politics. It’s a fun read. It also has a more serious side. It looks at the transnational power of information technology and the men who own it. It considers America’s role in the world. It raises the challenge of how, in a world like this, you keep those you love safe. 

To read my 2012 review, click on the link below.

“Reamde” by Neal Stephenson – Long, enjoyable read – “Snow Crash” all grown up