Sore feet

Stacey hopped on one foot.

‘Sorry.’  Kevin took a step back, his face flushed red.

‘You can count, right?  I’m not marrying a complete idiot?’

‘I told you, I have two left feet.’

‘All you’ve got to do is count.  One, two, three, four.’  Stacey moved in time to the music.

‘I’m doing that.  It’s just that your feet are in the way.’

‘One dance.  That’s all I’m asking for.  The first dance.’

‘Can’t we just shuffle around?  Last dance at the disco.’

‘It’s meant to be our special day, not a re-enactment of the day I sold my soul.’




A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Snuff by Terry Pratchett (Corgi 2011)

Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is a city man and workaholic and has little interest in a holiday in the countryside at the ancestral home of his aristocratic wife, Sybil.  Nevertheless, he’s been packed off for two weeks of rest and recuperation in the stately home and to introduce Sam junior to the delights of rural pursuits.  The staff and tenants of their vast estate are as happy with Vimes’ presence as he is himself and they become even hostile when he starts to pick away at their social norms and to investigate rumours of a terrible crime.  After finding the mutilated body of a goblin and being accused of murdering a local blacksmith he swings into full action, along with the local constable and Willikins his gentleman’s gentleman, despite the fact that he is out of his jurisdiction and operating in a culture very different to the streets of his native city.

Both Terry Pratchett and Commander Sam Vimes are in fine form in Snuff.  Pratchett uses Vimes’ visit to his wife’s ancestral home to parody rural high society and the novels of Jane Eyre and her contemporaries, as well as more recent productions such as Downton Abbey, as well as explore heavier issues such as racism, exploitation and slavery.  To this end, Vimes performs his usual role of flawed emancipator and mediator, who believes in fairness and justice, but is happy to bend a few rules to combat prejudice and discrimination.  The story lacks some of the light humour that pervades most of the Discworld series, instead relying on some fair obvious satire, but makes up for it in the fullness of the plot, the action sequences, and its thoughtful engagement with somewhat weighty themes.  The characterisation is very nicely done, as are the keen social observations.  Overall, a solid, entertaining edition to Vimes’ thread in the Discworld series.

Review of A Loyal Character Dancer by Qui Xiaolong (Sceptre, 2002)

It is the early 1990s and Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau is a talented cop and an accomplished poet, with political connections that mean he is on a fast track to a senior position.  On an early morning visit to the Bund Park a body is discovered in the undergrowth, covered with eighteen axe wounds.  Just as Chen starts to investigate he is called away and assigned to chaperone US Marshall Catherine Rohn who is arriving to accompany a former dancer and party loyalist Wen Liping to the United States, where her husband has turned state witness against a triad gang who are running an illegal immigrant trafficking racket.  However, Wen has disappeared from her rural village in Fujian.  Chen dispatches Detective Yu to the province to hunt for her, whilst he stays in Shanghai to stall the American marshall and to present a favourable view of the country just a few years after the Tiananmen Square protest.  It soon becomes clear that Wen is being pursued by a triad gang intent on preventing her from travelling to the US and Chen gets further involved in the hunt for her, taking Catherine Rohn along with him against the orders of the party. 

I reviewed the first book in the book in Chief Inspector series, Death of a Red Heroine, in 2009.  It was a book I had struggled through, but since I was travelling to China I decided to give the second book, A Loyal Character Dancer, a go.  The story was an improvement on the first, presenting an interesting view of China at the start of the period where it opens up to the West, using the arrival of a US Marshall to explore cultural differences.  Chief Inspector Chen is relatively engaging as a lead character, prepared to take risks and challenge the party line and is reflective, quoting poetry as a way of making sense of the world.  However, whilst he’s meant to be a talented and skilled cop, he makes a series of poor and amateur judgements throughout the story, culminating in setting off into the lion’s den with the main source of prey, telegraphing his arrival and bringing no back-up.  Indeed, the procedural elements of the plot are a little weak throughout.  Moreover, the dialogue is somewhat stilted.  The result is a story that is interesting culturally, but falters with respect to the mystery, and whose resolution is far from convincing.

Review of Landscape and Society in Contemporary Ireland by Brendan McGrath (2013, Cork University Press)

Whilst I was away in China my review of Brendan McGrath's book, Landscape and Society in Contemporary Ireland appeared in the Irish Times.  It ran thus:

Two of the key attractions for visitors to Ireland are its landscape and people. In survey after survey, tourists positively mention the beauty of the Irish countryside. Such praise is forthcoming in spite of the rapid and extensive developments that have occurred in rural Ireland over the past 40 years, including extensive one-off house building, sprawling suburbanisation, and the expansion of infrastructures such as motorways, electricity pylons, wind farms, and telephone masts. 

It seems, however, that whilst visitors appreciate the landscapes of Ireland, the Irish hold a more ambivalent relationship, one that prioritises property and individual rights rather than conservation, heritage and the common good. 

This is the principal argument of Brendan McGrath in Landscape and Society in Contemporary Ireland. The Irish, he contends, are often ill at ease in the places they inhabit, mostly viewing land as a commodity and resource rather than an amenity that needs to be tended and carefully planned and managed.

The consequence has been little consensus at both local and national scales concerning how development should occur, plenty of contestation over particular attempts to alter landscapes through construction activity, and little in the way of planning reform or landscape designations that would protect landscapes from negative change.

Through 11 short chapters McGrath provides an overview of how the Irish understand the landscapes they inhabit using a number of case examples that are richly supplemented with photographs, maps and plans. The argument developed contends that the relationship between people and the land is shaped principally by culture, nature, political economy and aesthetics, which have a particular configuration in the Irish case given its colonial past, localist politics, and weak regulation.

McGrath contends that whilst clientelism is a feature of Irish planning it is often not needed in practice as local authorities share the non-utilitarian position of local people and facilitate planning applications that run counter to national policy and international good practice. This is aided by weakly applied and contradictory planning policies across scales – local, county, regional, national, European.

Moreover, he notes, that the Irish government’s commitment to landscape protection rarely and barely extends beyond the aspirational and collapses at the first sign of opposition from local landowners worried about the loss of possible future development potential.

In other words, there is a gulf between planning theory and practice and an absence of working consensus across different stakeholders that enables ad hoc individualism at the expense of the common good. Although there is a balance in the coverage, with McGrath setting out the positions of different constituents, it is clear that his vision for housing and property development is one of concentrated urban development in the towns and cities, with a containment of low density suburbanisation, and nucleated villages in rural areas with limitations on one-off housing.

In both cases there is an appeal to sustainability, in terms of travel patterns and service and utility provision, but most particularly to landscape conservation and protecting habitats and cultural and landscape heritage. This is underpinned by a strong sense of visual aesthetics and the notion that “physical beauty enriches our lives.” 

It’s most definitely a planner’s and conservationist’s view of how land and landscape should be managed, forwarding an approach that is common across Europe and elsewhere. It is one that most Irish planners will be sympathetic to. However, given the widespread distrust and subversion of planning by politicians and the general population, it is a view that will not find favour amongst many stakeholders.

Aware of such opposition to his standpoint, McGrath’s suggestion for gaining consensus is a participatory approach wherein the local community is more actively engaged in planning and managing the landscape. For example, he suggests that protected areas need to be run by, with and for local people, and have both social and economic objectives as well as conservation, rather than be directed at a distance by government agencies in Dublin or Brussels.

For all of its positive qualities, the book does have two shortcomings.

First, the analysis is overly descriptive and lacks depth of argument. This is perhaps to be expected. It is a book aimed at a general, interested audience rather than a contribution to academic debates. Nevertheless, the account would have benefitted from more explanation and from an engagement with more normative questions about how the relationship between Irish society and landscape should be formulated.

Second, McGrath’s notion of landscape limited in scope and the title should have the word “Rural” at its start, given it barely discusses urban landscapes. Indeed, with the exception of a couple paragraphs about suburbanisation and the management of development on Howth peninsula, the towns and cities of Ireland are entirely absent from the analysis. Even villages barely get a mention.

The urban in Ireland is apparently devoid of landscapes worthy of discussion despite its inherent landscaping, architectural design and cultural heritage. For McGrath landscape is synonymous with countryside and, more specifically, romanticised, scenic vistas of mountains, bogs, lakes and coastline rather than agricultural land or Big House estates. Nearly all his examples are drawn from the Western seaboard stretching from Kerry to Donegal and refer to locales acknowledged to be areas of natural beauty.

Nonetheless, the book provides an interesting and engaging account of the relationship between landscape and society in contemporary Ireland and raises important questions about the nature of this association.

Given the piecemeal, wasteful and often damaging developments of the Celtic Tiger era and the on-going competing demands on Ireland’s landscapes it is clear that we need a full and frank debate about how land is managed. McGrath’s book provides a solid, accessible foundation to inform such a debate.

Lazy Sunday Service

Whilst I was away in China the number of page views on the blog crossed the half a million mark according to the blogger stats.  Which is a fair number of hits and beyond my expectation.  By far the most popular post to date has been one entitled: 'Classic crime fiction curriculum challenge'.  Thanks to everybody who has stopped by the blog over the past four and a half years. 

My posts this week
Guangzhou heist
Back from China
Review of The Eye of Jade by Diane Wei Liang

Guangzhou heist

Eva parked the BMW in front of the loan shark’s office. 

‘Ready?’

Evelyn grinned.  ‘This is going to be so super cool!’

‘Let’s go and free some money.’

They exited the car and headed for the door dressed like twin Hong Kong criminal fashionistas -- head to toe in tailored black threads, dark shades, hair pulled tight into ponytails, each gripping a handgun. 

A man stepped out of the shadows to block their progress, but changed his mind and melted away.

Eva pushed open the door and Evelyn stepped inside, her gun raised, already shouting orders at the startled occupants.





A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Back from China

I arrived back from 7 days in China (and a day there and a day back) yesterday morning.  It was a really excellent trip taking in Guangzhou and Shenzhen in the south of the country and we were very well looked after by our hosts in Jinan University, where we co-ran a workshop.  The scale of development taking place has to be seen to be believed, with extensive building work taking place.  Skyscrapers seem to be going up everywhere.  To get a sense of this, Guangzhou had a population of 5.6 million in 1982 and 12.7 million in 2011 and Shenzhen had a population of 314,000 in 1979 and 10.5 million in 2011.  Despite the rapid growth, all the various urban systems worked fine, and the cities were clean and safe.  The only negatives were being unable to access my usual social media - my blogs, twitter, facebook and friendfeed - and the smog on the final couple of days.  Thankfully I'd lined up a couple of posts before I set off.  Definitely somewhere worth a visit.

Review of The Eye of Jade by Diane Wei Liang (Simon and Schuster, 2008)

Head strong and proud, Mei Wang has left her job at the Ministry of Public Security and set herself up as an information consultant, a front given that private investigators are illegal.  Having given up a good position and still without a husband, Mei is a worry for her mother, who idolises her successful sister, a TV presenter who is married to a rich businessman.  When an old family friend, ‘Uncle Chen’, asks Mei to search for a piece of Han dynasty jade stolen from a museum during the Cultural Revolution, she takes up the challenge.  But not long after she starts her hunt her mother has a stroke, forcing her to balance the case with hospital vigils.  Both the case and her mother’s illness lead Mei to question their family history, stirring secrets that might be better left undisturbed.

Many detective stories seek to balance the back story and everyday life of the detective with the investigation and the resolution of the mystery.  In most cases, the balance veers towards the mystery element of the story, with the main character’s personal life and history taking a back seat.  In The Eye of Jade, Diane Wei Liang reverses this balance.  The story mostly focuses on the main character, Mei Wang, and her relationship to her mother and sister, and the family’s murky past tied up in the Cultural Revolution.  As such, the mystery element to the story is largely a plot device to enable the family history and present relations to be examined.  As a result, the investigation is a little thin and sketchy, with a somewhat quick and weak resolution.  This is, however, compensated to a degree by some nice characterisation, especially Mei Wang as a strong willed woman who is a little out of sync and place with Chinese social norms, and nice contextualisation with respect to life in Beijing, Chinese culture and values, family relationships, and China’s recent past.  Overall, a detective story that needed a little more focus on the mystery element, but nonetheless an interesting read.

Reluctant witnesses

The couple veered off the pavement and crossed the deserted road, their heads bowed, eyes swivelled to their right.

‘Jesus, they’re going to kill him,’ the woman whispered.

‘Just keep walking.’

In front of a shuttered shop three men were savagely kicking a fourth who was curled up on the ground, his hands wrapped around his head.

‘We need to do something.’

‘We’ll call the police once we’re round the corner.’  The man tugged the woman along as she glanced over her shoulder.

‘What you looking at?’ one of the men shouted.  ‘You want to be next?’

‘Fuck.  Come-on, run.’




A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of The City of Strangers by Michael Russell (Avon, 2013)

March 1939.  Europe is on the edge of war and the IRA has started a bombing campaign in Britain.  Garda Sergeant Stefan Gillespie is serving in a small Wicklow station, raiding illegal dances and investigating petty rural crime.  He’s somewhat surprised when the Garda Commissioner calls him up to Dublin to tell him that he’s to take the new flying boat service from Foynes to New York to bring back a young man wanted in connection to the brutal murder of his mother.  On arrival Gillespie comes into contact with Clan na Gael, the upholders of Irish Republican politics in the US, campaigners to keep the US out of European affairs, and power-brokers between the IRA and German intelligence, and also meets an old colleague from G2, the Irish Intelligence unit.  He’s soon drawn into helping a woman holding vital secrets escape from an upscale psychiatric home, placing himself in danger, yet unable to turn to a police force dominated by Irish republicans.

The first Stefan Gillespie book, The City of Shadows, was one of my top three reads of 2012, so I’d been looking forward to the second book in the series.  The City of Strangers does not disappoint, with Michael Russell skilfully blending together three interconnected storylines: Gillespie travelling to New York to bring back a young man suspected of murdering his mother; a revenge plot dating back to the civil war; and the IRA’s political manoeuvrings in the US and with German intelligence and the Irish response just prior to the Second World War.  The result is a compelling, page-turner police procedural/political thriller.  Indeed, Russell has done a fine job at punching all the right buttons - as well as a gripping plot, the characterisation is strong, the historical contextualisation excellent, and the sense of place well realised.  Gillespie is a well penned and engaging lead, with a well developed back story.  He is accompanied by a mix of fictional and real characters who are all alive on the page and whose interactions are nicely observed.  There is a balanced blend of Irish and international politics, supported by some nice historical detail that is informative without swamping the story.  And the reader is dropped into pre-war Wicklow, Dublin and New York.  Overall, a very fine piece of crime fiction and I’m looking forward to reading the third book in the series. 

November reads

November proved to be my slowest month of reading so far this year.  I completed and reviewed just six books.  They were six very good reads, however.  My book of the month was The Thicket by Joe Lansdale, an adventure yarn set in East Texas in the early part of the twentieth century.

The Thicket by Joe Lansdale *****
The Low Road by Chris Womersley ****
Hunting Eichmann by Neal Bascomb ****
The Master Switch by Tim Wu ****
Outerborough Blues by Andrew Cotto ****.5
Severance Package by Duane Swiercynski ****.5

Lazy Sunday Service

My review of The Thicket by Joe Lansdale was my 100th book review of the year so far, despite the fact that my resolution for this year was to reduce my reading and to write more.  I am writing quite a bit, it's just that it's nearly all academic stuff.  Next year I want to get back to more fiction, but hopefully without sacrificing my reading.  Talking of reading, last night I finished Michael Russell's excellent The City of Strangers and I'm now reading The Eye of Jade by Diane Wei Liang, ahead of my trip to China.  Expect reviews shortly.


My posts this week:
Review of The Low Road by Chris Womersley
Getting lost in The Thicket
Review of The Thicket by Joe Lansdale
To the death

To the death

As a startled looking Peter slipped out Cassie as she grimaced and squeezed the bones in my hand to dust, I knew I’d be prepared to fight to the death to protect them.  Little did I realise that I’d be doing just that six weeks later, struggling through forest undergrowth towards the border, pursued by the retort of pistols and drunken shouting.  We were targets in a game beyond our comprehension which was fast approaching its endpoint.  When we finally reached the river Cassie plunged in, swimming with Peter held above the water, as I fired shots into the dark.


  
A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of The Thicket by Joe Lansdale (Mulholland Books, 2013)

Jack Parker has just turned sixteen when his mother and father die from small pox on their East Texas farm.  His grandfather arrives to take him and his younger sister, Lula, to an aunt in Kansas.  Not long after setting off they run into Cut Throat Bill and his gang, who have just robbed a bank.  The gang murder Jack’s grandfather and kidnap his younger sister.  Jack makes his way to the nearest town to find the sheriff, who killed when the bank was robbed.  Determined to rescue his sister he turns to two bounty hunters, the charismatic dwarf, Shorty, and his partner, Eustace, the son of a slave, offering them the deeds to his parent’s and grandfather’s land in return for help.  The three of them set off in pursuit, picking up Jimmie-Sue, a young prostitute seeking to leave the profession, and Winton, another sheriff interested in the bounty on capturing Cut Throat Bill’s gang, dead or alive.  Tracking, Fatty, one of Bill’s gang, they home in on their quarry, hoping that Lula is still alive and they can rescue her whilst maintaining their own health.

Set just as oil is being discovered in Texas and the first cars are bumping along unpaved roads, The Thicket is an adventure yarn that is a mix of Tom Sawyer, Stand by Me and True Grit, with a solid dose of the comic, dark humour that populates Lansdale's Hap and Leonard books.  The strengths of the tale is its voice, characterisation, sense of place and time, and plot.  The story is told as a form of a reminiscence through a very engaging narrator’s voice that makes it feel as if it’s the transcript of porch-told tale.  Jack Parker is a wonderful character, just on the cusp of becoming an adult, but still naive and unworldly, though brave and determined.  And Lansdale puts in his company a colourful band of bounty hunters, who are ranged against an equally colourful band of dispicable villians.  The plot is a boys own adventure with a large dose of spice and grit, that is perfectly paced with the right balance of action and reflection, and the reader is placed into the landscape of East Texas in the early twentieth century and its social relations and rhythms.  Overall, Lansdale is on fine form and The Thicket is a thoroughly enjoyable escapist yarn.

Getting lost in The Thicket

In The Thicket Joe Lansdale continues his coming of age crime-filled adventures in East Texas some time in the early twentieth century - as with The Bottoms and Edge of Dark Water - told in the form of a reminiscence.  It's great stuff.  Here's how it starts.

I didn't suspect the day Grandfather came out and got me and my sister, Lula, and hauled us off toward the ferry that I'd soon end up with worse things happening than had already come upon us or that I'd take up with a gun-shooting dwarf, the son of a slave, and a big angry hog, let alone find true love and kill someone, but that's exactly how it was.
    It was the pox that got it all started.  It had run through the country like a runaway mule and been especially unkind to the close-by town of Hinge Gate. ...

The pages just kept turning after that.  Review shortly.