Once more Renko goes searching for Tatiana, the rusty knight chasing after the damsel in distress intent on exposing the corrupt rapacity of oligarchic dragons.

Slowly slide down a long twisting curve into bizarre weirdness, body horror and a twisty apocalypse in a remote town infected by spirals. It's utterly horrifying. Oh my God. So wildly horrifying, on a level that is nothing short of visionary. Twisted genius.

Still feeling too ill to do proper reviews. Some great stories here, some ok, one or two I disliked, but the Frtiz Leiber story is definitely the TED Klein story of Book One of Book Two.

Hello prersent surivivors of covid and furure historians trawling the ancient net archives for tiny fragments of social and cultural life during what we with little affection and great trepidation call 2020, but which the future will centextualise in ways we probablty prefer to avoid imagining. The only insight I have to offer is that reading and reviewing books is hard. Really, really hard. I don't know why. It's just difficult. Everything feels difficult. Everything's tense and anxious, even for people like me relatively well set up to endure lockdown.

Anyway. I have read a few books, and I haven't reviewed them, hopefully I'll get back to them at some point. I picked up Spy Hook having watched the old TV adaptaion of Game, Set And Match on YouTube. Personally, I thought it was very good with excellent performances and a good script. It did make me not exactly nostalgic but wistful about the good old grimy grey drizzly days of the Cold War and the threat of nucear annihilation and the backstabbing, treachery, double dealing and sheer human waste of the espionage game. so I fished out Spy Hook because I couldn't remember how it all worked out in the subsequent trilogies.

Poor old belligerent and pig-headed Bernard Sampson ploughs on doggedly with a life wrecked by his wife's defection. Poking around in places he doesn't belong despite increasingly elaborate warnings by everyone around him leads him to a troubling conclusion and a whole heap of trouble, and then the book ends and I don't have Spy Line, and the libraries aren't taking orders yet, dammit! When will my suffering end?

I think one could be forgiven for assuming, after even only a brief survey, that the primary purpose of religion is to keep women in their place. You would be wrong, of course. Women just aren't that important. The primary purpose of any given religion is to inculcate children into that religion. Some of those children will turn into women and if you inculcate them well enough, they'll keep themselves in their place.
Maybe I'm being unfair. The polygamist practices of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, and of the many other Mormon spin-off sects who also practice plural marriage, are enough to turn you off religion for life, and possibly humanity in general if you're having a really bad day. The mainstream LDS Church, of course, has turned away from polygamy, it being illegal and more trouble than it's worth. Committed polygamists, however, appear to believe that it's a sacrament and commandment so fundamental and important to their faith that they hive off to their own communities and risk arrest for the right to marry, for example, their own 14 year-old step-daughter, or, only slightly less skin-crawlingly, hive their 14 year-old daughters and step-daughters off to be married to other polygamists. If the daughters don't, they will, of course, suffer eternal damnation.
This is one of the religious issues which forms part of the backdrop to the appalling double-murders of a mother and her infant daughter in the Summer of 1984 in Utah by Dan and Ron Lafferty. God told them to do it. They're both in prison now, Dan for life and Ron under sentence of death, protracted for decades on appeal. Neither of them are particularly sorry for their crime. They don't even regard it as a crime. God told them to do it, directly and personally, and they thought long and hard about it before concluding that they'd better get on with it or risk angering God.
Krakauer traces the story of the Lafferty brothers and what led them to commit divinely inspired homicide, tracing the roots of their beliefs through the history of the founding of Mormonism by Joseph Smith and the peculiarly bloody and violent rise of what is now one of the fastest growing religions in the world. Persecution, exile, murder and massacre follow the Saints on their trek across America, inflicted on them and perpetrated by them.
It's a compelling, sobering narrative, and though it examines some incidents in a certain amount of detail, in some ways this serves best as a survey for those unfamiliar with the history of Mormonism. Fellow Irish Catholics will not be surprised to discover that the darkest side of religion is, as always, not the dreadful and violent actions of extremist believers, but the systematic and widespread corruption, abuse and repression of the young and the innocent.

I made the crucial mistake, while reading this, of listening to the Radio 4 comedy, All The World's A Globe, with the result that every now and then I would discover that I was reading it in the voice of Desmond Olivier Dingle, rendering this epic, tragic tale of the strangest left-turn in history, utterly hilarious.
It does boggle the mind, somewhat, that a holy crusade whose primary intention is to go kill Muslims in the Holy Land ends up off killing Orthodox Christians in Constantinople, but Philips lays it all out for the reader and traces the logic of how an untimely death here, a bit of uneven preaching there, some over-inflated numbers, a massive economic hole that threatens to founder both the crusade and an entire city-state, and a deposed Prince turning up at just the right time with just the right offer, all lead inexorably to the catastrophic downfall of one of the most amazing cities of the medieval world, and an entire empire falls with it.
My dimly remembered knowledge of this particular military foray recalls that most of the blame for the wayward expedition was lain at the feet of the wily Venetians, who built the fleet that was to carry the crusaders to the Levant. Phillips lucidly argues that the only truly naked act of greed and cynicism that the Venetians can be fairly blamed for is the siege of Zara. The leaders of the Crusade vastly overestimated the numbers and ordered ships accordingly, at a huge price. Venice literally stopped all other commercial activity for an entire year to produce the fleet, and when the numbers failed to materialise, were left very much in the same hole as the Crusaders. Even when settled on the shore of the great city, they had no intention of attacking the place: they fully expected the princes' extravagant promises to be honoured, whereupon it would have been hey-ho, off to Jerusalem we go. Circumstances, betrayals, mistrust, coups, murders, sneak attacks and outright hostility followed, and the rest is history.
Its a sad, fascinating story. One has to admire the drive, religious devotion, determination and sheer military skill of the Europeans, if not the use to which they are put. Phillips emphasises the importance of tournaments - wide ranging, sometimes lethal competitive brawls - in training the knights and soldiery of the west, as opposed to the neglected, poorly led and deteriorating Byzantine military forces. Even so, in the end, nothing much is achieved except a lot of dead people, tons of looted treasures, one burnt, wrecked and sacked city, and a lingering bitterness between the Catholic and orthodox churches
Basically.

Well, this is cheerful stuff. Nick Davies, respected journalist, gives the lie to the notion that the biggest threat to journalism is the interference of owners or the threats of advertisers. His thesis is that the drive for profits has driven journalism to the brink of destruction. Staff cuts and spending cuts have resulted in fewer journalists working with fewer resources on more stories. Unfortunately those stories are provided by the booming new sector that is the Public Relations industry, which is not above manufacturing news and events and whipping up fear and disinformation. Meanwhile, the network of reporters who used to cover all sorts of stories from all over the world has shriveled to nothing. Which leaves us with the interesting question of how true the picture of the world presented to us daily in the media actually is.

Davies traces the decline of old-fashioned journalistic practices and values and the rise of the new 'churnalism,' which reproduces and rewrites PR copy without much in the way of checking or exploring or context. Not everything you read on your newspapers or see on your television is churnalism. But a lot of it is. He also touches on the campaign of lies, distortions and misinformation that was part of the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, shocking in its scope and in the utter capitulation of the media in the face of the official line.

Just when you thought you were outraged out, Davies saves the most appalling for last: The Daily Mail and the Press Complaints Commission. One routinely lies and distorts and attacks innocent targets with unmitigated ferocity. The other turns down more than 90% of the complaints it receives without even considering their content.

It ends on a note of pessimism. The only real solution, unstated by Davies, is for a widespread return to the proper funding of proper journalism. The trend at the moment, however, is for less reporters, more stories, higher profits, and so long as that continues truth will suffer and so will we.

Extraordinary book about an extraordinary time and extraordinary men doing extraordinary things. And yes, it's mostly men doing the big things, such was the nature of the times. Women are mostly minor characters, walk-on cameos and victims, though one of the most admirable acts is performed by an unnamed woman.
The Chicago World's Fair, a monumental undertaking by a monumental group of Chicago architects. The time is too short, the task is too big, there are delays and disasters waiting along the way but that doesn't stop them rolling up their sleeves and transforming a piece of lakeside wasteland into the fabled White City which becomes a marvel to enchant the whole world.
It's a story of sheer capitalist American achievement, awesome in scope and grandeur, and the sacrifice, vision and dedication of mighty men of business and industry in the name of civic pride is staggering to behold. It's also a vision of American darkness, however, with economic chaos, labour unrest, crime and insanity a kind of dark twin to the shining ideals of the fair. Most of all, though, deepest in the shadow of the White City, is Dr HH Holmes, charming and handsome, with his World's Fair Hotel and it's rooms full of vulnerable young women and it's secret vaults and gas lines and air-tight rooms and specially designed furnace. A monster of appalling proportions, the full scope of his awful crimes can never be known.
Larson runs the story of the fair and the story of the killer in parallel, writing with immense dramatic energy, the urgency of a novel and the riveting knowledge that this is fact, not fiction.

The Parker novel par excellence, returning to the setting and the abandoned money of Slayground and calling on old friends from many of the previous novels. Professional criminal Parker's having a bad streak with jobs going bad or turning up empty, leaving his funds dangerously low. With partner Grofield he goes back to the town where he robbed an armoured car, but was forced to stash the take. The take is gone, and Parker sets out to find. At first, it seems like a variation on The Man With The Getaway Face, as Parker and Grofield put pressure on a local mob by robbing their various joints, but with a takeover being mounted behind the scenes, things soon go badly wrong, Grofield is shot, Parker loses patience, and it all ends in a massive series of heists and an explosion of ruthless violence. The Parker books went on a long hiatus after this one, and it's easy to see why. In a series of brilliant, brutal crime novels, this is definitely a high point.

I don't like to be prescriptive, but I do like it when literature has the readability one might associate with more middlebrow works of popular fiction. But that's just a question of bias and narrow experience. Most of my reading is middlebrow, and I cleave to it precisely because it tends to be the home of that quality of readability one craves in one's books. But why shouldn't works of literature have that quality? The people who write them are usually very, very good at what they do. More challenging works, like Ulysses, or Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest tower like behemoths over everything else, blotting out the fact that a lot of literature is written to be enjoyed as an experience; more ambitious, perhaps, in terms of human enrichment and intellectual engagement, but fundamentally, enjoyably readable.

All of which is to say, it's nice to be reminded by someone like Robertson Davies that literature can be as readable as a thriller. Or, more accurately perhaps, that thrillers derive much of their readability from the work done in literature.

This strange, entrancing epic of Jungian archetypes loose in the first half of the 20th century begins with spiteful snowball, a premature birth, a mother damaged to the point of disgrace or sainthood and a man raised in a cloying religious community who rejects religion but not spirituality and devotes much of his life to the legends of saints and sainthood. There is a sort of lifelong friendship with the snowball-thrower and involvement with the damaged woman who he comes to regard as a saint and her long-vanished son encountered by chance in the Swiss Tyrol. It's a cunning and enthralling tale that unfolds wonderfully through the narrator's life, full of incident and adventures physical, spiritual and personal, not to mention cast of characters drawn with skill and humour and insight that is both clear-eyed as it is humane.

The Manticore begins where Fifth Business suddenly and dramatically ends, David Staunton, drunk but highly eminent lawyer, flies to Switzerland on the verge of collapse and embarks on an intense and protracted period of Jungian analysis, exploring his childhood and background, some of which has already been glimpsed in Fifth Business, and his troubled relationship with his family, most particularly his father. It is a life laid bare, the traumas and woundings and treatment that created the damaged and troubled man.

Where The Manticore shoots off from the end of Fifth Business, World Of Wonder sets out from the beginning, the terrible fate of Paul Dempster and his long, lonely, squalid and horrific journey to fame and success. Dempster embodies the Jungian Shadow. His lack of education frees him from a certain type of intellectual constraint and prejudice, opening him to a vivid, primitive powerful mode of perception. Raped and kidnapped, his childhood is spent in a carnival and in cheap vaudeville. His talent for sleight of hand illusions and mechanisms is fostered in miserably darkness, but he survives, tough and raw and auto-didactic, he is a dark mirror to David in The Manticore.

What to make of the whole thing? People are the centres of their own stories. One's actions resound and affect the lives of others for good or evil, and one has little control over which. Religion is corrupt and stifling but spirtuality is necessary for a full understanding of life, and that spirituality takes many forms and comes with its own dangers. A rich, heady, humane trilogy, and a masterpiece of 20th century literature.