Book review: Archangel

Having read and enjoyed Fatherland, I foud Archangel second hand so gave it a go. I think that as a thriller it is superior: the ending in particular is great, from that perspective. As a book overall I prefer Fatherland; Archangel seems just a little parochial by comparison. But Archangel suffers a little by being read immediately after Fatherland, since the over all plots - evil empire, long-lost dox exposing terrible secret - are rather similar.

We're in Russia, during Yeltsin's premiership - I think this is not explicitly said, but there is a scene where a character on the phone to him hears the clink of ice cubes in a glass and thinks oh no, not this early in the morning - when all is chaotic; there is liberalisation, vast fortunes swirling around, but also longing for ye olde dayes amongst those losing out.

Our Hero, a scruffy feisty historian who has offended too many others, is at a conference in Moscow organised by the archives. And is approached by an old scarred man, ex Beria's service, who knows where Stalin's fabled notebook is buried. And then the chase is on.

Sadly - in my view; but then it would perhaps have been just too similar to Fatherland - the notebook turns out to be not Stalin's, but a young woman on whom he fathered a child, who turns out to be still alive, in the forests not too far from Archangel. And the plot turns into chasing him down. That makes a fine thriller but somehow, to me at least, rather small scale.

I think I thought to myself that Our Hero meeting the Old Guy was rather coincidental; happily this is fixed up at the end: it was all arranged. I think Our Hero should have guessed this, or at the very least considered it. I'm also rather dubious about the Son living off in the woods for so long, especially as town is only an hour or so away by boat. Oh, and a flaw: as Beria is dying, he shouts "Archangel", which means nothing to most Western readers, but really everyone who heard it would know is a city in Russia.

The book does a good job of showing you how badly the Soviet Union broke so many people's lives and what a terrible regime it was.

If you like forests-in-snow, then I think Billion Dollar Brain does it better.

Meta

I find myself asking Gemini questions now, so here is its answer to "is Archangel or Fatherland a better book?". FWIW, Goodreads gives F 4.03, and A 3.83.

Fatherland is widely considered the better and more iconic book by Robert Harris compared to Archangel, though both are gripping thrillers.

Fatherland (1992)

• Premise: An alternative history noir set in 1964 where Nazi Germany won World War II, and a Berlin detective named Xavier March uncovers a massive state secret while investigating a murder.

• Why readers love it: It is often praised as Harris's breakout masterpiece and a true classic of the alternative history genre. Readers highlight its chilling, richly imagined atmosphere of a victorious Nazi superstate and a tense geopolitical standoff with the United States.

• Consensus: Most fans and reviewers rank it higher in Harris's bibliography, citing a stronger and more iconic concept than his later thrillers.

Archangel (1998)

• Premise: A post-Soviet political thriller set in modern Russia, following a historian (Fluke Kelso) who tracks down a secret notebook belonging to Joseph Stalin.

• Why readers love it: It is a fast-paced, entertaining read with a satisfying ending and fascinating snippets of Soviet-era history.

• Consensus: While some individual readers prefer its pacing or setting, it is generally viewed as a more conventional thriller that lacks the cultural impact and atmospheric dread of Fatherland.

I find "more iconic" grates, here and whenever I see it elsewhere. Something either is, or isn't, iconic; I don't think it can be used in degree. 

Book review: Fatherland

Fatherland is a 1992 alternative history detective novel by English writer and journalist Robert Harris. Set in a world where the Axis won World War II, the German Reich spans from the Rhine to the Ural Mountains and so on. Unlike SS-GB, which is set in 1941, this is set well after the war, 1964. I read it perhaps 15 years ago, I think from Mfd's copy - which in retrospect is strange - but recalled little of it, other than the dream-like Autobahns heading east over the ridges, to keep the winter snow off the roads. So I was a little disappointed on the re-read to find that is only a sentence, towards the end.

The plot is that the Krauts, having "won", and having implemented the Final Solution, and then covered it up, are finally killing off the last officials who know. Our Hero is a KriPo (Criminal Police) officer who starts with a body found in a lake; evenutally he assists in smuggling out documents; and ends up hunted off towards the barely visible ruins of a razed concentration camp.

So there's lots of nice investigation, and slow discovery of historical facts, and uncovering what was going on, and indeed a primer on the Holocaust for those who had forgotten. We get digs at Speer's tasteless gigantic Berlin - I recall reading his book years back, and being amazed at how unimaginative and derivative it all was: "we'll have an arch, and it will be much bigger than the Arc de Triomphe", and very dull. Like Trump. And so on.

The grey pall that SS-GB portrays extends to the book's present: while the Krauts have "won", a rump Russian govt behind the Urals propped up by the US fights on bleeding greater Germany; resettlement to the East is not nice; the Gestapo are still active and feared and poison the land, and so on. In a way I would have liked a more optimistic book, where the world was flourishing, and perhaps Our Hero has to wonder whether revealing long-forgotten reality is really worth upsetting prosperity.

I feel that the book's central premise isn't reasonable: that 11 million Jews could not actually go missing and have no-one know. Indeed the books characters admit this to themselves towards the end, but say that without evidence... waves hands. "The East" seems to be a land of mystery, as though behind an Iron Curtain, which doesn't seem right. But with all that, it is a fun read.

The holocaust of the laptops

Alas poor laptops, I knew them well. The EGU stickers on this one make it a BAS laptop, and I left there in 2007. That one, a P3110CT, is so old it had an actual hard drive. And the lower sticker is a PalmPilot alphabet code. There were Qualcomm stickers on some others, though I think those were Q stickers I gave to E for hers.

But they had been gathering dust and taking up space in the living room for ages, so eventually had to go. The power supplies have long vanished, so to wipe them I chiselled open the backs, ripped out the SSDs and broke them. Arguably overkill; they likely have no secrets and were likely unbootable without an unreasonable level of effort, but it was sorta fun.

So now they are all at Milton Tip for disposal. Sic transit gloria mundi. You'll be pleased to know that I've used the space released to tidy up my diaries, which I'll never read again.

Refs

* The holocaust of the owls.

Book review: The Moving Finger

Tis another Marple, though she is terribly discrete and slides in gently at the end in her little old lady knitting guise. I was going to be all offended because I guessed wrong, but in the end I think that while she cheated a bit, overall the answer is clear enough that I should have guessed right.

So, my guess was Megan, based on the rather obvious I-hate-the-world stuff; the surprise factor; her not being included in the lists that Our Narrator makes; and her surprise return home on the morning of Agnes' call.

That return is only cleanly explicable in that she hears Agnes' call, and realises that Agnes knows something; that Agnes has seen something or - as I guessed correctly - has actually seen nothing, which is puzzling. With the true villain unmasked, her return has no explanation; which is why I say this is cheating a bit. I do agree thought that Mr S has a better motive than Megan.

Once you realise that Mrs S has been killed, then one realises that the letters are all a sideshow. I did so realise; in particular, the scrawled "I can't go on" is just not plausible as a suicide note: far too brief, and anyway doesn't even fit: she's only just that day got one letter. No-one even says these obvious things which is a clear sign of their importance. The replacement of "Barton" by "Burton" on one envelope shows they were all prepared in advance, but that doesn't get you anywhere.

Is killing Agnes believeable? Not really. As ever it is always the second murder that does the villain in; and in this case the realisation that she hasn't seen anyone, whilst puzzling, isn't really going to go far; the risk of a murder is obviously higher and cannot but draw police attention.

The weird bit from Colnel Mustard just before the denouement about taking Elsie into town baffles me.

Book review: Billion Dollar Brain

Another Deighton of the "nameless narrator" school. It is good. If "Twinkle" was the desert, this is the slow soft melancholy fall of snow in the Finnish forests. That atmosphere pervades most of the book; perhaps that makes the "Brain" scenes in the US even more an outlier; perhaps they could have been omitted.

I think various aspects are slightly unsatisfactory: Our Protagonist goes to Helsinki because Klaarna has been killed, but he is unimportant, so why do they care? His meeting Signe appears pure chance. And perhaps others; but I think that I don't really care about that; take the overarching plot as given.

Within that various scenes are lovely: Midwinter's little white animals hitting each other. The huge steaming beast in the misty forest that turns into the cavalry man and horse. OP waking up under corpses. Harvey stealing the fake eggs. The train, and the fake stop. Walking across the ice.

The computer-y stuff was perhaps the flavour of the year but doesn't age well and isn't Deighton's area of expertise: as this review points out, the titular Brain is supa because it works in base 10 not binary. Oops.

I like Deighton's writing. Sometimes, well perhaps often, he is trying a bit too hard with the "the sky was like a..."¹ stuff, but a lot of it works.

Notes

1. Also known as similies, I understand.

Book review: SS-SB

By Len Deighton. I read this years ago, though long after the classics, and for some reason didn't like it: I think I failed to realise what it was about and didn't get into it. On this re-read - but hacving totally forgotten the plot - I liked it, and read it quickly.

The premise is that in 1941, Britain having lost to a Nazi invasion, there are two twining plot elements - stop now, spoilers ahead - that meet in a murder investigation. As Deighton says in an intro, he chose his detective viewpoint to give a plausible inside view of the machinations he was trying to imagine. The threads are some documents related to atom-bomb work; and a plot to rescue the King from his incarceration in the Tower of London. I was kinda expecting, in a manner of say Horse Under Water, that one of those would turn out to be fake but no; they both continue to the end and work together.

Deighton is a military historian - see-also Bomber, Fighter, Blitzkrieg - and interested in the legal machinations - see-also Winter - and so the book has a realistic feel including the interservice rivalry on the German side. The grimy subjugated England feels quite similar to the world of The IPCRESS File and friends. Indeed one result of the book is to make me feel, again, grateful to be living in the modern world.

The book works: the plot fits together, there are no major holes. I think the atomic research would be more secret; people talk about it quite casually, I feel that more plausibly even knowing of it would be dangerous. I don't think the 35 pages of handwritten notes would be very valuable: once the idea exists, it is reproducible, given enough tech and engineering; although the US was interested in UK science around this, in the real war.

The book gives us no feel for what is going on in the rest of the world. The implication is that the war is frozen: Germany and Russia remain allies, America is neutral and regards Japan as an enemy but isn't clearly at war.

I've seen reviews complain that the mystery of the initial death fades out and becomes unimportant; that seems foolish to me: this is not by Our Ag; the point of the book is not whodunnit, but the overall situation.

Book review: Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy

I didn't like this book, even though it is a Len Deighton, and I'm not quite sure why. The title is irritating, as is the cover picture, but my dislike and indeed disappoinment goes deeper. I think it was mostly that the sequence of things that happen, though perhaps quite interesting in themselves, don't fit together terribly well. It is too much just one thing, then another thing, until we reach the end.

This is set during the cold war, obvs, and we start with Our Nameless Protagonist in the desert with Major Mann of the CIA, in the middle of an operation to pickup commie defector Bekuv, a maser expert. We never go to England, and I miss WOOC(P) and Dawlish and so on. Anyway, they pick him up although he doesn't seem keen and on the way back the vehicle he was in - fortunately driven on ahead by some local arab - is shot up by a helicopter. But, never mind. We then wander around the States a bit in various rather sterile well-off surroundings.

There's a weird bit where ONP gets off with "Red", a beautiful backgammon player who just happens to be floating around, turns out to be CIA, and then turns out to be a - gasp - lesbian, as does Bekuv's wife. ONP is comically thrown by this, making the story vastly more dated than the cold-war frame does.

We then return to the desert, for a very silly and patently unnecessary car chase, before the denoument - look away now - that the dastardly commies have a big dish in the desert able to eavesdrop on our relay satellites over the Atlantic. But this makes no sense as the comms would hacve been encrypted anyway - no?