California Literary Review

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

• Book Review: Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch
  Posted on 09 Mar 2010 in History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Sociology
  

  Voodoo Histories isn’t an attempt to tell everyone to chill out and stop worrying about what people in authority are up to. Rather, it attempts the trickier task of explaining why a set of conspiracy theories do not hold water on close examination, and accounting for how they differ from traditional historical explanations – what is specifically “conspiracist” about them.

• The Scarpetta Factor by Patricia Cornwell
  Posted on 04 Nov 2009 in Crime Fiction, Fiction Reviews, Mystery
  

  She’s developed an enjoyable way of beginning novels in the middle of a story, letting her audience watch the characters carry out conversations and actions which they don’t yet understand, but which will be unravelled as the book continues. This must be an even harder trick than it looks, and The Scarpetta Factor is driven by the reader’s need to find out what the heroes know, as well as what the villains have done.

• Democracy: 1,000 Years in Pursuit of British Liberty by Peter Kellner
  Posted on 22 Sep 2009 in Great Britain, History, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  Magna Carta, that legendary document which is so frequently referred to in discussions of freedom, and which permeates our cultural history from Rudyard Kipling (“What say the reeds at Runnymede?”) to Tony Hancock (“Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?! Brave Hungarian peasant girl…”) was produced by a power struggle between the military aristocracy and the monarchy. Any resulting “liberty” for ordinary people was a waste product of the medieval warlord industry.

• Waiting for the Etonians by Nick Cohen
  Posted on 28 Jul 2009 in Great Britain, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics
  

  Nick Cohen is undoubtedly one of Britain’s finest living polemicists, and Waiting for the Etonians will be a genuine treat for readers who have come to rely on his rigorous thinking, stylish phrase-making and carefully controlled rage. The book’s subtitle, Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England, reflects his despair at the current state of left-wing (or “left-ish”) thinking in Britain, which he sees as almost irrevocably compromised by post-modernism, cultural relativism and the focus-group politics of New Labour.

• The Roar of the Butterflies by Reginald Hill
  Posted on 05 May 2009 in Crime Fiction, Fiction Reviews, Mystery
  

  Hill has written far fewer books about the black Luton lathe operator turned PI, but The Roar of the Butterflies displays the same qualities which make the Dalziel and Pascoe series so notable: a remarkable turn of phrase, a generous tone and persistent pushing at the boundaries of what crime fiction can encompass.

• Scarpetta by Patricia Cornwell
  Posted on 16 Mar 2009 in Crime Fiction, Fiction Reviews, Mystery
  

  There are flashes of wit – the description of the morgue as a “deconstruction site”, for example – and a sense of the book probing its own genre at times. A particularly striking passage involves faked emails, supposedly sent by Scarpetta, which purport to “dish the dirt” on autopsies at which the medical examiners mock the corpses, take souvenirs and generally act callously.

• Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell
  Posted on 24 Feb 2009 in Fiction Reviews, France, Great Britain, Historical Fiction, Military
  

  Much more serious, though, is the book’s take on the medieval world as a whole. Alongside the loud cynicism of its insistence that the battles are meaningless, the church is corrupt and the aristocracy live in a different world, Agincourt continually asserts a broadly positive, modern outlook.

• A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carré
  Posted on 18 Nov 2008 in Espionage, Fiction Reviews, Great Britain, Politics, Thrillers
  

  The violent and crude final pages of the book force us to scrutinise our feelings over the last three hundred pages – did we will this? Are we guilty of this ending, if only by five percent? The brutal inanity of the dialogue is a warning that in Le Carré’s world, we don’t get to argue over the proportions and scale of what we set in motion.

• The Right Side of the Tracks
  Posted on 20 May 2008 in Crime Fiction, Fiction Reviews, Great Britain, Literary Themes, Mystery
  

  Detective fiction revels in the possibilities offered by railway travel, but it also expresses some anxiety about them. The ability to travel across Britain at such speeds was exciting, but also potentially unsettling for a social system which still, in many ways, preferred that people remained “in their place”. When Sir Henry Baskerville is being followed by an unknown bearded man in London, he suspects it may be the butler from Baskerville Hall, and sends a telegram to check whether or not “Barrymore is at his post in Devonshire.”

• Lots in a Name
  Posted on 21 Jan 2008 in Crime Fiction, Fiction Reviews, Mystery, Writers
  

  Rather more subtle is Hercule Poirot, whose name contains elements of both “Hercules”, the classical hero, and “Pierrot”, the Italian clown – an interesting combination of heroism and buffoonery. The name reflects Christie’s practice of presenting Poirot alternately as a figure of fun and a stern emissary of justice. Dorothy L. Sayers balances her detective hero in a similar way – Peter Wimsey’s name has all the connotations of his silly-ass-about-town persona, but he is shadowed by his middle name – “Death.”