In Gnomon's land: Powerlessness, politics and predators

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so powerless.

I’m living under a dangerously incompetent UK Government. But worse than that, it’s weak, at war with itself, beset with lies, half-truths and cynical self interest. It has permitted some really toxic elements in British society not just to express their opinions, but to weaponise them online through unaccountable spending, to engineer the electoral process for their own nefarious purposes. It has encouraged an atmosphere where vicious, violent crime against people, even elected members, whose opinions are not shared by the bullies and bigots, can be promoted and perpetrated. And all of this in a technological context where control, surveillance and manipulation of the public is being allowed to run rampant.

I live in Scotland, a Scotland which even a year ago seemed capable of taking a different path. Which had, in the European referendum, voted - if not as resoundingly as one might have hoped - for cohesion, inclusivity, co-operation and openness. I felt embarrassed by my previous campaigning, in the far-off days of the Scottish Independence Referendum, confidently asserting that a vote for independence would remove us from Europe. I shifted my view towards what seemed a possible solution - Scotland in Europe, separate from a UK which seemed to be slipping towards an appalling mixture of brutal stupidity and tyranny.

But since then there has been political stasis in Scotland, with an SNP leadership uncertain how to proceed and a Labour Party apparently intent on savaging itself from within into irrelevance: And I understand the problem for Nicola and her cohorts: everything indicates that in the current climate of abject terror about the future, any second referendum for Scottish independence would bring defeat for and possibly a major fracturing of the SNP. The last thing the EU or this tottering Westminster administration wants now, as negotiations on Brexit range from flailing idiocy to dumb intransigence, is for that to be complicated by events north of the border. If there was a determined push for indyref 2, I could see London taking really drastic steps to stop it, moves that would make events in Catalonia seem like an episode from I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Apart from anything else, the UK cannot afford to lose Scotland - it’s oil and gas, its whisky, its strategic geography, its nuclear weaponry - in the face of exit from all that Europe is and represents. For the time being, Scotland will simply not be allowed to secede.

But Nicola has the Braveheartian elements within her party to consider. The anti-tax rise tartan Tories. The immigrant-hating element of escapees to ‘pure’ Scotland. And those who despise England, along with all who sail or sailed in her. There’s realpolitik. And there’s a need to keep the saltires fluttering and the bagpipes inflated.

Meanwhile, Labour is in the grip of romantic leftism - to which I am not immune - I mean, Jeremy Corbyn, like me,once owned an MZ motorbike and rode it to Portugal and back; no-one else in politics, aside possibly from the legendary Hugh Kerr, can say such a thing. But come the crunch of yet another general election, can Labour, hopelessly compromised on Europe and beset with ugly internal conflicts ranging from anti-semitism through  sexual harassment to the shameful vilification of Kezia Dugdale (but not by The Beloved Jeremy), actually win? In this torrid atmosphere of hate crime and the ruthless, moneyed exploitation of social media by so-far unidentified forces of the extreme right?

And whither Scotland? The SNP Government seems to be desperately pushing for the retention of Holyrood powers that could easily be sacrificed by Boris, ‘Red Mike’ Gove and their chums. While facing a meltdown in public services, notably health, which can only be addressed by tax increases. A route it is poised to take, but understands could alienate yet another element of nationalist support. 

I am writing this after finishing Nick Harkaway’s hugely disturbing, vastly entertaining and - let’s be honest - quite difficult and very long book Gnomon. On the face of it, and to simplify drastically,Gnomon is a doorstop of dystopian sci-fi which reads at times like a brainstorming session involving Neal Stephenson, William Gibson and the late Iain (M) Banks. But it’s really a book about Brexit Britain, about the surveillance state, about how we ignore digital manipulation by Government at our peril. At how the evil  in our society lurks, waiting to assume control. It’s also about nationalism, dictatorship and how worldwide, we are reaping the whirlwind of identity politics.

Which of course brings me back to Scotland. Is the unutterable mess the UK wallows in right now a result of Scotland’s kicking against the Westminster pricks? Did Scotland’s drive for independence, all starry-eyed and moral, liberating and socially liberal,  unleash the poisonous forces of brutal, racist, skinhead Little Englandism?

There was undoubtedly  an element of reaction. But amid the Greek gods and Ethiopian art, the demons, sharks and books (because Gnomon is about books as much as politics, including arcane pulp references such as the word ‘Forsythean’ as in Frederick, and a submarine called Rebus) Nick Harkaway identifies a worldwide retreat into parochialism, fuelled by the ever-encroaching power of the internet. Scotland’s wee story is more symptom than cause.

What to do now? What can we do? My faith, I have to say, is in the power of words. Not this book, or not only Gnomon, but the fantastic journalistic work being done to uncover the way the Brexit referendum was corrupted and manipulated by those who stand to gain most from it. And I don’t just mean the Russians.

There are sharks everywhere. 

“What’ll I tell the kids?” 

“Tell ‘em I’m going fishing...”

Gnomon, by Nick Harkaway. Published by Heinemann. £14.99

Welcome to Myersworld: These Darkening Days and the Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers, with detours to Glasgow and New York

These Darkening Days by Benjamin Myers (Moth, £7.99)

The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers (Bluemoose, £7.99)

McGraw by Reg McKay (B&W, £9.99)

The Force by Don Winslow (Harper Collins, £9.99)

I get my various Yorkshires confused: Leeds, where I went to buy a Jeep Grand Cherokee from a dealer in used police cars. Leeds, setting for Alan Plater’s magnificently, hilariously grim Beiderbecke Trilogy. There’s the David Peace/Red Riding /Damned United Yorkshire. Leeds again. Then you’ve got your Brontës and your Hughes and your Plath and your James Herriot. Wait, don’t diss The Herriot: veterinary doings have made Thirsk’s ‘World of Herriot’  one of the UK’s top visitor attractions. Haud me back. And then of course Harrogate, where I get my tea. Yorkshire Gold, the greatest argument against Scottish independence. 

If I ever travel to Yorkshire again, I will go mainly for Betty’s, and to see if Hebden Bridge is really the epicentre of rugged, hand-made-breeks bohemianism it portrays itself as. Or if it’s more like Sally Wainwright’s superlatively scary (and millstone-grit-hard) Happy Valley.

Thirsk is North Yorkshire, technically. Myersworld is West: The Upper Calder Valley, the Pennines, and yes, Hebden Bridge. Myersworld is mired in blood, mud, grimy mythology, twisted history, poverty, extreme rural violence - haplessly loyal dogs are ALWAYS under threat -  and sheer, grinding grimness. It reminds me a bit of RS Thomas’s bitter and gloomy hill farming Wales, but with a much older, dirtier religiosity.

Having read Myers’s other fiction - including the eye-wateringly fierce Pig Iron, the unforgiving Beastings, the intensely moving Richard, and his first venture into ‘rural noir’ genre fiction, Turning Blue (reviewed on Thrillfilter last year), I thought I was ready for anything this former specialist music press correspondent in black metal could throw at me. But I have to admit that the sex scene early in The Gallows Pole (pregnancy, lots of hydraulic detail) was, well, bracing. I can see the interactive display in Hebden Bridge’s World of Myers...no, on second thoughts, perhaps not.

The Gallows Pole tells the story - tackled in fiction previously - of the Cragg Vale Coiners, an episode in the inexorable move towards industrialisation in 1760s England, which saw a kind of rebel state of forgers and ‘coin clippers’ established in the Upper Calder Valley, led by the ruthless, brutal and charismatic ‘King’ David Hartley. The forces of modernity, symbolised by the building of a new turnpike road and the threat of mechanised looms, stand ready to invade the valley, and tax collector William Deighton is determined to stamp out the ‘yellow trade’ and bring Hartley to justice.

At first there’s a touch of the Cold Comfort Farms/Python’s You-Were-Lucky in the combination of ultra-grimness with some of Myers’s more poetic flights of descriptive writing: Is he entirely serious? I settled for seeing an element of very dark humour,  and once you get used to the style, which goes for mythic portentousness a little too often, the narrative’s inexorable momentum carries you along, albeit with some rather lumpy moments. Notably the pidgin dialect thoughts of Hartley himself, which preface each chapter, and fall into the trap (common in written Shetlandic, for example) of painstaking phoneticism. 

I was left with powerful flashbacks of some scenes, some I wish to retain, some I don’t, and a real sense of the central story’s contemporary political relevance. But my feeling - and to be fair, this isn’t reflected in other, almost universally enthusiastic reviews - is that this book, with its astonishing cover and great immersion in the details of an historical landscape, sees Myers allowing the fascinating source material, and the location, to overwhelm him and his characters.

I was, however, now thoroughly prepared for the sequel to Turning Blue, These Darkening Days, ‘the second Mace and Brindle novel’, which arrived not long after I’d finished The Gallows Pole. This is Modern Myersworld, set in an affectionately parodied Hebden Bridge, with its yurts and houseboats, prayer wheels, dreamcatchers and a gloriously right-on music venue where they won’t serve bottled water on ethical grounds, man.

Everything here, from the now-familiar landscapes to the description of life at the local newspaper and the behaviour of parachuted-in Sun reporters, is note perfect. Where Turning Blue had a tendency to sprawl, brilliantly, the economy and precision of These Darkening Days, and its flinty humour, takes this sequel onto a new level. And fascinatingly, like The Gallows Pole, it’s central plot - the whodunnit element - is based on local historical events.

Mace is an alcoholic, gay local hack, moved ‘down into the valley’ from his high moorland horrors in Turning Blue, living on an ex-hippy houseboat. Brindle, OCD-afflicted and unwilling to admit his desperate loneliness, is on long-term suspension following his meltdown as a result of the horrific events in that book. A local woman in ‘the Valley’ suffers an appalling knife assault, and as her background in amateur pornography and prostitution emerges, things spiral into bloody mayhem.

There is a convincing portrayal of the media in action, from the callous cruelty of YouTubing smartphone adolescents to the full panoply of ‘multimedia’ Sun teams and the slide into economic doom of local newspapers. But the book goes much further, delving into society’s hysterical  narcissism and the way its tendrils snake all the way back into myth, legend and half-forgotten community history. The lynch mob pursuing an almost-innocent boy (his life a twisted reflection of John-John’s in Pig Iron) could comprise the same gnarly characters who followed ‘King’ David in The Gallows Pole, along the same streets, in some of the same hostelries.

Perhaps there’s not quite enough Brindle. Maybe the final wrapping-up is bit too pat, but there’s no question that this is a superb piece of work which combines wonderfully fractured, eccentric characters (more of the transgender pathologist, I think, next time) a fantastic eye for landscape and great political and cultural insight. Good dog, too. It’s funny, brutal and properly thrilling. 

But that’s no way to skin a rabbit. When the school parties are touring Myersworld, they’ll need to be shown the unzipping method.

Meanwhile, back in my everyday world of research, I have been immersing myself in Glaswegian ‘true crime’, courtesy of memoirs by an assortment of detectives, criminals (mostly, but not all, with the aid of ghostwriters) and Reg McKay's (one of said ghostwriters) very odd and utterly compulsive McGraw: 'The Incredible Untold Story of Tam ‘The Licensee’ McGraw'. Featuring the wholly unappealing farting Rottweiler Zoltan, who comes to a very bad end.

Most of the slew of books I’ve been reading centre on the major Glasgow gangsters of the 70s, 80s and 90s - Walter Norval, Arthur Thompson, McGraw and the enigmatic Paul Ferris, with the pivotal event in the modern history of Glasgow crime undoubtedly the horrific 1984 arson attack on a house in the Ruchazie housing scheme, which killed six members of the Doyle family, part of the so-called Ice Cream Wars. 

McKay’s posthumous biography of McGraw contains so much torture, murder, rape, arson, abuse, drug dealing, betrayal, bombings and police corruption it makes Myersworld seems like Narnia after the Return of Aslan, and

Don Winslow’s New York epic The Force (powerful, but fatally undermined by its Spielbergian sentimentality and endless nods to The Sopranos, Serpico and The Godfather) like a Famous Five novel. 

When it comes to Glasgow, you quite literally could not make it up.

Drinking for Scotland: Rachel McCormack's Chasing the Dram

Chasing the Dram: Finding the Spirit of Whisky
By Rachel McCormack
Simon and Schuster, £16.99

Rachel McCormack is someone I am in contact with only through her acerbic Twitter presence, but she is the only person in my sphere of even virtual acquaintance who has ever heard of, let alone read and critiqued (very forcefully), the Catalan author Manuel Vazquez Montalban. Who was so admired by the Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri he named his protagonist Inspector Montalbano after him. 

Rachel did live in Barcelona and is well known for her Spanish and Catalan cookery expertise, some of which may have permeated down from the otherwise (apparently) loathsome Sr Montalban, who was both a gastronome and writer of several cookbooks, notably La Cocina Catalana. He was (at different stages of his life) also a Marxist, a CIA agent and writer of some of the most peculiar detective novels in the genre. If you want to know what may be going on in the dark underbelly of both the Catalan and Scottish independence movements, his last book, The Man Of My Life, is available in English and I’d highly recommend it. Nobody else likes it.

Anyway, Rachel herself has just published a book which is, and she won’t appreciate me saying this, not dissimilar to some of the Montalban canon in its enormously entertaining eclecticism. Just as Pedro Carvalho, Montalban’s detective, veers from political pondering and philosophy through gourmandizing on a grand scale to cooking, unearthing criminal activity and making impenetrable jokes, Rachel has produced a whisky travelogue which purports to be a ‘road trip’ through Scotland searching for ‘the meaning of whisky’. While championing the inclusion of whisky in food through a series of recipés, some of which are  appealing, some  hilarious, while others appear to be spirit-fuelled culinary fire hazards. There is also quite a bit of politics, some very funny and piercingly sad family encounters, and a lot of extremely entertaining drinking, much involving the conversion of whisky-haters to lovers of at least some version of the cratur. And there is truly wonderful travelogue. The sojourn in Kilmarnock is worth the price of admission alone. Hogmanay  with her mother and blue-rinse pals is the funniest and most accurate piece of writing about Milngavie I’ve ever read.

There are some great character studies, notably of broadcaster Billy Kay’s hair, beard and voice, as well as  an occasional (knowing) submission to the PR blandishments of things like the risible Keepers of the Quaich ceremony (a Masonic Lodge/Orange Order for upmarket drinks retailers). But there are some really splendid insights, too  - and while some of the less worthy in whisky geekdom have already tried to trash the book (jealousy, I’d guess, in particular of the Simon and Schuster imprint, and now removed from the Amazon listing) one of the most erudite and experienced of topers I know was hugely impressed by her wheedling out of dark secrets concerning what Ben Nevis’s Japanese owners actually do with their new-make spirit.  I ended up spending £37.70 on a bottle of Ben Nevis 10-year-old, for reasons you’ll have to buy the book to discover.

Rachel’s breezily clear descriptions of whisky making, its legal and historical  context and maturing processes are accurate and careful, and it’s only her initial and typically belligerent dismissal of ‘terroir’ that both misleads and, in the end, is contradicted by the book itself. In the early sections she argues that nearly all of a whisky’s character and taste comes from its ageing in wood, and that all that stuff about distillery location, sea breezes and water is romantic nonsense. As her journey progresses, though, Rachel inadvertently marshals various facts against her own argument: Malting barley turns out to be crucial, as is the design of the stills, the methods of heating them, and yes, location. 

We move towards an admission that there’s perhaps a 70-30 split in the effect of wood against other factors, or maybe 60-40...but by the end of Chasing the Dram we know, as this Glasgow woman who left Scotland and then came back surely does, that whisky is all about place, and people; history, myth and magic as well as science. And for Scotch Whisky, that can only happen in Scotland. It’s our terroir, pal, and we’re gonnae use it. You could even write a book about it.

Provided with a superb, note-perfect cover by Sarah Mulvanny though it is, I can’t help feeling Chasing the Dram deserved the kind of large-format, copiously-illustrated presentation the late, great Leslie Forbes (artist and writer) produced so well with things like A Table in Tuscany and her masterpiece, Recipes From The Indian Spice Trail. That design approach might have made the abrupt arrival of the ‘whisky recipés’ , which at times have little to do with Rachel’s actual textual adventures, a little less jarring.

Still, this is an enjoyable, erudite, funny, sometimes brilliant book full of passion, insight and ebullient, feisty, boozy sarcasm. And chips. Mustn’t forget about the chips. She is very good on chips. Or patatas fritas we call them in North Lanarkshire.

Not Very Cheap Thrills: Kindling a price war over Rankin, McKinty, Moore and Ben-David

In the crack cocaine world of the  long-running detective series, waiting for the next Rebus or Duffy can be excruciating. I haven’t decided if Adrian McKinty’s habit of blogging teaser chapters of upcoming books is a good or a bad thing - personally I couldn’t face the gap between the opening chunk of Police At The Station And They Don’t Look Friendly (Tom Waits song) dangled online by McKinty and the rest of the book, which I consumed on release day at a single sniff. Ian Rankin’s I’d Rather Be The Devil (John Martyn/Skip James song) was another much-anticipated sequel, though it’s a case these days of slumping with a pleasurable sigh alongside a crumpled, semi-retired and ageing Rebus  (and his dog and assorted retinue) as he more and more measuredly ponders mortality,  slouching along the crime-ridden streets of Disneyburgh, grumbling.

With Duffy, whose journey through the Troubles has reached the late 1980s, there’s still an aghast, stomach-churning sense of being in an out-of-control car heading for unfathomable horror, even as the drugs and wisecracks flow, the intellectual references and gunfire rattle out and the BMW 535i V8 (derestricted) hits 140 mph on the M2 outside Belfast, either NWA or Arvo Part on the stereo.

But here’s a thing. I admit to being a McKinty addict. Which is why paying £9.09 (as I write; it was £12.99 earlier) in paperback -yes,  paperback -  from Amazon might have been a genuine option, had the Kindle version not been a more agreeable £4.74. Go on, Serpent’s Tail, take ruthless advantage! The Rankin book is in a more peculiar position. You can get it in hardback - yes, hardback - on the Big A for £7.00, while the Kindle version is a frankly lunatic £9.99.

I know Amazon prices are set partly by algorithms depending on sales as well as whatever deal the publisher has struck with Bezos and his acolytes, but some of the Kindle prices on high-demand books are frankly disgusting attempts to rip off the hopelessly addicted - or, if you prefer, the faithful fan. Publishers are, on the whole, short-sighted idiots who just don’t get digital; even the vicious fools in the record industry, while punting the dead format of vinyl in pursuit of the vast mark-up an LP offers, will offer you a download code as part of the deal. But seek an offer of a souvenir hardback with a free Kindle edition, and the Neros of print will laugh in your face, and fiddle their launch-lunch budgets as their industry smoulders.

Another example. Alan Moore’s amazing (and badly under-edited, not to mention logorrheaic) Jerusalem came to me as a gift in the single-volume hardback edition. That would be 1100 pages of tiny type, 600,000 words. I wanted badly to read it but it was too heavy and it hurt my eyes. Easy, I’d download the Kindle version and beef up the font. How much? £14. FOURTEEN QUID? Nope. A Kindle version as part of the hardback (£17) deal would have saved sprained wrists and damaged eyesight for thousands.

Grumping about pricing aside, Rather Be the Devil is Late Rebus (Continuing), and extremely enjoyable. Far more concise and focused than the early Rankins, and, dare I say it, relaxed. It offers considerable pleasure alongside a nagging sense of doom. Rebus must die, will die and you sense the author knows that, but can’t bear the thought. The wait for cancer results may be pushing it a bit, though...great music choices, the delights of various restaurants and of course the Oxford Bar. Rankin’s cruising here, but Rebus undoubtedly knows there’s an iceberg ahead,

Police At The Station And They Don’t Seem Friendly - a ‘Troubler’ as some call Northern Irish political thrillers - is among the best of the superb Duffy series from McKinty. Some find these books a bit broad-brush but the speed, wit, sense of place and history are, to my mind, irresistible. Duffy’s Catholicism is very much on display in this latest book, which looks at some extremely unpleasant aspects of Ulster’s past policing, in the form of the infamous ‘B Specials’. Assured plotting, the best gunfight descriptions in the business, vast quantities of drink, drugs and fast cars...that was Royal Ulster Constabulary life in 80s, folks! I absolutely loved this book which in its hectic, full-on humour, constant threat of violence and looming  tragedy, captures the more lurid aspects of Norther Irish life you will find nowhere else in literature. And it doesn't even come close to Altnagelvin A&E on any Saturday night.

Pricing problems looming again, this time for a text which, as I write, isn’t out yet. I loved (see Thrillfilters past) the first  Mishka Ben-David book to be released in English, Duet in Beirut. Now Final Stop Algiers, which I read pre-release, offers even more insights into the strangely casual world of Mossad missions

At first, this tale of a would-be artist recruited into counter-intelligence seems oddly deliberate, then romantic and unlikely. But Ben-David writes as a former Mossad officer and has always stressed in interviews that he keeps his books as realistic as possible. Finally, it occurs to you that this is what it’s really like, right down to the matter-of-fact approach to death and violence, meted out as part of the job and described with great candour.

The final section of the book, detailing a mission to Algeria, grips not because it’s particularly well written (and I don’t think the translation is as colloquial as Duet in Beirut) but because you know it’s really like this. Terrifying, compulsive and uncompromisingly patriotic, there is nothing like Ben-David’s work in the thrillersphere. Powerful, memorable stuff.

But expensive. £11.99 in paperback on release to pre-order and £9.49 on Kindle. Then again, I got mine for nothing...

Murakami's 1Q84 and Hawkins' The Girl On The Train, via two books by undertakers

You can do yourself a psychological injury, I have decided, by being a tad too eclectic in book consumption. Promiscuity is all very well in any aspect of life, but you can be left a bit befuddled. And going from Haruki Murakami’s IQ84 (Books One and Two; waiting for Part Three to arrive) to Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, via two memoirs about the funeral trade: Robert Connolly’s Over Your Dead Body

and James Baker’s A Life in Death, has left me slightly discombobulated. One minute it’s timeshift parallel worlds in Japan with a vengeful assassin afflicted by leprechauns and classical music (Murakami), then you’re queasily learning about embalming techniques and how cremation will be displaced by dissolving bodies in strong alkali solutions. That’s for research purposes, honestly -

Baker’s book is a curiously happy, rather self-satisfied  memoir about undertaking in Stroud; Connolly is much more astringent and offers a brief history of death and how we deal with it. With some very funny personal memories covering similar ground to Baker (though in more lip-smackingly horrific detail). Nevertheless, Baker is better on embalming. Absolutely nothing seems to have upset him during a career which began with work experience aged 15...

Then I found myself attempting to read a discarded copy of Paula Hawkins’ 10-million-selling debut sensation The Girl on the Train. I got to page 182 before throwing it down in frustration. Both my wife and daughter had done the same thing. How such an obvious and clumsy reworking of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, with an easily guessed ‘real murderer’ and seriously unconvincing, not to say unpleasant characters, could become so successful is really...oh, but the clue is in the criticism, or the critic. This isn’t pulp. It’s heavily sugared and spiced mush, served in a reassuringly familiar container, easily gulped or sucked through a thick straw, and not so much ingested as absorbed and then painlessly excreted. There’s going to be a movie, with Emily Blunt, set in the USA. Oh shit.

But 10 million copies? Why? Well, it’s banality pretending to complexity, wrapped in the blindingly obvious. That universal experience of seeing something inexplicable out of a train window, of wondering about the lives exposed as you gaze into other people’s houses. Hooked? Three narrators, with the central one so unreliable you know from the start she can’t possibly be as bad as you’re initially meant to think. And then it’s all soap opera sex, betrayal. Infertility and ‘imagining his long fingers on my body’. Believe me, Gone Girl this is not. Gone Girl is like a Japanese bullet train compared to this tarted up Thomas the Tank Engine. A sophisticated piece of engineering as opposed to cartoon tech from another century. Actually, I’m being unfair to Thomas.

But it’s popular. And popular  (also to be blindingly obvious)is not always good. Even though early Thomas the Tank Engine was very good, actually, before Ringo left the series.

On the other hand, Murakami’s absolutely insane, berserk epic IQ84 is also massively popular worldwide, despite being so demanding of your credulity, plotwise, that once completed you wonder how anyone could possibly get away making it so brilliantly, compulsively readable. And with Books One and Two in the hands of separate translators, too.

To summarise (deep breath): Deadly young female assassin killing off abusers of women in and around Tokyo finds herself in what appears to be a parallel world, very similar to hers other than it having two moons. The lost love of her life, a maths lecturer and author, ghost writes the story of a strange young girl concerning the aforementioned, and malevolent, leprechauns (‘little people’, not called O’Shea). A strange religious cult, much coolly described sex, family dislocation, a fantasy about cats and much else comes together in what is an utterly absorbing and often very funny/violent fable about faith, intimacy and the power of fiction, riffing constantly about music, martial arts, food and fashion in modern Japan. Murakami’s use of labels and trade names anchors his writing in ‘reality’ (cf William Gibson, also obsessed with Japanese culture) even as its explodes into areas which initially seem utterly fanciful, but then become accepted as part of the reader’s reality. It’s playful in the extreme.

Friends who have been to Japan say that the country’s religiosity is omnipresent, and highly eclectic, with magic, Buddhism and extreme cultish Christianity sometimes casually combined. Murakami’s book identifies the bizarre dangers in this, with clear references to the Aum doomsday group, the subway sarin gas attacks and more.

Wonderful, really. But I’d better get back to my study of funeral practices. Did you know that this new method of ‘liquid cremation’ is being pioneered by a Scottish company? But of course!

Eoin Colfer's Plugged and Screwed

Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl books  were favourites of my son James and extremely entertaining, carefully iconoclastic young teenager fiction which led Jimbo straight on to The Great Carl Hiassen. Thence to Hemingway, McCarthy, all kinds of ‘proper’ literature and now a flourishing career as an author of wildly successful tomes on how to make bread, cakes and beer. Fortunately, having seen where writing and showbiz get you, he has a proper job as well.

Anyway it’s at least partly Eoin Colfer’s fault, who - while remaining a top bairns’ writer, and currently being Laureate nan Og (Ireland’s children’s laureate)has come up with a brilliant plan to maintain contact with his demographic as it ages. Many of his once-young readers are now adults, sort of, with an implanted need for the same kind of witty brutality as found in Fowl, easy-reading crime fiction though now with the violence, coy sex, super-sweariness and arch media references young men with tattoos’n’tweed expect in their light reading matter. Post-Hiassen stuff, in fact, Jack Reacher  with a sense of humour. Kind of Tony Soprano  - they’re set in New Jersey - with less angst. Oh, and McEvoy’s Irish. “If you loved Artemis Fowl” goes the publisher’s tagline on one edition’s cover, “it’s time to grow up.”

So we have Daniel McEvoy, former Irish army sergeant, suffering PTSD from his time as a UN peacekeeper in Lebanon (but hey, often to hilarious effect) and now (in Plugged) a doorman in the small NJ town of Cloisters. The follow-up, Screwed, sees Daniel as owner of a sleazy casino and drinking den called Slotz. Presumably the third book will be called Fucked, though his publishers may have words to say on the subject.

Both Plugged and Screwed (Screwed more so, as Colfer was evidently in the Adult Orientated Raunch groove by the time he wrote it) are effortlessly brilliant romps, seamlessly plotted, frenetically paced and full of characters you recognise from TV shows, films and other books. Notably, McEvoy is like a cartoon version of Adrian McKinty’s early Michael Forsythe character.

It’s broad brush stuff, but very funny, full of outlandish Hiassenesque scenes (especially echoing Striptease) and with a host of deadpan one/two liners (“there isn’t a naked person on this planet who isn’t scared of hot pasta”...”they say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. I would argue that a scorned woman would pale and back out of the room when faced with a Rottweiler who just got his scrotum twisted…”)

McEvoy has psychological and hair transplant problems, plus a shrink (from The Sopranos) and a Jewish doctor pal (out of Hiassen and MASH). He’s very good at killing but queasy about the actual act. He has a lot of sex but is loath to go into details. Hey, kids might be reading. And there’s a complicated family background involving his mother’s millionaire dad (shades of Benjamin Black/John Banville’s Quirke).

Colfer is very good in Jersey and NYC psychogeography and breakfast at Norma’s in the Park Meridien is definitely on the cards for me should I ever visit the city again. The occasional lapses into maudlin self-examination are forgivable. Just.

I read Screwed first, which I definitely do NOT advise, as some of the characters only make proper sense if you first meet them in Plugged. Which I didn’t. These are fast, snacky reads, full of fun, guns and violence, very cleverly constructed and snappily written. Worth a penny plus postage on Amazon in my book. Liam Neeson in the movies, surely? Perhaps too much hair.

Turning Blue, by Benjamin Myers: Reservoirs of rural evil

Turning Blue

Benjamin Myers

Moth publishing, £7.99. Published 11 August 2016

Like any other trend of temporary grooviness, the hipster nature writing thing will surely run its course. There have been some outstanding pieces of tweedy, wind-scoured, leaky-wellie writing over the past few beardy years, but the whole Caught By the River cult, this back-to-nature reaction to cokefreak urbanism, will inevitably wither and fade. Too much of its confessional wing wallows in the river twee, and its fashionable links with the whole vintage canvas knapsack and hand-made clog scene is hard to take here in the real, Gore-Tex and ripstop world of remote living.

Benjamin Myers, though an enthusiastic participant in the Robert MacFarlane landscapery-worship movement, is destined to outlast and outgrow the merely transient Lawrence-lite, and there are some very good reasons for that. His body of work is a fascinating progression from commissioned cuttings-file rock biography (System of a Down, Lydon, Green Day, Muse, The Clash) through the hilariously transitional The Book of Fuck (squat-dwelling rock hack tries to interview a Marylyn Manson figure) to the pivotal Richard, a truly affecting fictionalisation of Manics songwriter Richey Edwards’ last days.

Carefully and lovingly written, that controversial book’s tale of a rural journey into oblivion saw Myers tackling landscape for the first time to great effect. Myers’ relocation to Yorkshire (he’s a Durham lad originally) then brought about a severing of ties with the rock music that had hitherto fuelled his muse and paid the bills, and initiated a concentration on overtly rural themes: The gypsy death-fighting of the ferocious Pig Iron and then the astonishing Beastings - a child kidnapping, a priestly pursuit, the utter corruption of religion set among the glowering Cumbrian fells.

Pig Iron and Beastings are both brutal, beautiful books, prose pared to the bone, owing greatly to the Hemingway via McCarthy school of American writers but uncompromisingly English in tone. And they benefit greatly from the fact that Myers is a pro. He’s been a prolific rock hack since his university days, he’s fought the sub-editing wars for decades; he’s grammatically armed, experienced,  and capable of subverting language to dangerous effect. Beastings has the power of folk myth, and some uncompromisingly disturbing scenes which led me to lend it out with stern warnings for the easily offended.

I wondered, though, when I heard Myers was planning a, for want of a better term, ‘detective series’. It would be ‘folk noir’, we were promised. OK, that could work. But was this an attempt to commercialise his vision of rural life, to render his themes more accessible to a bigger audience? And is there anything wrong with that?

No, in my opinion. And so we have Turning Blue, which is being sold as the first in ‘the Brindle and Mace series’. That would be Detective Sergeant Brindle of the mysterious Cold Storage unit (which bears a certain resemblance to Derek Raymond’s The Factory) and Roddy Mace, former tabloid journalist, who has renounced the moral soup of London for a local newspaper in the dales and a beer-and-vodka stymied attempt to Write A Book.

Rural detective stories are nothing new. The Midsomer Murders concept has become a joke (how dangerous IS Midsomer?) mainly due to its endlessly repetitive televising, and then there’s the Anne Cleeves phenomenon, with the Jimmy Perez books set in Shetland and the Vera Stanhope mysteries, which take place not far away from the desolate moorland of Turning Blue.

Barnaby, Perez and Stanhope are mass library fodder, inoffensive plodders whose agonising is all Mumsnet forum stuff. Myers is trying for something much closer to what we see Sally Wainwright going for in Happy Valley and in the first series of Chris Chibnall’s Broadchurch or Hugo Blick’s The Shadow Line. Only much, much darker.

I mentioned Derek Raymond’s Factory novels earlier and if you’re aware of how deep into the details of moral degradation I was Dora Suarez or How the Dead Live go, you’ll still be unprepared for the sheer amount of human horror in Turning Blue. The descriptions never cross the line into the truly unpleasant sadism found in the likes of Stuart MacBride’s Logan Macrae books, but finding yourself more and more inside the head of the appalling Steven Rutter grows increasingly hard to take. Yes, I know there are mythic overtones to what he gets up to, horrible old folk songs that clog dance the same murky territory, but still. I’d argue that this aspect overbalances the book, leaves the truly unique partnership that develops between Brindle and Mace, and their fascinating characters, a little swamped.

As for the Yorkshire landscape, as you’d expect it’s superbly captured, initially in a snowbound winter, then spring, then summer, the seasonal structure tracking the revelations effectively. It’s extremely well plotted, moving inexorably from the disappearance of one girl, Melanie Muncy, to a vast and pullulating evil spreading from the Dales throughout the land. Though I’m loath to give away too much, I will say that TV star ‘Lovely’ Larry Lister’s resemblance to Jimmy Saville, and what Saville was involved with (cf the last series of Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty) is more than significant.

There are echoes of the great Bill James (Harpur and Iles) at his peak, but in terms of the current pantheon of crime writing, there truly is nothing with Turning Blue’s dark power and literary ferocity, save perhaps some of Louise Welsh’s early work. It IS the first in a series. Good. This is very serious, very disturbing but hugely compulsive crime fiction.

Two things: the textual device of running the dialogue without any quotation marks may give a sense of uh, poetic literary-ness, but in a book of this length and with this many characters it truly messes up your appreciation of who’s actually speaking…(a sub-editor writes). And I should mention the ‘press pack’ (pictured) which came with my advance copy.

Experimentation has proved that was just dried moss in the tobacco tin...

Thrillfilter is back! Coming up in the next few days and weeks: Rankin, Myers, Mitchell, Gardner, Colfer, Proulx and more

It’s not that I stopped reading after the heart business, the stent, the relapse, the heavy duty medication and the sense of imminent demise. I read like a crazy man. I read as if each book was going to be my last. I just couldn’t be bothered writing about the writing I was reading. There was always another Amazon Prime two quid deal (including postage), a heap of back catalogues to catch up with, the occasional full-price quagmire to squelch through (thank you, Annie Proulx). Dearie me, Barkskins is absolutely terrible.

So Thrillfilter has taken a back seat. A seat in the bleachers. A perch on a faraway tree, overlooking a deserted motorway interchange. Until now.

I’m at a point where the medication has eased, the stent has presumably bedded in and there’s a distinct possibility I could go on living, reading and even writing for a time yet. I’ve started cycling again. Given up the medicinal red wine (when my cardiologist said ‘one drink a day’ he meant one bottle, right?’). And I’m suddenly busy with stuff like 60 North Radio, serving as a non-exec on the local health board, one or two wee magazine columns, and most recently being a (surprisingly busy) funeral celebrant.

What have I been reading over the past year? Deluges, veritable cataracts of ‘genre’ fiction - much of which is going to have to remain uncelebrated in these colyooms. And re-reading, a comfort thing. A third (or it may be fourth) trip through the entire Len Deighton/Bernard Sampson saga - 10 books, in order, starting with A Berlin Family. Lumps of Ian and Ian M Banks. PG Wodehouse (overrated). The wonderful, ignored and now mostly out of print Anthony Price. Alexei Sayle (those short stories are stunning, especially Barcelona Plates, still). And much more, as those DJs say.

Anyway, I’m going to revive Thrillfilter, and imminently there will be reviews appearing of the amazing and harrowing Turning Blue by Benjamin Myers, Screwed by Eoin Colfer, Ian Rankin’s Even Dogs in the Wild, The awful Barkskins, the lost spy novels of John Gardner and a look at the work of the aforementioned Anthony Price. Oh, and David Mitchell’s mind bending, rip-roaring take on sci-fi fantasy, The Bone Clocks and Slade House.

All coming up...very soon

Quick trawl through the recent woodpulp (August 2015)

...and woodpulp it has been, largely, as I've grown somewhat fed up with the inability to gauge my progress through a book by thumb and forefinger. Still, the Paperwhite continues to lurk, and there have been some entertaining downloads.

My son Sandy recommended the George RR Martin anthology Rogues, which contains some great stuff as well as the occasional piece of impenetrable sword-and-sorcery. Worth the price of admission for stories by Neil Gaiman and Gillian (Gone Girl) Flynn.  Sandy also pushed me in the direction of Christopher Brookmyre, whose arch-Caledonian sarkiness I've found hard to handle since Quite Ugly One Morning. I enjoyed Dead Girl Walking, though, for its deft rock'n'roll tourbus background.

Big re-reading and rediscovery has been Daniel Woodrell, fuelled by my daughter picking up my copy of Winter's Bone and loving it, then a re-viewing of the movie version (Jennifer Lawrence's first). I remember reading the novel and immediately thinking it would make a great film (same feeling as with Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men....and by the way, how could the Coens get a 'best script' Oscar when the novel basically WAS the script?).

Since then I've worked or re-worked my way through most of the Woodrell oeuvre, including the wonderful early 'crime' novels in The Bayou Trilogy, all featuring detective Rene Shade (Under The Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing and the Ones You Do), all set in 'St Bruno' on the Mississippi, a fictionalised St Charles.

They're  longer and more florid than his later, Ozark-set work, which owes something to Faulkner at his most lurid, Hemingway, Jim Harrison and - oddly, two Scottish writers I think, William McIlvanney and ( 'Greenvoe' reference noted). George Mackay Brown. The Maid's Version draws on Woodrell's own family history in the area, and may be his least successful novel. Give Us a Kiss is the most explicit of his books, a brilliantly vicious exploration of family, history, revenge and lust, with a weird tacked-on happy ending which is probably meant as a literary joke. The Outlaw Album is probably his masterpiece - a collection of short stories which read a bit like McCarthy with a sense of humour. They are superb. Tomato Red has just arrived (0.01p via Amazon).

Along with all this southern USA rurality, I've been unable to get Ben Myers' astonishing novel Beastings out of my head. Lauded as part of the uber-fashionable Caught by the River school of 'cool nature' writing, it's far more visceral than that label implies. Gruelling, in fact, but not so much haunting as utterly unforgettable.It concerns a runaway girl and child in a Lake District rendered brutally oppressive, pursued by a psychopath who makes McCarthy's Anton Chigurh seem like Santa Claus. Every terrifying scene remains with me in detail.

Having no idea who Ben Myers was, I was surprised to delve into his back catalogue and find he is an ex-rock journalist, specialising in the extremes of heavy metal, whose early literary efforts bookwise were band biographies. I decided to avoid most of that, but couldn't resist The Book of Fuck, allegedly written in just six days and all about a rock hack's pursuit of legendary reclusive satanic rock proponent The God of Fuck (clearly based on Marilyn Manson).  It is fantastic, one of the best rock'n'roll books since Nik Cohn's I Am Still  The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo and very, very funny. Difficult to get as it was printed in small quantities. Not be left casually lying about the house when elderly folk are visiting. Or missionaries.

Anyway, I have Myers'  much-lauded Pig Iron unread on the Kindle, but I got hold of a secondhand copy of Richard, which I regarded with some suspicion. It is a fictional look at the life and mysterious disappearance of the Manic Street Preachers' Richey Edwards, and has had what one might safely say are mixed reviews. Some Manics fans have apparently been outraged.

Not an easy read, written in the first person from Edwards' point of view, its portrayal of depression and despair in the rock context is, I would say, carefully and compassionately realised. The detail of 80s and 90s music biz indulgence is accurate and compelling. The last harrowing scenes have both a dreadful inevitability and a hallucinatory power as nature, in the form of the Welsh Marches, imposes itself. Another 0.01p worth spending.

So, onwards we go, via  a borrowed copy  of Edzard Ernst's A Scientist in Wonderland ('a Memoir of Searching for Truth and finding Trouble') which is already (only a few pages in) much lighter and more accessible than the much-praised On the Move by Oliver Sacks, another medical memoir but one I found oddly leaden.

Right. Back to reading.

William Gibson and the debt to Banks. Plus Chris Morgan Jones and Jeremy Duns

I absolutely loved William Gibson’s so-called ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History) and have had his latest novel, The Peripheral, on Kindle pre-order for weeks. I came to it fresh from a long thrillerbinge on first Chris Morgan Jones’s Ben Webster books (Agent of Deceit and The Jackal’s Share) and then Jeremy Duns’ Paul Dark trilogy.

Chris Morgan Jones’s writing is terrific - and his take on the spy/private eye novel is strikingly new: Drawing on his own background, his hero is essentially someone who carries out due diligence checks on companies and individuals, on behalf of other companies and individuals. Russia and Iran provide the nastiness in the two (so far) Webster books, which are revelatory on the often violent and sordid world of international business. Extremely cool, with a sense of the threat, bullying  and viciousness lying behind those glossy corporate adverts you see on telly.

Jeremy Duns couldn’t be more different, and yet the Paul Dark books (Free Agent, Song of Treason, The Moscow Option) are also a breath of fresh air. Based on rigorous research and actual events ranging from World War Two to 1969, they’re crazed, tongue-in-cheek first person romps full of cars, bad sex, daft twists, ultraviolence and Bulldog Drummond-like feats of athleticism. James Bond in other words, the difference being that Dark is a Russian agent embedded in the British Secret Service. 

Initially a wee bit alienating and difficult to take with the seriousness Fleming, even at his most arch, demands, you find yourself swept along and always keen for the appendix in each book revealing the detailed historical facts that fuelled the fiction. Though by the middle of the Moscow Option, I’d kind of had enough. You could see those Åland Islands approaching 700 miles off...

Between Song of Treason and  The Moscow Option The Peripheral popped up on the Kindle, and I threw myself into it with enthusiasm. And found myself struggling in a future rural dirt-poor America portrayed in Gibson’s trademark style: You have to work at his worlds, the unfamiliar tech, the unnamed wars and disasters and political machinations that have brought these characters to their grisly pass. And then we’re 70 years in the future, and there’s some sort of gaming  connection. Suddenly it’s a time travel and drone/android/human identity book. And a love story.

The Blue Ant trilogy worked so beautifully because the strange tech was only half unfamiliar, and most of it on the verge of hitting the edges of the midstream. And the use of Gibson’s own favourite objects, ones actually available ( Buzz Rickson jackets, VW Phaetons, 3D projections, remote airships) or from history (coding machines, watches, heavy denim) left you tingling with an almost physical desire to possess some of them. (There’s even a special William Gibson edition Buzz Rickson flying jacket if you’ve got a spare £500. Nylon, of course).

The problem with The Peripheral is that the tech, indeed the central concept of ‘The Peripheral’ (an advanced humanoid inhabited at a distance by a ‘real person’) is very familiar, but from other books. Notably Iain M Banks, to whose work The Peripheral owes a very considerable  debt. Almost all Banks’s Culture novels feature the human soul/drone habitation issue, usually tackled with great wit,  and sarky Scottish charm. The odd (and I think successful) Banks combination of SF and ‘literature’ (no ‘M’ in the authorial byline) Transition is even nearer in tone and has ‘time’ travel involved too.

And I have to say that Banks, even over the course of some very long books indeed, is generally very consistent  when it comes to his internal SF logic, avoiding paradox and making the science appear plausible. Something Gibson loses his grip on in The Peripheral. I’m trying to avoid spoilers, but the central notion of ‘the stub’ - a kind of fork in the road, leading to a dead end in time and history - is completely undermined by the motivations of  one of the central ‘future’ characters. And that swarm tech is just a bit too convenient at times.

There’s lots to enjoy, some great fight scenes, a strong (typical Gibson) central female and an interesting satire on poverty-into-wealth via technology. But the ending is eye-poppingly daft and afterwards, I was left wondering why one of all those editors, writers and readers credited in the appendix with helping didn’t just say: Hey, Wullie! Scrap it. This stuff’s been done before, and better.

Kindle fatigue, Tim Winton and David Mitchell (not the one that's married to her off Only Connect)

An October week in Crete doing nothing but read, eat, drink swim and bask in the warmth without getting sunburnt. Hint: Ludicrously expensive (and dangerously so, from a skin cancer point of view) sun creams should be avoided. Go for the super-high-factor baby versions at a fraction of the price.

I had loaded the Kindle (Paperwhite) with what I hadn't read of Robert Littell's Cold War oeuvre - Legends, now a TV series starring Sean Bean is brilliant and The Company epic in a Charles McCarry kinda way. However, I stalled on The October Circle and then gave up on Young Philby. Too many repeated motifs and too much overt parading of the same historical detail. You can somehow bear this kind of 'atmosphere surfeit'  with Alan Furst but I've had enough of the Lubyanka dungeons for the moment.

Where we were staying (Artemis Apartments, Stavros, highly recommended, laid back, informal,) had excellent wifi, so, slightly stymied, I downloaded David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks having half remembered one of my sons recommending it. Which, in point of fact, he hadn't. Still, I'd loved Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks is even bettter, ranging across time and genre, emerging into full-on Harry Potter-meets-The-Matrix via the funniest (and probably most bitter) parody of Martin Amis and the Cult of Book Festivals you'll ever read. Brilliant stuff. I then (due to a technical glitch) zappped the same author's Black Swan Green onto the IPad (Kindle app) and enjoyed that (loads more references, from Angela Carter to Salinger and (credited) Stewart Maconie. It brilliantly conjures up that early 80s awfulness and the horrible frustrations of an adolescent summmer.

Reading on the iPad was OK, and I found I preferred it to the Kindle Paperwhite, which frankly I've become rather sick of. It's slow, clunky and to be hhonest, I miss books. I miss paper, the sheer bulk of a book. Also, some works just don't work electronically, I think. When I downloaded Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, I found that being unable to feel the actual size of what I'd waded through made me lose heart. Because this a long, long book, and frankly it almost sapped the will to live out of me. Certainly, I lost the desire to keep reading, even though there are fascinating preliminaries to The Bone Clocks in the plot. The endless descriptions of 18th Century Dutch trading practices and Japanese etiquette gradually wore me down, until abandonment ensued. Maybe I was pixellated out of love for it, but I frankly cannot understand the many five star reviews this book has accrued. It seems an awful example of an author's obsessive interest in a place and period overwhelming style, plot and narrative drive.

Kindled and iPaded out, I resorted to the pile of paperbacks left in the Akrotiri bar by previous guests. I'd read Tim Winton's marvellous 'coastal memoir' Land's Edge after hearing it  on BBC Radio Four, but hadn't tackled anything else. The Riders, which is something of a phenomenon in his native Australia, having been turned into an opera, no less, absolutely blew me away. And it was all the better for being on saltwater-soaked, much-thumbed paper.

It's,, on the face of it, a classic thriller plot: Scully, is an Aussie expat drifter/builder/preparing a new life in Ireland for his pregnant wife and young daughter, who are wrapping up their old life  down under and due to join him just before Christmas. The trio have spent the past year travelling throughout Europe - living and working in Greece, Paris, Amsterdam and London. He goes to Shannon  Airport to collect them. Only the daughter is on the flight, and she cannot speak.

Scully and his daughter embark on  a desperate search for the missing wife and mother, revisiting their former European haunts. Nothing is what it seems, old friends turn out to be obscurely treacherous, loved places threatening and as Scully, a tower of physical strength and emotional simplicity, falls apart, his daughter Billie gradually emerges as...

Och, you'll have to read it. It subverts thriller modes to become something much more resonant, and I would say important. The writing at first seems florid and earthily 'literary', but gradually it overwhelms you with its sheer power. It's very disturbing, particularly for a father and husband. I don't want to be pretentious, but it's also a novel about Australia and Europe, really. I loved it. there are scenes in it you will never be able to forget.

And then, as it was a proper book, I gave it to my wife to read, and we talked about it for hours. She brought it back to Scotland, and handed it on to a friend. It will become more and more scuffed, worn and torn, and its power and brilliance will only increase.