Hello St Marks

The Street Library has gifted me with a copy of 'The Kraken Wakes' so old it has a price of 3'6 on the cover and is held together with sticky tape. This is one of John Wyndham's catastrophe novels, written in the 1950s and in print ever since. Like 'The Day of the Triffids' and 'The Midwich Cuckoos', 'Kraken' is a perfect short novel. Succinct, very clever, astutely observant and never overwrought. Very British of its era, or so I imagine. In 'Kraken' interstellar monsters colonise the deep oceans of Earth and set about changing the climate to their ends, so among the joys of this book is a 1953 perspective on climate change denial, propaganda and response. With more tape, this one goes back to the library — a 1963 edition of a 1953 novel, ready and relevant for another 2021 reader.  Postscript: I'm delighted to advise that 'Kraken' lasted less than a day in the Street Library before finding its next reader. 

“Strange customs, you know?”. Duncan Peck is ‘The Last Good Man’ of the title. A hard man, hard to like, but he knows right from wrong and that’s going to matter in this village on the moors, “a village living in the shadow of an enormous wall”. Anyone can write on the wall, and if its written, there are consequences. There’s no law, just the will of the people written on the wall. Flee, and the chasers will hunt you down and bring you back to be burdened—literally burdened, a fridge tied to your back—or placed in the stocks, or wounded. And then it’s done, the crime forgiven, justice done. Peck’s a stranger, newly arrived from the dystopian horror of the city and deeply invested in finding a safe haven in this place. But, he can’t help think. But.  “The wall, in that moment, seems to Peck to be alive in its malignancy, conscious in its efforts to do them harm, and he would not be surprised to see the lines between slabs open and close with the slight course of breathing.” Thomas M...

'The Last Mrs Summers' is the 14th book in the the 'Royal Spyness' series by Rhys Bowen (AKA Janet Quin-Harkin). When you're 14 books in, it's like a old family friend comes visiting and you settle in for a long chat. We met  Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie Rannoch in 1932  when she was 20ish, 34th in line to the throne currently held by Queen Mary and flat broke. "I am constantly being reminded that it is my duty to make a good match with some half-lunatic buck-toothed, chinless, spineless and utterly awful European royal, thus cementing ties with a potential enemy", says Georgie, and flees the ancestral castle in Scotland. Too aristocratic to work, she's ill-equipped for independence (she knows where to seat a Archbishop at dinner but can't boil an egg), accident-prone, plucky and kind—the perfect protagonist for a comic historical cosie. Then a Frenchman is found dead in a duke's bathtub and away we go. But I can't be glib ...

Another day, another viral apocalypse. In 'Last One at the Party' a gormless English women is the sole survivor of 6DM (so named because 'six days maximum' is all you've got once infected). The unnamed protagonist is a classic chic lit hot mess. Burdened with a happy childhood, loving parents and a perfectly nice husband, she's a self-sabotaging snowflake in search of a fairytale ending. Then everyone dies, and it's all about her, her, her. I cared not one bit whether she lived or died, but the perky cover is mostly pink so I had an inkling.

COVID-19 has armed us all with a working knowledge of the variables driving pandemic apocalypse plot lines: R0, latency, mortality, vectors. So when Sweeney-Baird introduces the viral protagonist of 'The End of Men' I'm nodding sagely, anticipating global collapse. 100% mortality, 2 day asymptomatic period while infectious, airborne transmission. It only affects men, and 1 in 10 men are immune. Do the math. Sweeney-Baird introduces a swag of characters through which she reports vignettes from the world turned upside down. It's not very well written (the apocalypse has inspired some superb literature, just not in this case), but it's fascinating. Women rule, literally. Some of Sweeney-Baird's predictions are feminist tropes (endometriosis is cured, gun violence plummets) but others are more nuanced: when the vast majority of women have little chance of heterosexual love, marriage and children, sexuality is not pre-determined, but pragmatic. 

There are 788 billionaires in the USA. Like most people who read Michael Mechanic's 'Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live and How Their Wealth Hurts Us All', I think I'd handle mega-wealth just fine, given a chance. But Mechanic makes a strong case for the profoundly toxic social and psychological effects of wealth on the wealthy, and without an opportunity to prove him wrong, I'll take his word for it. Most of this material was familiar, but one thing felt new: Mechanic reports on the growing paranoia of the uber-rich, nervously building fences and buying islands against the moment when the justifiable outrage of the have-nots explodes into action.

I suspect the author's name is not really Elizabeth Aston. The author of 'The Exploits and Adventures of Miss Alethea Darcy' clearly has a well-developed sense of the absurd and astute commercial judgement. Miss Darcy—imagined daughter of the Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet—flees an abusive husband to Italy where, disguised as a young gentleman, she collides with Titus Manningtree. Really. He's chasing a lost Titian. She finds work as a castrato. It's a romp, but nicely done and I'm not embarrassed by the odd piece of nonsense in my library. This book has the additional glow of a volume well-loved—it carries both the 'Booked Out' stamp of a long-closed local second hand book store, and a sticker from the renal clinic at Prince of Wales Hospital; it now goes back to the Street Library for a new adventure.

I'm a fan of journalist Jon Ronson, so 'Them: Adventures with Extremists' was a welcome gift from the Street Library gods. Ronson's 'So You've been Publicly Shamed' (about the fallout from social media pile-ons) was brilliant, as was podcast series 'The Butterfly Effect' (about the porn industry). Ronson is the kind of gonzo journalist who puts himself into his investigations, brilliant but apparently bumbling, faux-naive but genuinely curious, and is invited right into the heart of the story.  For 'Them' Ronson rides along with extremists of all stripes—Islamic fundamentalist Omar Bakri, separatist Randy Weaver, radical Protestant Dr Ian Paisley and assorted militia leaders, Klansmen and neo-Nazis. 'Them' is a book about conspiracy theorists and one central conspiracy—that of "the New World Order, an internationalist Western conspiracy conducted by a tiny, secretive elite..." AKA "a mystical cabal conspiring to establi...

I've been following Matthew Shardlake around Tudor England for years—a couple of years for me since Casey recommended the series, and a dozen years for Sergeant Shardlake, lawyer, who we first met in 1537 in 'Dissolution', the first in this seven book series. 'Tombland' is set in the Summer of 1549; Henry VIII is dead and 11 year old Edward VI holds the throne but lightly. Shardlake, greying now, hunched and without faith, remains the voice of reason and compassion in a vicious, criminally unfair world. As always, Sansom places Shardlake at the centre of a moment of political or religious and social tumult—firstly in service to Cromwell, then Archbishop Cranmer, Queen Catherine and now Princess Elizabeth—and with a twisty crime to solve. Tudor England is painted in vivid colours, stinking and visceral, with layer on layer of intimate, immersive detail. Brilliant. 

In 1967, four clever English women invent time travel. One goes a little bit mad, but nevertheless time traveling develops into a elite profession managed by the secretive, eccentric Conclave. I can't make it sound any less silly in a short summation, but 'The Psychology of Time Travel' is not a silly book. Kate Mascarenhas is a psychologist and a writer, and this book is witty, insightful and full of clever details about the culture, community and mental health of time travelers. We meet multiple versions of each character from different time periods spanning 1967 to 2075; their 'green' and 'silver' selves interact freely across time periods, casually and cruelly trading foreknowledge. There's a classic locked room murder. A love story. A villain. And—an odd detail—all the protagonists and secondary characters are women; I can't recall a single male character of any importance. I didn't love this book, but others will, so it's back to the St...