Book Review : Riz (The Rizwan Sabir Mysteries) - Charlie Flowers 7*

Riz is the début e-novel from Fighting Cocks band leader Charlie Flowers.  It tells the story of Riz, a former wannabe Al-Qaeda terrorist now working for a shadowy and violent branch of British security.

Riz is a fast paced novella and liberally peppered with guns, bombs and blood.  It takes place in contemporary London at the time of the 2012 Olympic Games, Riz is employed to get inside a terrorist cell and nullify them, to this end he associates himself with a group of cyber-hacking, gun-toting, helicopter flying girls known as the Hur al-hyn, Cheerleaders or Black Eyed Maidens.  This then is where life imitates art imitates life.  Flowers heads up a pro-Muslim / anti extremism group called the Cheerleaders who are variously a group armed with the cultural weapons of mass destruction - according to themselves, or possibly a group of lunatic fringe internet trolls and bullies - according to a handful of right wing bloggers. Is Flower's vision of  heavily armed babes taking on Islamic terrorists just fantasy then, or does it cross over into the real world, it certainly adds a level of intrigue to a fairly strait-forward narrative.

Flowers mixes a fast paced spook story with gore in abundance as the Hur al-Hyn ladies launch themselves against their nominated foes in a visceral frenzy, look away if the thought of teenage girls playing football with severed heads is likely to upset or offend.  The plot builds in a vivid cinematic style to an apocalyptic fire-fight and leaves a plot thread hanging for the follow up novel.

Mostly I really enjoyed Riz, but where it could do with a little more work was a broader look at the both the moral reasoning and background of both Riz and the Hur al-Hyn girls, their motives seemed slightly glib and glossed over.  The blur of acronyms didn't help clarity at a couple of points. Amidst the general carnage and welter of gunfire and explosions though these are only minor criticisms. Riz, despite the title, isn't a mystery, it's a fast paced action adventure novel, a sort of boys own rush crossed with Die Hard and the opening ten minutes of Saving Private Ryan. Gun filled, blood drenched, high octane mayhem. The Kindle edition from Amazon can be bought at the bargain price of 77p!

Book Review : AVSI Judaism - Norman Solomon 7*

I had a bit of an autodidactic spree before starting a degree course and read a few of Oxford University Press' A Very Short Introduction series, and generally they are very good little books, offering a necessarily brief yet reasonably academic view into the topic of each book.

AVSI Judaism is the fourth of the religion introductions I have read after Linda Woodhead's Christianity, Eleanor Nesbitt's Sikhism and Islam by Malise Ruthven. Of the four, Woodhead writes clearly and distinctly and stands back from the subject in a proper academic fashion, Nesbitt and Solomon both appear slightly too close to the religion they are describing, and Ruthven's book is in parts a baffling impenetrable collage of concepts, ideology and phrases that left me little the wiser at the end.

Solomon has chosen to write in a very simple style, perhaps the accusation overly simple could be levelled at some points, his use of language does sometimes come across as a kindly old man teaching a class of six year olds.  Never the less, Solomon explains the tenets, practices and history in a clear and succinct style, albeit shaded by obvious proximity to and love of his subject.

The ongoing tension and clashes between Jewish Israel and the Muslim Middle East are obviously hard to describe for anyone who has a vested interest, and I feel that Solomon did not manage to stand back far enough from this difficult part of the subject.  Solomon talks about the Jewish military concept of tohar ha-nesheq with its demand that soldiers must take care to avoid collateral damage and civilian casualties, but he does not make it clear whether he thinks that Israel's armed forces embrace this concept.

In other places Solomon's love for Judaism shines through, especially in the chapter on home life.  These points aside though, it is a good description of one of the world's great religions, easy to read and understand and gain a basic understanding of the subject in hand.

Book Review - South: The Story of Shackleton's 1914-1917 Expedition - Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton 10*

Back when men were men. At the outbreak of WWI Shackleton had outfitted two ships and crews to try a continental crossing of the Antarctic.  He offered to halt the expedition but was ordered to continue by Winston Churchill.  Famously, the crossing never took place.  What did happen was an increasingly desperate fight to survive by the two ship's crews on opposite sides of the polar continent.

The book is largely made up of extracts from Shackleton's own diary and the diaries of some of the other expedition members, worked together into a strongly coherent narrative.  Shackleton charts the problems faced by his (the Weddell Sea) side of the expedition.  His ship, the Endurance, became stuck in sea ice in January 1915 where it drifted slowly across the Weddell Sea until it was crushed and sank in November of the same year. Shackleton's crew camped on the moving ice until April of 1916 when their ice floe broke apart and they were forced into the salvaged ship's boats to make a harrowing five day sea voyage to the dry land of Elephant Island.

Shackleton exhibits huge compassion for the suffering of his men. The rationing, the constant extreme cold and atrocious weather, the poor rations (including periods where the men were doing the backbreaking work of hauling sledges, after the deaths of the dogs, on rations of a single biscuit and a mug of cocoa a day), frostbite, boredom, ennui, scurvy, snow-blindness, exhaustion - the range of problems thrown against the men seems almost insurmountable, and yet, through it all, Shackleton keeps his group together working hard for each other's survival.

Parts of the tale are so epically British that you can't help but feel a swell of pride for a nation that produced men like these.  "The Endurance sank, but we saved the pennant of the Royal Yacht Club." Signs are important of course, and when throwing away almost of of their personal possessions after the sinking, Shackleton knew the importance of keeping just a few items, the pennant, an encyclopaedia, the men's pipes, that would remain as a tiny measure of normality and home comfort in the dark days ahead.

When everything seemed almost lost at the Elephant Island camp, with some of the men finally submitting to the throes of depression, Shackleton and a volunteer crew launched the ship's boat, the James Caird, a vessel slightly larger than a sailing dinghy and sailed 800 miles to South Georgia, arriving there due to the excellent navigational skills of the Endurance's captain Frank Worsely.  This voyage alone, through freezing, storm swept, mountainous souther ocean, would be enough for a heroic survival story, and upon landing on the wrong side of South Georgia the men still have to make a long and dangerous march in order to reach the whaling station and raise help.

The conditions faced by the crew of the Aurora across the continent in the Ross Sea were no less incredible.  The crew here followed in the tracks of Captain Scott, laying food and fuel depots for Shackleton's party to find as they crossed the continent.  The Aurora was ripped from its moorings and drifted, badly damaged, until the crew nursed it to New Zealand.  As Shackleton was organising the rescue for the Elephant Island team, so the Aurora's crew organised a rescue for their comrades on the ice near Ross Island.

South is a tremendous tale of survival against the odds, of what people can do when faced with extremis, when lying down and giving up would have been far easier than struggling on, for day after day, month after month.  It is an inspiring read, uplifting in its own way, and illuminates well how these men were the products of the era they lived in - after being rescued every man fit to serve signed up for military service in WWI.


South is currently available for free download from Amazon.

Book Review : The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins 6*

Perhaps the most famous famous, and amongst the most militant atheists writing today, Richard Dawkins has shifted over two million copies of his anti-religion polemic. That's an awful lot of books. Rick Warren's pro-Christian tract The Purpose Driven Life has sold about 30 million copies (source - ABC News), that's a truly massive amount of books.

Dawkins hates religion, much of The God Delusion burns with his fury at theism in all its forms.  I say in all its forms but to be honest it is mostly the big faiths of Christianity, Judaism and Islam that Dawkins takes on, and Christianity that he seems particularly angry about.

Dawkins is obviously a hugely intelligent man, Oxford University don't choose fools to be professors, and he has an incredible pedigree in the fields of ethology and evolutionary biology.  He also has quite a large ego, I don't think I have read another scholarly book in which the author mentions himself quite so often.  Dawkins just loves pointing out how clever he has been in previous verbal sparring with theists and how often he himself has demolished theist arguments. It does become a little wearing after a while.

Where Dawkins is particularly strong is the science. I enjoyed discussions on topics like Martin Rees' six constants theory, and the evolution pieces are splendid especially where Dawkins explores in detail how a pre-disposition toward religion could have been a very useful, if slightly misdirected, element of evolution itself.

Where Dawkins makes rather a fool of himself is politics.  He asserts twice in TGD that without religion, there would have been no Troubles in Northern Ireland, and then claims that if children were schooled together the tensions in that community would die out in a generation. This is simply rubbish, those people in NI who consider themselves Irish and Catholic would still be opposed to a British and Protestant government if the religious element was missing. Although I have some sympathy for the view that cross-community schooling would help the community as a whole, joint education of white and black/asian children certainly has not wiped out racism in the wider community.

Dawkins really attacks religion, and tried to prop up the values of atheism by claiming that religion systematically influences people to do bad things.  One of his arguments for this is that he doesn't think that there are many atheists in prison (an unverified claim as far as I can see), you could look at this claim from another point of view and say that people turn to religion when they get themselves into a bad spot.  In a Louis Theroux documentary a prison guard offered a nicely cynical point of view when he said that he saw a lot of religious 'conversions' in prisoners as it certainly didn't harm their chances with the parole board.

There are numerous instances of religious people doing bad things, far too many to count.  Bad Popes, the Inquisition, dozens of Kings and Queens who have made war for religious reasons, paedophile priests, the nutters from the Westboro Baptist Church, all claiming that one god or another tells them to do bad things. Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler were all largely atheist though, and that didn't stop any of them from massacring millions.

I have tried to think of a single moment when my church, its priests and followers, its teachings and public pronouncements have influenced or encouraged me to be bad. I cannot think of one. Instead I can clearly remember the things it has tried to influence me to do. To love all people equally without regard for race, nationality or religion. To have compassion and charity for those less fortunate. To know the difference between the older faith of an eye for an eye which we do not follow and the teachings of Christ that we should turn the other cheek. To strive to be the best you can be in this life, but not at the expense of others.

The God Delusion was an interesting read, but did it destroy my belief in God and throw a new kind of light  into my life ? Well, it didn't. It raised some interesting questions, trod over a lot of already well trodden anti-religious rhetoric and argued mostly wisely from a scientific point of view.  On the downside there are far too many assumptions and presumptions made when scientific fact and research would have safely shored up his arguments, such as in his discussion of the Montreal Police strike when he says "the majority of the population of Montreal presumably believed in God." It is no good presuming things when arguing from a scientific viewpoint, do the research, find the facts and use them, unless you have found them and they don't quite support the point you wish to make.

Book Review: Reality Hunger - David Shields 2*

The cover lines for Reality Hunger read "Is the novel dead ? Can You copyright reality ? Is art theft ?". All good and interesting questions which I was hoping Shields was going to demonstrate his arguments in a clear and informative fashion.

Instead, he has chosen to 'illustrate' his points, or mostly point singular - how much he detests the narrative novel form - by constructing his book from hundreds of quotes, each presented without reference or context apart from appearing under headings such as reality, mimesis, genre and persona.  What at sight of the cover looked to be an engaging and thought provoking read soon turns into a tedious grind of wading through hundreds of short texts supposedly linked to the chapter heading Shields has dreamed up but often having only the most tenuous of connections.

Perhaps I should construct the review along similar lines to the book by giving you two of the quotes...

359 - "Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. As is already more than self-evident."

362 - "Nothing is going to happen in this book."

Book Review : Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow - Peter Hoeg 6*

I have mostly really enjoyed Hoeg's creation Smilla Jasperson, the slow paced plot and the cultural meditations supplied by the character.  I have also mostly been told by people who have read this novel just how utterly wonderful both it and the central character are, but I can only agree up to a point.

The plot unfolds unevenly, as real life does, sometimes the determined amateur sleuth makes headway, sometimes she is headed off.  The mystery at the heart of the novel concerns the death of a boy who lives close to Smilla, a boy with a paralysing fear of heights who has apparently fallen from a rooftop while playing.  Smilla, troubled by her young friend's death, sets out to get to the core of the mystery.

So far so good then, we have a nice detective story, a quirky, odd heroine akin to Lisbeth Salander and a plot that although it constantly unravels, does not let you see too far around the corner.  Some of the story seems ever so slightly far fetched, as when Smilla signs on a ship as an unwanted and superfluous waitress.  I did enjoy some of the tension provided by the contained universe of the ice breaking ship, but then something really strange happens.

Michael Crichton drops in and writes the last chapter, and the plot which has so far been fairly tense and gripping suddenly dissolves under the strain of having the quirky, offbeat detective genre suddenly morph into a bio-warfare sci-fi plot.  The last few pages were frankly unbelievable and made a mockery of the preceding 400.  This is a shame, as Miss Smilla has many good elements, Smilla herself is a fine creation, cynical, intelligent, not quite world weary and Hoeg sense of timing as he reveals some plot elements is masterful.  The last chapter though is a juxtaposition too far, it is jarring and shocks the reader out of the imagined world of the story.

Book Review : Swiss Family Robinson - Johann David Wyss 2*

I was hoping that this would be more in the Crusoe vein, but it isn't, it's tripe.

The Robinson family get shipwrecked on a bountiful coast containing a menagerie of wildlife from various continents, all of whom appear overly eager to hurl themselves on the family's hunting spears whenever they get peckish. Indeed, the life at the shipwreck point is so rich and varied that they hardly seem to eat the same meal twice.

Within a year the family have established a system of irrigated farms, have built a number of homes, have domesticated half the animal population of the area and then bump into the natives - read; savages - of the area who have not managed to do any of these things.  The author though understands full well why the locals have not reached shipwrecked Europeans standards of living, it is obviously because as they are black / savages / natives / brown skinned, they are obviously uneducated.

I disliked this book all the way through, every mild problem the family encounter is solved with overwhelming efficiency, almost nothing appeared believable.  If you want a decent historical shipwreck story go for Crusoe.

Book Review - The Underdogs : Mariano Azuela 6*

Image via Wikipedia Written about events during the Mexican Revolution, this tale follows the exploits of a group of villagers who band together under their local leader Demetrio Macias.  The men seemed to have joined the Revolution not out of ideals, but because a side has to be picked, and a poor working man has to be anti-Federal.

Demetrio leads through force of action, but when a Federal deserter, Luis Cervantes, arrives with his city education and, initially at least, his strong sense of ideals for the Revolution, the group find they have a spokesman who can express why they are fighting.

As the war grinds on, Demetrio's band experience some success, but along the way they become corrupted by greed and revenge.  Petty killings occur on the flimsiest of pretexts, and robbery and looting become the order of the day.  Eventually they come to be feared and hated by the peasentry in turn as the federal soldiers who burn Demetrio's home were hated by them. Cervantes uses the power of his speech to set Demetrio up as a great general, with Cervantes rising in power at his side.  The city man though can see which way the wind blows, and as the Revolution begins to turn on those people it was meant to serve, he flees the fighting with his war loot and sets himself up in business.

When the gang eventually return home they can find no peace.  Demetrio is asked why he keeps on fighting, but after two years the fighting has come to define his life and he can see no other purpose for it.

The Underdogs chronicles the failures of the Mexican Revolution as it turns on the very people it was meant to serve.  In its unflinching treatment of the main characters and Azuela's depiction of men changed by war and greed, it paints a picture which has become more familiar to us in more recent war books and films, particularly those concerning the American involvement in Vietnam.

An interesting read that introduced to me a period of history I knew nothing about, but which makes clear the eternal pointlessness and brutalising nature of war.

Gentlemen Of The Road - Michael Chabon 8*

Gentlemen Of The Road is a fantasy adventure novel for readers who don't like orcs and elves but do appreciate a bit of sword play and a pub brawl.  Chabon pilfers outrageously from various fantasy sources, most notably Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion for the character of Zelikman, while the giant African Amram is Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd.

From the 'borrowing' of the main characters Chabon then proceeds to set them on the path so well trodden in the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series of novels. Amram and Zelikman are swords for hire, rogues with good hearts who accept the coin of their employers without giving up their own (admittedly well hidden at times) personal sense of right and wrong. 

The great thing is though, no matter how much of the protagonists character traits, and Zelikman's educated dour and fatalistic mannerisms and appearance could make him Elrik's twin, Chabon writes his swords without sorcery story in such a manner, and with tongue so firmly in cheek, that the book is a real pleasure to read.  The two friends fight, cheat, steal and bicker their way through life, following lost cause after lost cause until they eventually let their consciences lead them into a holy war.

At the heart of the novel is the great love and respect that the two men have for each other, and the heroic feats they are prepared to undertake in defence of the life of their friend, they fight like an old married couple because as life goes, they are almost married, all they really have is each other, the road and their wits.

This highly enjoyable tale isn't really a story of right versus wrong or good versus evil, Chabon's heroes exist more in shades of grey than they do in black and white, but they are good characters to involve yourself with, heroic enough to make you like them, complex enough to keep you interested, and both gifted with a wry, self-deprecating sense of black humour.  Great fun to read, I don't know if Michael Chabon is the sort of author who revisits previous characters, but I would certainly enjoy further volumes of Amram and Zelikman.