The only surviving fragment of a never-written travel book

You know what it is like: one day, while dusting a tall shelf you never look at you discover lying there an old diary, some faded photographs, or something else that catches your attention. You think “Oh! I’ll just take a quick look”, and suddenly you feel transported to long bygone days. Memories start storming into your brain as so many desperate shoppers on the opening day of the sales; old flames make your heart miss a beat, and long unheard-of friends make you wonder what ever became of them and why were you not more disciplined in keeping in touch. Exactly this happened to me recently. I found an old notebook lying around; it contained some notes I jotted down during a cycling holiday in Scotland nearly 20 years ago, and although it is far from complete, it brought memories of that trip and that time sharply into focus.

As a rule, this blog is about books written by others, that I have read (and mostly liked). But today I am going  to make an exception: I am going to write about a book that never got written, but if it had, it would have been written by me. To be more precise, I am going to reproduce that book,  what little got written of it. It is not too long. Here it goes:

Ullapool, 5th August 1996

Well, I don’t think I ever did so little planning in preparation of a cycling holiday as I did for this one, but so far it has worked out rather well. On Wednesday I said at work that I was going, or thinking of going. On Saturday I booked by BR ticket from Crewe to Inverness; on Sunday I travelled, and here I am on Monday. Actually, the getting to Inverness was rather eventful. At Stoke Railway Station I was told first that one of the many trains I had to take (Glasgow-Perth) already had its quota of bicycle reservations covered, so I could not travel either on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday. In a second attempt, booking was possible from Crewe to Edinburgh, but from Edinburgh to Inverness there were already to bikes booked, and this is BR’s quota of bikes on trains (incredibly). Nevertheless the ticket salesman told me that if I asked nicely, chances were that the guard would let me on the train, so I decided to risk it. Needless to say, the first thing the train guard said when he saw me approaching the Inverness train at Edinburgh station was “Where’s your bike reservation?”, before I could even blink. When I explained that I didn’t have one he was furious, but not because there were already two bikes on the train, but because he thought that I was trying to get away without paying the reservation. In a nervous, stammering fashion, I muddled things up further trying to explain that I would pay for the reservation, but BR simply would not allow me to. Looking sternly down on me from his train window, he said that without a reservation I was not getting on the train. I then explained, in my most heart-felt impersonation of a dejected, miserable, rain-soaked kitten, that I would be stranded in Edinburgh, and offered to pay the reservation to him. At that, his iron heart softened a little, and he decided to let me on the train, but not without first swearing strongly for my benefit.

When I finally arrived at Inverness it was already 9:40 pm, and daylight was fading fast. I was fortunate enough to find my way to the B&B I had booked the day before, which was on 2 Glengarry Road, close to the Caledonian Canal, towards the west of the city. The old lady at the house was worried that I would not find it in the dark, but I knew where it was supposed to be in some detail, thanks to a clear street map that I found at the station.

I got a takeaway for supper, some disgusting chicken curry with chips, and took it home to eat while chatting with my lady host. She was rather talkative, and while I downed the spicy grub she told me about her son, an engineer who worked in the construction of the Kyle of Lochalsh bridge to Skye, something of which she didn’t sound terribly proud. He now is building another bridge, one that will link Denmark with Sweden across the Baltic sea.

Today I had an early start. I was called at ten to seven, as  wanted to take the train to Kyle of Lochalsh, leaving Inverness at ten past eight. I had my first cooked breakfast for a while, and then headed for the station. I didn’t go all the way to Kyle, but left the train at Garve, the most convenient station for heading to Ullapool, following the A835. The sky has been cloudy all day, and there has been a light but persistent drizzle more or less all afternoon, but so far the weather has been kind to me, as I have enjoyed today one of those very rare occurrences in cycling: having the wind on your back rather than against you.

With the help of the wind the journey was a real pleasure, in spite of the fact that the views weren’t quite as impressive as they would have otherwise been, given the overcast sky. I rolled along a moderately busy road, but not busy enough as to be a pain, and as a rule cars gave me plenty of space.  After twelve miles or so I decided to stop at an inn claiming to be the last one for another twenty miles; I thought it would be a good place to stop and have some coffee. I was also given some supposedly home-made shortbread; just what I needed: plenty of sugar and fat to confront the miles ahead with a cheery disposition. The inn was located just before the dam at Loch Glascarnoch. You can still feel the aftermath of last year’s exceptionally warm summer in the low waterlines of the lochs around here, which is a good few metres below the normal one.

Further along the road, just beyond the junction where the road coming from Gairloch meets the A835, is the Corrieshalloch Gorge, with fantastic views of the water below running among the rocks. The bridge from which you get the view as a notice board saying “No more than 6 persons on this bridge at any one time”, and oscillates noticeably enough to send shivers down the spine of a height-chicken like me. Nevertheless it was fun.

There were some nice descents down to Loch Broom from the gorge, and I fully enjoyed them. There are, I am sure, few sensations that can withstand comparison with a freewheel down a hill in the Highlands of Scotland (or anywhere else for that matter) with the fresh air pumping up your lungs and throwing your hair in disarray behind you.

After that it was all plain sailing, more or less, into Ullapool, 31 miles from Garve. Not bad for the first day of cycling, though in my opinion, covering large distances was never the purpose of a cycling tour. I think it must have been around 2 pm when I came into Ullapool, which felt rather busy, with lots of people around.

Of course, my first concern was to find accommodation. I had not made my mind as to staying or continuing along the road at this stage, and I was seriously considering the possibility of pushing further ahead. The Youth Hostel had two “female” beds available, but they wouldn’t give one to me, for some reason. I was told that there was another hostel, an independent one, and was given directions, but I came to the other end of town without finding it. At that point I found a B&B called “Primavera”, and the Spanish name made me go for it. Alas, it was in vain, but a German lady there directed me to the hostel I hadn’t been able to find earlier on, and fortunately they did have vacancies, so I decided to stay.

The hostel had one shower only, which leaked from the hose, so that the flow of water you could count with for your shower was of very little pressure, and most of the water ended directly on the floor. The kitchen, however, was very nice. The warden was an Australian girl who looked like Lulu.

There was not very much to do in Ullapool, other than visit tourist shops of one kind or another, so I did a bit of that; the rest of my afternoon was spent writing this diary.  Then I cooked some spaghetti with a mushroom, tomato and onion sauce, which served its purpose but it was otherwise not very inspiring.

After attending to the basic needs of the cyclist’s tummy, I was ready to attend to other, less basic needs. I thus went for a pint of Guiness to the Caledonian Hotel with a Swiss guy also staying at the hostel. He was a very nice chap, an engineer from Zurich, and we chatted for a while. Among the topics covered, we discussed about how Spanish people stick together when on holiday and don’t interact too much with the locals, most likely because of the language barrier, I suppose.

Ullapool to Achmelvich, 6th August

Today I had a much harder day than yesterday. I covered approximately 33-34 miles, involving many more climbs than yesterday’s gentle introduction. The first climb came immediately after leaving Ullapool, and that was tough enough, but it was only a warning of what was still to come. Had it been the only climb, it would not have been bad, but it was only the first of many. I noticed that probably Elsa (sorry, I should have introduced Elsa, the main character in this story, before: Elsa is my bike, a wonderful lioness) does not have quite as low gears as most bikes around, as I found myself having to push her up hills that others could climb without much apparent difficulty. Maybe, though, it is just that I am simply less athletic than average.

I followed the A835 for about 10 miles, during which every climb was followed by a rather splendid descent. At the bottom of one of those descents I was close to suffering a potentially severe accident with Elsa. I did something rather stupid out of lack of concentration: I switched to lowest gear while still being on the biggest plate. Since my chain is shorter than it should be, having once been broken, it was in such tension that the gear mechanism became entangled, and had I tried to pedal any harder than I actually did, the whole think would have been left in such a mess that probably I would have had to go back home. Fortunately, nothing was damaged beyond repair and it was just a case of moving the pedals by hand to get the chain back into position.

… And there it ends, I’m afraid. I can’t really recall why no more of this diary was written at the time. Possibly because the climbs and head winds didn’t give me much respite, and I was too tired to write in the evenings. Anyway, the trip continued uneventfully; I cycled up to the very north-west corner of Scotland, and then along the rugged landscape of the north coast. Eventually making it into Aberdeen, from where, after much trying with another helpful BR ticket saleswoman, I managed to book a ticket for both Elsa and myself, back to normal life. I now wish I had been more persistent with my writing, but there you are, that’s as far as it gets. As usual, comments welcome.

Saturday, by Ian McEwan

I have to admit that I have been rather slow at posting here of late; I will try to keep it up at a more regular pace in the future!

I started reading McEwan only fairly recently, a little more than a year ago, though I have known about his work for a lot longer than that; I was not initially drawn to it because I had the impression that his novels tended to be somewhat twisted and macabre. That is certainly true of some of his early short stories collected in “First Love, Last Rites”, and perhaps of his earlier novels, which I am yet to read. However, when I read “Saturday”, I was on sabbatical in London, a city that I love, where I was born I-am-not-exactly-sure-how-many-years-ago, and was actually living very close to the area where the action of this novel takes place. Reading it there and then gave me a special, eerie feeling. Since reading this, and just before it, “Amsterdam”, I’ve come to realise that my apprehension was misplaced, and that I had been wasting my time not reading him earlier.

The book tells the story of one day in the life of Henry Perowne. Though confining the action to 24 hours may give some a feeling of time-claustrophobia, it actually does not feel like that at all. Strictly speaking the story unfolds in that space of time, on the Saturday of the title, but during the story our hero has time to reminiscence earlier events in his life, such as how he got to meet his wife, his relationship with his father in law, and so on. The result is that though the time span of the novel is formally short, it does not feel that narrow. And besides, Perowne packs a lot into his Saturday, as you’ll find out if you read this novel.

Perowne is a neurosurgeon, working at University College Hospital, and living nearby in Fitzroy square. He is good at his job and appreciated by his colleagues. He is happily married to a successful lawyer and has two gifted children, a young man who is a talented guitar player, and a daughter who is a promising new poet. In fact one of the themes of the novel is the contraposition of Perowne’s technical/scientific background against the more artistically-oriented rest of the family, starting with his father in law, who is a famous poet, and ending with his daughter, who is taking her first steps in that direction. I will return to this point below.

In the early hours of this particular post-9/11 Saturday Henry Perowne finds himself wide awake in bed, lying next to his sleeping wife, with the ineffable feeling that something is not quite right, that something is either happening or about to happen, something that will have dramatic consequences. From his bedroom window he sees, or thinks he sees an airplane flying in flames on its approach to Heathrow, and this vision starts a train of feelings of unease, of impending doom. And this itself is another theme lurking through the pages of the novel, the feeling that after the dramatic events of 2001 the world is less safe a place, even for those who before 9/11 felt in the relative safety of the western world. This is not any Saturday either: for one thing, London will host one of the biggest popular demonstrations ever to march through its streets, on this occasion against the Irak war, a war that will give plenty of food for thought to our hero during his day. At a more personal level, it is an important day for Perwone, because a family get-together is planned for the evening, hosted by Henry and his wife Rosalind, to be attended by their two children, including their daughter Daisy who now lives in Paris, and Rosalind’s expat father, who, as mentioned above, is a respected literary figure, largely responsible for Daisy’s artistic inclination. Henry is charged with the practical aspects of this family reunion, as he is a good cook, and has a free day.

I am not going to give a whole synopsis here; I am not into writing spoilers, and it would be very difficult to write more without revealing too much. It is enough to set the scene for what will turn out to be a Saturday to remember, not only for the characters of the novel, but for its readers too. I just want to say that in less than three hundred pages the author manages to pack a wealth of themes, and to do it in such masterly fashion, that this novel is truly memorable. Perowne marvels at his good fortune in life, and how this good fortune depended on small chance coincidences, like meeting his wife in a hospital ward where she was being treated while he was a young doctor in training. His Saturday is going to confront him with someone who has not been so lucky in life, and that encounter, or actually series of encounters, is going to have dramatic consequences. Read this novel; it is good.

I just want to conclude with a small comment on what, to me, was the least satisfying aspect of the book, though this is a rather minor aspect of this really multifaceted novel. What I did not like so much was the portrayal of Perowne himself as a man with a scientific mind struggling to appreciate the artistic pursuits of his daughter and father in law. He is portrayed as a man who does not fully appreciate classical music, literature, or the arts in general, though his daughter tries to “educate” him in this respect. I personally felt that this responded more to a cliché vision of the author as to what scientists are really like. There is no doubt that you can find scientists and technically trained people that have no artistic interests whatsoever, but in my experience the opposite situation, scientists that are keen readers, or passionate about music or other art forms, is far more common. Regrettably, one cannot generally find many artistic-minded people who are equally passionate about the sciences, and thus they tend to think of scientists as square-headed nerds (though possibly this is a scientist’s cliché vision of what arty people are really like!). This, however, is only a minor criticism of mine, and should not deter you from reading what is a wonderful novel. Enjoy!

A Life in Secrets, the story of Vera Atkins and the lost agents of SOE, by Sarah Helm

As promised, my post today is on Sarah Helm’s excellent biography of Vera Atkins. So, who was Vera Atkins and why was I drawn to reading this book? As hinted at by the subtitle on the cover, Atkins worked at SOE (yes, yet again the Special Operations Executive) during WWII, and if you have read the previous three posts you will know that the topic of the undercover activities of the secret services during that period is a pet interest of mine.

Vera Atkins worked in SOE’s F-section (F for France); she was in charge of the tutoring and training of would-be agents, who would later be infiltrated into France. Once there, these agents were expected to mingle among the locals, seek out potential recruits and set up resistance cells from which a secret army could be built. The idea was that this secret army, equipped by means of parachute drops of arms and explosives, would lay in wait, springing to action coinciding with the planned allied landings. Many of SOE’s agents were French nationals; others were British or of other nationalities, who had a good knowledge of France and the French language. Notably, some were actually women. Atkins appears to have felt particularly responsible for these, and took great care in their training.

But of course, the job of an undercover agent in enemy territory is a dangerous one. Inevitably, there were severe casualties. Many of F-section’s agents were arrested. The German counter-espionage services (the Abwehr, the Sicherheitsdienst) seem to have been particularly effective, to the point that many agents became convinced that there were traitors in SOE. Indeed, those arrested who survived the ordeal confessed to having been amazed at how much the Germans knew of the inner workings of SOE, its order of battle,  their secret codes, etc. Wether it was through treason or recklessness on the part of some of SOE’s ranks, the fact remains that many of its agents were rounded up, interrogated, tortured and executed. Among those that didn’t come back when France was liberated, nor even after the final collapse of the 3rd Reich, were twelve women agents, out of those that Atkins had taken under her wing. She saw it as her duty to go and find out what had happened to them.

SOE was dismantled at the end of the war, but Atkins pulled strings and got herself posted to research commissions investigating war crimes, so as to be able to travel through Europe in search of different clues that would eventually allow her to piece together the fates of those agents. Needless to say, what she found out was not nice.

This book tells the story of Vera Atkins’s search for her missing agents, but it doesn’t stop at that. Atkins was an intriguing person; she seemed to be cut out for the secret services. She was a very clever person, with a prodigious memory and a reserved nature. The author reconstructs her life from youth in Romania, where she was born to a wealthy family of jewish abstraction, to her final days in retirement on the Sussex coast. She packed a lot into her years, and was not forthcoming about her past, which makes the work of her biographer all the more admirable. Atkins was shrouded in mystery, and this shows by the widely different opinions held on her by people who had crossed her path. She seems to have been liked, despised and suspected in equal measure. To some she was a heroine, to others a cold-hearted chess player with real people as pawns. Perhaps she was all those things simultaneously. The author gives every opinion a decent hearing and subjects it to scientific scrutiny. She keeps her distance, without glorifying nor demonising her subject, with an honest balance. And what I liked specially is that this biography is immensely readable. That is partly thanks to Atkin’s eventful life, but also because the author has written it very well. She mixes with the biographical material accounts of her personal experiences while researching her topic, like when she travels to Romania and Ukraine to trace the remains of Atkin’s family estate. Such details make the book an even greater read. Highly recommendable.

Between Silk and Cyanide, by Leo Marks

Over the summer I’ve read two splendid biographies, both of persons connected with SOE, the famous Special Operations Executive, a secret organisation set up at the start of WWII, whose mission it was, in Churchill’s words, to set Europe ablaze. The first of these biographies, in fact an autobiography, is the subject of today’s post; my next one will be about “A Life in Secrets”, Sarah Helm’s magnificent book on Vera Atkins, a key figure in SOE’s F-section, who trained and saw off many of the agents sent undercover to France, and who went to look for those that did not return.

In “Between Silk and Cyanide”, Leo Marks tells the story of his war experience, from the moment he left his London family home to train at a cryptographers school. Marks must have been quite a character: he was a child prodigy who was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Gold Bug” to become a code breaker, at the tender age of eight. He learnt everything he could on the topic, first testing his abilities by breaking his father’s price code system, used on the books he sold in his famous rare and antique books shop at 84 Charing Cross (itself the subject of a book by Helene Hanff, which, alas, I have not read). He comes across as a teaser with a wicked sense of humour. Perhaps this had something to do with his failing to get to Bletchley Park, the secret establishment where efforts on breaking the enemy’s Enigma code were centralised, and where the trainees of the cryptography course were expected to end up. Either Marks was not thought to be good enough for Bletchley, or else he managed to get on someone’s nerves; the fact is that he was the only one out of fifteen pupils that did not go on to Bletchley, but ended up working for the newly created SOE instead.

Marks was to work in SOE’s code department, responsible for the secret codes used for communicating with agents on the field. He tells of his dismay on learning that SOE relied on poem codes to encrypt their messages before transmission, a highly insecure cipher method, and he saw it as his mission to impose alternative methods that would make German cryptographers work harder for their money. Not only was the poem code relatively easy to break; because agents had to memorise their poem, it could be extracted from them under torture. His first measure was to write original poems to hand to departing agents, as this would marginally complicate the task of breaking the code. Well known poems by Shakespeare or Poe, which the agents tended to choose, could be easily recognised and reconstructed, thus allowing the enemy to break not a single message, but all previous traffic from a given agent. He then introduced the so-called worked out keys, or WOKs (nothing to do with an oriental frying pan), and letter one-time pads, LOPs. A departing agent would take a set of keys, each one to be used for one message only, and then destroyed. The keys would be printed on silk, and thus easily camouflaged in the agent’s clothes; after use, each key would be cut out from the piece of silk and destroyed. This would make the agent’s traffic practically unbreakable. SOE was, however, not well known for its efficiency in many respects, and it was decidedly slow to take on innovations. Marks faced and uphill struggle in getting his improvements accepted and implemented. The way he saw it, the choice, as far as agents were concerned, was between codes printed in silk, or else having to swallow a cyanide L-pill, which agents took with them to avoid capture when trapped. Hence the title.

He was also responsible for decrypting “undecipherables”, i.e. messages received from agents in the field that, because they had been wrongly encoded (understandably, agents worked under a lot of stress), were rendered unreadable in the first instance. By analyzing agents traffic he became convinced that a number of agents in Holland and France were communicating under duress; in other words, they had been arrested and were forced to communicate with their case officers back in London as if they were still free. The heads of the Dutch and French sections, however, were reluctant to accept this possibility, and as a result SOE ended up sending numerous agents and tones of equipment  and ammunition directly into German hands. In fact, SOE had been efficiently penetrated both by the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst, the German counter-espionage services.

Marks also briefed training agents on all issues relating to coding and communication. That was how he got to meet, among many others,  Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Kahn, two brave and beautiful young girls sent undercover to occupied France, never to return. He tells of how he had agreed with Noor that, should she be arrested and forced to communicate with London, if she was to use an 18-letter key for her message, he would know that she was acting under duress. This was the worst of it all: realizing that agents had been arrested, were probably undergoing painful torture, and were most likely to face the firing squad. As will be seen in my next post, the actual situation endured by trapped agents, and in particular by Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Kahn, was even more harrowing.

A priori, because of the contents, it would seem as if this book could only be enjoyed by those (like myself) with a particular interest in SOE or on the history of WWII. But actually the text is very witty, with lots of wordplays and puns; it is actually quite fun to read. I think it could be enjoyed by anyone (who likes reading, that is). His character descriptions are incisive and sharp, and he shifts from the comical to the dramatic or moving with surprising ease. Supposedly this memoir was written during the 1980’s, some fourty years after the events described, but his recollections of facts and people are incredibly detailed.

Well, in summary, I really enjoyed this book; it provides an insider’s view on the workings of a secret service, with all the blunders and the triumphs, the misfits and the heroes, the narrow escapes and the tragedies. And it made patently clear how brave those men and women who volunteered to fight the enemy from within actually were.

HHhH, by Laurent Binet

I am fascinated by the history of WWII, and more specifically by the role played by the secret services such as MI6 and SOE and others, so I was naturally drawn to this book since I first knew of it, a few years ago. It is Binet’s first novel, originally written in French (though I read the English translation), and it won him the prestigious Prix Goncourt du premier roman, which would translate as the prize to the best first novel, in 2010. HHhH tells the story of operation Anthropoid, the code name given to what could only be described as a suicide mission, the aim of which was to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich.

Heydrich was one of the key figures of the nazi regime, at the time Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, a charge that he exercised with an iron fist. Although nominally Himmler’s subordinate, he was widely regarded as the most dangerous and ambitious man in Germany. He was Himmler’s right hand, and his main asset in the fight for Hitler’s favour that engulfed the Nazi elite. In his CV, Haydrich could claim responsibility for such “niceties” as organizing the disturbances known as Kristallnacht, in which Jews and their properties were targeted throughout the Reich in 1938; he was the main architect of the final solution; he was also responsible for the purge known as the Night of the long Knives, in which Himmler and Heydrich ordered the arrest and subsequent execution of the leadership of the SA, a nazi paramilitary organization, and particularly its head, Röhm, whom they regarded as a potential rival in the squabble for power. Heydrich had a tendency to accumulate responsibilities, all of them connected in one way or another with the subjugation of others: he was an SS general, head of the Gestapo and criminal police (Kripo), and founder of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), a secret police organization in charge of stamping out any opposition to the regime. Hitler himself referred to Heydrich as “the man with the iron heart”; he was known to others as the “blond beast”, and as Himmler’s brain (the title of the book refers to this). A real viper of a man if ever there was one, he had no qualms about turning against his former mentors when it suited him. No wonder he was probably feared much more than he was admired by others in the nazi elite. This was the target of operation Anthropoid.

So, Heydrich is the bad guy; the main heroes are Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, two agents trained by SOE in Britain and sent to Prague with the instigation of the Czech government in exile, which was desperate to prove to the British that the Czech resistance was alive and ready to oppose the invader. I say the main ones because these were the two that were charged with the task of actually killing Heydrich, but they counted with the assistance of numerous members of the Czech resistance movement and other infiltrated SOE agents. The story is well known, at least in outline: Gabcik and Kubis spent several months living in hiding in different safe houses throughout Prague, while they planned and prepared the assault on Heydrich. The latter was so vain and felt so safe that he travelled daily to and from his headquarters without an escort, in a Mercedes convertible, accompanied only by his driver, and the agents saw this as their best chance of success. On the fateful day, 27th May 1942, at a hairpin bend on the road, where the car had to slow down, Gabcik and Kubis waited for Heydrich’s limousine to appear, with a third man, Valcik, posted as a lookout to warn the other two of the car’s approach. Nothing goes according to plan when it finally does come, and the mission appears to fail in the first instance, but Heydrich was injured, and eventually he would die from his wounds, while SOE’s agents managed to escape with only minor injuries.

The attack on Heydrich and his subsequent death shocked the nazi regime. He was the highest ranking nazi leader to have ever been targeted, and Hitler was furious. A wave of brutal reprisals was unleashed, with two entire villages, wrongly thought to have assisted the perpetrators, being razed to the ground and all their inhabitants either executed or deported to concentration camps. The partisans themselves were finally betrayed by one of their own, and were cornered down in a church, where they preferred to fight to the end sooner than give themselves up.

I feel somewhat uneasy about tagging this post under “Historical fiction” because Binet is at pains to constantly remind the reader that historical fiction is not what he aimed for when writing this book. Neither is it a historical account of the facts, at least not in the usual sense, though again the author stresses repeatedly how much research he carried out to get his facts right. Rather, it feels like the author is recounting his own struggle in writing the book. He looses no opportunity to remind the reader that, out of respect, he doesn’t want to fall in the ignominy of historical fiction novelists, who have no qualms about inventing dialogues for their characters, even if these were once real people. Yet sometimes the temptation is too great to resist; a bit of invented dialogue crops up, and then we have to read all over again about the author’s reservations about doing that. It can get a bit tiring after a while!

Essentially, Binet has written a book about his own obsession with this story, a story that is one of the most celebrated examples of courage, heroism and comradeship to come out of WWII. I found his approach interesting, certainly innovative, but tiring at times. I was interested in the story itself, in the facts, and frankly, not so much in Binet’s troubled relationships with his girlfriends and his struggle in trying to write a historical novel without falling into what he sees as the vice of historical fiction. I felt that if he wanted to give it a more personal touch, it would have been possible to make a good story out of how he reconstructed the facts of operation Anthropoid. That would have been much more interesting, I think, than reading about his insecurities and reservations during the writing of the book. Anyway, the book reads well, if only because the story is really a true dramatic tale of heroism, that of a few men and women who were prepared to actually confront death herself in order to rid humanity of a man who no doubt was one of the darkest and most sinister characters that ever walked the surface of the earth.

Treasure Island, by Robert L. Stevenson

Unless you have lived your life up to now like monk or a nun in a cloistered monastery, you are likely to know the basic story line of this, perhaps the most famous and representative example of adventure books. It is certainly one of the classic adventure stories that has been given the film, TV serialization and children’s cartoon treatment most frequently, and not always faithfully. And in spite of this, which normally I would  find off-putting, the reading of the original turned out to be every bit as enjoyable an experience as I could have hoped for. I don’t think I can put my finger on what it is that makes the story so attractive still today. It is plainly told, in simple and direct language, with simple and direct characters. The bad ones are very bad, with perhaps the exception of Long John Silver, who, being bad, seems to be altogether of a better sort than the rest of the “Gentlemen of Fortune” that he commands into mutiny. The good ones are so quintessentially English, with their honesty and fair play (though the bad ones are English too, and the book was written by a Scot!), that you know that good, in the end, has to prevail, as indeed it does.

Although it is a classic of children’s literature, it is not a children’s book, or certainly not only; it appeals to all ages, and that is its great, enduring power. To me in particular, it brought back distant memories of Saturday afternoon pirate films and of galleons constructed with living-room sofa cushions, with their wind-filled sails cutting against the blue sky of childhood. I guess it is the power it has of bringing back those memories that makes this book so enjoyable. Also, having read this in a beautiful Folio edition, with illustrations by N. C. Wyeth, was certainly a plus.

Stevenson also wrote plenty of short stories and travel literature, most of which I have to bring myself up to speed with (I have read “Travels with a Donkey”, which is endearing, and “An Inland Voyage”, also fun, and a number of his short stories, compiled under the title “The Body Snatcher and Other Stories”, also by Folio). Some other adventure classics of his I found more indigestible, e.g. “Master of Ballantree”, or “Catriona” (the sequel to Kidnapped). “Kidnapped”, and of course the famous “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” are very very good, but my own personal favourite is, no doubt, “Treasure Island”, which I whole heartly recommend, if you have not read it yet. And yes, I do subscribe to Borges’ opinion, that “if you don’t like Stevenson, then there is something very wrong with you”. So, there!

The Conquest of Gaul, by Gaius Julius Caesar

Caesar was certainly one of the greatest men of antiquity: a gifted and lucky general (the way Napoleon wanted them), an inquisitive mind, a soldier with a tendency to show mercy to the defeated enemy, even when he proved to be a treacherous former ally, and as this book shows, also a gifted writer.

Most probably the book was intended as a pamphlet of self-propaganda, and even if his writings are carefully crafted to hide some of his blunders at the field, and to present himself as a capable ruler in the eyes of Roman citizens witnessing the transition from Republic to Empire, it is nevertheless an invaluable source on the campaigns of the Roman army in Gaul, Germany and the British Isles. It is also the only surviving memoir written by a general of antiquity on his own campaigns. But aside of its historical significance, it is a book that is as readable today as it must have been two thousand years ago, without falling into the flowery poetic and heroic language that was favoured so much then. It is written in a straight-forward, matter-of-fact way. It is certainly an eery experience to read words that sound like they were written only the other day, about facts that took place two millennia ago, that were actually written by a direct witness.

The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

This book tells the story of Scott’s ill fated expedition to Antarctica and the South Pole, written by one of the members of the team. I learned much from this book. For example, I always thought that Scott’s expedition had one objective, namely to reach the South Pole before anyone else. It turns out that, though surely that goal must have been high on Scott’s agenda, and it was certainly one that caught the public’s imagination, it was only one of the many aims that Scott and his team hoped to achieve during their voyage south. Scott’s expedition was primarily a scientific endeavour, and biologists, geologists physicists and other scientists were included among the crew; much research was undertaken during the three years of their visit to Antarctica.

One of the key scientific objectives of the expedition was the study of the Emperor Penguin, a species then practically unknown to science. This required a winter journey to their colony, a journey that was itself a miracle of polar exploration, and to which the title of this book makes reference. Of the three crew members that participated in that journey, one was the author of this book; the other two perished with Scott on their way back to the base camp from the South Pole, only 14 miles from a food depot and from safety.

The book contains numerous excerpts from the crew diaries; to read the last entries penned by the dying members of Scotts Polar team brought tears to my eyes. How such an episode must have affected people at the time can only be imagined; the fact that the horrors of WWI, taking place immediately after these events, did not wipe it out from memory is quite telling. The tragedy of Scott’s expedition has meant that, like with the case of Napoleon, it is not so much the victor who is remembered, but the defeated. There is a kind of poetic justice in this. Of course, Amundsen’s achievement in getting to the South Pole first, and surviving the ordeal, was a great one, and has earned him a special place in the history of exploration. However, in a sense, that was “it”; there was no other objective, no ambitious scientific program, certainly nothing of the caliber that was an essential part of Scott’s expedition.

Granite Island, A Portrait of Corsica, by Dorothy Carrington

I remember seeing this book during my first trip to Corsica; it caught my attention then and I remember thinking that it should be something worth reading. Two years later I was again in Corsica, that wonderful island, and I decided then that it was time to satisfy my curiosity about the book. So far in this blog I’ve only written about books that I did like, and I am not sure I will ever get round to waisting anybody’s time (including my own) with the books I did not like, so you can anticipate that my curiosity about the book was amply satisfied. It is probably the travel book I have enjoyed the most out of those I have read, running neck and neck with Dervla Murphy’s “Full Tilt”.

In a sense, this is not travel literature, since the author does not describe a journey to the island; it is more a sociological and historical study of Corsica and its inhabitants. It contains many interesting anecdotes, such as the fact that there really was a historical Don Juan, of Corsican parents, that nationalist leader Pasquale Paoli was the first to put forward a democratic constitution as we understand it today, some thirty years before this was done in the USA, and many other such things. It also discusses how the geographical isolation of the islanders resulted over generations in a closed society and how in such circumstances the development of a mafia culture is almost an inevitable consequence, drawing many parallels to what is also argued to be the case in Sardinia to the south, and obviously to Sicily as well. Irreconcilable feuds between families dating back to the middle ages, that have resulted in a long history of blood, frequently having started by incidents that by todays standards would have been disregarded as trivia.

But, for me, the real joy of this book came from recognizing so many of the places named in it, thus being able to recall their familiar landscapes, and not having to rely on their descriptions in the text to build up a mental image of them, but rather to have their memory rekindled by the reading of the text. Corsica is like a small continent packed in the space of an island, with alpine mountains at its centre, impressive rough coastline with rocky cliffs and idyllic beaches, and everything in between those extremes. I can very well understand Dorothy Carrington being bewitched by the place, to the point that she gave up her life in England to settle there. I wish I was so brave and adventurous myself!

Beyond the Pale and other stories, by William Trevor

Some years ago I saw a movie directed by Atom Egoyan, “Felicia’s Journey”, it was called. Knowing nothing of the plot, I just went to see it because I had greatly enjoyed Egoyan’s earlier film, “The Sweet Hereafter”. Had I read the synopsis, I probably would have given it a miss, because I am not into movies about serial killers that have you jumping in your seat. Luckily the movie was not like that at all; yes, there is a murderer of young damsels in distress, and naturally the Felicia in the title is one of his potential victims, but there any resemblance with American Psycho or other similar silver screen serial killer ends. The story was, somehow, very humane, and you almost end up feeling a certain sympathy for the murderer. I later learned that the plot was adapted from a book bearing the same title, and I thought that it must be a good one to read, if the film was anything to go by.

This, however, is not a blog about movies, it’s a blog about books, so what am I doing here writing about a film? Well, it turns out that my book today is a collection of short stories by William Trevor, who also happens to be the author of “Felicia’s Journey” (the book). That’s the connection. I only discovered this once I was nearing the last few stories in the book, and it felt so fitting; the stories in “Beyond the Pale and other stories” and the novel “Felicia’s Journey” could only have been written by one and the same person, and if you have read these books, or any other by William Trevor, you probably know what I mean. He has such a sensitivity for the weaknesses in his characters, and at the same time such an understanding for each of them, it is as if he personally inhabits their psyche.

You might have guessed by now, if you have read my earlier posts in this blog, that not only am I a reader, I am also a bit of a bibliophile, and I read this book in a beautiful edition by Folio, with illustrations by Lyndon Hayes, whose paintings go so well with the mood of the stories. You can see some of his illustrations for this book here:
http://www.foliosociety.com/book/BYP/beyond-the-pale-and-other-stories

Yes, it is the mood of these stories that makes this book a memorable read; nothing much happens in most of them, but the atmosphere is so eery and charged that as you read you know that the lives of their protagonists will be irreparably changed, or else have been changed in some indefinite past that sets the context to the plot. The common theme of all these stories is human relationships; how the lives of their characters are affected by their interaction with others around them, sometimes close friends or family, sometimes passing strangers. Almost invariably, the view presented is a pessimistic one. And it is not, one feels, that the author negates the possibility of things going well in our interactions with others around us; it is rather that he is more interested in the myriad ways in which things can go wrong.

Well, this all sounds rather depressing; it is certainly not cheerful stuff, but I would not say “depressing”. The stories are crafted with sensitivity and great skill, and they are a joy to read.