Criticism

Review: Origins

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This book, by Lewis Dartnell and subtitled ‘How the Earth Shaped Human History’ caught my attention because it deals with the intersection of science, history and human evolution.

Lewis Dartnell is professor of science communication at the University of Westminster. He has won several awards for his science writing and contributes to the Guardian, The Times and New Scientist. He has also written for television and appeared on the BBC’s Horizon, Sky News, Wonders of the Universe, Stargazing Live and The Sky at Night.

Lewis Dartnell

This book is rich in its recounting of the history of humanity from its evolution in Africa to its spread across the land masses of the world. It then covers the development of the flora and fauna put to different uses by peoples in various parts of the world. This was our early agrarian existence. What we build with, from mud to marble is accounted for in a chapter which describes how these substances originated. Man entered the Iron Age with the smelting of iron ore, but there was also tin, copper, gold and more modern metals. We learn how these metals were formed, where they are found and why. Depending on the places where they settled, people became migrant herdsmen, settled farmers, or traders. The earth is a great ‘wind machine’ whose dependable winds are capable of carrying sailors to particular destinations of interest around the world. This led to exploration and the establishment of global trade. Finally, the discovery of coal and oil led to the industrial revolution, and we learn how these fuels were formed millions of years ago. Along this journey covering millions of years we discover why particular current facts were pre-ordained million of years ago. For example, one can trace the pockets of historic Democratic voting in regions of the American South, to the prevalence of large slave populations to cotton plantations, to particular soil which was left by an ancient receding sea. It is this kind of linkage of human culture and behaviour to geography which provides fascinating insights. Throughout the book there are references to the drifting and collisions of land masses, the resulting mountains and volcanoes, earth’s temperature changes, and the resulting lakes, seas and ice caps.

The book is well worth reading, even if one feels that one has a good sense of the geographic history of the world. It is the relating of the outcomes of that ancient history to specific present-day economic, political and cultural situations, with names, dates and places, which makes it so memorable and interesting.

Review: LUKA

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This novel was recommended to me by a friend, and as it is about civil conflict situations, I bought a copy.

The author, Ian Bancroft, is a writer and former diplomat based in the former Yugoslavia for over fifteen years. He has written travel articles for various publications, and he has produced foreign policy analysis for The Guardian, Radio Free Europe, UN Global Experts and others. Ian’s first book, ‘Dragon’s teeth – tales from north Kosovo’, was published in 2020.

There are four main characters in LUKA. ‘A’ is a beautiful girl who grew up in Old Town; she has lived through a prior war. She is single and now twenty-seven. ‘L’ is a talented young painter who also lives in Old Town. ‘U’ is a long-serving police officer who never questioned the wisdom of his superiors. ‘K’ is the mother of ‘A’, and an assembly-line worker in a munitions factors. She vigorously defends her father known by the nom de guerre ‘Jinn’, as in ‘djinn’, owing to his almost mystical ability to conjure things into existence. Her father is rumoured to profit from illegal arms sales. ‘A’s great grandfather – unnamed- also appears in the context of previous wars. Most of the book deals with the historic and current conflicts of Old Town, New Town, Upper Town and Lower Town. These are not straight forward military conflicts, but anti-civilian conflicts, involving snipers, rape, torture, imprisonment, and other crimes against humanity. ‘L’ is imprisoned in Luka, an assortment of warehouses in a port. His left hand, which he uses to paint, is crushed by an invisible woman using a hammer. The woman smells of vanilla. At the conclusion of the conflict, ‘A’ and ‘L’ plan to marry. ‘L’ visits ‘A’ at ‘K’s house, where he suddenly recognises ‘K’ as the woman who smells of vanilla. ‘K’ runs out of the house, pursued by ‘A’ and into a nearby forest which is mined. There is an explosion which ends the novel.

LUKA is almost a catalogue of crimes against humanity, presented factually, but there is relatively little explanation of the motivations, the reasons, impulses, etc. which generate these crimes. The characters are realistic, but the use of generic letters to identify them deprives them of flesh and blood. Similarly, the use of generic place names takes away their authenticity. The time line of the book is sometimes difficult to follow. The actual narrative covers about twenty years, but the historic references cover nearly a century. A more conventional structure, cause and effect, and real world identification would have been far more satisfying.

More Controversy at Royal Society

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Following up on last week’s post, there is an article in The Standard written by Merlanie McDonagh, an Evening Standard columnist on Salman Rushdie’s views on the dispute.

Sir Salman Rushdie

“Sir Salman Rushdie has intervened in the kerfuffle about the Royal Society of Literature under the presidency of Bernardine Evaresito, author of Girl, Woman, Other. Irked by questions from some members about whether the organisation is doing its job, especially protecting the interests of writers, she declared in the Guardian that this “historic institution” is doing just fine. But it had to be “impartial” about issues as in, though she didn’t mention it, the attack on Sir Salman at a literary festival.

The great man has responded on X: “Just wondering if the Royal Society of Literature is ‘impartial’ about attempted murder, @BernardineEvari? (Asking for a friend.)” Dame Marina Warner, a past president, had complained that the RSL hadn’t supported him.

Quite so, Sir Salman. If the RSL cannot bring itself to clamber onto its high horse about a homicidal attack on a writer because the attacker did not like Sir Salman’s views on Islam, it may as well shut down those agreeable premises in Somerset House and go home.

But the discontent about the society goes beyond this rather low bar. It’s a rarefied version of the problems that attend any institution that goes in for diversity and inclusion. It would be invidious to say that the appointment of Evaristo, a Booker prize-winner, is part of this, though she kind of invites the thought by saying that her presidency shows how the institution is modernising.

A more obvious example is the extension of fellowships to 40 under-40s. It took the waspish Philip Hensher to observe: “Some of the writers who have benefited from this widening are i) expensively educated and privileged ii) not very good.” Oof.

Most of us who keep authors afloat by buying books aren’t bothered about the RSL. But there’s a small stratum of writers for whom it matters desperately, whose status is bolstered by being a fellow. And it does do good work, for instance in getting books into prisons.

The row demonstrates the elephant traps that await organisations that try to modernise without taking on board what that entails. And Evaristo, though a feisty promoter of the RSL, is more activist than figurehead. Good for her, less good for the RSL.”

I agree completely with Sir Salman and Dame Marina!

Review: Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire

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I ordered this book when it received some publicity in my alumni newsletter. I knew nothing about Assyria. My ancient history studies were confined to Greece, Rome and a bit about Egypt. it is written by Eckhart Frahm, who is professor of Assyriology in the Department of Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale. One of the world’s foremost experts on the Assyrian Empire, he is the author or coauthor of six books on Mesopotamian history and culture. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Professor Eckhart Frahm

When this book arrived, I found that it was 420 pages long with 8 pages of colour photographs and 5 pages of maps. In addition, there are 55 pages of footnotes and a 20 page index. I thought, how am I going to get through this. I haven’t read a history book in about 70 years. But I soon found that Professor Frahm’s enthusiasm for his subject is quite infections. The book is written in the tone of a mystery which has been solved.

Professor Frahm divides the history of Assyria into three periods. The Old Assyrian period beginning is about 2000 BCE after the town of Ashur (in what is now Iraq) and its god of the same name became politically independent. At that time it was ruled by a popular assembly and a dynasty of hereditary leaders. In about 1700 BCE, Ashur went into a period of decline which lasted until the 14th century when Ashur got back on its feet and became a territorial state eager to expand by military means. This marked the beginning of the Middle Assyrian period. Assyria was now a full-fledged monarchy and began to see itself as equal to Babylonia and Egypt. In about 1100 BCE, Assyria suffered a number of set-backs including climate change, migration and internal tensions. The Neo-Assyrian period began in 934 BCE when a series of ruthless and competent kings took over the Assyrian throne. In 671 BCE, King Esarhaddon and his army conquered Egypt. This made Assyria a fully fledged empire including northeast Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, stretching east into western Iran, north to Anatolia and south to the Persian Gulf. But only half a century after Esarhaddon’s rule, Assyria collapsed and Ninevah, its capital, was destroyed by Babylonia.

This story is, of course, very much dependent on archaeological finds, and in particular, on thousands of clay cuneiform tablets which tell the details of what took place. These can be compared to what is contained in the Hebrew Bible. The cuneiform tablets deal with everything from the economic details to who was appointed the king’s cup bearer. There are records of nearly every Assyrian king over a period of nearly two thousand years. The culture, politics, economics and trade, agriculture, the military capabilities, the vassal states, the languages, literature and arts, as well as the daily life of ordinary people are covered. The Assyrian political model became a guide for the Babylonian and Persian Empires which followed. There is also a discussion about the damage done to monuments and artifacts by ISIS.

For me, the only short coming about the book is the maps, which do not relate the ancient cities to modern geography.

Assyria is a fascinating and enlightening read.

Review: How to Slay a Dragon

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I saw some publicity about this book before it was published, and I ordered it. The dragon in the title refers to Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, generally, and the author is Mikhail Khordorkovsky, who is a Russian oligarch who spent ten years in prison for criticising Putin. I decided it had to be a good read.

Mikhail Khordorkovsky

Khordorkovsky was born in Moscow in 1963 to a Jewish father and an Orthodox Christian mother, both his parents were engineers. He graduated with a degree in chemical engineering in 1986. As a young man, he was a fervent patriot, a committed communist and well introduced in the Soviet apparatus. In 1988 he founded a private bank and was a financial advisor to Boris Yeltsin. In the early 1990’s, he took advantage of runaway inflation to make a fortune in currency trading. In the mid 1990’s he bought 78% of the shares of Yukos, an oil conglomerate for 318 million dollars. (The shares were worth 5 billion dollars.) By 2003, the shares were worth $16 billion, and Khordorkovsky was the richest man in Russia. That same year, during a television appearance with Putin, he criticised the endemic corruption in Russia. He was then arrested for tax fraud and in 2005 he was sentenced to nine years in prison. Meanwhile, Yukos lost most of its value and was acquired by Rosneft, a state-owned company. In 2010, he was convicted of embezzlement and money laundering and his sentence was extended to 2017. Most independent observers, including Amnesty International, consider Khordorkovsky to be a prisoner of conscience.In prison he wrote of the need to “turn left” and adopt more liberal views in Russian governance, and he engaged in several hunger strikes for the benefit of fellow celebrity prisoners. In July 2014, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that the Russian government deliberately bankrupted Yukos to seize its assets and ordered it to reimburse Yukos shareholders a sum of approximately $50 billion. No such payments have been made. On 20 September 2014, Khodorkovsky officially relaunched the Open Russia movement , with a live teleconference broadcast with pro-democracy opposition and civil society activist groups in several Russian cities.  According to media reports around the time of the launch, Open Russia was intended to unite pro-European Russians in an attempt to challenge Putin’s grip on power. Khodorkovsky said the organization would promote independent media, political education, the rule of law, support for activists and journalists, free and fair elections and a program to reform Russia’s law enforcement and justice system. He has also said that the power should be shifted from Putin to parliament and the judiciary. He lives in London.

In How to Slay a Dragon, Khodorkovsky does not really address his ‘How to’ question except to suggest that it may happen from peaceful protest or uprising, what he calls a ‘revolution’. He is also vague about any role he might have in a future Russian government; he insists that he just wants to argue the case for a European style government in Russia. Nonetheless, it is clear that one doesn’t write a book as clear, comprehensive and as well argued at this one without having political ambitions. If it were up to me, I would put him in a high office. The strength of this book lies in the thoroughness of its coverage of the possibilities of government: empire vs nation state; superpower vs national interest; democracy vs autocracy; monopoly vs competition; how much freedom of speech; left or right inclination; justice vs mercy; parliamentary vs presidential republic. Khodorkovsky comes down on the liberal side of the available choices, and he is clear that Putin must go, Russia must change and victory should belong to Ukraine. The author makes these choices based on what is best for Russia, and he argues each case from the perspective of how the Russian culture is now, how it was historically, and how it should be for Russia’s and the world’s benefit. His knowledge of the details of Russian history is impressive. A very good read.

Review: Truth to Power: My Three Years Inside Eskom

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Eskom used to be a customer of mine when I worked for Westinghouse in the 1970’s. I took several trips to South Africa, but never got any business. Retrospectively, possibly because Westinghouse didn’t pay bribes. Eskom’s current severe load shedding attracted me to this book by André de Ruyter, the CEO of Eskom during the three year period 2020 -2022.

André de Ruyter must have written this book in a hurry. He resigned as CEO of Eskom in late February this year, and the book was distributed in late August. That’s six months to strike a deal with the publisher, Penguin, write the book, have it edited, publicised and published. At just over 300 pages it is filled with facts that he would have had to look up. As most novels have a ‘gestation time’ of at least a year, it is a remarkable feat to publish this book in six months.

de Ruyter got the top job at Eskom in January 2020. He says that 28 presumably qualified black candidates turned down the job. This gives an indication of how tough the job was. Eskom was shedding load regularly, deeply in debt, owned by the South African state, subject to political manipulations, and racked by corruption. de Ruyter says he took the job because it represented a challenge, and out of patriotism to South Africa and not for the low compensation.

In the book, de Ruyter describes the difficulties he faced as CEO:

  • Eskom had no reserve generating capacity, owing to years of indecision by the government. Government regulation made it impossible for privately owned generation to enter the market. The government wanted 100% control of the electric power market.
  • Eskom’s tariffs were below cost, and the government resisted efforts to raise tariffs, on the basis that cheap energy was desirable, but this only led to a huge debt mountain.
  • Municipalities did not pay the bills for power delivered to them. They had to be taken to court.
  • The government was biased in favor of coal fuel. This made it difficult to plan for renewables for power generation. Moreover, the quality of available coal was deteriorating, contributing to maintenance and output problems.
  • Corruption was rife in the purchasing of coal fuel oil and goods. A major, privately funded investigation found that senior ANC members were involved in corruption.
  • Local police did not co-operate in the prosecution of criminal employees
  • Violent threats were made against whistle blowers, including the CEO who had to have body guards.
  • The CEO was served a cup of coffee that had been laced with cyanide
  • The skills base was badly eroded. Regulations made it difficult to re-hire skilled white workers and difficult also to dismiss under performing black workers.
  • The average age of the power stations was more than forty years, and they had not been subject to routine maintenance
  • Regulations made it difficult to obtain OEM spare parts directly. This opened the possibilities of corruption
  • Sabotage of operating plant for political ends was not uncommon.

In spite of these challenges, de Ruyter did accomplish quite a lot:

  • a plan to transition to a low carbon future with privately- and Eskom-owned renewable generation
  • a culture change in Eskom: loyalty, accountability, and values based
  • the division of Eskom into three entities: generation, transmission and distribution

de Ruyter resigned when a new chairman was appointed with a brief to run a ‘hands on’ board. This led to management being undermined and second-guessed by amateurs at every turn. Unfortunately, that chairman is still in place.

This book will have caused consternation within the ANC. There are many specific accounts of named government leaders taking decisions and actions which are contrary to the interests of the country.

I have two criticisms of this book. First, it is not well organised. Topics and the timeline are frequently switched around. The whole story still gets told, but in a somewhat disjointed way. Second, de Ruyter lectures the reader frequently about why his management style and techniques are right. They are right, but the average reader will not need the lecture.

This book is a very valuable piece of work. It exposes the inherent weaknesses of a naive, Marxist-oriented government, shows the risks in government ownership of business, and makes the undoubtable case for competent, modern management.

Review: The Marriage Portrait

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I recently bought a copy of The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell, having been attracted by the brief description of a historical novel involving a marriage in XVI century Italy, and by the author’s biography.

Maggie O’Farrell is the author of Hamnet, winner the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I am, I am, I am, both Sunday Times  no. 1 bestsellers. She was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and raised in Wales and Scotland. Her novel The Hand that First Held Mine won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, and The Distance between Us won a Somerset Maugham Award. She currently lives in Edinburgh.

Maggie O’Farrell

The Marriage Portrait is set in XVI century Florence and Ferrara, Italy. The protagonist is Lucrezia, the fifth child of the Duke of Tuscany, a somewhat rebellious child, who stroked a captured tiger in the basement of her father’s castle and was thought to have charmed the beast. At the age of thirteen she was betrothed to Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara who was more than ten years her senior. He had previously been betrothed to an older sister who died. Her marriage took place when she was sixteen in Florence and she moved to Ferrara as a young duchess with a maid, Emilia, who is two years older and the daughter of her childhood nanny. There is political intrigue in Ferrara, where Alfonso’s mother has taken up a hostile alliance. One of Alfonso’s two sisters, Elizabetta, is having an affair with the captain of the palace guards, Ercole Contrari, and the other sister, Nunciata, seems hostile to Lucrezia. When Alfonso discovers the love affair between Elizabetta and Ercole, he orders that Ercole be strangled by the brutal Baldassare, the dukes cousin, while Elizabetta is required to watch. It becomes clear to Lucrezia that she is required to produce a male heir for Alfonso. She must perform her marital duty frequently. Her husband sometimes strikes her as cruel and distant and warm and loving at other times. When the couple move to a remote hunting lodge, Lucrezia is convinced that her husband intends to murder her. He refers to a marriage portrait of Lucrezia as “my first duchess”. I won’t give away the ending which is quite satisfactory, but I will say that the real first duchess, on whom Lucrezia is based, was reported to have died of a “putrid fever”, but there were rumors that she was murdered by her husband. The real Alfonso II married twice more; neither duchess produced an heir.

I have only one major criticism of this novel, and that is that it is too long. It is 432 pages long, but it could be trimmed without any significant loss and it would gain urgency. Ms O’Farrell likes to describe her settings in poetic detail which makes them beautifully clear but a bit laborious. The plot of the novel is excellent. One is convinced of being immersed in XVI century Italy with characters who are living like royalty and servants can at best survive. The values and traditions of the times are captured as well. There is a frequent transition between a short chapter which is set in the final hunting lodge and an earlier, longer chapter containing events leading up to the end. This sequencing can be confusing, and I’m not convinced it is necessary to maintain the ‘is he really going to kill me?’ tension.

Review: Tropic of Cancer

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As you may know, this novel by Henry Miller was banned in the US as obscene for twenty-seven years after it was first published in Paris in 1934. Having never read any of Henry Miller’s work, I decided to start with this one. Now, having read it, I would say that it is not obscene (although it is occasionally explicit and does not shy away from bad language), it is, in my opinion, misogynistic. Henry Miller has little respect for women as equals.

Henry Miller was born in New York in 1891. Surprisingly, he attended City University for only one semester. (He writes with considerable skill and with an astonishing vocabulary.) He worked in personnel at Western Union for ten years before devoting himself entirely to writing. He developed a semi-autobiographical, stream of consciousness style. He lived in Paris during the 1930’s, in Greece briefly and in California until his death in 1980. He was married five times. His major works, aside from Tropic of Cancer, include The Rosy Crucifixion, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn and The Colossus of Maroussi.

Henry Miller

Tropic of Cancer is set in Bohemian Paris during the 1930’s when Miller was a destitute, struggling writer there, having separated from his second wife, whom he recollects warmly. The book is written in the first person, as Henry Miller, and is a commentary on the human condition from a low-down, devil-may-care perspective. Many of the characters are thinly disguised friends and associates of Miller’s. The narrative is disorderly, sometimes in the present and sometimes a recollection of past events. The subjects are the peculiarities of the characters, their influences on one another, the scarcity of money, various venues and scenes in the city, sexual encounters, writing, philosophy, and employment, all revealed unvarnished and with clarity. Millers’s writing is characterised by an eagerness to reveal all, and he views his desperate financial circumstances and challenging relationships with startling optimism.

Tropic of Cancer is clearly a literary milestone in its construction, style, subject and narrative. Strangely, perhaps, it makes an engaging read. One wants to discover what Henry will discover next. For me, there is no overarching theme or message, and if one tried to construct a philosophy from the events, it would probably be self defeating. For example, Miller seems to view the church disdainfully, but his observations are congruent with Christian theology. The writing is extraordinary its clarity and erudition. While I take strong exception to Miller’s view of the role of women, I have to admire the way he has described his experiences in Bohemian Paris in the 30’s. Is it a great literary treasure? I think not. Is it a book one should read. Yes!

Review: The Maid

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The second novel – a crime novel – that my wife and I listed to during the drive down to Sicily was The Maid by Nita Prose and narrated by Lauren Ambrose. It is certainly an entertaining book, though when we started to listen I wasn’t expecting a crime novel; I was expecting a romance or an adventure. It has sold over a million copies and won a couple of awards.

Ms Prose says, “As for my professional life, I work in the publishing industry. I began years ago as an intern, photocopying edited manuscripts and secretly snooping the fascinating margin conversations between editors and writers. Currently, I’m vice president and editorial director at Simon & Schuster in Toronto, Canada, where I have the privilege of working with an incredible array of authors and publishing colleagues whom I credit with teaching me, manuscript by manuscript, book by book, the wondrous craft of writing.”

Nita Prose

The central character is Molly, who is a maid in the Regency Grand Hotel, a job to which she feels she was born and is obsessively dedicated. She likes nothing more than restoring a filthy, messy room to perfection. She has such an orderly, Polly-Anna-ish mind that I thought she has learning disabilities until I learned that she had completed some university level courses. Molly lived alone with her grandmother, who has a similar character, is full of simple-minded advice, and who dies halfway through the book. The other characters are a supervising maid, who is lazy and apt to purloin tips that have been left for Molly. There was a boyfriend who stole a large nest egg which Molly’s grandma had been saving for them. Molly’s current crush is the hotel bartender, who has suspicious friends and treats her with indifference. The hotel manager is a harried soul who treats Molly with respect, and there is the hotel dishwasher, a conscientious Mexican worker whose immigration papers are not in order. Mr Black, an older, very rich, disagreeable man in doubtful businesses, and his younger, trophy wife are frequent guests at the hotel. Molly strikes up a friendship with the wife, and Molly finds Mr Black dead in his room. It was murder and Molly is the prime suspect according to a zealous police detective. Fortunately, the doorman has a daughter who is a very clever criminal lawyer and who devises a scheme to prove Molly not guilty and to reveal the actual perpetrator. A drugs operation involving the bartender, Mr Black and assorted outside thugs is discovered. Molly knows who actually killed Mr Black, but for personal, sympathetic reasons, she does not reveal the person at the trial.

Certainly it is a clever device to create a character who goes against our reflex notions of a hotel maid: invisible, unmotivated and slap-dash. This strange character wins our sympathy, though perhaps a little reluctantly in my case. For me, Molly is a little too dedicated to her simple-minded perfectionism to be fully credible. Perhaps if Molly had some learning disabilities she would have worked better for me. The writing is lively, though not of literary quality, nor should it be. The scenes and characters are clear. The plot is well conceived, and tension is maintained throughout. For me, Molly’s motivation not to reveal the true killer was not strong enough, and in the real world the killer would have been identified.

Review: The Ghost

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I listened to this novel by Robert Harris on our drive down to Sicily from London.

Harris is a British novelist and journalist born in 1957. He was educate at Cambridge, and began his career at the BBC where he worked in news and current affairs programs. He became the political editor of The Observer at the age of 30. From 1982 to 1990 he wrote five non-fiction books. His first novel, a commercial success, was Fatherland, based on the Nazis having won the Second World War and published in 1992. He has written fourteen further novels. The Ghost was published in 2007 and was made into a film starring Pierce Brosnan.

Robert Harris

The Ghost is told in the first person by an unnamed professional ghostwriter, who is hired by a prominent publisher to complete the memoirs of Adam Lang, an ex-prime minister of the UK, thinly based on Tony Blair. Lang’s original ghostwriter, Mike McAra, a former aid to Lang, had died in strange circumstances, having fallen overboard from the Woods Hole Ferry. Most of the action takes place on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, where the publisher owns a lavish summer home. Lang’s wife is depicted as a scheming manipulator, while Lang is having an affair with his attractive female assistant. Frustrated with having an opaque picture of the real Adam Lang, the ghostwriter gets into McAra’s rented car an allows it to follow a previously set destination. This takes him to a Professor Paul Emmett, who went to Cambridge with Lang, was an associate of Lang’s wife and was a CIA agent. Lang’s former Foreign Secretary, Richard Rycart, loosely based on Robin Cook, is now working at the UN and has produced documentation that Lang had four terror suspects arrested in Pakistan by the SAS, and turned over to the CIA for interrogation. Potentially, Lang would be charged with was crimes. The ghostwriter finds Rycart’s phone number in McAra’s files, and arranges to meet Rycart in New York, where Rycart confirms that he and McAra had concluded that Emmett had recruited Lang into the CIA. Lang is assassinated by a protester. The ghostwriter finishes the book, but does not reveal Lang’s secret, because he does not confirm it before he is killed.

The book is brilliantly read by Michael Jayston who uses a distinctive voice for each major character. The plot unfolds beautifully and with constant tension until it seems likely that Lang was a CIA agent. This seems far fetched and renders a satisfactory conclusion to the book nearly impossible. The writing is captivating, though it occasionally wanders into unnecessary detail. The characters are well draw and credible. Two events struck me as lacking substantiation: the fling between the ghostwriter and Lang’s wife and the beach scene at night where McAra’s body washed up.

Perhaps Mr Harris permitted his disenchantment with Tony Blair to overrule his literary craft.