The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

We seek him here, we seek him there, 

Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. 

Is he in heaven?— Is he in hell? 

That demmed, elusive Pimpernel.

La! Odd's fish! Begad, and strike me for a lupin! but  I've been meaning to read this book for the longest time. It's just one of those things - apart from hearing a few cultural references and mistakenly reading one of the sequels, I've somehow managed to avoid The Scarlet Pimpernel in all its manifestations.

This is the book that sets the scene for the series.  Paris 1792.  The Reign of Terror is in full swing.  The tumbrel business has never been so good as a seemingly endless supply of French aristocrats and their families meet their appointment with Madame la Guillotine.  Well, except those who are rescued in spectacularly inventive ways and whisked away to safe haven in London by an anonymous mastermind and master of disguise known as the Scarlet Pimpernel.  So successful is the Pimpernel, the French authorities send their agent Chauvelin to England to unmask and neutralise him or her.

The Scarlet Pimpernel is a far better book than its third sequel, Eldorado.  While it suffers from the same defects as the sequel - mildly purple prose, slow action by modern standards, and the narrator telling rather than showing us the action/characters' internal state - it is inventive and charming in its own way.  There is much interest in seeing how the main characters get themselves out of the trouble that is either devised for them or is of their own making.

Not the greatest book in the world, but it is certainly one that helps while away a wet weekend enjoyably.

The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs

In these days of spy satellites and global positioning systems, it is very difficult to believe there may be an undiscovered continent lurking somewhere in the South Pacific Ocean; yet that is what Edgar Rice Burroughs, writing in 1918, asks his readers accept as a possibility.  What would Hollywood have done without the possibility of a Kong Island in South East Asia or a Shangri-La in the Himalayas?  It is sad that our technologies have now rendered the whisper of such a 'what if ' absolutely mute.  Still, we must play the game and suspend our disbelief, if only for a short time.

In 1916, an unnamed traveller to Greenland happens upon a thermos flask bobbing in the surf off Cape Farewell.  In it he finds a manuscript recounting the incredible adventure of one Bowen Tyler.  In the early days of the First World War, Tyler has two unfortunate encounters with a German U-boat.  One thing leads to another, and Tyler and his colleagues are transported to the South Pacific where they find the large, uncharted island of Caprona.  It is after making landfall that Tyler's problems really begin.  Can he save himself and the woman he has come to love?

There is no disguising it, The Land That Time Forgot is unashamedly an adventure story which

trades in scientific fantasy.  There is primordial nastiness, hungry and vicious, on Caprona Island, and the hero is pitched from one dire predicament to another and must call on all his resources in order to survive.  Yes, there is not much chance of literature here, but Burroughs is capable of turning a memorable phrase:

I clung to life because some ancient, reptilian forbear had clung to life and transmitted to me through the ages the most powerful motive that guided his minute brain - the motive of self-preservation.

 And:

... the same deathless passion that has come down unchanged through all the epochs, periods and eras of time from the beginning, and which shall continue to the incalculable end - woman, the imperishable Alpha and Omega of life.

On the other hand, Burroughs was a prisoner of his time, like the rest of us: there are a few racist and sexist howlers in the text that are not easy to overlook and offend modern sensibilities.  Those are the lumps.

I enjoyed The Land That Time Forgot.  Despite its shortcomings, it is a well-written and entertaining tale that certainly kept me turning the pages.

Dune by Frank Herbert

Dune - Science Fiction Classic - A Must Read.

Ah-h-h-h, how easy it is to parody Frank Herbert's writing style; but few have ever matched his imaginative scope, at least not in the case of Dune.  This is the biggie of Science Fiction: big in its inventiveness, big in the sweep of its action, big in the scale of its ambition.

'A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.'

Where to begin?  This book is about so many things on so many levels.  It can be seen as a tale about monopolies in a far-flung future where humans have colonised the stars - monopolies of military strength, transportation, pharmaceuticals, technology, genetic manipulation and mental training.  They collide in a war centred on the planet Arrakis, also known as Dune; and by the end of the story one of these monopolies is broken and another rendered pointless, changing forever the power structure of the galactic empire. 

Frank Herbert presents the reader with a political situation mired in byzantine court intrigues and centuries-old vendettas.  The parties ranged against one another seek to exploit their enemies' weaknesses and their own strengths.  Their calculations are wide-ranging and made down to the minutest level, and for many of the players their grand strategies are undone in the most unexpected ways by the numerous wild cards that come into play as the action progresses.

Herbert tells his tale in a very idiosyncratic style.  Chapters are preceded by gnomic quotations, there is a lot of reported internal dialogue, the characters say 'Ah-h-h-h' a lot, and it is fun to count the number of times any one of them 'swallows in a dry throat', or that the word 'mouth' is used.  

Even so, Herbert steadily and surely paints a vivid and believable picture of a world utterly unlike our own.  You can never visit it, but you will want to.

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

A haunted castle, secret passages, a villain, a damsel in distress, an unwanted wife and a hero with a shrouded past: all the vital ingredients for a gothic novel - in the case of The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first gothic novel.

Conrad is heir to the lands of Otranto; unfortunately, he dies under very odd and inexplicable circumstances on his wedding day.  Isabella, his betrothed, has been spared marriage to a sickly young man.  Lord Manfred, Conrad's father, desperate for an heir, hatches a monstrous plot to marry Isabella himself.  What follows is a desperate game of hide and seek.  Can anyone save Isabella from Manfred's clutches?

The basic conceit of this novel is contained in the preface to the first edition.  Supposedly, the book is a translation  of an Italian manuscript dated 1529 that was found in a private library somewhere in the north of England.  

The first edition was well received by the public.  Walpole caused a bit of an uproar by revealing in the preface to the second edition there had been no manuscript and that the work was entirely from his own imagination.  In this preface he makes clear his artistic intentions:

It was an attempt to blend ... two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success.

In other words, Walpole was trying to tell a tale of the supernatural using a realistic narrative style.  He succeeded.  

One can understand the popularity of the novel amongst its contemporary readers and those in the following generations.  Indeed, it spawned its own genre - the gothic novel - and there have been many imitators and innovators.  We are still telling gothic tales in modern times: The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco's popular novel of the 1980's, adopts Walpole's premise of a mediaeval Italian manuscript coming to light and being translated; Ridley Scott's Alien is a gothic tale set in outer space.

It has been 250 years since The Castle of Otranto was first published.  This presents a problem for the modern reader: we know these gothic tropes so well it is hard for the work to seem fresh and new.  From our perspective it is, perhaps, the unravelling of the supernatural mystery at the heart of the tale that presents the greatest interest.

World War Z by Max Brooks

It has been a long time since I devoured a book, but that is what I did with World War Z over the course of a very enjoyable day.  And when it comes to a book about zombies, devour is a very apt word.

Zombies?  Really?  The book is subtitled An Oral History of the Zombie War, but don't be fooled by the name.  This is a story about what people do when they are confronted with an unrelenting enemy; the zombies are just a satirical device.  

It is not a coincidence that Brooks sets some of the action in countries like Israel, South Africa, North Korea, Cuba and the United States: all these are countries where the resident population (or at least parts of the population) have perceived themselves to be under siege from larger, hostile forces.  Let us not forget that in the real-world cases of Israel and the United States, both countries are building physical walls of separation from their neighbours.

The book is set out in the form of first-hand accounts from survivors of the war, starting from the outbreak of a zombie plague and going through the various phases of the war between the zombies and the rapidly dwindling human population until the war's conclusion.

Brooks has done a marvellous job of giving authentic voices to the several dozen respondents who were interviewed for the history.  We get insights into their psychology as they recount their stories and the actions of those around them, as well as finding out how war on a vast scale impacts the lives of individuals and communities.  The respondents come from a wide variety of nationalities and backgrounds: doctors, soldiers, social engineers, politicians, and ordinary, everyday civilians; Chinese, Japanese, Arabs, Iranians, Russians, Latin Americans, Canadians and Yankees.

All of the respondents are eloquent storytellers, and there are some memorable quotes in the book:

Lies are neither bad nor good.  Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they're used.

I must admit, I allowed my emotions to rule my hand. I was the typhoon, not the lightening bolt.

The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts. 

All up, World War Z is an entertaining, well-written and thought-provoking book that asks us what it means to be human.

Greenmantle by John Buchan

It has been a hundred years since First World War began.  How the world has changed in that time, and yet people are still fighting wars.  They are also still reading books.  John Buchan wrote several books during the war.  The most famous is The Thirty-nine Steps (1915) which is set just before war broke out.  Greenmantle (1916) is the sequel, and is set in the months leading up to January 1916.

Richard Hannay, now a major in the British Army, is recovering from wounds received in the Battle of Loos.  Sir Walter Bullivant of the Foreign Office offers Hannay a secret mission.  Something is brewing in Europe that threatens to set the Islamic world on fire.  What that something is Bullivant is not sure, but he tells Hannay:

The East is waiting for a revelation. It has been promised one. Some star – man, prophecy, or trinket – is coming out of the West. The Germans know, and that is the card with which they are going to astonish the world.

The Germans know; the British only have a cryptic three-word clue from a now-deceased intelligence agent: "Kasredin, cancer, v.I."  It is up to Hannay to scour Europe to find out who or what the threat is, and to end it, if possible.  And so the adventure starts.

Buchan has expanded Hannay's stage.  Whereas in the first Hannay novel the action took place in Scotland and London, our hero now travels to Berlin via Lisbon and strikes out from there for Constantinople and beyond.  Hannay is pursued on land and on water, by boat, car and on horseback.  As always, Buchan provides terse but highly evocative descriptions of the natural world - one of his great strength as a writer; and, as usual, once the action gets going it keeps going, only punctuated with brief respites to let everyone to catch their breaths before starting up again.

If you can suspend your disbelief long enough to get past improbable coincidences (and there are quite a few in this book), then Greenmantle is a first-rate adventure story.  And it is interesting to see what people were reading and enjoying during the First World War.