Regicides on the run

"I was wondering how a man who wished to do right could act so unjustly and unwisely as Charles the First sometimes did [...] Still, I like Charles – I respect him – I pity him, poor murdered king! Yes, his enemies were the worst: they shed blood they had no right to shed. How dared they kill him!"

Thus Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. When it comes to Charles I of England, I have been raised in the Helen Burns school of thought, and have had little cause to doubt it. It does seem as if poor Charles's main crime was losing the Civil War, which was no reason for the victors to lop his head off. He can't very well be expected to be in favour of deposing himself. 

At the same time, I have sometimes wondered if I'm being a hypocrite. I don't object to the lopping off of a monarch's head in principle, after all, if he is actually guilty of a crime. I have zero problems with the execution of Louis XVI of France approximately 150 years later (because he committed treason – me fancying one of the regicides has nothing to do with it). Which raises the question: could any case be made for Charles I having committed treason? What did treason (in political terms) even mean in the 17th century? When did the meaning shift from "treason against your ruler" to "treason against your country and your people"?

So it was with some interest I learned that Robert Harris's (him again? I'm afraid so) historical novel Act of Oblivion would be dealing with the escape of two of Charles's killers, and the attempts made during the Restoration to track them down and despatch them in their turn. Maybe this was a chance to learn more about the rationale behind the decision to execute the king?

It turns out the book has little to say about this particular question for a good two thirds of its respectable length. It's still a gripping read, though, for the most part anyway. There is built-in tension in a man hunt, and the based-on-fact circumstances of this one are exciting enough. The two regicides in question, both willing signees of Charles I's death warrant, are Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe, aka Ned and Will. They escape all the way to America, and as they start to build a modest life there you'd think they'd be pretty safe. Turns out they're not.

The significance of the North American colonies still being under English rule slowly dawns on the reader. The Governor of Massachusetts may be a Roundhead through and through: in the end, when faced with a direct order from the King, he must obey it or face consequences for the whole colony. And so the fugitives move from one safe-seeming hideout to another, doggedly pursued by Royalists. It's thrilling stuff, as soon as the chase is on, especially if like me you have no idea of how it's going to end.

But there is one slight problem for a Helen Burnsian like myself. It is somehow natural to root for men who are being hunted, and the two regicides are quite likeable, so yes, I was rather hoping they wouldn't get caught. At the same time, they're not a pair of Jean Valjeans. They did kill the king, and though Ned eventually comes to question the decision (I suspect it's Harris who's doing most of the questioning on his behalf; it would surprise me if the real Edward Whalley had many qualms), the doubt is a long time coming. Will never has any doubts at all. So they will just have to face up to the consequences, won't they? They can't be surprised that Charles II isn't prepared to forgive his pa's killers just like that. What did they think would happen?

At  the same time, the fictional leader of the man hunt against them, Richard Nayler, is hard to have much sympathy for. At first I wasn't sure that Nayler being a bit of a pill was intentional. After all, I have found more than one of Harris's heroes to be pills. As the story progresses, though, it becomes pretty clear that Nayler's the bad guy. Harris does give him a strong, albeit contrived, motive for wanting to – well – nail Whalley and Goffe (Cromwell's infamous banning of worship on Christmas Day comes into it), and he's not beyond reason. He's not too thrilled about digging up and executing already dead regicides, for instance (Cromwell and two others). Nevertheless, enough should be enough. I'm not sure the personal motive was such a good idea on Harris's part, either; it would have been more interesting if Nayler had been carried by Royalist convictions alone.

The novel, as one expects from Harris, is well and vividly written, and he writes skilfully about the "down times" in the hunt as well. But the book is a little on the long side for my liking, and some of the hiding-out descriptions could possibly have been cut to tighten it up. I was torn about Whalley writing his memoirs while hiding: it did give me some of the background for the decision to execute Charles I that I was initially looking for, but at the same time it slowed down the narrative. 

Also, while I applaud Harris's attempts to get into the religious mind sets of his protagonists – otherwise, it's a common fault in modern historical novels that the characters lose their faith far too easily, so the author doesn't have to deal with a piety they don't understand – I didn't always find it convincing. Better that, though, than Nayler's increasing atheism, which doesn't make much sense seeing as he is so outraged by the very idea of beheading a King. (Why is that so terrible if the King isn't God's anointed? Nayler doesn't seem to have had any personal relationship to Charles.) All in all, Harris has a better hand with the historical figures than the fictional one, though it's clear he prefers Ned to Will.

This isn't my favourite historical novel by Harris, but it's still good; I've found myself missing the New England atmosphere after having finished the book. It's no mean feat to make me sympathise with two Puritan regicides, while at the same time remaining convinced that I would have hated living in Oliver Cromwell's England.

Harris on the rise of the machines

It's high time for a book-themed post – only, unsurprisingly, it won't be about a Nobel Prize winner. It is safe to say that the Nobel Prize Project is languishing somewhat. I gave up on A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez after only 40 pages (why I lasted the course with Vargas Llosa and not García Márquez I really would not want to speculate). With Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, I'm doing somewhat better – I've made it 150 pages in, and am just interested enough to keep reading. But it's going slowly, and I find myself starting and finishing far lighter fare in parallel to plodding through Zhivago.

One of the books I had no problem finishing while leaving Zhivago aside was The Fear Index by Robert Harris. This was how badly I wanted a gripping read; although I had made up my mind not to try this Harris offering, I ended up reading it anyway, while inwardly steeling myself.  When I saw on the blurb that the main character was a hedge fund manager, Alex Hoffmann, who is suddenly targeted by an unknown enemy set on pushing his fear buttons, I imagined I knew what kind of story I was in for. I thought Alex would be an arrogant city slicker and the main aim of the novel would be to Teach Him A Lesson. 

Luckily, this enjoyable thriller wasn't the cautionary tale for the rich I had feared it would be. True, it is a bit sniffy about wealth-creation, but the main target is not supposedly greedy individuals (as in, more adept at making money than you or me or Harris), but the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. Alex is not some smooth city type, but rather a socially awkward scientist who's perfecting an algorithm designed to make better market choices than any traders of flesh and blood. It's his business partner Hugo's job to do the smooth-talking while Alex can go on working with his algorithm – only, sometimes he has to show himself and make a suitably brainboxy impression. It's on a day like this, when he's set to present a new and improved algorithm to a bunch of hard-nosed clients, that his life starts spiralling out of control.

Now, generally I'm favourably inclined towards technological advances, especially if they make my life more comfortable. But I'm not above indulging in some mild technophobia if need be – it's preferable to wealth-bashing, anyhow. It was a bit alarming, I must confess, to learn that algorithm-based market trading is apparently A Thing. Hugo complains at one point that the fund's office is full not of tough traders with balls of steel, but of nerdy boffins with dandruff in their hair. For my part, I always imagined market traders to be of the steel-balled, human kind. I've been impatient with the lemming-like tendencies of financial markets to drop and keep dropping at the slightest hint of alarm. Why are city boys so jittery, I've asked myself – can't they exercise some restraint and common sense? If a lot of financial decisions are indeed made by computers following a pre-programmed pattern, it would explain a lot; common sense is hard to program.

Having said that, this is not by any means a realistic thriller, nor is it meant to be. It reminded me of Harris's earlier book Archangel in that it starts off from a premise you can get on board with and then takes it to such lengths that you end up shaking your head in disbelief. All the same, the notion that the same kind of AI that comes up with suggestions for further viewing on your streaming service might one day decide on how your savings are invested is chilling enough to build a paranoia-feeding thriller on. In a way, I'm glad it went over the top, because it has the calming effect of reminding you that this is all fiction. Whatever happens financial-algorithm-wise in the real world, it will never turn out like this. Surely?

Who cares about the post-apocalypse? Gimme a love triangle

I very nearly didn't read The Second Sleep by Robert Harris at all. Once I started, I nearly gave up at the 100-page mark, but decided to continue for just a bit longer. And it's a good thing I did, because it's thereabouts this book turns into a really good read with the Harris trademarks of gripping writing and colourful side characters (the hero is seldom the main attraction in Harris books).

Seeing as I've mostly had good experiences with Harris's novels, with the odd exception - I hugely enjoyed the Cicero trilogy Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator, was gripped by An Officer and a Spy and had a good time with The Ghost, Conclave and Archangel, though the latter was pretty silly - one could wonder why I was so reluctant to try The Second Sleep. The answer is mainly its genre, or sub-genre rather: the Post-Apocalyptic Tale. Novels (and films/TV series) of this type usually contain two of my least favourite things in fiction: extreme bleakness and moralising. Readable though Harris is, he hasn't been above lecturing in the past, so I had grave misgivings.

The Post-Apocalyptic Tale usually sets out to do two things: one, to show you how dark the future could be if we're unlucky, and two, to tell you in a cautionary-tale-way how the world could risk ending up in that state. There are PATs that are more interested in how human beings act in times of extreme crisis and how far we are prepared to go for survival, but although that's better than pontificating about how The Evil Of Mankind will lead us to dire straits, it's still not really my kind of thing. As for causes for the catastrophe, it's usually greed, or hubris (i.e. scientists getting carried away), or a combination of both. Mad scientists come up with, say, grade A Artificial Intelligence, unscrupulous (of course) corporations find unethical ways to market it, and wham: it's the rise of the machines. Oh, and sometimes we get an anti-war message worked in somewhere.

The Second Sleep does put a somewhat different spin on the PAT from the start. The beginning of the novel reads as if it's set in the Middle Ages, with maybe a puzzling early-modern touch or two. Christopher Fairfax, the hero, is a cleric sent out to the middle of nowhere by his bishop in order to conduct the funeral service for a reclusive parish priest who has died in what appears to be a tragic accident. At the dead priest's house, Fairfax finds proof of the "heresy" of diving too deep into the past. Father Lacy turns out to have been an "antiquarian". Only, the artefacts he uncovered - including an iPhone - are clearly from our age.

Look, I'm sorry if this is a spoiler, but the revelation takes place on page 29, so it's not that much of a rug pull. Besides, you will probably already have heard (if not, you have now) that the novel isn't an ordinary Medieval Mystery. I didn't find the conceit that fascinating - why would the post-apocalyptic world take on a Medieval pattern when most of the knowledge of the "real" Middle Ages has been lost for centuries? - but it does enable Harris to write an almost-historical novel without having to bother about involuntary anachronisms. Still, the problem remained that I wasn't too fussed about finding out what had happened to our modern world. Props to Harris for not setting the book in a too-bleak future; after a long period of misery, things settled down, and people are poor but they get by. However, the mystery set up - how did we get from iPhones to this? - looked all too much like the excuse for a lecture on our modern ways.

The thing about Harris's novels, though, is that it's seldom the grand solution to a mystery that makes them enjoyable: the end revelations are often something of an anti-climax. It's the hero's journey towards finding answers that is thrilling, especially if he meets interesting characters along the way. In this instance, the Quest for the Truth proves to be a bigger MacGuffin than ever. What makes the plot pick up pace is instead Fairfax getting mixed up with the local gentry - well, sort of. While digging for clues about Father Lacy's death, he becomes friendly with the widowed and attractive Lady Durston who, while appearing very genteel, is actually a woman of modest background who has married into rank and (comparative, but diminishing) wealth. She is now reluctantly contemplating another marriage, to rough self-made man Captain Hancock who is a most insistent suitor. When Fairfax shows up as a third wheel, Hancock is none to pleased. Fairfax, on the other hand, though he's meant to be celibate (he's already had a hard time keeping his distance from the parsonage housekeeper's pretty niece), can't help thinking Hancock a very poor match for Lady Durston.

It's this love triangle that kept me interested, not the speculations about what happened to the "ancients" (us). What's more, when Lady Durston and Fairfax are obliged to confide in Hancock, he becomes a surprising ally, as he's all too eager to find out the secrets of the "ancients" and has zero problem with the "heresy" angle. From this moment on, the novel takes on the Captain's own energy and canters along at a cracking pace.

So though the beginning was slow and the novel felt like it fizzled out at the end, the middle was good enough to make it a pleasant read overall. Post-Apocalyptic Wisdom-wise, though... I don't know. Harris makes some neat points about how much of our modern-day stuff isn't built to last - one reason the Church got such an edge in his post-apocalyptic world was that the stone churches stood firm and became a refuge while modern office towers crumbled. The whole depiction of the Church, however, makes it hard to take Harris's vision of a possible future seriously. Why would it revert to its Medieval form with some early-modern add-ons? Why suddenly strive to be a power factor, and re-impose celibacy on its clergymen? It's not a very likely scenario. There are other movements in our modern-day society that I would have thought would be more obvious candidates to be depicted as enemies of progress and technology. I could easily imagine them being interested in keeping the kind of society Harris describes undeveloped for, as they believe, the greater good of mankind. But I guess wily bishops make more interesting villains.

In vain pursuit of a little light reading

There's no such thing as a foolproof enjoyable read, is there? Not even rereads are quite safe, as there's always the risk that you won't like a novel so much as the previous time/s you read it. My system of "safe bet" authors - if I've enjoyed more than one novel from an author, then I assume I'm going to enjoy all of them - has let me down twice recently, and just as I was going back to work and needed a pick-me-up, too.

True, Dawn French doesn't quite have the official safe-bet status, as I'd only read one of her novels - A Tiny Bit Marvellous - when I started on her latest, According to Yes. But I really liked ATBM, plus I've found much of the French and Saunders material hilarious, so I thought I could reasonably expect great entertainment from According to Yes. And yet the chapters went by without raising so much as a giggle. As I realised, about two thirds through, that the book wasn't going to get any funnier, and as I still hadn't warmed to the heroine Rosie - which it is sort of the point of the story - I gave up on it, after checking that one of the more criticised characters would be all right. He was. They all were. You can't accuse According to Yes for skimping on the feelgood factor, but the feeling good is very much on the heroine's terms. She, a chaotic English nanny, is going to "save" an Upper East Side clan from their humdrum lives and teach them to have fun. Her wit and wisdom are never challenged as one family member after the other are bowled over by her carefree ways. I never thought I could have much in common with an elegant Upper East Side matriarch, but my sympathies were more and more with Glenn, the family's grandmother and the most Rosie-resistent of the characters, especially in passages which were supposedly told from her perspective but which were really criticisms of her (the novel is told in the third person). What do you call those kind of passages - "fake-getting-inside-someone's-head narration"? Does narratology have a good term for it? Anyway, Glenn is going to give in to the reign of Rosie eventually - of course she is - but this isn't my idea of fun.

The second disappointment was Pompeii by Robert Harris. As I've mentioned, I've read quite a lot of Harris's novels by now, and I was a sure as I could be that as long as he kept off the gloomy subject of Nazi crimes against humanity, I would find his writing enjoyable. And then, ancient Rome, which he handled so well in his Cicero books! Alas, Pompeii has so far been quite a different matter from the Cicero trilogy, but then this is an earlier work. For one thing, the author's learning isn't worn so lightly, and the hero is the priggiest I've yet come across in a Harris novel, which is saying something considering he's up against types such as Picquart in An Officer and A Spy and Xavier March (why March? That's not a German name) in Fatherland. What really surprised me, though, was the schematic depiction of the rest of the cast. A dastardly millionaire who feeds one of his slaves to his eels? His fair and innocent daughter? A consistently hostile foreman (the hero is a young engineer struggling with a failing acqueduct)? Really? Honestly, even Harris's Nazis were nuanced compared to this lot.

We even get more examples of "fake-getting-inside-someone's-head-narration" (I really must find a better term), this time with the Bad Millionaire as its subject. I was particularly annoyed about coming across this stereotype yet again (he's an ex-slave too, so not only do we have an illustration of modern society's prejudices but of Ancient Rome's prejudices as well). During my holidays, I twice came across the "let's stick it to the multi-millionaire" plot - and this in chick lit books, which aren't exactly Das Kapital. Is there no escape anywhere from the mindset which makes a virtue of resenting those who are richer than us? I'm seriously considering chucking Pompeii in, too - and I don't think I will be trying Harris's The Fear Index in a hurry.     

Caesar is the man

This may not be the ideal time to express admiration for a politician who puts his career before his country, but it can’t be helped. The third part of Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy, Dictator, confirms what I already suspected in Lustrum: Gaius Julius Caesar is the Roman for a villain-loving girl like me. He’s intelligent, charming, elegant, multi-talented and keen on handing out strategically thought-through pardons (to Romans, that is, not to Gallic tribes: I’m sad to say they’re pretty much history once their paths cross with Caesar’s). Perhaps most importantly of all, he also has a sense of humour. He enjoys Cicero’s jokes, even when they’re at his own expense, and you suspect that this is one reason why he has more patience with Cicero’s political to-ing and fro-ing than one would expect. Sometimes I could not help thinking that Cicero would have done better to stick with Caesar from the beginning, though I can see why some of his actions – like starting a civil war and, once in power, proclaiming himself a god – would be a little hard to swallow.

I re-read Imperium and Lustrum before moving on to Dictator and was reminded of how much I  enjoyed dwelling in the world of Cicero’s Rome, as told by Harris. It’s mostly down to the author’s skill, of course. He’s a dab hand at both gripping prose and strong characterization, and the dialogues are blissfully down-to-earth and not written in the stilted historical fictionese which blights so much of the genre.The political intrigues manage to be both riveting and educational (did you know there were two Brutuses?). Descriptions related to life in Ancient Rome only occur when they’re directly relevant to the story of Cicero and his faithful slave and secretary (and the trilogy’s narrator) Tiro, who is finally granted his freedom in this last novel. But Harris is also helped by the nature of his heroes. Cicero is far from being a saint: sometimes, he even comes across as a bit of a turncoat. Tiro, who existed but whose personality is in all probability imagined by Harris, is a sweet man and perhaps the most humane of the characters – he is the only one in Cicero’s circle who shows any regret for “Caesar the man” when the latter is assassinated – but his loyalty to Cicero keeps him from ever getting on his high horse in moral matters, because then he’d be forced to judge his wily master as well.

In his sympathetic telling of the career of a man who tries to do the decent thing but doesn’t always succeed (I’m talking about Cicero here: Caesar didn’t care a scrap about doing the decent thing), Harris avoids being bogged down with an obvious moral message. I’ve read three other Harris novels apart from the Cicero trilogy: An Officer and A Spy, The Ghost and most recently, for my sins, Fatherland. They are all good, An Officer and A Spy especially: Harris always delivers on the readability front. But though he’s careful not to preach overtly, I did occasionally feel, in particular with Fatherland, like I was having my fingers slapped by a ruler wielded by a teacher with a moral mission.  Moreover, Harris’s heroes tend to be dour types, intelligent but humourless  – a bit like Octavian in Dictator, as a matter of fact. The more easy-going Cicero and Tiro are easily the protagonists you would most like to spend an evening at a restaurant (or a taverna) with.

Having said that, another of my favourite characters in the Cicero trilogy is Caesar’s polar opposite, the unkempt, uncompromising idealist Cato. Everyone thinks he’s a pain with his unbending adherence to an often wrong-headed moral code, but there is an engaging bluntness to his truth-telling, which has a rhetorical power of his own. Here’s a man whose moral fibre does impress me. Perhaps the trick of getting readers to swallow a dose of morality is not to try too hard.

2014 – TV and book highlights

No, December is not a great blogging month, but when all else fails, you can usually rustle up an end-of year list of some sort. My wishes for the new year are more or less the same as in 2012, with the exception of the vain wish that Dan Stevens would stay put in Downton – that ship has sailed long ago. What then, in blog-related areas, has happened during the last year?

Author discovery of the year: Sally Beauman. Yes, this is middlebrow romance we’re talking about, but middlebrow romance with quality. After quite liking Rebecca’s Tale (though it was, as one would expect, too pro-Rebecca) I decided to give Destiny a go and was hooked. Since then I’ve worked my way through Beauman’s back catalogue, and am now looking forward to investing in her newest novel The Visitors, once it’s out in paperback. Let’s hope it has more in common with Destiny and Dark Angel than the over-gloomy Landscape of Love – and I would be grateful if no fictional children were harmed during the making of it.

Villain of the year:There’s still a dearth of new villains on the book front, but TV dramas seem finally to have twigged the importance of villains. Both Mr Selfridge and The Paradise topped up their cast list with new villains, and then there’s Morse’s hot envious colleague in Endeavour (hm – wonder where they got that idea from). But my prize goes to a villain from 2011 whom I haven’t caught up with until now – the delectable, devious politician Troels Höxenhaven in Borgen. Mr Lang – sorry Thackeray – in Mr Selfridge gets an honourable mention. This doesn’t mean I’m over Thomas, though.

Villainess of the year:No contest – it has to be Missy in Doctor Who. The series was in great form this year - more, please!

Costume drama of the year, not counting Downton:I have to take Downton out of the running, or it would win every year until it ends (my guess is series six will be the last, but I’m happy to be proved wrong as long as the characters are not stuck in a Bramwell-like limbo). Adaptations of classics seem to have gone quite out of fashion, regrettably. I’ve begun rewatching Little Dorrit recently, and was once again struck down with melancholy over the axing – many years ago – of the planned Andrew Davies adaptation of Dombey and Son. Nevertheless, the current trend of scripted-for TV costume dramas has its advantages. For one thing, they have a longer life-span, and you don’t know what will happen next. The Paradise has run its course, which is a shame considering what an improvement the second series was on the first, but Mr Selfridge will be with us again next year. And in spite of the trying Selfridge himself and the cool shop-girl Agnes who lacks Denise’s charm, Mr Selfridge continues to trounce The Paradise.

High-brow read of the year: Well, strictly speaking there may be only one high-brow read to choose from. I really must buckle down to some more Ambitious Book Projects next year. Anyway, The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst was a good read. It’s strange to think that largely thanks to a whole crop of not-really-into-chicks baddies, I not only cheerfully wade through guy-on-guy scenes which would have me reaching for my smelling salts ten years ago but positively ask for them – “come on, surely it’s time to give him one?” I’m telling you, villains build bridges.

Totally trashy beach read which you would never admit having read to your friends of the year: I had a surprisingly good time reading a 50-pence copy of Judith Krantz’s Lovers, and I suspect that it’s not her best novel by a long chalk. The characters don’t stay with you, but some of them talk a great deal of common sense. Krantz knows how to spin a yarn, and she’s no fool.

Apology of the year: OK, sorry about having sneered at Zola’s part in the Dreyfus case. He was right, and he was not simply in it to brandish his anti-establishment credentials. Read all about it in An Officer And A Spy by Robert Harris. This doesn’t mean I like Zola – on the whole, the pro-Dreyfusians including Harris’s hero Picquart could have been a more likeable lot. But they were indisputably fighting the good fight.

Comebacks of the year: Jeeves and Wooster made a successful and welcome return in Sebastian Faulks's homage to P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells. And then there's Bridget Jones's last hurrah, Mad About The Boy. Forget the sneering reviews: if you enjoyed thirtysomething Bridget's diaries, chances are you'll snigger over and sympathise with her fiftysomething self as well.  

English high society and French spies

Sally Beauman once again proved a hard act to follow, but at least two novels have kept me well entertained since I regretfully finished Dark Angel. First out was The New Countess, the third and final part of Fay Weldon's "Love and Inheritance" trilogy. My expectations from when I started the the first book, Habits of the House, have been pretty much fulfilled: the three books are a light-hearted, witty, gossipy read set in Edwardian high society, with occasional trips downstairs to the servants' hall. But it lacks the heart-warming quality of the best Upstairs Downstairs episodes: the tone is reminiscent of the more satirical episodes of that series. James's friend Bunny's appalling country-house circle of friends come to mind. True, the Earl of Dilberne and his family shape up a bit after getting off to a bad start in Habits of The House, where they begin the book by snubbing their long-suffering (and powerful) financial advisor. But they don't engage your sympathy the way, say, Richard Bellamy, Hazel or Georgina do in Upstairs Downstairs.

A comparison with Downton Abbey doesn't present itself in the same way because its brief is somewhat different: the good-natured Fellowes wants to give each and every one of his regular characters a fair shake, and has never claimed for one moment to be of a satirical frame of mind. Upstairs Downstairs is closer to the "Love and Inheritance" trilogy in tone, but it digs deeper, and the characters remain more central to the story than any point made about the occasional rumness of master-servant relationships. In fact, Hazel Bellamy's touching speech about there being two families living at Eaton Place actually trumps Downton when it comes to all-in-this-together optimism. Picture any Crawley, even the Earl of Grantham at his most blue-eyed, likening their servants to a family! It would be a very dysfunctional family indeed.

Getting back to "Love and Inheritance", the closest we get to a likeable upstairs character is the heiress Minnie O'Brien (!) who ends up marrying the Earl's son Arthur. She is, for the most part, sweet-natured. As for the Dilbernes (or Hedleighs, to use their family name) themselves, they're not mean, exactly, just very selfish. They, and Minnie for that matter, seem to change their minds about each other a lot just to facilitate some witty phrase. One moment Countess Isobel likes her daughter-in-law and sees why she's upset with Arthur; a little later she doesn't understand why Minnie is making a fuss and is wondering of Arthur wouldn't be better off without her. These alterations of mood happen quite often, and some characters - Anthony Robin "Redbreast" springs to mind - change their leopard's spots completely. As for the downstairs characters, they remain little more than amusing sketches. So, not quite Upstairs Downstairs in book form, then, but the three novels (the middle one, Long Live the King, is the weakest in my view as it introduces the Earl's rather dull niece Adela) are still satisfyingly fun and frothy.

Robert Harris's historical spy thriller about the Dreyfus affair, An Officer and A Spy, is a different book altogether - but there again, I didn't feel passionately for the protagonist. In fact, I quite disliked Georges Picquart at first, and I'm not even sure I like him now after I've finished the book. It doesn't matter, though, as there is no disputing the rightness of his cause. I'm ashamed to say I had no idea the Dreyfus affair was this bad: suspicious as I am of miner-hugging French writers, the assumption had crossed my mind that it was all little more than a blunder, and that Zola used it as a stick to beat the establishment with. Not so. Dreyfus was victim first of a scandalous framing, then of an equally scandalous cover-up of the framing. Zola wasn't merely being a revolutionary show-off when he defended him: he was right, and he took a personal risk doing so. However, it is Picquart, who discovers the evidence of Dreyfus's innocence quite by chance while going after the real spy, and then refuses to let things rest in order to save the French military's face - and is made to suffer for it - who is the real hero of the tale.

But likeable? I dunno. Any character who starts out by describing David's painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps as an "atrocious piece of Imperial kitsch" has uphill work when it comes to gaining my sympathy. Moreover, Picquart stems from Alsace (as I suppose I must call it), but his family elected to remain French in 1870 and so were turfed out. He is hostile to Germans as a consequence, and he's not wild about Jews either, whose patriotism he suspects. His prejudices are of his time and not overdone by Harris. Mostly, historical prejudices are either caricatured (in "bad" characters) or non-existent (in "good" characters) in historical fiction, and I like the fact that this author tells it like it is. Nevertheless, Picquart's icy disdainfulness is trying. Frankly, he's a bit of a prig, and his snooping on the German military attaché Schwartzkoppen's (admittedly fascinating) love life did little to endear him to me.

Still, Picquart has his good points, quite apart from his honesty. Above all, Harris endows him with the characteristics necessary for a good narrator: a keen sense of observation and occasional flashes of humour. A straight man in more ways than one, he nevertheless dutifully takes notice of the personal attractions of male characters he meets, for the benefit of us men-fancying readers. A surprising number of his friends and foes are handsome; Schwartzkoppen sounds a real peach, which would explain his, er, universal appeal.

Above all, the story is a cracking read, and a good example of how historical research should be used in a novel: not in clunky look-how-well-read-I-am pieces of exposition, but as a means of enlivening the narrative with colourful detail. Neither Picquart, nor the unfortunate Dreyfus - whose lack of charisma is part of his tragedy - would make the ideal dinner guest. But they are, or rather were, honourable men, and this book is a fine tribute to them.                      

Brutus says he was ambitious...

After having finished the high-prestige Swedish crime story - which proved not to be so very gloomy after all and included a touching description of male friendship - I'm back in ancient Rome. Harris's second novel "Lustrum" is even more highly acclaimed than the first one, but I must confess that in my view, it could have done with a bit more "the politicians at home" scenes. What I liked in "Imperium", apart from the West-Wing-in-togas-feel, was the intimate portait of some of the Famous Romans. The lumbering Pompey enthusing "didn't I tell you he was clever?" when Cicero came up with one of his brilliant ideas or the tough old bird Crassus genially pinching Tiro's cheek (Tiro is Cicero's secretary/slave and the books' narrator): these kind of scenes added a personal note to all the political schemes. They are still around in "Lustrum", but not as much as I would have liked. We never do get any real take on what Catilina was like as a person. I have gathered this much, though: if any Roman resembled the kind of villain I easily fall for, it was Caesar, not Catilina. Caesar is the sly one.

This idea gets some getting used to. Only now do I realise how favourable the portrait of Caesar in my old "Asterix" comics really was. Yes, he was an enemy of the intrepid Gauls and was time and again defeated by Asterix and his gang, but he had dignity and honour all the same. "Asterix" comics shouldn't really be allowed to influence one's judgement regarding a historical personage - they are, after all, cheerfully unhistorical, and only the Latin quotations have any basis in fact. But once you have seen the Asterix version of Caesar slumped in his chair, as baffled as the reader by a lecture on economics, and finally giving the one-word comment "Eh?", it's hard to imagine him as an unscrupulous wheeler-dealer with little regard for anything except his political ambition.

As I remember it, Shakespeare didn't help either. Granted, it's a long while since I saw the play (or read the Illustrated Classic - a very good cheat's guide to the Western Canon). But I chiefly recall three things about Shakespeare's Caesar: 1) He loved Brutus like a son (big mistake) 2) he preferred fat people to men with a "lean and hungry look" who thought too much 3) he couldn't swim as well as Cassius. Honestly, who would have thought he was a lean-and-hungry-looker himself?

It is possible, of course, that Harris is exaggerating Caesar's dastardliness a bit just to make a point. He is on Cicero's side after all. All the same, I do trust him more than I trust the "Asterix" comics when it comes to historical accuracy.

Now, time for a summary of the Swedish crown princess Victoria's wedding festivities on TV, and then a football match with the Ivory Coast, trained by our "Svennis". I told you I'm very Swedish in some ways.

Lazy Monday afternoon

A bonus day off today because the Swedish National Day (6 June) was on a Sunday. The holiday commemorates the vaguely-more-democratic-than-the-last-one constitution of 1809 which has been ditched many times over since then, so it's hard to get too steamed up and patriotic. Although if I'm not mistaken, Gustav Vasa marched into Stockholm after having defeated the Danes on 6 June as well, which is a bit more like it. All right, Independence Day it ain't, but a holiday is always welcome, whatever the pretext.

The problem is, it's time for me to pick a new Ambitious Book Project, and I'm feeling far too lazy. It should cheer me that the last ABP turned out to be great fun - "Imperium" by Robert Harris, which I counted as ambitious because I haven't read anything by him previously and because the scene is set in ancient Rome rather than in, say, Victorian England. It is also a book about Cicero, which sounded faintly worthy. I remember a picture of Cicero we had in our Latin book in school, painted 1800 years or so after his death, I would say. In it he was attacking Catilina in the Senate. Cicero had a flowing white beard and looked upright and noble. Catilina looked like a bird of prey. You can imagine whom I rooted for.

It turns out, though, that Cicero was a shrewd politican and only vaguely more principled than his contemporaries. Yes, he tries to do the right thing, but only if it does not hinder his political ambitions. It makes it easier to cheer him on than if he had been the incorruptible paragon ready to defend the Republic at all costs I imagined. As for Catilina, he seems a bit too loony and violent to be a villain in my taste, but I'm not quite giving up on him yet - he did look very foxy in that picture. Let's see how he turns out in "Lustrum", book No. two in Harris's Cicero series (it does sound learned, doesn't it?).

After "Imperium", I indulged myself with a frothy Regency Romance by Julia Quinn ("How To Marry A Marquis"). Frothy entertainment is not so easy to write as one may think. I remember being thoroughly bored with one bestselling author's supposedly escapist novel, in spite of a good premise and a glamourous setting, and at another time I was bemused when a romantic bestseller turned out to be written like a children's book. But Quinn knows her stuff. She is not the new Austen, as someone quoted on the cover alleges, but she may well be the new Georgette Heyer, and that is not bad at all. In spite of the title, there is less snobbishness displayed here than normally in the genre. The hero is not a nonesuch of the first stare, fussed about the tying of his cravat, for which one is thankful. I do wish, though, that he had not been an ex-spy. I cannot imagine him, or any other Regency Romance hero, lasting ten minutes pitted against Fouché's finest.

But now I have wallowed in a bodice-ripper, including romantic but blush-inducing sex scenes, I really should read something meaty and mind-expanding. A gloomy crime story written in the Fifties by one of Sweden's leading authors seems the likeliest candidate right now. I just wish I felt more enthusiastic about it.