Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre

Not to be confused with the far superior “Agent Z and the Penguin From Mars”, Agent Zigzag is the true story of Eddie Chapman. Chapman was a criminal specialising in blowing up safes before the second world war and was languishing in Jersey prison when the island fell to the Nazis. In a bid to return to the UK mainland (or maybe just to earn some money, his motives are often pretty unclear) Chapman volunteered to spy for the Germans.

He was then left in jail in France while his request filtered through German bureaucracy. After being interviewed by the German secret service he was sprung and trained for sabotage mission to blow up the DeHavilland factory that made the Mosquito. Chapman parachuted into Britain and immediately defected. He was then used to feed inaccurate information to the Germans. MI5 faked the sabotage of the DeHavilland factory to keep his cover intact and Chapman was sent back to the Nazis via neutral Portugal.

Almost as soon as he arrived, Chapman sent a couple of bombs disguised as lumps of coal back home for the secret service to investigate, by suggesting that he smuggle them aboard the British merchant ship that brought him. The Germans then spent some time interviewing Chapman, to try to ensure that he had not been "turned" by the British. Nazi interrogation seemed to comprise mostly of taking Chapman out to expensive bars and restaurants and getting him drunk. If this is accurate, then MI5 are more than welcome to take a crack at me; I like a decent Sauvignon Blanc, Pims, Kier Royale and a cocktail of my own devising made from vodka, Archers and blue flavour Panda Pop.

After a lot of booze, Chapman was sent to Norway where he trained other German spies (passing their details on the the British). As the tide of the war turned against Germany, he was parachuted back into the UK with a mission to find out about secret U boat detection technology (there was no such thing; military intelligence just knew where subs would be due to intercepting their transmissions one the Enigma code had been cracked),radar and to feed back data to help target V1/V2 missiles.

When the war ended, Chapman was dropped by secret service. He wasn't “one of us” and didn't fit in with the public school types runnng the show. And it didn't help that he'd taken up with his criminal friends again. He lived the rest of his life as a crook. There was a film loosely based on Eddie Chapman's lifestory called "Triple Cross". I haven't seen it but I don't have high hopes for it; it's got Christopher Plumber in it.

Whatever a book blurb may say, real life is never more incredible than fiction. If I were to rewrite the story, I would have Chapman tortured by the Gestapo, stuff would really get blown up, rather than just faked and I would probably have killed off one of the nicer minor characters (Major Reed, Zigzag’s first handler or Dagmar, his Norwegian girlfriend) for extra pathos. It might be mean, but it makes a better story.

The Course of Honour by Lindsey Davis

Before Lindsey Davis hit her stride with the Falco books, she had a go at historical romance in the form of this account of the love affair between Flavius Vespasianus (who would go on to become the Emperor Vepasian) and Antonia Caenis, an ex-slave from the royal palace. The book is very good in parts. For example, I particularly enjoyed the bits about Roman politics and palace intrigues and the demented, murderous antics of Caligula and Nero. Unfortunately, the bits about their actual relationship however, can strike me as a bit, “He was a victorious Roman general. She was a humble slavegirl. THEIR LOVE WOULD ROCK AN EMPIRE!” I would have preferred to find out more about the Year of Four Caesars and the civil war, which were dealt with very breifly.

If romance is not your thing (and to be honest, it isn't really mine, either) consider reading I, Claudius instead, of even The 12 Caesars by Suetonius. “The 12 Caesars” is particularly good fun; it's like finding a copy of Heat magazine which is 2000 years old.

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Bad Science is effectively the book of the blog by the lovely Ben Goldacre*. Throughout the book Ben deconstructs sloppy journalism and abuses of scientific language, roughly in order of how angry Ben gets about them. So we start with relatively harmless bollocks like detoxing and face cream, moving on to Homeopathy and Nutritionism. Then we look at the ethics of pharmaceutical companies and finally media heath scares and hoaxes like MMR. On the way there are some excellent explanations of the placebo effect, and of probability and statistics, which strike many people as counter-intuitive. And some amusing ranting at Ben's favourite awful poo lady**.

There is also a bonus chapter available from the internet, which deals with a particularly unpleasant man who has been trying to flog vitamin pills to Africa as a cure for AIDS. This was left out of earlier editions of the book, due to the filthy villain attempting to sue our Ben.

I particularly liked the final chapter in which he complains bitterly about the quality of science journalism. Ben points out that there must be loads of people with degrees in science subjects who have gone on to work in unrelated fields (yes! Yes! Here I am, Ben!) and yet whenever we get any science on in the media it has to be dumbed down so the lowest common denominator crapwits who couldn't differentiate e^x with respect to x can understand it. Where's my science, eh, world? Is it in the same place as all the trousers that actually come up to your waist have gone?

To the roll call of “cargo cult science” (things that like to use sciencey-sounding language but completely lack the rigour of the genuine article) I would like to add psychology and economics. In fact I think it would greatly benefit the world if economics were renamed “guesswork”.


*I think I have a bit of an intellectual crush on him. I'm not interested in the contents of his trousers, but I do love him a bit. If he ever wants a platonic groupie, he knows where I am!

**Amoungst other hilarious claims, Gillian believes that "foul-smelling stools" are a sign of ill health. This especially amused me; McKeith literally thinks her shit don't smell.

Back to the Golden Age...

What, in these difficult times, could be more cost-effective than reading second hand books?* This month I have been using second hand books to return to the “Golden Age” of science fiction, the 40s and 50s, when stories were relentlessly optimistic and everyone was looking forward to a shiny new world of spaceships, robot slaves and scantily-clad alien princesses. Unfortunately, I’ve been reading Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury, who rather bucked the trend for mindless optimism.

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

I bought my copy of The Sirens of Titan from a shelf of second hand books in Lillypool cafe in the Mendips for 10p. What a bargain! You don’t half get a lot of satire for your money.

Winston Niles Rumfoord is an aristocratic space adventurer who, together with his dog, Kazak, was sucked into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum in between earth and Mars. This means that he now exists as a waveform, rather than a person (appearing in human form only where the orbit of a planet intersects an antinode of his wave) and has knowledge of past and future. At first it appears that he has used this knowledge to toy with the lives of other people, including his wife and the rather reprehensible millionaire playboy Malachi Constant. Rumfoord engineers a war between Mars (whose population he builds from kidnapped Earthlings) and uses the resulting soul-searching to found The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent with the strap line “Take care of each other and the Almighty will take care of himself”.

When the action moves to Titan, we learn that the master manipulator is himself a puppet of aliens from the planet Tralfamadore: A Tralfamadorean robot called Salo has crashed there while taking a message from one side of the universe to another and his spacecraft requires a spare part. The whole evolution of life and intelligence on Earth was engineered by his home world just in order to provide him with a specially-shaped piece of metal to continue his journey. After being goaded by Rumfoord, Salo peeks at the message he’s being carrying to find that it is... a single dot.

Although funny and wittily told, this has to be one of the blackest comedies I’ve ever read: no one has any free will, millions die for a faked-up religion and the ultimate reason for human existence turns out to be completely feeble! A fine book, but if you only read one Vonnegut book in your life, make it "Slaughterhouse Five".

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

The Illustrated Man is a collection of short stories. Bradbury seems to me to write at the intersection of SF, fantasy and horror, but these stories are pretty much traditional science fiction. What makes Ray different from many of his contemporaries (and therefore more readable to the Bookclub of One) is that he has a realistically low opinion of human nature. This means he is unable to subscribe to a gleaming, hi-tec utopia; he knows what we'd really do with technology.

Two of my favourite stories were "The Velt" and "Zero Hour". In "The Velt" a couple use a sort of virtual reality theatre to educate and entertain their children and are subsequently murdered by the selfish, empathy-free brats they have spawned. In "Zero Hour" all the children in a small town become obsessed with a make-believe game called "invasion", which turns out not to be make-believe at all. The kids are being used as a fifth column for aliens and they've sold out humanity in return for being allowed to stay up an extra hour. I think I like these stories because I find children spooky and unfinished. You might think yours are cute, but when I look at them, I see those twins from The Shining or the little girl from F.E.A.R.

The absolute stand-out story for me, though, was The Concrete Mixer. A Martian invasion fleet arrives on Earth to a rapturous welcome. While the Martians thought they were conquerors, the Earth men see new consumers and new markets. The invaders are soon addicted to a life of booze, cars, pointless sex, indolence and useless spending. Their culture is plundered to make crappy Hollywood films which Earth sells back to them, their bodies are poisoned and their spirits are crushed. O God, I'm living in that particuar distopia right now!

*Other than going to the library. Or stealing books. Or reading over other people’s shoulders on public transport. Or downloading free ebooks and giving yourself a headache trying to read them. Or just shamelessly standing there in Waterstones, reading the whole thing in spite of the tutting (particularly effective for graphic novels, that method, as they are both pricey and quick to read). Now that I think about it, there are quite a few better sources of cheap books than the second hand market, but let’s celebrate it anyway. We’ll cover stealing another time.

Storm Front by Jim Butcher

Well, this book fits squarely into the "Enjoyable Tosh" category and could even be a contender for my "Airport novel of the year" award.

It's the first book of the "Dresden Files", the cases of Harry Dresden a sort of wizard private detective. At first I was a little disappointed as I was hoping for something like Terry Pratchet or Douglas Adams but Mr Butcher takes his fantasy very seriously. The first chapter has a reference to wizards being "subtle and quick to anger" and I would rather read the kind of book that warns you not to meddle in the affairs of wizards as they are subtle and will piss on your computer. It took a while to come to terms with a po-faced book that thought vampires were a subject I should take seriously, I gradually began to really enjoy it. "Storm Front" worked for me as a pageturner. Eventually, I was so into it I got caught in the work canteen reading this silly book about a wizard. You just have to enjoy the magical special effects and ignore the clunking noises coming from the plot. One website described it as "Harry Potter for adults" - I think that's a fair description and I leave it to the reader to decide whether it's complimentary or not!

If you find yourself in an airport, and this is the only thing you kind find in English, relax and buy it, it's mostly harmless.

A quick poke about the internet showed me that "The Dresden Files" has become a TV series on SciFi. I look forward to finding out whether it is watchable when it comes to freeview (sometime around 2020, I guess).

My favourite quote:
"My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk,"

Molesworth Books by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle

I complained so bitterly about how long and slow-moving "The Dream of Scipio" was that E (you remember E, disapproves of Derren Brown, that one) loaned me her two Molesworth books "Whizz for Atomms" and "Back in the Jug Agane" to cheer me up.

Molesworth is a pupil in the 3rd form at St Custards boarding school (you can use the magic of the Interweb to take a virtual tour round St Custards here ) and the books are not so much stories as short vignettes of school life. In common with "Transpotting", "A Clockwork Orange" and I can haz cheezburger, the Molesworth books are spelled phonetically and written in dialect. By someone who can't spell. This means that it takes a while to get into them. And I'm still not sure what some of the 1950s slang means. The trade mark style of these books makes it tempting to have a punt at mimicry so here are my school days at St Custards Grammar School For Girls:

The scene is the form room of 10b. The gurls are engayged in activities befitting yung wimmen cosmo quizzis, makeup, finding the bits abowt (HEM-HEM) in Shirley Conran books and givving each other annerreksya, ect, ect. But soft! (posh prose) here come their form teacher. Miss Batley teech ART and kno nothing. She woud not recognise the gerund if it started nesting in the art cupboard and drinking the poster paint. (Mrs Roebuck the latin teacher kno all about the gerund and gerundives. She also make us stand by our desks and sa "Salway magistra" like we were at Mallory Towers chiz chiz chiz! ). "Hullo clouds, hullo sky," sa Miss Batley, "Hullo Personal and soshal education worksheets, hullo anti smoeking leaflets ect ect". Miss Batley's antismoeking leaflets do more for the tabacco industry than smoeking beegles. 10b adopt the 1000 yard stair of trormatised veterans when will the torment end ect ect. And still it continue! Now we must do roll pla and try to sell each other drugs but hav scientist found a drug which fry the mind like personal and sowshal edukation? They hav not.

The Dream of Scipio - Iain Pears

My God, this is one of those books that is just too bloody clever for its own good! One quote on the cover said it was “Illumined by a fizzing passion for the recondite”. What does that even mean?

My first disappointment was that the book is not about Scipio at all, nor is it even about the original “Dream of Scipio” written by Cicero. It interweaves 3 different stories of men from different periods in history. Each of them lives near Avignon at a time when it seems that civilisation itself is under threat and faces difficult moral dilemmas.

Manlius is a Roman of patrician class, living in Gaul at the time when it is falling to the Goths (insert your own joke about black nail varnish here). The empire can't protect its territories, the slaves needed to work in the fields keep running off to join the enemy and the Christian Church has started taking over a lot of the functions of the old state. Manlius's philosophy teacher Sophia persuades him to leave his estate, bribe his way to a Bishop's job and start using his expensive education in strategy and diplomacy to do what good he can, rather than sitting in his villa reading poetry as his world falls apart.

Olivier is a medieval poet whose patron is a cardinal at the court of Pope Clement. In between delivering the cardinals letters, he tracks down ancient manuscripts makes copies and tries to preserve them. He finds a piece called “The Dream of Scipio” written by Manlius. This interests him because he can scarcely understand it and those bits he can understand seem heretical, yet it was written by a bishop. He asks advice from a Jewish scholar and falls in love with his beautiful assistant – at a time when the black death comes to Avignon and the Jews are being used as scapegoats.

Julien Barneuve is a scholar who served in the trenches of the first world war. It was this experience which led him to his belief that civilisation is to be preserved at all costs. It also leads him to retreat from the world and channel his energies into academic studies. Both Manlius and Olivier are known to him. He puts years of work into attempting to unravel the meaning of Manlius's “Dream of Scipio” and he knows Olivier as a medieval poet famous for murdering his lover and having his hands and tongue removed as punishment. Julien's lover is a Jewish artist, and yet when France falls to the Germans he takes a job with the Vichy regime in order to prevent the country descending into chaos and barbarism.

One of my major complaints about the book is that it switches between stories far too frequently. I feel like I've barely found my feet in one time, when I'm whisked off to another. This makes reading hard work. The ending was very strong (though pretty depressing), but I would have edited out most of the middle of the book, were it up to me!

I enjoyed the reversals in the final act: Manlius is corrupted by power, betrays his friend and signs tracts of land over to the barbarians, allegedly to keep the peace. Olivier, whom the reader is led to despise as murderer and ignorant medieval clod, comes good. We finally see that he sacrificed his reputation as well as his life to save his girlfriend and tutor. Julien the Vichy official immolates himself, his house and his life's work and his funeral pyre serves as a beacon to warn his friend in the resistance. Julien goes a bit crazed in the end and starts to believe that while throughout his life he has striven to preserve “civilization” through academic studies and through collaborating, he was utterly wrong. He comes to think of the Holocaust as the end product of thousands of years of progress; it required administrators, industrialists, government, police and international co-operation to make it happen. It required philosophers and theologists to prepare the ground and set up justifications. Julien's last act is therefore to destroy as much knowledge and learning as he can.

The book gives us a sort of potted history of European anti-semitism, as well as telling the reader far more than he or she ever wanted to know about Neoplatonism. The central question of the book, however, is whether it is ever right to side with evil men, in order to ameliorate their actions. By the end, Iain Pears seems pretty clear that it isn't.

The argument which dupes Julien into working for the Vichy government is that someone else will do it if he doesn't, and they'd be harsher. For my money, this argument is completely fallacious and you've my permission to punch anyone who tries to use it on you. It is no more than the trick of rhetoric known as the false dichotomy. Consider: the only thing in the whole world you can really control is your own actions therefore you have a straightforward choice between agreeing to do evil and not. The consequences of not agreeing cannot be known in advance – maybe the next candidate will refuse too. My view also passes the simple ethical test passed down to me by my mum: “What if everybody behaved like that?”. If everybody behaved my way in these circumstances, evil jobs could only be done by completely amoral people, and though some exist, they are pretty rare. “The evil done by men of good will is worst of all”. If you don't believe me, go and see Watchmen when it comes out.

To my mind civilisation is not about arcane knowledge or a classical education. It's not necessarily even about the rule of law. The word literally means the habit of living in cities, and all we really need to carry on doing that is the ability to rub along with each other without violence. Politeness, consideration and cooperation are what makes us civilised not cultivated tastes for the high arts or spending our time in contemplation. The nice thing about my way of seeing this is that each and every one of us can either do our bit to keep civilisation going or hasten its demise through our own behaviour. It's up to you. Now go out there and save the world!