Material Witness

You may not like football, but you must watch Ted Lasso

Only once have we taken my wife to watch football with us at Atlético de Madrid, where my youngest daughter and I have season tickets. On a freezing cold December night in the upper reaches of the new Metropolitano, she spent the entire match reading the Guardian on her phone as Atleti played out an uninspiring 1-0 victory over Alavés. She has zero interest in football and was merely humouring the rest of us by participating in a family activity.

I tell you this because it's important to understand that having zero interest football is no bar to loving Ted Lasso, the runaway Apple TV hit, that is staged in a football setting, but is not about football. Even if, as one of the characters repeatedly insists, "Football is Life".  Jane could not care less about football; but she loves Ted Lasso, and so will you. 

To be honest, even if you like football, the premise of Ted Lasso, was not promising and I wasn't sure I should watch it.

There is no way on God's green earth that it should have worked at all, let alone that it should have turned out to be a truly beautiful and inspiring piece of television. Every element of the set up was riddled with cliché starting with a fish-out-of-water plot in which an American football coach is transplanted to a Premier League team - essentially King Ralph at Selhurst Park. Then the players: an aging, cynical veteran; a chippy, arrogant hotshot too good for his own team; a wildly over-enthusiastic Latin American; a superstitious young African. Stop me if you've heard this before. Major League at Manchester City?

Then there's the disinterested owner, the inevitably hostile, the ignorant and cynical media, the profane and free-drinking fans, the WAGs... Please. 

My skepticism never made it any way near to cynicism. I enjoyed episode one when Ted arrives in London - and immediately visits Tower Bridge (on his way to Richmond from Heathrow!!!), tells us all he hates tea and is immediately thrown to the wolves in a disastrous welcome press conference - "Heck, you could fill two internets with what I don't know about football". 

By episode four, the arrival of the new Ted Lasso was a highlight of the week. And that's because none of the stuff above matters one bit. With its smart, sensitive writing, the Ted Lasso storyline became compelling and the clichés charming. On top of that, it's funny. And then there are quite wonderful performances across the board, Hannah Waddingham as the acerbic, scheming owner; Juno Temple is a perfect WAG and Brendan Hunt's deadpan Coach Beard is a great foil to Ted himself. The footballers deliver on and off the pitch and Brett Goldstein, also a writer on the show, is outstanding as Roy Kent,  the hard man midfielder raging against the dying of the light.

And then there is Ted himself, wonderfully played by the outstanding Jason Sudeikis. The show is not about AFC Richmond's fight for Premier League survival. It is about what Ted Lasso has to teach us about life and how we can all be better at it. Ted Lasso is the kindest, most generous, sensitive, forgiving and optimistic soul to have walked the earth. With his homespun wisdom and instinctive goodness he has an encouraging word for everyone and an effervescent optimism that can lighten even the gloomiest moment.

He arrived at the perfect moment - six months into the Covid pandemic, audiences were probably ready for more kindness, more optimism and more goodness in their lives.  The show is very funny, hugely entertaining and genuinely moving. Season two starts this week, and I can't wait for the arrival of my new favorite TV show. And so what if you don't like football. You'll love Ted, and if you don't you can go back to The Guardian. 

    

REVIEW: Daughters of Night by Laura Shepherd-Robinson

The question I  ask myself of historical fiction is: "Does this pass the smell test?" The best historical fiction is totally immersive: it takes you straight to the heart of the adventure and brings everything about it alive conjuring an entirely new world from thin air. It's not difficult for me to imagine Rebus having a pint at the Oxford bar or River Cartwright chasing someone through the City. I've walked those streets and had that beer. I don't have those reference points for Georgian London so I need the author to play Doc Brown to my Marty McFly, and literally transport me there. 

And so you walk through the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in 1782, the site of the opening scene of Daughters of Night, you experience an assault on all the senses: you can hear the gaiety of thousands of Londoners enjoying late summer reveries, see the colourful lanterns lighting up the night sky, feel the late evening dew and taste the ale and wine that is raising the volume, the tension and the hackles. 

But what do you smell? Is it the fear of Caroline Corsham, walking out into the far reaches of the Gardens in pursuit of her own secret? Or the smell of firework smoke from the festivities in the background? Or the metallic tang of blood of the woman Caroline finds bleeding to death in the dark bowers? 

It's all three, and within a few short pages, Shepherd-Robinson had me fully immersed and hooked. 

Shepherd-Robinson took the historical crime fiction scene by storm in 2019 with her debut novel, Blood and Sugar, a thrilling and evocative novel set around the slave trade. That novel passed the smell test, and Daughters of Night is a worthy successor. Caroline Corsham is the wife of Henry, who set off for Deptford in the previous novel on the scent of a killer. A year or so later, he is abroad, on some secret squirrel diplomatic work for His Majesty's government. So when the body in the bushes turns out to be that of a London prostitute rather than an Italian countess, it is his wife that takes up the investigative cudgels as the official authorities lost interest quickly. 

The case of Lucy Loveless takes Caroline and her hired thief-taker, Peregrine Child, into the darkest corners of London society, where the low world of gambling and prostitution intersects with a world or privilege, position and money. 

Shepherd-Robinson marries attention to period detail with compelling plotting and strong characters. The result is another highly accomplished atmospheric thriller.  

 

REVIEW: A Cursed Place by Peter Hanington

Do you know what the tech giants are doing with your data? Do you read the fine print in the agreement you make with Google when it updates its privacy notice or with Apple when you buy a new iPhone? Or, like me, do you just click "Agree" and move on quickly to whatever you need to do? 

Because, what's the worst that can happen? Amazon sends you recommendations for books that are similar to A Cursed Place because you bought Peter Hanington's superb journalistic spy thriller... that's not so bad, not so dangerous. Right?

The truth, however, is that we don't really know what they're doing with their data. We're not completely sure whether we can trust them, but we like the convenience of having our songs, our location and our health data all in one easily accessible place. Accessible to us... and to our service provider. And so, even if the evidence suggests that bad actors might have used the insights that this data provide to influence the Brexit vote, or Trump's election victory or to track down political dissidents, we still seem content to make the trade. 

A Cursed Place is built around this very contemporary issue, and it addresses it in the most breath-taking thriller of 2021. And this is what makes Hanington's novels - now a trilogy featuring old school radio hack William Carver - so compelling. He combines important, current themes that are sensitively and intelligently handled with pulsating plots and credible, enjoyable characters. 

At the heart of this story is Public Square, a Google-esque Silicon Valley tech giant with a charismatic husband-and-wife leadership team. A slightly unusual conglomerate, Public Square has interest in hardware, software, data and mining the metals that power the tech revolution. The story, set in 2014, is broadly split between California, Chile, where they mine copper, London, where Carver has laid down his microphone and is teaching journalism and a Hong Kong that is in the midst of student protests against China, a story being covered by Patrick, Carver's former Radio 4 producer. 

Hangingon's novels occupy a space most readily associated with the great John Le Carré: a world in which all the action takes place in the shadows. But where once those shadows were to be found in the dark, spook-inhabited streets of Helsinki or Vienna, in A Cursed Place they are behind firewalls, in virtual private networks and even in plain sight in Cupertino board rooms. 

And instead of Smiley or Jackson Lamb, we have Carver, a proper journalist: irascible, incorruptible and steadfast in his determination to use his platform to hold power to account - 'an analogue man in a digital world' and perhaps A Dying Breed according to the title of the first book in the series. 

It is a story brilliantly told, the disparate strands pulled together with pace and menace. The last 10 or so (relatively short) chapters delivered so much tension I barely remembered to breathe. But A Cursed Place never loses its sense of purpose, persistently asking whether we really should be comfortable surrendering so much ourselves to technology companies who may not always have our best interests at heart. 

-  As ever, I recommend addressing a series in the order it was written. A Cursed Place would stand alone as a wonderfully enjoyable novel but most readers will get much more out of it if they first read A Dying Breed and A Single Source (which I finished two weeks ago and is equally breath-taking). 

 

Summer holiday book bag

In times past, the reading for a two week holiday required a box to fitted to the roof of the car, in which about six kilograms of hard and paperbacks were installed. These days the Kindle slips comfortably into a back pocket. While I mourn the loss of the beauty of physical books, my aging eyes prefer the Paperwhite, and the danger of finding myself without fresh material has evaporated. 

So, following the earlier post of my recommendations for Summer 2021, here's what's on my Kindle:

A Cursed Place by Peter Hanington

In an increasingly unprincipled world, a man of principles is a danger to himself and others. William Carver is one such man - a veteran, irascible, old school journalist working for Radio 4's Today program is a reporter who uses his position to hold the powerful to account. In two previous outings, Hanington, himself a former Today producer,  has taken Carver through war-torn Afghanistan and Cairo during the Arab spring. Hanington grapples with big global themes in books that are rich in drama, detail, intrigue and ideas.  In A Single Source, his previous novel, Hanington takes two young Eritrean men through the arduous, perilous and demeaning refugee journey from their homeland through the Sahara and across the Mediterranean to Europe. It's a piece of writing that everyone with a view on the refugee crisis should read, and in particular policy makers. It is empathetic, powerful and shocking - a second act in a book crammed with incredible characters and compelling story lines. I can't wait to get tucked into the next installment which takes Carver from Chilean mines to Silicon Valley. Hanington's books are not quite 'spy novels' but they occupy a similar territory to that currently covered by Henry Porter, Mick Herron and Charles Cummings, a space we might call 'post Le Carré', and they are worthy successors. 

The Kill by Jane Casey

Detective Constable Maeve Kerrigan has become my number one running buddy during 2021. As I (slowly) pound the streets she has become my chosen Audible partner. I love this series for a number of reasons. Firstly, Casey has developed a set of core characters whose appeal broadens each story. They're a little different too. There's a lot of cliché in police fiction, but Casey carefully steers through it to bring more interesting and nuanced characters to life. The dynamic between Kerrigan and her (very odd) boss DI Derwent is particularly interesting. And the storytelling is strong, the narratives dynamic and the dialogue sharp and convincing. In short, the Kerrigan books have everything a series needs to be successful, and I've made it to book five, The Kill,  pretty quickly and if I hit my target of 1,250 km by the end of 2021, Maeve will have played her part. 

The Royal Secret by Andrew Taylor

The prolific Andrew Taylor has been a feature of my reading list for the best part of 20 years, since the publication of The American Boy, and in 2008 wrote one of this blog's favourite ever books, Bleeding Heart Square. More recently, the 17th Century Marwood and Lovett series has helped to do for the Stuarts what Shardlake has done for the Tudors. Such is the strangeness of the English history curriculum (at least during the 1980s) I managed to leave school knowing little about the 17th Century (beyond fire and plague) that happened after Charles I parted company with his head. So James Marwood, a reluctant court detective, and his occasional (and even more reluctant) partner Cat Lovett have been tremendous guides through the intrigues of the post Restoration monarchy. The series is full of period social detail and political machinations not to mention great mystery storylines. It has matured with age, and I am looking forward to revisiting the sights, sounds and smells of Stuart London in this fifth installment. 

Transient Desires by Donna Leon

Is it really a summer holiday if there's no Guido Brunetti novel for the beach? Donna Leon's series has been a constant companion for almost three decades and opening one of these books is like slipping on a much-loved sweater or settling down to comfort food and a glass of Chianti. There's nothing I don't love about these books: the unhurried plots; the excursions into literature, family and gastronomy; the banal evil of Scarpa, the venality of Patta and the goodness of Brunetti; the insights into the delights and horrors of daily life in Venice. It all fits together beautifully with Leon's elegant writing. This, amazingly, is book number 30 which means I've been with Brunetti for longer than I've been with my wife. I should probably celebrate with a grappa...

(Review: Beastly Things by Donna Leon)

 

On Hampstead Heath by Marika Cobbold

Amanda Craig is on the hook for this recommendation, a tale of journalistic integrity and the search for truth set in the wrong half of London.  My days as a journalist are long behind me (I left the trade at about Brunetti book 15) and while there are days I really miss it, I don't envy those still practicing it the newer tyrannies of their trade: the pressure to generate clicks, the never ending deadline demands of social media and the internet, and most of all the moral maze of fake news. This novel promises to delve into all these themes as it follows the latter part of the career of Thorn Marsh who falls out with her employer when she finds its principles don't correspond to her own, and then undermines her own views with a late night filing that bends the truth. If it's good enough for Amanda Craig, it's good enough for me, north London or not. 

 

Daughters of Night by Laura Shepherd-Robinson

A quick fast forward from the Stuarts to the Georgians, and a new novel from Shepherd-Robinson, whose brilliant slave trade debut Blood and Sugar was one of the best books of 2019. "From the pleasure palaces and gin-shops of Covent Garden to the elegant townhouses of Mayfair, Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s Daughters of Night follows Caroline Corsham as she seeks justice for a murdered woman whom London society would rather forget . . ." So reads the synopsis, and really, who could resist? The best historical fiction resonates through the ages and speaks to our own situation. Blood and Sugar did this brilliantly, and I have very high expectations for a novel that has drawn rave reviews. 

 

 

La Cara Norte del Corazón por Dolores Redondo

Every year I take at least one book to the beach that I am highly unlikely to read. Last year, it was How to Be A Stoic, this year it is Dolores Redondo's The North Face of the Heart, in its original Spanish. I haven't read a book in a language that is not English since I was a 17-year-old A Level student misunderstanding Raymond Radiguet's The Devil in the Flesh. But this marks a moment of progress. Eight years I've been living in Spain, but only now have my pitiful attempts to learn Spanish delivered me to a point where I even contemplate reading a novel. But the spirit is willing. I loved Redondo's Baztan mystery trilogy, set in the mists of Navarra and her tough Pamplona detective, Amaia Salazar. This is something of an origins story, taking Salazar back to her earlier career and a placement at the FBI Academy, which results in her visiting New Orleans at about the same time as Hurricane Karina. Doubtless this book will outlast the summer, but I will finish it.  

Reviews: The Invisible Guardian and The Legacy of the Bones by Dolores Redondo

Summer recommendations 2021

Putting together a reading list for the annual summer holiday is one of my favourite occupations each year. No matter that this year's summer break, already shortened to less than a week by logistical challenges, is now threatened by child C spending yesterday in the close company of a friend who just turned in a positive Covid test. And so as literature might now be this summer's only escape from this wretched year, the books are even more important.  

The book gods have been very generous to me this year, delivering a string of brilliant novels, and so this year's list is in two parts: the books I'm taking with me (to Ibiza or the end of the garden). That will come tomorrow. First, the recommendations. 

Recommendations

Love in Idleness by Amanda Craig 

Our last summer holiday pre-Covid was in gorgeous Tuscany, in an old farmhouse with glorious views across the much celebrated rolling countryside to the hazy towers of Siena. Perhaps not an enormously dissimilar location to Casa Luna, the setting of Craig's summer retreat novel in which Polly and Theo Noble host a house party of friends and relatives. Even if Love in Idleness doesn't have the big social and political themes that gives Craig's later novels their punch, it has all her wit, charm and storytelling magic in abundance. In a tale of star-crossed lovers and domestic angst, there was a passage towards the end of the book, when I suddenly realized what Craig was doing with her story, that gave me the purest moment of joy.  

 

 

Black Diamond by Martin Walker

Many happy summer days have been spent in the Dordogne, where a much loved aunt and uncle have a gorgeous Perigordine house with an incomparable view over the bastide town of Beaumont du Perigord. It was there, a few years back,
that I first found Bruno, chief of police of the fictional Dordogne village of St Denis, sitting in a pile of slightly dusty novels. Bruno, the hunting, cooking, detecting creation of Martin Walker is to the Dordogne what Guido Brunetti is to Venice: the perfect charming guide to a region rich in culture, history and gastronomy. In this, the third in the series, Bruno is in pursuit of truffle fraudsters. This is a perfect read for a lazy summer's afternoon.

 

 

Mr Wilder and Me by Jonathan Coe

I should have read this book last year, five minutes after it was published, as I generally do with Coe's books. Somehow, however, I convinced myself that this Greek odyssey, one man's pursuit of legendary movie director Billy Wilder, was not the book I wanted from Coe, whose Rotter's Club and sequels are among my favourite books. Well, how wrong can you be? This is a quite wonderful novel, ingeniously imagined and elegantly executed. It tells the story of Wilder - a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who arrived in Hollywood via London and Paris - through the eyes of Calista, a young Greek woman who meets the director in a chance encounter in 1970s Los Angeles. This meeting earns her a role on the crew of Fedora, one of Wilder's later and less successful movies, which is partly shot in her native Greece. The story is gentle, charming and thoroughly engaging. 

 

The Stranding by Kate Sawyer

It's a big year for the end of the world. Covid and climate change dominate now, but Sawyer reminds of us of an older and perhaps forgotten threat, one that delivers fire and brimstone by way of warheads rather than infected bats or CO2. The end of the world arrives for Ruth on a beach in New Zealand, the country in which she has recently arrived from London, seeking both cetacean adventure and a break from a claustrophobic, damaging relationship and a teaching career. Ruth, and a man she meets on the beach, take refuge from the apocalypse in the mouth of a stranded, dead whale. When they emerge, the world has changed beyond all recognition. The Stranding tells two stories: why Ruth is on the beach and how she rebuilds her world after everything she has ever known is taken away. In both parts, the story is often spell-binding, full of warmth and wisdom, and alternately terrifying and uplifting. An incredible, unforgettable debut novel.

 

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

I had no idea what Sorrow and Bliss was about when I bought it on impulse after many Twitter recommendations. And at first, Meg Mason's novel presents as a very funny and sharp take on life growing up in a dysfunctional family. All of which made the arrival of the book's over-arching narrative - a woman's struggle with mental illness and its destructive influence in ever corner of her life - something of a gut punch. And in the end, the novel offers perhaps the most vivid and powerful insight into mental health issues I can recall reading, somehow without ever losing the sense of humour. I made the mistake of starting it at 11pm one (school) night, having finished another book, and didn't stop reading until 3am. 

 

 

Widowland by CJ Casey

Not having the opportunity to browse bookshops - and Amazon, for all its obvious advantages for an emigrant, is hopeless for that - most of my recommendations come from Twitter. And there, it was Widowland´s striking cover that first grabbed my attention, and then the story: an alternate history, in which the Battle of Britain was lost, and in a negotiated settlement, the UK becomes a Protectorate of Nazi Germany. In this new Britain, women are allocated to different "castes" according to, first, their child-bearing potential and then their various other attributes. The story's protagonist, Rose Ransom, is a "Geli", high caste and destined to marry well and produce many strong Aryan children. The first half of the novel explores the theme of womanhood in this dsytopia, and through it tells a powerful feminist story for our own times. The second half, is a gripping thriller in which Rose, an official in the Orwellian culture ministry, finds herself investigating  potential plots against the regime in the run up to the coronation of Kind Edward and his wife Wallis Simpson. The two pieces mesh well in a worthy successor to CJ Sansom's Dominion and Robert Harris's Fatherland. 

Also still highly recommending these books that I recently reviewed: The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird and Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera.