Why Should I Read...?

Bomber Boys

Patrick Bishop, 1997

I recently read this remarkable book--a history of Bomber Command's activities in World War II--as research for my latest fantasy novel.  Bomber Boys is far more than a research source, though: it's a meticulously researched and morally balanced survey which also packs considerable emotional power.

The story of Bomber Command is more complex than any other branch of the British military.  The astonishing bravery of the aircrew, and the appalling risks they encountered, is beyond dispute.  Figures vary, but most sources agree that around 75,000 airmen flew active missions during the war; 50,000--two-thirds--were killed.  A tour of duty was 30 operations, and at the height of the casualties, 1943, only one crew in six survived to complete a tour; only one in forty made it through a second.  The crews knew the odds, and still they carried on volunteering.

But the bomber crews are not remembered today in the same way that other branches of the armed services are.  There is no national memorial, and no campaign medal.  The reason is easy to find: the nature of the missions they flew.  The technology of the age was not adequate to bomb small targets precisely, and the strategy, under Sir Arther 'Bomber' Harris, was to bomb German cities into oblivion.  Over 40,000 civilians were killed in one raid on Hamburg, nearly as many in the more notorious Dresden attack when the war was nearly over.  After the war, the Allied leadership felt it necessary to distance itself from these tactics.

Bishop is to be commended for even-handed treatment of the issues.  His account has eyewitness testimony from German survivors of the raids, and he never seeks to minimise their impact.  He does not allow his undoubted admiration for the aircrew to blur the difficult moral question of whether the strategy was justified.  He presents the evidence, and lets the reader decide.

Bomber Boys is a moving, troubling account of a grotesque period of human history.  Recommended for anyone with an interest in the period or the morality of warfare.

Why Should I Read...?

The King of the World

David Remnick,1998

When people under 40 think of Muhammad Ali, the image that comes to mind is probably the national--or world--treasure, bearing his illness with dignity and commanding universal respect and affection.  Those slightly older may remember his epic boxing matches with Joe Frazier and George Foreman in the 1970s.

Remnick's biography goes back still further, concentrating on his early career, particularly his first world title fight against the seemingly invincible Sonny Liston in 1963.  Sometimes I'm asked whether sports books are important enough, or serious enough, to deserve critical attention.  The King of the World is one example of why they are.  

I'm not really a boxing fan--there's something highly disturbing about watching two invariably black men inflicting brain damage on each other for the entertainment of a predominantly white audience--but this is a compelling book, because it's about much more than boxing.  In the early 1960s, Ali--or Cassius Clay, as he was then--was a hugely reviled figure.  Conservatives despised him for getting above his station (with his ready wit and showman's personality, he just did not know his place), while liberals felt his association with Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam undermined the civil rights movement.  (Ali's commitment to black separatism caused great ill-feeling with the more integrationist Floyd Patterson, culminating in a merciless beating for Patterson in a 1965 world title fight.  Patterson consistently referred to Ali as Clay long after his conversion to Islam). 

If all this were not enough to seal Ali's unpopularity, he then had the temerity to refuse to be drafted to Vietnam, a move which seems more courageous and principled now than it must have looked at the time.  "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietkong", he memorably said.

Remnick's book, in focusing on the point at which Muhammad Ali invented himself, illuminates not only a fascinating character--more deserving of our admiration than our pity, despite the illness that overtook him as he fought on too long--but a pivotal period in US history.  The final word should go to Ali himself:

I’ll tell you how I’d like to be remembered: as a black man who won the heavyweight title and who was humorous and treated everyone right.  As a man who never looked down on those who looked up to him and who helped as many of his people as he could—financial and also in their fight for freedom, justice and equality.  As a man who wouldn’t embarrass them.  As man who tried to unite his people through the faith of Islam.  And if all that’s too much , then I guess I’d settle for being remembered only as a great boxing champion who became a preacher and a champion of his people.  And I wouldn’t even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was.

Why Should I Read...?


Bomber
Len Deighton, 1970

In my teens I read a lot about the Second World War, a phase I'm sure most bookish boys go through.  Until re-reading it this week, I haven't read Bomber for at least 25 years, but it always remained in my mind as a remarkable book, even once I had long forgotten the details. Reading it again now I can see why I remembered, and why judges as good as Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess rated it among the great novels of the 2oth century.

Bomber  is set in one single day ("31 June" 1943) and tells the story, in clinical "docudrama" style, of a bombing raid against a German industrial city.  The novel uses multiple viewpoints and perspectives, both from the British and German sides.  The raid is a disaster on every level: the light Mosquito bomber, in a precisely choreographed scene, drops its marker bombs by accident on a sleepy market town, with the result that the 700 heavy bombers following carpet-bomb the town instead of the target.  Most of the inhabitants we see are killed, as are many of the German fighter pilots and the British bomber crews.  Deighton doesn't take sides; instead, with chilling detachment he chronicles the varying fates of the characters, who die heroically, farcically, gruesomely (one plane is downed by a bird strike, another from friendly fire).  Of those who survive, one German pilot is arrested on landing and subsequently executed for protesting against concentration camps; the star British pilot is taken off flying duties for refusing to play in a regimental cricket match.  For all the crisp precision of the prose, this is an angry book, showing up the horror of mechanised warfare.

Technically the book is also a tremendous achievement.  Deighton makes us care about the characters despite the pared-back prose (and also allows us to differentiate a large cast in our mind), and to admire the bravery of both the bombed and the bombers.  I suspect that 40 years ago the book was even more revolutionary, both stylistically and in the way in which all the characters are portrayed as victims.  (I suspect that Alastair McLean's action stories like The Guns of Navarone or Where Eagles Dare are more typical of the period).

Bomber is not an easy read, but it is a bleak masterpiece.   

How has it influenced me?

Bomber was probably one of the first novels I read that dispensed with any pretence of happy endings.  The novel is a gruelling read but the reader recognises the rightness of the downbeat conclusions.  If the bomber crews had all come back safe, if the German pilots had all survived to collect their Knight's Cross, we might have been pleased for men we had come to care about, but it would have been the wrong ending for the novel.  It also shows that the writer can create sympathy for the characters without purple prose.  Deighton's ability to create memorable characters in a couple of paragraphs--one or two telling details can do it--is also something we can all learn from.

Why Should I Read...?

The Sunne in Splendour
Sharon Kay Penman, 1982

They say there is no creature in nature, however seemingly malign, which doesn't have a benign impact somewhere (the ichneumon wasp would seem to come close). Even Ken Follett, whose truly appalling novel World Without End befouled my mind for a fortnight, can been seen to have a positive effect; when I was reading some reviews to see if anyone else thought it as bad as I did, I came across a couple of approbatory references to Sharon Kay Penman, along the lines of "this is how it should be done".

So it was that I tracked down her best-known work, The Sunne in Splendour, a vast saga covering the Wars of the Roses from 1459 to the Battle of Bosworth a quarter of a century later. Although it deploys, very skilfully, multiple viewpoints, it is really the story of Richard, Duke of Gloucester--later Richard III. Penman takes the increasingly fashionable view that Richard's reputation was the result of propaganda designed to obscure the Tudors' tenuous right to the throne, and instead presents him in a highly positive (but still nuanced) light.

All but one of the main characters are drawn from history, so anyone familiar with the period or Shakespeare's history plays will have their own sense of who they are - which can only make Penman's task more difficult, but they are all realised with crispness, freshness and vigour: Edward IV, a man for a crisis but rudderless without one; Elizabeth Woodville, his calculating and ambitious parvenu Queen; John Neville, destroyed by his split loyalties; his brother Richard, 'the Kingmaker', at once charming, manipulative and egostistical. Penman is accomplished in drawing subtle characters, and while she is clearly sympathetic to the Yorkist cause, the Lancastrians are not uniformly reviled.

I'm not giving anything away in saying there is no happy ending, and Penman is at her best when she touches on grief and loss. This is a book with real emotional power, and doesn't attempt to sugar-coat just how grim the period really was.

The book is not faultless: the extended courtship between Richard and Anne Neville is far too long, and the dialogue occasionally jars in its archaism (although at least the reader never cringes at excess modernity). Taken as a whole, though, it's magnificent, capturing the otherness of the 15th century in a world peopled with rich and believable characters. This is just about as good as historical fiction gets.

How will it influence me?

The first influence, strangely, is a negative one. Any thoughts I might have had of writing a Shakespearan wide-screen epic on the Wars of Roses are effectively scuppered, since The Sunne in Splendour does it so well. While I remain keen to tackle the Wars of the Roses, I'll need to find a different approach.

Nonetheless The Sunne in Splendour does show that the period lends itself to the epic tale. In that sense, it is more inspiration than encouragement.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

• Historical fiction is set in the past (doh!), so don't try to modernise the diction or the mindset
  
• You can write a successful historical novel using primarily historical figures
  
• Just because Shakespeare's already done it doesn't mean you can't
  
• There are better choices than the Tudors for your historical novel
  
• You don't have to give 'em a happy ending