War is Hell for Other People

TITLE: D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
AUTHOR: Antony Beevor
PUBLISHER: Viking

RATING
5/5 "The Mother of All Battles"; 4/5 "The Aunty of All Skirmishes"; 3/5 "The Granny of All Protest Marches"; 2/5 "The Niece of All Arguments"; 1/5 "The Step-Sister of All Tantrums"
SCORE: 4/5

The D-Day invasion of France, the golden moment of the Greatest Generation, is probably one of the best-known battles of the whole war. A new book on the subject sheds little new light on the events, but helps remind us of the staggering cost in lives, Allied, German and civilian, that was the price of victory.

In "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy", British historian Antony Beevor attempts to recreate the award-winning formula that served him so well in 1998's "Stalingrad" and 2002's "The Fall of Berlin 1945". With these books, Mr Beevor found something of a niche between scholarly, broad and sweeping histories like John Keegan's "The Second World War", and more intimate accounts like Stephen Ambrose's "Band of Brothers".

Mr Beevor's style is to weave together first-hand accounts of generals, soldiers and civilians into a coherent and comprehensive account of battles. This again is the pattern for "D-Day", flitting among personal anecdotes as it follows the campaign from the initial airborne landings to the liberation of Paris. He does an admirable job of balancing his sources, including American, British, Canadian, French and German voices.

If the objective is to let you know how it felt to be there, then the book fails. You can't pretend that reading about the explosions, the screams, the fear, the stench can come within shooting distance of the real thing, any more than watching "House MD" trains you to be a doctor. It does, however, give you a better sense of war as something experienced by its participants, rather than some abstract development on a map. You can appreciate the feelings expressed, even if you can't understand them.

Mr Beevor's style also allows him to highlight previously under-appreciated aspects of the campaign. In "Stalingrad", this was the role of the hapless Soviet "volunteers" in the German armed forces, viewed as traitors by their countrymen and sub-humans by their new masters. In "D-Day", the spotlight again falls on those dealt the lowest of war's playing cards: civilians, prisoners and the wounded.

These people tend to get short shrift in most accounts. War is hell, we are often told. Yes, but who for? "Saving Private Ryan" or "Letters from Iwo Jima" focus on the plight of the men in uniform, but by contrast Mr Beevor's account makes it clear the real horrors happen not on the front lines, but behind them. Indeed, the book leads me to the (admittedly unoriginal) insight that it's much easier to shoot people who aren't shooting back, and the safest thing to do on the battlefield was probably to be the one holding the machinegun. Mr Beevor presents us with a series of saddening, sickening stories of prisoners and wounded shot, civilians murdered, towns massacred and destroyed. It's sobering to realize that more French people died being liberated by their allies, than Englishmen did being bombed by their enemies.

However, what worked so well in "Stalingrad" and "Berlin" begins to feel a little forced here. The two previous books were both about sieges, which by nature gave them both a limited scope and a natural beginning, middle and end. The colossal scale of D-Day, and the lack of clear ending work against Mr Beevor's style.

"D-Day" provides only a sketchy overview of the strategic course of the battle, supplemented by some awkwardly-placed maps. It does not stay with any one figure long enough to give us any insight into their personal lives. Analysis of leading figures never rises above the level of oft-repeated cliches: vain Montgomery, nagging Churchill, foul-mouthed Patton. The rank-and-file get even less air time. Ironically for a book built on first-person recollections, we never get to know any of the participants as people. Instead they frequently get used as local color, to spice up the account and move it along, before returning to obscurity. The book does not so much reach a conclusion as abruptly stop, with a lame comment on how different the world would be if the invasion had failed.

In spite of these shortcomings, "D-Day" is a highly readable addition to the coverage of the campaign, and a useful guide to the true costs of war.

Sharp-Edged Wit

TITLE: The Blade Itself
AUTHOR: Joe Abercrombie
PUBLISHER: Pyr

RATING
5/5 "Go ahead, make my day."; 4/5 "You talking to me?"; 3/5 "Say "hello" to my little friend!"; 2/5 "Yo, Adrian!"; 1/5 "You maniacs! You blew it up! Oh damn you! Goddamn you all the Hell!"
SCORE 5/5

Logen Ninefingers is the toughest, baddest fighter in all of the North, the kind of stone-cold killer who could eat Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone for breakfast, and still have room for Arnold Schwarzenegger for desert. When we first meet him, he's doing what he does best: killing things. Of course, like all action heroes, he cracks wise as he breaks heads; his first lines are, "Shit", followed by "Gah!", "Hah", "Shit" yet again, then "Aaargh!". Ah, such poetry. He whimpers, grunts, squeals, then falls off a cliff.

He what?

Yes, the heroes of "The Blade Itself", by British author Joe Abercrombie, are not what you expect. It's as though Mr Abercrombie has taken well-worn archetypes of fantasy and swords & sorcery, the Tough Barbarian, the Wise Wizard, the Young Gallant, the Cynical Veteran, the Damsel in Distress, placed them lovingly on a pedestal, bowed deeply before them, then cut their throats, ripped out their entrails and set them on fire. Rarely have such genre clichés been deconstructed with such élan and obvious glee.

Gritty, dark fantasy seems to have enjoyed a surge in popularity over the past decade, boosted by authors such as George R R Martin, Stevan Erikson and Scott Bakker. Their heroes are anything but heroic, sometimes die, and frequently swear. Of course, there's an inherent contradiction in trying to write a "realistic" fantasy, and all too often such stories become a race to the lowest, pimpley-est of adolescent common denominators, stuffed with blood, gore, swearing and sex. Mr Bakker's "Prince of Nothing" series springs to mind as a particular culprit. "The Blade Itself" neatly avoids these pitfalls. The charm of Mr Abercrombie's work is that he manages to wallow in the mud without getting dirty. He remembers fantasy is, above all, supposed to be fun.

Mr Abercrombie has a rare talent for sketching vivid personalities in just a few strokes. His characters may be more memorable than believable, but always sympathetic. Take Logen, for starters. You'll never have such a soft spot for such a hard lump of a man. He's lost his family, his friends and his axe – now all he has for company is a cooking pot. Mr Abercrombie deftly portrays him as a worn nub of a man, tired from years of fighting, who could still snap you in two if he had a mind to.

His fall from the cliff is not the end, and eventually he falls in with Bayaz, a man who claims to be the First of the Magi. Unlike most Wise Wizards, he's not much of a one for fireside wisdom and heartwarming homilies. Waving magic wands and speaking pig-Latin doesn't appear on his "To Do" list, either. The Darth Vader neck-crushing thing is more Bayaz's speed, when he's not making people spontaneously explode, like Tetsuo in "Akira".

Bayaz brings Logen to the city of Adua, the capital of a massive but decrepit, patchwork kingdom called the Union. There, they cross paths with Jezal dan Luthar, a dashing and dishy young swordsman callow to the point of almost mental incapacity, and Inquisitor Glokta, a torturer with unique insights into his job thanks to two years spent in the dungeons of the Union's enemies. He walks with a limp, climbs stairs with reluctance, is missing half his teeth but none of his wits. You feel sorry for him, when he's not cutting people's fingers off.

There are plenty of fingers in line for the chop, as the Union is beset by enemies within and without, real as well as imagined. People claiming to be powerful wizards go right to the top of the inquisition's Suspicious People list, and Glokta is put on the case of finding out whether the old man really is who he claims to be. In this, he's aided by two thuggish helpers, an ex-criminal and a giant, near-mute albino, who naturally gets one of the novel's best lines.

There also are a number of minor stories, each packed with equally quirky characters. The requisite Damsel in Distress is Ferro Maljinn, an escaped slave and, incidentally, a feral, evil spirit of a woman, madder than a pit bull on acid. When offered salvation, her first instinct is to stab her rescuer. Other interwoven lines follow dour Major West and his hard-drinking sister, and a band of northern outlaws with colorful names like Dogman and Threetrees.

As the first book of a trilogy, much of "The Blade Itself" is spent on stage-setting and world-building. You get the sense of forces gathering, like mountaineers under a snow shelf after someone says, "Atchoo". The aims and motives of the protagonists remain mostly shrouded, and the overarching mythology is revealed in teasingly brief glimpses. The action is therefore episodic rather than epic. Some readers may be put off by the slow plot development, but although small-scale, the fights are never less than electric in intensity. It all builds nicely to a climactic, crimson scene where we learn why Logen Ninefingers is also known as "The Bloody-Nine."

"The Blade Itself" is stripped-down fantasy, anarchic and endless fun to read, Monty Python does Conan the Barbarian, with Jason Bourne in the lead. It is not an Important Book, it won't change your life, just give you a few hours of genuine pleasure. You'll whimper, grunt, and perhaps even squeal with laughter. Then you'll go and buy the next book in the series.

Guilty on all Counts

TITLE: Previous Convictions
AUTHOR: AA Gill
PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster

RATING
5/5 "Espionage"; 4/5 "Treason"; 3/5 "Blasphemy"; 2/5 "Sedition"; 1/5 "Littering"
SCORE: 3/5

There comes a time in every love affair when the emotions finally release the optic nerves, letting you see your partner as they really are, when last night's date becomes this morning's hangover, when you stop locking the bathroom door and start cutting your toenails in front of one another. It's surviving that moment, more than any other test, that makes or breaks relationships.

That moment arrived for me and AA Gill about a third of the way into "Previous Convictions". I'll save you from skipping to the end: it turns out all right, we're still together, but it was a close-run thing.

Partially it was my fault. I was quick to overlook Mr Gill's faults. At first, I knew him only vaguely by reputation, as a witty and acerbic columnist for the UK's Sunday Times newspaper. The first book of his I read was "Angry Island", and I was hooked. The vitriol sometimes fell wide of the mark -- he seems to have a personal animus against the Welsh, for instance, which seems to be about as relevant as being against quilt-making or the color green. But he was always original, always fun to have around. His travel writing collection, "AA Gill is away", sealed the deal. It's like pumping ten thousand volts through your literary nerves, blowing all your preconceptions of what travel writing should be. I had it bad, as you can see.

"Previous Convictions" started out right. Oh sure, there was a bit of pretentiousness in his division of the articles into "Here" (the UK) and "There" (everywhere else). The first piece though, on the Glastonbury music festival, had me in hysterics. The high point arrives when the police attempt to escort away a naked, elderly woman noisily masturbating in front of the stage. "Come quietly, love".

But then, I started to notice the little things. How his heart really wasn't in it sometimes. The line about Africa waking up with such promise? That's from "AA Gill is away". The paean to India, ditto.

Sometimes, he was so self-indulgent, like he couldn't even be bothered trying. Like the article devoted entirely to a phone call to his 11-year-old son. Worse yet, he started throwing his own relationship in my face. Here's AA Gill and Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson in Texas. Here's AA Gill and "Jeremy" in Iraq, in Mykonos, in Amsterdam. Other than as showcases for Jeremy's asinine prejudices and Mr Gill's love of name-dropping, there's not much to recommend about any of these pieces.

I was almost in tears. The bastard, how he let me down. Then I went back, reread the better pieces, the middle stretch especially. Wait, the magic was still there. The piece on gold mining in South Africa, that's good, you get a real sense of the oppressive heat, the stifling dark, the hellish noise. His take on the essential loneliness and desperation of fitness clubs ("As close as most of us non-Hindus will ever get to knowing what it's like to be a hamster") has the disturbing ring of truth, his anger at the massacre in Darfur feels genuine (the book was pusblished in 2006, before Darfur became a cause celebre).

His bleak portrait of Haiti is timely given the recent earthquake, and a reminder that it will take more than money to get this basket-case country on its feet again. The trip to Peshawar, near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, is nicely balanced, a human look at the conflict that has dragged on through British, Russian and American occupations for over a century.

In short, "Previous Convictions" is patchy, baldingly uneven, but when Mr Gill gets it right, it shines. Brilliantly.

Sometimes you just have to close one eye, accept the other's faults, and learn to appreciate the good times. Luckily, in "Previous Convictions" there's still plenty of the latter. I just pray that's the last I've heard of Jeremy-bleeding-Clarkson.

Humanity 101

TITLE: Origin of the Species
AUTHOR: Nino Ricci
PUBLISHER: Doubleday Canada

RATING
5/5 "Rain man"; 4/5 "Gingerbread man"; 3/5 "Iron man"; 2/5 "Method man"; 1/5 "Piltdown man"
SCORE: 3/5

I'm not normally partial to romances. I mean, "happily ever after"? Yeah, and then what? This, though, is my kind of love story.

Love, sex: it all boils down to genetics, which when you think about it, boils down to sheer, dumb, blind luck. Primates' nearest cousins died out 50 million years ago. There's maybe one lucky mutation that separates a dead species from one whose descendents will be using opposable thumbs to text each other Tiger Woods gossip.

That's the rather bleak message at the heart of "Origin of the Species" by Canadian author Nino Ricci; life is random chance. Nobody better exemplifies this than Alex Fratarcangeli, an Italian-Canadian graduate student studying at Montreal's Concordia university. Alex drifts along, a passenger in his own life, carried by the currents and eddies of chance as they bring him bumping against fortune's flotsam and jetsam. These include Esther, a bubbly neighbour who sadly suffers from multiple sclerosis, Ingrid, a Swedish divorcee with unfortunate taste in men, Desmond, an unlucky British would-be researcher, Maria, an El Salvadorean refugee, a professor on the skids, a businessman with a disease -- Yes, there's plenty of dumb, stupid luck to go around.

There isn't much plot, but then that was Darwin's point as well; there's no grand plan, no script, no author, no guarantees other than a very final End.

Alex scrapes a living teaching English as a second language while trying to muster enough enthusiasm to finish his thesis on the biological origins of storytelling. Books, in other words, are just another way to propagate your genes -- to get people to have sex with you (fair warning: book reviewing, on the other hand, has no such power). Not that Alex needs any help in this department, despite his rather passive approach to life. The main branches from the main plot follow his disfunctional relationships with a raft of women, including Esther, Ingrid and Maria, as well as with Desmond and the others.

Without plot, you're left to fall back on character and setting, and this is where Mr Ricci's writing comes to life. Alex and his companions are not just believable, they're disturbingly familiar. You want to hate Alex, then catch part of him in your reflection. Ingrid, Esther and the others exist as fully-formed individuals, never mere ciphers or signposts. Each adapts to their environment, showing you different facets of thier personality, now a bullying tyrant, now a cringing supplicant. Only in Desmond, relentlessly awful and irritating, does Mr Ricci get carried into caricature.

"Origin of the Species" isn't a compelling story, but it's filled with compelling people. They pull you along in their wake, unwilling to let go so you can unravel their codes, see what makes them tick.

I said it was a love story, didn't I? And the object of desire is Canada. Canada in the 1980s, in Montreal, to be precise. American readers be warned; Mr Ricci expects you to keep up when he references Steinberg's, Pierre Trudeau and Peter Gzowski. "Origin of the Species" is brashly Canadian in exactly the way that Canadians aren't. It's like the Group of Seven, Canadians are always drawn to the land, even if it's seen from the windows of a coffee shop. The rush of names is overwhelming even for a Canadian, but you'll manage, you'll adapt. It's in your genes.

It's not always a fun read, but the love of place is part of what stops things from being completely gloomy. This may be all we have, but hey, isn't it something? We may be no more than genes, but you know, they're pretty good ones at that. There's the possibilty, not the promise, of happiness for those who fall in love. With the here and now.

And that's the kind of happy ending you can believe in.