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Going Solo by Roald Dahl (1986)

What a fortunate fellow I am, I kept telling myself. Nobody has ever had such a lovely time as this!
(Going Solo, page 92)

In my simplicity I had thought that Going Solo was an account of Roald Dahl’s time in the RAF in Africa; I hadn’t realised it is simply the continuation of his autobiography, which had begun with Boy: Tales from Childhood (1984), that it picks up precisely where that book ended, and that the RAF memoirs form only a part of the book.

To be precise, the text starts with Dahl setting off in 1938 at the age of 22 for his first job, a three-year contract with the Shell Oil company in East Africa. Little did he or anyone else know that the Second World War would break out only a year later and that Dahl would volunteer for, and be accepted into, the Royal Air Force.

The book therefore falls naturally into two halves: his experiences as a civilian in East Africa and the RAF period. This latter can itself be sub-divided into half a dozen or so parts:

  • training in Nairobi
  • more training in Iraq
  • his crash in the North African desert and the long hospitalisation and recovery which followed
  • fully recovered and returned to service for aerial combat in Greece
  • aerial combat over Vichy Syria

Before he becomes increasingly incapacitated by blinding headaches and is invalided home, arriving back at his mum’s house three years after he left, and that’s where the narrative ends.

I also hadn’t expected it to be a children’s book. Even Dahl’s ‘grown-up’ stories have an element of cartoon simplicity about them. They tend to be packed with eccentric characters who perform grotesque actions except that, in the ‘adult’ books, in the Tales of the Unexpected stories or a book like Uncle Oswald, these often involve sex. In this book there are, as you would expect, quite a few deaths, some pretty gruesome. And yet the same cartoon simplicity, the noticing of odd characters with silly names, the sense that situations and people are rounded and simple, is basically the same as he uses in his famous children’s books, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Twits and so on.

Thus the narrator of this book portrays himself as ‘a conventional young lad from the suburbs’ (p.3) and, in the Africa section especially, the main content focuses on the oddballs, eccentrics and freaks that he meets. This air of an innocent boy abroad in the crazy adult world is emphasised by two notable features of the text:

1. The way that each of the generally short chapters ends by including the text of one of the many, many letters he wrote home to his beloved Mother throughout the three year period, often repeating what we’ve just been told in the main text.

2. The photos. At various points Dahl tells us about cameras he’s bought (and which get stolen from him, as on a Greek airfield) and it’s clear he was a compulsive snapper. The book is liberally sprinkled with photos illustrating every step of his adventures, images which become increasingly dramatic when he sees action in Greece and which include photos of improvised airfields, crashed Messerschmitts and burned-out Hurricanes. The photos of him also bring out what a devilishly handsome young man he was, and freakishly tall, at a strapping six foot six.

Roald Dahl wearing flying helmet, goggles and scarf standing in front of a hedge

Roald Dahl aged 24 training to fly with the RAF in Nairobi

By ship to Tanganyika

In the opening chapters the narrator travels by ship, the SS Mantola, in the old, lazy style, across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea, but the focus isn’t on places and atmosphere or history. It is on the peculiar upper-class types who, back then, in the 1930s, ran the British Empire and were, without exception, ‘the craziest bunch of humans I shall ever meet’. There’s Major Griffiths and his wife who, every morning, run round the ship’s deck stark naked to keep fit; the elderly Miss Trefusis who eats fruit with a knife and fork so as to avoid the beastly germs on one’s fingers; Dahl’s cabin-mate, the improbably named U.N. Savory, manager of a cotton mill in the Punjab who, it turns out, is bald but wears a series of four wigs, each thicker and fuller than the one before, in order to give the impression his luxuriant black hair is growing, before its monthly trim, all to impress the Sikhs he employs.

  • On the SS Mantola just about everybody had his or her own particular maggot in the brain (p.3)
  • Everyone on this ship was dotty (p.12)
  • The man was as potty as a pilchard. (p.19)

These chaps and chapesses had generated a special lingo, a dialect incorporating numerous words from Swahili, Hindi and so on.

  • sundowner = evening drink
  • chota peg = drink at any other time of day
  • the memsahib = the wife
  • a shufti = a look around
  • shenzi = poor quality
  • tiffin = supper

Dahl arrives in Dar es Salaam, the Red Sea port of what was then Tanganyika and is now Tanzania, which he describes as made up of small white and yellow and pink buildings set on a sweeping bay of golden sand against luxuriant tropical jungle. Wow. Reminder that it is 1938, before the world was ruined by over-population, tourism and pollution. The whole book is like this, conveying a fairytale sense of wonder and joy at everything Dahl sees and everyone he meets, he is continually reflecting:

what a lucky young fellow I was to be seeing all these marvellous places free of charge and with a good job at the end of it. (p.23)

The clarity of his prose and the untroubled enthusiasm of his schoolboy mentality makes this an extremely enjoyable book to read. Coming from such a modest background he doesn’t feel any class entitlement to the wonders of the Empire but is continually amazed and astonished at it – precisely as a schoolboy traveller back in time from our day might be.

Working for Shell in Dar es Salaam

Thus he is amazed to discover the Shell office in Dar es Salaam is run by just three Englishmen but set in a grand villa with an astonishing cohort of native servants, a cook, a gardener, and a ‘boy’ each. He is a personal valet who looks after every aspect of your clothes and shoes and rooms etc, but in return you were expected to look after him, his wives (at least two) and children. Dahl’s ‘boy’ is Mdisho. Dahl describes how one day he saved their ‘shamba-boy’ Salimu from being bitten by a black mamba snake and thus secured his undying loyalty.

He gets to be driven all around Tanganyika, visiting Shell customers in a wide range of farms and businesses, and revelling in the scenery and the wildlife, which is described as a boy would describe the wonders of a zoo, for there are lions! and hippos! and elephants! and zebra! Apart from the snakes. Dahl hates snakes.

Oh, those snakes! How I hated them! (p.44)

He is taking a sundowner on the terrace of a district officer, Robert Sanford, and his wife when a servant comes running round the corner of the house yelling that a lion is carrying away the cook’s wife. Sanford grabs a gun and gives chase so we have the comic sight of the lion loping along with cook’s wife between his jaws, chased by the cook, chased at a distance by Sanford brandishing his rifle, followed by Dahl wondering what he’s doing. Sanford fires a shot into the ground ahead of the lion who turns round and, seeing all these humans chasing him, drops the cook’s wife and canters off into the jungle. The cook’s wife is perfectly unharmed and gets to her feet smiling, and the whole crew return to the house where another drink is served and the cook gets on with preparing dinner.

Can this possibly have happened? Surely not as pat and neatly as he describes. The book is like this all the way through, perceived, imagined and written in the style of a crisp, clean children’s book. But, regarding this particular story, he goes on to write that the story became a legend and he was eventually asked to write up his version for the local paper, the East African Standard which paid him £5, his first published work. So maybe it did happen.

But whereas events like this in the hands of, say, Hemingway would have become a gripping insight into the eternal contest between man and beast, or in the hands of Graham Greene would have had a much messier ending involving someone’s adultery and guilt – under Dahl’s light touch it becomes a neat children’s story with a happy ending.

War breaks out

After a few more colonial adventures (the main one featuring ‘the snake man’, i.e. a little old European who specialises in catching poisonous snakes as and when they enter people’s homes) the Second World War breaks out on page 66 of this 223-page edition i.e. about a third of the way through.

To Dahl’s horror, he is conscripted by the captain of the King’s African Regiment and put in charge of a platoon of native soldiers (‘askaris’), armed with rifles each and one machinegun. He tells us that, as it had originally been a German colony (‘German East Africa’) there are far more German citizens in Tanganyika than all other European nationalities put together, and the army officer expects that, as soon as war is declared, all the Germans will try to escape on the one road which heads south towards Portuguese East Africa (nowadays called Mozambique). Dahl is ordered to stop them, and send them back to Dar where the men will be interned in a camp for the duration and the women and children remain free.

So he heads south in a lorry full of askaris. Like so many inexperienced young officers he has to rely on the experience of his (black) sergeant, who tells him where to stop and how to set up a roadblock. They camp for the night and the platoon cook makes a delicious meal of boiled rice and bananas.

Next day they get a phone call telling them war has, indeed, been declared and later that morning a convoy of German citizens in cars and vans arrives at the roadblock. In this account the German men get out of their cars holding guns and a young inexperienced Dahl finds himself confronted by the bullish leader of the convoy who refuses to return. He tells his comrades to start dismantling the roadblock and points his gun directly at Dahl. At which point a single rifle shot rings out and the man’s head explodes, his body falling to the road like a puppet. Dahl’s askaris emerge from their hiding places and the civilians mutely put down their guns, get in their cars and turn round, to be escorted to the camp by his lorryload of native soldiers (pages 59 to 70).

The thing is, in a story Dahl wrote a decade earlier, Lucky Break (1977), the shooting doesn’t happen. The Germans meekly turn around and return to Dar. Is this later version the true, unabridged version of events? Or a deliberately more violent and garish version, reflecting the uninhibited nature of culture as a whole, which became steadily more interested in graphic violence from the 1970s onwards? Or an old man (Dahl was 70 when this memoir was published) enjoying giving his readers the shivers?

Dahl joins the RAF and trains

In December 1939 Dahl enrols in the RAF. His employer, Shell, release him and continue to pay his salary for the duration of his service (!).

Dahl gives a beautifully boyish description of the long solitary drive from Dar up to Nairobi in Kenya, stopping to marvel at giraffes and elephants.

At Nairobi he is quickly inducted and taught to fly a Tiger Moth, which you started by swinging the big wooden propeller by hand, making sure not to topple forwards because then it would chop your head off. The text radiates boyish glee in the macabre and violent.

How many young men, I kept telling myself, were lucky enough to be allowed to go whizzing and soaring through the sky above a country as beautiful as Kenya? (p.90)

Once he can fly he is sent by train to Kampala, flown to Cairo, which was lovely, and then on to Habbaniya in Iraq, ‘the most godforsaken hellhole in the whole world’ (p.94) where he spends six months, from 20 February to 20 August 1940 (p.98) training in Hawker Harts.

Finally he ‘gets his wings’ and is transferred to RAF Ismailia on the Suez Canal, and posted to 80 Squadron, who were flying Gladiators against the Italians in the Western Desert of Libya. He is boyishly fascinated by the way the Gladiator’s two fixed machineguns fire bullets through a propeller rotating at thousands of times per minute (p.99).

He is stunned to be told no-one is going to show him either how to fly a Gladiator nor anything at all about aerial combat. He’s just going to be plonked in one and given the map co-ordinates of 80 Squadron and told to make his way there by himself. Here he makes the first of what become many comments and criticisms about the RAF and army’s lack of imagination and planning.

There is no question that we were flung in at the deep end, totally unprepared for actual fighting in the air, and that, in my opinion, accounted for the very great losses of young pilots that we suffered out there. (p.101)

He crashes

Dahl is at pains to point out that, although it was reported in the press that he was shot down by enemy planes, this was propaganda cooked up to make the incident sound patriotic.

On 19 September Dahl was ordered to fly his new Gladiator from RAF Abu Suweir on the Suez Canal to join 80 Squadron in the Western Desert. He refuelled at Amariya near Alexandria and flew on to Fouka. It is mind-boggling to learn that he had no radio and only a map strapped to his knee for guidance. The CO at Fouka gave him the co-ordinates of his final destination, the current 80 Squadron base, and he set off. But it wasn’t there. He flew up and down and round and round looking for it, as the desert dusk drew in and he ran short of fuel. He realised he had to make an emergency landing, tried to find a flat long stretch of desert and took the Gladiator down.

The plane hit a boulder at about 75 miles an hour. He regained consciousness to discover his nose was smashed, his skull fractured, he’d lost a few teeth and he couldn’t see. In one of the most vivid parts of the book, he describes the incredibly lethargy he felt, he just wanted to sleep, but the plane was on fire and eventually the scorching heat persuaded him to undo his straps and reluctantly leave the nice cosy cockpit and crawl onto the sand. Here he just wanted to curl up and sleep but, again, the fierce heat persuaded him reluctantly to crawl away towards the cool desert night.

Later he discovered the area he crashed in was no man’s land between the Italian and British front lines and that three brave British soldiers ventured out after nightfall to check the wreckage and were surprised to find the pilot had survived. They carried him back to British lines and thence began the long, complicated journey back to hospital in Alexandria.

Anglo-Swiss Hospital, Alexandria

In his clear, boyish style, Dahl vividly describes his prolonged hospital treatment. He spends around six months recovering from his injuries, under the care of the hospital staff, in particular nurse Mary Welland whose gentle ministrations to the swollen flesh around his eyes is calming and reassuring. He has various operations, including an adventure with a spanking new anaesthetic, sodium pentathol, which turns out not to work at all (pages 112 to 116).

Then one day, as Mary is laving his swollen eyes, one opens a crack and light floods in. For six weeks he had been blind, his other senses heightened. The return of light is a revelation (pages 118 to 122).

Dahl was discharged from hospital in February 1941, five months after he was admitted, and goes to stay with a wealthy English family in Cairo, the Peels.

When he reports to RAF Ismailia he is told 80 Squadron are now in Greece, and are no longer flying Gladiators, but Mark I Hurricanes. Once again he is thrown in the deep end, given just two days solo practice, the first time he’d flown a modern, super-speedy plane, the first plane with retractable undercarriage, with wing flaps, with a variable pitch propeller, with machineguns in the wings, that he’s ever flown.

Two days to teach himself then he’s ordered to fly solo across the Med to Greece. The Flight-Lieutenant tells him they’re fitting it with extra fuel tanks, but if the pump doesn’t work, he’ll run out and be forced to ditch in the sea. Then swim home.

Fighting in Greece

As soon as he lands his Hurricane at Elevsis airfield near Athens, the ground crew set him straight about the parlous situation. The entire RAF has just 15 Hurricanes and four clapped-out Blenheims. Dahl explains the background: the Italians invaded Greece in October 1940 but ran into unexpected resistance. The British government took a vital slice of Field-Marshall Wavell’s Eighth Army and planes and sent them to Greece in March 1941. When it was just the Italians to hold off, this was fine. But on 6 April 1941 the Germans invaded and began a steady advance which was to bring them to Athens just three weeks later on 27 April. The German Luftwaffe outnumbered the measly little RAF outfit by anything up to 100 to 1.

So Dahl had flown into an utterly hopeless situation, and the pilots and ground crew let him know it straightaway. Sending British forces to Greece had been a colossal miscalculation. Now the best that could be hoped for was managing their withdrawal. It was like Dunkirk but was being hushed up in the press.

Dahl immediately made friends with David Coke, in line to inherit the title Earl of Leicester, who is appalled to learn that Dahl has absolutely no idea about air combat whatsoever. Over a couple of pages he fills Dahl (and the reader) in on the basics.

There follow a sequence of absolutely thrilling and terrifying descriptions of aerial warfare. On his first flight he takes on a pack of 6 Junker 88s, apparently downing one but making every mistake in the book. The Squadron CO barely looks up when he tells him. Every day more men and planes are being lost. In the small ‘mess’ there are no friendships, people don’t talk. They are all alone with their thoughts, convinced they will all die within days.

Next day he tries to defend a British ammunition ship from attack, engaging with Stukas and being chased by what he says felt like 30 or so Messerschmitts to avoid which he descends right down to tree level, then fence level, terrifyingly dangerous. Did this actually happen or is the professional author in Dahl giving the reader a thrill for their money? It’s noticeable how many times he directly addresses the reader, as if in one of his children’s books:

You may not believe it but I can remember having literally to lift my plane just a tiny fraction to clear a stone wall, and once there was a herd of brown cows in front of me and I’m not sure I didn’t clip some of their horns with my propeller as I skimmed over them. (p.153)

There follows a chapter packed with incident as he details the four consecutive days leading up to the Battle of Athens:

  • 17 April he went up 3 times
  • 18 April went up twice
  • 19 April went up 3 times
  • 20 April went up 4 times

They try to defend ships in Piraeus harbour from German bombers. On 20th the entire squadron of 12 Hurricanes is sent up to fly over Athens to try and bolster morale, led by legendary air ace Flight-Lieutenant Pat Pattle, but of course the Germans send hundreds of Messerchmitts after them and it turns into a mad bloodbath. His description of the intensity of split second perceptions required continually is amazing.

Dahl survives but five of the 12 Hurricanes were lost. After he lands he finds he is drenched in sweat. His hands are shaking too much to light a cigarette. He has stripped and is washing alongside his friend David when the airfield is strafed by Me 109s.

Amazingly all seven planes survive and the Messerschmitts don’t return, probably expecting the little airfield to be heavily defended, not knowing it is only protected by one measly Bofors gun.

Next thing Dahl and the other 6 are ordered to fly to a new landing strip along the coast, near Megara. The existing ground crew will decamp with all tents etc that evening. Next morning the seven pilots awaken to a camp stripped almost bare. There’s no mess tent, no cooks, no food. As dawn breaks they climb into their planes, assemble at 1,000 feet and fly down the coast to Megara.

They land in a field which has been rolled flat. There is absolutely no-one else about. They wheel the planes into the cover of olive trees and climb a ridge from where they can see the sea. There’s a large oil tanker 500 yards out. They watch as Stukas dive bomb it, blow it into a fireball, and watch as the crew leap off into the flaming water and are roasted alive (pages 174 to 175).

The ground crew and other ancillaries arrive in lorries and set up tents. Again the pilots ask why the devil they’re not being sent straight to Egypt. They conclude it’s so that propagandists/the Press/the government can claim that the RAF stayed till the bitter end to protect ‘our troops’. Words like ‘mess’, ‘balls-up’, ‘muddle headed’, ‘incompetent’, ‘terrific cock-up’ sprinkle the text. The Commanding Officer unhappily tells them they have to stay.

A flight of Messerschmitts flies over. Their new base has been rumbled. They calculate they have an hour and a half before a bombing raid returns but the commanding officer idiotically refuses to let them take off and be prepared. Instead they must wait till 6pm on the dot and then fly off to cover the evacuation of troops. a) this gives the Germans exactly the right amount of time to return and shoot up the new airbase, killing one pilot in his plane as it is taking off and b) when they get to the location where they’re told they’re meant to be protecting the troops, there’s nothing there: no troops, no ships. In actuality the troops were being disembarked down the coast at Kalamata where they were being massacred by Ju 88s and Stukas. Another complete cock-up.

When they return from this pointless errand they find the new landing base has indeed been heavily bombed and have to land in smoke. In a hurry the Adjutant finally orders five other pilots to fly the five remaining Hurricanes to Crete, all other pilots to take a lorry and cram into a de Havillande Rapide. This includes Dahl. He carries his Log Book and crams in next to his buddy David.

Two hours later they land in the Western Desert and catch a truck back to Alexandria where the superbly well-mannered Major Peel and his wife immediately put their entire mansion at the disposal of nine filthy, hungry, smelly, penniless pilots.

‘The whole thing was a cock-up,’ someone said.
‘I think it was,’ Bobby Peel said. ‘We should never have gone to Greece at all.’ (p.195)

Although whether Bobby Peel actually said that, or even existed, is a moot point, given the neat roundedness of so many of the facts and anecdotes in this account.

So what comes over very powerfully indeed is the stupidity and futility of the short-lived British expedition to Greece. On the last page of this section Dahl gives his opinion straight, which is that diverting troops and planes from the African desert to Greece fatally weakened the Eighth Army and condemned it to years of defeats against the Germans under Rommel who at one stage threatened Cairo and thus the entire Middle East. It took two years for the British Army’s strength to be rebuilt sufficiently for them to drive Rommel and the Italians back into Tunisia and ultimately win the war in the desert.

Fighting in Syria

Lebanon and Syria were French colonies. When the Vichy government came to power in France, the French forces in Lebanon and Syria switched to the Vichy side and became fanatically pro-German and anti-British. They could obviously provide beachheads for the Germans to land in the Middle East and so threaten a) our oil supplies from Iraq b) the Suez Canal, our gateway to India (and large numbers of Indian troops). Which is why there was a bitter and hard-fought battle for control of Lebanon and Syria which pitched British, Australian and South African forces against the Vichy French.

In May 1941 80 Squadron were redeployed to Haifa in northern Palestine. They consisted of 9 pilots and Hurricanes and their task was to protect the Royal Navy as it pounded Lebanon’s ports. Dahl briefly describes a series of run-of-the-mill sorties, during which 4 of the 9 pilots were killed.

He spends much more time describing a solo mission he was sent on, to go, land and reconnoitre a satellite landing field 30 miles away. Here he discover a strip of land which has been flattened but has absolutely no other facilities whatsoever. It is ‘manned’ by one tall old man and a surprising legion of children.

It’s a peculiar scene, whose sole point is that the old man and the children are Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. Dahl goes out of his way to demonstrate his naivety on the Jewish Question, and emphasises that he has been totally out of touch with European news for 2 years, and so simply doesn’t know about the escalating Nazi attacks on Jews (p.208). Which explains why he doesn’t understand what the man means when he says that he and the children are refugees, and really doesn’t understand it when the man says this is his country. What, you’re going to become a Palestinian, asks Dahl in his naivety. But the man is clearly a Zionist, clearly a believer that the Jews have a right to a homeland the same as every other nation on earth, and clearly believes that he and his comrades are going to build that homeland right here, in Palestine. Dahl is ‘flabbergasted’ at his attitude and, maybe, this is a good indicator of the lack of understanding of many British people and armed forces during and immediately after the war, as the Jews’ struggle to establish the homeland of Israel reached its climax.

Demobilised and return to England

Dahl continues dutifully flying missions from the Haifa base but during the month of June 1941 begins to suffer increasingly intense headaches, including ones which lead him to black out. The base medical officer reads his history, particularly the fractured skull from his crash, and orders him to cease flying. He is demobilised, takes a bus back to Cairo, catches a luxury liner to South Africa, then a troop ship which makes the perilous journey up the west coast of Africa, threatened by enemy planes but especially U-boats, eventually docking in Liverpool.

From here he makes phone calls to relatives and discovers his mother’s house in Kent was bombed out and so she’s bought a cottage in rural Buckinghamshire. It’s worth reminding that every few pages of this text includes excerpts from the letters he wrote to his mother regularly as clockwork throughout this period. Cumulatively, these convey a very close bond between mother and son. He catches a train to London, stays overnight at a relative’s place in Hampstead, then catches a train and a bus to his mother’s village, steps down from the bus and into his mother’s waiting arms, and it is with this moment that this exciting, eye-opening, boyish and fresh-faced memoir comes to a dead halt.

Credit

Going Solo by Roald Dahl was published by Jonathan Cape in 1986. All references are to the 2018 Centenary Collection Penguin paperback edition.

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Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen (1995)

Nothing in her modest criminal part had prepared her for the hazy and menacing vibe of the hurricane zone. Everyone was on edge; evil, violence and paranoia ripened in the shadows.
(Stormy Weather, page 107)

Stormy Weather is Carl Hiaasen’s sixth novel. It is longer than usual, at 472 pages, and it feels decisively more nihilistic and misanthropic than its predecessors. Boy, is it full of scumbags and sleazeballs!

Just like its predecessors, Stormy Weather rotates around a central theme, in this case the impact of a big hurricane on South Florida (the setting for all Carl Hiaasen’s novels), from which all kinds of other topics and issues spin in gleeful riot.

Actually, I was hoping for some grand set-piece description of a hurricane but the storm itself is strangely absent. The hurricane happens off-stage, as it were, and has been and gone by page 30. What the text consists of is the adventures of a larger-than-usual cast of miscellaneous characters, often lowlife, often criminal, across the comprehensively devastated and trashed South Florida landscape after the hurricane has hit.

In the darkness, she couldn’t see Augustine’s expression. ‘It’s madness out here,’ he said. (p.51)

In most of the previous novels there’s been not only a central theme but a central crime or scam, which then spawns further crimes in a bid to cover it up (I’m thinking in particular of Skin Tight though the same structure informs his most recent book, Squeeze Me) and these subsidiary crimes ramify out into a luxurious growth of garish characters and grotesque incidents.

Stormy Weather feels like a distinct development or offshoot of the basic pattern, in that there is no central crime or scam: instead Hiaasen’s lowlifes and criminals roam across a devastated landscape, meeting, mingling, scamming and attacking each other at will. It reminds me a bit of the late Elizabethan epic poem, The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser (1596). In each of the first two books of the poem one central knight undertakes one clearly defined quest and the reader knows what the themes and issues are. But in books 3 and 4 Spenser lets go this format, relaxes and introduces a fleet of knights and squires and monsters and enemies and lets them roam, apparently at random, across his fairie landscape, characters from one storyline unexpectedly popping up in another character’s story, or disappearing without explanation.

That’s exactly the sense of expertly controlled narrative chaos you get from this novel. And it is, as a narrative structure, of course, entirely appropriate to, and mimics, the main theme of post-hurricane chaos.

Characters

Chief among the characters is our old friend Skink, aka Clinton Tyree, the former governor of Florida-turned-environmental vigilante who’s featured in most of the previous stories (full backstory on pages 142 to 146). Skink catches two students chucking empty beer cans over the side of the Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys and terrifies them into tying him to the guardrail of the bridge so he can experience the full awesomeness of the hurricane’s primal energy. Skink, we are told, has spent the years since he quit as governor on:

a solemn hermitage interrupted by the occasional righteous arson, aggravated battery or highway sniping. (p.146)

Max and Bonnie Lamb are on a week-long honeymoon in Florida but Max (a junior account executive at a New York advertising company named Rodale & Burns) angers his new wife by cancelling their planned trip to Disney World in order to tour the hurricane ruins with a videocamera, even interviewing families shivering outside their utterly wrecked and flattened houses, speculating that he might be able to sell the footage to cable TV. Bonnie realises with a thump that she’s married a heartless schmo.

Edie Marsh is a typical Hiaasen lowlife. Before the hurricane she had been cruising Miami bars determined to hook up with a member of the famous Kennedy clan and marry rich. To her own surprise she does indeed manages to be wined and dined by a minor Kennedy one evening, but completely fails to seduce him. Instead, she finds herself teamed up with ‘Snapper‘ (real name Lester Maddox Parsons, p.386, full backstory, including his upbringing in a Ku Klux Klan family! pages 132 to 133) and, along with him, fakes a scene in which she appears to have been trapped and pinioned under a falling house in order to defraud an insurance company.

They’ve chosen one of a huge estate of houses which were completely flattened by the storm, on the recommendation of a crooked housing inspector they know, Avila, under which to pretend to have been injured. Unfortunately, they’ve picked the house next to Tony Torres, greasy scumbag ‘salesman of the year’ for a company called A-Plus Affordable Homes. Tony won the award for selling hundreds of flimsy trailers which blew away in the first strong wind, producing a cohort of very angry customers. The address Edie and Snapper have chosen is 15600 Calusa and it is destined to become the central location of the novel.

Anyway, at this early point of the story Tony sees through Snapper and Edie’s scam in moments. He’s a no-nonsense hardcase and makes them come and sit in the ruins of his house at gunpoint while he figures out what to do with them. He has two dachshund pets, Donald and Marla.

In other words, a lot of the characters are already two-timing scumbags, even before a big natural disaster like this brings out the worst in people. As Tony Torres says:

‘Because of the hurricane. The whole place is a madhouse!’ (p.31)

Augustine Mojack had just inherited his uncle’s failing wildlife import business when the hurricane hit. Augustine is 32 and independently wealthy. He doesn’t have to work because of the big insurance settlement he received after a boating accident. Augustine’s hobby is juggling skulls (an image picked up on the book’s cover art), medical skulls from hospitals or medical shops. He can juggle up to five at a time. He harbours fantasies of performing some big destructive spectacular theatrical event, though he doesn’t know what.

But the important thing about Augustine is he has just inherited a wildlife import business from his recently deceased uncle. When the storm hits, it devastates the animal compound and cages, releasing a bear, a Cape water buffalo, a cougar, a lion, miscellaneous snakes and lizards, and a bunch of monkeys into the wild.

Ira Jackson is a tough guy from New York (‘a stocky middle-aged stranger with a chopped haircut [and] a gold chain round his neck’, p.210). The mobile home belonging to Ira’s mother, Beatrice Jackson, was blown into fragments and she was killed by a flying barbecue from next door. Unfortunately, Ira remembers the name of the sleazy fat man who sold his mother the trailer and it only takes a phone call to the city records for him to find the address and come looking for… Tony Torres.

Long story short: Jackson finds Edie at Torres’s place, tells her to take a walk, then knocks Torres unconscious, drives him to a remote plot and nails him to an eight-foot satellite dish in the crucifixion position, impaling his body on the central node. Most Hiaasen novels have one or a few central gruesome and macabre incidents or images. Well this is it: a crooked homes salesman crucified to a huge satellite TV dish!

Plot developments

Max Lamb is in the middle of filming yet another distraught home owner in the wreckage of their house when a small monkey darts out of nowhere and attacks him, scratching his face before seizing his camera and scampering off. Max gives chase and is kidnapped by Skink. Skink had enjoyed being tied to the bridge during the storm but it wasn’t as totally awesome as he had hoped. Now he is going seriously off-piste, as indicated by the fact he has taken to smoking toad sweat, which is amusingly referred to as generating ‘Bufo madness’ (p.270).

Skink said, ‘Care for some toad?’ (p.170)

Skink fits an electric shock collar (a Tri-Tronics dog collar) around Max’s neck, tramps him out of suburbia, through woods to a waterway, forces him into a boat, takes him out to an Indian camp in the Everglades and subjects him to various humiliations, all the time asking what he’s doing, the pretentious New York jackass, coming down here to Florida, knowing nothing about the place or people or making any effort to learn etc? Over the coming days we watch as Skink, by repeatedly shocking Max, manages to train him, to make him as obedient as a dog.

Now abandoned, Bonnie Lamb is rescued by Augustine who is out in his car looking for his escaped animals and carrying a tranquiliser dart gun. In all Hiaasen’s novels there is generally one more or less normal, reasonably good guy, strong and capable. Augustine plays that role in this novel. When we see Augustine through Bonnie’s eyes, he is tall, square-shouldered and handsome. Rather gorge, in fact.

Just a reminder of Hiaasen’s good guys:

  1. Tourist Season – Brian Keyes, private eye, former journalist
  2. Double Whammy – R.J. Decker, private eye, former newspaper photographer
  3. Skin Tight – Mick Stranahan, private eye
  4. Native Tongue – Joe Winder, reluctant PR man, former reporter
  5. Strip Tease – the central figure is probably Erin the stripper, with the good guy role divided between Shad the bouncer and the recurring character, Miami homicide detective Al García

Over the coming days Augustine helps Bonnie try to find her husband, a quest which involves several trips to the city morgue which seem pretty peripheral to the ‘plot’ but give the reader an insight into what a big city American morgue looks and smells like, and a cross-section of corpses each coming with a particularly fruity backstory.

Since Skink periodically allows Max to use payphones (reminding us that this is all set years before the advent of mobile phones) he is able to leave messages on the couple’s answerphone in New York. When Bonnie rings the number, she gets Max’s messages saying he’s OK, but she is distraught and then disgusted to realise he is much more concerned about his work, about the fate of the advertising accounts he’s managing, than he is about her wellbeing or feelings.

As you might have predicted, slowly Bonnie falls for strong, well-armed Augustine, who every night takes her back to his place. He doesn’t lay a finger on her; it is entirely her choice when she chooses to snuggle up in his bed for comfort and then, a couple of nights later, to sleep with him.

Meanwhile, when Edie returns to Torres’ house (remember how Ira Jackson had shooed her away at gunpoint) to find him gone so she sets up base there, it’s as good as anywhere else.

Along comes Fred Dove, an insurance assessor (thousands of them are by now swarming all over the wrecked territory). At first she tries to con Dove into believing she’s Torres’ wife, hoping to get the full $141,000 which she discovers is the payout for Torres’ wrecked house. Unfortunately, Dove finds a wedding photo of Torres amid the wreckage which clearly shows that Torres’ wife was a petite but well-endowed Latina, not Edie. Edie immediately switches tack, makes schoolgirl eyes, apologises, bursts into tears, grabs Dove’s hand and kisses it and manages to seduce him on Torres’ (very uncomfortable) lounger. Having shagged him, Edie now ties him into her plan to defraud the insurance company and split the proceeds. Dove is understandably reluctant and scared of breaking the law, but also ‘pussy whipped’ (definition: ‘dominated or controlled by a woman – typically used of a man’).

A day or so earlier, Edie’s partner, Snapper, had gone on an exploration and fallen in with a bunch of crooked roof repairers organised by Avila the crooked standards inspector. In fact, this little crew know nothing about repairing roofs but realise they can gouge cash deposits from desperate home owners, promise to come back, then disappear with the loot. Snapper has a lucky break when he finds himself selling the crew’s dodgy services to the ditzy woman owner of a big luxury house now minus a roof, Mrs Whitmark, who is only too willing to hand over $7,000 in cash (p.150). With typical deception, he hides this from his fellow scammers when he gets back to the truck where they’re waiting, keeping the cash for himself.

When the woman’s husband, Gar Whitfield, returns and discovers what his wife has done, he is livid. Turns out he is himself a property developer and not only knows Avila but has actively been bribing him, with money, booze and porn to give legal approval to the sub-standard housing Whitefiled has been putting up for years.

So Gar Whitfield rings up Avila and tells him he has enough dirt on him to have him arrested the same day and in prison by nightfall, and has the clout to make sure Avila is put in the same cell as Paul Pick-Percy, a famous cannibal, unless he a) repays the seven grand b) pays for the actual repair of Whitfield’s roof.

This little vignette is a good example of the way Hiaasen depicts corruption within corruption, scumbaggery within scumbaggery. Everyone is corrupt. Everyone is deceiving each other.

What a cold shitty world, thought Avila. There was no such thing as a friendly favour any more; everybody had their greedy paws out. (p.276)

On the plus side, also making a reappearance is Skink’s good fairy, Highway Patrolman Jim Tile, the only black man on the force and the routine target of all kinds of racist abuse from redneck drivers and his own cracker colleagues. In this novel we watch Jim form a relationship with a fellow (white) woman police officer, Brenda Rourke. Unfortunately for her, we then see her try to arrest Snapper, who is ‘one mean motherfucker’ (p.200) and beats the crap out of her. When Jim Tile is called to the scene he is devastated to see his battered girlfriend and vows revenge. A landscape of corruption, theft, embezzlement and extreme violence.

Backstories

I really like the way Hiaasen creates and positions backstories for the characters, not when they’re first introduced but scattered cleverly throughout the text. These backstory interludes break up the flow of the narrative in a very enjoyable way as the forward engine of events is put on hold while we get 2 or 3 pages about the childhood, upbringing and previous adventures of various characters.

It helps that these potted biographies are themselves often every bit as florid and entertaining as the narrative itself, for example the detailed description of Snapper’s upbringing in a household of devoted Ku Klux Klan members is worth reading in and of itself for its sheer amazeballs. Other backstories include:

  • Snapper pp.132 to 134
  • Skink pp.142 to 146
  • Bonnie Brooks pp.216 to 219
  • how Avila and Snapper met at a brothel p.264
  • how Snapper shot his drug dealer partner Sunny Shea p.386

More plot developments

After crucifying Tony Torres, Ira Jackson discovers that he doesn’t really feel much better, so decides to go after the next person responsible for his mother’s death, the crooked building inspector, Avila, who he again tracks down from city records.

Ira kidnaps Avila and gets him to confess that he didn’t even inspect the trailer homes Jackson’s mother lived in, but ‘passed’ them after being paid a hefty bribe by the builders. Then Ira sets about crucifying Avila, too. He knocks up a makeshift crucifix nailed to a half-destroyed pine tree and tapes Avila’s wrists and ankles to it. He hammers a nail into Avila’s right hand and the latter faints but when he comes round he realises a) he’s alive b) he’s not in agony. He opens his eyes and sees a lion, a lion!!! finishing off Jackson. (The reader realises this is one of the animals who’ve escaped from Augustine’s wildlife centre). The lion has eaten half of Ira. There are bones scattered around and tatters of clothing. Avila freezes and watches the lion as it finishes its Ira Jackson meal, snuggles down and falls asleep. Then very, very slowly Avila unwraps the tape, frees his nailed hand and sneaks off.

Being Hiaasen, having a character eaten by a lion isn’t quite enough. Avila is a devotee of Santería, the Cuban voodoo religion and, as he tiptoes past the snoring lion, he bends down to retrieve one of the wet and glistening bones of what was once Ira Jackson. You never know. Might come in handy in one of Avila’s Santería rituals.

Skink motorboats Max Lamb out to a wooden house on stilts in the part of Biscayne Bay known as Stiltsville. He’s arranged a rendezvous here with Bonnie and Augustine. The encounter is suitably bizarre and surreal, Skink takes off Max’s electric collar and calmly hands him over but announces that he wants to spend some time with Bonnie who is intrigued but not scared byt Skink’s grotesque appearance but calm and polite manner. However, Augustine shoots Skink with the tranquiliser dart gun he’s been carrying round everywhere. Bonnie and Augustine had previously hooked up with Trooper Jim Tile who now supervises them taking tranquilised Skink back to the mainland and helping him recover.

Tile is conflicted. He knows he should arrest Skink for kidnapping Max, but will only do so if Max presses charges. But in the weird, post-hurricane atmosphere, Max realises he’s in more of a hurry just to get back to New York and his job than get involved in a prosecution.

Thus as soon as he can, Max showers, puts on clean clothes and flies back to New York. Bonnie says she feels too ill to accompany him, promises that she’ll catch the next plane. Of course she doesn’t, she misses the next flight, then the one after that, as she falls more and more deeply in love with Augustine. Eventually they sleep together.

The Max-kidnap storyline has run its course. The reader had been in suspense over how it would pan out, and now we know: it ends with a relatively peaceful handover and Skink being brought back into civilisation.

It is replaced as the main motor of the narrative by Our Gang (Jim Tile, Bonnie, Augustine and Skink) setting out to track down whoever it was who savagely beat Brenda. The Max Kidnapping has been replaced by The Brenda Beater Quest. We readers know it was the vile scumbag Snapper. (This creation of an alliance of the good guys, featuring solid Jim Tile and wacky but effective Skink, who then set out to get to the bottom of a crime or mystery, is the characteristic narrative shape of many of the novels.)

While Our Gang is meticulously tracing the stolen car in which the scumbag was riding who beat her up (Brenda remembers its number plate), the narrative cuts away to the further adventures of Edie and Snapper. The central idea is that Edie is now routinely shagging and blowing weak-willed insurance assessor Fred Dove with a view to getting hold of dead Tony Torres’s house insurance. But their plans are complicated by three developments:

1. Fred Dove alerts them to the fact that his supervisor from the insurance company is paying a visit to check on things. Thus Snapper and Edi (who are by this point at daggers drawn; he has tied her up and kicked her in the head, she managed to get free and smashed his knee with a tyre lever; it’s a very uneasy, violent ‘partnership’) are going to have to pretend to be Tony Torres and his loving wife for the duration of the visit. Comic potential.

2. Out of the blue a 71-year-old named Levon Stichler arrives to wreak vengeance on Tony Torres who sold him a crap mobile home which blew away in the storm. He mistakenly goes for Snapper, thinking the latter is Torres. He fails and Snapper beats old man Stichler very badly indeed.

3. Just after that happens, Tony Torres’s real wife, Neria, arrives, having made numerous bewildered phone calls from Eugene, Oregon (the couple are, of course, divorced) where she lives with her lover, Charles Gabler, a professor of parapsychology. Just to enhance the scumbag quotient this fraudulent professor and exponent of crystals and auras and chakras and so on, had insisted they bring along one of his graduate students, big-breasted Celeste, for the ride to Florida, and Neria kicks him out of the VW camper van when she discovers him screwing the bosomy student.

All this takes place while Our Gang – Skink, Augustine and Bonnie – manage to track down the stolen truck from which Brenda was attacked to outside Torres’s house. They park themselves in a nearby wrecked house and watch the comings and goings listed in 1 to 3, trying to figure who’s who and what the devil is going on.

Journey to the Keys

Rather randomly the action then shifts to the Florida Keys. This is predominantly because Snapper has developed a mad, drug-addled plan to drive a hundred miles south in the stolen Jeep Cherokee he’s been driving, to stay at a motel whose owner owes him some favours, and photograph old Levon in compromising positions with a couple of local hookers Snapper knows (that’s how he knows Avila, they had a double date with these two hookers back in the day), and so blackmail Levon into keeping his mouth shut.

This seems improbably complicated – surely just shooting Levon dead would be more Snapper’s style. But then there’s an unexpected twist. At one point Augustine leaves the house where Our Gang are hiding out and spying on events at the wrecked Torres place, and no sooner has he left than Skink amazes Bonnie by simply walking out of their hiding place and walking bold as brass over to the Jeep Cherokee just as Snapper and and Edie are loading the body of Levon Stichler into it (still alive but gagged and wrapped in a carpet).

Bonnie doesn’t know what to do so goes running after him. Inevitably, Snapper, initially fazed by this strange visitation, simply points his gun and tells them both to get in the Jeep Cherokee and, within a minute, this unlikely foursome (Snapper, Edie, Skink and Bonnie, plus Levon in the boot) are heading south on Highway 1, then crossing the Card Sound Bridge (the very same one which Skink had himself tied to at the start of the story).

Snapper behaves like a pig all the way down, threatening Edie with the gun, a .357, pulling her hair, pushing the gun painfully deep into her breast, getting surly on painkillers and Jack Daniels, as Edie drives them all south. Skink is content to let it all happen but in several key exchanges confirms beyond doubt that it was Snapper who brutally beat up Brenda (and stole her mother’s wedding ring, which she had been wearing on her finger, into the bargain).

Anyway, through devious plot developments, both Avila and Trooper Jim Tile and Augustine also make their separate ways after the bad guys’ Jeep Cherokee. Why? Avila wants to find Snapper so he can pay him back for pocketing the cash from Gar Whiteside’s wife without telling anyone else in Avila’s little roofer scam. Jim Tile sets off in pursuit because his investigations have led him to suspect Snapper is the man who beat up his girlfriend (something the reader has known all along). And Augustine is after them because he is now in love with Bonnie, and was part of the trio staking out Torres’s house till he snuck off to do a chore and, returning, discovered Skink and Bonnie gone.

(By the way, the Jeep is relatively for the other characters to identify since its mudguards have distinctive painted decals, easily spotted from a distance and confirmed closer up.)

Anyway, the novel rushes towards a farcical climax as all these characters pitch up at the ironically named ‘Paradise Palms’ motel (but then anywhere in Florida with a nice name becomes ironic merely by included in a novel by a novelist who believes Florida is a cesspit of unprecedented human corruption) in the middle of a hot, humid tropical rainstorm.

1. Avila

First incident in the brutal climax is Avila angrily chases Snapper round the car park yelling that he wants his seven grand back. Snapper hands Edie the .357 (why doesn’t she throw it away?) before turning the tables and chasing after Avila. Snapper chases Avila for quite a distance along a rain-drenched highway till they reach a bridge and, as Snapper raises the axle of some trailer over his head to whomp him, Avila jumps over the edge and into the water. The current carries him away. He takes off shoes and clothes and bobs into a block of plywood. He’s clinging to it at dawn when he’s picked up by the coastguard, given clean clothes, a coffee and taken onshore to Immigration control. Suddenly, surrounded by immigration officials who think he’s just another illegal immigrant, Avila realises that, rather than go home to face the wrath of his wife and mother-in-law and Gar Whiteside, what the hell, maybe he should just let himself be ‘repatriated’ to Cuba and start a new life there.

2. Jim Tile

Trooper Jim Tile has followed the Snapper and Edie’s Jeep Cherokee all the way south. Now he parks aslant the entrance to the car park and walks towards the car. Now, when Snapper had been off chasing Avila, Edie, sick to death of the situation had offered to hand the .357 with its 2 remaining bullets over to Skink but the latter, in his perverse way, had refused and Snapper had snatched it back when he eventually loomed back out of the pouring rain having seen Avila jump off the bridge. Seems like a terrible mistake.

Now, as Jim walks towards the Jeep, Snapper winds down the window and shoots Jim smack in the chest, the trooper going over backwards. This really upset me. Earlier Snapper had shown everyone the ring he had yanked off Brenda’s finger and had casually thrown it into a canal. That upset me, too. The way he casually kicked Edie in the head back in Torres’s house upset me. Now I was upset and depressed by Jim being shot. Someone should have killed Snapper long long ago. Instead, he now drives off, skirting the patrol car, and Edie notices Skink has sunk down in the backseat, for once winded and beaten. Why didn’t he take Snapper’s gun from Edie when he had the chance?

In fact, Jim is not dead. He was wearing a kevlar vest, never goes anywhere without one, so his chest is badly bruised but he’s basically OK. The hookers Snapper had set up to look after and compromise Levon, call 911 and police and ambulance soon turn up. But still. For about ten pages everyone in the car (Skink, Bonnie, Edie and Snapper) think Jim is dead and I thought he was dead and it left a really bad taste in my mouth.

3. Augustine

Augustine had separately followed the Jeep Cherokee south, parked a little up from the motel and seen a lot of this transpire because during the Avila interlude he climbed into the back of the Jeep. A ways up the highway Snapper pulls over into a roadside restaurant car park and steals a new car, belonging to a French architect, Christophe Michel. Even this peripheral and marginal figure gets implicated in the theme of the poor building and design standards which have led directly to people’s homes being wrecked. Turns out Michel was himself about to be investigated for malpractice and so had packed up all his belongings and savings with a view to getting a plane out of America (p.398). It’s very bad luck that Snapper chooses his car (a Seville) to steal at gunpoint, turfs Michel out of it, hustles the three others into it and drives it off.

A little ways further up the highway, Edie notices the black Jeep Cherokee is following them. How? It draws abreast, Augustine winds down the window and fires his tranquiliser dart into Snapper’s neck. Simple as that. Snapper immediately passes out, Edie grabs the wheel and steers them onto the hard shoulder. Here Bonnie is joyfully reunited with big, sensitive and competent Augustine.

Now Skink leads them all on an extended tour into the bush, into the outback, through miles and miles of mosquito-infested backwoods until they eventually reach his camp. Skink lights a fire and cooks some roadkill. Augustine and Bonnie are amazed by Skink’s book collection, which he keeps in an old camper van. (Earlier, in this book’s version of Clinton Tyree’s biography we were told that Clint had, between serving in the army and standing in politics, been a literature professor. I think that’s a new nugget of information about him.)

Long story short:

Snapper bound After confirming it was Snapper who beat up Brenda, Skink ties his hands and wedges his mouth open with one of those security locks you apply to a car steering wheel.

Bye bye Edie Edie is seriously confused by what’s going on and the bewildering shifts in psychic dynamics among the group Skink has led into the outback over the next few days. She reacts the only way she knows how by seducing the alpha male in the pack, following Skink into the lake when he goes for a swim and nibbling and teasing him into making love to her in the water. Skink nonetheless gets her dressed and walks her a long way to a highway where he’s arranged for Jim Tile, now much recovered though still wearing bandages on his chest, to pick her up and drive her over the bridge to mainland Florida. She is back in civilisation. Ho hum. Maybe she can go to a bar and pick up a young eligible millionaire…

Neria strikes it rich For some time we have had bulletins on Tony Torres’ wife, Neria, as she drives with her professor boyfriend all the way from Oregon to Miami. In the final stages she is accompanied by a truckload of Bible-tattooed, God-fearing, in-bred Tennesseeans driving down to make a fast buck as cowboy builders amid the hurricane wreckage.

When she finally arrives at the wreckage of her and Tony’s house at 15600 Calusa, Neria tries to find out from the neighbour what’s been going on, coming across some of Snapper and Edie’s belongings strewn about the place which are, of course, a complete mystery to her. While she’s still puzzling it out, a Federal Express man arrives and hands her a letter. Inside is the insurance checks for $201,000. This is the money Edie spent all that time sucking off insurance assessor Fred Dove to get him to sign off and approve from his employer. Now, ironically, neither Snapper, Edie nor Fred are around to collect it. In fact Fred turns up with some flowers for Edie (throughout the story he’s been staying at a nearby motel on company expenses and motoring over to conspire with and/or be sucked off by Edi). But when confronted by a large angry Neria, timid Fred beats a hasty retreat. Now Neria is rich. Who cares what happened to her lowlife, worthless husband? She’s going to start a new life.

Max Lamb flies back down from New York. (Actually he flies via Mexico where he’s sent by his company to try and persuade the owner of a huge tobacco company, Clyde Nottage, who is dying of cancer, and being treated with sheep semen (!), not to cancelling his huge advertising spend with Max’s firm. To no avail.) Since Bonnie has been able to phone him now and then, she sets up a rendezvous where Max and Bonnie are finally reunited under the watchful eye of Skink and Trooper Tile. She tells him she doesn’t love him. He is livid. Trooper Jim Tile drives him back to the meeting point, a boarded-up MacDonalds, as Max kvetches and whines and complains about ‘women’. Then catches a plane back to the Big Apple and his snazzy career.

Snapper redivivus When Bonnie arrives back at the ‘camp’ after her uncomfortable reunion with her soon-to-be ex-husband, it’s to discover that Snapper caught Skink asleep, has beaten him up and heading off into the backwoods. Oh for God’s sake won’t someone just kill Snapper!!! Bonnie takes off after him which is (once again) plain dumb. She catches up with Snapper and jumps on his back but he easily throws her off, throws her to the ground and starts clubbing her in the head using the big metal car lock rammed in his mouth (it’s stuck in his mouth so he waggles his head from side to side to make the long metal handle clout Bonnie again and again in the face). Then Snapper is aware of someone grabbing him by the balls and a gun goes off at his temple.

Max and Edie Edie had been dropped off by Trooper Jim near where Max now collects the rental car he hired in Miami. Opening the car Max discovers she’s stowed away in it. He offers her a lift, they swap stories, Max begins to like her, Edie realises he’s a successful advertising executive. It’s a mismatch made in heaven.

Snapper abandoned Snapper broke Skink’s collarbone and several ribs. It was Augustine who tracked Snapper down and was tempted to shoot him dead but instead just shot his ear off instead. Augustine and Bonnie patch Skink up, insisting he see a doctor but he refuses. Instead he packs up the camp, packs bags and leads Bonnie and Augustine down a trail to a lake which they swim across, then to a road i.e. civilisation, leaves them there before himself disappearing back into the bush. Skink had told Snapper (with his mouth still wedged open by the car lock and now minus one ear) to make his own way to freedom, confident he won’t, that he’ll die of exposure.

Augustine and Bonnie come to the Card Sound bridge and walk up it. At the crest, at the high point of its gentle slope Bonnie asks Augustine if he’ll tie her to it, in readiness for a coming storm, just like Skink had done at the start of the book. She has become fully nativised.

Brief thoughts

By the time you stagger to the end of this 472-page-long narrative the reader is, I think, exhausted with the unrelenting panorama of scumbag lowlife amorality, violence and corruption. Not just that, but Hiaasen’s novels have a distinctive characteristic which is that they are packed with stuff. Either something is happening, generally something violent and garish, and being described in taut, snappy prose and super-pithy dialogue; or you are being filled in on the background of this or that scam (in this case, extensive explanations of how building regulations in Florida aren’t worth the paper they’re written on). It feels like every inch of the text is packed, there is little fat or respite or padding, nowhere for the reader to pause while enjoying a nice restful description. There is no rest or respite. It’s this unrelenting nature of the text which I think makes many critics describe them as ‘page-turners’, ‘gripping’ and so on.

In my opinion this is slightly wrong. Hiaasen’s novels aren’t really ‘thrillers’ or crime novels in the usual sense because by and large the reader watches the crimes being committed and knows exactly whodunnit. There is none of the suspense associated with crime novels: we saw it happen; we know whodunnit.

Instead the grip or pull of the narrative is the reader’s curiosity about what monstrous grotesque incident Hiaasen is going to pull off next. We don’t read for the plot so much as in eager anticipation of the next stomach-turning and mind-boggling atrocity.

This explains, I think, the sensation I often have of being a little disappointed by the final acts in Hiaasen novels. Quite often they don’t live up to expectations set by earlier macabre scenes. So, for example, I felt Snapper, the evil bastard, deserves a punishment of Baroque complexity and vehemence. It’s certainly grotesque that he ends his days staggering lost through the vast Everglades with his mouth wedged open by a car lock but… well… somehow it doesn’t feel quite adequate to the extended Sodom and Gomorrah of incidents which have preceded it, and to the long list of his disgusting brutality and mindless aggression.

I think Hiaasen often finds it difficult to cap, right at the end of his stories, the inspired grotesqueries he often features half way through. Thus nothing that happens later on can imaginatively outdo the incident of Ira Jackson crucifying Tony Torres on a satellite dish. Somehow that says everything about the society Hiaasen is depicting, its values and morality. He manages to outdo himself when crucifixion number two ends with Ira being eaten by a lion! But he’s set the bar very high in the Gruesome Stakes and, in a way, the entire second half of the novel, the long car journey south to the keys and the rather muddled sequence of events in the car park of the Love Motel in the pouring rain, although it has its moments, feels confused and like an anti-climax. In the end the plot only drags on for its last 100 pages because Snapper keeps hurting people and well before the end I just wanted someone to kill him and bring the novel to a close.

Still. Bloody funny, hair-raisingly amoral, shockingly gruesome, it’s a Hiaasen classic.

Minor details

Donald Trump

Ivana Trump was mentioned in this book’s predecessor, Strip Tease. In this one Bonnie Lamb indicates how shallow her husband is by telling Augustine he doesn’t read much and that the most recent book he’s been reading is ‘one of Trump’s autobiographies’ (p.109).

It’s interesting to learn that Trump and his wife were bywords for flashy superficiality 26 years ago, and all the more mind-boggling that 21 years later he was elected President of the Yoonited States. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer country.

Santería

Briefly mentioned in the last book and emerging as a running topic this one is the Cuban version of voodoo religion, Santería. Avila, the crooked surveyor, regularly sacrifices chickens to Chango, the god of lightning and fire, in a bid to escape the various investigations and prosecutions aimed at him.

To quote Wikipedia:

Santería, also known as Regla de Ocha, Regla Lucumí, or Lucumí, is an African diasporic religion that developed in Cuba during the late 19th century. It arose through a process of syncretism between the traditional Yoruba religion of West Africa, the Roman Catholic form of Christianity, and Spiritism.

The topic is played for laughs as Avila’s sacrifices keep going hopelessly awry, a billy goat he buys to sacrifice brutally goring him in the groin, a raccoon he buys later on scampering free and attaching itself to his mother-in-law’s towering hairdo till Avil sprays it, and her, in fire extinguisher foam. The more earnestly he sacrifices, the worse his luck gets.

It’s also interesting because Santería crops up as a theme in William Gibson’s novel Spook Country, published in 2007 i.e. twelve years after this novel. Interesting in itself, but also because Santeria’s inclusion in these two Hiaasen novels makes you realise it’s a less esoteric and obscure reference than the Gibson novel, and its easily-pleased reviewers, suggest.

Can I hear you knockin’?

You know that cheerful knock on the door pattern many of us give? I’d never heard it described onomatopoeically as ‘shave and a haircut – two bits’.

Credit

Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1995. Page references are to the 1996 Pan paperback edition.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

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Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (1973)

Good God, this is a great read! What a thrilling, compelling, exciting and wonder-working story.

Rama appears

It is 2031. Humanity has spread out to colonise some of the planets of the solar system and to conduct trade across much of it. We have realised by this stage that the system is crossed y hundreds of thousands of asteroids, meteors and comets travelling through it.

But a new one is spotted, that is spinning so fast (with a rotation period of 4 minutes) and then, upon closer investigation, is so symmetrical in shape, that astronomers conclude it must have been made by intelligent life. Since, as Clarke sardonically remarks, astronomers long ago ran out of names from the Greek and Roman pantheons with which to name heavenly bodies, they are now well into Hindu mythology, and that is why the unknown object is christened ‘Rama’, after the seventh avatar of the god Vishnu.

The solar survey vessel Endeavour captained by Commander Bill Norton is diverted from its scheduled route to go and investigate and so – fairly quickly, only 20 or so pages into the text – Norton and his crew come gingerly to rest on one end of an absolutely enormous metal cylinder, some 20 kilometres (12 mile) in diameter and 54 kilometres (34 miles) long.

With his trademark attention to scientific detail and the practicalities of physics, Clarke follows Norton and his crew as they almost immediately locate a ‘wheel’ embedded in one of the three large ‘studs’ which stick out of the otherwise vast smooth surface of the ‘end’ they’ve landed on.

Inside Rama

When Norton touches the wheel it lifts away from the stud and when he turns it… a side of the stud opens to reveal an entrance. It gives onto a long tunnel, which ends in another door with a control wheel, another tunnel, another door – a system of triple airlocks, with the final one opening into the interior of Rama, a vast empty cylinder which is so large, and is spinning at such speed, that the inside surface has gravity and on it appear to be various buildings.

Norton and the men and women of his crew realise that each of the three ‘studs’ must contain the airlocks and tunnels, because they can see two other doorways cut into the surface they can now see. From each of them a ladder stretches out across the surface of the gently curving ‘end’ towards the sides or ‘floor’ of the vast cylinder. After a few kilometers the ladders change into steps, a vast staircase which leads eventually down onto the smooth interior of the ‘floor’ which is, of course, cylindrical i.e. if you set off along the circumference you would eventually end up back where you belong. But due to the gravity imparted by Rama‘s spin, once on the ‘floor’ your body thinks it is a flat surface.

For the first hundred pages the teams navigate the ladders and steps, bring in equipment, set up a base at the foot of ‘their’ steps, then set out to explore the world more. Notable features include that it is warm, the air is breatheable if musty, but it appears uninhabited and completely lifeless.

One team arrives at the most striking feature of all which is a great central ‘sea’ which runs in a ten kilometer-wide band around the centre of the world, dividing it in two (p.41). Far away in the distance, at the south of the cylinder, on the ‘top’ or flat surface opposite the one they’ve come in by, they can see a set of six long, thin cones surrounding a truly massive one (which they name ‘the Big Horn’) which they speculate might be something to do with the propulsion system.

As in the best Clarke books,  the laws of physics, astrophysics and so on are rigorously adhered to and thoroughly explained. They provide the underpinning for everything that happens.

Surprises

But at the same time Clarke carefully paces the book (250 pages long in the Orion paperback version) to fill it with mounting suspense. At regular intervals there come great shocks or twists in the story which take the reader – and the crew of the Endeavour – by surprise.

Light

Thus the early spying out of the interior is done by means of enormous floodlights which the Endeavour conveniently is carrying. It is a great shock to the crew when suddenly… the lights go on. And we all realise that the six deep ‘canals’ which run the length Rama and which appeared to have ice or some frozen substance along their bottoms, are in fact Raman flood lights.

Storms

Then, as the atmosphere slowly warms up as Rama‘s trajectory through the solar system takes her closer and closer to the sun, Clarke gives a perfect example of the way he conceives the most dramatic twists, but based entirely on real scientific principles. One of the earth experts who are monitoring the crew’s mission, Carlisle Perrera, points out that… they should expect cyclones. Given the ship’s spin, and the fact the air is warming up, and that there is a central sea to provide moisture… well, they just better get out of it as soon as possible. Initially sceptical, Norton feels a breeze on his cheeks and orders the immediate evacuation. They take all the equipment they can and withdraw behind the airlock for 48 hours.

When they re-enter Rama it is to discover that it has clouds and a climate.

Sky bike

The longest thread or sequence concerns one of the crew members Jimmy Pak, who has smuggled onto the Endeavour one of the low-gravity sky bikes which he is a noted champion for riding on Mars. You lie in its very fragile, very frail balsa wood structure with gossamer fine wings and pedal a bicycle wheel which works a light propeller.

He now suggests to Commander Norton that he sets out dead centre to the axis of Rama (where he will have no gravity) and rides fragile his bike (aptly named Dragonfly) all the way to the south end. Norton agrees. In fact, being Clarke the author explains that Pak will actually get more traction on the air if he cycles a little off the central axis and so has a modicum of gravitational pull to help stabilise the bike.

He takes a camera and radio and reports back to Norton what he (and the reader) are seeing. It takes some hours but he gets right to the end and is floating around the vast central cone which sticks out miles into the centre of Ramas atmosphere when, by an unfortunate coincidence, he realises it is projecting a magnetic field, and then sees flicker of flames.

The experts back on earth who are monitoring everything via an audiovisual link tell the team that Rama is making a manoeuvre, altering the angle of its approach to the sun. Obviously whatever energies are achieving this are creating fireworks on the cones. They tell Pak to get the hell out of there. He gets a fair distance before there is a big discharge and the airwaves smash his sky bike like matchsticks. Very slowly but irrevocably it starts its long descent to the ‘floor’ beneath, with Pak furiously cycling to see if he can make it back across the Central Sea.

He doesn’t. It crashes. He is knocked out.

Robots

When he regains consciousness he sees a giant metal crab snuffling round him. It takes Pak a while to realise that it is some kind of robot and that it appears to have the task of collecting litter and detritus. It picks up the wreckage of Pak’s bike and slings it into a basket on its back. Pak follows it as it locates, chops up and stores all other metal bric-à-brac it finds before it makes its way to a huge circular hole with water at the bottom. It tips the trash into it and scuttles off. Pak watches as distant things surface from the murky water below and seize the trash.

He makes his way through a landscape of ‘fields’ clearly divided form each other but each put to bizarre uses, some covered in metal, or metal grilles, some with black and white squares, nothing to do with agriculture in our sense, although Pak does spot something which looks like an earth ‘flower’ and (rashly) plucks it – only to have it shrivel in his hand.

Norton has been planning a rescue attempt ever since Pak got into trouble. Another member of the crew, Sergeant Ruby Barnes, is an experienced sailor. She is able to rig up a craft with an improvised motor which should be able to make it across the Central Sea. Norton and others climb aboard.

The team’s biologist, Surgeon-Commander Laura Ernst, had taken samples of the Cylindrical Sea and discovered that, while it is water, it is packed with minerals, metal traces and poisons, making a kind of ‘organic soup’. Emphatically not to be drunk, preferably not even touched.

This makes it tricky when the rescue boat arrives at the other side because of a phenomenon they’d all observed but no-one can explain. Whereas the cliff from the ‘land’ down to the sea’s surface is only 50 metres on their side (they call their side the ‘north’ side), on the other side it is ten times as high, 500 metres. Huge.

The parachute

They discuss various ways that Pak might get down, until one of the earth scientists makes another, very realistic practical Clarkean observation. With gravity about a fifth of earth Pak can probably get by with simply using his shirt as a parachute. So, commending his soul to the lord Pak jumps off and, to everyone’s relief, it works and he sails gently down into the sea, admittedly landing in the toxic water a little way.The crew quickly get him out and wipe him down

Tidal wave

Half way back to the ‘north’ side the crew spot a terrifying thing. For some reason a wave seems to be moving across the sea, starting at a point over their heads, but moving fast. It is, they speculate, maybe the beginning of a ‘tide’, much as the heating of the atmosphere caused storms. Or maybe was caused when Rama made the course correction which caused the sparking and detonation which wrecked Pak’s sky bike.

Anyway, it looks like it will hit them before they can get to the other side. The sailor is quick witted and notices that the mountainous frothing wave gives way to shallow bump when it passes over the shallows. Clearly the bottom of the sea is very irregular. Noticing structures close to the surface, Barnes navigates to a shallow area, and the wave passes harmlessly past them.

And here again they see a strange looking nine-spoked wheel emerge from the disturbed sea, and then watch as it, too, is dismantled by a horde of tiny other little aquatic ‘creatures’. the place is pulsing with life but none of it organic.

Biots

As this summary shows, we don’t meet any Ramans. There are no alien encounters and shootouts with ray guns. Almost all the perils and dangers the crew face are the result of basic physical laws and some of the inexplicable behaviour of the inside of the ship.

This changes a bit when the crew wake to find bits of their camp dismantled and moved about. Looking down onto the plain they realise that it is now covered with moving objects. One of them is discovered damaged near the camp. It is three-legged, like a tripod with a football at the top. Upon inspection it appears to be partly organic, part machine, powered by a sort of organic cell. These along with the crab Pak saw, are obviously forms of robot carrying out maintenance tasks on Rama.

But where are the Ramans, the designers of it all?

Templates

As soon as the big lights had come on the crew had realised that the interior of Rama was dotted by clusters of buildings, which they referred to as cities and jokingly named London, Paris and so on with pride of place given to the cluster of buildings located on land within the great Central Sea. When they had investigated any of the cities they were puzzled by the ‘buildings’ which were building-shaped alright but had no windows or doors or even break between themselves and the metal floor.

The explorers’ time on Rama is running out. During the three weeks they’ve been there it has travelled from near the orbit of Jupiter to approach Mercury on what appears to be a journey which will take it close to the sun.

Commander Norton decides it is time to ‘break in’ to some of these buildings. They go to the nearest city, which they’ve named London and use a laser to cut a way into one of the buildings. Inside they see a formal array of pillars of what looks like crystal stretching away. On closer examination they realise each one contains a sort of hologram image of an artifact. Slowly they realise they must be tools, maybe even eating utensils and, the most thought-provoking find, what appears to be an item of clothing, which appears to have straps and pockets.

Threes. The Ramans do everything in threes or multiples of three. There were three airlocks into the interior. there are six enormous long fluorescent strips running the length of the ship. The biot they found had tripod legs. And now this uniform looks like it is designed for something with three arms. Hmmm.

Could it be that these holograms are the stored record of items which can be manufactured at will out of the ingredients found in the Central Sea? That the proliferation of biots they saw suddenly appearing are manufactured by this process, and anything which is damaged, lost or consumed is chucked back into the sea which thus provides an eternal source of everything necessary to build and maintain this world?

Time to leave

Anyway, other members of the crew report that the biots seem to be returning to the Central Sea, and they all notice that the six gigantic striplights which illuminate Rama’s interior are beginning to dim. Time to pack up and leave and go back aboard the Endeavour. Not without quite a bit of frustration on everyone’s part that they have seen so much, and seen so much and yet… haven’t even scratched the surface, are left understanding nothing.

The Hermian conspiracy

Right at the end there is a bit of ‘thriller’ content, an utterly man-made peril. All through the book we have been cutting away to meetings of the specially set-up Rama Committee consisting of members of ‘the United Planets’ i.e. representatives from all the colonised planets and moons.

The Hermian colonists have been sharp and aggressive throughout and withdrew altogether from the Committee a few episodes earlier. They consider that Rama might establish itself in an orbit just inside that of Mercury and use this position ‘to dominate the solar system’.

Now Endeavour‘s crew detect a rocket carrying a nuclear weapon approaching Rama. They receive a warning from the government of Mercury (the Hermians, from Hermes, Greek name for the Roman god Mercury) telling them they have an hour to get away before the bomb is detonated. Norton is appalled at this act of barbarism against an object he has come to deeply respect.

Again Clarke uses his knowledgeability about basic physics to have one of the crew members, Lieutenant Boris Rodrigo (‘the quiet, dignified communications officer’, p.66), point out that there is a significant time delay for radio signals to pass from Mercury to the rocket, about five minutes. This would give him about ten minutes to putter out to the rocket on his jet ‘scooter’ and disarm it before the Hermians have time to react. Even if they see him approaching the rocket using a little jet-propelled pod and press detonate, that signal will take five minutes to travel back.

In other words he should have time to propel himself out to rocket and cut the cables activating the bomb. If his jet propellent works properly. If he succeeds in securing himself to the bomb quickly. If he can find the right cables. if he can cut them.

Clarke ratchets up the tension with thriller-style suspense here at the end but, of course, Rodrigo succeeds, and the Hermians are covered in vituperation from the rest of the United Planets. Not only does Rodrigo disarm the bomb, but he cuts the cable securing its radio antenna, so that it can no longer receive any signals from Mercury. And then he very slowly uses the small amount of propellant the ‘scooter’ has to redirect the missile and then push it slowly away from the sun. It is now set on a trajectory to take it away from the sun and out of the solar system (although it will, admittedly, take it several thousand years).

(It is no coincidence that Rodrigo is picked for this job. He is a Cosmo-Christer,follower of a form of Christianity which has updated itself for the space age.)

Ave atque vale

Endeavour activates its engines and steers away from Rama initially using its cone of shadow to protect it from the sun to which they are both now uncomfortably near.

Since it was detected human scientists have been speculating about whether it intended to contact earth, to slow down and ‘visit’ one or other of the planets, or adopt a permanent orbit round the sun. But right to the end Rama maintains its complete indifference to humanity. As it reaches its closest point to the sun it changes direction, using the sun’s gravitational field and its own mysterious ‘space drive’ to accelerate on out the other side of the solar system, heading towards an unknown destination in the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a mystery to the end.

An artist's impression of the interior of Rama

Of the many available images I think this artist’s impression of the interior of Rama best conveys the scale but also the barrenness of Clarke’s conception

Captain Cook

The spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey is named Discovery. In Rama the central spaceship is named Endeavour. These are both names of ships led by Captain Cook in his famous three voyages around the Pacific. On page 89 we learn that Commander Norton is not only a fan of Captain Cook, and has read everything he wrote, but has turned himself ‘into probably the world’s leading authority on the greatest explorer of all time’. No surprise, then, that when they’re wondering what to christen the makeshift dinghy they’ve knocked up to sail on the great Cylindrical sea, they come up with Resolution, the name of another of Cook’s ships. And again, after Norton has received the threatening ultimatum from Mercury telling him to take the Endeavour clear of Rama before the Hermians detonate the nuclear bomb, there is a page when he is alone in his cabin looking at his portrait of Captain Cook, communing with the old explorer’s spirit, while he tries to decide what to do: obey the simple order and let Rama be obliterated, or act on his instinct to preserve and save it. Cook’s spirit of tolerance and scientific enquiry prevails. Norton gives the order for Rodrigo to set out on his Rama-saving mission.

Clarke writes from an era when one could give unqualified praise to the great white male heroes of the past. Having been to two exhibitions about Captain Cook this year, I know that this, along with many of Clarke’s other views, no matter how reasonable, now seem very dated.

Audiobook

YouTube has a number of readings of the entire book. This sounds like the best one.

Related links

Arthur C. Clarke reviews

  • Childhood’s End (1953) a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
  • A Fall of Moondust (1961) a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into galactic consciousness
  • Rendezvous with Rama (1973) a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s

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Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain by Len Deighton (1977)

For new pilots the high-altitude battles could be a frightening experience. It was very, very cold at 25,000 feet, and the Spitfires slipped and skidded through the thin air, as the propeller blades failed to bite. Invariably the Perspex misted over and reduced visibility. Only slowly did the aircraft add a few hundred feet, and for this reason the throttles remained wide open. It meant that if a pilot dropped back from his formation through lack of flying skill, he could never catch up with them again. And above them were the Bf 109s, watching and waiting for just such a straggler. This was the way that many young men died: alone and cold in the thin blue air, peering through the condensation into the glare of the sun, unable to see the men who killed them.
(Fighter, page 244)

This is a totally gripping, impressively researched and comprehensive history of a key moment in British and world history and showcases the incredible depth and range of Deighton’s knowledge of the subject matter and period.

I read Blitzkrieg, the later book first, because that is the sequence of events. Both books are divided into five parts, with a long central section about the technical developments in the key weapons (tanks in Blitzkrieg, airplanes in Fighter) followed by an equally long section describing in detail the key events (of the German invasion of France in May 1940, of the Battle of Britain July to October 1940) ending with a fairly short epilogue or summary.

Fighter’s strengths

Fighter is the more enjoyable book, becoming steadily more gripping and exciting as you read on. I think it’s because:

  • Fighter planes are more beautiful and inspiring than tanks.
  • The planes were more directly the creation of inspired genius designers, who are more interesting to read about than the designers of tanks (Willy Messerschmitt, Reginald Mitchell the Spitfire, Sydney Camm the Hawker Hurricane).
  • The history of manned flight since the Wright brothers is more interesting than the history of putting metal plates and a machine gun on a lorry chassis and calling it a ‘tank’, and understanding how airplanes actually fly is more interesting, and more broadly applicable, than understanding how tank tracks work.
  • The fighter plane part of the battle concerns dashing and heroic individuals who Deighton names and describes in detail – Peter Townsend, Josef Frantisek, Adolf Galland – there are photos of them – unlike the largely anonymous and massed ranks activity of the Battle for France, led by a handful of rather imposing generals (Rommel, Guderian).
  • Later in the war, it all got vastly bigger. While Britain was producing 400 new planes a month, towards the end of the year President Roosevelt ordered his factories to begin producing planes, 50,000 planes a year! Later in the war the Luftwaffe was to lose in one day as many aircraft as it lost in the entire Battle. The Battle of Britain represents a moment when individuals still counted – Deighton calls it the last romantic battle in history.

Learnings

I learned that:

  • Lord Beaverbrook’s contribution to victory – put in charge of Fighter Command logistics by Churchill, cutting through lots of bureaucracy to maximise factory output and set up roaming repair squads – was as important as Air Chief Marshal Dowding’s contribution, and that Dowding said so. I was virtually cheering the Beaverbrook passages. I like his motto: Organisation is the enemy of improvisation.
  • The Germans didn’t have a plan. Hitler wasn’t much interested. Operation Sealion (the invasion of Britain) was conceived too late in the year (August) and Göring never gave clear strategic guidance to his marshals. The Germans fundamentally didn’t know what they were trying to achieve and Deighton lists four possible outcomes which included: destroy Fighter Command to give Germany control of the air and enable a cross-Channel invasion; bomb London into submission; destroy Britain’s war machine ie factories. They did some of each but none completely and all historians agree that they were on the verge of destroying Fighter Command – reducing airfields, planes and pilots below an operational minimum – when, early in September, they switched to the second strategy and bombed London for 57 consecutive nights. Though the population of London wouldn’t have agreed Dowding and Park considered this ‘the miracle’ for it gave them time to rebuild the fighter force.
  • When summer slipped into autumn and the weather worsened making a seaborne invasion impossible, Hitler shrugged his shoulders and got out his maps of Russia. Britain was effectively neutralised, the war in the West essentially over: he was interested in new adventures.
  • Deighton powerfully dislikes the bureaucrats at the British Air Ministry whose main contribution was to hamper Fighter Command with stupid orders, come up with pointless hare-brained schemes, and treat Dowding and Park, the two men whose masterly strategy won the Battle, appallingly. Both were sacked at the end of the year. Dowding was given 24 hours to clear his desk.

Robust views/detailed knowledge

As in Blitzkrieg, Deighton is confident in his opinions. Discussing one of the countless machinations of Air Field Marshall Erhard Milch, Deighton writes:

Milch’s allegations are nonsense. (p.301)

These kind of confident assertions are based on Deighton’s incredibly in-depth knowledge of the entire period, from the technical spec of the planes, through the organisational structure of both air forces, detailed profiles of the key players on both sides, to an understanding of the changing tactics developed by each side, down to precise descriptions of uniforms, medals, hats, parachutes and so on.

For example, his captions to many of the 62 photos in the book not only point out the figures in a picture but name the medals the pilots and generals are wearing; there are few photos of planes without additional information about their markings or pointing out details of design and construction to look for. As in his other books, he shows a special interest in organisational structures:

A Geschwader was about 100 aircraft, give or take twenty according to circumstances. It consisted of three Gruppen, always designated by Roman numerals I, II or III. Finally there was the Staffel, about twelve aircraft. Staffeln were numbered from 1 to 9, in arabic numerals, to make a Geschwader. Thus, III/JG 26 means the third Gruppe of Jagdgeshwader (fighter Geshwader) number 26. While 8/KG 26 is the eighth Staffel of Kampfgeschwader (bomber Geschwader) number 76. (footnote on page 129)

Towards the end of the book, Deighton makes the very broad claim (repeated in Blitzkrieg) that, without Hitler’s antisemitism – which forced many of Germany’s best scientists and engineers abroad – the Nazis would probably have developed atomic bombs and the long-range missiles to deliver them and would quite possibly have taken over the world. From the minutiae of medals to grand sweeps of alternative history, this is a fascinating and rewarding book on countless levels.

Conclusion

After the first four Ipcress novels Deighton’s fiction changed – his prose became more obvious and functional while he experimented with new subject matter: comedy, a novel set in Hollywood, and then his devastating documentary novel about a World War II bombing raid, Bomber. When he returned to the spy genre in the early 1970s, the three spy novels leading up to Fighter feel much weaker than the Ipcress set.

Could it be that the time and mental energy Deighton expended researching his WWII histories, visiting key locations, months spent at the Imperial War Museum and other archives, and the correspondence and meetings he had with key players in the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain (both books contain photos ‘taken by the author’ and refer to letters and conversation with eye witness participants) – could it be that this massive expenditure of time and effort and immersing himself in bureaucratic records and organisational archives, permanently damaged his imaginative prose style and weakened his fiction?

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by Simon on August 25, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, History, Second World War, War
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Posted by Simon on August 25, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/08/25/fighter-the-true-story-of-the-battle-of-britain-len-deighton/

Attack Alarm by Hammond Innes (1941)

‘I have to get to a certain farm tonight,’ I said. ‘I’m playing a lone hand against a gang of fifth columnists. They’ve got a plan that will enable the Germans to capture our fighter aerodromes. I aim to stop them.’…
A sudden gleam came into his small, close-set eyes. ‘Cor lumme!’ he said. ‘Wot a break! Like a book I bin reading all about gangsters in America. Will they have guns?’
(Attack Alarm, page 158)

This is a cracking good adventure yarn in the spirit of John Buchan or, at moments, Biggles. It’s a first-person narrative by Barry Hanson, formerly a journalist on the Globe newspaper, who is now, in the Battle of Britain summer of 1940, one of a platoon or squad manning a 3-inch anti-aircraft gun at ‘Thorby’, a fighter airfield near the North Downs, south of London.

Set-up

We meet the dozen or so men of Hanson’s detachment, their officers, some of the WAAFs, watch them man the gun, rest and sleep and feed at the NAAFI, thus establishing the workaday background.

Rumour has been going round that a Nazi agent was found with detailed plans of Thorby airfield. The crew watch one night as the nearby airfield of Mitchet is heavily bombed by German planes. A few nights later our chaps hit a German bomber and watch it fall to earth and explode. The crew parachute down to land near the field and Hanson is among those who are close enough to talk to the captain. He is a surly Nazi who insists on seeing an officer. When Hanson (who picked up German while working in his paper’s Berlin office before the war) questions him a bit more, the German arrogantly says, ‘The Invasion is coming, the Luftwaffe will defeat the RAF, this airfield at Thorby will be flattened on Friday.’ He is in mid-flow when he suddenly shuts up. Looking behind him Hanson sees the camp librarian, a Mr Vayle, has appeared. Was it his presence which made the pilot go quiet?

Later Hanson hears the pilot was much more circumspect when hauled before the airfield CO and Intelligence officer, downplaying the Friday bombing claim – and Hanson learns that Vayle was in attendance, chatting to the pilot in German while he was being attended to the Medical Officer and before that interrogation. Can Vayle possibly be a German spy?

Hanson asks a WAAF he’s got friendly with, Marion, to send a telegram to the Globe’s crime correspondent, but the message is suspicious enough for the village Post Office to report it to the camp commandant, and Hanson finds himself hauled over the coals: he is in the Army now, it is forbidden to go off freelancing like this, if he has suspicions he reports them to his CO and goes through proper channels. It is ludicrous to think Vayle is a Nazi spy, the man is Jewish and fled the Nazis in 1934. — Hanson is confined to camp for 28 days.

One man who knows the truth

The result is a classic early thriller situation: one man who is convinced he knows a secret the authorities won’t admit; who is convinced he knows about a spy; is convinced there will be a devastating raid on his airfield; but the Authorities won’t believe him. And even his colleagues turn suspicious of him, since they all saw him having a chatty conversation in German with the downed pilot. They think he‘s the fishy one. Like the protagonist of a Hitchcock film, he is surrounded by suspicion and fear.

I sat there in a numbed state of fear at the thought of what it meant. For it meant, of course, that I was a marked man. (p.78)

In quick succession Hanson finds a folded-up map of the base hidden in his pass, then finds one of the camp workman has reported him to the authorities for asking lots of suspicious questions about the new rewiring of the airfield. The workman suggests the authorities search Hanson, which they do, not finding the map which Hanson burned immediately after finding it – but now he realises that Vayle has this man as an accomplice; there’s at least two of them.

And then he discovers there’s a woman, too: Elaine, a pretty, flirtatious WAAF. Hanson breaks into Vayle’s office and finds a photo of Vayle and Elaine together, with ‘Berlin 1934’ written on it. Are they a husband-and-wife spy team? Will the big attack the German pilot promised for Friday actually materialise? Hanson’s girlfriend, Marion, overhears Elaine talking in her sleep about Cold Harbour Farm: does that place have some significance in Nazi invasion plans?

The pace doesn’t let up, and the setting, in an airfield where everyone is tense with anticipation of the next air raid and overwrought through lack of sleep, adds to the increasingly feverish atmosphere, until Hanson realises he is going to have to go AWOL and nip out of the camp to go in person to this Cold Harbour Farm to find out if it really is the base for some kind of invasion plan. It’s lucky for him that the squadron’s pint-sized cockney, Mickey, picks the same time and place to do a runner, so that they end up forming an unlikely alliance to combat the fiendish Nazi conspiracy.

Historical accuracy

Innes served as a Royal Artillery anti-aircraft gunner at RAF Kenley during the Battle of Britain. We can assume that the description of the geography and layout of RAF ‘Thorby’, along with the officers and men, and the tense and draining life of constant worry, are accurate. And, as with most of Innes’ other novels, you experience the strange sensation of buying into a totally mundane, ordinary, workaday setting, and then slowly getting sucked into the mounting hysteria of an ever-more unlikely plot.

How to create tension

Part of the technique is to put the ordinary bloke protagonist through a succession of scary or tense situations; then to have him mull over at frequent intervals, the nature of fear, of feeling your guts turn to water or becoming aware of your heart beating fast on your chest etc. It helps that the hero only has one other person he can rely on, ideally a dishy, plucky, loyal woman – at least she believes me – in this case the WAAF Marion, who runs up to hug Hansom at the very satisfying happy end of this gripping entertainment.

Innes’ delaying tactics

This early novel also hints at a technique he will really on more and more as the years pass, the tendency for all Innes characters to never quite express their thoughts, never tell each other what’s happening, to bottle up, or not express, or not spit it out. So many Innes conversations feature pregnant pauses, shrugging of shoulders, hesitations or plain silence… Used in moderation, this is a way of increasing tension, but even in this early novel the plot only really exists because Hanson refuses to go to his CO and lay all the evidence before him – at which point things would be taken completely out of his hands and we’d have no solo heroics. Similarly, if protagonists of later novels just said ‘We scuttled the ship’ (The Wreck of The Mary Deare) or ‘We’re looking for diamonds’ (Target Antarctica) the narratives would stop dead in their tracks. Instead Innes concocts two hundred pages from his tactics of delay and non-communication.

Sensations not thoughts

It also reveals the rather low intellectual content of his books. The narrator has a few sentences feeling sorry for the poor buggers in the planes they’re trying to shoot down and which are blown up in the book’s spectacular conclusion, a few trite reflections on the beastliness of war – but these are shallow gestures, clichés, the kind of nostrums you’re expected to utter as ‘a Writer’.

In fact, the text shows no reflectiveness or thought. Its focus is on convincingly describing the boredom and irritations of Army living, interspersed with vivid descriptions of terrifying air attacks, before settling down to shock, thrill and excite the reader with its breathlessly melodramatic plot.

Credit

Attack Alarm by Hammond Innes was published by William Collins in 1941. Page references are to the 1980 Fontana paperback edition.

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by Simon on October 24, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Adventure, Books, Second World War, Thriller, War
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Posted by Simon on October 24, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/10/24/attack-alarm-hammond-innes/