Junior Officers’ Reading Club

I’m about to go away for a week: a weekend in Worcester at Holycombe teaching the second in a series of ten workshops to a group of dreamers advancing round the wheel (that makes it sound less like a ladder to be climbed, which thereby short-circuits the tendency to spiritual ambition… I think it might work, but I’ve never dared try the alternative) - followed by 5 days in west (not wet) Wales with a rather greater group of dreamers and their children. Assuming I survive, I’ll be back in a week.

So - before I go, I thought I’d give you all some reading:

cover from amazon

First, is the Junior Officers’ Reading Club by Patrick Hennessey - if you want to know what life’s like in the army, specifically in an infantry battalion, if you’ve ever tried to imagine going through Officer training at Sandhurst, if you want to know what, exactly, is insane about the armed services procurement… but particularly if you want to taste the grit, feel the burn (pain is just weakness flowing away -apparently), smell the cordite in the morning - this is for you. As it says somewhere on the back, ‘officers who can write are as rare as authors who can strip down an AK47 blindfold’ - and what it doesn’t say is that whereas the English is pretty mangled at times, it’s probably deliberately so - and the effect is truly envigorating. This is the real thing. Makes me wonder why I didn’t go on into the army recruiting office the day I stood outside the door in Cambridge…

Next after that - it’ll take a couple of nights - is Transition, by Iain Banks.

It would be hard to be more different. In fact, the only tenuous link I can find is that they both have somewhat haphazard timelines. But where JORC is an autobiographical piece written by someone with a good, if basic, command of English, Transition is a masterpiece written by a man who knows the English language backwards, who can twist a sentence three times between first capital and full stop and they aren’t necessarily big sentences. This book is genre-less and needs to stay that way. If it isn’t on the Booker shortlist next year, then we need new judges with new criteria because, wonderful tho’ Wolf Hall is, this is streets, whole city blocks, ahead in terms the sheer quality of its prose but also the concepts that string along, sprinting after a plot that is so incredibly linear in its switch-back, angular way.

Technically, I suppose this is science fiction. Certainly it plays with the idea of multiple parallel universes in which our world may or may not be called “Earth” and in which people may or may not behave as we would expect them to. Our earth doesn’t come off too well in comparison to some of the others - on the ‘cruel/kind’ spectrum, we’re a long way towards ‘cruel’ where some of the alternate earths, by implication, are more towards ‘kind’, but that doesn’t stop various of our heroes - particularly Temujhin Oh, an assassin, from visiting here on the instructions of his overlords, and over-ladies (mostly the latter) of the ruling ‘Concern’ in order to top the various people he’s sent to dispose of in order to facilitate the smooth functioning of the world. That’s what he’s told, anyway. And he’s good at his job, so it takes a while before he asks if it’s true and by then the Concern have their trackers onto him. The locations (he really doesn’t like Scotland, does he? Or pheasants) are beautifully drawn without being overly done and, as always with Banks, the sex is pretty graphic and (here) exclusively heterosexual. I guess if you’re into that kind of thing, it’s probably good.

All of which doesn’t sound as good as the book really is. Buy it, read it, devour it. A five-nighter, at least, and I defy you to see the world the same way afterwards.

This is quite easily one of the best books I’ve read this year - and it’s been a good year.

Last in your reading list for while I’m away is Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

The first thing to say about Kay is that if you haven’t come across him, you’ll want to go back and read the lot. Well, most of them. His Tigana was one of the great works of fantasy fiction that should have won mainstream acclaim if ‘literary’ editors/reviewers/publishers weren’t so stultifyingly tedious in their belief that genre fiction has no literary worth. If you believe that, you’re in the wrong blog, so assuming you’re not and you don’t, go find Tigana, and enjoy it.

But before you do, go and find Under Heaven and treat yourself to some joyfully lyrical, beautiful, flowing writing. This is history written as fiction. I’m not an expert on 8th century Chinese warlord history, but I’m pretty sure it’s a great deal more accurate than a lot of historical fiction out there: Kay does his homework well and he’s a master of taking the important pieces and fitting them together. SO this tale of a fictional not-quite-china, in the midst of dynastic change, has to be a valuable insight into the real thing. And even if not, it’s brilliant fiction.

The story is simple: A young man, Shen Tai, has decided to bury the un-mourned war dead of both sides at a remote battle site. For his pains, he is given a gift of horses - not just ordinary horses, but an entire herd of Sardian mounts, the most magnificent horses of the era and the location. A man might be killed for just one. To have ownership of two hundred and fifty is a death warrant. And so, the second son of a general who might have hoped for a quiet life is catapulted into the centre of the not-quite-Chinese court intrigues - and they are utterly, ruthlessly intriguing. Among the kingfisher feathers, the jade and the lilies, are people who will kill a man slowly for bowing too often or in the wrong place.

Mixed in the tale is a delightful shamanic culture, with wild magic and wolves, and the Kanlin masters who can run up walls as per ‘crouching tiger, hidden dragon’. - and beautiful women, of course, and lots of sex. One day, Kay is going to write a lesbian relationship at the heart of something and I’ll be an immensely happy woman, but in the meantime, his men and women push against the constraints of their time in ways that feel real and satisfying.

His blog is here: Brightweavings and worth a look (his piece here on why he writes fantasy, not direct history is particularly thought provoking) , but do read the book…