February 2018 book review

Welcome to February’s media review. Please see subsequent posts for movies. There’s some crackers, as well as a couple of dogs!

BOOKS

THE TERRORISTS, by Maj Sjowell and Per Waloo
Martin Beck, nearing retirement, has been kicked upstairs into a desk job but is chosen to go into the field to head up security for the visit to Stockholm of a right-wing American senator. It soon becomes apparent his work will not be surplus to requirements: a terrorist cell is indeed active, staffed by experienced pros. In fact they’re so good they are confident they can stay one step ahead of the authorities, but they haven’t bargained for the likes of Martin Beck and his anarchic, but extremely effective sidekick, Gunvald Larsen. Perhaps if they kill them as well...

This is the last in the ten-book series of Martin Beck police-procedural classics, and may be the best of all of them. Again the authors mix their world-weary, but clear-headed analysis of Swedish society as it entered the 70s with a brilliant and thrilling tale of catch-the-assassins. I’ve read one a year for the last ten years, and I don’t know what I’m going to read on city breaks now. I’m going to have a job finding thrillers of this standard, that’s for sure.

GHOSTS, SPOOKS AND SPECTRES, edited by Charles Molin
Designed to be read by teenagers but eminently suitable for adults too, here is a fine little collection of classic ghost stories, from Oscar Wilde’s celebrated The Canterville Ghost, through Dickens’s haunting The Signalman, and on to amusing little cameos like James Thurber’s The Night the Ghost got In and Conan Doyle’s The Brown Hand. Well worth a couple of hours of your time.

DISORIENTING ENCOUNTERS: The journey of Mohammed As-Saffar, edited by Susan Gibson Miller
In 1846, having suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the far more technologically advanced French, the Moroccan sultan decided to send a delegation to Paris to try to find out how they were able to do it so easily. Among the delegation was a young man of letters who was asked to keep a journal of his experiences.

He is amazed by what he finds: a far higher standard of living seems to be enjoyed by almost everyone in France, despite its ‘arctic’ climate, and entranced and repelled at the same time by the beauty of the women, who seem happy to flaunt their physical charms even in the company of men they don’t know. He is impressed by their economic organization, and wonders if that might be related to their success on the battlefield. But all along, he is contemptuous of their idolatrous religion, which fails to accept the supremacy of Mohammed and the True Faith.

An interesting idea for a 3000 word essay, but not enough meat for a 200 page book, featuring an introduction which comprises nearly 1/3 of the text. And there’s far too many footnotes for anything other than a PhD thesis.