The Fall Of Troy by Peter Ackroyd

In The Fall Of Troy, Peter Ackroyd explores some grand themes against a backdrop of a grander history, but always from the narrowed view of an obsession that denies experience.

The story is set in the early twentieth century, a period of great and fast discovery of ancient sites. It is also a time when archaeology is being transformed from a pastime of those with time on their hands to a science for professionals. Obermann has his mission, an overbearing, all-consuming obsession that drives him to uncover ancient Troy. He knows where to look. In defiance of received wisdom, he demonstrates the accuracy and veracity of his assertions. 

He feels things to be correct, admits no question and seeks to edit all dissent from any discussion. Enthusiasm feeds obsession, while obsession drives the man, excluding others. He has a track history of success, however, so when he pontificates about the whereabouts of the lost city, others tend to listen, despite his ideas appearing at best off-beat.

Obermann has taken a new wife, a young and attractive Greek woman called Sophia. She reads ancient Greek, so she can recite Homer to her new husband in the hours that cannot be devoted either to practical archaeology, of which we learn much, or marital duties, of which we learn nothing. She becomes a member of his team, entrusted if not actively enlightened, and soon learns how certain discoveries of her husband need to be sanitised to protect them from the gaze of their resident Turkish official, who is burdened with the task of inspecting all finds. She learns, also, how not to question the wisdom of her husband, a wisdom apparently founded in myth, expressed via whim and summing to obsession, but which is invariably correct. Until, that is, visitors appear.

There is a Harvard academic called Brand and an English vicar. Then there is Thornton from The British Museum. These visitors join Obermann and his wife, alongside a self-confessed Frenchman and a young man the boss calls Telemachus, who helps, but whose motivation remains suitably opaque. But Obermann always dominates. Sophia becomes a new Helen of Troy while her husband’s assumptions are elevated to a religion he must live or be punished by.

As the dig progresses, finds appear, are sometimes revealed, sometimes not, and are interpreted, discussed, even fought over. If the resulting ideas conform to Obermann’s assumptions, harmony is publicly maintained. But if contradicted, the archaeologist appears to have the power to conjure divine retribution upon his critics. He is a man of the gods. But eventually he is revealed as a man of the world. Sophia, the new wife, discovers a reality she never expected. She acts decisively when things come to a head but, as far as Obermann is concerned, it is the gods, perhaps, who play the last card.

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Day Seven of Forever Friends

Forever Friends Blog Tour

Thank you for reading this blog entry! This is the seventh post on the Forever Friends blog tour and we have made it through the first week! Thanks again to everyone following the tour for your support! I hope the next seven days are as enjoyable and eventful as the last seven days. On Tuesday, the book finally became available at the amazing price of $9.99. This was a mistake made by amazon.com that allowed many members of the Published Authors Network and forum to take advantage of their mistake. You will find a link to amazon.com at the bottom of this post. The same day the book became available from all the online bookstores, I received the first review of Forever Friends by Apex Reviews.

In the review, the reviewer, Linda Waterson referred to the different sections in the book:

Compiled in various sections, ranging from “Family Friends” to “Lost Friends” to “False Friends” to “Spiritual Friends,” the literary offerings contained therein just as equally travel the full spectrum of friendship, covering all imaginable ground in-between. There is reminiscing over childhood heroes, protectors of the four-legged ilk, and gracious musings over friends who were – quite literally – lifesavers. There are also poems that wish for the spreading of global goodwill, as well as verses rendered in homage to friends that are gone, but not forgotten.

She also made reference to the use of quotes at the beginning of each section:

For added contextual flavor, preceding each section is an insightful blurb helping to foster within the reader a greater understanding of what that particular facet of friendship is really all about. Consider, for example, this literary jewel that precedes the “False Friends” section:

False friends are like our shadow, keeping close to us while we

walk in the sunshine, but leaving us the instant we cross into the shade.

Christian Nestell Bovee

Philip Spires short story, Stranger than Friends, is the first book in this section. The well-crafted characterizations and authentic dialogue make for an entertaining read. The boredom of the staff and the insensitivity of the clientele in the bar of the Old Hotel in an off the track village, are all too obvious to an unmarried couple staying at the hotel overnight. In the morning, things have come to a head and one family will not be the same as it was the night before as people who were once friends become strangers to each other. I would like to congratulate Philip on a story that draws in the reader right from the beginning as two strangers descend the steep path to a small tightly-knit place, where outsiders are welcome – but only for a short stay.

I would also like to thank Philip for inviting me to make this post on his blog and for giving me the opportunity to add a bit more information about the anthology.

It isn’t too late to order a copy and, as I keep saying, you will not be disappointed!

Forever Friends is available now from all major online stores, including amazon.com:

Forever Friends

and barnesandnoble.com:

Forever Friends

Thanks again for reading this and best wishes for the holiday season!

Shelagh Watkins

Please follow the tour to learn more about the book.

Blog Tour

December 1 Chelle Cordero

December 2 Zada Connaway

December 3 Mary Muhammad

December 4 Helen Wisocki

December 5 Pam Robertson

December 6 Dick Stodghill

December 7 Philip Spires

December 8 Milena Gomez

December 9 L. Sue Durkin

December 10 A. Ahad

December 11 Malcolm R. Campbell

December 12 Lynn C. Johnston

December 13 Dianne Sagan

December 14 Donald James Parker

December 15 Karina Kantas

December 16 Grace Bridges

December 17 Tiziana Rinaldi Castro

December 18 Yvonne Oots

December 19 Dana Rettig

Over By Christmas by William Daysh

Over By Christmas by William Daysh is a war novel. It is also a superb novel in which real events, imagined histories, human relationships and politics intertwine. These elements are combined via a beautifully paced narrative whose use of multiple forms only adds to its clarity.

While naval battles of the first half of World War One are described, we encounter some of the politics that generate their necessity. We see the in-fighting and posturing around the desire to avoid responsibility. We share the priority of a Prime Minister who, amidst the pressure of decision, remains obsessed with a young woman – and not for the first time! – a woman to whom he is compelled to write, often several times a day. There are numerous factual reports of the war. These provide the background, the context to allow us to position the experience of the book’s characters.

And central to these are the Royals, not the rulers in London, but a naval family in Gosport, Portsmouth. Jack the father and George the son are seamen, while Emily, wife and mother, is their home port. In his spare time, which seems to be quite sparse, George is a bit of a lad. He is a handsome, honest type who falls for two girls in particular, Carrie and Carla. The first is a single mother, left encumbered but compensated by a period of “service”. The latter, a minor character with a major role, is a dusky-skinned, half-Italian shop assistant.

And then there’s Bill, who takes up with Carrie, and then later with a Mr Paxman to further his growing business interests. But throughout there is the war. Throughout there is the threat of suffering alongside the daily reality of early death, the hell of battle. War, and especially this one, claims many lives and takes them arbitrarily, though never without loss for those who survive. The wounded, it seems, sometimes have to cope with more than death.

George emerges as the central character of Over By Christmas. We follow him repeatedly to and from Portsmouth. He sees The Pacific and the South Atlantic. He sails around Britain into the North Sea. He is in Malta and Gallipoli. Above all, he is in the war, perhaps not muddied in trenches, but permanently threatened by torpedo, shell and sea. He makes friends, is loyal, and gallant and is promoted. But throughout, his passion for Carrie remains. Chances to reconcile their differences, to realise their shared love are rare, but important moments. And then… And then this is the beauty of Over By Christmas. 

The narrative engages the reader in its characters’ lives. In twists and turn it surprises, but in the end we have merely the complications of human relationships. Warfare is about sparring, about conflict, imagined gains and suffered losses. Affairs of the heart may demonstrate strikingly similar qualities.

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Pain Wears No Mask by Nik Morton

Pain Wears No Mask by Nik Morton is no ordinary thriller. It has an extra dimension that constantly encourages the reader to take an interest in more than a tale of events. It is the book’s central character that provides this extra dimension, because she seems to have two quite different identities. One provides the content of her tale, while the other informs her approach and motives. 

 As Maggie Weaver, the book’s first person narrator is a policewoman in Newcastle. She is devoted to her husband, also a policeman, and is utterly involved with her work. Like many honest, hard-working law enforcers, Maggie is angered at the suffering of the victims of crime and outraged at the ability of the guilty to avoid punishment. Even greater ire is reserved for the bent cops that facilitate both outcomes.

When Maggie Weaver, the policewoman becomes involved in a particularly brutal case, the final outcome affects herself personally, her marriage and her colleagues. The case is resolved, partially, but the mayhem it generates has permanent consequences.

Sister Rose works in a hostel for the homeless in south London. She has adopted her vocation as a mature woman, trained, taken vows and spent a couple of years as a missionary in Peru. It was there, high in the Andes, working with poor people who have to scratch for a living, that she truly understands the nature of her vocation. When, back in London, Sister Rose finds herself by chance involved in a complex, multiple crime, she resolves to accept the challenge to become involved, to pursue her privately-informed investigation of events.

Sister Rose, the compassionate nun, and Maggie Weaver, the experienced crime fighter and policewoman are, of course, the same person. Maggie’s and Rose’s stories are not presented sequentially, however. Nik Morton begins with the London crime which gradually reveals its relevance to what befell Maggie in Newcastle years before. Thus, both in form and content Pain Wears No Mask transcends its genre. Because of this the reader finds that Sister rose’s future is also as interesting as her related past. When, via Peru, the story returns to Newcastle to confront the unfinished business of years before, Maggie and Rose combine talents, approaches and identities when events promise the settling of old scores and the possibility of reaching beyond the mere foot-soldiers of injustice. 

 Pain Wears No Mask is a well written, intriguing story. It will entertain those used to its genre, but it will also provide interest for the general reader.

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Notes On A Scandal by Zoë Heller

In Notes On A Scandal, Zoë Heller presents a novel narrated by Barbara Covett, a history teacher in St. George’s, a comprehensive school in north London. When Bethsheba Hart joins the staff as a pottery teacher, Barbara realises that a special person may just have entered her life. Sheba seems to be much that Barbara is not. She is younger, attractive, apparently free-thinking, married, has children and is irretrievably middle class. What she is not, unfortunately, is an experienced teacher, having trained only after bringing two children into adolescence. She is thus going to find life at St. George’s rather tough.

For reasons best known to herself, the sixty-ish, self-assessed “frumpy” Barbara decides to keep a journal. Sheba figures in its pages and eventually comes to dominate them. It is an out of character pastime, perhaps, since Barbara seems to have little but contempt for her colleagues, and survives her educator’s role by constantly keeping her students at arm’s length. Perhaps this is what Barbara has done with every aspect of her life, despised it and shunned it in one. Strange, then, that Sheba, her character, her actions, even her words come to dominate Barbara’s thoughts.

Like many who meet this new teacher, Barbara becomes apparently infatuated with this elegant, apparently free spirit. And also, we learn, does one of her pupils, a fifteen year old boy called Stephen. Sheba, of course, is not the confident, satisfied, fulfilled dominatrix that others invent. She is a vulnerable, not quite organised mother of two. The elder daughter is a difficult teenager, the younger son disabled. Her husband is considerably older than her. Like Barbara, she also suppresses emotion, suppresses it, that is, until it takes over her life with abandon as her relationship with the boy simultaneously fulfils both reality and fantasy.

It lasts for several months before it inevitably comes to light. Barbara’s role, throughout, is central. She is in the know. She is watching. She is not in control, of course, but exercises considerably more power than an onlooker. And when, eventually, the muck hits the fan, Barbara, who has done her share of the slinging, gets hit by some of the fall-out. The denouement is both surprising and logical. Though it is Sheba’s motives that the police, the national press and her colleagues want to dissect, it is Barbara’s that must interest the reader. She as been an informed, motivated diarist, it seems.

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A Sunday At The Pool In Kigali by Gil Courtemanche

For me, Gil Courtemanche’s book, A Sunday At The Pool In Kigali, bore a great similarity to the screenplay for the film Hotel Rwanda. Having seen the film twice, it is a positive statement about the book to state that I did not make the association until almost two thirds of the way through. On the other hand, much of the material I did not associate with the film verged on the prurient or scatological. Much of what rose above this level eventually depressed, because it addressed like an obsession the detail, the consequences and the pathology of AIDS. The doubly unfortunate truth about the last two sentences is that the book probably, in its excesses, under-states the reality.

An enduring memory is a character, a visitor to Rwanda, seeing what he takes to be a cultivated hillside and then praising effusively the presence of agriculture in the centre of town A moment later he is introduced to reality by his host who confirmed that the excavation was a cemetery to cultivate the profusions of corpses produced by AIDS. The scenes of genocide that follow can only match the horror of what went before.

At the core of the book is the relationship between Valcourt and Gentille. He is Canadian, a journalist film-maker, who seems at home in Rwanda’s tribulations. Gentile is a woman of virtue, a virtue she plies with ease. She looks like a Tutsi, but is a Hutu. In some ways their relationship mirrors the colonial heritage that at least exacerbated, if perhaps not actually caused the potential for ethnic conflict that eventually ignited so disastrously.

But A Sunday At The Pool In Kigali points to social divisions in an apparently valueless community that sees other people, both collectively and individually, merely as the exploitable given form. There’s not a lot of joy here, even in the book’s copious sex that seems, anaesthetised, to dominate much of the text. But overall there is little to uplift in the book. Almost no-one offers love or compassion. An almost unrelenting torrent of cynicism, abuse, persecution and social degeneration floods from every page. It is a portrait of an almost uncompromisingly ugly and abhorrent experience.

The book is thus an often one-paced, one-dimensional read. The problem, unfortunately, is that it might be accurate.

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The Destiny Of Natalie X by William Boyd

An aspect of William Boyd’s writing that always seems close to the surface of his work is an examination of selfishness. At the very least, his characters fulfil their self-interest. One recalls how the events of The New Confessions or Any Human Heart unfold, how in both cases the central character’s aspirations are forever paramount, often to the detriment of those he proclaims to love. But it is probably in his short stories that this theme is best illustrated and his collection, The Destiny Of Natalie X, does precisely that.

Two of the stories, The Dream Lover and Alpes Maritimes, in just twenty pages each, pursue there ideas in depth. In the first, a student in a south of France university is envious of the obvious wealth and easy-going lifestyle of an American fellow student. This well-heeled American splashes money around, advertises his talents and gets the girls – at least in theory. He even has a desirable Afghan coat. By the end of the story, the narrator has utterly reversed the roles. Not only does he come out on top financially, he goes off with the girl, and even gets the coat. In addition, he has benefited from the other’s profligacy along the way.

Another side of selfishness is expressed via responses to temptation, specifically to the proximity of opportunity. Even a man in a stable, happy relationship cannot avoid speculating what a taste of something different might bring. The possibility that it might sour everything else is, of course, never contemplated. In Alpes Maritimes a lusty young man just cannot resist the idea that grass is greener on the other side of the twins. His partner is one twin, his desire might be the other. He years to sample what he seems to see as the merchandise. So while it is in progress, William Boyd suggests that life may be a neurotic search for ever greater fulfilment, even if that is only imagined. Future promise, it seems, always surpasses experience.

When it is ended, however, life seems inconsequential. We live, we love, we dream, we die. And we are soon forgotten, even the turbulence of the journey is soon smoothed. Those with whom we have shared our lives may remember us for a while, but even memory, it seems, is founded in self-interest. Perhaps memory of a deceased is the livings’ mechanism of coping with their own future.

The Destiny Of Natalie X, the title story, deals with the making of a film. It addresses pretence and the inflation of egos. But it also makes us think of the mundane and how, for every individual, it remains special, the only possible existence. As ever, William Boyd uses many different forms to express his ideas. For some readers this variability may get in the way of appreciation of the material. But rest assured, the material is worth the challenge and, if it forms a barrier, then the stories are worth several readings until their challenges are overcome.

View this book on amazon "The Destiny of Natalie X" and Other Stories