Robert Harris – BooksPlease

Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56: Archangel by Robert Harris

Published on May 10, 2024May 10, 2024 by Margaret10 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

I’m featuring Archangel by Robert Harris, one of my TBRs, a book I bought five years ago. It is a thriller set in late 20th century Russia.

Book Beginning:

Late one night a long time ago – before you were even born, boy – a bodyguard stood on the verandah at the back of a big house in Moscow, smoking a cigarette.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. You grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Page 56:

Stalin had suffered a catastrophic haemorrhage in the left cerebral hemisphere some time when he was alone in his room between 4 am and 10 pm on Sunday March 1 1953. Academician Vinogradov, who examined the brain after death, found serious hardening of the cerebral arteries which suggested Stalin had probably been half-crazy for a long while, maybe even years.

Synopsis from Amazon:

When historian Fluke Kelso learns of the existence of a secret notebook belonging to Josef Stalin he is determined to track it down, whatever the consequences. From the violent political intrigue and decadence of modern Moscow he heads north – to the vast forests surrounding the White Sea port of Archangel, and a terrifying encounter with Russia’s unburied past.

~~~

What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris

Published on July 20, 2021 by Margaret7 Comments

I read An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris in June, but as I was on a roll, reading but not reviewing books I’ve only just got round to writing about it. I loved it, one of my TBRS, a hardback book I bought in 2016. I’d heard of the Dreyfus affair but knew very little about it.

In his Author’s Note Harris writes that his aim in writing this novel was to ‘retell the true story of the Dreyfus affair‘, describing it as ‘perhaps the greatest political scandal and miscarriage of justice in history, which in the 1890s came to obsess France an ultimately the entire world‘. What follows is a chillingly dark, and realistic novel of conspiracy and espionage.

The book begins in Paris in 1895. Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish officer, has just been convicted of treason, sentenced to life imprisonment at Devil’s Island, and stripped of his rank in front of a baying crowd of twenty-thousand.

It’s narrated by Colonel George Picquart, Chief of the Statistical Section of the French Army, who became convinced that Dreyfus was innocent. But Picquart is told by his superiors to drop his investigation. Despite that he doesn’t and ends up losing his position and being relocated to North Africa, where he was assigned a dangerous mission. Eventually he was dismissed from the Army whilst Dreyfus remained imprisoned on Devil’s Island under the most appalling conditions. Dreyfus was released from prison in 1899 but was only exonerated in 1906.

What gives An Officer and a Spy such authenticity is that Harris has used transcripts of the various trials, inquiries and hearings, biographies, family letters as well as Dreyfus’s own writings in writing his novel. He goes into meticulous detail in staying accurate to the actual events, but even so this is a gripping book and I was completely absorbed by it from start to finish.

Robert Harris is one of my favourite writers and I have yet to read a book of his that disappointed me, but this book surpassed my expectations, and is one of his best in my opinion.

V2 by Robert Harris

Published on January 6, 2021 by Margaret6 Comments

Random House UK, Cornerstone| 17 September 2020| 314 pages| Kindle review copy| 5*

Description

Victory is close. Vengeance is closer.

On the brink of defeat, Hitler commissioned 10,000 V2s – ballistic rockets that carried a one-ton warhead at three times the speed of sound, which he believed would win the war.

Dr Rudi Graf who, along with his friend Werner von Braun, had once dreamt of sending a rocket to the moon, now finds himself in November 1944 in a bleak seaside town in Occupied Holland, launching V2s against London. No one understands the volatile, deadly machine better than Graf, but his disillusionment with the war leads to him being investigated for sabotage.

Kay Caton-Walsh, an officer in the WAAF, has experienced first-hand the horror of a V2 strike. When 160 Londoners, mostly women and children, are killed by a single missile, the government decides to send a team of WAAFs to newly-liberated Belgium in the hope of discovering the location of the launch sites. But not all the Germans have left and Kay finds herself in mortal danger.

As the war reaches its desperate end, their twin stories play out, interlocked and separate, until their destinies are finally forced together.

My thoughts:

V2 is historical fiction with a solid factual framework. I like to know when I’m reading historical fiction how much is history and how much is fact. So, I was pleased to find that at the end of the book Harris has included a list of the sources he consulted on the history of the V2 and how it worked, including the work of the photographic reconnaissance interpreters, before writing V2. In particular he acknowledges Eileen Younghusband’s two volumes of memoirs – Not an Ordinary Life and One Woman’s War. She had worked as a WAAF officer on the Mechelen operation, working on detecting the location of the V2 launch sites, and her memoirs had provided him with a vivid insight into her wartime life. Without them he would not have written V2.

It’s set over five days at the end of November 1944 as the Germans fired V2 missiles on London from the woods around Scheveningen on the Dutch coast. The British response was a counter-operation, including a team of WAAFs. The cast includes some historical figures such as Werner von Braun, the real-life head of the Nazi rocket programme, and SS-General Hans Kammler. It’s told in alternating chapters from two of the fictional characters’ perspectives – Dr Rudi Graf, a rocket engineer on the V2 team and Kay Caton-Walsh of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Kay was part of the team based at Mechelen using radar to try to locate the V2 firing sites. Harris emphasises that his fictional character, Kay, bore no resemblance to Mrs Younghusband, apart from the fact that she worked on the Mechelen project.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel, learning a lot about that period of the Second World War and about the V2. It is detailed and tense, and very readable, describing the intricate details of the launching of the V2s and Kay’s work, which became increasingly dangerous as their location became known to the Germans.

Many thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for my digital proof copy.

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris

Published on August 13, 2020 by Margaret12 Comments

I decided to read The Second Sleep because I enjoy Robert Harris’ books and when I saw him on a TV programme talking about this book I thought it sounded interesting and a bit different. I’m glad I did because I thoroughly enjoyed most of it – it was the ending that I felt was rather flat.

I read it at the end of June and I wish I’d written about it straight away – but I didn’t, it got left because I’ve been finding it difficult to concentrate on writing reviews. So, this is one of my catching up posts that can’t do justice to the books. But, I really do think that you should go into reading this book with an open mind, without knowing too much about it.

The blurb certainly made me want to read it:

Dusk is gathering as a young priest, Christopher Fairfax, rides across a silent land.

It’s a crime to be out after dark, and Fairfax knows he must arrive at his destination – a remote village in the wilds of Exmoor – before night falls and curfew is imposed.

He’s lost and he’s becoming anxious as he slowly picks his way across a countryside strewn with the ancient artefacts of a civilisation that seems to have ended in cataclysm.

What Fairfax cannot know is that, in the days and weeks to come, everything he believes in will be tested to destruction, as he uncovers a secret that is as dangerous as it is terrifying …

As I began reading I had that feeling that this is a book I was going to enjoy – historical fiction, with a mystery to it as well. There is something not quite right about Faifax’s mission as he approaches that remote village in the dark, something menacing and dangerous. The signs are all there – a cataclysmic disaster and a terrifying secret await him when he reaches that village.

But then – all is not as it first appears and I wondered if all this is a smoke screen – what is really going on, is this really the medieval England I’ve read about in history books? And here it is – the nub of the matter – what is going on, where and when are these events taking place? This is an imagined world, a piece of speculative fiction, a bleak and brutal world under a strict authoritarian rule. It’s about progress, or lack of it, about the rule of law, and the power of knowledge.

As I expect in Harris’ novels, apart from that abrupt ending, it is paced well, as more and more information about this strange time and place are revealed the tension rises and rises. The characters became real to me and I could easily visualise all the scenes – in other words I was gripped and involved in the story. So, it was with a sense of an anti-climax that I reached the ending – was that it? I wanted to know more. Even so, I can say that this is a book I thoroughly enjoyed and I think I’d like to re-read it sometime, prepared for the ending.

I was interested in the title, the second sleep, referring to the characters’ sleep pattern of having a period of wakefulness of a couple of hours in the middle of the night and then returning to bed for a second period of sleep. I wondered if that was historical fact – these days it’s not considered to be good to have a broken sleep pattern. It was – I found this BBC article, which explains there is a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks and that during the waking period people were quite active – as they are in this book. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.

Format: Kindle Edition
File Size: 2384 KB
Print Length: 330 pages
Publisher: Cornerstone Digital (5 Sept. 2019)
Source: I bought it

My Friday Post: The Second Sleep by Robert Harris

Published on June 19, 2020 by Margaret19 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

My choice this week is a book that I’ve just started to read – The Second Sleep by Robert Harris and it promises to be good.

It begins:

Chapter One – The Hidden Valley
Late on in the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of Our Risen Lord 1468, a solitary traveller was to be observed picking his way on horseback across the wild moorland of that ancient region of south-western England known since Saxon times as Wessex. If this young man’s expression was troubled, we may grant he had good cause.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice.

These are the rules:

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
Post it.
Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Page 56:

One letter, however, had been sealed in its own plastic wallet, and this was found to be in near-perfect condition. Mr Shadwell had made a copy, and asked permission to read it aloud to the society. His proposal was approved unanimously
Imperial College, London, 22 March 2022

Blurb:

Dusk is gathering as a young priest, Christopher Fairfax, rides across a silent land.

It’s a crime to be out after dark, and Fairfax knows he must arrive at his destination – a remote village in the wilds of Exmoor – before night falls and curfew is imposed.

He’s lost and he’s becoming anxious as he slowly picks his way across a countryside strewn with the ancient artefacts of a civilisation that seems to have ended in cataclysm.

What Fairfax cannot know is that, in the days and weeks to come, everything he believes in will be tested to destruction, as he uncovers a secret that is as dangerous as it is terrifying …

~~~

If the quotation from the Sunday Times is right, this is exactly what I want to read right now:

A thoroughly absorbing, page-turning narrative in which the author, with his customary storytelling skills, pulls us ever deeper into the imaginative world he has created. It [also] poses challenging questions about the meaning of the past, the idea of progress and the stability of civilisation. It is a fine addition to Harris’s diverse body of work. Sunday Times

The Ghost by Robert Harris

Published on October 25, 2018 by Margaret14 Comments

The Ghost

I have enjoyed all of Robert Harris’s books that I’ve read and The Ghost is no exception. The ‘ghost’ in this novel is a professional ghostwriter employed to finish writing the memoirs of recently retired prime minister of Great Britain, Adam Peter Benet Lang. McAra, Lang’s long-term assistant, had nearly completed Lang’s memoir when he was found dead, drowned. He had gone overboard during the ferry crossing to Martha’s Vineyard, where Lang and his wife, Ruth are staying.

The setting of Martha’s Vineyard in winter reflects Lang’s mood, it is out-of-season, closed down, practically empty – as isolated as Lang himself, disconnected from the world of power he once dominated and stuck on this bleak island with his volatile wife and his aide, the beautiful Amelia Bly, who Ruth suspects is having an affair with Lang. The ghostwriter soon discovers that Lang has secrets in his past that are returning to haunt him – secrets with the power to kill. And he suspects that McAra’s death was neither an accident nor a suicide.

This is fiction, but Adam and Ruth, do have similarities to Tony and Cherie Blair. Lang is charming, personable, full of restless energy, with an engaging smile and thick wavy hair. The narrator, an unnamed writer, who Adam calls ‘man’, is a likeable character more used to ghostwriting the memoirs of footballers than politicians, who has just one month to complete Lang’s memoirs. But soon after he arrives this is reduced to two weeks when news breaks that Lang is accused of war crimes. The International Criminal Court in The Hague are investigating the allegations of Richard Rycart, the former British Foreign Secretary, that Lang had ordered the illegal handover of suspects for torture by the CIA.

I liked the details about ghostwriting from the quotes heading each chapter taken from Andrew Crofts handbook, Ghostwriting. But what I liked most about The Ghost is that it is fast- paced, full of tension and written in a straightforward linear narrative – no flashbacks or fly forwards, or multiple narrators. As in his other books I’ve read it’s written in such a way that I feel as though I’m there with the characters taking part in the action. And his characters are distinct people, easily distinguishable from each other. In so many books I’ve read recently I’ve come across a character and have been unable to place them and have had to backtrack to find out who they are and how they fit into the plot, or the characters have similar sounding names or all begin with the same letter. Not so with The Ghost the characters have depth, the structure is clear, and there is a twist at the end that revealed the menace implied through the whole novel. Harris is a great storyteller.

My copy: