The Women who flew for Hitler by Clare Mulley

A detailed exploration of the lives of two female aviators in Nazi Germany. The one, Hanna Reitsch, is quite well-known; the other, Melitta von Stauffenberg, is not. Both transcended the social, political and professional norms of their time and place to follow their dreams of flight, and as a result received recognition. One of them (Reitsch) considered the other a rival, and engaged in what we would now call hostile briefing against her. Von Stauffenberg’s response was mainly to double down and continue her work as an aeronautical engineer, garnering the respect and recognition of her peers and eventually the state, whilst shunning much in the way of public approval. There were good reasons for this, of course; quite apart from being by nature a more reserved person than Reitsch, von Stauffenberg was, despite being from the Junker class. one-quarter Jewish, and therefore in the eyes of the Nazi establishment, tainted. But her work was of such importance that exceptions were made. (This only added to Reitsch’s antagonism towards her.)

Both women were motivated by patriotism and loyalty; but those motivations expressed themselves very differently. Melitta von Stauffenberg, as I said, was from the Junker class: she considered herself a patriot, but that was towards Germany first and to a political creed very much second. Towards the war’s end, when her brother-in-law Claus attempted the assassination of Hitler, Melitta’s loyalties went through a re-prioritisation. Although potentially (if very tangentially) implicated in the plot, she switched her loyalties towards her extended family first of all, and used her position to try to alleviate their conditions, without seeking special privileges or trying to intercede for them.

Hanna Reitsch, on the other hand, started out by being politically naïve, but that naivety morphed into fully-blown Nazism. Despite occasional instances where she interceded for Jewish colleagues in minor ways, she embraced Nazi racism and its ideology, and persisted in Holocaust denial to the end of her life, even when faced with direct evidence.

The book has a lot of detail and paints a clear picture of German aviation in the years following the Versailles Treaty. It also includes some interesting side details of those who met either Reitsch or von Stauffenberg, including the famous British test pilot Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown and Sidney Cotton. Both women had professional relationships with many of the key figures in German aviation and the Nazi regime, and these are reflected in accounts of the Nazi leadership as well as German aviation figures such as Ernst Udet and Robert von Greim. There is also a concise account of Claus von Stauffenberg’s assassination plot and its aftermath.

The tragedy of Melitta von Stauffenberg’s death in the closing days of the war (shot down by a USAAF Thunderbolt whilst trying to fly a Bücker Bestmann to reach her imprisoned husband) is contrasted by Hanna Reitsch’s post-war career, which involved on the one hand, international recognition of her gliding achievements and on the other, her continued support for Nazi legacy groups. The author draws some wide-ranging and relevant conclusions from these two parallel lives about the nature of patriotism and its implications in an ideological regime. In particular, she also quotes Melitta’s nephew Berthold, who says of wartime Germany that “not every Party member was a Nazi, and not every non-Party member wasn’t”. In the end, this should serve as a useful reminder to anyone looking at European politics today; trying to fit the politics of Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland or the Ukraine into our own definitions of ‘liberal’ or ‘authoritarian’, ‘left’ or ‘right’ is going to stumble over what seems to us like contradictions.

A minor demerit to this book is the presentation and packaging. Footnotes are marked with an asterisk, which is printed so small as to be almost indistinguishable from quotation marks. And I took issue with the book’s actual packaging: the title suggests something far more black-and-white than the story of these two remarkable women actually is; whilst the sub-title, The true story of Hitler’s Valkyries goes further and suggests outright direct operational military flying, which was not the case. Hanna Reitsch was, at one point, described as a Valkyrie by a senior Nazi; this could never be, and was never applied to Melitta von Stauffenberg.

Industrial Locomotives & Railways of the North East by Gordon Edgar

An attractive album of industrial railway photographs of the North-East of England, taken mainly between the late 1950s and the 1970s, but with some images from as late as 2012. These are railways in the service of industry – their original function – and the images show the dying says, both of industrial steam engines, the railways and the very industries themselves. So much of what is shown in these pictures has been swept away – not just the industry, but the whole way of life. Most of the photographs concentrate on the industrial installations and their railways, but there are occasional glimpses of the world over the factory wall. Some of these photographs were taken in the late 1970s, at a time when I was living on Tyneside. It is sobering to think that had I known where to go, I too could have photographed the dying days of industrial steam.

The bulk of this book deals with the coal industry in County Durham and Northumberland. There are pictures here of pits that had worked for more than 160 years at the time of their closure. Looking at these pictures of almost endless wagonloads of coal, steam engines (sometimes) belching smoke, and the piles of spoil giving testimony to the volume of coal dug out over the years suggests the impact that the burning of all this coal must have had on the environment, and hence how we got where we are today. Some politicians hail the ending of coal mining as a major contribution to the saving of the environment; but that is excessive greenwashing on their part. It was political considerations that saw these industries closed down; it ushered in a domino effect reflecting the change of emphasis away from mass employment in extractive and manufacturing industries towards a post-industrial society with no room for the ideas and values of an earlier era. Looking at these pictures and considering the world they depict, one might ask whether we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

Other photographs show coking plants, the British Steel works at Consett, and the Doxford shipyards on the River Wear at Sunderland. All these have also now gone.

The pictures themselves are a mixture of nicely balanced colour and monochrome. Some of them have a particular beauty about them, despite the harshness of the subject matter and the hard labour they depict. Digital transfers have been well done, with a minimum of sharpening artefacts visible. Pictures display a nice tonal range; a few of the monochrome ones are slightly soft focus, but not so much as to degrade the images. The book is printed on a high-quality semi-matt paper. If only more books of railway photography were as well produced as this!

Leviathan Falls; book nine of The Expanse by James S.A. Corey

And so we reach the final volume of The Expanse. Winston Duarte has undergone a transformation, and is now seeking to fight off the entities that destroyed the gate-builders – but at a terrible cost to humanity. The options are to either be destroyed, or subsumed into a hive-mind of Duarte’s making, the perfection of the order imposed by the Laconian Empire across all the human-settled worlds – now back-footed following the events of the previous book, Tiamat’s Wrath, but still possessing powerful assets. Against this is pitched the crew of the Rocinante and Dr. Elvi Okoye, who following her experience of the protomolecule on Ilus (as depicted in book four, Cibola Burn), has been put in charge of research for the Empire. But as always with the Laconian Empire, failure is not an option, no matter how high your rank.

The fates of all the characters we have met so far, including Teresa Duarte and a Laconian Marine officer we meet for the first time in this book, are wrapped up, some more neatly than others. By the end, we have said goodbye to everyone, some more finally than others. It is hard to see how this could have ended in any other way.

I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the tv series, in particular the fact that the series ended with the dramatisation of book six, Babylon’s Ashes. Many people are holding out hope that the final three novels might be dramatised at some point; and given that there are thirty years between books six and seven, this would not be impossible, if the same cast could be re-assembled some years down the line. The main issue would be accommodating Cas Anvar’s absence, as his character – Alex Kamal – was written out of the show in season 5. But as Alex’s son and his new family play a fairly direct role in this book, some plot gymnastics would be necessary. It’s also interesting to see how some of the short stories – collected in the volume Memory’s Legion – are shown in the tv show, to the extent that anyone coming to this book without having either seen the show or read the collected stories will find two quite important characters suddenly appearing and playing a central role apparently out of nowhere. So – on to the short stories!

An American Story by Christopher Priest

This novel is highly deceptive. On the surface, it is about the impact of the 9/11 attacks on those it left behind. It then goes into some of the less lurid conspiracy theories; Priest makes the case for the evidence presented so far being seriously lacking. In this, you might think we were in similar territory to Ken Macleod’s Intrusion, where another science fiction writer goes a bit off piste to orthodox political thinking for the purposes of building a contrarian viewpoint to provoke debate. But that isn’t Priest’s intention at all.

Priest introduces us to Ben Matson, a British journalist whose girlfriend goes missing on 9/11. He believes her to have been a passenger on American Airlines flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. but her name appears on no passenger lists. As he investigates her fate, he becomes increasingly sceptical about the official narrative – and then a crashed jetliner is found off the US coast which seems to have come from nowhere – no corresponding aircraft has been listed as missing, and the US Coastguard suddenly declare that the wreck is not a jetliner after all, but rather a ship sunk in World War 2.

As the story develops (told in numerous flashbacks), we meet Kyril Tatarov, a mathematician born in the Soviet Union but now an American citizen. Possessed of a brilliant mind, Tatarov has evolved a theory that extends from the mathematical into the social, proposing that in a world governed by social media, with more and more people being exposed to a range of opinions about what others think happened, that consensus can reach a point where reality warps and what people think happened becomes the new reality.

In a world where political debate is now governed, not by facts but by “optics”, this idea seems all too possible, though the only reality being warped in our world is that inside our own heads – for the moment. Yet we have long understood that “history is written by the victors”, and “a lie can be half-way round the world before the truth has got its boots on”, and similar ideas are part of the currency of modern political and social debate. How long before actual facts are bent to suit the consensus – and how long before we cease to notice it?

But beyond this, Priest is playing games with us. On one level, the title allows for some ambiguity from the outset. Is An American Story a story from America, or is it a story about an airliner, in the sense of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest? Or both?

And there are other clues that point in a different direction. Priest’s three books immediately preceding this one – The Islanders, The Adjacent and The Gradual were all, partly or mainly, set in Priest’s fantastical seascape of the “Dream Archipelago”, on a world very much like ours but home to a large number of islands scattered across a world-ocean which are subject to strange time dislocations, making the business of travelling from island to island more complex than just dealing with different administrations and their varying rules for entry, exit and customs. This book is firmly set in our world, but part of the action takes place on the Scottish island of Bute, or Eilean Bhòid in Gaelic – just as the islands in the Dream Archipelago have their common name and their local, patois name. Priest describes the seas around Bute, and the ferries that ply these seas, in the same way that he described the islands of the Dream Archipelago in his previous books. And the arcane and sometimes seemingly pointless bureaucratic processes that travellers in the Dream Archipelago encounter when arriving on a new island seem echoed when Matson arranges to interview Professor Tatarov in a mysterious American intelligence establishment suddenly set up in a disused hydropathic resort on Bute (which vanishes almost without trace a few years later).

Just to increase our sense of dislocation, the book was written in 2017-18 but is partially set in around 2021; Priest’s idea of the fate of post-Brexit Britain, with a pro-EU Scotland declaring independence adds to the feelings of dislocation; a Balkanised Britain is a theme that Priest has hinted at throughout his writing career, and it certainly adds to the reader’s unease. There is an element of autobiography in all this, as later in life Priest settled on Bute and lived there until his death earlier this year.

All in all, then, this was a book that made me think. At the end of the novel, Ben Matson finds some evidence he can believe in, no matter where that leads him. How the evidence got there is never explained, but within the context of the story it all makes some sense – but that leads to other parts of the 9/11 narrative being undermined. Perhaps this all takes place in a world where reality really is malleable – there is an Easter egg in the text that gives readers of other Priest novels a hint – but ultimately this is a novel designed to challenge our own complacency about the world we are making for ourselves.

D-Day through German eyes; how the Wehrmacht lost France by Jonathan Trigg

This book promises much, and it more than delivers. At its core is an account of the D-Day landings, the days leading up to them, and then the battle to break out from the beachhead, all told from the point of view of German commanders, junior officers and some ordinary foot soldiers.

But there’s more. Bracketing that account is an analysis of the disposition of German forces in occupied France, with an examination of their composition and abilities. In order to maintain garrison troops throughout the Greater Reich, Germany put defence of the Atlantic Wall (itself a concept that Germany had proved obsolete when they avoided the Maginot Line in the invasion of France) into the hands of regiments comprised of older troops, medically borderline ones and troops and auxiliaries from the occupied territories in the East. These were reinforced from time to time by a rotation of experienced personnel from the Eastern Front, but again, usually when they were convalescing from wounds.

The equipment of the army in the West – the Westheer – is discussed. I was already well aware that the German army in World War II still used horses extensively for transport. This book makes that clear. But it also points out that the production numbers for tanks, armoured cars, half-tracks and lorries never reached the levels expected; and where these were available, coverage was patchy and tended to favour elite regiments. The book gives due prominence to the ingenuity of some German officers, particularly Major Alfred Becker, who was responsible for producing a range of self-propelled weapons based on French and Czech motorised chassis and Czech, Russian and French guns, combined in bewildering variety.

The strategy of the defence of the French coastal regions was based around the idea that the locally-based troops would be thrown into the battle to hold any invasion force on the beaches until such time as they could be reinforced by heavier and more elite formations rushed into theatre in support, That was the theory. It broke down under the mess of contradictory lines of command, the German belief until well after D-Day that the Normandy landings were a diversion away from the actual landings still to come in the Pas de Calais, and the unexpected onslaught of unprecedented levels of air and naval artillery bombardment that saturated the inland areas from 6th June onwards.

Jonathan Trigg’s analysis of both the military situation and the underlying issues with German decision-making is comprehensive, and goes beyond the level of the Oberkommando der Heer (OKH, the military high command) all the way up to the top and Hitler himself. So many of Hitler’s decisions were based in his personal ideology, which percolated downwards. Particularly, the idea that individual courage and daring could compensate for inadequate (or completely absent) equipment or an imbalance of forces better than 30 to one in troops (over the whole period of the landings) was pervasive (and still holds excessive popular influence today). In the end, the Wehrmacht lost France because of the resources that the Allies were able to pour into the beachhead.

I found some interesting sidelights in the text. Hitler’s insistence that competing subordinates would result in the best answer to any problem emerging through a social Darwinist process of elimination had all sorts of unintended consequences. Trigg talks (in passing) about the freedoms granted to local Nazi administrators in the occupied territories, the Gauleiters. Recounting some of the decisions different Gauleiters took reminded me of their role in the organisation of the Holocaust on the ground in occupied Poland; where one Gauleiter would vigorously arrange for Jews to be cleared from their homes by force, other Gauleiters would arrange for them to be “Germanised” in an administrative process that ticked the boxes Berlin demanded over demonstrating that places had been cleared of Jews. I have often heard people who lost relatives in the Holocaust pondering why Uncle A had been sent to the camps and perished, whilst Uncle B had survived comparatively unscathed at home; this policy was why. Trigg goes further into this process in discussing Nazi policy in occupied France, which gave me an insight into a question I’ve been pondering for a while now over the fate of ethnic Germans left in Poland at the war’s end.

The accepted wisdom is that ethnic Germans were all evacuated in 1945-46 into shattered Germany. And yet, over the years, I have encountered Polish people from Silesia or East Prussia who, even one or two generations on, seem at first sight to be typically “German” in appearance, or who have a fluency in German that you would not expect. But Trigg’s analysis of German internal policy suggests to me that individual Gauleiters who were capable of declaring Jews to be German at the stroke of a pen would be just as capable, in the dying days of the Reich, of forcibly suggesting that it might be best if ethnic Germans changed their names and learnt Polish. Not a conclusion I expected to draw from this book, and yet Trigg’s analysis led me in this direction.

Having said this, there were things I did not like about this book. Although Jonathan Trigg has a number of books under his belt, he displays a turn of phrase which from time to time lapses into sloppy journalism; combined with poor proof-reading and sub-editing, this made me stumble over the text a few times. There is one translation of a reminiscence which is slightly scrambled by the translator retaining the original German word order. And the maps that such a book demands are a) lacking in number, and b) located for some reason at the back of the book, between the notes and the index.

Nonetheless, we have here are eye-witness accounts of one of the pivotal events in history. The visceral nature of much of what is described makes for salutary reading. It shows what happens to ordinary people when they are thrown into the grinding machine of war. It also shows what happens when a commander puts their personal ideology before practical or strategic considerations. The end result is tragic, and for that reason alone, this book should be more widely read.

I will end with a surprise that this book held for me. In the photographic section, I saw a picture of one Oberleutnant Hans Höller, an Austrian who had served with Rommel in North Africa and who was a company commander in the 21st Panzer Division in Normandy. He presents as a handsome young man, looking resplendent in his best dress uniform, and photographed under studio lighting in more peaceful times.

I had seen this picture before. Some twenty years ago, we were trying to find sheltered housing accommodation for my partner’s mother. In the course of this, we were invited to look around a sheltered housing complex in Birmingham, and were shown around one lady’s flat. She had a picture on her wall of a handsome, young German officer – whether a brother or a departed husband I cannot now say. But I can now say that this was a picture of Hans Höller, because that same picture is in this book. That gave me a wholly unexpected level of personal involvement with this book (my own father was in Italy in June 1944, and so my engagement with the D-Day landings was never, until now, very direct). How strange that a book can deliver such a connection, eighty years after the event.

Riley in Ireland; a photographic odyssey, compiled by Michel McMahon from the photographs of R.C. Riley

This slender volume consists of a collection of photographs taken by the renowned railway photographer R.C. Riley on a visit to Ireland in 1950. At that time, Irish railways were (mostly) some twenty years behind similar lines in Britain, although in some areas (such as the adoption of diesel railcars), they were ahead. But even new engines being built in the late 1940s and early 1950s were mainly from much older designs. Moreover, railways in the Republic, recently nationalised, were recovering from what was known as “the Emergency”, the restriction of fuel imports from the UK due to the war situation.

What this means is that the photographs here are a glimpse into a very particular moment in Irish railway history. There are some very workaday scenes as well as outstanding portraits of locomotives.

This book is a print-on-demand publication from Totem Publishing, the publishing arm of the photographic archive The Transport Treasury. It is reasonably priced and produced to a very high standard of reproduction and binding – but with one exception. It seems that no-one actually cleaned the negatives used in this book before they were scanned. Many pictures display prominent blemishes caused by dust and hairs. Equally, much of the more obvious damage could have been eliminated using Photoshop’s image repair tools post-scan. That this was not done is a shame, as it is literally a blemish on what would otherwise be a fine publication.

The Gradual by Christopher Priest

We are returned to Priest’s ‘Dream Archipelago’ for this novel, which traces the career of composer Alesando Sussken, from his early life in the military dictatorship of the Republic of Glaund – one of the protagonists in the global war that the islands of the Archipelago are neutral in – through his growth as a composer, and then his life-changing trip with a cultural delegation around the islands of the Archipelago. How that trip changes him, both of the better and for the worse, is the substance of the book. Along the way, we discover more of how the temporal vortices affect those who travel between islands, and how more experienced travellers deal with this. (Of course, this may or may not have any bearing on other Priest stories that happen to be set in the Dream Archipelago; that is in the nature of things.)

The sense of life amongst the islands of the Archipelago is just as strong here, and it is contrasted with life in Glaund, an Orwellian grey townscape of concrete, industrial decay and deadening conformity. Sussken takes inspiration for his music from distant views of an offshore island that his government prefers not to talk about; he can only take that so far until his tour. Glaund also affects him in other ways; he has an encounter with the Generalissima of the military regime who commissions a work from him. The parallels between Sussken’s situation and that of Shostakovich faced with demands from Stalin for uplifting music in the service of the State, are clear.

Sussken notes, though, that prolonged exposure to the Archipelago seems to make other composers adopt more populist themes, based around folk tunes and popular marches. That he reacts against this suggests that he feels unwilling to compromise his art (though readers may reflect that this never stopped Charles Ives or Gustav Mahler incorporating such themes in their symphonies). When the Generalissima sets out the requirements for the work she commissions from Sussken, he is dismayed to find these to be the elements she demands. But as so often, it’s “art for art’s sake, but money for God’s sake”, which lands Sussken in more trouble.

The denouement ties up all sorts of loose ends, though it would not be possible without the extraordinary nature of the Dream Archipelago It is satisfying, and (unusually for Priest) has a little humour in it (also be alert for a northern English Easter egg slipped into the text). There is also a reference to one of the earlier Dream Archipelago stories, but that only adds to the sense of dislocation rather than binding the stories together in any way. This was most likely Priest’s intention.

As ever, the writing makes the events clear and the story holds together well, despite the complexities of the plot. The world of the Dream Archipelago is not out world, but neither is it at all alien. This is where the strength of the novel lies, in making the setting familiar and yet not familiar. Recommended.

Achtung Schweinehund! A Boy’s Own story of imaginary combat by Harry Pearson

I’ve been following Harry Pearson ever since his first book, The Far Corner, which was all about non-League football (a subject I have no interest in) in North-East England. For my money, he is consistently one of the funniest writers in the English language. This book just strengthens that reputation.

It is an account of his arm’s length love affair with the Second World War and military matters in general. That love affair is expressed through the medium of a) British war comics, b) plastic model kits (mainly Airfix) and c) table-top wargaming. In amongst the anecdotes from his two childhoods – the one he had as a boy and the one he is now living through as an adult (allegedly) – he inserts a lot of social history of 1950s and 1960s Britain, plus a lot of history of the model soldier business.

World War 2 was the defining event for my father and others of his generation. It was reflected in the popular culture of comics, books, tv shows and films for possibly the following twenty years or more. Pearson maps this out and shows how it turned his generation, the “baby boomers” of the 1950s and 60s, into a generation obsessed with military modelling of some sort or another, I am of that generation; and I remember my junior school friends all being equally obsessed with modelling aircraft, tanks and ships. Pearson has written an account of all our childhoods that is both funny and true.

The same goes for his portrait of the wargaming community. The characters he illustrates are typical to most specialist interests and many readers will be able to identify the personalities and fill in their own selection of names known to them. I particularly identified with the final line of his acknowledgements, where he names all the people he’s traded miniature figures with or faced across a wargames table, ending with “…several dozen blokes named Dave.”

God’s War by Kameron Hurley

I had been looking forward to this book for some time, based on a personal recommendation from someone whose judgement on these things is usually sound. What I found was some impressive world-building, though I got the feeling that the narrative stalled a bit when the actual plot kicked in – hey, we’re on a war-torn alien desert planet settled 800 years ago by mainly Islamic populations but of all things we get a car chase! – but it pulled itself back and I finished it with a better impression that I’d thought I was going to have. Having said that, I’m probably not going to seek out the rest of the series, but I’ll happily acquire them if I happen across them.

As I said, we are on a desert planet that has been settled for a good eight hundred years; but this isn’t Dune. The world of Umayma wasn’t settled because of unique resources, but instead because of religious politics. The settlers were all Muslims; centuries on and they have schismed and fallen into a savage war. Some Islamic traditions have survived; others have mutated – one nation has actually inverted the gender roles and now apply similar attitudes towards men and male roles that more fundamental strands of Islam apply to women in our world. But another holds to views and practices that we would recognise. Hurley identifies these, adding in overt racism and body horror. And a lot of insects. Biotechnology in this world has harnessed insects for a range of tasks, and a class of people – “magicians” – can manipulate these insects through biochemical means. (This is not magic as such but as Arthur Clarke would have said, to all intents and purposes it is indistinguishable from magic, so the coinage fits well enough.)

We are propelled into the life of Nyx, a female war veteran, former assassin (or ‘bel dame’) and now reduced to various bounty hunting and black courier jobs. Her career takes a number of bad turns, and we follow her and her team into increasingly perilous situations in pursuit of a wayward “alien” (actually a off-world human in pursuit of more bioweapon materials).

As I said, the world-building on show here is impressive. The manipulation of insects is convincingly portrayed; the Muslim faith and practice is painted sympathetically, although Hurley does not flinch from challenging some practices such as polygamy or (in passing) female genital mutilation. At the same time, Islam is shown to have adapted over eight hundred or more years in a range of different ways. And we are also shown a sub-culture of female boxing which is fairly unique in contemporary science fiction.

As I said, the female assassins in the book are referred to as ‘bel dames’; I got the reference, but there’s no clues anywhere in the text or the world-building itself to point less knowledgeable readers in the right direction. (And I had to stop myself thinking of Michael Flanders gloriously mis-translating it as “the beautiful woman who never says thank you”.)

So: a violent and unsettling tale for a number of different reasons, depending on the reader’s own viewpoint. I suspect many might react badly to this, as “a novel or characters I cannot relate to”. Well, one reason I read science fiction is to be shown something outside my direct experience; and this book certainly does that.

The Islanders by Christopher Priest

Immediately before reading Christopher Priest’s The Islanders, I had read a biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor, the remarkable Englishman who trekked across Europe on foot in 1932 as a very young man, exploring the places, people and lives he met in those distant, pre-war years. He spent time after his walk living in the Balkans; during the war, he helped lead insurgent forces on Crete, mingling with the Cretan shepherds and (through speaking fluent Greek) mingling with them invisibly. After the war, he settled in Greece, living on the Peloponnese coast and writing about his travels on the mainland and around the islands of the Aegean. So when, through a fairly random choice, I opened The Islanders, I was ready for a novel made up of gazetteer entries for imaginary islands set in an imaginary sea, populated by artists, writers and scientists, leading lives that only seem ordinary on the surface.

The stories in this book are set in the “Dream Archipelago”, a profuse scattering of islands in a great world-sea between two warring continents in north and south. The world they are on is not ours, and yet bears outward similarities to our own. But there is much about the Dream Archipelago that is illusory. Time and space are sometimes not fixed quantities; the world of the Dream Archipelago stands at an angle to our own, and the familiar may sometimes flip over into the fantastic. At first, this is only reflected in some of the gazetteer entries and some of their handy hints for travellers that bring the reader up short; but then. as we go further into the book, we encounter stories about individual inhabitants of this world, first as historical background material and then later as individual accounts, and we see the world, and specific events in it, through different eyes. Gradually, our own perception shifts and our interpretation of events is challenged.

Priest started writing stories set in the Dream Archipelago in the late 1970s, with the first three appearing in book form in his collection An Infinite Summer in 1979. In his introduction to that book, Priest says that the stories were inspired by a holiday in the Greek islands, but that there were a number of other locations that went into the mix, especially the Channel Islands (a small group of islands just off the northern French coast, but held as the semi-feudal property of the British Crown for many hundreds of years). Indeed, Priest gives the islands of he Archipelago a legal and administrative system that seems to come directly from Jersey or Guernsey. He also said in that introduction that the individual stories should not be considered as being linked in any way; other than being set in the Dream Archipelago, they had little or nothing in common. But he kept returning to the subject, and by the time all his Archipelago stories were collected together in The Dream Archipelago in 1999, some of the earlier stories had been revised to make them fit more directly into the loose series that these stories had become. His 1981 novel The Affirmation also had segments set in the Dream Archipelago, although that part of the novel portrays the protagonist’s own psychotic retreat from his (and our) reality into a world that appears to be of his own making. But this is a game that Priest is playing with us, because in The Islanders, there are references to a novel written by a character in this book, called The Affirmation. Later Priest novels, such as The Adjacent (2013) and The Gradual (2016) are set, partly or wholly, in the Dream Archipelago. Yet it would be unsafe to think of these books as constituting a series of some sort, but rather a setting that Priest returned to as ideas occurred to him that would befit from the shared setting.

So in The Dream Archipelago we piece together some lives – and deaths – from different viewpoints, and over an extended reading, rather like the way we who read history piece together our own interpretation of events based on differing interpretations of the same events as seen from different viewpoints, or relating seemingly un-associated snippets of information that go together and make a whole story. This approach will always leave some narrative holes, whether we are reading about real events or fictional ones, but that just gives a book like The Islanders a special smack of authenticity, just like real life. It is a prime example of the sort of speculative literature that I think of as a “puzzle novel”; but in this case, there is no one answer that is right. Rather, the reader has to arrive at an answer that they personally find satisfying. For Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth. And if you find this novel to have beauty, you will find truth in it, no matter how fantastic the events or how fragmentary the beauty.