As with the holidays to Greece last Summer and this Spring, I took a batch of Jarrolds' 'Jackdaw' Library paperbacks on holiday - this time to a family villa on the south coast of Spain. I took seven but only managed to read four of them. The weather was too sunny and hot for much of the time (am I complaining?) and relaxing in the pool or simply lying stretched out on a recliner was the most I could do. As for the four books? They were very different from each other, but that's why I like the 'Jackdaw' series. I have now read twelve of the sixteen Crime 'Jackdaws' (I haven't been able to track down the last four yet) and nine of the twenty-two Library series. (I have a further seven on the shelves to read, with only six to find.)
'Jackdaw' Library paperback edition - 1937
The subtitle of this novel is 'A Peace Book' and it is pertinent that George Lansbury, who became Leader of the small group of Labour M.Ps who refused to follow Ramsay MacDonald into the National Government in 1931, wrote the quotation on the front cover: "All who love peace and hate war will welcome this book". Lansbury's pacifism and opposition to rearmament, and rejection at the 1935 Labour Party conference, led to his resignation. He spent his final years travelling through the United States and Europe in the cause of peace and disarmament. As for Bernard Newman himself, he appears to have led a very full life. Born in 1897 and dying in 1968, he wrote over 138 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and was considered an authority on spies. He may even have been one himself! He visited more than 60 countries between the Wars, even meeting Adolf Hitler. Of local interest, he was born in Ibstock to a farmer and cattle dealer and his wife - the village is a mere ten miles from where I type.
The novel is a passionate cry for peace; not unusual since the author had lived through his late teens and early twenties in the Great War. Like so many, he desperately hope it had been the war to end war. His protagonist is born of a momentary liaison between a French girl and a German officer. Her nominal boyfriend, a French officer, is disgusted by her consorting with a swine of a Boche! Eighteen years later Madeline de Montigny tells her son Paul the circumstances of his birth. He forgives her and his education takes him from the college of Rheims and the Paris Sorbonne to London University in 1942. Yes, a novel written in 1931 looks to a future that does not include the Second World War and has no mention of Herr Schicklgruber! Instead, in the early 1940s Churchill - a man almost old in years, but with the eyes of youth - has taken over from Sir Oswald Mosley. There has been a war between Russia and Poland, but it did not spread. Meanwhile, , Paul de Montigny establishes a laboratory in Paris and, by 1950, has demonstrated a new process for the fixation of nitrogen. Overworked, he has a rest holiday in the Pyrenees, where he meets Antoinette ('Toniette'), who is unmasked as the daughter of M. Vierzon, high up in the French government. Notwithstanding the deception , the romance blossoms into marriage.
The author looks back from 1950 to the Armistice of 1918; to President Wilson, with the simplicity of a rustic, the ideals of a Methodist revivalist, and the geographic knowledge of a elementary schoolmistress; to Lloyd George who was suspect; and Clemenceau who may be a hero to France, but to world history he will be judged harshly. He then shows up the League of Nations for the toothless institution it was. It seems incredible that in such an age (1950) of advanced civilisation and material comfort ideas of War still existed. But exist they did...yet it must be admitted that the history of war is the history of the human race...even a dog thinks higher of human nature than does man himself.
To counteract the threat of war, Paul establishes a League of Scientists - a reality, not like the anomaly in Geneva. By a process I couldn't follow (more like science fiction than any reality), the League manages to stop a war between Italy and Turkey by jamming their ships engines etc. The league also speaks to the peoples of the states through controlling the airwaves. It also halts a much more serious potential conflict between France and German over Alsace in 1961. It ends, rather dramatically, with the deaths of the two instigators - the leader of France (Toinette's father) and the leader of Germany (Paul's father). Far fetched? Absolutely; but no more far fetched than the idea War can be stopped. Bernard Newman lived until 1968 - through the Spanish Civil War, Italy's invasion of Abyssinia, the Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam conflagration.
The end of the novel sees Paul broadcasting - a pallid face with faith shining from its fanatic eyes. They heard a voice, first hesitant and toneless, then becoming finer and resolute. And a message: the death of war; the dawn of peace. The end of an age; the beginning of a new. An entreaty, a summons, a command. Try selling that to Ukrainians. Paul's ideas would never succeed for a simple reason: Human Nature.
I dislike disparaging books but I found this simply boring. J. Leslie Mitchell writes under his own name (he used the pen name Lewis Grassic Gibbon). I read on the flysheet of the dust wrapper that Compton Mackenzie thought Spartacus a remarkable achievement. I had thought that the 1960 film, starring Kirk Douglas as Spartacus was derived from Mitchell's book, but it was taken from the 1951 novel by the American writer Howard Fast. He had to self publish it, as he was blacklisted during the McCarthy anti-communist era and no publisher would touch it. Looking at the synopsis of the book online, it appears rather more interesting than Mitchell's.
In the latter's novel the main character is not Spartacus himself, but Kleon, a fictional Greek slave and eunuch. Another important character is Elpinice, a slave woman who helps Spartacus and his comrade gladiators escape from Capua and who becomes Spartacus' lover. The books sticks fair closely to the known facts about the revolt, making use of Plutarch, Appian and Sallust. Perhaps that is its problem - not enough life or character is added and the feeling is one of dry-as-dust.
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