“The Violent Century” by Lavie Tidhar (Hodder)

A strange-yet-brilliant blend of Watchmen-style Super-Heroes and John le Carré Spy Fiction

They’d never meant to be heroes.

For seventy years they’d guarded the British Empire. Oblivion and Fogg, inseparable at first, bound together by a shared fate. Until a night in Berlin, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and a secret that tore them apart.

But there must always be an account... and the past has a habit of catching up to the present.

Recalled to the Retirement Bureau from which no one can retire, Fogg and Oblivion must face up to a past of terrible war and unacknowledged heroism, a life of dusty corridors and secret rooms; of furtive meetings and blood-stained fields, to answer one last, impossible question: What makes a hero?

The Violent Century is, much to my shame, the first novel of Tidhar’s that I’ve read. And it’s quite the impressive accomplishment. Tidhar is not a stranger to pushing the envelope – see, for example, his World Fantasy Award-winning Osama – and in The Violent Century, he has created an original, engrossing fusion of noir-ish super-heroes and gritty espionage thriller. The publicity material that came with the ARC managed to capture it very well – “Watchmen meets John le Carre”. This is a very good novel.

Upcoming: “The Mole: The Cold War Memoir of Winston Bates” by Peter Warner (Thomas Dunne)

Another book I spotted in the publisher’s catalogue (I do like going through them, from time to time). This sounds a little different, and one more for the thriller crowd, although it may appeal to a wider audience, given the synopsis…

The fictitious memoir of an unlikely foreign spy planted in Washington, D.C., in the years after World War II

Recruited by a foreign power in postwar Paris and sent to Washington, Winston Bates is without training or talent. He might be a walking definition of the anti-spy. Yet he makes his way onto the staff of the powerful Senator Richard Russell, head of the Armed Services Committee. From that perch, Bates has extensive and revealing contacts with the Dulles brothers, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms, Lyndon Johnson, Joe Alsop, Walter Lippman, Roy Cohn, and even Ollie North to name but a few of the historical players in the American experience Winston befriends — and haplessly betrays for a quarter century.

A comedy of manners set within the circles of power and information, Peter Warner’s The Mole is a witty social history of Washington in the latter half of the twentieth century that presents the question: How much damage can be done by the wrong person in the right place at the right time?

Written as Winston’s memoir, The Mole details the American Century from an angle definitely off center. From Suez, the U-2 Crash, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and Watergate, the novel is richly and factually detailed, marvelously convincing, and offers the reader a slightly subversive character searching for identity and meaning (as well as his elusive handler) in a heady time during one of history's most defining eras.

Peter Warner’s The Mole: The Cold War Memoir of Winston Bates is due to be published in October 2013 in the US, by Thomas Dunne Books.

Propaganda & Politics – When Historical Images Remain Relevant

I was at the British Library’s Propaganda: Power and Persuasion exhibition last week. I highly recommend anyone within easy reach of London visit the exhibition (open until September 17th). There are a good number of excellent displays, and even a couple that are relevant to content that has appeared on Civilian Reader. I’m putting together a longer post about a specific piece in the exhibition, but I thought I’d share another of my favourites here today. Namely, “Freedom American-Style” by B. Prorokov (1971):

I shared this over on Politics Reader, too, but I thought some readers of this blog might also find it interesting. According to the British Library’s page on the poster:

“… New York’s famous Statue of Liberty is parodied as a look-out tower for the American police to observe its people, mocking the idea that it is a symbol of freedom. The poster attacks and subverts American propaganda that promoted the idea of the democratic freedom of the West.”

Given the considerable prison population in the United States, it would appear that Prorokov’s piece retains contemporary relevance, and probably will for quite some time to come…

Guest Post: “On Mind Control” by David Nickle

No question about it. Mind control is more than a trope. It’s a bona fide kink.

You can verify this with a simple Google search (that you should probably do from home, when the kids are asleep or your parents are out), or you can take my word for it: The idea of bending another’s will to one’s own, for whatever purpose, is something that a great many people find fascinating, in that way.

It shouldn’t be surprising: mind control, like the most popular kinks, is all about power differentials – the savant who can exercise said control being the “top”, and the poor, usually uncommonly attractive and unattainable shlub on the receiving end being the “bottom”.

My novel Rasputin’s Bastards is all about mind control. The story covers decades in the lives of specially-selected and trained psychic powerhouses, working on behalf of the old Soviet KGB against their counterparts at Langley, in an Amazing-Kreskin variation of the Great Game. The psychics in this book engage in astral projection, and are able to enter the minds and bodies of properly-conditioned sleeper agents.

Upcoming: RASPUTIN’S BASTARDS by David Nickle

I stumbled across this novel by accident, when Madeleine Ashby mentioned it in an interview answer for CR (sorry, you’ll have to wait until next Wednesday to read the interview…). Naturally, my first reaction was to Google the book, and I found its great cover artwork:

The novel will be published in June 2012 by ChiZine, and after reading the synopsis (below), my interest has definitely been piqued:

They were the beautiful dreamers. From a hidden city deep in the Ural mountains, they walked the world as the coldest of Cold Warriors, under the command of the Kremlin and under the power of their own expansive minds. They slipped into the minds of Russia’s enemies with diabolical ease, and drove their human puppets to murder, and worse. They moved as Gods. And as Gods, they might have remade the world. But like the mad holy man Rasputin, who destroyed Russia through his own powerful influence in the end, the psychic spies for the Motherland were only in it for themselves.

It is the 1990s. The Cold War is long finished. In a remote Labrador fishing village, an old woman known only as Babushka foresees her ending through the harbour ice, in the giant eye of a dying kraken – and vows to have none of it. Beaten insensible and cast adrift in a life raft, ex-KGB agent Alexei Kilodovich is dragged to the deck of a ship full of criminals, and with them he will embark on a journey that will change everything he knows about himself. And from a suite in an unseen hotel in the heart of Manhattan, an old warrior named Kolyokov sets out with an open heart, to gather together the youngest members of his immense, and immensely talented, family. They are more beautiful, and more terrible, than any who came before them. They are Rasputin’s bastards. And they will remake the world.

Rasputin’s Bastard is available for pre-order from Amazon in the US (paperback and Kindling) and in the UK (paperback and Kindling).

Comics Round-Up (Jan.4)

For the first week of 2012, we get quite a nice mix of new comics. I’ve gone for some superheroes, an undead king, a British Cold War spy, a creepy theatre, and some horror. All in all, a pretty good selection.

While I have your attention: expect lots more comic and graphic novel reviews to appear on the blog in 2012 – I keep finding more and more titles that are interesting and worth mentioning, so I’ll try to feature as many as I possibly can. Especially after I get back to New York, when I’m going to have a lot of DC titles to catch up on as well.

Reviewed Herein: Cold War #4, Irredeemable #33, Monocyte #1-2, The Theatre #4, Valen the Outcast #2 [For some reason, I seem to have reviewed them in reverse alphabetical order…]

Comics Round-Up (Dec.14)

A short round-up of some of this week’s comics

As I’m outside of the US for the next few weeks (about a month and a half), my weekly round-ups will be a little less focused on new releases, as I do some catching up with collected editions. Wherever possible, I’ll review some new stuff, but otherwise they’ll have to be saved for February. Which will be fun for me at, the very least. So, this week we have a couple of catch ups and the new issue of Seven Warriors.

Reviewed herein: Cold War #1-3, Seven Warriors #2, Operation: Broken Wings #1-2, The Untamed #1

“The Trinity Six”, by Charles Cumming (Harper Collins)

Spies, Cold War politics, and one unsuspecting history professor caught in the middle…

London, 1992. Late one night, Edward Crane, 76, is declared dead at a London hospital. An obituary describes him only as a ‘resourceful career diplomat’. But Crane was much more than that – and the circumstances surrounding his death are far from what they seem.

Fifteen years later, academic Sam Gaddis needs money. When a journalist friend asks for his help researching a sixth member of the notorious Trinity spy ring, Gaddis knows that she’s onto a story that could turn his fortunes around. But within hours the journalist is dead, apparently from a heart attack.

Taking over her investigation, Gaddis trails a man who claims to know the truth about Edward Crane. Europe still echoes with decades of deadly disinformation on both sides of the Iron Curtain. And as Gaddis follows a series of leads across the continent, he approaches a shocking revelation – one which will rock the foundations of politics from London to Moscow…

This is the second novel by Charles Cumming I’ve read, and both have been superb in every way: prose, plot, pace, and characterisation – Cumming really knows how to write. The Trinity Six harkens back to the glory years of Cold War espionage thrillers, but with a contemporary feel and a historian’s perspective. From the very beginning, I was utterly riveted by this thriller, and loved every minute I was reading it.