Orbital (Samantha Harvey, 2024)
I started the year finishing a book I started in the last days of 2024, the absolutely brilliant short novel Orbital by Samantha Harvey which had won the Booker Prize. I hope i will have time to reread the book -- it is so exquisite, and has the virtue of being just 136 pages.
Windfall (Desmond Bagley, 1982)
When we were teenagers, the genre my friends and I enjoyed the most were a class of thrillers written by (mainly British) authors such as Alistair MacLean and Desmond Bagley, featuring resourceful heroes pitted against villains (MacLean would use the phrase "the ungodly"). Such books were common in the lending libraries that children of professional middle-class Indians living in cities could access in the 1960s and 1970s. Very occasionally a school library would buy them, perhaps because some teacher thought it was better that children read such thrillers rather than not read at all. Also, each of us would also somehow manage to buy a few novels of this kind from our pocket money -- they were commonly available in bookshops in those days, certainly in Khan Market. And especially in the bookshops or stalls at train stations, not just the Higginbothams of our times but even in those little carts that vendors plied on the platforms.
Then there would be the usual frenetic exchange of such books within our circle of friends -- you were expected to return them within a few days, a week at the most. Friendships could come unstuck if you broke that compact, taking too long to return a book or comic, or horror of horrors, losing it. There was a constant fear of comics being confiscated by a parent, but not such books. No one would anyway believe you lost it -- you were deemed unreliable thereafter. And you would have to be a real idiot to take them to school and have them confiscated there.
Bagley was a journalist and thriller writer who wrote books such as The Golden Keel, High Citadel, The Vivero Letter, The Tightrope Men, The Freedom Trap (which was filmed as The Mackintosh Man) and The Snow Tiger. Windfall (1982) was the last thriller published while he was alive. I saw this book in the library of the Delhi Gymkhana Club, a paperback that the library had had bound in a red hardback with the title and author's last name imprinted in gold lettering. I immediately picked it out since I was curious to revisit the kind of books I read nearly 5 decades ago, and see whether the writers of this genre had any real quality to their writing. Beyond entertainment.
I cannot say that this particular book by Bagley was remarkable for its writing. The action in this novel is set mainly in Kenya, with some sequences in Los Angeles, New York and London. Having lived in Africa, and travelling there, Bagley had some feel for that continent's terrain, vegetation and people. The main baddies in the novel were the white South Africans. The main protagonist Max Stafford runs a security agency after retiring as a colonel in the British military intelligence -- there is nothing particularly charismatic about him. Some of his collaborators and associates have capabilities that are a bit exaggerated. [There also are some odd names -- a Sikh called Nair Singh and a minor character called Natterjee, who is said to be a Parsi. But hey, this was Kenya, and names could get transcribed differently there.] The descriptions of the colonial clubs and colonies in Nairobi and hotels there and further into the bush sound reasonably authentic. A lot of cold beer and some gin is drunk by all (Nair Singh drinks juice or lassi though). I got to learn a charming phrase for speed-breakers on the road: "sleeping policemen".
The Secret Hours (Mick Herron)
