I must be getting old....(actually, an incontestable truth).

But, damn, I was sure I had already written a review of this book, however it is nowhere to be seen. Maybe I wrote it and never submitted it. Maybe my memory is just crap.

So, here goes... though I have to say at the outset that it is a while since I read it and so I don't recall the names of the all the protagonists.

At the beginning of the book, we are in Afghanistan when it was still a kingdom, (which places it in around the early 1970's)... before it became the tragic, war-torn country that we see almost daily on the news.....before the Russians tried to invade, and were repelled heroically by brave tribesmen supplied with munitions from the United States. (One wonders if any of those same "freedom fighters" are now known as the Taliban).

The narrator is a small boy, Amir, the son of rich man who lives like a feudal lord, with servants and retainers who touch their forelocks to him. The father is not just rich, he is physically large, a fighting man admired and respected by all his friends for those qualities; a man not to be challenged.

Amir has a friend, Hassan, who is the son of one of the retainers. Hassan belongs to an ethnic group called the Hazara, a tribe who are treated with contempt by other afghani clans, and regarded as suspicious..... rather like the attitude of British people towards Romany folk, but famed also for the beauty of their women. Amir, on the other hand, is a Pashtun. Readers of National Geographic magazine may recall a photograph of a young green-eyed Afghani girl who's captivating expression bewitched the world some 20 years ago from the front cover of that journal. I believe she was Hazara.

Due to the differences in social standing between the boys, Amir, the rich and privileged one, goes to school, while little Hassan stays home doing the menial tasks assigned to him as a servant boy. As a result, Hassan remains illiterate....and Amir mocks him for his ignorance. Hassan is portrayed as a noble, loyal little boy..... he is also the kite runner of the title.

At that time in Afghanistan, as in other countries, small boys indulged in the practice of kite-flying as a form of combat. It is a rather civilized type of contest, where one party gets defeated, but no one gets hurt (at least that is the theory). I happen to know a little about this, not from having lived in Afghanistan, but in Mexico. There small boys fly home-made kites of split bamboo, cotton thread and coloured tissue paper, which are called "papolotes", an old Nahuatl word...which suggests that the practice dates from before the Conquest. My youngest son was quite adept at making, and flying papalotes when he was younger; a very wholesome pastime, I always thought. The sport involves tying razor blades to the string just below the kite (or alternatively, shards of broken glass are glued to the line), and then once the kite is airborne, trying to engage an enemy kite and cut its string. This causes the defeated kite to plummet to the ground, its tail trailing behind it.

At the opening of the Kite Runner, we meet Hassan, the little servant boy and expert kite dude and his social "superior", Amir. It is a lyrical beginning, portraying the innocence of youth, the peaceful sun-blessed days with blue skies, when small boys sit in a pear tree, surrounded by its blossoms, and discuss their possibilities of winning the next kite flying contest.

I had great hopes that the story would continue to enchant me like those first few pages did, but I was disappointed. I would say that it went down-hill progressively from the opening pages.

We are also introduced to the bad guy, a kid who is half German and half Afghani, by the name of Hermann (I am not sure that this is really his name, but it will do for my purpose).

Political strife comes quickly to upset the old order, there is a revolution, the king is deposed, shortly after that the invasion by Russia begins... the victims, as ever, are the civilians caught between the warring factions. Violence becomes a way of life, and the Taliban appear.

And who do you think grows up to be the meanest Taliban of the lot....? Hermann, of course. And just to make sure that you really don't identify with him, Hermann is guilty of the following faults, a) he is a paedophile... he likes small boys b) he is a sadist, and takes great pleasure in torturing his victims, c) he is a heroin addict d) finally he is the worst sort of hypocritical, bigoted, intolerant, religious fundamentalist.

So, a really good question is, why is this particular book being hailed across America as a terrific read? Could it be that it is because it is saying exactly what the American public want to believe?

In the same way that the crushingly boring books of the late Alex Solzhenitzin were acclaimed and he got the Nobel (for one of those dreadful, depressing tomes like Cancer Ward, or the Gulag Archipelago) because at the time, the cold war was on and this was what the West wanted.... an authoritative account to reassure them that communism was really as nasty and evil as they had thought. (A belief which made storming into Vietnam seem "justifiable".)

Now, from what we are able to glean from the news....which of course will be slanted by the people in power.... the Taliban are indeed responsible for some dreadful crimes and oppression.... (particularly towards the unfortunate Hazara people). However, this caricature of evil, in the person of Hermann, seems to be intended as a symbol for us to seethe against and hate.... as a literary device, it seems too blatant, too extreme, and unlikely to be typical.

Towards the end, the story degenerates even further. Amir and his father being wealthy, escape to America... there Amir courts an Afghani girl as though they were still in Afghanistan.... by asking her father for her hand. And gets married. Frankly, it just reads like mundane autobiographical stuff... of interest only to the people concerned.

Later, motivated primarily by the guilt he feels about the way he treated his little buddy, Hassan, who is now dead, Amir has to go back to Afghanistan to rescue Hassan's son.... a child traumatized by ill-treatment at the hands of Hermann, and bring him to live happily every after???? in the land of the free. Oh dear.

My advice... forget it. It is propaganda disguised as literature.

Post Script. I wonder if this review is too judgmental, too damning. Maybe too arrogant? Is there something I am missing here? Should I be listening to Mr Hosseini more sympathetically? I am aware that a lot of people are reading this book and seem to think it is great ... please share your impressions by adding your comments. Thanks.

Year of Wonders is a powerful and lyrical work. The story, as narrated by a young servant-woman called Anna Frith, tells, in shocking detail, how the Great Plague of 1665 arrived in a tiny village in the Derbyshire Peak district....and how the population re-acted to the horrors brought by that pestilence.

It must be said that the language used is beautiful, and there can be no doubt that Ms Brookes has trawled through mountains of seventeenth century texts to be able to compose a narrative that reads as though it may have been written by a low-born person of that era.

But there is nothing tiresome in this. Rather there is a natural poetry such as may have pervaded an age when religious influences were so strong, perhaps flavoured by the style of the King James bible. There is a richness of vocabulary that puts me to shame, and a knowledge of agricultural and lead mining practices that indicate diligent scholarship.

(In fact a little glossary of some of the very obscure terms would have been welcome.)

Try this little taster: "As I polished the Mompellions' damascene chest, I would study its delicate inlays and wonder about the faraway craftsman who had fashioned it, trying to imagine the manner of his life under a hot sun and a strange God."

But most of all, this is an emotional story. Anna, the protagonist, has been whipped and beaten as a child, and marries Sam, a simple miner, to escape her cruel and drunken father. She is to know little happiness, this bright child..... at 15 or 16 a bride, at 17 a mother, at 18 a widow....and this is just the start.

The village folk, Anna's neighbours and friends, are brought to life with a clarity and sympathy that is startling. The hardest thing to come to terms with is that the story is broadly true.... such a village did exist, (and still does). As a community, led by their minister, the surviving villagers swear an oath to quarantine themselves, and so all commerce with the outside world is halted. The Earl of Chatsworth agrees to supply the necessary victuals, deposited at the Boundary Stone, and no one may enter or leave till the plague has run its course.

The central figures, aside from Anna, are the rector, Michael Mompellion, and his wife, Elinor. Elinor and Anna become close friends, and as the crisis deepens, the two women tend the sick with no regard for their own safety.... in the case of Anna she has nothing left to lose. Soon the barriers between a servant and her mistress are eroded by the harrowing experiences brought by the plague, the terrible loss, the fear, and also the courage and sacrifice.

Anna, it is true, is a bit of a Wonder-Woman.... during the course of the year she miraculously teaches herself to practice herbal medicine, deliver babies, mine lead ore, and a host of other fanciful things. But I forgive her all that. Basically, she is such a warm and likeable girl that I can excuse her for being almost too perfect.

There are some surprises too, near the end. I would not dream of spoiling them for you.

But I do exhort you to read it yourself..... with this proviso. I would suggest that anyone who has recently had a death in the family, especially if the deceased was a child, may find this account too up-setting.

Guns, Germs and Steel.

I found this book a revelation. The question posed at the beginning of the work was put to the author by a native of Papua New Guinea, where the author was doing field-work. Simply put, the thinking man in Papua wanted to know how come the Europeans (and "the West" in general), have all the (supposedly) good things... the cars, the TVs, the full bellies, cool clothes, the flush toilets etc.... and the Papuans have to import all these items from the other side of the world. How did that come about?

Jared Diamond proceeds to investigate the roots of the historical events that gave rise to this situation.

Firstly, there is a discussion about food production. It is pretty much agreed that civilization started in the area of the Middle East (around modern-day Iraq) known as the fertile crescent.

The people who lived there found that there were certain crops which were good to eat.

As a result, agriculture started.... not as a deliberate act, but as a consequence of people collecting the biggest and best fruits or grains. The descendants of those bigger and better plants very likely sprouted on top of latrine areas.....never mind the aesthetics; it was a process of selection which lead to "cultivars" appearing.

There is also a discussion about hunter/gatherer cultures versus sedentary, agricultural ones. Hunter/gatherers must travel to pursue their quarry, and to avoid over-exploiting one small area of land. They must limit their possessions to the things that can be carried. This in turn means that the number of dependent infants must be limited too. So those societies take longer to grow numerically.

However, settled farmers can produce more children....they are not limited to the number of infants that a mother can carry, and because they are settled, they can produce food more efficiently which in turn serves to nourish the growing group.

Then we come to consider the domesticated animals......the people of the fertile crescent area were fortunate in finding suitable animals to domesticate. Cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, horses, various oxen, buffalo, yaks etc were all exploited by early man, not just for meat, milk and leather, but to haul the plough, and manure the fields.

(And "suitable" refers not just to their size and usefulness, but also their disposition. For example zebra appear to be very like horses.... but they are not inclined to co-operate with humans, and will bite and kick to an extent that no-one would want to keep a lot of them. There are similar deterrents to keeping giraffe, rhino etc)

This luxury of plenty, both with regard to plant foods and animals, is not repeated else-where. So the Americas simply did not have the variety of plants that lend themselves to agriculture, or the animals that are suitable for husbandry....consider the civilizations of Meso-America...Maya and Aztec, for example, which sprang up after the successful domestication of corn....virtually no large meat animals were available. Apart from a few deer, and little dogs, the biggest menu item was the turkey.

Diamond speculates too, that some of extinctions of pre-history in the New World, may have been due to the arrival of humans.... in other words, due to over-hunting.

But the critical thing is the "germs" mentioned in the title. Most of the diseases which could cause epidemics among humans, were associated with certain livestock.. Eg: cow pox metamorphosed into small pox. As a result, most Europeans in the sixteenth century, if they had not died of small pox, had a certain amount of resistance to it.

Not so in the Americas where it is thought that well over 90% of the population was wiped out by disease within a few years of the arrival of the whites.

This review can only mention a few of the stimulating ideas contained in this book, ideas about inventions, scripts and writing, social organization, and a whole range of obscure but fascinating historical and anthropological information from every continent on the planet... plus the effects of geography on land masses.

Importantly, the conclusion is not that any one race is "brighter", or "more inventive" than another..... (or conversely that any ethnic group is "naturally conservative" or even "lazy"). No, Diamond says that all that mattered was "real estate".

It is clear that Diamond is an academic, but the depth of his erudition in a wide range of disciplines is very impressive, and yet he can write in a manner that is accessible to the lay reader.....and be entertaining too.

There are many highly original ideas embedded in the text, some of which may be controversial, (for example "How Africa became black", and "How China become Chinese."), but at the end, one stands out above the others, it is a cogently argued plea for History, in the future, to be regarded as a Science subject.

I think this is an important book. It has given me an insight into how those weird facts of history came about.... how did Hernan Cortes with his band of a few hundred, bring down the Aztec empire?

How could almost the same thing happen to Pizarro in Peru with the Inca Empire?..... the answers to these and many more interesting questions are to be found in the pages of this excellent and thoughtful work of non-fiction.

It is to be hoped that the guy from Papua New Guinea has received his copy.

Review of An Iliad, a story of war

Alessandro Baricco.

This was one of the books Dan Champion was offering free of charge to people who wanted to review them. I think I am like most people in that I can not resist something for nothing, so I dashed off a mail to him saying "I will have a copy, please."

Frankly, I should not have bothered.

I have to say firstly that I don't read Greek.... so of course, any attempt to read poetry in translation is flawed from the outset. However, when I was younger and thinner, I did read Mr Lattimore's translation because it was a set book for my Classical Civilization course. It was quite hard work, but enjoyable.

Signor Baricco has decided that we need a more modern version, to be read to an audience, and converted into the form of soliloquies from different speakers.... so we hear the accounts of Patroclus, Phoenix, Agamemnon etc.

Does this approach work? Well, not for me.

I thought we were going to get a spiced up version.... a racier account, as it would be reported in the Daily Sport eg ....Helen of Troy tells all, "Paris wasn't half the man that Menelaus was." Or perhaps... "Three in a bed, Patroclus confesses; debauched evening with Achilles and Briseis" or something along those lines.

Sadly no. We get a whole catalogue of "heroes", who in fact have the morals of Hell's Angels.... selfish, petulant, blood-thirsty pirates, who share out the captive women as part of the booty, and rape the unfortunate women of Troy, after it is captured via the deception of the famed wooden horse. Shockingly, Cassandra is raped by the "heroic" Ajax on the altar to Athena. These are war crimes comparable to the ones we heard about being committed in Viet-nam 30 years ago..... gratuitous, cruel, sacrilegious and violent.

A good proportion of the cast are unknowns... who are mentioned in one line and eliminated in the next...usually with an astonishing attention to the details of their wounds which would satisfy the modern Hollywood directors of war movies. So we hear for example, that Erylaus is struck between the eyes by a rock and dies with his head still inside his helmet, cleft in two. Or "with his sword he cut off Hippolochus' arms and then his head, and sent him rolling like a trunk through the dust...." One grim account follows another, described with macabre details.

Candidly, this becomes rather boring.

We know that these things are features of Homer's original work, but he had the excuse of singing for the warriors who wanted to hear their bravery extolled, and of being a product of Achaean society in approximately 1000 or 900 BC.

At the back of the book, Sr. Baricco has added a justification, in which he basically defends the work by arguing that we need to consider how horribly destructive and horrible war is, yet acknowledge its beauty. Not me.

All I can say about this book is that I am glad I did not pay for it. I don't think it contributes anything useful to modern society except to convince us that the warrior class in the Mycenaean age were an ignoble bunch who are best forgotten.

So, does this make me a philistine? Perhaps it does. Oh well....

Half of a Yellow Sun starts off being the story of some young people, for the most part privileged and educated, enjoying their lives and loves in the Nigeria of the early sixties.

Odenigbo is a university lecturer and intellectual, who wins the heart of the gorgeous Olanna, a woman whose beauty turns heads.

In contrast, her twin, Kainene, is "the ugly one". Their father is a man from the country, one of the nouveau riche, making money hand over fist via a combination of good luck, scheming, and ruthlessness which enables him to exploit a network of bribery and corruption. He is one of the fat cats of the post-independence era.

Shocking though it sounds, at one point, Olanna is offered to a fat old government minister as part of one of her father's business deals, and Kainene, realizing this, is glad she is not pretty. As she says, baldly: "the benefit of being the ugly daughter is that nobody uses you as sex bait."

Most of the characters in the book belong to an ethnic group called the Igbos. (In English, the 'g' is not pronounced, so it is often rendered Ibo). The other big language groups in the country are called the Hausas, (mainly Moslem), and the Yoruba, (some Moslem, some Christian). There are of course a whole lot of other tribal groups and languages.

This book concerns the domestic affairs of the protagonists, set against the backdrop of the political events taking place at that time. In this sense it could be compared to Ikram Seth's "A suitable boy."

So, while making no pretence of being any kind of authority on Nigerian history, I feel the need to insert something of the historical events as I understand them....and I hope this synopsis will not offend anyone.

The Igbo, for the most part, were Catholic, and had a tendency to be successful, especially in commerce. Some officers in the army became disillusioned with how the government was mis-managing affairs of state, and overthrew it in a coup. Most of those officers were Igbo.

Before long, rumours were spreading and the non-Igbo people began to take fright. It seemed as though the Igbos were trying to control everything, the best jobs, the highest posts in government, and the officer class of the army.

Unexpectedly, the non-Igbo soldiery of the Nigerian army rose up and massacred as many Igbos as they could... like the pogroms against the Jews in European cities, the violence spread amongst the civilian population; mobs ran amok, and many Igbos were victims of murders, lynchings and shootings, in many cases a cover for looting and theft. No one really knows how many died in this outbreak of violence ... some sources quote the figure of 30,000.

One of the central characters of the novel is the humble houseboy, servant to Odenigbo, and then to Odenigbo and Olanna. Ogwu is just a boy when he is taken from his village by his aunt to work in the house of Odenigbo.

Initially, Ogwu is amazed at everything.... he has never before seen running water, or a refrigerator. And he is so overcome by the sight of a whole chicken sitting there on the top shelf that he takes some of it back to his room in his trouser pocket, hoping to find a way of delivering it to his sister.

Odenigbo, Ogwu's "Master", being a liberal intellectual... (who has also come from a small village like Ogwu's), he treats his servant much better than most people would treat a mere houseboy, and undertakes to educate him, stating that: "Education is a priority. How can we resist exploitation if we don't understand the tools of exploitation?" So Ogwu goes to school and tries to improve himself, and to understand the conversations of Odenigbo's little group of friends, mostly university staff like himself, as they conduct intellectual discussions and talk about current affairs around the world.

Ogwu lies awake at night, reading works like The Mayor of Casterbridge, in an endeavour to educate himself. Much later in the book, and in Ugwu's life, he comes across the memoir of Frederick Douglass, and is inspired by the idea that a black man and ex-slave has written this eloquent condemnation of slavery.

War comes like a whirlwind after the charismatic leader of the Igbos, General Ojukwo, declares Igbo land to be the independent Republic of Biafra.

The response of the Nigerian government was to launch a war which has been called genocidal, against the rebel state. When I was growing up in the sixties, this war featured on our TV screens, and we were vicarious witnesses to wholesale deaths of civilians, a very high proportion of whom were infants. The world had not seen so many people intentionally starved to death since the liberation of Belsen. Protesters marched on Downing Street, then home to Mr Harold Wilson, and were largely ignored. To our great shame, Britain supported and armed the Federal Government of Nigeria even when they declared a total embargo, with the objective of starving Biafra into submission.

Even though the story of the conflict is told from the Igbo point of view, the Igbos are not idealized. The Igbo soldiery can be just as barbaric as the enemy... the conscription methods just as arbitrary, and the refugees can be as cruel to one another as the enemy can be towards them.

This is a very human story, of complex human relationships tested in the fire of warfare and slow starvation, displacement, loss and mourning. All the characters who start off having only admirable qualities, are later seen to fail, like the central characters in Shakespeare's tragedies. All flesh is weak.

Ogwu, with all his faults, becomes the hero, but a flawed hero, deeply ashamed of how soldiering dehumanized him. But there is a certain optimism to be found in the account of Ogwu's education and development. As a result of the help and influence of the family, he too becomes a wise and eloquent observer of his era.

An excellent book....recalling a tragic war we had almost forgotten, and indeed most British people of my generation would prefer to forget our government's ignoble role in that conflict. The ending brought a tear to my eye.

To me, this book is a priceless gem, but I can see that not everyone will share my enthusiasm... I suppose it depends a lot on where you live, what you are interested in, and where your life is going when you look at it.

So, to begin at the beginning..... cob is a mix of clay, with sand and straw added, mixed to a squelching mush with water, and then used for building work. There are various places in Britain, (but mainly the South West), where there are cob houses which have stood for over half a millenium and are still in use. For some mysterious reason, the secrets of how to build with cob were almost lost, until re-discovered by Ianto Evans and friends.

Ianto is/was an architect by profession. That is to say, he got a degree in architecture a long time ago, even though in his own words, he "knew nothing about building". And he taught students of architecture so that they would also know nothing. That was years ago, on another continent.... after he returned his diploma (or whatever papers architects have), he set about living with tribal peoples in different countries and studying vernacular building techniques.

At first the secret of the perfect recipe for cob eluded him, until he found himself working on a project to produce a wood burning stove in Guatemala. The objective was a stove with a chimney for extracting the smoke, and a low consumption of fire-wood. He tried with a mix of clay and sand, but the mix kept cracking when it dried, so Ianto went on adding more and more sand until, to his surprise, a very fine cob was produced which gave excellent results.

The book contains some beautiful photographs of very old cob buildings in places as far apart as England, Scandinavia and the Yemen, and some very new ones in North America and elsewhere.

On the outside they are quaint and pretty... on the inside they are stunning and magical. Ianto can not stop enthusing about how cosy they are, how friendly and comforting, the quality of the sound and the light.... the sheer joy of living in them.

This book is full of that rare entity which is inaccurately called "common sense". The prospective cob builder is encouraged to mix the mush by hand, and by foot (literally), rather than use machines. The houses made in this way do look like something from the set of Middle Earth... hobbit houses, with lovely curved walls and round windows, and they remind me of the images of the gingerbread house from the tale of Hansel and Gretel.

The fact that they are dirt-cheap to build, low technology, and environmentally friendly are very seductive points in their favour. Consider this... for most building work you reach a certain height and then need scaffolding, or a lot of ladders. Not with cob... you can build timbers into the walls which can support the scaffolding once it is dry. Afterwards, you can use the timbers for something else or just saw them off and hide the hole where they were.

Of course, cob building is very labour intensive, but Ianto has a view on that as well.

The author himself looks a little like a hobbit.... there is a photo of him near the front, a wee baldy head and a generous beard, a big grin and bare feet. Don't let his looks deceive you, here is a man with something important to say.

Even in the heavily regulated United Kingdom, there are cob houses being built which meet all the specifications of planning committees, building regulations etc... so it is only a matter of time before these techniques become main-stream again, as they were when Walter Raleigh and Will Shakespeare were lads.

There is, of course, a website at www.cobcottage.com

I must say something else as well.... the author seems to have very little interest in making money. He is on a mission to spread the word, and encourage other people to discover the joy of building their own carbon-neutral home, with curved walls and cubby holes.

I once read the memoir of an Oglala Sioux called Black Elk. (Black Elk Speaks, by John G. Neihardt). Black Elk comments that the problem with white people is that they live in unnatural rectangular houses, and this accounts for their pig-headedness. All the God's other creatures make a rounded shelter, the fox his earth, the beaver his lodge, the birds make round nests, and the Plains Indians their teepees.

Ianto appears to have taken a page from Black Elk's book, and found it to be an uplifting and fulfilling experience.

This is the first book I have read by the improbably named Robert Rankin (this has to be a pseudonym).

I almost daren't try to give a synopsis of the story, because I will probably make it sound so silly, that it will put you off reading it.

So, let me say at the outset that is all the following: very funny, completely zany, off-the wall humour, flippant, innovative, imaginative, irreverent, and the sort of book that school teachers used to confiscate from kids on the grounds that it was "rubbish".

He starts off by mentioning an ancestor who died at the battle of the Little Big Horn... not as a combatant, but as a farmer who had gone to complain to Custer that his troops were ruining his crop of sprouts.

I found it very refreshing and enjoyable. In a way, it is a total waste of time.... this book will not fill any gaps in your education, or make you a better person, nor contribute towards solving any of the world's problems, but it will make you laugh.

The protagonist is a youth of 15 who looks 45. He is the possessor of an extraordinary power to influence world events... and he attracts the attentions of the sinister Ministry of Serendipity.... now read on.

This book is all about making things.... making a bread oven, making bread, even making your own yeast (or at least capturing naturally occurring yeast).... and you could go on.

Mr Denzer is clearly a busy chap, with a load of old fashioned values. He sings the praises of bread baked in a traditional hemispherical oven, fired with wood, made from all natural ingredients. This is not for the man or woman who wants instant gratification... but rather for people who will enjoy the act of making the oven, and the communal activity of cooking with it and sharing the goodies with their friends.

This book is timely I think, because although ovens like these are found all over the world in almost every traditional society, from the high Andes to the desert regions of Africa.... the art of building them is probably in danger of disappearing.

As an instruction book it is comprehensive. I personally found it inspirational. According to Mr Denzer, pretty much anyone can build one of these ovens, and all you need is a little space, some clay and sand and straw and water...quite a bit of energy and a few friends. There is no reason to spend a lot of money on this project, and it would be a wonderful activity for a kids' day out or a summer camp. A terrific excuse for getting really muddy too. I can not wait to get started.

The whole thing is well illustrated with line drawings which are easy to follow, and several pages of glossy photos that will make you say "Wow", or similar expression of admiration.

The photographs are maybe a little intimidating in the sense that some of these ovens are absolute works of art, being as they are sculpted into extravagant forms, frogs, a phoenix etc... but the fact is that those of us who are less ambitious can still make a very satisfactory bee-hive shaped oven, with the satisfying roundness of a pregnant human belly.

Anyway, I feel a tiny bit hypocritical as I write this review, because I am ashamed to say that I have not yet tried to build such an oven...(though I do occasionally make bread). However, I intend to get round to it, with the help of this little work. Maybe this summer....watch this space.

This is a remarkable story. Thomas McFadden was a bright young drug smuggler from Liverpool, England. Apparently he made a career out of this, and considered himself rather elite....the man who was so meticulous and cool that he never got caught.

He went to Bolivia specifically to buy cocaine and smuggle it out to a country where it will be worth a great deal more. We learn that this is not his first Bolivian enterprise. In order to ensure that the operation goes smoothly, he normally bribes high ranking officials. On this occasion, the official who has taken his money double-crosses him, the authorities find the cocaine and McFadden is sent to the prison of San Pedro, in La Paz. One wonders is this a joke on the part of Bolivian officialdom, as St Peter is traditionally believed to be in charge of the keys to some more ethereal gates.

San Pedro is an utterly bizarre penal institution where the inmates have to buy their cells, and like any other real-estate market, the price can fluctuate. There are also restaurants inside, shops selling everything imaginable, wives and children living with their convicted relatives, and illicit laboratories which produce the highest quality cocaine in the country.... the champagne of abusable substances.

On arrival McFadden has a hard time and comes close to death, but he is befriended by another inmate, Ricardo, who speaks English and allows McFadden to share his room and his food.

Ricardo shows the young Englishman the ropes, and explains the system whereby anything can be achieved providing you bribe the guards enough. Slowly McFadden finds his feet, rapidly learning enough Spanish to survive and manages to live independently, although at the outset he is right at the bottom of the prison pecking order.

All that changes when he becomes a tour guide. A routine is established whereby foreign back-packers passing through La Paz call at the prison and pretend to be friends of his. McFadden takes money from them, and bribes the guards to allow them in for a while, and the back packers love it. So does McFadden... he is a man who thrives on having an audience, and the tales he tells are astonishing and improbable, but they seem to be true.

One day a young Australian shows up, a boy called Rusty Young who has a degree in Law. Rusty is fascinated by McFadden's story, and suggests writing a book about it.... naturally McFadden is seduced by the idea of reaching an even wider audience, and also having a medium for denouncing the corruption that underpins the whole penal system.

In total, Rusty Young spent about 3 months conducting interviews with McFadden, and smuggling out the tape recorded material to be transcribed. McFadden, it seems, is totally candid... perhaps not really believing that the book will see the light of day. Nice photographs accompany the text. Never once does McFadden mention the morality or otherwise of what he has done... but neither does he feign innocence. He is quick to condemn the immorality of the corrupt people who take his money, even though this is the very system that enabled him to survive the experience.

Fortunately, by the time the book was published Mr McFadden had been released. Rumour has it that he works on construction sites in Liverpool.

I was planning a trip to Bolivia (but certainly not to San Pedro) and someone told me to read Marching Powder to give me an insight into how corruption permeates society. On arrival, I was crossing Illampu street when a man greeted me in English, but spoken with a Scottish accent. I brushed him off and pretended not to understand what he was saying. Later I heard that he is really Bolivian, but he specializes in accosting foreign tourists, and can pass for North American, Scottish, Australian or whatever at will. I met a German boy who was approached by this person, and they engaged in coversation for a while, then the Bolivian guy asked the German lad to hold his bag for a few minutes while he ran an errand. With that, the bag was thrust into his hand, and the Bolivian disappeared. The German looked inside and found fourteen little wrappers of tin foil. He threw the back down and ran away quickly, before the Bolivian could arrive back with his friends in the police force.

Some of the foreigners living in La Paz think the mysterious Bolivian is actually Ricardo... friend and saviour of Thomas McFadden.

It is an adventure story, and I found it very readable. McFadden was lucky because he could easily have died in custody, and he knew that. This book is a pretty solemn warning to anyone who may be entertaining a career like McFadden's.

Songs of Silence is one of those stories which reminds me of something from my childhood. In the Sixties, my mother took a weekly journal called The Woman, (my father, on whom be peace, never tired of joking about how many "old women" there were in his bedroom). The Woman often featured quite long stories similar to this, in serialized form.

You were always left hanging at a moment of high drama. There was that annoying little line of dots, and the slogan.......to be continued.

Actually, Songs of Silence is beautifully written, and set in the hills of North Wales, which are described with skill and a love for the landscape and sheep farming.

The protagonist is a doctor, Owen, who is cracking up.... divorce and the loss of his children, who are now in Australia, has left him vulnerable and ship-wrecked. He is taken to Wales by another couple, to hide out in their cottage and recuperate.

Meanwhile, another parallel narrative is unfolding in a similar place but some years further back. (The clue to this is that one character is living in Britain before the decimalization of the currency, and the other in more recent times). Rhodri is a handsome young hill farmer living like a hermit in a cottage on the mountain, with only his dogs for company.

Curiously, in both narratives, there is a person who is mute. In Rhodri's village it is Malen, a woman-child with hair the colour of fire, and copper and poppies, and skin white as snowdrops and cotton-wool clouds. In the village that Owen inhabits, there is an old, old man, Gethin Morgan, who can not speak, but screams instead. Naturally, some people find this unsettling.

Owen has the good fortune to meet Miss Right, a primary school teacher called Gwenhwyfar Jones, a lady with "a soft, deep voice which matched her soft, deep breasts", terrific legs, and endless compassion. Together they explore the mystery of who Owen really is.... he was adopted in infancy, and now Gwen tells him he bears an uncanny resemblance to a local author.

There is a lot of discussion about what a mute person feels, and how they handle the inability to speak.... and yet in both the cases mentioned, the mute is able to communicate volumes with gestures, eyes and other body language. There is a kind of empathy for both these people, almost like an appeal for the world to be more tolerant of folks afflicted in this way.

It is a complicated little story, but one I found easy to read and rather satisfying. Little Gwen is extremely likeable, while Owen is a bit self absorbed. I keep wanting to tell him to grow up and snap out of it. I guess I would never make a counsellor.

Anyway, it is a refreshing and clever story and contains snippets of wisdom.