Customer Reviews

Damned Good Show

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

OK. It's not terribly fresh in plot or characters. In fact you could say it's Piece of Cake transferred to Bomber Command without the freshness or style that made the previous book so good.

But it kept my interest for the day and a half it took me to read it.

To begin with, we learn a fair bit about medium bomber operations in early World War Two, before the bomber offensive really got cranked up. Just as in Piece of Cake, they were doing it all wrong at the beginning yet thought they were hot stuff and it takes a while to puzzle out their mistakes.

The arrival of a film crew and their participation on a mission over Germany gives a unique insight into the difficulties of undertaking such a mission at all, let alone filming it. I enjoyed that part.

But on the down side, when two of the wilder pilots went off for a drunken spree in London, I thought oh-oh - I've been here before. There's a bit of a feud and a bit of tension amongst the characters, but it hardly comes close to what we enjoyed in Piece of Cake. The marriage of two of the characters and subsequent events is just bizarre.

On the plus side, it didn't descend into the slapstick of A Good Clean Fight.

All in all, it covers a lot of familiar territory, it doesn't have the "edge" of previous novels, but it's inoffensive and entertaining. I like Robinson's style and that made this a four star book rather than a more mediocre three.

Derek Robinson is certainly one of the best writers of wartime aviation fiction, as demonstrated in superb books like Goshawk Squadron and Piece of Cake. In Damned Good Show, Robinson attempts to use the same winning formula that he used in six previous novels about fighter units to dramatize a notional RAF bomber squadron in 1939-1941. However, Damned Good Show is simply not in the same league as Robbinson's previous novels.
It is entirely too derivative, with too much cloned from Piece of Cake but without the drama or trademark dry humour. Indeed, there is little to laugh about in this novel.

Damned Good Show consists of three episodic sections: the antics of two quirky pilots (Langham & Silk), the arrival of intelligence officer Skull Skelton, and the film producers who are sent to the squadron to make a film of a bomber raid over Germany. Unlike previous Robinson novels, character development in Damned Good Show is minimal, indeed the entire book feels like it was produced from left-overs. The final section of the novel results in a merging of all three subplots into a rather dull and untidy mush. As in his last few novels, Robinson continues the disturbing trend of adding annoying civilian female characters into what is essentially an all-male environment. Certainly Zoe Herrick, a fabulously wealthy Anglo-American nymphomaniac, detracts far more than she adds to Robbinson's portayal of Bomber Command. Indeed, her marriage with pilot officer Langham is so improbable and absurd as to cause the reader to wonder why the title of the novel was not Damned Silly Show.

Nor is the presence of "Skull" Skelton much of a comfort here, for readers who enjoyed him in Piece of Cake and A Good Clean Fight. Transferred to Bomber Command, Skull appears as more of a carping whiner here, than someone with insight who will improve unit efficiency. Nor are there any interesting squadron or flight leaders in Damned Good Show; commanding officers like Rafferty or Hunt come and go as ciphers without any of the panache of someone like squadron leader Rex.

Robinson's main points about Bomber Command - that it couldn't hit within five miles of most targets in night raids over Germany in 1939-1941 - are already fairly well known. Although Skull and other intellectuals raise the issue of whether the heavy losses of sustained night bombing are worthwhile, Robinson presents the case that there was little alternative in 1941. Britain had no other means of hurting Germany or showing the Soviet Union and the USA that it was still in the fight. Actually, Robinson is not correct in this theory and there were many others at the time who felt that the enormous resources poured into Bomber Command could have been better applied elsewhere. If even a few hundred RAF bombers had been diverted from Bomber Command in 1941 to anti-submarine patrols, the German U-Boats would have been seriously affected. More effort could have been put into modernizing the Desert Air Force and the RAF in Singapore, where the payoffs would have been sudden and apparent. Instead, Britain's political leadership was bamboozled for years into wasting scarce resources and lives on a campaign that never held much promise of success.

Derek Robinson has proven himself to be the best writer about
air combat in World Wars I and II. This novel centers on the
first couple of years of the british bomber command. Some of
the characters from his other novels (e.g. the intelligence
officer "Skull" Skeleton) appear here--a nice way of helping
give continuity--Fighter Command (Piece of Cake), Bomber
Command (this novel), North Africa (A Good Clean Show), etc.
The novels pull no punches--terrible tactical theory, hugely
inflated combat claims, etc--you learn a lot about little-known
historical details, things that the military establishment
would rather be forgotten. These are not anti-war novels, but
novels which often stess the dichotomy between the individual
pilots and aircrew and the military bureaucrats who lay down
policy. The example that best springs to mind (Goshawk
Squadron, air combat in WW I) is when Squadron Commander
Woolley is told that headquarters deosn't want any more silk
scarves issued (too expensive). These scarves are needed
because the pilots must continually turn their heads to look
for enemy aircraft--no silk scarves means bad chafing and less
head-turning and more danger. Woolley puts a couple of bullets
through the briefcase with the HQ demand.

Robinson's best novels are his WW I novels--5 stars, with
Goshawk Squadron being the best. The WW II novels are close--
4 to 5 stars. My star ratings are usually based on how often
I would reread a novel--I reread Goshawk Squadron about once a
year--similarly Piece of Cake. 4-star novels are not quite as
rereadable. There are a couple of 1-star books that I will
reread once in a while, for amusement--these books really
deserve much less than 1 star. Some books I keep, some get sold
to used bookdealers. Derek Robinson's novels I keep--and often
get a backup copy for my office.

I really enjoyed this book. Derek Robinson has once again provided a witty, informative, entertaining, and well written book about British bomber command in early World War II. It was expecially interesting for me as I was reading the non-fiction Nineteen weeks at the same time which covers a similar time period.
I do not have much to add to what previous reviewers have said, but I think it is unfair to compare him against himself. As other reviewers have pointed out, some of Derek Robinson's other books may be better or more original, and if I was rating this as a Derek Robinson book I might only give it 4 stars. Rated on its own merits or even against the many other books I have read in the last year, in my opinion it deserves 5 stars.

I must protest some of the less than stellar ratings for this book, especially when the objection is a comparison to some of his others. I've read, and thoroughly enjoyed, several of his books, but that doesn't mean that I wasn't just knocked out by the insight into early WW II Bomber Command strategy, aircraft, and aircrew in this book.

Some of his other books deal with, perhaps, more "glamorous" services, but I find bombers terribly interesting, and I think he has done a marvelous job of capturing not only RAF Bomber Command's early efforts, but the attitudes of the people involved.

My suggestion is: don't be put off by the less than good reviews of this book shown here. It's a fascinating read!

At this point I think I have the measure of Derek Robinson. Though I haven't yet read all of his books, I'm fairly certain that if I open the pages of any of them, I'm going to find the following:

1. Glib-tongued characters
2. Facetious dialogue
3. Black comedy
4. Farsical sub-plots
5. Romantic sub-plots
6. British cynicsm
7. Sacred cow massacres
8. Pitiless storytelling
9. Characters introduced almost to the end of the book, because
10. Characters are always getting killed off, and;
11. The RAF (and the British mind) as only an insider could write it.

DAMNED GOOD SHOW, the second of a loose three-book trilogy Robinson wrote that began with PIECE OF CAKE and ended with A GOOD CLEAN FIGHT, is not a great book. It is not a bad one either. It has all the Robinson trademarks I just mentioned; what makes it less impressive than some of his other works is the proportion of these elements to each other.

SHOW is about the awkward, clumsy, and painful origin of the Bomber Command's war against Nazi Germany - the slow evolutionary process of the RAF's bombing tactics and the frightful price they paid in lives and expense during the period 1939 - 1941 while they were learning the ropes of this new type of warfare. Robinson's books are always ensemble casts, and in this novel the ensemble includes two smoothly shallow bomber pilots, a ferocious Scottish explosives expert, several narrow-minded squadron leaders, a politician or two, a thrill-seeking young woman with a domineering and rich mother, a boy-girl documentary film crew and - serving as the continuity between the three books of the trilogy, the trouble-making Oxford don turned intelligence officer of PIECE OF CAKE, "Skull" Skelton.

As I mentioned before, this book contains all the classic Robinson elements. He has a peculiar ability to write without mercy or favoritism, so that the reader never knows who is "safe" and who is dead meat (for the record, nobody in a Robinson book is "safe".) He's very good at capturing the odd combination of immaturity and emotional shallowness that seems to typify flying men, and his dialogue, when it is "on", cracks with wit. He understands the mechanics of flying - not just the technical jargon, which he writes to a minimum, but the way pilots think and act and the way machines work - or don't work. And he is the most fearless man behind a typewriter out there when it comes to slaughtering the sacred cows of history - in PIECE OF CAKE and his nonfiction work INVASION he demolished the myth of the Battle of Britain. In A GOOD CLEAN FIGHT he ridiculed the idea of the Desert War as, well, a good clean fight. And in this book he shows the night bombing campaign for what it really was - a random massacre of German civilians by pilots who had no idea where their bombs were falling and could have cared less, carried out because the Brits had no other means to "carry the war to Germany."

The problems I had with it came largely from the fact that Robinson tried to tackle too much in too little space. This novel is fully as ambitious in its scope and the number of characters involved as anything he has ever attempted, but it is rather short in length, and all those people and sub-plots left me feeling dizzy and confused, particularly because Robinson is still introducing major characters in the book's last act. It is at its strongest when that walking thorn in the military's side, Skull Skellen, is annoying everyone senseless with his insistence on questioning the soundness of the operation or the believeability of the pilots, but Skull comes rather late to the book (transferred from Hornet Squadron) and aside from him and McHarg, there are few characters that really stand out in my mind. Robinson's gift for writing shallow characters well is unquestionable, but in the end there is only so much you can do with pilots who in terms of their personality and maturity are as like as peas in a pod. In the end, DAMNED GOOD SHOW is merely okay, but even an "okay" Robinson is still better than three quarters of the novelists out there.

A fitting companion to Derek Robinson's other war stories - Piece of Cake, War Story etc. A solid, interesting and often compassionate look at RAF Bomber Command during WW2. Robinson's fighting stories are not the "guts or glory" books, but tell it pretty much like it was. His research is excellent and his stories always enjoyable.

A story of the RAF Bomber Command in the early days of World War 2. The fictional 409 Squadron starts out in Hampdens (which the Germans shoot down in droves on daylight bombing missions until they are scrapped) and then switch to Wellingtons for night ops, flying deep into Occupied Europe on a nightly basis to strike back at the enemy. They do it to let the Londoners in the Blitz know that Germany is suffering like they are, they do it to let America know they are still able to stand up to Nazi Germany and they do it to let Russia know they are not alone in fighting the Germans. All at a terrible cost in lives and aircraft. It takes awhile to develop effective night bombing techniques with many fatal lessons along the way. This is a book that is hard to put down but I thought was not nearly as good as Piece of Cake which has more characters developed in it with much better mess conversations. Robinson basically focuses his story on Silk, a bomber pilot, and throws in a Crown Films project of filming a night raid on Germany from start to finish to boost public morale which I thought detracted from rather than added to the story.
I would read this book first, then read Piece of Cake. Also, I thought Len Deighton wrote a better story of the heroic efforts of Bomber Command in his book entitled simply Bomber.

A pleasant enough read in itself but it fails to reach the heights of Goshawk Squadron and even more so A Piece of Cake. In many ways, Mr Robinson in rewriting the same story in a different theatre. Perhaps, I am being unfair but the Battle of Britain boys just seemed more vivid than Bomber Harris's men. The same themes of perception, propaganda and purposelessness weave their way through the story and a sense of continuity is provided by the presence of Skull as it is by the tragedy and waste of the other brave men who populate it.

I was disappointed by DGS. I had expected Robinson to do for the early war Bomber Command what he did for the BoB Fighter Command in Piece of Cake; and he didn't deliver.

The bombing missions are not presented with the same level of detail and rivetting drama of the earlier book, therefore I cannot rate this novel as highly.

It's an okay read, though more about people than about the war.