Customer Reviews

A Little White Death

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the third book in John Lawton's series and you should read it ONLY after "Black Out" and "Old Flames". First of all, it deals a lot with the events and characters of the those novels, and second...it is not as intriguing as those two books. I liked it, but that's because I am fond of the characters, especially Troy himself. Starting the book, I expected to find a web of intrigue, but the events mentioned on the back cover happened only after several hundred pages! Until then we had Troy's reflections on life, death, etc. What we have here is a good, clever novel about the 60's, just don't expect it to be a thriller it isn't.

This is the third, and from the look of it the last, in the Troy series. It's also the longest. The plot does take a while to get going, but that's becuse Lawton is at work upon a vast canvas - post-war British history, the evolution and generation of a culture. And he does it very, very well. He lifts the book out of the genre altogether to create 'Something Else' - a new genrre, if you like. To be moaning about kinky sex is to miss the point, that it's a book about morality and the last thing the sex is is superficial. There's not alot of it, but it is central to the ideas Lawton is dealing with... the moral crisis in a nation that creates its breaking point. Usually he garners comparisons to Le Carre or Deighton ... this is more Waugh or even Gore Vidal. This is a writer out of the top drawer. Not to be missed.

Perhaps Lawton is an aquired taste - his books are long on atmosphere and the minutia of life in post war Britain but if you lived through these trying times you would know how well he portrays what was left of the class system, the "old boy" network and the idiocy of British politics. Once you have the taste of his books they become as addictive as chocolate and almost as much fun. Detective Troy is both severely human and astonishingly clever and Lawton paints him in glorious technicolor. He's a rogue, a magnet for beautiful women and not beyond bending the law almost to breaking point.
Readers should start with "Bluffing Mr. Churchill" and finish with "A Little White Death" and they, as I, will be totally in thrall.
Please Mr. Lawton if you are reading this, give us an encore!

One of the great things about John Lawton is that his 'Troy' novels never go where you expect them to go. That's not to say that they are irrational or that they jump around or throw things out at you just to confuse the issue. Lawton never sinks to the level of throwing in a couple of 'red herrings' just to make things interesting. As things unfold, and sometimes not what you expect, they do make sense in a linear way.

At one point late in the book, he has a character make a mistake that even the character (and me too) doesn't realize. It takes Troy a while to figure it out, but figure it out he does. How he (Lawton) plays out the complex conspiracy is something to behold, and will keep most people guessing until the end.

There is only one flaw in the book to my analysis, and that is a character who becomes something of an obsession to Troy, never has a final rendering, but just drops off the map. It's this one loose end that for me keeps this from being a perfect novel. Also, the prelude and epilogue are meant to wrap up the novel like bookends, but have so little to do with the real story, that they are like using "Hello Kitty" bookends to hold up your leather bound "Shakespeare" collection.

Another winner from John Lawton. His books are issued in wrong order, or he wrote them set in different times, I am not sure . Anyway, these richly textured, multy-layered novels are feast for the soul. Nothing is simple ahd easily guessed in his books. People wear masks, there are secrets and deceit on every step. Commander Freddie Troy tries to find the truth in this mess. England in 1960's is a turbulent place, everything is changing. There isn't much difference between good and bad guys, or they switch roles on regular basis. Stunning book by this reclusive author. No wonder he avoids limelight if his view of the world is his work.

I read this book not knowing the history of Chief Inspector Troy and his other adventures. I picked this up cold because a friend recommended the style. The friend was right. "A Little White Death" seems to go nowhere at first, but the writing is so rich and character so interesting, I was drawn right in. A little drawn out? Perhaps. Once the plot starts rocking along, which it does, I think it could come to a faster conclusion. But this is a terrific character study set in a fascinating time. "A Little White Death" shows there really are no rules to structure. Now I need to go back to the beginning and find out more.

Lawton is trying to use the mystery/thriller format to accomplish something fairly ambitious. In the Chandler tradition, he has a detective who is something of an outsider who is dedicated to finding truths that the powerful wish covered up. At the same time, he is trying to produce a series of social novels that detail the changes in British society in the WWII and postwar era. This is a very good idea but not one that he pulls off very well. In this book, he is trying to use a fictionalized version of the Profumo scandel to examine the changes in British society that occurred in the 60s. This is a good idea but relatively superficial and using an alienated figure like his hero, Frederick Troy, is probably not the best way to look at social changes. Lawton continues to be dogged by a taste for overly elaborate plots and an unforunate tendency to drag characters from Troy's past back into his life in improbable ways. While conventional, the recurrent highlighting of kinky sex scenes has become distasteful.

This book was the last of the Lawton Series on the Troy Family of Russia, Germany, Vienna and eventually, England. Though it is put forward as a mystery series, it is equally a story of the experience of social upheaval and immigration in Europe during the twentieth century, and in that way reminds me of Anita Brookner's books about emigres to England and the complexity
of their adjustments to the new and alien culture.

While this chapter in the saga was not as strong as many of the earlier books, it held my intense interest until the end, and I would unhesitatingly recommend it to readers.

The family history, and specifically Frederick Troy's history, wends its way through the early to mid twentieth century in a way that insures the credibility of the characters and an element of suspense, even though one knows how the stories will end--for the most part.

The question of the character of Frederick, known as "Troy", is developed in an interesting and provocative way and the writing is good, even if the Kindle editing is not.

I recommend that you buy all of them, and read them in order, via checking the publication dates.

I stumbled onto John Lawton's books when I was drawn to the cover of his newest, A Lily of the Field. Since that time I have enhaled all of his Inspector Troy series. Sadly, A Little White Death is the last until he produces a new one. I love the blend of history and fiction. The series ranges from the 1930's into the second world war and beyond. Mainly set in England; Russia, Vienna and Paris are also visited. Troy deals with international spies and plots that cross borders and time. The use of the British vernacular is sometimes difficult to fathon, but adds authenticity. Lawton has a great range in vocabulary. I love his books and hope he writes another in the series.

The Little White Death of the title in John Lawton's follow-up to "Black Out" refers to tuberculosis, or in the case of Scotland Yard Commander Frederick Troy it is also called "Khrushchev Flu" because of its prevalence in post-World War II Russia and Eastern Europe.

Troy contracts the disease, most likely as the result of a sexual romp with his female KGB shadow, while in Moscow attempting to untangle a Kim Philby-like case of ambiguous political allegiance and spooks and counter-spooks.

The wasting, debilitating nature of Troy's illness - he's sent to an English National Health System sanatorium and then told to lay low and recuperate for a year or longer - serves as an obvious metaphor for post-World War II England, which in the late 50s and early 60s is still a depleted country looking for its bearings and just beginning to feel the effects of socio-sexual change being swept in with the Swinging Sixties.

Troy's England has become a different place where "Nothing. Nothing lasted. Everything changed. Everything passed." The story begins in a snow storm in January in Hertfordshire in the East of England during the "worst winter in living memory" and ends eleven months later in New York on November 22, 1963, when the nexus of change would shift from England to the United States.

Lawton is setting out to write more than a political / spy thriller where insiders wield power and where "the best lies are always couched in the vocabulary of the lied to." He's writing about the manners and mores of upper-class England during the sixties by weaving in aspects of the notorious Profumo scandal and the sexual escapades of Christine Keeler to create a portrait of recklessness where the country's leaders are exempt from other people's sense of morality and "presumptuous enough to think they are above, not the law, but perhaps the rules that govern."

The story of manners and politics trumps the thriller, which ambles around and doesn't gain its real momentum until half-way through the moderately long novel.

It's likely readers who don't remember Dudley Moore and the "Fringe" boys, or who were born after the Beatles "Love Me Do" or when Carnaby Street was still in fashion will fully relate to the book's milieu, but when the bodies begin to show up slumped in overstuffed chairs, when the facts don't appear to line up and logic circles around itself, the intrigue, deduction and powerplay weave together a grabbing entertainment.

Pieces of the story: There's a country estate that had been partially bombed out during the war and the very young Ffitch sisters who pass themselves off as of-age twins to share themselves together and singly with all types of aristocratic houseguests, high government officials and foreign spies, English gentry and Russian diplomat. That includes Inspector Troy, an observer and participant. Dr. Patrick Fitzpatrick is the impresario of the ongoing sexual rondelay. There are consequences to all this that disrupt the status quo and threaten a government, and it's up to Inspector Troy to sort through the deception, determine responsibility and reestablish balance and what he believes it means to be English.

Following "Black Out" and "Old Flames" in sequence, this is the third book that squares off the highbrow aristocrat who raises pigs for a hobby against the ruling establishment during World War II and immediately after. "A Little White Death," as were its predecessors, is best at evoking a world that no longer exists and mixing in plenty of intrigue, reversal and even some derring-do into a pleasurable and often provocative stew.