The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)

"At Oxford Circus I looked up into the spring sky and I made a vow. I would give the Old Country another day to fit me into something; if nothing happened, I would take the next boat for the Cape."

John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps is a fast paced spy thriller/political drama following a plot that may lead to the outbreak of a world war. It centres on Richard Hannay, an expat recently returned to England after several years in South Africa, drawn into a plot of international intrigue by an American who promptly ends up dead. Seemingly framed for the murder, Hannay goes on the run, dodging both the police and the agents of the conspiracy, narrowly escaping capture (or worse) several times as he struggles to unravel the plot that he has unwittingly stumbled into.

Buchan's prose is simple and unadorned, taking the reader from one incredible scene to the next switfly and with little fuss. Although the novel deals with a plot to assassinate a world leader, which in turn will lead to war, and was published during as the First World War was entering into its second year, there's a lightness to it and it plays out like a caper. One of the more entertaining aspects of the novel is the way Buchan details how Hannay shifts from one persona to another, altering his appearance on the fly and creating new characters for himself to play, although this sense that the adventure is something of a lark is somewhat difficult to reconcile with the seriousness of the plot, especially as the story nears its conclusion.

The Thirty-Nine Steps has been adapted to the screen numerous times and it's easy to understand why. Despite some minor inconsistencies with respect to tone, it's an exciting and taut thriller, the archetypal one man army/man on the run, type story, and Hannay is an interesting and engaging character. Hannay would go on to star in four more novels by Buchan, further exploring his wartime adventures, though The Thirty-Nine Steps is the best known and most enduring of the stories. Although parts of the novel sometimes feel a bit cliched in the light of 2011, The Thirty-Nine Steps holds up remarkably well and is well worth revisiting.

The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower (2009)

"Rome's fate seems to act as a warning that strength and success will always prove transitory in the end, and that civilization will not automatically triumph. It was no coincidence that one of Winston Churchill's most famous speeches from 1940 foretold that Britain's defeat would result in 'a new Dark Age' - particularly apt since many believed that the Roman Empire had been destroyed by German barbarians in the fifth century."

Long after its fall from dominance, Rome continues to fascinate the imagination. It is the standard against which all great empires are measured and its fate is still not completely understood - at least not in a way that can be universally agreed upon by historians. Adrian Goldsworthy tackles the challenge of trying to explain why and how Rome fell, exploring four hundred years of history, of triumphs and reversals, of enemies from without and enemies from within. With an expert's eye he guides the reader from a united and powerful nation to one split apart, half strong, half falling away piece by piece.

The question of why Rome fell from power (or, at least from the overwhelming power it once enjoyed), is not simple to answer; it's more of a series of answers. First of all, there's the matter of size. Rome occupied a large part of the world - too large to maintain given both the technology available at the time (things like air travel and the internet have made the world a much smaller place now, but armies and information moved considerably slower in the time of Rome's empire), and the assertions of autonomy by natives of the occupied territories. There is also the deteriorization of Rome's social structure, a watering down, if you will, of the standards by which Emperors were selected. Where once Emperors were borne out of the highest spheres of Roman society, by the end of the Empire the man who who was best able to gain the support of the military took the title, regardless of his station in life. Although this isn't to suggest that someone not of the highest rank of society is somehow less "worthy" to rule, the fact that military support came to play such a dominant role in how rule of the Empire was decided meant that usurpation became easier and probably more frequently inevitable.

There were many other reasons for Rome's fall, reasons which Goldsworthy takes pains to explore, but those are the two that ultimately stand out, a cancer from without and a cancer from within working together in concert over the course of four centuries to eat away at Rome's power and influence. Goldsworthy's accounting of Rome's decline, and the various personalities and factions that led to it, is thorough, giving as detailed a picture as I imagine is possible. Though his prose is sometimes a bit dry, the story itself is so fascinating that it hardly matters. The Fall of the West is a must read for anyone with even a passing interest in Roman history.

The Beauty of Humanity Movement (2010)

"Old Man Hung makes the best pho in the city and has done so for decades. Where he once had a shop, though, he no longer does, because the rents are exorbitant, both the hard rents and the soft - the bribes a proprietor must pay to the police in this new era of freedom."

Camilla Gibb's latest novel, The Beauty of Humanity Movement, explores the classic trope of Old World vs. New. In it, American raised Maggie Ly returns to Vietnam in search of information about her father, an artist who disappeared into Communist re-education camps after the fall of Saigon. Her search leads her to Old Man Hung, an itinerant pho seller who once owned a shop frequented by artists, but whose memory of Maggie's father and his fate is, at best, spotty. Maggie is brought into Hung's circle, which includes Tu, a young Vietnamese tour guide who is caught in the clash between the conservative values of his community and the ever growing American cultural influences, and who joins in Maggie's search for answers.

Stories such as this can sometimes be problematic, in that they leave themselves open to accusations of cultural appropriation, but Gibb tells the story with a great deal of sensitivity and respect and the complete absence of exoticization is one of the novel's many strengths. Gibb crafts a story and characters that compliment Vietnam's complex history, showing a nation that has been the victim of forces both outside and within, but also a nation with enough strength at its core to endure. The nation portrayed in the story is one in transition, the features of hardline Communism still apparent in some aspects, but one that is also begining to embrace Capitalism. It is also a nation struggling against popular perception of itself as provincial and unsophisticated, an image which artists such as Maggie's father and the others who frequented Hung's shop challenged with their work, but which was buried during the course of cultural cleansing re-education.

Gibb's prose is engaging and the story often powerful. The characters and the community in the novel are crafted with care, with Gibb slowly revealing the depths of both as the story progresses. Though The Beauty of Humanity Movement never quite attains the weight of her previous work, 2005's Sweetness In The Belly, it's still an excellent read and certainly one of the best books of 2010.