Book #10 for 2024. This was one of Valancourt’s cut-price titles for this month (less than AU$5 for Kindle), so I decided why not… The book is a wartime thriller published in 1942, right in the middle of the war, and Priestley was interestingly on the money when he had a character observe that a German loss would result in America dominating one part of the world and Russia the other; given that America had only just officially entered the war (I don’t know the month of publication, but the story takes place at the end of January ’42), that seems reasonably prophetic. (And interesting that Priestley apparently didn’t see the UK as part of the postwar world power deal.) Blackout is a pretty straightforward example of the sort of thing it is; our hero is a Canadian engineer who’s been suckered into working for British counter-intelligence, and the story sees him posted to the somewhat shitty industrial town of the title, because it’s a bit of a clearing house for Nazis sending vital information back to the Fatherland. The problem is going to be working out exactly who the Nazis in town are, cos Gretley offers a number of possibilities… Not exactly a deathless masterpiece of world literature, then, but an obviously solid example of this sort of story, with sufficient intrigue to keep you interested while being short enough to read in one night without feeling like it’s crapping on unnecessarily at any point. And Priestley’s socialist sympathies are in full evidence; if they inspired his positive words about Stalin which have… aged poorly (along with some remarkable and unfortunate racism early in the book), they also inspired the undercurrent of anger in the ultimate revelation of the main villain… which I obviously won’t spoil but I can imagine Priestley genuinely hating the “rightly privileged person” running things. I enjoyed this a fair bit.
