Gavin Extence - The Empathy Problem

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A decent read, but not one of Extence's best

Gavin Extence is an excellent, witty and insightful writer and I enjoyed this book, but I don't think it's in the same class as his previous two.

In The Empathy Problem, Extence creates Gabriel Vaughn, an unpleasant, unfeeling hedge-fund manager who views everything in life as a series of transactions and who has no humanity whatever.  Vaughn develops a terminal brain tumour and, for the first time in his life, forms a genuine attachment to a woman.   The story is set in 2011-12 during the Occupy protest outside St Paul's which is used as a way of excoriating financial skulduggery and social injustice. 

If the idea of a rich, grasping, inhuman  person redeemed by illness, trauma and love sounds very familiar…well, it is.  There have been endless books, films and TV programmes on exactly this theme going back to Dickens and beyond, which means that a new book needs to be original in some way - and I don't really think this is.  Gavin Extence writes very well – his dialogue is especially good, I think – and there are some genuinely touching moments dealing with relationships, humanity and coming to terms with dying, but there are also flaws.

Even though I am in sympathy with Extence's political stance, much of the speechifying about financial inequity (and iniquity) was horribly clunky and contrived, and I found Gabriel's sudden discovery of a social conscience and self-loathing wholly unconvincing, I'm afraid – tumour or no tumour.  The whole thing felt very like yet another Richard Curtis film in style, structure and message, which is fine, but there was a strong sense of knowing where this was going and having been there many times before.

However, I kept reading and I did care about what happened.  There's easily enough about this book to give it a four-star rating; it's just that The Universe vs Alex Woods and The Mirror World of Melody Black were so exceptionally good that this felt like a slight disappointment to me.  It's good enough, but I look for more insight and originality from Gavin Extence, and I hope we get it in his next book.

Alexandra Oliva - The Last One

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good, with some flaws

I enjoyed much of this book, but I thought it had its weaknesses.

The narrative is (almost inevitably these days) in a fractured timescale, with the first person narrative of protagonist known as "Zoo," who is alone in wooded land, believing she is still a contestant in an endurance reality TV show.  The other is in the  third person and recounts the earlier development of the reality show, in which we learn very early that a mysterious illness kills huge numbers of people, including many of the TV team, that Zoo is in fact on her own and what she believes to be artifice is in fact real.

It's an intriguing set-up and works well in some ways.  Zoo is an engaging, believable character and I found her story and narrative gripping and interesting.  Post-apocalyptic survival is a well-worn theme and there are familiar echoes here, but Oliva writes well and the story seems fresh and genuinely human. 

I was less keen on the rather long, slow set-up story of the reality show.  Oliva makes a lot of important, telling points about the manipulative dishonesty and cynicism of TV's treatment of people and about the public response to it, but the unendingly cynical tone got a little wearing, and the large cast of rather thinly-drawn characters didn't really engage me much.  I think it would have been better to concentrate on Zoo herself, because during these passages Oliva shows that she is a very capable writer and she offers some good psychological and sociological insights.

I still enjoyed the book and found it pretty involving, so despite my reservations I can recommend it as a good read with some valuable things to say.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Denise Mina - The Dead Hour

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent crime novel

I enjoyed this book enormously. It has taken me a while to get round to Denise Mina and this is the first book of hers that I have read. It certainly won't be the last.

For those unfamiliar with Mina's work, the book is set in Glasgow in 1984 and the time and place are extremely well evoked without ever being intrusive, which gives a real solidity to the book. Another of its great strengths is the believable and well-drawn characters. In particular, the main protagonist, a young, struggling woman journalist called Paddy Meehan, is very well portrayed. She is an ordinary young woman from a poor background, slightly insecure and worried about her weight. She has no spectacular character traits or flaws to make her "interesting" nor does she have a particularly Complicated Personal Life - just the normal situations one might expect her to have to deal with - and yet she is a very engaging and interesting character. I thought her a really excellent creation by Mina, and the other characters are similarly well drawn and plausible.

Meehan works the night shift, and Mina creates a fine "film noir" atmosphere throughout the book. The plot is gripping and (praise be!) both plausible and comprehensible, and the narrative is well constructed, well written and entertaining. It builds the tension very nicely and I was completely enthralled. All in all, this is one of the best crime novels - indeed one of the best novels - I have read for some time. Very warmly recommended.

James Hannah - The A to Z Of You And Me

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Exceptionally good

I thought this was quite exceptionally good.  It really doesn't sound alluring: Ivo, a 40-year-old man lies dying in a hospice while he looks back at all the mistakes he's made in his life, but I thought it was readable, very involving – genuinely gripping at times – and said a lot of important things very well.

There is a plot of sorts.  Interspersed with Ivo's present-day circumstances and deterioration we get the story of his young friendships, the love of his life and how the two interacted and broke each other.  It sounds horrendous, and in the wrong hands certainly could have been, but James Hannah writes with such insight and honesty that I found it completely involving and I was utterly gripped as things developed.  It is extremely well written, well paced and well structured.  The love between Ivo and Mia is especially beautifully evoked and seemed completely real to me. 

Obviously, I have never been in Ivo's situation, but I have been to the very end with two beloved family members who were, and Hannah seems to me to have got that exactly right, too, as he is both unflinching and compassionate in his depiction of Ivo's physical suffering and his struggles with bitterness and whether reconciliation is desirable or can even be possible.  There is also the beautifully and delicately evoked kindness of Shiela, Ivo's nurse, and how overwhelmingly important that is.

I cried long and shamelessly toward the end, for sorrow but also at the greatness of humanity, friendship and kindness.  It's an excellent book which deals with a difficult subject superbly and movingly without ever slipping into sentimentality, mawkishness or facile answers.  The subject matter may not make it sound like a good read, but it is - it really is.  Wholeheartedly recommended.

(I received an ARC from Netgalley.)

Andy Hamilton - The Star Witness

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent book

I thought this was an excellent book.  Andy Hamilton is one of Britain's best comedy writers for the screen with a string of successes like Outnumbered and Drop The Dead Donkey on television and Old Harry's Game on Radio 4 among many others.  Screenwriters, though, however good, don't always make good novelists – but Hamilton has produced a genuinely good novel here, which is readable, funny, insightful and genuinely touching in places.

The Star Witness is a kind of contemporary morality tale of fall and at least partial redemption, narrated in the first person by Kevin Carver, a hugely successful middle-aged soap star, who is accused of assaulting his young girlfriend (and fellow star).  The inevitable "trial by media" and social media savaging follows, and the novel deals with Kevin's personal story through the subsequent developments – some of which are very unexpected.

Hamilton creates a cast of excellent, believable characters, and his dialogue is brilliantly authentic, of course.  Kevin's internal narration is also very good as he begins as an arrogant, dismissive man with an inexhaustible supply of cynical responses (some of which are very funny) and then deals with the crisis which engulfs him.  There is the mix of wit, intelligent social observation and real human insight which anyone familiar with Andy Hamilton's work will be familiar with.  It's extremely readable with some laugh-out-loud moments and there are some excoriating portraits and brilliantly cynical one-liners and observations about contemporary culture.   But, as always in Hamilton's work, there is compassion and kindness running through it and one scene quite late on where a minor character begins to sing genuinely had my eyes pricking with tears.  

This is a funny, intelligent and thoroughly enjoyable book which also has some important things to say, in that way where you notice afterward rather than battering you over the head with Important Pronouncements.  It's a great read and warmly recommended.

(I was kindly sent an ARC by the publisher.)

Marcus Sedgwick - Mister Memory

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good, but not Sedgwick's best

I enjoyed this book, particularly in its later stages.  It's perhaps not Marcus Sedgwick at his brilliant best, but it's still very good.

Set in Paris in 1899, this is the story of Marcel Despres who has a remarkable gift: he remembers *everything*.  This is also a grave burden as he has extreme difficulty sorting the important things from the irrelevant in his memories which gives him considerable social difficulties, too.  The book opens with his arrest for the murder of his wife and what plays out is both an investigation of what memory is and what it means to us and a conspiracy thriller.  It's a fine, ambitious idea which is only partially successfully realised, I think.

Sedgwick is a brilliant storyteller with a remarkable gift for getting inside his subjects' heads and really brining them convincingly to life.  He manages this very well, but only some of the time here.  The opening 100 pages especially seemed rather stodgy to me.  He creates a superb atmosphere of decadent, violent fin-de-siècle Paris and gives us believable characters, but it all feels a bit slow and worthy in a way that, for example, the brilliant She Is Not Invisble never is.  As the pace of the plot begins to pick up things improve considerably and what could be a rather run-of-the-mill story of Battling Corruption In High Places is very well developed with building tension, carefully placed revelation and some genuinely surprising events making it exciting and gripping…eventually.

Throughout this, the character and struggles of Marcel Despres are explored and again, it's only partially successful.  It's believable and in places rather interesting, but it all hangs rather heavily rather than illuminating the book, so I was relieved when the plot began to move along and Marcel's mental state receded into the background a little.

Nathan Filer, Gavin Extence, Jem Lester and many others including Marcus Sedgwick himself have shown what excellent, involving books can be centred on disability and mental illness.  This doesn't really succeed as well as some, but it's still well worth reading.  As always with Sedgwick, it's readable, well researched and has plenty of value to say – it's just not quite as brilliant as some of his others.

Liz Nugent - Lying In Wait

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent psychological thriller

I thought this was a very good book.  It is a tense, well written and disturbing psychological thriller.  The book is set in Dublin beginning in 1980 and is told in the first person by three different characters: a woman involved in a murder, her over-protected son and the victim's sister.   The voices are very convincing, and the story is extremely well told. 

Although a crime drives the whole plot, it is not a whodunit. The murder is revealed in the first sentence; the book begins, "My husband did not mean to kill Annie Doyle, but the lying tramp deserved it.  After we had overcome the initial shock, I tried to stop him speaking of her.  I did not allow it..."  This gives a flavour of the style, which is direct and readable while being an authentic, revealing voice.  That word "allow" establishes the character of the mother brilliantly; she is a selfish, manipulative monster of callousness and self-deception.  I found the psychology of her character very believable, which is by no means always the case in novels of this kind.

I also thought the other characters, both the narrative voices and others, were very well done, as was the sense of place and the crushingly oppressive moral atmosphere of the time.  There is a fine, building sense of tension as the consequences of the murder play out over years, there are unexpected, sometimes shocking developments and I was reminded of both Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith's Ripley – which is high praise.

This is dark and harrowing in places, but I found it a very gripping read, with some penetrating insights.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Charles Cumming - A Divided Spy

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good, gripping read

I enjoyed A Divided Spy, but like all of Charles Cumming's books so far, I didn’t think it quite as brilliant as many people do.

This is an espionage thriller starring Thomas Kell, now the subject of three of Cumming's books.  He is a damaged, world-weary agent of MI6 who at the start of the book is out of the Service and grieving for the death of his partner.  He is drawn back in by the chance sighting of the Russian agent he holds responsible for her death.  The plot sees Kell's attempt to blackmail the man into working for British Intelligence and the subsequent psychological and tactical developments.  Interspersed with this we get a portrait of a man planning a jihadi attack in Britain, and as the two threads become related a very exciting plot develops.

It's very well written and structured, so I found it an easy and compelling read.  The tradecraft and development of the plots is very well done, the first of the two climaxes is especially exciting and the whole thing was enjoyable.  Cumming is very concerned with the psychological make-up and responses of his subjects and while this was all pretty plausible, I did find it a little clunky much of the time.  I found the set-up just a little implausible and doubts, ambiguities and uncertainties seem to be listed rather than woven into the atmosphere in the brilliant way of le Carré, with whom Cumming is now often compared.  Cumming is good, but I still think he has some way to go before those comparisons can be justified.

Despite these small reservations, I found this a good, very gripping read and a thoughtful novel in places. Recommended.

Camilleri - August Heat

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Enjoyable if flawed

This is another very readable, enjoyable book in Camilleri's Montalbano series. All the things we have come to expect from previous books are there - the excellent sense of place, the world-weary cynicism about the corruption in the Italian system, the food (naturally), the rather clumsy comic turns by Catarella and so on. It moves at a good pace, the dialogue is snappy and I found myself keen to get back and read some more when I had the opportunity, which is always a good sign.

The book isn't perfect by any means. The translation is very clumsy in places - so much so that several times it really jarred - and some of the plot elements are frankly absurd, but I still found it a very enjoyable and quite rewarding read and I can certainly recommend it warmly.