Piers Paul Read - The Villa Golitsyn

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Disappointing

Piers Paul Read's books passed me by the first time around so I was glad to have an opportunity to try one, but although The Villa Golitsyn began rather well, I wasn't very keen overall.

First published in 1981 and set in 1979, the book begins with a good espionage thriller set-up as Simon Milson, a middle-ranking civil servant in the Foreign Service is sent to Nice to stay with Willy, an old school friend whom he has not seen for years, in order to determine whether the friend was responsible for passing secrets to the enemy fifteen years ago.  From here on, it is largely a novel of character as the various, slightly oddly assorted, guests interact with Willy and, to some extent, each other.  There is a convincing picture of an intelligent, charismatic man disintegrating in alcoholism, with some interesting, if a little clunky, discussions of morals, ethics and so on. 

It's decently written and competently enough done, but I found that things flagged badly by half-way and the second half became something of a slog.  There is a lot of description of the area, an awful lot of detailed (often quoted) political writing which may have influenced Willy and so on, which eventually seemed designed to show off how much research Read had done rather than to enhance the book.  I wasn't convinced by the motivations or relationships which developed, there is some rather lazy stereotyping of an American visitor (and some unpleasantly misogynistic writing about her body which seemed to me to come from the author, not just his characters), a somewhat implausible climax and so on. 

Also, given some of the content, have to question the taste of reissuing this book after Savile, Operation Yew Tree and all that has emerged in the last decade.  I fully accept that books are of their time and I wouldn't wish to suppress it in any way, but I do wonder about the decision actively to revive and market it.

So, a disappointment for me, I'm afraid, and I won't be returning to Piers Paul Read.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Hanif Kureishi - The Nothing

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Brilliant writing

Hmmm.  This is a tricky one to review because  I enjoyed reading The Nothing, but I'm not really sure what it added up to in the end.

Hanif Kureishi's short novel is narrated by Waldo, an elderly, dying, once-feted filmmaker who has had, shall we say, a colourful past.  He is now bed- and wheelchair bound and begins to suspect that his younger wife is conducting an affair with an old acquaintance who takes sanctuary in their flat.  How things play out is a large part of the pleasure of this book so to say more would be too much of a spoiler, but there are some darkly humorous and sometimes shocking developments as suspicion and plotting on all sides develop.

Kureishi writes brilliantly and the book is a pleasure to read.  Waldo's voice is completely convincing as a self-absorbed, lubricious, often vengeful man who was plainly both an extremely talented artist and often a deeply unpleasant person to work with (…"one of my scribblers. A bastard I thrashed into talent," gives you an idea) and who is now facing his own death with something like equanimity.  The prose is very readable, and scattered with neat observations, like "Drugs had given me a faux bravery but they stopped me taking risks.  Every outrage has to be earned; you cannot cheat reality,"  and also dry humour like "After all, a saint is only someone who has been under-researched."  There is a great deal of very frank talk about sex, both in the language used and what is said with it, which I found completely in character but some readers may like to be warned.  It's also a tale of a lot of pretty unpleasant people doing pretty unpleasant things much of the time, but it still made enjoyable and absorbing reading.

I'm not sure whether The Nothing really says a great deal that is new or profound, but it's a brilliant character study, I found it a very good read and I can recommend it with a little caution.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Benjamin Ludwig - Ginny Moon

Rating: 4/5

Review:  Good, but...

Benjamin Ludwig is a thoroughly admirable man who has written this book from close personal experience, having adopted a teenager with autism. Any criticism of a book written with such goodness of heart and nobility of purpose seems terribly churlish, but although I thought Ginny Moon had its merits, I had some reservations about it.

The story is narrated in the first person by Ginny, a girl with autism who has her 14th birthday during the story. She is very troubled by a traumatic past with her neglectful and violent birth mother and is now adopted by her Forever Family (the third family with whom she has tried to make a home). How her past affects her current behaviour is well depicted, the story emerges skilfully and one's heart is genuinely wrung by Ginny's plight and puzzlement at the world, even when she behaves in ways which look terrible to outsiders.

All of this is well done, parts of the book are very gripping and Ludwig plainly cares deeply for his subject and for Ginny, whose internal state he portrays well for the most part. However, I think his degree in Creative Writing interferes with what he is trying to do in places. Ginny talks in simple, literal sentences which are very convincing, but far too often some very non-Ginny language or phrasing intrudes. For example, "I am talking to the only person who can bring me to the other side of Forever. To the other side of the equals sign. He is gone." In the context, this is a heart-rending moment which Ludwig renders very well in those words…but they are the crafted words of a writer, not Ginny's voice at all, and this happened often enough to continually throw me out of the narrative. I also think the book is too long at nearly 400 pages; in the structure and plot Ludwig labours his points rather and a tighter structure would have made the impact greater, I think, and I had my doubts about the slightly Disney-esqe ending, too.

Ginny Moon is not a bad book at all and has some excellent things about it. I am genuinely sorry to be critical; it’s just that for me it doesn't compare with the brilliance of books like The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Nighttime (Mark Haddon), The Universe vs. Alex Woods (Gavin Extence) or Shtum (Jem Lester) and this comes with a somewhat qualified recommendation.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley}

Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Outstandingly good

I thought My Absolute Darling was outstandingly good.  It is beautifully written, remarkably insightful and completely gripping.

This is the story of 12-year-old Julia "Turtle" Alveson who lives with her survivalist father on the fringes of society in Mendocino, California.   She is skilled in guns, survival skills and so on, but at sea with other people and in social situations.  Told entirely from Turtle's point of view, we see her struggles with understanding her father's obsessive and abusive behaviour which she (and probably he) believes to be what love is.  As events and growing maturity begin to make her more aware, the tension between what she has believed and what she begins to recognise as reality grows and Turtle has to wrestle with where her future lies and how, if at all, she can realise it.

This doesn't sound like a great read on the face of it, but it is.  I genuinely found it hard to put this book down; the story is gripping, with some passages of incredible tension and real adventure, and Gabriel Tallent takes us right inside that young woman's head with her confusion, self-doubt (often spilling into self-loathing) and resilience in a way which I have seldom experienced.  The portraits of her and of her monstrous father are fantastically real, and I found the entire thing completely convincing.  Be warned that there are some quite horrifying scenes of child abuse, but they are absolutely justified in the context and excellently judged - a world away from the often offensively facile use of child abuse as a theme in run-of-the-mill thrillers.

The prose is excellent.  Gabriel Tallent writes in a measured, unmelodramatic but rather lyrical style, which brings the people, especially Turtle, wonderfully to life.  Just as a tiny example, we get sentences like this: "She waits there in the grass, feeling her every thought stored up and inarticulate within her," and this sort of brilliant distillation of internal experience shines through the book.  The sense of place is excellent and dialogue is completely convincing; I especially liked some wonderful episodes of the jokey, wordy, literate chatter of two High School boys as it contrasted with Turtle's near-silent inarticulacy.

I find it hard to express quite how good I thought this book was.  It is a rare combination of an utterly gripping story, excellent writing and genuine depth of content.  Very, very warmly recommended.

Lisa McInerney - the Blood Miracles

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Very disappointing

I enjoyed The Glorious Heresies very much so it pains me to say this, but I got to about half-way in The Blood Miracles and gave up.  I may go back to it at some point, but for now I've had enough.

The Blood Miracles picks up Ryan Cusack's story from the end of The Glorious Heresies.  After a sort of recuperation period he is back at work with Dan, organising a new drug route from the Camorra in Naples.  He continues to drink and use drugs, so his life continues as a series of mess-ups (not the exact phrase used in the narrative) and dealings with dangerous people as things fall apart with Karine…and so on.

Lisa McInerney writes as well as in the first book, but I needed more that The Blood Miracles offers, I'm afraid.  There is no leaven this time of comedy or humanity, nor any of the background social commentary; it's just a long, bleak slog of Ryan messing up, getting into trouble, allowing his addictions to spoil things, and so on.  It's a convincing portrait, but we've already had that, better done, in The Glorious Heresies and in the end I simply couldn’t find a reason to carry on reading.

Lisa McInerney is a very good writer and I am genuinely sorry to have to be critical of this book, but it really fell a long way short of what I would expect from her and I can't recommend it.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

John Donne - The Complete John Donne

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A very good e-edition

This is a very good e-edition of Donne's complete poetry and prose works.

Donne's writing needs no critique from me.  His poetry, in particular, has been a love of mine for many years; I have printed editions of his work, I have some of his shorter poems by heart and I read A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day at every winter solstice.  (And yes, I know that's no longer St. Lucy's Day, but I read it then because 'tis the yeares midnight.)  I wanted an edition to keep handy on my Kindle.  This fits the bill admirably.

This edition is well laid-out; the formatting is good and I found finding and navigating from the Contents to a particular poem or prose work pretty simple.  Spelling and punctuation have been modernised which suits me well in some contexts, although I am very glad to have my beautiful old print edition with Donne's somewhat chaotic approach to both spelling and punctuation because I enjoy that very much, too.  Here, Donne's words are as clear as they can be and it's an excellent reading edition.  So far as I can tell as a lay person, the works are accurately reproduced and this is a comprehensive edition.

At under a quid, this is an unmissable bargain for me, and I can recommend it very warmly.

Liz Moore - The Unseen World

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very good

I thought Liz Moore's Heft was quite brilliant.  The Unseen World is also very good and shares Heft's qualities of insight, humanity and compassion, but I did have some reservations about it.

The Unseen World is a novel about identity.  It is the story of Ada Sibelius whom we first meet aged twelve in the early 1980s.  She is a very intelligent young woman whose father David is raising her alone almost in isolation and home-schooling her, including at the Boston computing lab of which he is the head.  Here they are working ELIXIR, an early project in artificial intelligence.  When David's mental faculties begin to fail this life breaks down, Ada has to join the world and mysteries about her and David's backgrounds begin to appear.  There is some very thoughtful investigation of what constitutes a human identity, with a neat background of developing artificial intelligence which quietly points at similar issues.

There is much here that is very good.  Liz Moore writes very well in an unfussy, readable style and her characters are believable and very human.  There's some neat, unemphasised juxtaposition between David's loss of mental capability and ELIXIR's slowly developing ability to seem conscious.  Moore has plainly researched the topics she deals with in depth so the book is credible and I became very involved with Ada's story, some parts of which were beautifully and poignantly done.

I did feel that the book was a bit too long and could have done with a little tightening up in places; there was rather too much of Ada's adjustment to and relationship with her peer group at school, for example, and the book lost some focus as a result.  Also, it is told in a timescale which moves between Ada as a child and as an adult which seemed an unnecessary distraction to me and might have been better as a linear narrative. 

However, these small flaws are more than compensated for by Moore's insights into character, her humanity and compassion, all of which shine through here.  This may not be as exceptionally good as Heft, but it is a thoughtful, intelligent and very involving read which I can recommend.

James Delbourgo - Collecting the World

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Tough going

My word, this was hard work!  It's thorough, remarkably well researched and with a firm purpose in mind, but as a readable biography I found it pretty tough going.

Hans Sloane was at the centre of The Enlightenment and his collections of objects of all kinds formed the basis of what became The British Museum.  He was an immensely significant figure in the development of Western civilization, and I was keen to find out more about him and what he actually did.  I like to read a good biography and am perfectly prepared to put in a fair amount of work to understand and digest what is written about someone, but this wasn't really for me.  I suspect that it may be much better suited for academic reference – I think it is significant that about one-third of the book's 500-odd pages are devoted to notes, references and the index.

James Delbourgo has done a colossal amount of research in compiling this book.  He likens trying to understand Sloane through his collections to the futility of those who tried to understand Citizen Kane through his work.  He attempts to reveal the man through his correspondence and his huge network of acquaintances throughout the world, and it is a strong thesis of the book that the collecting was not solely conducted by Sloane but a huge collaborative effort which Sloane largely maintained and co-ordinated.  It's decently done, but I found the immense wealth of detail and slightly stodgy style hard to take in large quantities.  This read more like a textbook than something intended for a more general readership (and the dense, small type doesn't help), and as a result I didn't really feel I'd got to the man himself.

This may be just me and others may fare better.  Plainly this is a work of fine scholarship which will be of real value to students of the period.  Personally, however, I can't recommend Collecting The World as the readable, illuminating book I was hoping for.

Robert Seethaler - The Tobacconist

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Truly excellent

I thought The Tobacconist was excellent.  I was wary of it because it reflects closely in time and place some of my family's most harrowing history, meaning that if it were badly done I would hate it.  In fact, it is exceptionally well done, and one of the best novels I have read about the onset of Nazism.

Part of the reason it is so good is that although it is set in Vienna in 1937 and 1938 around the time of the Anschluss, the main story is of the coming of age of Franz, a young, naïve country boy who arrives in Vienna to take a job in a tobacconist's shop.  Franz is a wonderful protagonist; he is innocent but intelligent, honest and thoughtful and he observes what is happening with the somewhat bemused eye of decency.  He also forms a friendship with Sigmund Freud, who is a customer, with whom he discusses things, including the turmoil of his teenage heart, which is beautifully depicted.  The political turmoil is a well-drawn backdrop to this for much of the book, and is all the more potently depicted for not being heavy-handedly in the foreground.

Robert Seethaler creates a superb sense of time and place, often through the observation of minutiae (including the way things and people smell), and Franz's reflections, self-doubt and sometimes plain bewilderment in the face of both falling in love and of the rise of thuggery and vicious political control was very real to me.  We also get little vignettes of things like the stolid, elderly postman who is uneasy about some of what is happening, but manages to put it aside because, well, it doesn't seem *that* bad, he isn't really affected personally and he needs to complete just a few more years trouble-free service for his pension.  Again, an utterly convincing portrait of how a basically decent person can shut out and hence allow evil.

I also like the observations which sometimes remain very pertinent today, like "The morning edition's truth is practically the evening edition's lie; though as far as memory's concerned it doesn't really make much differencr.  Because it's not usually the truh that people remember; it's just whatever's yelled loudly enough or printed big enough."

This is a fairly short but brilliant book.  It is superbly translated, so that all the author's insights into character, place and so on come over perfectly, and it is insightful, readable, rather uplifting in places as Franz's integrity shines through, and ultimately very moving.  This is one to keep and re-read many times, I think.  Very warmly recommended.

Donald Jack - It's Me Again

Rating: 5/5

Review:
The best so far

This is the third volume of The Bandy Papers. I have enjoyed all of them and I think this is the best so far.

It's Me Again opens with Major Bandy being sent to take command of a dispirited squadron in France.  It is remarkably well organised, in that even the coal is whitewashed, for example, but is achieving very little with extremely high casualty rates.  Bandy manages to turn this model of efficiency into "the most disreputable bunch of bandits" with one of the highest success rates and the tale of how he does it is, as always, amusing and very exciting and with Jack's typical excoriation of incompetent and uncaring administrators and commanders.  There follows a brief interlude of social farce in Canada, and then Bandy is sent off to Russia to intervene in the civil war there.  Again, Donald Jack manages to produce a superb mixture of knockabout humour and genuine excitement in a tale which is also plainly well researched.  This section reminded me a little of Hornblower, as Bandy's unorthodoxy and resourcefulness produce unexpected results.

This is a great read.  It is full of excitement, genuine humour and one episode of real, heart-piercing poignancy, showing what a fine writer Jack was.  He has really hit his stride in It's Me Again; the two preceding books are excellent in parts but to me rather patchy, while this is consistently very good.  I would suggest reading the first two books before this one, but it's not essential.  Whether you do or not, this is a fine book and warmly recommended.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Danny Wallace - I Can't Believe You Just Said That

Rating: 5/5

Review :
Entertaining and thought-provoking

I thought this was an excellent book.  I tried it on a bit of a whim, not knowing quite what to expect, and it turned out to be witty, intelligent and genuinely insightful about the things which make people behave rudely, why such behaviour may be becoming more prevalent and, crucially, the damage it does to us both as individuals and as a society.

The great thing about I Can't Believe You Just Said That is that it is extremely readable and entertaining while saying genuinely important things.  When my copy first arrived I thought I'd have a quick look at the first few pages and read it properly sometime later.  Instead, I was hooked and read the whole thing straight through.  Danny Wallace is a very engaging writer who manages to be funny, honest and self-deprecating while describing situations and personal responses to rudeness which everyone will recognise. 

The book begins with the Hot Dog Incident, in which a café-owner was staggeringly rude to Wallace who is a customer.  As a result, he went off and did a lot of serious research into rudeness, its causes and effects.  He commissioned a survey and also talked to a lot of academics and others who have looked into the topic in detail.  The results are fascinating – and rather scary.  The severe damage to personal performance caused by someone being rude is positively terrifying (this includes medical errors increasing hugely if someone, not necessarily the patient, is even mildly rude to a practitioner, for example, and the effect persists for a long time) and the corrosive effect of general rudeness on groups and entire nations is also disturbing.  There are also some uplifting accounts of ways of combating rudeness and some thoughtful (and sometimes very witty) analysis of its origins in all sorts of groups of people.

I can warmly recommend this book.  I found it extremely entertaining as well as being very thought-provoking, and I hope it is very widely read.

(I received a review copy from the publisher.)

Chris Brookmyre - Want You Gone

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Brilliant

Chris Brookmyre has become a must-read author for me; I enjoyed Black Widow very much and I thought Want You Gone was even better.

This time, Jack Parlabane is based in London where he and his shadowy occasional collaborator, the hacker Buzzkill, are drawn into some very devious and dangerous hacking and industrial espionage.  There's a twisty plot which develops convincingly and very grippingly and it became very exciting – I found it very difficult to tear myself away and fairly raced through the book.  There is an awful lot about the techniques of hacking and the circumventing of security systems, which may sound rather dry and technical, but which is so well done that I found it absolutely riveting.  There are some thrilling and nail-biting episodes, a genuine sense of threat and layer upon layer of mystery and deceit.  Brookmyre also cleverly plays with stereotypes and assumptions for some neat but very plausible surprises.

In addition, he paints his usual subtle and convincing portraits of his characters in the now familiar combination of third person narrative of Parlabane's activities and inner life, and first-person narrative from another character.  It's very well done indeed; I was completely drawn in to their lives as well as the plot, and Brookmyre makes some shrewd observations about people, behaviour and modern life along the way.

In short, I thought Want You Gone was brilliant and immensely entertaining.  Very warmly recommended.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

James Wong - How To Eat better

Rating: 4/5

Review:
helpful and sensible dietary advice

James Wong is a properly trained, experienced scientist who really knows what he is talking about.  In the field of popular dietary advice, this is by no means always the case and is very valuable attribute.  He puts this knowledge over very well here in a well balanced, nicely presented and easily readable book.

The book does what it claims to do: it gives advice about how to choose and cook foods to get the best dietary advantage from them.  No dodgy, overblown "superfood" claims, nor "radical new diets" but sound scientific research and sensible suggestions based on it.  Wong is also refreshingly clear about what is established fact about what compounds are found in certain foods, for example, and what is suggested but not fully established by research about any beneficial effects these may have.  In a world where a tentative suggestion from incomplete research may be trumpeted as an Astonishing Breakthrough which will Transform The Way We Live, such honesty is very welcome.

All the advice is sensible, although it's not all welcome, to be honest.  For example, Robusta coffee beans may contain lots more possibly healthy compounds than Arabica – but they don't taste nearly so good to me, so I'll just take my chances on that one, thanks.  Nonetheless, the information is there to be assessed, and the recipes to help to utilise the science are sensible and largely appetising-looking.

In short, this is a nicely presented, useful book with genuinely sensible and valuable content which is easy to read and understand. It stands out in a very crowded market indeed and I can recommend it.

Arnaldur Indridason - The Shadow District

Rating: 2/5

Review:
A disappointment

I have enjoyed a few of Arnaldur Indridason's Erlendur novels.  I'm afraid that I didn't think that The Shadow District, the beginning of a new series, was nearly so good.

The story is told largely in two time frames: in present day Reykjavik an elderly man is found dead, and turns out to have been smothered.  He has cuttings which relate to a murder in Reykjavik during World War Two.  Konrad, a retired policeman, begins to investigate both the present day killing and the wartime murder.  Intercut with this is the story of the investigation of that murder by two policeman at the time.  The stories develop in parallel, as links and new revelations slowly (painfully slowly) begin to be revealed.

For me, the whole thing lacked much credibility and the pace is positively funereal.  I'm all for slow, atmospheric plots, provided that what is around the plot itself is interesting and involving.  Here it felt plodding and rather turgid.  The history of wartime Iceland is rather interesting, I suspect, but there were so many lengthy expositions (often rather repetitive) and long, long back-stories of lots of characters that it became rather a slog.  The sudden, late introduction of a third timeframe, told from the point of view of the present-day victim to explain what happened to him seemed very contrived, and a conveniently neat and thoroughly implausible confession made the ending seem a bit silly.

The translation doesn't help.  It's not terrible, but the prose feels a bit stilted and often pretty stale, with clunky clichés like "he nearly jumped out of his skin" or "they talked about everything under the sun" cropping up far too regularly.

So, a disappointment for me.  I won't be bothering with any more in the Konrad series, and can't really recommend this.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Donna Leon - Earthly Remains

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An enjoyable read

This is another very readable and enjoyable Brunetti novel, although perhaps not quite as involving as some others.

There comes a time in every long-running detective series when the protagonist takes a – usually enforced – holiday.  Brunetti has reached that point here, and goes off to an island in the laguna for a couple of weeks rest.  Needless to say, he eventually becomes embroiled in the investigation of a possibly suspicious death, which leads to the possibility of much larger-scale wrongdoing and corruption.

Donna Leon always gives us a classily undemanding read, and this is no exception.  However, as so often with detective-on-holiday novels, removing Brunetti from his natural milieu in Venice with official corruption, his vain, idle and spineless boss and so on does diminish the story somewhat.  We do get excellent descriptions of the life of the islands of the laguna and so on, and Paula is, thank heavens, still just a phone call and a few kilometres away, but Earthly Remains didn't quite have the hugely enjoyable sense of Brunetti in his Venetian element and among his family.

Nonetheless, this is a very enjoyable read.  It may not be a Brunetti classic but you won't be disappointed.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)