Billy Bragg - Roots, Radicals and Rockers

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Terrific stuff

This is a terrific book.  Billy Bragg is immensely knowledgeable about the history of Skiffle and has done some meticulous research – and what's more he can really write.

Roots, Radicals and Rockers is a detailed history of Skiffle, that uniquely British phenomenon which was the precursor to so much of the great British music which followed.  For example, Bragg gives the full context of George Harrison's famous line "No Lead Belly, no Beatles."  What Harrison actually said was, "If there was no Lead belly, there would have been no Lonnie Donegan; no Lonnie Donegan, no Beatles.  Therefore no Lead belly, no Beatles."  Well, quite. 

This is a thorough account of the origins, development and impact of Skiffle, reaching right back to early Blues, Jazz and Ragtime.  Bragg certainly hasn't skimmed the surface here because there is a wealth of detail, anecdote and illustration, all of which I found extremely interesting.  He also shows a real cultural and political awareness of the context of the music on both sides of the Atlantic, and there's real social history here, too.

The style is very readable and enjoyable.  This little quote, which I liked a lot, is a good example: "Before commerce made ownership the key transactional interest of creativity, songs passed through culture by word of mouth and bore the fingerprints of everyone who ever sang them."  It's a real pleasure to read.

I have admired and enjoyed Billy Bragg's music and his work in other fields for a long time now.  Here, he has shown that he can also produce a fascinating book of real scholarship which is also a pleasure to read.  Don't miss this if you have any interest in the history of popular music; it's a gem and very warmly recommended.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Brian van Reet - Spoils

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very good but flawed

Spoils is a good, well-written book, but it has its flaws. 

The well-publicised nub of the story is that in the 2003 Iraq war, a female US soldier, Cassandra Wigheard, is captured by a group of jihadi fighters.  We get a first-person account by Abu al-Hool an experienced, slightly world-weary jihadi and a third-person narrative from Wigheard's point of view.  Both of these are very well done; van Reet clearly knows about his subject matter and I found the setting and action completely convincing.  These two voices, too, are very good and I found myself involved with both characters.  There is also another first-person narrative from Sleed, another soldier, to give the perspective of those observing and trying to find Wigheard.  I thought this was a mistake. 

The story moves a little sluggishly to begin with; the capture which the publishers' blurb suggests is the central theme of the book doesn't happen until about half way through.  The book chops between narrators and timescales (almost obligatory in current fiction, apparently) which for me didn't help the book at all, and the Sleed voice simply got in the way.  He is making important points about the conduct of the war – but they're not what the book is really about and a tightening of the structure would have helped a great deal.

I thought the second half of Spoils was excellent.  It was tense, gripping, insightful and very well written.  Van Reet's portraits of Wigheard and al-Hool are excellent and I was completely involved as things developed.  The Sleed narrative still intruded, but less so, and apart from one long, inappropriate flashback to earlier times just as the climax approached, I found it completely engrossing.

With tighter editing sand structure, this could have been a real modern war classic in the same league as The Yellow Birds or Billy Lynn's Long Half Time Walk.  There are parts of Spoils which are in that class, but it was somewhat flawed as a novel.  However, much of it is truly excellent and very memorable and I can recommend it.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Jenny T. Colgan - Spandex in the City

Rating: 4/5

review:
Very enjoyable

I enjoyed Spandex And The City.  As a man in my 60s, I'm not really in its target audience, but a great title and a friend's recommendation persuaded me to try it and I'm glad I did. I thought it was funny, engaging and rather exciting in places.

Jenny Colgan (whom I hadn't read before) has produced a comic mash-up of a rom-com and superhero adventure and done it very well.  It is narrated in the first person by Holly who works in a dull job in the PR department of the mayor's office in the fictional US city of Centerton - which has its own superhero in Ultimate Man.  ("I mean, seriously? Ultimate Man?" "Well, all the good names had gone.")  He's a Batman/Superman type who rescues Holly from a supervillain a couple of times and a will they/won't they love story begins.  It could have been awful, but Colgan has a lovely touch so the story is humorous with exactly the level of irony needed to be witty, the dialogue is excellently done, Holly is a very engaging protagonist and there's some genuine excitement and some rather thoughtful content in places.

This isn't intended to be Great Literature, but it's a very well-written and entertaining book which I enjoyed a lot.  It would make a great beach read!  Recommended.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into A Bar

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Gripping and memorable

This is not a relaxing read but it's a completely gripping, memorable and rather brilliant one.  I only tried it because I'd heard it favourably spoken of; I rather expected to hate it, but it turned out to be excellent.

A summary of A Horse Walks Into A Bar sounds pretty off-putting: set in Israel (and translated from the Hebrew), it is narrated by a retired judge who receives a completely unexpected phone call from Devaleh, with whom he was, briefly, good friends at school.  Devaleh asks him to attend his stand-up act observe and speak honestly to him afterward.  Almost the whole book is then an account of the evening as Devaleh, who is plainly ill and possibly dying, mixes a little conventional stand-up with an account of the trauma of his childhood as he comes near to breakdown on stage.  In fact, it was excellent and I was completely riveted by the whole thing; I was very keen to know what happened next both in Devaleh's story and in the comedy bar where the audience are finding his performance very troubling, to say the least.

It's very edgy stuff a lot of the time.  There are a few genuine laugh-out-loud gags, but even the comedy routine is often disturbing – for example, a comedy riff on Dr Mengele is always going to divide an audience, shall we say.  Dev's story is brilliantly told as the comedic aspect of being a picked-on putz becomes steadily more serious, and the brilliance of writing – and translation – had me right there feeling the same elation and extreme discomfort described in the audience.  There is some very important stuff here, with genuine psychological insights and a fine illustration that comedy and human pain are often closely linked.

I found this original, enthralling, unsettling and very moving.  Warmly recommended.

(I received and ARC via Netgalley.)

Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Rather a disappointment

I'm afraid that I agree with several other reviewers: this is a novel by a very fine writer, but it didn't really engage me or add up to all that much in the end.

Commonwealth is story, spread over decades, of two families which splinter and unite in different ways with divorce, marriage, leaving home and so on.  It is told in a fractured timescale – which is one of my problems with the book.  It's a very common structure nowadays which sometimes works very well, but it's not always appropriate and is sometimes positively confusing and damaging to the narrative.  I thought that was the case here.  It is a very long time before the real nub of the book is revealed, and the structure just added to the sense  - pretty well throughout the book – that this was a lot of excellent prose with some decent characters, but not much else.

I'm afraid I was disappointed in this.  We all know that Ann Patchett is a great writer, but I need more than just lovely prose and I'm afraid I got a bit bored by Commonwealth because I wasn't engaged by what was actually going on.  After Elizabeth Strout's recent, brilliant Anything Is Possible (not to mention My Name Is Lucy Barton), for example, this was a let-down, I'm afraid.  Only a very lukewarm recommendation.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Jonathan Lynn - Samaritans

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Funny and thought-provoking

Jonathan Lynn is a truly great comedy writer. He has produced a very good book in Samaritans, which is funny and thought-provoking - and disturbing.

Samaritans is the story of a struggling community hospital in Washington DC which appoints Max Green, an executive from a Las Vegas casino as its CEO in order to deal with its difficult financial situation.  Max is a monster of self-centredness, greed and corporate malpractice whose approach to healthcare is summed up in this conversation with his secretary:

"What do you think we should do if our uninsured patients can't pay the bills?" [Max asked.]

"Same as your last business did, I expect."

"Break their legs?"

She smiled "No, silly, use a collection agency."

"You mean, bankrupt them?"

"If we have to.  Otherwise everyone will want healthcare, whether they can afford it or not."

"You're exactly right," Max said.  "people can't have what they can't afford.  That's what got America into this economic mess – everybody wanting something for nothing.  There's no morality in that, is there?"

Subtle, this ain't.  It's a political polemic, really, but made witty and very readable by Lynn's comic skill.  He aims somewhat crude but well-directed blows at corporate greed, management hypocrisy and callousness, the excesses and absurdities of the US healthcare industry and so on.  The book is very well-researched, so people cite genuine cases describing just what Lynn is denouncing, making the whole thing quite chilling.  (And do make sure you read the Epilogue when you've finished the main book.  It's brief but brilliant, I think, especially in the light of recent political developments.)

Samaritans is an enjoyable read which made me smile, made me angry and made me think.  Recommended.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

H.R.F Keating - One Man And His Bomb

Rating: 1/5

Review:
Dreadfully bad

I'm afraid I thought One Man And His Bomb was dreadfully poor.  I have never much liked Keating's Inspector Ghote series, but I thought I'd give this a try to see how he dealt with a crime novel set in England.  He doesn't deal with it well at all.  It is clunky, implausible and, frankly, very poorly written.

The plot revolves around Harriet Martens, a senior police officer in "Birchester".  She learns in the first few pages that her twin sons have been caught in a bomb attack in London; one has been killed and one critically injured.  Nevertheless, the following day she takes sole responsibility for a hugely important case in which an extremely dangerous experimental herbicide which could devastate British agriculture has been stolen.

The book begins badly and never recovers.  It opens with Harriet (Keating apparently cannot decide whether her surname is Pinnick or Martens, by the way) and her husband relaxing in the evening, with dialogue so stilted it is painful.  For example, he jokingly refers to her as "the Hard Detective," to which she responds, "I thought we had a pact…you'd never mention that label they put on me back when I was in B Division, stamping on petty crime."  This sort of ridiculously clumsy way of conveying her history to the reader carries on throughout, and the dialogue is simply laughable.  The whole plot is absurd: a herbicide which has genes which can be manipulated?  A senior detective who fails to spot the most obviously concocted story (even if it is concealed within a painfully stereotyped shifty Irishman)?  And so on and so on.

It was so bad that I gave up in the end because I simply couldn't bear any more.  The set-up, the plot and the writing were all miserably poor and I am amazed that an experienced author like Keating would write something so amateurish.  One to avoid.

Elizabeth Strout - Anything Is Possible

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another gem from Elizabeth Strout

I thought My Name Is Lucy Barton was outstandingly good, but I wasn't at all sure about a follow-up which is effectively a series of linked short stories about characters in small-town Illinois who are linked, some closely and some peripherally, to Lucy Barton.  In fact, Anything Is Possible is, in my view, just as good. 

Elizabeth Strout here does what she has been doing so well for so long: she creates completely recognisable, complete and believable characters and examines the important things in everyday life – family ties, love, kindness, selfishness, decency, wickedness, human damage and so on – through their eyes.  In less brilliant hands it could be dull or forced or facile, but Strout has an extraordinarily shrewd understanding of the common complexities of life and the wonderful skill to put these over plainly but with humanity and compassion.  Often, we see people's realisation that they have ended up somewhere they didn’t expect, and their life isn't even quite the life they thought they were in.  We see, too, the understanding that acting to change things can bring difficulty and pain as well, perhaps, as liberation.  As one of Strout's characters sums it up, "she saw [her]as a woman who suffered only from the most common complaint of all: Life had simply not been what she thought it would be."

I love Strout's prose, which has a graceful simplicity to it.  It manages to be extraordinarily evocative while seeming gently straightforward.  It is all in the third person, but the voice of each subject is very well evoked, so what she is writing about is quietly vivid, whether it is kindness or great wickedness – and we get both here, plus a full range of very human characters with their own mannerisms and quirks all laid gently before us with great clarity and insight. 

In one place Strout writes, "she pictured her mother's quick and gracious loveliness to that man on the street."  I think "gracious loveliness" is a fitting description of the quality of this book.  Very, very warmly recommended.

William Shaw - Sympathy For The Devil

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good setting, slightly stodgy storytelling

I enjoyed Sympathy For The Devil overall, but I did have some reservations about it.

This is the fourth in the Breen & Tozer series.  I hadn't read any of the previous books, but this is fine as a stand-alone novel.  Set in London in 1969, Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen is called to investigate the murder of a prostitute with an exclusive clientele.  Things become convoluted and murky as it becomes clear that people with influence are impeding the investigation.  The plot unravels fairly convincingly, with blind alleys, the possibility of espionage and the eventual discovery of the killer with a slightly more plausible denouement than we often get in this sort of story.

It's a pretty well-told tale.  I did find it a little plodding and stolid at times, but the characters seemed real to me and the period was well evoked.  I think William Shaw has done a good job in portraying the attitudes of the time; he manages to strike that difficult balance of showing how many people thought and spoke then, while not making the book intolerably offensive to modern readers.  For example, there are just a couple of uses of what would now be thought of as pretty shockingly racist terms but which are exactly the sort of words used casually by many people in 1969.  It's enough to be realistic and makes the point but doesn't labour it.  The same applies to some of the sexist views and attitudes to "unmarried mothers" – which was often a term of severe disapproval then. 

This is a decent read without being a brilliant one, I think.  The setting is a good deal better than many "period" crime novels and it's well worth a go to see whether you like it, but be prepared for some slightly stodgy periods.  3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

(I received and ARC via Netgalley.)

James Carol - The Quiet Man

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I'm afraid I didn't get on with The Quiet Man at all.  I tried this because the Vancouver setting sounded interesting and Faber have a well-deserved reputation for publishing quality books.  Sadly, there was little sense of place and the book itself was a very run-of-the-mill affair.

There is a serial killer who targets women (of course) and murders them – sorry, "brutally murders" them, of course – by strapping a home-made bomb to them which is triggered by a family member opening a door in their house.  This happens every 5^th August, and Jefferson Winter, former FBI profiler and son of a serial killer (!) meets up with unjustly forced-out ex-Vancouver cop Laura Anderton as private investigators in a Race Against Time (of course) to stop the killer striking again.

It's as cliché-ridden as it sounds.  Winter and Anderton spend a lot of time telling each other things they already know in that brisk, Professional-ese which people only use in stories like this.  Winter is so empathetic he's practically psychic.  The characters are straight out of Crime Central Casting, including the vain, self-seeking and incompetent Police investigator, the unscrupulous, untrustworthy journalist…you get the idea.  The plot moves slowly and rather predictably with lots of unconvincing padding and technical-sounding but rather vacuous detail.  For example, if you strap a bomb to someone's chest with a hard case facing outwards but an open side toward the chest, it's blindingly obvious to the meanest intelligence that the blast will be directed toward the chest and kill them, isn't it?  But Winter has to say – to experienced intelligent professionals who apparently take him seriously:

"It all comes down to physics.  Something that has forward momentum, whether that's a river or a waveform or the blast wave from an explosion, will always seek out the path of least resistance.  That's what happened here.  The blast is directed toward the victims.  Ultimately, that's what kills them." 

Well, thanks for that, Jefferson; it's a good job you're here to tell us that.  Not only is it absurd in context, as a physicist I can tell you that the "physics" is a load of meaningless waffle.  And, "ultimately, that's what kills them."?  Please!  They've been blown to bits by a bomb and you have to point out that "ultimately" it kills them?

I became increasingly irritated and bored by all this stuff, I'm afraid.  Stilted dialogue, tedious and clichéd plot, generic setting, by-numbers characters…maybe this would be OK for mindless distraction for half a day on the beach, but I really didn't enjoy it.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)