Colin Watson - Bump In The Night

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A real treat

Bump In the Night is the second book of the Flaxborough series (after Coffin, Scarcely Used) and if anything I enjoyed it even more than the first.  This time, a series of small nocturnal explosions destroys a drinking fountain, a statue and the like in Chalmsbury, and eventually Inspector Purbright is called in from neighbouring Flaxborough to investigate as matters become more serious. 

It's a decent plot which maintains interest (although I'd spotted the culprit well before Purbright did), but the chief pleasures of Colin Watson's books are his wonderfully dry, witty style and his brilliant portraits of the characters which inhabit his small, fictional towns.  People like the editor of the local newspaper, his over-eager, cliché-prone cub reporter, the local Councillors and others are quite brilliantly drawn and the reality beneath outward respectability is very neatly skewered.  It is also worth saying that the book is about half the length of a typical modern crime novel and is all the better for it, in my view.

A couple of brief passages may give you a flavour.  Purbright spends a night at a supposedly superior small-town hotel "where he had been ill-fed and insulted by a staff who behaved like émigré dukes," and later visits a room in a boarding house: "The room was as he had last seen it; tidy, ordinary, and wear the faintly depressing air common to all apartments, whether prison cells or bed-sitters, in which a man must share his dreams with his shoe brushes."

I have only recently discovered Colin Watson, but I am coming to regard him as a treat to be looked forward to.  I have no doubt that I shall read the whole Flaxborough series as they are reissued, and I'm looking forward to them enormously.  Very warmly recommended.

(My thanks to Farrago for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Lisa Halliday - Asymmetry

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I made it about a third of the way through Asymmetry before deciding that life was too short and giving up.  I just became thoroughly bored and rather irritated.

It's all very well written, but it had that style-over-substance feel that, frankly, just annoys me. The annoyance isn't as extreme as with Satin Island, for example, which made me want to hunt down the author and give him a good slap, but it has the same sense of a writer implying that the reader needs to be exceptionally clever and knowledgeable to be worthy of reading their brilliant work, while not actually saying anything very insightful or original (or possibly anything at all).  There just seems to be page after page of fine writing, convincing dialogue, well-painted background and so on, but which added up to very little as far as I could see. 

I also found a distinct air of intellectual snobbery about it.  Lengthy, unattributed passages from books appear and then vanish with little clue as to their source (or relevance), or they go to a concert about which we are told nothing in advance and then get, "…she flung up her wrists, flared her nostrils, and the Hammerklavier was sprung from its cage…"  Deliberately structuring the narrative like this so that the reader is excluded if they don't recognise cultural references seems to me to have a self-congratulatory tone that I really don't like.  I make no claim to be especially cultured; I've read enough Primo Levi to recognise a passage of his, I know and like Beethoven's piano music and so on, but there was plenty here that I didn't know and couldn't place.  I'm always very happy to learn more, but I am not willing to be condescended to.

A friend of mine tried to encourage me to continue by saying that she "found Part 1 the hardest to wade through" which, frankly, didn't seem like the strongest of motivations to carry on.  It's possible that the later sections would have entranced and delighted me, but having stuck at it as long as I could, I couldn't be bothered to find out.  I have given the book two stars rather than one because it is well written, but I'm afraid Asymmetry was definitely not for me.

(My thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Emily Koch - If I Die Before I Wake

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Slightly disappointing

This is a difficult book to review because its central premise of a narrator in a Persistent Vegetative State is quite well done and rather invites a high rating, a bit like actors playing terminally ill people or Holocaust victims to try to boost their Oscar chances, but as a novel I didn't think it worked all that well.

Alex Jackson is in hospital almost two years after a fall while rock climbing, still unable to move at all, but conscious and able to sense and feel things.  The story is entirely told in Alex's voice as he lies in bed; visitors and medical staff whom he can't really see but can hear perfectly talk to him and to each other and it becomes clear slowly that police now believe that the fall wasn't an accident.  A psychological thriller develops as suspicions develop.

Alex's state is very well portrayed, but it's not enough to carry a whole book, so even though it's a worthy subject, things did drag quite badly in places.  The original premise aside, the plot is average, pretty implausible psychological thriller stuff, with more than a whiff of deus ex machina about the denouement.  A tense and emotional ending did work for a while, but the eventual culmination felt over-sentimental and didn't affect me as it might have done.

The book is well written and deserves praise for an original take on the genre, but although it feels slightly churlish I can't give it more than three stars.

(My thanks to Vintage for an ARC via Netgalley.)

Derek B. Miller - American By Day

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A very good read

I thought American By Day was very good in the end.  It is very well written, witty, engaging and thoughtful.

Be warned that this is the sequel to Norwegian By Night and the first 50 pages or so form a very extensive spoiler, so I'd recommend reading Norwegian By Night first.  In fact, I found the opening rather a struggle, with a lot of slightly unconvincing recapping and scene-setting.  However, when the protagonist Sigrid arrives in the USA from Norway to find out what has happened to her brother, things really begin to take off.  This is largely because of Sheriff Irv Wylie, who is an absolutely brilliant character; a Divinity scholar turned policeman he is wise, erudite and very funny.  Sigrid's very Norwegian, down-to-earth analytical approach makes a great contrast, and the result is a delight.

A good, engaging crime story evolves, but the real meat of this book is a thoughtful, humane but unsparing look at aspects of US society.  Set in the run-up to the 2008 Presidential elections, there is some really fine analysis of race relations especially, but some shrewd observations on all sorts of other aspects of American life, too; food, gun control, the meaning of "freedom" and so on.  There are some very familiar tropes of political interference, media misrepresentation causing serious community problems, and others, but they are handled with such insight and lack of cliché that it all felt very fresh.

American By Day developed into a very good book indeed and despite an unpromising beginning, it deserves five stars.  Warmly recommended.

Terry Pratchett - Feet Of Clay

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Brilliant

Feet Of Clay is a terrific book.  It has always been a favourite of mine and reading it again (for the third or fourth time, I think) it has lost none of its brilliance.  It's worth saying that if you're new to Pratchett, don't be put off by the trolls, dwarves and so on.  It's just an incredibly effective device for mirroring human society.  (And Detritus the troll is a wholly wonderful character, too.)

Here, Vimes and the Watch are investigating apparent attempts to poison the Patrician, while something strange and menacing is going on with the golems in the city.  It's a superbly constructed story, excellently paced and very exciting a lot of the time, but what makes it special, as always it Pratchett's incisiveness about human issues.  There is some wonderfully acute observation about race, gender politics and class, for example, all lightly and often very funnily done, and underpinned by Vimes's humanly flawed attitudes and pragmatism.  He manages to say really important things without ever being ponderous or preachy about it.

There are, of course, plenty of great comic moments.  For instance, early on, three crooks burst into the Watch's bar, take Angua hostage and haul her out into the street:

"Hadn't we better help?" said a constable who was new to the Watch.

"They don't deserve our help," said Vimes.

(I should probably confess at this point that I have been hopelessly in love with Angua for years.)

Feet Of Clay is written in really good, unobtrusive prose and it is thoughtful, exciting, gripping, very funny and at times genuinely moving.  What more could you want?  Very warmly recommended.

Walter Mosely - Down The River Unto The Sea

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A very good crime novel

I really enjoyed Down The River Unto the Sea.  I read and liked the early Easy Rawlins novels, but ran into diminishing returns with them and haven't read any Walter Mosely since.  I was very pleased to find that he seems to have begun a new, very good series.

Joe King Oliver is a disgraced NYPD detective who was framed and kicked off the force a decade before the book opens.  He is now working as a private detective and is asked to take a case investigating the conviction of a man for shooting two police officers for which he is sentenced to death.  He also begins to look into the circumstances of his own downfall on the force, and the two appear to be related somehow.

It's a very well told story.  Mosely writes very good prose and Joe's narrative voice is extremely convincing, as is the milieu of New York's underworld.  He creates excellent, believable characters, especially Joe himself, who is flawed but fundamentally honest and decent – and gravely damaged by his experience in prison.  That experience is evoked brilliantly; it's a fairly brief but exceptionally powerful passage, and all the more affecting for not being laboured.  His relationship with his teenage daughter is also exceptionally well done, I thought.  I found the story very good (although he does meet an awful lot of people so it's not easy to keep track of the characters) and I was gripped throughout.

In summary, this is a gripping, readable crime novel with some genuine weight, too.  I can recommend it warmly and I look forward to more Joe Oliver.

(My thanks to Weidenfeld and Nicolson for and ARC via NetGalley.)

Jonathan Lynn - Mayday

Rating: 3/5

Review: 
Not Jonathan Lynn's best work

Jonathan Lynn is a brilliant comic writer, but I didn't think Mayday added up to all that much in the end.

First published in 1993, this is the story of Ernest Mayday, a cynical and grumpy Englishman and writer of potboilers who has moved to Hollywood to work but who finds himself blocked.  His girlfriend is heavily involved in a "church" whose founder and guru is about to be tried for financial and sexual misconduct.  Mayday becomes embroiled in a clever, convoluted scheme to try to get the inside story and adapt it for his next novel, while at the same time pitching a screenplay for an adaptation of an earlier book.

It is all very well written and it's a decent story, but it did feel a bit stale to me, I'm afraid.  The targets of Lynn's satire are all thoroughly deserving of ridicule; vacuous intellectual pretentiousness, the shallowness and dishonesty of the film business, exploitative fake religions, the mangling of language and so on…but they have all been pretty thoroughly skewered both before and since Mayday was published.  This ended up feeling a bit like an amalgam of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, The Bonfire Of The Vanities (which Lynn explicitly references) and the TV series Episodes.  The story just managed to keep me reading and is cleverly twisty, but it did get very wordy and preachy, especially in the last few chapters, and in the end I was rather glad to finish the book.

For me, this hasn't aged all that well and for a comedy genius like Jonathan Lynn, I don’t think it counts among his best work.  It's OK, but no more, I think.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Tony Parsons - Girl On Fire

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good, gripping novel

This is the first of the DC Max Wolfe books that I have read and I enjoyed it.  It works fine as a stand-alone novel, but I think it would have been better if I'd read at least some of the earlier ones – which I intend to do now.

Girl On Fire has one of the best, most arresting openings I can remember.  The first sentence is "I woke up and the world was gone," and we learn very soon that Max has been caught up in a terrorist outrage and the scenes which follow are quite brilliantly done.  The phrase "You had me at 'hello'" sprang to mind and although the remainder of the book couldn't quite keep up the stellar standard, it was an engrossing and exciting read.  Max and various police colleagues deal with the aftermath of the incident – tracing suspects, knocking down doors, dealing with public reaction to events – and it's all pretty plausibly done.  Throughout, there runs the story of Max as a single father and his relationship with his daughter (and his ex-wife) which makes a good backdrop and also has important things to say.

Tony Parsons writes very well.  He has an easy, flowing prose style and Max's narrative voice is very convincing.  There is a tendency to indulge occasionally in slightly stilted homilies about things like single fathers, liberal democracy and so on, but generally I found it an easy, gripping read.  My only other reservation is that it's pretty unremittingly grim; a small leaven of humour would have helped a lot.  Books on similar themes by, for example, Mick Herron or Khurrum Rahman (whose East Of Hounslow I thought very good) achieve this and may be rather more effective in their message as a result.

In short, this is a good, involving crime novel with some intellectual weight.  Recommended.

(My thanks to Random House for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Colin Watson - Coffin, Scarcely Used

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very enjoyable

I thoroughly enjoyed Coffin, Scarcely Used.  It is exceptionally well written and a decent mystery to boot.

Originally published in 1958, this book introduces Inspector Purbright of the Flaxborough police.  Flaxborough is a (fictional) small coastal English town where outward respectability conceals Untoward Goings-On.  The discovery of a second body, this time a murder staged as a suicide causes Purbright and the equally admirable sergeant Sid Love, to investigate.  They are a very engaging pair, with Purbright as a seemingly slightly hapless, polite investigator, and the whole thing is a pleasure to read. 

It is decently, if slightly implausibly, plotted.  The characters are well drawn, with pointed wit but genuine thoughtfulness, so that although it is genuinely funny in places, it has an essential believability and insight into the character and mores of the time which make it a very involving read as well as just an entertaining one.  It's perhaps a bit like a much less donnish Michael Innes or a 1950s version of Simon Brett in tone.  I marked this little exchange between Purbright and Mr Smith, the local bank manager which gives a flavour of the style:

'"We should be glad to have your help, sir…"

Mr Smith inclined his head and continued to register delight. "Anything we can do, we shall only be too pleased."

"…in a somewhat delicate matter," Purbright added, and the tiniest flake of frost settled upon Mr Smith's manner.'

If you like that, you'll like the book.  I like it very much, and I'm looking forward to catching up with more of Inspector Purbright, whom I haven't read before.  I'm grateful to Farrago Books for making available and introducing me to a third series of excellent but nearly forgotten books which are very well written and entertaining, the others being Miss Seeton and the Bandy series by Donald Jack.  All are warmly recommended.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Julian Barnes - The Only Story

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Brilliant but slightly flawed

I thought The Only Story was excellent in some parts but that it lost its way a little.  It is, of course, beautifully written throughout with some very poignant observations but struggled to carry the story through to its end.

The story begins with a nineteen-year-old Paul in the mid-1960s in a "respectable" Surrey village, who falls for and eventually begins an affair with an older, married woman whom he meets at the Tennis Club.  Julian Barnes uses this as a device to reflect on youth and its lack of care for consequences, on love and on the progress of lives, including the slowly growing crises that may overwhelm them.

For much of its length I found it excellent.  Barnes is insightful and slightly resignedly compassionate to his characters, who all seem exceptionally real and well-drawn to me.  His prose is wonderful; elegant, poised, sometimes very witty and very easy to read.  The narrative is partly in Paul's first-person voice which I thought caught the mind of a middle-class nineteen-year-old at that time beautifully.  I highlighted a lot of examples, like this, for example: "I was keen in those days to find hidden motives – preferably involving hypocrisy – behind the obvious ones."  Period is perfectly painted in attitudes, language and the general background.  He is very good on memory – the idiotic details we do remember and the important things we don't, and its unreliability.  He sums it up well in the phrase, "But I'm remembering the past, not reconstructing it."

The final third of the novel is in the third person (but jumps to first person briefly, which I found simply annoying) and although it's thoughtful and intelligent, it read to me less like the conclusion to a novel and rather more like an essay on the way a life can begin with real passion and ideals and then be lived at a slightly sad, reserved level.  For two-thirds of the book I was very involved with the story of Paul and Susan, but the long, rather bleak and melancholy conclusion didn't work quite so well.  It is full of truth and insight – but perhaps not really a story.

Despite this reservation, The Only Story is beautifully written and has lots of real insight.  I can still recommend it warmly. 

(My thanks to Jonathan Cape/Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Julian Barnes - The Pedant In The Kitchen

Rating: 5/5

Review: A delight

I found this a delight.  It was a present of the best sort; one which I probably wouldn't have bought for myself but which I am delighted to have discovered.

The Pedant In the Kitchen is a collection of Barnes's regular articles in The Guardian, so it's a sequence of relatively short pieces, each on a cooking- or food-related theme.  They are often very funny and, like so much good comedy, based in very shrewd observation and understanding.  He recounts his own cooking experiences with wit and common sense.  For example, of being told to halve and de-seed 200-odd cherry tomatoes: "All together now: We're not doing that!"  Or after looking at all three chicken recipes in The River Café Cookbook, "Well, hello again Delia."  (And I love his healthy dislike of The Dinner Party; instead, he has some friends coming round for supper.)

Barnes loves good recipe books and good writing about food, and is hilariously withering about a good deal of the pretension and self-importance which often surrounds it.  For example, he says this of his (quite rightly) beloved Jane Grigson when comparing her writing to some other cookbooks by celebrity chefs: "There is no such cult of personality with Grigson: rather her presence suffuses her writing like some familiar and warming herb in a stew.  You are constantly aware of it, the stew couldn't have been made without it, yet you don't keep having to pick it out from between your teeth."

If you like that sort of writing you'll like this book.  Personally, I loved it and I can recommend it very warmly.