Friday 30 August 2019

Ann Cleeves - The Long Call


Rating: 3/5

Review:
Disappointing

This is the first Ann Cleeves that I have read and I was looking forward to it. Sadly, I was rather disappointed.

The Long Call is the first in a new series featuring DI Matthew Venn, who has recently moved back to his childhood home in North Devon. He is estranged from his parents and the strictly religious group in which he grew up because he is gay and has married another man. A body found on a beach leads Matthew into an investigation which (of course) involves this group and also the arts and day centre for learning disabled people run by his husband.

Ann Cleeves generates a good sense of place and it’s good to see gay and learning-disabled characters at the forefront of the story...but the story just isn’t all that well done. There are lots of great, indigestible chunks of characters’ history, quite often of characters who aren’t that important, the whole thing moves very slowly and I got quite bored at times. The “It’s Personal” aspects felt like a well-worn literary device rather than a natural part of the story and there is (of course) a Race Against Time toward the end with some pretty implausible Investigator In Peril stuff which all felt very formulaic - although we were at least spared a clichéd Cornered Killer Climax.

I did finish the book, but it was a bit of a slog and I’m not inclined to pursue the series. Personally, I can’t really recommend it. (2.5 stars rounded up to 3.)

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

Saturday 24 August 2019

Louise Penny - Still Life


Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very enjoyable

I enjoyed Still Life. I hadn’t read Louise Penny before; she was a recommendation by a friend and I’ll certainly be reading more in this series.

Set in a small town in Quebec, Penny creates a fine sense of place and of the French/English politics of the place which often run below the surface. Her characters are excellently drawn and Gamache is a thoughtful, engaging protagonist. The plot involves the death of a much-liked and respected woman and reminded me in structure of Agatha Christie, with a closed community, red herrings, revelations and so on. Penny’s characters are much richer than Christie’s, though, and this is what gives the book its quality. I found it very engaging and readable – although I could have done without an implausible “climax” which, in contrast to the rest of the book, seemed formulaic and rather silly.

I’m looking forward to the rest of this series and can warmly recommend Still Life.

Monday 19 August 2019

Simon Brett - The Killer In The Choir


Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not one of Brett's best

Simon Brett is always reliable and you know pretty much what you’re going to get in the Fethering series; a well written, fairly light-hearted mystery with some rather shrewd characterisation and comments on village life. The Killer In The Choir is firmly in this mould, although I didn’t think it was one of his best.

This time, Carole and Jude look into the death of a local businessman, whose wife is a stalwart of the church choir. There is the usual nice contrast between Carole’s prim, direct manner and Jude’s more easygoing understanding of people and the enjoyable characters of Fethering. I did have some reservations, though. The story touches on some quite dark themes of sexual abuse and PTSD, which didn’t sit quite comfortably with the generally light tone of the book. I also thought the red herrings were a little overdone and the denouement a bit silly, to say the least.

This is a light, easy read and fine for a couple of hours distraction, but perhaps not quite as enjoyable as some of Simon Brett’s work.

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

Friday 16 August 2019

Elizabeth Strout - Olive Kitteridge


Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very good but not perfect

There are brilliant things about Olive Kitteridge, but as a whole book I didn’t think it was quite as fantastic as many people have done.

Elizabeth Strout is a very fine writer; her prose is beautifully unfussy while being occasioanlly strikingly beautiful, she creates excellent, complex, human characters and her portraits of them are penetrating, humane and very memorable. These things are evident in abundance in these 13 linked short stories, all involving Olive Kitteridge either as a major protagonist or as a tangential character. Strout conjures wonderful characters in a small New England town and Olive herself is complex, direct, flawed and fascinating, all of which kept me reading, often with great enjoyment.

Overall, though, I found the structure a bit hard to take. Its fragmented nature and loose chronology felt a little mannered sometimes and robbed the book of the real depth of My Name Is Lucy Barton, for example. It’s still a very fine book, but for me not quite the masterpiece it’s often cracked up to be. I can recommend it, but not quite wholeheartedly.

Wednesday 14 August 2019

Dave Hutchinson - The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man


Rating: 3/5

Review:
Well written but badly flawed

I enjoyed quite a lot of The Return Of The Incredible Exploding Man, but I had some pretty severe reservations about it.

The first thing to say is that Dave Hutchinson writes very well. I’m not normally much of a sci-fi fan, but he developed such a good sense of slow menace and a lot of very good, complex characters that I was very drawn in to the quite slow-paced first two-thirds of the book in which the protagonist, a struggling science writer, is brought in to write about a huge, privately funded supercollider. There are some quite shrewd, well balanced observations about the way in which the super-rich behave toward the rest of us and Hutchinson creates a group of people with whom I became quite involved.

The trouble is, there is a massive event about two-thirds of the way through which changes everything, including the tone and pace of the book, and all those people are quite quickly left behind as the story moves on at a time-skimming pace. It’s reasonably interesting from a sci-fi point of view, but not very well developed and ultimately a disappointment.

Hutchinson seems to be setting us up for a series (or a sequel at least). Despite my enjoyment of the first section, I don’t think I’ll be bothering with any more because I thought the later parts were much weaker. Others may fell differently, but overall I can’t really recommend this.

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

Friday 9 August 2019

Sara Pascoe - Animal


Rating: 5/5

Review:
Brilliant


Animal is brilliant. I like Sara Pascoe very much so I expected to enjoy it, but it was even better than I expected.

Sara Pascoe is very funny. She is also very intelligent, thoughtful, well informed, honest and insightful. The result is a very readable, often very funny book about human – especially female – sexuality, the female body, it’s workings and people’s attitudes to it. It is full of insight and genuine science, all of which she relates extremely well to our everyday experience. She is also refreshingly direct about topics like menstruation and engagingly - sometimes almost alarmingly - honest and open about her own experiences, emotions and insecurities. I found the sections about how someone so fabulously attractive as she is can still feel dreadfully insecure about how she looks especially helpful to my understanding, and the section on consent/rape is exceptionally good, too.

Pascoe is knowledgeable and intelligent in her approach, while still often being very amusing. For example, she has a genuine grasp of the process of evolution (which is by no means always the case among people who write about it) and she is exceptionally good about acknowledging the things we do not know. This is one of the marks of a true scientist and she refuses to go in for that old, familiar trick of selecting just those (often dubious) bits of evidence which seem to support preconceptions or a political stance and pretending that they form a watertight case. As a result, her conclusions and politics about female sexuality and the way it has been (and still is) misrepresented and abused, body image and so on are all the more powerful, and she makes a very compelling case.

Books on these topics are often worthily turgid; this is anything but. Pascoe is rightly angry about a lot of things, but she channels it into a non-aggressive, engaging, honest and very convincing voice which is fascinating, informative and highly entertaining. Everyone should read it, no matter what your age or gender, and this gent in his mid-60s can recommend it very warmly indeed.

Oh, and Sara – you know the bits where you talk about how you can be in love with someone you’ve never met…?

Tuesday 6 August 2019

Peter Maughan - The Ghost Of Artemus Strange


Rating: 3/5

Review:
Amiable but not great

Although I quite enjoyed Artemus Strange overall, I had some quite strong reservations about it.

This is the fifth of the Batch Magna series; I have read the first which I liked but none of the others. Here, Sir Humph and Clem are looking for ways to raise money to keep the Hall going and the residents of Batch Magna come up with a scheme to attract people by invoking the ghost of a young man, heroically killed in the Hall during the Civil War. It’s amiable enough fun and Peter Maughan writes very well, but I thought the real strength of the first book was the sense of the rural community, its characters and atmosphere, and especially the descriptions of nature which were exceptionally good; all of these are much less in evidence here.

This book does have charm, but not in the same degree, I thought. There’s a lengthy caper in the seedier parts of East End London which didn’t do a lot for me and while there are moments of genuine human feeling and insight (which Maughan did so well in the first book) they are thinly scattered and more subservient to a rather pantomimic story.

I can’t recommend this with the warmth with which I greeted The Cuckoos Of Batch Magna, I’m afraid. It’s a well-written, amiable read, but not much more.

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

Sunday 4 August 2019

James Ellroy - The Black Dahlia


Rating: 3/5

Review:
Atmospheric but flawed

The Black Dahlia has had lots of rave reviews, but although it is very well written I thought it was quite badly flawed.

Set in late-1940s L.A., the story is told by Bucky Bleichart, a cop who becomes involved in and then obsessed by the sickeningly horrible murder of a young woman who comes to be known as The Back Dahlia. It’s a convoluted tale of corruption, brutality and of Bleichart’s near breakdown as his behaviour becomes more and more extreme in pursuit of his obsession. The period and the atmosphere are very well done, and Ellroy doesn’t flinch from describing sickening violence and brutality, nor from the language and attitudes of the time. I think this is quite justified, but the homophobia, sexism, racism, anti-Semitism and pretty well any other -ism you can think of are starkly portrayed in language which today is quite shocking.

It’s very well done and extremely atmospheric. My problem is that I didn’t find the story and the motivations, including Bleichart’s behaviour, very convincing. I thought the first third or so was very good but the book seemed over-long and poorly structured and, frankly, I was glad to finally get to the end.

So, I’m a rather dissenting voice. I can see the book’s merits, but I have some pretty strong reservations and I’m not sure I’ll be going back for more of this quartet.