C.S. Forester - The Commodore

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

More great Hornblower 

 

This is another terrific Hornblower book.

Here, Hornblower is appointed as the eponymous Commodore of a naval task force in the Baltic as Bonaparte launches his offensive against Russia. There are a number of thrilling action scenes, both naval and military, plus an insight into the extreme importance of Hornblower’s tactical and diplomatic decisions in a time when communication with England took weeks. The whole thing is engrossing and fascinating; Forester’s grasp of the politics of the time and the importance of relatively small acts in determining great outcomes is a great feature, as is Hornblower’s introspective character.

I have been thoroughly enjoying re-reading these books for the fifth or sixth time, and The Commodore is among the best. Warmly recommended.

Alan Melville - Weekend At Thrackley

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

An enjoyable Golden Age mystery 

I enjoyed most of Weekend At Thrackley very much, although I did think it tailed off rather toward the end.

Published in 1935, this is a variant on the classic country house mystery. It has all the most appealing elements of the genre: an engaging protagonist in Jim Henderson, a variety of well drawn and sometimes amusing characters, a very bad baddie and some romantic interest. The plot is decent and unusual (if scarcely credible in places) and kept things moving nicely, but it is Alan Melville’s style which gave me the most enjoyment here. It is very readable, often wryly amusing and, in the dialogue especially, sometimes very funny. The banter between Jim and his old school friend has a Wodehousian feel to it and it is a huge compliment to Melville that it doesn’t feel like an inferior imitation of the Great Man.

Things did peter out a bit in the last quarter of the book, with some rather over-convenient wrappings-up, but it was still a very engaging read which I can recommend.

C.S. Forester - Flying Colours

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

Another gem in the series 

Flying Colours is another beautifully written and constructed Hornblower book, and is a cracking read.

It is impossible to give any summary without significant spoilers for both this book and for the end of A Ship Of The Line which precedes it. I will just say that, yet again, Forester manages to involve us closely in the lives and characters of Hornblower, Bush and others and to strike a great balance between character, background, tension and action – although this time it’s not quite the action we are accustomed to.

In short, it’s yet another cracker from Forester which remains as involving and thrilling on what must be my fifth or sixth read. Warmly recommended.

C.S. Forester - A Ship Of The Line

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

Another great instalment

This is yet another cracking Hornblower book.

Following on from The Happy Return, it is 1810 and Hornblower is now in command of a 74-gun ship of the line. We follow his grave difficulties in manning his ship, his thrilling exploits on his commission near Toulon and an absolutely thrilling and devastating naval battle at the climax.

C.S. Forester gives us a fine insight into the workings of the Navy at the time without ever making it ponderous or didactic. He also develops Hornblower’s character very well here, with his self-excoriation, periods of depression and puzzlement at the esteem and affection in which he is held. It’s a winning combination and yet again I found myself wholly engrossed in the story and characters.

(It should be said that, written in 1938, the language used by some characters does occasionally include insulting names for the French and Spanish, for example, and even one use of the n-word. It is the way seamen of the time would have spoken, of course, but it may grate on the modern ear. It often happens when reading historical fiction, but you may like to be warned.)

This must be my fifth or sixth reading of these books and they have lost none of their sparkle and allure. Very warmly recommended.

C.S. Forester - The Happy Return

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

Another enjoyable, thrilling tale 

 

Age cannot wither these Hornblower books, nor custom stale. I read Hornblower And The Hotspur for probably the 5^th or 6^th time, just for the pleasure of it, and had to go straight on to The Happy Return. It’s just as good.

Newly promoted to Captain, Hornblower is in command of the frigate Lydia in the Pacific, dealing with tricky diplomatic matters with Spain and with a half-mad tyrant whom he has orders to assist. It’s another superbly told tale, full of fascinating detail which is never ponderous, and with some absolutely spellbinding battle sequences. C.S. Forester’s portrait of Hornblower’s psyche is as acute and believable as ever and the whole thing is just a pleasure from start to finish.

Written in 1937 (it is actually the first Hornblower book Forester wrote), some of the racial language used does grate on the modern ear – but that’s always a factor in reading books of earlier periods and sensibilities and it didn’t spoil things for me at all.

Many of my very well-worn 1970s paperbacks of the series carry an endorsement from Winston Churchill: “I find Hornblower admirable, vastly entertaining.” Well, I’m with Churchill on that one, and this is up there with the best of them. Very warmly recommended.

C.S. Forester - Hornblower and the Hotspur

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

Still brilliant after all these years 

This must be the fifth or sixth time I have read Hornblower and the Hotspur, but I’ve not read it for at least ten years. I read it again for the sheer pleasure of it, and wasn’t the slightest bit disappointed.

Hornblower is in command of the Hotspur, a Sloop Of War in the blockade of Brest. C.S. Forester constructs an involving and sometimes thrilling tale with very well-drawn characters, a deep understanding of naval warfare in Napoleonic times and a superb portrait of Hornblower himself. He is a brilliant creation, I think, and Forester’s fine psychological portrait of a complex character is what gives these books their real depth to add to his brilliance as a storyteller.

Many of my very well-worn 1970s paperbacks of the series carry an endorsement from Winston Churchill: “I find Hornblower admirable, vastly entertaining.” Well, I’m with Churchill on that one, and this is up there with the best of them. Very warmly recommended.

Mick Herron - Nobody Walks

 

 Rating: 4/5

Review:

A very good thriller

I enjoyed Nobody Walks. It’s not in the stellar class of most of the Slough House series, but it’s a very good thriller which fleshes out some familiar characters – most notably Dame Ingrid Tearney and J.K. Coe.

It’s a clever, labyrinthine plot: Tom Bettany, ex-Service agent, returns to Britain after the apparently accidental death of his son and goes looking for those responsible. There are twists and revelations as Bettany has to decide whether he is being manipulated into action, and if so, why and by whom.

Herron has frequently been compared to le Carré, but I’ve often felt that that was just lazy thinking because although they’re both fine writers and take espionage as their subject, the style and approach of the Slough House novels is very different from le Carré. Here, Herron produces a thoughtful, serious and penetrating character study of Bettany which is more reminiscent of le Carré. Herron also builds a fine, tense plot peopled with well drawn characters and which refuses to give easy, neat answers.

This isn’t classic Herron, but it’s very well done, it’s gripping and it left me thoughtful and a little haunted by events and characters. Nobody Walks is well above the average slew of spy thrillers and I can recommend it.

John Boyne - All The Broken Places

 

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

More brilliance from Boyne 

This is yet another brilliant book from John Boyne. I found it involving, very moving and an engrossing read. It is a sort of sequel to The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, but although reference is made to events in that book, this works fine as a stand-alone.

All The Broken Places is at heart a study of guilt – which makes it sound worthy and turgid, but I found it nothing of the sort, but an involving, page-turning read. We meet Gretel Fernsby, now a respectable 93-year-old widow living in Mayfair but who was the daughter of a concentration camp Kommandant and in whom the guilt of her supposed complicity in her father’s monstrous crimes still burns. The arrival of a new set of neighbours involuntarily takes her back to that time and she is eventually presented with the possibility of atonement, but at great personal cost.

The narrative, in Gretel’s first-person voice, switches between the present and past events in places she has lived – escaped to, in reality. Boyne judges it to perfection, so that her stories emerge naturally and those things which made the woman she is now come together completely plausibly. All this is in excellent, readable prose which just carried me along throughout.

The blurb makes much of the question of how guilty Gretel really is, but the book is more subtle than that. Boyne understands that whether or not the guilt is justified, it exists in the minds of others and in Gretel’s own mind, and it is this that keeps her always having to lie and evade – and possibly face danger or flight. Whatever her past, I found Gretel a rather sympathetic character, which is quite some achievement given that members of my family died in the camps. It is also worth saying that Boyne treats the subject of the Holocaust with respect and thoughtfulness but without the excessive reverence many writers feel it requires, and is a world away from the exploitative use of the Holocaust by some writers to lend spurious gravitas to otherwise mediocre books. I think it’s perfectly judged.

All The Broken Places can be emotionally bruising at times, but it’s never a difficult read and I was gripped throughout. I can recommend it very warmly.

Sarah Caudwell - The Sibyl In Her Grave

 

Rating: 5/5

Review:

A delight

This is the fourth and, very sadly, the last in the Hilary Tamar series. I enjoyed it enormously; as before, the chief delight of the story is in the telling.

Julia’s aunt has a minor tax problem on which she consults Julia, and the usual quartet of young-ish barristers plus Hilary are drawn into a strange web of dodgy psychics, insider dealing, possible poisoning and mysterious deaths. I found the plot rather weaker than in the previous books, but I didn’t care at all. Hilary’s narrative voice is as enjoyable as ever, with its wit, pomposity and self-delusion (or at least self-exculpation), and the usual communications by letter of events elsewhere are equally well done. The dialogue is invariably brilliant (I’m a particular devotee of Selena’s searching and acerbic wit) and the whole thing is a delight.

Sarah Caudwell’s books for me stand with those of P.G. Wodehouse, Damon Runyon and Flann O’Brien; the prose in all of them makes me laugh out loud, no matter what the story. I can give them no higher praise and recommend all of them very warmly.

Cara Hunter - Hope To Die

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review: A good, enjoyable episode 

 

I enjoyed Hope To Die. It’s a well-constructed and involving police procedural which also develops the characters in the series nicely.

Fawley’s team are called to a shooting at an isolated house outside Oxford. Quite soon, anomalies begin to appear in the story told by the two elderly occupants and links emerge to a sensational crime of fifteen years earlier which cast doubt on the conviction. The investigation which follows becomes gripping as the team slowly close in on the truth, but Cara Hunter makes it refreshingly unsensational and avoids cheap Shocking Twists.

There is plenty of very familiar stuff here – the re-investigation of a very high-profile crime and conviction, huge press interest and so on – but Hunter handles it well and manages to make it feel quite fresh. She structures the narrative with a number of points of view, transcripts from police interviews and TV programmes, newspaper articles etc., which in other hands can sometime be very wearing but here I found it very effective. The one thing that grates slightly is Fawley’s first-person contributions among the other third-person sections, but it’s a very minor gripe.

One of Hunter’s best achievements is her creation and development of the police team. They are a varied, wholly believable bunch in whose lives I have become quite invested. Fawley himself is actually rather a bland protagonist, but I find I like that as a welcome change from the overblown, melodramatic Complicated Personal Lives of so many fictional detectives. The characters add to the story rather than distract from it, which is a cause for celebration.

This has been a slightly variable series so far, but this is an enjoyable and involving instalment which I can recommend.

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

Francis Iles - Malice Aforethought

 

Rating: 3/5

 

Review:

Good in parts 

 

I enjoyed the beginning and end of Malice Aforethought, but it flagged pretty badly for me in the middle.

This isn’t a conventional murder mystery – we know from the outset who the murderer is – but more of a character study of the murderer. He is Dr. Bickleigh, a GP in a West Country village, who pursues local women in the belief that he is genuinely in love with each...until the next comes along. His stern and overbearing wife becomes an insurmountable obstacle to his supposed happiness and his homicidal plans begin to take shape.

It’s an excellent beginning; Francis Iles (a pseudonym for Anthony Berkeley) writes with real wit and his intimate portrayal of Bickleigh’s internal thoughts and state of mind is shrewd and very well done. He also paints waspish portraits of the village’s other residents, which works well for a while, but seemed a good deal less original to me, in that it’s been done by a good many other writers of that age and since. The parade of sexist – even misogynistic – stereotypes which form his female characters became rather too much for me, as each one is portrayed as having at least one clichéd supposed defect of her gender to make her contemptible in some way: gossipy, bitchy, overbearing, timid, clingy, stand-offish, unintelligent snobbish...and so on. Particularly coupled with a long, slow examination of Bickleigh’s thought processes, I struggled with the middle part of the book.

The later part did pick up very well, though, with a police investigation and some very well done courtroom scenes. I didn’t enjoy this as much as others have done, but it does have its merits and may well be worth a try.

Alan Garner - Treacle Walker

 

Rating: 5/5

Review:

Wonderfully evocative and compelling

 

 I loved Treacle Walker. It is brief, strange, atmospheric and compelling – and extremely hard to describe.

We meet Joe Coppock, a youngish lad alone in an apparently isolated house. From the dialect (and what we know of Alan Garner), it appears to be in the Cheshire area. A rag-and-bone man appears – the eponymous Treacle Walker, who knows Joe’s name...and then a mixture of everyday and strange, mystical things happen as Joe’s “lazy eye” develops a curious kind of vision. An ancient sleeper in a bog awakens, and Joe begins to learn…

It really is rather odd, but there’s a compelling, ultimately rather satisfying narrative even though much is left unsaid. The things Garner has always done so well are well in evidence here: the evocation of the power of ancient myth, the sense of deep, ancient mystery and powers in the landscape and also the brilliant language in his use of local dialect, in old rhymes and sayings and in touches of invented language, too. To me, these things carried echoes of The Owl Service, Red Shift and The Stone Book quartet, which I first read many years ago and have stayed with me ever since. I think Treacle Walker will do the same. I read it almost in one sitting, somehow quite spellbound. I think it’s exceptionally good and is very warmly recommended. (And I hope it wins the Booker, too!)

Jim Crace - eden

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

Readable, but rather familiar ideas 

 

I find it quite difficult to review eden. I enjoyed the writing and became quite engaged with the characters, but I wasn’t sure that it added up to all that much in the end.

Set in the Garden Of Eden long, long after Adam and Eve have left, we see a picture closely resembling an oppressive, totalitarian regime. Those remaining in the Garden have eternal life; they do not age nor bear children. The price for being fed and sheltered for eternity is hard daily work tending the Garden and subservience to a hierarchy of angels. These are physically splendid but morally flawed, bird-like creatures without arms and with beaks, who enforce rigid routines and dispense propaganda about the dreadful life lived in the outside world. We see into the minds of a go-between (or snitch) who informs on his fellow “habitants”, of a hard-working, decent orchardman and a rebellious woman who has somehow escaped Eden just before the narrative begins.

Setting such a story in Eden is subversive and clever, and could be read as a satire of organised religion, offering (in this case, literal) eternal life but requiring subservience, labour, adherence to strict ritual and acceptance of hierarchy in the life currently being lived. Habitants also have an unrealistically hubristic view of their own superiority and benevolence, angels are enforcers flawed by pomopsity and arrogance, but as one habitant asks, “What can an angel do without a little help, except expect to be obeyed?”

The thing is, I’m not sure it says anything very fresh or new. There are echoes here of Brave New World, for example, and especially of the conversation between Mustapha Mond and the Savage. There are some rather well-worn ideas about freedom, for example “being free to die is also surely being free to live as well.” The poisonous effect of envy and spite on an ordered community was well done but not terribly original. I enjoyed the prose, the book was atmospheric and quite involving, but in the end I wasn’t sure I’d really got much out of it.

I thought Harvest was an outstanding, original book showing the fragility of an ordered community subjected to disruptive influences. This covers some of the same ground but for me doesn’t have the same depth of insight. I have rounded 3.5 stars up to 4 because it was quite an involving read, but it’s a qualified recommendation.

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