David Lloyd - The Ashes According To Bumble

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good in parts...

I found this a mixed bag of a book. The 200 or so pages which are actually about David Lloyd's personal involvement in The Ashes as player, coach and commentator are pretty good, but there's some very thin stuff and some out-and-out padding, too. If you like Bumble's sense of humour you may well love this book. I'm not so keen on it myself so I didn't find it as hilarious as some people, but he's a knowledgeable and thoughtful bloke under the oh-so-jokey persona and there was enough here to make me glad I'd read it.

The meat of the book is Bumble's personal thoughts and experiences of The Ashes (including, of course, the Thommo at Perth incident which causes every male cricket lover to wince and cross his legs at its very mention), and his thoughts and insights into the players, staff and tactics are well worth reading. It's not the best-written of books, with, an especially idiosyncratic, use of commas. This, coupled with the lightweight rush through some Ashes history to start with, and two frankly dire chapters toward the end which consist of unfunny "comedy" stuff about his wife, his local football club and random press cuttings about sexual practices made me think that this had been padded and rushed out in time to cash in on the 2013 series rather than properly, thoughtfully written and edited. And the cover...dear Lord!

I've given this four stars (just) because I did enjoy the real Ashes stuff and found it interesting and quite often insightful. It's not a great book by any means, but there's enough here to provide a couple of diverting hours between Test Matches.

(Oh, and nothing to do with the overall quality of the book, but he's picked an "All-Time Ashes XI" which doesn't include Bradman. That's right. No Bradman. I mean, come on, Bumble - there's a difference between being a cross-grained individualist and being plain wrong, mate.)

Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good crime novel

I thought this was a good police thriller. It is well written and its setting in Kyrgyzstan is very well done.

It is the setting which sets this book apart from the ordinary. Tom Callaghan creates an excellent sense of place in the bleak winter in Central Asia, and his depiction of the corrupt, almost lawless society which his central character is trying to police is excellent. He also gives a very good view of the politics of the region but does it without lecturing, weaving it into the plot so you hardly notice you're being informed about relations between neighbouring countries and ethnic groups.

Callaghan's prose is very good. He creates a very good atmosphere and believable characters, and he drives the plot along very well. The plot itself has plenty of very familiar features: hideously butchered women, a decent cop (with, naturally, a Personal Tragedy in his past) trying to conduct a truthful investigation in the face of official corruption and obstruction, drug gangs, political involvement... You get the idea. It is saved by the quality of the writing and the setting, although I hope that Tom Callaghan will ease up a little on the graphic violence against women in future novels; I thought it bordered on the gratuitously sensational at times.

Small reservations notwithstanding, this is a good, well written police thriller which kept my attention throughout and left me with a very haunting sense of the setting. I will certainly read the next in the series, and I can recommend this.

Peter Grogan - The Knowledge: Red Wine

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent little guide

I think this is an excellent little guide to red wine. I suspect there are a lot of people like me out there who enjoy wine and are interested in it but don't study it particularly seriously. I have picked up a bit of knowledge from labels, books, TV and programmes and the like, I know quite a few grape varieties and a reasonable number of regions in quite a diverse range of countries and so on but I'm not really any sort of expert. If you're one of us, I think you'll like this book.

Peter Grogan is knowledgeable and keen to share his knowledge in a straightforward, comprehensible way. He has little time for the self-absorbtion and pretension which abounds in parts of the wine world, but recognises real quality when he sees it and does his best to describe wines clearly while avoiding the more absurd flights of fancy which some critics go in for. The style, in short, is readable and comprehensible and I've enjoyed browsing as well as using this as a basic reference.

The book is decently set out (although, oddly, there's no Contents page, just an index at the back) with good sections on the winemaking process, major grape varieties and major (and more minor) winemaking regions of the world. It is up-to-date, which is very important at the moment because the winemaking world is changing so rapidly and written with the average drinker in mind. Grogan does mention the top, super-expensive wines, but is more concerned with guiding people with more realistic drinking ambitions toward decent wine and away from poor stuff. He does it very well, I think, and I can see me looking into this pretty regularly as I'm making decisions or I hear of unfamiliar wines.

I think this is well worth a look if you're an ordinary wine drinker with a bit of an interest. I like it a lot and can recommend it.

Anna Smaill - The Chimes

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Original and gripping

I think this is a very good book. Anna Smaill creates an exceptionally convincing and original world with very believable characters and a decent plot.

The Chimes is set in a post-apocalyptic London. It is hard to give a sense of the plot and setting without giving away more that I would have liked to know before reading it because they emerge gently from an extremely skilful and gripping narrative. Memories are now transient and almost vanish each night, reading and writing are banned and long-forgotten skills. Such memories as people have and things like directions for navigation and a type of sign language are largely preserved in music, which permeates the whole plot and background of the book. Language has adapted to the new world; it is largely normal English, but with changes in vocabulary such as presto and lento for fast and slow, tacet for silent and so in. Smaill pays her readers the compliment of just using the terms without explanation, so it helps to have some knowledge of musical terminology and even a bit of basic music theory, but it's not essential.

I think the creation of this world is beautifully done. In less skilful hands this could be pretty dreadful, but the first-person narration is pitch-perfect and is a fantastically realistic and atmospheric evocation of the book's world and of the state of mind of the narrator. The language is perfectly convincing, with little touches like old circuit-boards now called secret-boards, and outlawed ideas termed blasphony making it perfectly believable to me. There are echoes of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker and other fine books, but they are faint echoes because Anna Smaill has created something wholly her own here.

The plot is perfectly decent but much less original, and unlike several other reviewers I found the second part of the book rather less interesting as the plot begins to unfold because it's an idea which is the basis of many, many books and films, with the "ordinary" character struggling to free the world from oppression by a mighty, dominating state machinery. It is Smaill's creation of her imagined, music-based world, rather than this plot, which gives this book its quality and distinctiveness, but it is all well done and did keep me reading avidly.

I have rounded what is really a 4.5-star rating up to 5, possibly because music is a big part of my life so this book spoke to me in a way I enjoyed very much. I can also recommend it to the non-musical, though, as a very well-written, evocative and engrossing book.

Markus Gabriel - Why The World Does Not Exist

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Well written and quite stimulating

This is a pretty demanding book.  It's written with wit and in a rather engaging style, but it's still a tough intellectual work-out.  On the whole I think it's worth the effort, but it's not an unmitigated intellectual treat by any means.

I am not a philosopher, although I have studied Philosophy of Science and it's an interest which I have kept up.  Markus Gabriel makes a decent stab at moving on from the sort of postmodern nonsense we've been subjected to of "our internal view of the world cannot be the world itself, so therefore (!) anyone's internal view is equally valid."  He does it with wit and verve and makes a decent case for his "New Realism."

It's not really for an amateur like me in a place like this to attempt to assess how valid Gabriel's ideas may be. However, with his admittedly slightly playful assertion that the title that the world as an entirety is not to be found within the world and therefore (!) cannot exist, he seems to me to be on some very thin philosophical ice.  Philosophers do like to play fast and loose with logical operators like "therefore" and "because" and Gabriel isn't immune from this.  For what it's worth, this just reads to me as a simple category error, like, "Here we have a pair of gloves.  However, the *pair* is not contained within the gloves, so therefore (!) the pair cannot exist."  The physical gloves and the concept of a pair are not of the same category, so this is plainly logical nonsense, and Gabriel seems to me to be making the same error about the world. I had a similar sense in a number of places, but it's reasonably cogent and sound enough to be stimulating rather than just infuriating.  (This is a considerable relief to someone who has actually read the whole of Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, for example.)

There is sometimes the slightly arrogant feel which seems to occur in a lot of philosophical writing where authors adopt an "if you don't agree then you're too stupid to understand" tone.  It's not as bad here as in some I've read, though, and at least the writing is largely comprehensible. 

I'd say this is well worth a go if you're interested in this sort of thing.  It is decently written, has some stimulating stuff in it and did make me think, which is, I suppose, what I'm looking for in a book like this.  I can recommend it on that basis.

Marcus Chown - Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent non-specialist account

This is a first-rate book. If you're looking for an account of the current state of Quantum Mechanics and Relativity which is accessible to a non-scientist and takes you from the basics through to most recent developments, this is for you. It is easy to read, but doesn't fudge issues or patronise and has real intellectual weight beneath a thoroughly good-humoured surface. Marcus Chown has been one of our best scientific writers in journals like New Scientist for many years and has already written several really good books. This is well up to standard and I recommend it without reservation. A cracker.

Nigel Farndale - The Blasphemer

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Very good - eventually

Once I had waded through the first fifty pages or so, I thought this an excellent book. It is thoughtful, insightful, gripping and generally very well written. I found the lengthy scene-setting at the beginning so tedious and apparently self-indulgent that I very nearly gave up but I am extremely glad I didn't. The rest is so good that I still rate it as a five-star book - a rare thing for me.

The publisher's blurb tells (slightly inaccurately) probably more of the plot than I wanted to know before starting the book, so I won't summarize it further, but it switches between the main protagonist in the present day and his great grandfather at Passchendaele in 1917 and 1918. This works extremely well: both stories are very involving and are very skilfully counterposed, with neat, subtle parallels and contrasts between the two. I thought the brief periods of extreme action in both stories quite brilliant. There have been a lot of fine evocations of the First World War trenches but Farndale's description of a man in the build-up to action and then going over the top felt quite new and had me absolutely riveted with a racing heart and sweaty palms. The crash which drives the present-day plot is the point at which the book really takes off and again is simply brilliantly described.

Thoughtful moments are equally well done. For example, Farndale says of one character waiting at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, "...he had not known his father, who in turn had not known his father. Neither man had grown old as he, the son and grandson, had grown old. They had instead been frozen in youth, their likenesses recorded in a few granular photographs, their names carved on stones in foreign fields. They were strangers to one another, grandfather, father and son, yet once a year, on the same November morning they met for two minutes in the silence." I found that very touching, and was equally moved to emotion or thought in several other places.

The book deals with a complex interplay of ideas: among others the nature of cowardice and courage, the nature of powerful religious faith and militant scientific atheism and whether either can offer a complete world view alone, and what might really constitute guilt, forgiveness and redemption. Farndale manages this without being at all turgid or preachy, and encompasses it all in a story which I found page-turningly engrossing and exciting. The characters are believeable and well-drawn. (He catches beautifully the blokey relationship between two men who really care for each other, for example.) There are even a couple of really good jokes. The dénouements of the various strands are perhaps not all entirely plausible, but I really didn't mind that - it certainly didn't interfere with my interest and enjoyment.

I'm sorry this is rather a long review. I don't think I could do the book justice in a brief one. Please don't be deterred if, like me, you find the book's opening a struggle. You will be rewarded with a really gripping read which pays you the compliment of discussing complex ideas and emotions without patronising or offering glib solutions. I thought this an excellent book and I recommend it very warmly to anyone who likes an involving, intelligent, thoughtful and thought-provoking read.