Favel Parrett - Past The Shallows

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Haunting and memorable

I thought this was an excellent book. It could have been terrible - a story of children with a bitter, cold and brutal father struggling to survive in a desolate part of Australia has the potential to be unreadably grim or repellently sentimental but this is neither. It is excellently judged and beautifully written, and I found it compelling and haunting.

Favel Parrett has previously written short stories and I think that is a great benefit to this debut novel. The book itself is commendably short and she shows the concision of the short-story writer in her wonderful ability to conjure character from a few thoughts and actions rather than long descriptions. Parrett also describes the landscape and sea of southern Tasmania beautifully, creating a real sense of the place and of its toughness and desolation. The story is told in the third person from the points of view of Miles and his younger brother Harry and I found the narrative engrossing and at times very touching. Parrett captures the sense of young Harry's kindness and of his insecurity very well. For example, Harry hears about someone whose brother went away to the war and never came back and "...thought that if Miles got lost, if Miles never came home, Harry's insides would go wrong and might never come right again." I found that really a moving evocation of a young boy's fears, and there is a lot here of a similar quality.

There is no a fast-paced plot, but there is often real drive and tension to the narrative. It is thoroughly involving and has a lot to say about kindness, about what family means and about the need to balance one's own freedom with one's responsibilities to others. This is a haunting and memorable book and I recommend it very warmly.

Pierre Lemaitre - The Great Swindle

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Dull and unconvincing (and poorly translated, too)

I really didn't get on with this book.  I tried it because I read Alex a while ago and thought it a decent thriller.  This was a very severe disappointment.

The story begins close to the end of the First World War in 1918 in the French lines where a frankly pantomimic villain tries to kills two of the soldiers under his command.  The subsequent plot involves their entangled subsequent activities in conflicting scams in the years immediately after the war…and I'm afraid I thought the whole thing was dismally poor.

Part of the problem is in the wholly unconvincing characterisation, which seemed to me to be clunky and clichéd, and in the period setting which is incredibly laboured but again failed to convince or involve me at all.  The style is plodding, and having characters say things like "The guy is overwrought," or "Is there a problem?" made it seem utterly unlike 1918.  And, oh dear - it does go on.  And on and on.  It takes ages for anything to happen as we're dragged through seemingly unending descriptions of things and events which don't convince.

Some of this is due to the translation, which I think is verging on the insultingly bad.  It is larded with cliché and stale usages; the second paragraph of the book begins, "He knew all too well…" which made my heart sink, and a couple of pages later in a just a single paragraph we get "his parlous situation", "legend had it", "the inexorable decline", and "rested squarely on his shoulders."  The whole book is like this and stale, amateurish stuff like this simply isn't good enough from a professional translator - or a respectable publisher, for that matter.  Tenses slip confusingly and randomly from present to past, the tone is inappropriately arch or ironic in places…I could go on, but that will do.  It is rare for me to give up on a book, but after diligently slogging through the first 120 pages I decided that life was too short and just skimmed and sampled the rest.  It didn't get better – and I grasped the story without having to wade through the prose, which was a blessing. 

I'm sorry to be so critical, but I really thought this was a poor book.  I have given it two stars, but only because it wasn't quite bad enough to made me actively angry (unlike Alex Grecian's The Yard, for example – but it's best not to get me started on that one) but I wouldn't recommend this at all.

M.J. McGrath - The Boy In the Snow

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Slightly formulaic

This is a perfectly decent thriller. I quite enjoyed it but in the end I found it followed a rather familiar formula despite the arctic setting which I had hoped would make it distinctive and more interesting.

The plot follows a pretty familiar course. Edie, an Inuit woman from the Canadian High Arctic travels to Alaska to support her ex-husband in the Iditarod race. Before she gets to the start she makes a gruesome discovery which local police fail to investigate to her satisfaction, and so...well, you can probably guess. The plot involves political corruption and ambition, untrustworthy policemen, dark secrets of sexual misdemeanour and child-abuse, our heroine coming under mortal threat and so on. It really did all feel very formulaic and wasn't really redeemed by the setting which I didn't find all that well evoked. The one exception to this was a terrific few pages toward the end where Edie and two companions are stranded and need to try to survive out on the sea-ice. Suddenly both Edie and the environment sprang to life for me and I thought it was a remarkably good passage.

I have given this four stars because it had this flash of brilliance and the rest was perfectly well-written. It's an easy read but rather disappointingly unoriginal, and I can only give it a somewhat qualified recommendation.

Malcolm MacKay - The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Original and gripping

Somewhat against my expectations, I thought this was a really excellent book. The story, set in present-day Glasgow, is of a request for a professional gunman to kill a small-time drug dealer and of its consequences for the various people involved. It sounds like a rather run-of-the-mill crime thriller, but turned out to be original, gripping and, to me at least, very haunting.

It is less a police procedural than a sort of drugs-world contract killing procedural. The narrative style is very pared down with few adjectives and almost no similes. It generally uses very short sentences. Quite often without a verb. I found this extremely effective and I was very quickly engrossed. The narrative is all third-person, but we get the thoughts and perspectives of a number of characters throughout the book, each of whom is very well portrayed. Descriptions are brief but very evocative, like this when a character hides in an alley: "The smell in the alley doesn't help. It's nothing specific, just a dirty smell. A mixture of all of life's ugly things, all pushed into the corners." We also get some very perceptive glimpses of people's inner worlds, like the young hit-man reflecting on his future: "It's a chilling thought. You work hard, take risks and make sacrifices when you're younger, and all you end up with is a craving for the things you sacrificed."

The plotting is excellent, the pacing is very taut and it makes for an exceptionally well-told and gripping story - but it is a good deal more than that, I think. For once, the publisher's hype is close to being justified; I think Malcolm MacKay really is a remarkable new voice in crime fiction and one that I enjoyed very much. I will certainly be looking out for the next in the trilogy, and I recommend this one very warmly indeed.

Andrew Taylor - The Scent of Death

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Generally enjoyable

I very much enjoyed Andrew Taylor's The Anatomy of Ghosts and was looking forward to this one. It is not as good, but is still an enjoyable read.

Set in New York in 1779-79 during the War of Independence, the plot concerns Edward Savill, an English civil servant sent from London to deal with claims by Loyalists who have lost property during the fighting. Narrated in the first person by Savill the story develops into a mystery and an adventure in which he and his acquaintances become embroiled and endangered. I won't give away any plot - I wouldn't have wanted to know more than that before I started - but it is a period mystery/thriller which began well, dragged somewhat and then picked up for the last two hundred pages or so.

Taylor creates a very good sense of place and of period. The privations of a freezing winter are especially well done and I thought this a real strength of the book. His prose is easy to read and preserves a good sense of the language of the time while not sticking rigidly to it: a difficult balance which he pulls off very well. The plot unfolds at a leisurely pace, and while this can be very effective, I did feel that there wasn't quite enough real content to carry the book for quite long periods in the central section and I thought it could do with being a good deal shorter.

Nevertheless, I think this is a generally involving and enjoyable book, and I recommend it, especially if you like historical fiction.

Aly Monroe - Black Bear

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Er...

I find it hard to write this review because I wasn't really sure what I made of the book overall. In many ways it is excellent: it is well written and readable, often gripping and often both subtle and penetrating in its characters and period setting. However, it is *so* subtle and often digressive that I sometimes had the sense of just catching tiny, faint glimpses of narrative through a thick mist of character and setting which left me feeling rather rudderless and lost.

Peter Cotton is a British intelligence agent in 1947 New York. For the first 120 pages of the book he is recovering in a clinic from having been subjected to mind-altering drugs, and the remainder of the plot is largely his recuperating while trying to determine who did this to him and why. The narrative is elliptical, digressive and slow-paced which in many ways I liked, and I found the long opening in the clinic very gripping even though almost nothing really happens. In fact, the book is an awful lot of nothing really happening much of the time, most of which is fine but which does get a bit wearisome at times - especially as John le Carré's most Delphic characters seem positively forthright by comparison with with many here, so that making sense of what is going on and what is being said or not said is sometimes extremely difficult.

I have given this book four stars because I thought it well written, it was certainly tense in places and it has stayed with me in rather a haunting way, but I wouldn't want to tackle another one in the series for a while. Anyone looking for an action-packed spy thriller with a strong, clearly articulated plot should give this book a wide berth, but if you like a subtle, allusive and occasionally bewildering novel this may well be for you.

Ness - The Crane Wife

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Disappointing

I'm afraid I found this book a disappointment. I loved Patrick Ness's thoughtful, intelligent insights, his wonderful storytelling and his outstanding writing in the brilliant Chaos Walking trilogy and was hoping for more of the same here. Sadly, I found it a slightly uncomfortable mix of magical realism (never a favourite of mine), a meditation on the nature of truth and love, and a collection of random barbs aimed at some of the author's pet hates about modern life.

The Crane Wife is a tale of a 48-year-old man in present-day London, his adult daughter and her infant son as the two adults struggle toward an understanding of love and fulfilment. The agent of this is a mysterious, enigmatic woman who may or may not be the incarnation of a wounded crane and who creates an eastern-sounding allegorical story about the relationship between a volcano and a Lady who was "born a breath of cloud." To me, it often had an air of self-regard while not saying anything nearly as deep as it thought it was and although it was well written I found it a slog because of its often rather pretentious feel.

It does have its moments. There are some rather touching character insights, and some of the satire is neat, like the woman whose every spoken sentence ends with a question mark or someone sitting down to watch "brightly coloured people suffer brightly coloured hysteria all across Saturday night telly," but other targets like cyclists or British stereotyping of Americans felt crudely done and sat uncomfortably alongside the mystical feel of the narrative.

Patrick Ness is a wonderfully talented writer, but I think he has ventured into a genre in which he isn't at home and the book suffers badly for it. I am sorry to be critical of a writer whose other work I have enjoyed immensely, but I didn't think this was up to anything like the same standard. It has enough about it to warrant three stars (just), but I can't really recommend it.

(If you haven't read the Chaos Walking Trilogy, I recommend it in the strongest terms. It's brilliant.)