Natasha Solomons - The Gallery Of Vanished Husbands

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A very good novel

Natasha Solomons is becoming established as a significant novelist, and rightly so, in my view. This is her third novel and, while I wasn't quite as keen on it as I was on The Novel In The Viola (her second) or The Song Collector (her fourth) it is still very good indeed.

The story is of Juliet Monague, a housewife in 1950s suburban England. Her husband has simply walked out and disappeared, leaving her in a very difficult limbo in the Jewish community in which she lives. It is the tale of her gradual breaking free of the stifling conventions and her emotional wounds to find a world in which she can be fulfilled. It sounds like a load of cliché-ed chicklit, but Solomons is a fine, thoughtful and intelligent writer who lifts it miles above that.

I love Natasha Solomons' writing. Her prose is readable, engaging and unfussy and she evokes period and place completely convincingly, but it is her characters an d hr treatment of them which really stand out. She is remarkably perceptive about people and sees her characters, flaws and all, with a very clear eye but also great compassion. I am always moved in some way by her books.

I can recommend this as a very good read indeed, which has important things to say about all sorts of human relationships. Warmly recommended.

William Sutcliffe - Concentr8

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good, thought-provoking read

This is a good, engrossing book with some important things to say.

Set in near-future London, the story concerns a group of teenagers who, during riots very like those of 2011, randomly kidnap and hold hostage a member of the mayor's staff.  It emerges that policies have been in place for years to induce large numbers of "difficult" children, including these, to be placed on Ritalin.  This was superseded by the cheaper drug Concentr8 but which has now been withdrawn in one of the "difficult decisions" made as part of the austerity programme.  The result is rioting and unrest with the inevitable political manoeuvring, dissembling and blame-shifting.

Told in multiple first-person narratives, we get the story of how the kidnap develops from the point of view of the teenagers involved, the hostage, the mayor, a journalist and a police negotiator.  There isn't all that much fast action, but the story is full of tension and menace and I found much of it pretty gripping.  It is really a well-told polemic about the insidious medicalising of social problems, driven by political and commercial advantages rather than benefit to "patients".   It's an important topic which Sutcliffe addresses pretty well, but I did have some reservations, too.

The multiple-voice approach is reasonably successful, but there are too many different voices, some of which add little to the narrative and not all of which work very well.  The main voice is Troy, who I found very convincing and compelling as a young man with intelligence but a troubled background which has denied him much education or opportunity.  Other voices were less convincing: although I am all in favour of merciless parodies of Boris Johnson (who is so thinly disguised here as to be in plain sight), this is so crude that it rather loses its impact, I think, and I could have done entirely without most of the other teenagers and the police negotiatior.

Nonetheless, this is a good, involving read.  It is also a book with genuine insight and substance which I can recommend.

Giltrow - The Distance

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good, exciting thriller

I thought this was a good, involving and at times very exciting thriller. It is certainly a very promising debut.

The plot summary sounds pretty dreadful to be honest - a shady "operative" asked to place a hit man inside an implausible-sounding prison facility to kill someone who isn't registered there, with all sorts of personal complications. I wouldn't have bothered but it was recommended to me by a friend whose judgement I trust and I'm glad it was. Some suspension of disbelief is required, but it is well written and structured, and the complex, multi-layered plot develops very nicely. I also found the characters thoroughly believable, which is by no means always the case with this sort of book.

The book is rather too long for its own good and a little tightening would have helped, but certainly not enough to spoil anything badly. Also, do be warned that there is a good deal of pretty graphic violence in it. It is certainly not gratuitous and is unflinchingly horrifying in places so it's anything but titillating, but if you're not keen on graphic violence this may not be for you.

I found this book a good, exciting read overall and I am looking forward to reading the next one in the series - always a good sign. Recommended.

le Carré - Smiley's People

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Still brilliant after all these years

I have just re-read this after about 35 years, and it is still very good indeed. There's not much in the way of violent action, although its aftermath does feature, but le Carré's brilliant storytelling keeps the tension high and kept me reading well after I should have gone to sleep.

I think what makes this so good is le Carré's mastery of character and dialogue. He knows the world of Intelligence intimately, of course, and he peoples it with plausible, beautifully drawn characters. There are also moments of description which encapsulate and idea or experience quite brilliantly, like "the unclearable litter of old age" or "a clarifying loneliness." These lift the book above just being a very good spy novel and make it a very fine novel in itself, I think.

This is the third in the Karla Trilogy, and it's best to read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy first, but this can be read on its own with great pleasure, too. I would recommend it very warmly – it is the work of a true master at the height of his powers.

Patrick Ness - Chaos Walking Trilogy

The Knife Of Never Letting Go
The Ask And The Answer
Monsters Of Men


Rating: 5/5

Review:
A brilliant trilogy



This is a remarkable and brilliant trilogy. It has an imaginative and interesting setting and premise, a gripping style and a story which kept me reading keenly right to the last page of each book as it came out and hungry for the next. They are billed as books for young adults and I think they would enjoy them greatly, but other not-very-young-at-all adults like me should read them, too. They are page-turningly exciting and form a really rich narrative which makes remarkably profound observations on very important themes without once making you feel as though you are being lectured.

The central, extremely ingenious, idea is that thoughts, including those of animals, are audible to everyone else. This is called their Noise and remains a fascinating idea throughout. The central character is twelve-year-old Todd Hewitt and a flavour of his narrative voice is given by this:
"Men's minds are messy places and Noise is like the active, breathing face of that mess. It's what's true and what's believed and what's imagined and what's fantasized and it says one thing and a completely opposite thing at the same time and even tho the truth is definitely in there, how can you tell what's true and what's not when yer getting *everything*? The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking."

Todd was brought up in a small, closely controlled community. Exactly where this community is and the nature of it emerges slowly in the narrative, and again this is very well-controlled and skilfully done. Early on in the story Todd discovers something which puts him in extreme danger and he has to run from the place in which he has spent every day of his life so far. The story to begin with is of an outsider searching, hunted and running in an unknown land. Later, as Todd takes on other roles, the story becomes morally complex and very involving in many ways.

The first book is narrated by Todd alone. For me, the second and third books are even better as other narrators also appear as their stories unfold - a very difficult trick to pull off convincingly, but Ness does it brilliantly. The voices are clearly identifiable, and the structure allows Ness to explore how misinformation and misunderstanding can be exploited by the ruthless and bring grief to the innocent. Ness also explores how a dictator can manipulate even the well-meaning, the nature of oppression and suppression and how the good can become dehumanised by inhuman situations and treatment. There is also a constant sense of the complexities of the ethics of resistance and terrorism, and how seemingly legitimate anti-terrorism measures can be exploited by those wishing to limit freedom. No easy answers are presented, very few people are portrayed as wholly good or wholly bad, and the entire book is imbued with a sense of the difficulty of knowing the right thing to do and how hard it can be to do the right thing even when you know what it is. And, though it all, an uplifting sense of the strength and power of friendship and love.

Be warned, there is some real, unflinching horror here, too. It is anything but gratuitous - it is central to the story and to the ideas being considered - but I found it truly disturbing because, like the whole of the trilogy, it is so brilliantly written.

These books have more intellectual, ethical and moral content than most books written for adults, conveyed in a superbly-told, imaginative and thrilling story. I cannot think of much more to ask of a book than that, and I recommend all three in the strongest possible terms to adults of all ages.

Lea Carpenter - Eleven Days

Rating: 3/5

Review: 
Not really for me

From the descriptions and the endorsements I was expecting something quite special from this book, but I'm afraid I didn't really get on with it.

The story has been well summarized by others: set in the USA in 2012 with intercut episodes of what led to the present situation, it is the story of single mother Sara whose son Jason decides not to pursue the brilliant academic career open to him, but to train for Special Forces.  As we join Sara, Jason has been missing in action for nine days and the book tells of her responses and those of others to unfolding events, with lengthy passages about Jason's training and military career.

In many ways it is very good: it is well written and extremely knowledgeable.  It is concerned principally with the internal lives of the two main characters and Lea Carpenter has put a great deal of thought into them – but it never really engaged me, somehow.  I found it rather plodding and frankly a bit of a struggle for a lot of iys length.  The episodic nature of the narrative is partly responsible, but I think it's principally that for me Carpenter doesn't quite create real, recognisable characters.  Something about them seemed a little like CGI in films – close, but not quite real.

Whatever the reason, the book didn't gel with me.  This is just my personal response, of course, and I wouldn't want to put anyone off.  My copy of the book carries endorsements from both Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Half Time Walk, and Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds which in their very different ways are both brilliant, and two of the best books about war I have ever read.  They both think Eleven Days is terrific, plenty of other people plainly think it's excellent and you may do, too, but I can only give it a very lukewarm recommendation.

Murari - The Taliban Cricket Club

Rating 3/5

Review:
Fluffy and predictable but redeemed by some good atmosphere

I expected this to be a quirky novel about life under the Taliban, leavened with some women's subversion of repression and cricket. There was some of that, but the plot is basically a fluffy, predictable romance with burkas thrown in and a tiny bit of cricket in the background. The book merited three stars for me because I found the portrayal of life in Afghanistan under the Taliban, particularly for women, powerful and convincing in places. The author is male and I am pleased to see that female reviewers found the female narrative voice as convincing as I did.

Apart from these undoubted merits, however, I found the plot and characters thin, predictable and unconvincing. It is packed with cliché and, needless to say, Rukhsana our narrator is perfect, with impeccable loyalty, a feisty spirit, unimpeachable integrity, remarkable beauty which she isn't really aware of...tick them off as you go. I strongly suspect that this was written with more than half an eye on potential film rights.

I must also warn anyone reading this because of the title that the writing about cricket is simply dire. None of the beauty, power and grace of the game is evoked anywhere and the poetry of its language was entirely absent - indeed the author simply doesn't know the meaning of some of the basic cricketing terms he uses, and the cricket itself is ludicrously unconvincing.

If it weren't for the decent depiction of the repression I wouldn't have finished this book and I found myself skimming as the predictable plot was played out by rather cardboard characters, so I'm afraid only a lukewarm recommendation