Rohan Gavin - Knightley & Son

Rating: 3/5

Review:
A little disappointing

I was a little disappointed in this book. It is aimed at 10- to 13-year-olds and tries to be a sort of Young Sherlock. I'm all for this sort of thing and in many ways the elements I would expect to enjoy are all there: a decent story involving a Sinister Secret Organisation, thoroughly idiosyncratic lead characters, plenty of deduction and action, idiotic grown-ups being made to look foolish, young people sorting out the incompetence of adults and saving the day...and so on. It ought to have been thoroughly enjoyable, but didn't quite manage it.

The main problem is that it all feels a bit stiff and stilted so that I didn't quite engage with the central characters, nor get really caught up in the plot. It's hard to put my finger on exactly why, but none of it felt quite real enough to work as a detective caper which left the sillier aspects of the story just looking...well...silly rather than enjoyably crazy, and the humorous elements are all a little forced. It's to do with the writing, I think; although it's competent enough, the style is slightly laboured. I don't know what it is that makes some writing really flow (if I did I would be a much better writer myself). My feeling is that this gets close but doesn't quite manage it, and I had a sense of wading through it rather than being carried along and it all felt a bit by-numbers.

I'm sorry to be vague, but it's my honest view. I see some reviewers share my reservations while others have enjoyed the book a lot, so it's obviously a personal thing. You may well get on better with this than I did, but I'm afraid I won't be bothering with any more in the series.

Mark Oldfield - The Sentinel

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Some brilliance, some tedium

This is a mixture of a book - terrific in parts but with some serious flaws which get in the way of it being the excellent novel it could have been.

Three stories are told simultaneously. The central tale set in Madrid in 1953 is bleak, gripping and brilliant. The compelling central character is Guzman, an utterly unprincipled, self-serving torturer and murderer who directs a unit of secret police for Franco's repressive fascist dictatorship. The story is exceptionally well told, the atmosphere superbly conjured and the characters all horribly believable. There are also brief flashbacks to events in the Spanish Civil War during 1936, also well done and whose significance becomes clear late in the book.

Unfortunately, interspersed with these very good stories is a present-day tale of a forensic investigator and her two historian colleagues who are investigating Guzman's history and trying to piece together who he was and what happened in 1953. Sadly, I found this story trite, unconvincing and rather uninteresting. Mark Oldfield is trying to show parallels between Franco's truth-suppressing totalitarian regime and postmodernist historians who regard history as narrative with no objective truth, but an exercise in personal interpretation where the truth is just what you can persuade people to believe. Now, I regard this approach (and postmodernism in general) as a toxic intellectual pollutant, so I am absolutely in sympathy with Oldfield here - but, oh dear, it does go on. Plastic characters, endless indignation about oppressive attitudes, a silly plot...no matter how much I agreed with what was being said it was tedious and absurd, and it badly marred what could have been a really fine book.

I have given this four stars because the 1953 story was so good, but the modern one is two-stars at best. Frankly, I think you'd be best off skipping the present day bits: you'd miss almost nothing and could immerse yourself in a really good, informative and atmospheric historical thriller.

Katerina Bivald - The Readers Of Broken Wheel Recommend

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A delight

Somewhat to my surprise, I loved this book.  I was persuaded to try it by good reviews, but approached it with caution because it could well have been dreadful.  Young foreign woman arrives in a dying small town, opens a bookshop, brings new life to both the town and herself and forms attraction to young man which Keeps Going Wrong  – it has the sound of a worn-out, sentimental load of cliché-ed nonsense.  In fact it is funny, rather insightful and absolutely charming without being in any way twee.

Katerina Bivald paints excellent pictures of her characters.  I found them wholly believable, recognisable in many cases and drawn with insight and compassion.  Even some of those who would be hard to like in real life are generally pictured with understanding and often with wit.  She also draws an evocative picture of a small farming town dying as a result of economic hardship and the rise of conglomerates driving family farms out of business and people away from the area – and of hope that it can be saved.  These aspects gave the book a real base of thought on which to build what is essentially a feel-good Romantic Comedy.

Bivald is also excellent on the pleasures and effects of books on the people who read them.  There are elements of 84 Charing Cross Road, The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society and others here – and Bivald neatly makes reference to them with a lovely light touch to let you know that she knows what she's doing.  She does this very cleverly and subtly with other books, too; some time after finishing the book I suddenly realised that her early references to Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre weren't coincidental, for example.  It's beautifully done.

The book is extremely readable – for which translator Alice Menzies deserves immense credit, too, because she has done a superb job.  I found myself utterly captivated, quite often laughing out loud (especially later in the book where humour based on established characters we now know well really comes into its own) and also enjoying both the insights into character and the occasional bit of homespun wisdom, like, "I think that life and sorrow go together like farmers and rain: without a little, nothing will grow."

I'm not that easily charmed these days but I found this book a complete delight.  I can recommend it very warmly.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Rhidian Brook - The Aftermath

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good, but slightly flawed

I enjoyed this novel, but perhaps not quite as much as some other reviewers. It is very good in many ways but I did have some reservations about it.

Set in post-war occupied Hamburg in 1946, the story follows the fortunes of the enlightened British Colonel Lewis trying to govern his sector with humanity, of his family, of some of the conquered Germans and of other British occupiers, many with attitudes very different from Lewis's. Rhydian Brook writes good, readable prose and conjures the atmosphere of ruined Hamburg in the freezing winter very well. He paints good portraits of the sense and attitudes of all shades of both German and British people there, I found many of his characters convincing and learned a lot about post-war Germany.

What I found less good was the character development and interaction, which seemed a little predictable and a slightly missed opportunity to look more deeply at attitudes to victory, forgiveness and grief, so the story itself didn't really grip me. I also found that anachronisms in the language damaged the sense of period: people simply didn't say things like, "It might send the wrong message," or "Do you think?" or "You have set the bar rather high," in 1946 and, although there wasn't enough of this to ruin my enjoyment, it did jar badly and kept throwing me out of the atmosphere rather.

This is a good read in many ways, and is certainly a well-researched and well-written book; I just didn't quite think it tackled its subject as deeply as it might have done and lacked a little originality in its plot.

Stevan Alcock - Blood Relatives

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good book - in the end

In the end I thought this was a good book, although I found the first half a struggle.

Set in Leeds between July 1975, when Peter Sutcliffe ("The Yorkshire Ripper") killed his first victim and January 1981 when he was arrested, this is the coming-of-age story of the narrator, Rick.  He is a delivery lad on a soft-drinks van: poorly educated, disaffected, rebellious and gay.  The story is told in episodes, each at a time of Sutcliffe's attacks, and headed with the name and date of the victim and narrated in a sort of Leeds dialect.

By the end I was glad to have read this; the second half has decently developed characters, a story which has gathered enough momentum to grip and a sense of time and place which has finally become convincing and natural.  There is a very good sense of how Sutcliffe's murders came to pervade people's and also of the attitudes of people toward gays and the political currents of the time.

Frankly, though, I found the first half of this book tough going.  If I hadn't received a free ARC via Netgally and felt obliged to persist I might well have given up.  In the end I was glad I had stuck with it, but the setting of the scene and time is pretty clunky, I found the use of Sutliffe's victims to mark the chapters in very questionable taste because it wasn't at all clear whether they were anything other than just chapter markers, and the narrative voice didn't really convince me.

The problem with Rick's voice persisted throughout the book.  I like the use of dialect, and it helped generate a sense of place and character, but it seemed very inconsistent to me.  In the same paragraph, for example, Rick says both "t'insect" and "the insect," he uses "misen" for myself but "my" rather than "me" and so on.  I spent my youth with a similar dialect and this didn't quite ring true to me.  Nor did Rick's very poetic use of imagery, simile and so on.  He hated school, left early and actually says at one point "Why do folk bother wi' poetry?" and yet he says things like "Gordon smiled frugally," or "Mistrust hung between them like a pane of glass onto which each exhaled icily."  Both excellent, evocative sentences – but from Rick?  Hmm.

I don't want to carp too much.  It's a good book in the end with important things to say and anyone who lived through those times will recognise the well-drawn attitudes and characters of the period.  If you can get on with the first half of the book and can live with the inconsistencies in the narrative voice, you'll enjoy this and I can recommend it.

Mark Mills - The Long Shadow

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not one of Mark Mills's best

I have enjoyed some of Mark Mills's previous books and hoped that this would be as good. Sadly, it isn't really. It was a light and fairly easy read but the plot is pretty silly and I had some reservations about the writing style, too.

The plot revolves around Ben, a struggling screen writer whose script is accepted by a billionaire tycoon and so becomes swept into the glamorous world of the super-rich...but is there Something Sinister underlying all this? I won't say more to avoid spoilers but it's pretty standard potboiler stuff and it isn't the remotest bit plausible. There's nothing wrong with that, but it is far too long to be sustained by such a flimsy story. Almost nothing but scene-setting happens for the first 200 pages, I genuinely groaned later on at the thought that there were *still* 150 pages to go and the ending is frankly ridiculous.

The writing is adequate but no more, and often rather lazy with stale phrases like "a dab hand at..." or people "puffing away merrily" on expensive cigars creeping in regularly. Mills is at pains to show us how much he knows - not always successfully - so we get lots of little vignettes which add nothing at all to the plot in which people play rugby and cricket ("centre stump"? - I don't think so, Mark), visit museums and have discourses about the artefacts and so on. He also cannot resist telling us what he has just shown us, so after a bit of dialogue he has to say things like "He had successfully deflected the conversation away from the subject," when that was obviously the whole point of what I had just read. This, and laboured references to literary and artistic works left me feeling rather patronised a lot of the time.

Mark Mills is capable of much better than this. I'd say it was OK as a mildly diverting beach read but not much more.

Dominic Utton - Martin Harbottle's Appreciation Of Time

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Thoughtful, witty and rewarding - in the end

I struggled with the beginning of this book but in the end I found it involving, with an interesting take on the behaviour of the tabloid press and some good things to say about life's priorities and relationships.

The book is a fictionalised version of Dominic Utton's blog in which he wrote to the CEO of First Great Western with the idea of annoying him in proportion to the annoyance caused by the late running of Utton's train each day. It's a good, amusing idea for a blog but runs the risk in novel form of annoying the reader, too, if it's too flip for too long. For the first 50 pages or more I did find the style repetitive and gratingly, relentlessly ironic, so the humour wore thin very quickly. For example, "Do you remember when Princess Diana died? Of course you do. Tall, blonde lass, liked a holiday, married that odd feller with the big ears, unfortunate business with bulimia, three of us in this marriage, Queen of Hearts, landmines, Paris underpass, all that stuff. That's the one!" is OK as a one-off, perhaps, but I really did wonder whether I could manage to wade through 300-odd pages of this sort of thing, and I went in for a bit of judicious skimming.

However, things began to pick up considerably around page 100 because interesting things began to happen and it started to become genuinely insightful. The narrator, Dan, is a journalist on the showbiz desk of a thinly disguised News Of The World (well, hardly disguised at all, really), and we get his take on things coming apart there as the hacking scandal unfolds against a background of fictionalised versions of real events. He makes some interesting and penetrating points about the way in which disgraceful press behaviour is seized upon by unscrupulously sleazy people to cover up genuine wrongdoing and hypocrisy, as well as about the attitudes within the newspaper, the sense of priorities in the world and in his own, troubled marriage. I came to care about him and be interested in what he had to say and in what became of him, and the style became far less intrusive and more appropriate somehow.

So, overall I did enjoy this book and am glad I persevered. You may, like me, struggle at the start but once the book shows where it is going it develops real purpose, insight and some genuine wit, too. I can recommend it.

James Craig - London Calling

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Enjoyable nonsense

In the end I enjoyed this book. It certainly isn't full of gritty realism and the plot creaks pretty badly, but it's decently written and quite fun.

James Craig has created a new detective, Inspector Carlyle of the Met. I found him a reasonably engaging character, refreshingly unburdened by the traditional Complicated Personal Life, Problems With Authority, Addictive Personality and so on, and I also liked the amiable and straightforward relationship he has with his sergeant. The prose is competent and pacy as one would expect from a former journalist, and the book is easy to read with necessary back-story in the form of inserts into the main narrative, which some readers found distracting or confusing but which for me worked well.

The plot and characters are both pretty silly, to be honest, but there is amusing banter, cynical remarks and just sufficient excitement to keep me reading and enjoying it. Craig uses the book to take sideswipes at some stereotypes of privileged politicians with no ability but plenty of spin and a colossal sense of entitlement. We also get the slimy, careerist senior officer, the bimbo TV journalist, the brutal and moronic police constable and so on. They are all so grotesque and absurdly caricatured as to be beyond satire, but it's light, amusing stuff, and if you're prepared to suspend disbelief from a very great height and don't mind a rather rickety plot and some pretty graphic and unpleasant descriptions of sex acts, this is an enjoyable, if disposable, read.

Adrian McKinty - In The Morning I'll Be Gone

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another very good Duffy thriller

I thoroughly enjoyed this police thriller. It has its flaws, but not enough to spoil things for me and if anything I thought it was better than its predecessor, I Hear The Sirens In The Street.

Sean Duffy is a Detective Inspector in Northern Ireland in 1984. Or at least he was until insubordination, excessive drinking and so on in the last book caused him to be demoted to sergeant and removed from CID. In this book things get even worse until he's recruited by MI5 to find a terrorist leader with whom he was at school and is back on the force... These are such clichés of the genre that I wouldn't normally bother, but the book is so well written that I didn't mind a bit. Duffy is an engaging if flawed character, he and other are exceptionally convincingly drawn, and the period and place are very well evoked. Dialogue is excellent; it is crisp, believable and pretty accurate for the period (although people do mention "issues" and "closure" which, mercifully, hadn't infested the language by then.)

The plot is beautifully paced and utterly gripping. It has its silly elements, to be honest, including an almost with-a-single-bound-he-was-free Bulldog Drummond-esque escape and dash to prevent National Catastrophe, but I was quite happy to go along with it and stayed up far too late to finish the book. It's an exciting, deceptively well-researched and erudite read, and a very good portrait of a turbulent time and place. Recommended.

Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

 


Booker shortlisted - hurrah!

I am delighted to see this brilliant book on the Booker shortlist. 

Er...that's it.  :o)  You can read my review of it on this blog or on Amazon HERE.
(All helpful votes warmly appreciated!)

J. Ryan Stradal - Kitchens of the Great Midwest

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Thoroughly enjoyable

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  I approached it with some scepticism because from the description I thought it might be a load of "heart-warming" sentimental old nonsense, but I was completely wrong; this is a very well written, excellently observed and very enjoyable book.

Notionally, this is the story of Eva Thorvald from her birth, through the trials of her growing up and wanting to become a chef.  In fact, it is a series of episodes told from the point of view of various characters whose lives intersect with Eva's (sometimes very tangentially), with only one chapter being from Eva's point of view directly.  The book is really a series of extremely well-drawn and engaging character studies, set in a wholly convincing milieu largely in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois.

The binding theme here is food and people's attitudes to it.  Ryan Stradal manages to make this completely engaging and, to me, very engrossing by creating such utterly believable characters.  They are human, often flawed, often very engaging and beautifully drawn.  The narrative is in the third person throughout, but for each one Stradal uses the language the character themselves might use so we get a variety of voices which I found very enjoyable and completely real.  From the besotted teenage boy via the vain, competitive "friend" to the upright Lutheran wife and mother, every one of them had me hooked, completely engaged, sometimes laughing out loud and sometimes very touched.

Stradal just catches the attitudes of the people and communities he writes about brilliantly and treats them with wit, warmth of heart and compassion.  He is also very good on the difference between the care for genuine, good quality food and trend-driven, competitive faddishness and the book is full of little insights into character, kindness, people's behaviour and so on.

In short, I thought this was terrific.  It has a rare combination of having some real substance while being very readable, often very funny and sometimes very affecting without ever straying into easy sentimentality.  The stories often don't go where you expect, and I really wanted to know what happened to these people.  It's a book which surprised me by how very good it is and I can recommend it very warmly indeed.

Charles Cumming - A Colder War

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An entertaining spy novel

I thought this was a good, entertaining and in places very gripping spy thriller. It is well written and paced with a pretty decent plot and a good sense of place.

The plot has been well summarized elsewhere on this page, but it involves a disgraced British spy, Thomas Kell, being brought back into the Intelligence fold to help to investigate some suspicious deaths of agents and to find the source of apparent leaks of information. We get a classic mole-hunt set in London and Turkey, and it's pretty well done. It is at its best when there is real tradecraft being described - surveillance, counter-surveillance, interpretation of detail in evidence and so on - which has led to comparisons with John le Carré.

Such comparisons are premature, to say the least. The story is a perfectly decent one, but neither the plot nor the characters have anything like the depth and subtlety of le Carré. The, to me, rather overblown aspects of Kell's emotional life and the introduction of a somewhat cliché-ed This Time It's Personal element would have no place in a le Carré novel, for example. It's noticeable, too, that Cumming has a penchant for male lead characters of roughly his own forty-something age and for sensationally beautiful, sexy, intelligent and significantly younger women to fall in love - and lust - with them (see also Trinity Six, for example). Bless! I wouldn't dream of accusing him of using his books for wish-fulfilment, of course, but I do find it all a little credibility-stretching.

I don't want to carp too much. I think we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves with the Great Spy Novel stuff, but I enjoyed the book. I found it very readable and in parts very exciting. Overall, I thought it was a very decent, engrossing spy thriller which would make an excellent holiday read.

Laline Paull - The Bees

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I'm afraid I didn't get on at all well with this book. Other reviewers whose opinions I respect liked it a lot but I really, really didn't.

The narrative is of the life of a lowly worker bee in a hive, who has gifts above her birth. It purports to be based on how bees interact and their social organisation, but I'm afraid it didn't convince me in any way. The characters seemed to me to be crude stereotypes designed to make allegorical points about social exclusion, sexism and the like. I am all in favour of this, but it was so crudely done as to be simply risible in places - more like a clumsy Disney cartoon than a novel with serious, subtle points to make.

The depiction of the hive and the colony was too much for me to take as well. I fully accept that some anthropomorphism is necessary and acceptable in a book like this, so I was prepared to be pretty forgiving - but there surely are limits. Doors into rooms of the hive? Sanitation bees with dustpans and brushes? Bees with hands and human-like genitalia (and human-like desires and abuses)? Perhaps things like this would have worked if handled rather more subtly and intelligently, but to me it just felt absurd and, to be honest, patronising. The book read to me like an attempt at a mixture of Brave New World, Watership Down and TH White's (brilliant) depiction of an ant colony in The Sword In The Stone, but without the intelligence, depth or finesse of any of them.

I'm genuinely sorry to have to say all this because I dislike writing very critical reviews of books, especially when an author has tried to do something unusual and imaginative, but I'm afraid that's my honest response. Plenty of discerning people liked this, so do read their reviews before dismissing it on my say-so, but I really can't recommend this.

Susan Hill - The Soul Of Discretion

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another excellent novel from Susan Hill

This is another excellent novel in the Serrailler series. Susan Hill has created a remarkable sequence of novels, I think, which deal with important human issues - most notably people's responses to death - while bringing us exciting, engrossing stories and thoroughly believable characters.

Here the focus is less on death and dying (although Cat's work still provides a background story on the theme) than on sex crimes which involves Simon in a plot which is rather more in the thriller genre than previous books. To me it's a little weaker in structure as a result, with some rather implausible and occasionally slightly predictable plot developments as we go down the Investigator In Peril route. However, Hill writes so well and uses the device to deal with her themes and characters with such insight and thoughtfulness that it's still an excellent book. Because of its subject it can be a harrowing read at times, but it never loses its grip as a narrative and sheds clear, uncompromising and very necessary light on aspects of sex crimes (including the treatment of victims and offenders) which are too often skated over as easy, convenient plot-drivers in crime fiction.

Long-term fans will doubtless be relieved to know that, in spite of the seriousness of the book's main subject, the Serrailler/Deerbon family stories continue to develop and that Hill still finds room to battle against the loss of things like a personal relationship with a family GP, proper end-of-life care and good, independent bookshops.

In short, this is another excellent, gripping and insightful novel in a series which may genuinely deserve the adjective "great." Warmly recommended.

Benjamin Svetkey - Leading Man

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Terrifically enjoyable

I enjoyed this book enormously. It is very funny, has some very shrewd observations to make on modern celebrity and is a very involving story.

The tale is narrated by Max, a successful journalist whose subject is celebrity, film and popular culture. He is a very engaging protagonist: self-deprecating, witty and sometimes waspish, but also touching in his depiction of his own broken heart over Samantha, his One True Love whom he lost many years ago. There is some wisdom among the wit and this combination makes it a very enjoyable story.

It is very readable. To give a flavour, there is a great little paragraph which begins Chapter 4, beginning, "Interviewing celebrities is not as easy as it looks. It's a delicate process, not unlike coaxing a frightened kitten out from under a bed...Whatever you do, avoid asking questions that require any serious thinking. You don't want to startle them." Or talking about the aftermath of his break-up with Samantha, "I tried to fall in love again. Really I did. I sure dated a lot. Or maybe "dates" isn't the right word for what went on. They were more like drive-by fondlings." If you like this, you'll like the book.

The prose is crisp and very readable and characters exceptionally well-drawn and believable. There were a lot of references to US popular culture, not all of which I got, but I didn't mind that. It's not especially original and is a bit like High Fidelity mixed with a rom-com, with digs at celebrity culture and musings on the nature of fame thrown in. All this was just fine with me; it made me laugh, it made me think a little, it was genuinely touching in places and was a terrifically enjoyable read. I recommend this very warmly - it's a real treat.

Rennie Airth - The Reckoning

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An enjoyable post-war mystery

This is an enjoyable, old-fashioned police mystery set in southern England (mainly London) in 1947.

The plot is fairly familiar in structure - seemingly unrelated killings begin to show signs of a connection and a retired detective becomes involved in hunting for the perpetrators. I won't give further spoilers but even so, readers may well find themselves some way ahead of the investigators quite a lot of the time. I didn't mind this too much, and was glad that the book held some mild surprises but refrained from Shocking Twists, Conspiracies Which Go Right To The Top and so on. It's Golden Age in structure, which suited me nicely.

The writing is good. Characters are well drawn and believable, although they do have rather a tendency to give speeches and lectures at times rather than talk as normal people do. The period is reasonably well-evoked, although there were weaknesses here which I found a little distracting. There is very little sense of the hardship and rationing which was still very much part of life, for example, and the language spoken by the characters doesn't really ring true to the period some of the time. Modern usages like "quit his job", "healthcare", "not a problem" and so on do creep in rather too often for my comfort, but it's not a serious flaw and the style was sufficiently readable and the plot sufficiently engaging for me to enjoy this overall.

This would make a very suitable summer read, or a relaxing book for anyone who likes a decent, traditional detective tale. Recommended.

Stuart Neville - Those We Left Behind

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good book, somewhat marred by cliché

Stuart Neville is a very good writer and this is a good crime novel, but I do have reservations about it.

We are introduced here to DCI Serena Flanagan, a police detective in Belfast.  This is billed as the first in a series featuring Flanagan and there is a lot of potential here, I think.  Flanagan has just returned to duty following treatment for breast cancer and finds herself embroiled in an old case following the release of two brothers who, as juveniles, killed their foster father.  The first two thirds of the book are generally very good, I thought.  Neville creates good characters and generates a fine atmosphere of menace and uncertainty.  There is also a good sense of place and a well-paced plot which kept me reading.

I struggled with the last section of the book, though, as it became more and more implausible.  Flanagan has a personal interest in the boys' case, as she does in the suspicious death of a friend who also has breast cancer.   To call this a Police Procedural would be stretching the description rather because Flanagan seems to have no concept of procedure whatever.  She constantly breaks rules, acts inappropriately toward suspects and colleagues, has gut feelings and insights which no-one else believes and (groan!) is eventually taken off the case by her imperceptive and defensive boss and forbidden to go near either case.  Have a guess whether she obeys.  Needless to say, Flanagan ends up Alone With The Killer In A Deserted Location And Only Narrowly Escapes (twice), after failing to follow any sort of procedure and certainly not calling for proper backup…and so on.  (I hope the fact that this is the start of a series featuring Flanagan means that her survival isn't too much of a spoiler.)

I'm afraid I ended up muttering "Oh, for heavens' sake" (at least, that was the gist of what I muttered) as the silliness and clichés mounted.  It's a shame, because Stuart Neville doesn't need to go over the top like this – he's easily good enough to write a very fine crime novel without overdoing things like this.  I have given the book four stars (3.5 rounded up, really) because there is a lot I did enjoy about it, but I hope Neville will calm down a bit in subsequent books and concentrate on the stuff he does really well without (for me) spoiling the stories with ridiculous cliché.  There is potential for a fine series here and I hope it develops as befits a fine writer like Stuart Neville.

(I received a free copy via Netgalley.)

Sara Sheridan - London Calling

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not quite convincing in period or character

I'm afraid that I didn't get on very well with this book. It did have its attractions - two likeable and engaging heroines and a decent enough plot, for example - but overall it didn't quite work for me.

The story involves Mirabelle Bevan, a reluctant but brilliant and doughty investigator, trying to get to the bottom of a debutante's disappearance and the subsequent death of a friend of her redoubtable sidekick, Vesta Churchill. It's a decently plotted mystery, set in Brighton and London in 1952 - and it is the setting which is a part of the problem for me because it doesn't really ring true. Sara Sheridan gives us quite frequent period details, but they are often very unsubtly signposted. For example, "The receptionist was absorbed in a crime novel - the latest by James Hadley Chase, Mirabelle noticed..." This is utterly irrelevant to any plot or character and these clumsy intrusions disrupted the narrative for me. Despite these garish Period Signposts, Sheridan allows very un-period usages to creep in to the language - "he'd have to up his game" for example - often enough to dispel any period atmosphere, and she describes things like "a black-and-white TV" on a market stall. Specifying black-and-white really jarred (there wasn't any other kind in 1952!) and there were several similar examples.

I also found the storytelling a little clunky at times, with a couple of quite outrageous coincidences and things like Mirabelle spraining her ankle so badly that she wouldn't be able to drive, but shinning up the outside of buildings without difficulty within 12 hours, and the whole thing completely forgotten about two days later - although by then she was nipping around London interviewing people with her collarbone badly shattered and no anaesthetic, which I suppose would have taken her mind off a sprained ankle.

Taken together, these things meant that I never really got into the narrative nor quite believed in the characters or the setting. It wasn't a bad book by any means - portraying racial attitudes of the time while not making them (as they often were) so poisonously offensive to a modern audience as to make the book unreadable is a tricky balance which she deals with very well, for example. It's just that as a whole it didn't convince or involve me, and I can only give it a very qualified recommendation.

Ben Fountain - Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time walk

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Simply brilliant

I thought this book was really excellent. It is hugely enjoyable and brilliantly written - engrossing, funny and extremely wise and shrewd about its subject and its characters.

The narrative has been well summarized here and elsewhere: briefly, Billy Lynn and his fellow soldiers of Bravo squad were filmed in a heroic firefight in Iraq and the Bush administration is now shipping them around the USA on a highly publicised "Victory Tour" to bolster support for the war. The book is an account of their last day of the tour seen through Billy's eyes and serves as a commentary on contemporary USA and its attitudes. It's a great read: excellently structured, involving and with a cast of brilliantly drawn characters including Billy himself who is a thoroughly engaging protagonist.

Ben Fountain satirises not so much the war itself as things like the hypocrisy, wilful ignorance and exploitation which surround it. He also shares JD Salinger's contempt for the phoney and how it has pervaded modern life. For example, of a rich businessman working a room: "Norm is confident, absolutely, he is the king of self-esteem, but this is the confidence of self-help tapes and motivational mantras, confidence learned as one learns a foreign language, and so the accent lingers in his body language, a faint arthritic creak in every smile and gesture." The book is full of these gems of insight as well as brilliant descriptive phrases like Billy ecstatically holding a beautiful cheerleader in his arms as she "breathes clouds of glory in his face," and I found the description of the half-time extravaganza so vivid as to feel I was there in Billy's shoes.

Some people have suggested that this is the Catch-22 of the Iraq war, but I'm not sure I agree. I think the style is closer to Hunter S. Thompson than to Joseph Heller, and I would describe it more as the Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas of the Iraq War. It stands on its own merits, though and it's a simply brilliant, engaging, thought-provoking read and very, very warmly recommended.

John Banville - The Blue Guitar

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Great writing, but doesn't add up to much in the end

This is a superbly written book (of course it is - it's John Banville) but I was left with the feeling that I'd just read an awful lot of superb writing without the writing having said all that much.

The narration is in the first person by Oliver Orme, a once-successful painter whose inspiration has deserted him and who is now living in a small, unnamed Irish town.  He has an interesting quirk (sorry!) in that he steals small objects from people, which Banville uses to give an insight into his character.  Not all that much actually happens: it becomes clear within a few pages that Orme has had an affair with a friend's wife and has been rumbled by his own wife.  The subsequent playing out of events is pretty unremarkable so even to hint at them would be a spoiler, but the plot, such as it is, isn't the point here.

Banville is interested in creating and exploring in depth a character who has gone from youthful joy and hope to middle-aged jaded gloom.  He does it brilliantly, as always.  The slightly rambling, digressive and disjointed monologue of the narration is completely convincing as a portrait, Banville is excellent in conveying the unreliability of memory and he creates extremely vivid scenes and reminiscences from minutiae.  The vocabulary is rich, slightly pretentious as befits the character, often esoteric...and given all this, if you've read Ancient Light you will understand my feeling when reading The Blue Guitar that I had done this once and didn't really feel the need to do it all over again.

It is always a pleasure to read Banville's prose, but I didn't think there was sufficient content here to carry a whole novel.  There are little gems of insight occasionally, but they are thin on the ground.  There are writers whom I read primarily for the pleasure of their prose (P.G. Wodehouse, Damon Runyon and Flann O'Brien, as three more recent examples) but they all have a real wit and sufficient content or narrative drive, of whatever kind, to keep me reading.  This book didn't, I'm afraid.  Because I received a free ARC through the kindness of Penguin and Netgalley I had an obligation to carry on, but I'm not sure I would have finished it otherwise.  I can luxuriate in fine prose and well-drawn character for a while, but a whole book does need more than that, so I can only give The Blue Guitar a very qualified recommendation, I'm afraid.

Peter Leonard - Voices of the Dead

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Decently written but a bit silly

Although this book had its merits, I'm afraid I didn't think much of it in the end. It is decently written with a flat, punchy prose style which suited the story, and the Holocaust background did lend it some extra weight but overall I thought it was pretty thin stuff.

It is hard to give a flavour of the plot without giving more spoilers than I would like, but the whole story hinges on a ludicrously improbable coincidence and gets more unlikely by the page. It's a revenge story set in Detroit and Munich in 1971 with a wronged American, a survivor of Dachau concentration camp, in pursuit of a not-so-ex-Nazi who is now a prominent citizen and potential future Chancellor, but who is currently touring Germany and the USA personally killing dozens of Jews and people who might expose his past. I was never really gripped by it and eventually realised that it resembled one of the less subtle action movies. The characters are all pretty stereotypical and all the ancient clichés of the genre are there: the realisation that It's Personal, the flimsy reasons for not going to the police, the unrealistic action sequences which you can see coming a long way off, the unlikely buddies thrown together and so on - even the Implausibly Available Beautiful Woman. It really did get a bit much and even the Tense Climax wasn't particularly tense.

In fairness, I thought that the Holocaust stuff was genuinely important to Peter Leonard and he wasn't just using it to lend a spurious gravitas to the book, but even that was made ludicrous in places. A Nazi who led a squad which shot 600 Jews whom he regards as subhuman animals remembers one individual among the victims thirty years later. Oh, really? The sheer weight of implausibility became almost too much to bear in the end.

I did finish the book, largely because it's not too long and I thought, "Now I've got this far..." but if I'd left it on a train I wouldn't have worried too much and I certainly won't be waiting for the sequel. Only the most lukewarm of recommendations, I'm afraid.

Susan Hill - Strange Meeting

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An exceptionally good novel

Over forty years on from its first publication, this is still an exceptional novel. It deals with the effects on two young men of serving in the First World War, and is remarkably evocative of trench life in all its aspects and of the utter futility of much of the action the men were called to take part in. It is written with Susan Hill's usual precision and directness, painting vivid and unforgettable pictures of people and events.

What makes this truly exceptional, though, is its subtle and penetrating study of character. The two main protagonists are beautifully portrayed, as is the growth of the love between them. Their contrasting relationships with their families are very believable, too, and every minor character is utterly convincing. It is a book which has important things to say about all of these people and their relationships, and of the redemptive power of simple human kindness and love. I found it very haunting and deeply moving.

In short, this is a very fine novel which conveys far more in its brief 180 pages than many books of twice the length and more have done. Very, very warmly recommended.

Dante - Inferno (trans. Sayers)

Rating: 5/5

Review: 
Readable and enjoyable

Mark Twain once (possibly apocryphally) described a "classic" as a book everybody wants to have read but nobody wants to read. I suspect a lot of people view Dante in this light, but I found this excellent, readable translation of Inferno surprisingly enjoyable and very rewarding. It is well worth reading Inferno for its narrative skill and its exceptional insights into human frailty and it is surprisingly engrossing - but then, if you're looking at this page you probably don't need me to tell you that.

My academic discipline is physics, not literature so I am not able to comment on this translation's accuracy or suitability for academic study, but for the interested general reader like me it is terrific. Dorothy L. Sayers was a very considerable scholar and a fine writer (as her Lord Peter Wimsey books show). This combination produces an excellent translation here. It is eminently readable and seems designed to draw the reader into the narrative and carry them along without ever losing the intellectual weight and important content of what Dante was saying.

Sayers has a deep understanding of the 14th Century mind and of the intricacies of Florentine politics which inform quite a lot of the book, and she brings it all alive very vividly. She uses a verse-form which tries to capture the spirit of the original which I found very engaging, with a summary of the story of each Canto at its start. There are excellent notes and readable, witty and scholarly introduction if you're interested or if you need explanations. I suggest that you read a few of the sample pages available here to see whether it's to your taste; personally I was hooked after a very few pages.

Sayers writes that The Divine Comedy has an enduring beauty because it is built upon noble bones. I agree, and Sayers herself has done a fine job in making that beauty available to modern readers. I warmly recommend this book - it has been a source of enormous pleasure for me.

Pat Barker - Noonday

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very good - eventually

This is the third volume in a trilogy and it helps enormously to have read the previous two, Life Class and Toby's Room.  Even though this one begins in 1940, a long time after Toby's Room, and it can be read as a stand-alone book, the histories of the three main characters, Elinor, Paul and Kit are very important.

Noonday is their story during the Blitz in 1940 and early 1941.  I have to say that I found the first half of the book a bit of a struggle.  In many ways it is very good: there are some excellent evocations of life during the Blitz including the sheer grinding exhaustion of it, and Pat Barker has a wonderful, almost forensically accurate eye for the nuances of relationships and the way in which people talk or don't talk to each other.  Her prose is precise and elegant, but narrative is rather disjointedly episodic and there are also some less successful aspects, like the episode with a medium, all of which made it rather hard going for me,

However, I found the last third or so excellent.  The interactions of the characters, the intensity of the Blitz and the general atmosphere all combined to produce something gripping and very memorable.   The slight feeling of slogging through the first half was well worth it for this, and if this isn't one of Barker's greatest books, it is still very well worth reading,

(I received a free ARC via Netgalley.)