James Henry - Blackwater

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Rather ordinary

This started quite well, but in the end I got pretty tired of it, I'm afraid.  It's a fairly competently-written police procedural set in Colchester in 1983, but neither the plot nor the setting really did much for me.

We're introduced to DI Nick Lowry, who is clearly going to have a series written about him.  He's a brilliant, fearless and inspiring but modest CID man whose boss is a sexist, drunken dinosaur.  The plot revolves around drug smuggling and dodgy goings on at the local army base…plus a load of stuff about Lowry's unfaithful, unreliable wife, the romantic leanings (or otherwise) of Lowry's "team" – a fast-tracked, highly educated DC and a WPC who just happens to be an ex-model.  (Yes, you heard right – an ex-model.)  I rather enjoyed the first hundred pages or so, but the book goes on for the best part of 500 pages and it's just slow, unnecessarily convoluted and not quite convincing in too many ways.  I got to page 300 with a sinking feeling that I still had 200 pages to wade through if I wanted to find out what happened.  A rigorous edit down to 350 pages would have helped a lot.

It's not actively bad, but there's an awful lot of unnecessary and tedious padding – three pages of wholly irrelevant description of trivial events just so the dinosaur boss can find out a routine piece of information, for example – and I began muttering "for God's sake get on with it" to myself, and it goes on so much that I rather lost my grip on the convoluted which involved dozens of names without much character attached.  Even the main characters are somewhat stereotyped and there's a good deal of stale cliché in the writing; "..going nineteen to the dozen…",  "..he took it upon himself to…" and so on.  Nothing frightful, but it's pretty ordinary stuff, really, and I felt the same about the period, which didn’t quite permeate the book as it should.

I can't say I'll be looking out for future Lowry books.  This might make a decent brain-off beach read but I can't really recommend it beyond that.

Joyce Carol Oates -The Doll Master

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent collection

I thought The Doll Master was an excellent collection of stories.  I'm not a fan of horror fiction and I don't usually like short stories much so I really wasn't expecting to like it but I tried it because it's by Joyce Carol Oates whom I respect greatly.  It turned out to be subtle, insightful, unsettling and utterly gripping.

To describe the plots of individual stories would act as more of a spoiler than I'd have wanted before I started, but these are set in contemporary, or near contemporary times and allow Oates to examine minds disturbed in different ways and those who are affected by them.  There is a variety of narrative voices, some first-person, some third-person and all are distinctive and completely convincing.  They describe a range of fears and terrors in everyday life, and the truth or reality often emerges slowly from a subjective, possibly unreliable narrative.  It's remarkably effective; the stories build toward usually inexplicit but horribly suggestive, threatening endings and they made me late for things more than once because I had to finish the story I was reading.

The writing is excellent; it is unshowy but precise, superbly crafted and very readable.  Oates uses her prose at times with an almost forensic skill to give vivid portraits of her protagonists and their state of mind – for example, the portrait in Equatorial of an insecure woman in marriage to a domineering man, unsure whether he is trying to kill her or whether she is imagining it all, is quite brilliant and completely compelling.

This is a collection of haunting, memorable stories by a very, very fine writer.  I'm very glad that I took a chance in it even though it's not my normal sort of reading and I can recommend it very warmly.

(I received a free ARC via Netgally.)

Nicola Barker - The Cauliflower

Rating: 2/5

Review: Too much dazzle

I tried.  I really did.  It is rare for me to give up on a book and I carried on long after I felt like stopping, but in the end I just lost the will to bother with this any more.

I can see the point here: Nicola Barker is trying to convey aspects of faith and its effect and to do it in an original, sometimes irreverent way.  It's virtuosic writing, with wild, unsignposted cuts between times and places, with different narrative voices and with varying styles including the odd remark addressed directly to the reader…and so on.  I really don't mind this sort of thing in principle and sometimes enjoy it a lot, but here…well, frankly, I just didn't care much about any of it.  It was so tricksy that any interest in the story or message just got lost for me and after what I think is a pretty creditable effort in persevering through far more of the book than I wanted to I felt my duty had been done and I put it aside with considerable relief.

I see that The Guardian's review of The Cauliflower describes it as "typically atypical, expectedly unexpected and inexplicably good".  Well, the first two, maybe, but I thought it explicably bad – the explanation for me being that the "dazzlingly non-pedestrian style" (Herald) is so "dazzling" that I couldn't see anything else, and being dazzled isn't something I enjoy.

So…not for me, I'm afraid.  Others have clearly enjoyed this far more than I did;  you may too, but I really didn't.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

R. N. Morris - A Razor Wrapped In Silk

Rating: 4/5

Review: Enjoyable period crime

I enjoyed this book - the first of Morris's I had read. Set in Tsarist St. Petersburg in 1870, it is effectively a police procedural with Porfiry Petrovich, Dostoyevsky's detective created in Crime and Punishment, as the main protagonist. It is well written with an engaging central character and a fairly interesting rather than utterly gripping narrative. What gives this book its distinctive character is the setting which Morris manages very well. He settles on a style which conveys the manners and mores of the time and this maintains the atmosphere very convincingly. The historical and political background seem well done (although my very scanty knowledge of 19th Century Russia doesn't make me a good judge of this) and it was this aspect I enjoyed most.

The plot itself is, frankly, pretty run-of-the-mill. Many of the familiar elements of the genre are trotted out: Crimes With No Obvious Link To Each Other, The Obvious Suspect, Political Pressure, Detective Under Threat, Not Knowing Whom He Can Trust, Implausible Flashes Of Intuition and, of course, a rather ludicrous Tense Climax. There is an odd, almost irrelevant sub-plot about ownership of a bank which seems to be there just to illustrate some of the prejudices of the time, and some of the aspects of the plot are a bit clunky. However, there is plenty in the book to enjoy

Four stars is a slightly generous rating, but three stars would have been very churlish and I can recommend this book as a diverting read.

Lisa Owens - Not Working

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Well written but ultimately a bit tedious

This is a well written book which I found amusing for a while, but I'm afraid it didn't really keep me engaged for all that long.

To be fair, I am not the target market.  This is a sort of Bridget-Jones-alike, aimed pretty squarely at twenty-something women, so as a man who hasn't been twenty-something for a number of decades I may not be the best of critics for it.  I did enjoy the scattered nature of the narrative, with Claire's first-person story reading rather like diary entries with random observations of the minutiae of life thrown in.  She has resigned from the job she doesn't like to try to take stock and choose a direction in life, and we get the story, her relationship with her parents and her boyfriend (which is refreshingly good, even if it gets a bit strained at times)…and so on. 

It's well enough done and I liked its tone and amusing asides a lot for the first third or so, but there really wasn't enough content to keep me interested and by half way I was beginning to struggle quite badly.  It all felt terribly familiar somehow, and I began skimming as I lost the will to engage with Claire's little angsts again…and again and again.

Others may enjoy this more than me, but I'm afraid that, despite some good moments and decent jokes, I just got bored with it in the end.  I've given it three stars because it is well written and I enjoyed it for a while, but I can only give it a very qualified recommendation.

Clare Morrall - After The Bombing

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Engrossing, readable and quietly brilliant

I thought this was an excellent book. I enjoyed Clare Morall's The Roundabout Man very much, but this is if anything even better. It is exceptionally well written, gripping, thoughtful and very wise.

The story is set around a girls' school in Exeter in 1942 and 1963. The two narratives are intercut, and Morall uses the device very well. The 1942 story is of an air-raid on Exeter and the school itself and the immediate aftermath, and in 1963 a new head arrives at the school and we meet again some of the characters from 1942 and learn about what has happened to others. The book is concerned with character, how events shape us and how different lives develop. It doesn't sound like much of a plot, but I found it completely engrossing and just as gripping as a tense thriller a lot of the time.

Clare Morrall writes very well. She has a very readable style and a deceptively calm tone with very few similes or metaphors, but conjures exceptionally vivid and convincing scenes and characters. The experience of being in the air raid which opens the book is brilliantly evoked, for example, and there are equally evocative scenes throughout. Morall is also brilliant at getting inside people's heads and hearts and painting fascinating and completely convincing portraits of her characters. She captures the complexities of people very well: their good intentions, their self-deceptions and insensitivities and also their kindnesses, endearing quirks and quiet nobilities. She has a quiet but deep understanding of what makes people tick, and her characters and her explorations of loss and its effects really speak to me as a result.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I found it involving, readable, humane and very rewarding, and I recommend it very warmly.

Simon Hughes - And God Created Cricket

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very enjoyable - eventually

I eventually enjoyed this book very much. I have a lot of respect for Simon Hughes's knowledge of the game and have enjoyed his previous books. He can write very well, and when he does he is interesting, insightful and amusing - as he is pretty consistently in the latter two thirds of this book

The problem came for me in the first hundred or so pages which are liberally sprinkled (in fact I would say seriously infested) with silliness which isn't nearly as funny as it thinks it is. Here's a random sample of an interesting little nugget, ruined for me by the subsequent "joke" complete with exclamation mark: "C. B. Fry also developed a fascination with the Nazis and once spent an hour chatting to Hitler, trying, and failing, to persuade him to form a cricket team. He spent so long explaining the lbw law it drove Germany into invading Poland. The Second World War was all C. B. Fry's fault!" There's a limit to how much of this I can take, but there was enough good stuff to keep me going - shortly after this, for example, there are several really fine, insightful and flippancy-free paragraphs on Frank Woolley, his possible similarity to David Gower and what it was like bowling to Gower.

Fortunately, the tom-foolery peters out as Hughes begins to talk about things he really knows and cares about (from about the 1920s onward) and the final 200 pages or so are full of insight, analysis and really interesting and amusing anecdotes. His accounts of the Bodyline and D'Oliviera affairs are simply excellent, for example, and he draws brilliant portraits of some of the greats of the game.

Overall, a very good book and well worth reading for anyone interested in cricket - just be prepared to negotiate a wayward opening spell.

Alexander Kennedy - Einstein: A Life Of Genius

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Deplorably inaccurate physics

The publisher/author sent me a free e-copy of this book for review.  I'm sorry to say that I didn’t like it, and the physics in particular is so badly wrong that it made me very cross.

The book is intended as a brief introductory biography of Albert Einstein.  As a summary of the events in Einstein's life it is adequate if a little plodding; I found the style rather dry and clunky but it is readable.  There are two comparatively lengthy sections at the end on Einstein's religious and political beliefs which listed a lot of known opinions but didn't offer much in the way of real insight.  However, in a brief sketch like this that is defensible. 

What is most certainly not defensible is the "explanations" of the physics, which are confused, inaccurate and largely just plain wrong.  For example, introducing Galileo's insights into relative motion (*not* relativity, as stated in the book), Alexander Kennedy asserts that if a cannonball is dropped from the top of the mast of a moving ship, the person who drops it will see it fall at the base of the mast, while a stationary observer on shore will see it fall some distance from the mast.  This is self-evident nonsense.  Of course the cannonball wouldn't land in two different places on the deck at the same time; quantum particles might, cannonballs certainly don't  – and to attribute this piece of idiocy to Galileo, one of the finest observational scientists ever to have lived, is simply insulting.  It gets worse from there; I won't even attempt to go into the inaccuracies and eventual utter absurdity of the subsequent "explanation" of Einstein's work on Relativity, and the extremely brief section on gravity, acceleration and General Relativity had me muttering "no, no, no!" with my head in my hands.

I'm sorry to be harsh, but anyone writing a biography of Einstein, however brief and non-technical, needs some understanding of the rudiments of his work; misleading nonsense like this is just not acceptable.  I have given the book two stars because some of the other biographical information is adequate, but for an introduction to Einstein I'd suggest trying one of the many fine available biographies of the man and giving this a miss.

Maylis de Kerangal - Mend The Living

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

This is a brilliant idea for a novel and the author shows real insight and intelligence in dealing with a complex, highly emotional subject but in the end I found that the excessive "style" completely drowned out the quality of the insight.  Ludicrously long sentences and the persistent and sometimes simply incorrect use of obscure vocabulary meant that I was forever aware of how show-offy the writing was, which too often prevented me getting involved with what the writing was about.

Maylis de Kerangal examines the death of a young man and the subsequent transplantation of his heart by telling the story over a 24-hour period of the various people involved.  She is very keen to give us rounded portraits of real characters, which is commendable and which she does by giving us some of the minutiae of their everyday lives.  However, it's terribly overdone; for example, as the story of the death and subsequent transplant begins she introduces us to a nurse thus:

"…if he had looked more closely he would have seen that there was something a little odd about her, eyes clear but marks on her neck, swollen lips, knots in her hair, bruises on her knees, he might wonder where this floating smile came from, the Mona Lisa smile that doesn't leave even when she leans over patients to clean their eyes and mouths, inserts breathing tubes, checks vital signs, administers treatments, and maybe if he did he would be able to guess that she had seen her lover again last night, that he had phoned her after weeks of silence, the dog, and that she showed up on an empty stomach, beauteous, decorated like a reliquary, lids smoky, hair shining, breasts warm…"

And so on and so on.  There's no trace of a full stop for another entire page and to me it all seemed excessive and, just as they're preparing to treat a critically injured young man, very out of place.  That gargantuan sentence also eventually ends up telling us that as a result of all this she is "someone he would be able to rely on," which seems a very questionable and peculiarly French idea of a guarantee of reliability to me.  (Mind you, de Kerangal does give this nurse the sublime name of Cordelia Owl, for which I can forgive her a great deal.)  Lots of characters get this sort of treatment, and it really does get a bit much.

As another example, the moment when the doctor breaks the news to the mother of her son's death could have been excellent and full of genuine human insight and compassion, but again was spoiled by overblown language and nonsense like the mother wishing for an "acidulous happy ending," and a little later going past a waiting room containing magazines with "mature women smiling from the covers, with healthy teeth, shining hair, toned perineums..."  I was so startled that had to check that perineum meant what I thought it meant - which seems to be more than the author or translator did.  It does, and frankly, that really isn't the sort of magazine cover I'd expect to find in a hospital waiting room. 

Somewhere under all this I suspect that there is an evocative and compassionate portrait of a mind struggling with the shock of sudden grief, but I only got an occasional fleeting glimpse of it among all the I'm-so-clever writing.

I also found the style intruding in plenty of other places, like the surgeon who loves the pattern of his shifts because of (among a long, florid list of other things) "…their alveolar intensity, their specific temporality…"  Er…what?  And "alveolar"?  Come on!  Neither the phonetic nor the anatomical meaning makes any sense here, and this is far from the only example of adjectives and adverbs thrown in for no discernible reason which are recondite, arcane and abstruse. (See? We can all do it, you know.)  Early on, two doctors speak to each other in medical shorthand which de Kerang describes as a language which (among a long, florid list of other things) "banishes the verbose as a waste of time."  It's a phrase of which I was forcibly reminded more than once while reading this book, I can tell you. 

At one point, a doctor enters and walks across the lobby of the hospital, which is described like this: "…Thomas knows this lobby with its oceanic dimensions by heart, this emptiness that he must cleave in one shot, drawing a diagonal across the space to reach the stairway…"  He's just arriving at the front door and walking to the stairs, for heaven's sake!  With absolutely everything presented with this pitch of ridiculously over-written intensity, the scenes and episodes which should have been really affecting lost almost all their power.

I'm sorry to go on so much (although this review is probably still shorter than some of de Kerangal's sentences) and to sound so critical, but this should have been a really fine novel, and for me it was destroyed by self-conscious literary tricksiness. (And if I'd read the Translator's Note first, I might well not have bothered at all.)  I think this is a terrible shame; I was very disappointed and in some places made very cross by this book.  I can't recommend it.

Mick Herron - Slow Horses

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Brilliant

I thought this was a brilliant book.  It is exceptionally well written, it is amusing and it is also a very good spy thriller.

Mick Herron has created Slough House, a backwater of MI5 to which spooks with a blot on their record - the Slow Horses of the title - are banished to perform tedious, menial duties.  Here we find a great cast of wholly believable characters presided over by the brilliantly monstrous Jackson Lamb; cynical, world-weary, rude and with appalling personal habits, he is apparently bone idle and burnt-out.  Apparently.  He provides a magnificent centre around whom events unfold.

The plot is a twisty tale of a kidnapping and threatened on-line beheading which reveals all sorts of layers of deceit and deception.  It is quite excellently done, I think, with a sardonic, sometimes laugh-out-loud tone but with genuine tension, character insight and fine storytelling.  I think it is Herron's depiction of the minds of his characters which makes this really special, from the slightly bewildered spooks to the excellent portrayal of the mental state of the kidnap victim.  These and the story held me absolutely gripped, and I found it a quite riveting read.

This is the first in what I expect to be an exceptionally good series, and I can recommend it very warmly indeed.

Sarah Hilary - Tastes Like Fear

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good crime novel

I thought this was a good, rather exciting book.  It is well written, has believable characters and is reasonably plausible, although it does become a bit predictably silly as the climax approaches.

Tastes Like Fear is a police procedural novel –which has the immense merit of the police actually following procedure much of the time.   This means that the story involving the disappearance of young girls in London and the investigation of the death of one of them does ring reasonably true for most of the book.  The two central police officers, DI Marnie Rome and DS Nathan Jake are well drawn and engaging protagonists whose personal lives don't intrude too much into the story.  I found the prose easy to read and the plot well paced and well structured with some nicely concealed surprises, although the obligatory Race Against Time Climax did seem pretty contrived to me.  I'm also not really convinced by the psychology and motives of the killer – but then, that's true of an awful lot of crime novels and it was a lot less implausible than many I have read.

I was quite gripped by the story and I enjoyed the book; small reservations aside, this is an enjoyable and involving book which I can recommend.

Trezza Azzopardi - The Song House

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent, enjoyable novel

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It is thoughtful, engrossing and very well written in a distinctive but very readable style. One of the book's great strengths is its pacing, as the story of a hidden childhood memory, the rediscovery of the truth and how both the events and their rediscovery affect those involved all gradually emerge, and I think the publisher's synopsis gives away more detail than I'd have wanted to know before I read the book, so if you've not already read it I'd advise you not to.

The style is somewhat unconventional, in that it's written in the present tense and speech has no quotation marks around it, leading to some slightly tricksy stuff with other punctuation and paragraph layout. Normally, I don't like this sort of thing at all, but I got used to it very quickly and it gave the narrative an atmosphere which seemed to fit the story very well.

The use of music as a powerful stimulus to memory is excellently done, as is the contrast between the parched summer of 1976 where the memories originate and the flood-sodden recent summer of the main narrative. Characters are extremely believable and well-drawn and Azzopardi also captures their emotions and transient feelings exceptionally well. As a tiny example, one character has become enchanted by and is at least half in love with a woman, and when she's absent Azzopardi writes, "She's still here, and in every room of the house. Even the daylight has the look of her." For me, those two brief, unflashy sentences capture the man's feelings perfectly. The book is full of such things and is worth reading for this alone, but I also found the emerging story really fascinating and kept having to read one more chapter.

In short, it's a really thought-provoking, involving and enjoyable book. Highly recommended.

Stig Dalager - David's Story

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good, if harrowing, story

I am rather wary of fictional works set during the Holocaust. One reason is that it is a subject of importance to me, but it has sometimes been used to lend a spurious air of gravitas to mediocre work which has been over-praised by critics out of of reverence for its subject matter. However, I thought David's Story a good book which painted a vivid, sometimes brilliant and often disturbing picture of those times.

The story - based on the accounts and diaries of children during this period - is about a young Jewish boy's experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War. The book is written (and excellently translated) in the present tense and in an unfussy, matter-of-fact style. Love and horror, acts of monstrous inhumanity and small, moving acts of kindness, for example, are all described in the same tone which gives the narrative a real drive and sense of immediacy which brings the events to life quite remarkably, particularly in the first half of the book. It is told almost exclusively from David's point of view, and one gets a real sense of his initial bewilderment and then his growing world-wisdom, pierced by his remaining humanity and child-like emotions. The cold, the fear, the hunger, the isolation and so on are quite brilliantly evoked.

Although I thought that the first part of the story was remarkably gripping and well told, the second section did begin to pall a little. Once David reaches the Warsaw Ghetto the narrative drive slackens and although we are given an excellent portrait of life in the ghetto, the style isn't as well suited to this more descriptive section, which felt less like a developing story and more like a rather fractured series of vignettes. Individually, many of them are excellently done but they hang together less well as a story and I found I was rather forcing myself on to the next one rather than being carried there. I also found the few brief sections told from other people's viewpoint a distraction, however important the point they were making.

Nevertheless, I still think this is a good book. It is a very involving story with genuine empathy and real quality of thought which has important things to say. Recommended.

Oliver Sacks - The Mind's Eye

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another Excellent book from Oliver Sacks

This is another excellent book from Oliver Sacks. The Mind's Eye is concerned mainly with vision - particularly the question of how our brains process the information from our eyes to form images, and the nature of remembered or imagined images. It is fascinating and illuminating and it has all Sacks's characteristic insight and brilliance combined with immense humanity and empathy with his subjects. It is, as always, quite beautifully written.

Following the pattern of many of his other books, Sacks gives us case studies of patients with some malfunction of their visual perception in which he gives an exceptionally clear, vivid account of the problems and a brilliant analysis of what we can learn from them about the way in which we process and use visual information. All of them are very involving and extremely interesting, and the book closes with a very fine essay about visual perception. The longest, and to me most involving, "case study" (about a quarter of the book) consists of extracts from Sacks's own journal during the time he developed a melanoma on his right retina. He observes the visual effects with characteristic brilliance, but also talks openly about his human reaction to developing cancer, to his treatment and his experiences as a patient and ultimately to losing some of his vision. It is an exceptional piece of writing even by Sacks's own stellar standard, and a very touching personal account.

This isn't a book to relax with after a rough day - it requires and deserves concentration - but it is gripping in its way and immensely rewarding. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it very warmly.

Brian Moore - Beware of the Dog

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A fascinating and courageous book

I thought this a very good book - far better than the usual blandly ghosted sporting autobiographies. It won the 2010 Sports Book Of The Year Award, and deservedly so, in my view.

Two things make it stand out: the first is the writing itself. Moore has a slightly odd prose style which is influenced by his the legal training, and this gives it a quirky, almost clumsy feel at times. I really liked this because it is so obviously Moore himself talking to you, and really brings his sincere, sometimes painfully honest account to life.

More important is the account itself. There is, pretty obviously, a good deal about rugby which I enjoyed very much and found very interesting. However, it is Moore's relatively brief accounts of the psychological effects of his being adopted and of the sexual abuse he suffered as a child which are the really powerful parts of the book. I think he deals with them brilliantly, trying to be as honest and insightful as possible about how these things have affected him, but doesn't dwell needlessly and there is no hint of that loathsome celebrity "My Agony" stuff. It is straightforward, un-self-pitying, courageous and insightful.

This book is well worth reading even if you only have a passing interest in rugby. It is far more than just the account of a distinguished sporting career and I recommend it warmly.

Zoe Sharp - Riot Act

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An involving and enjoyable crime novel

I enjoyed this book very much. It is the first Zoë Sharp I've read and it certainly won't be the last. It's the second in her Charlie Fox series, but you don't need to have read Killer Instinct first to enjoy this: we are given all the necessary background in a very skilful way which never feels like clumsy exposition.

The book is well-written and very well paced. Charlie Fox, having been thrown out of the Army Special Forces, becomes involved in dealing with gang crime and vigilantes on an estate in Lancaster where she lives. The plot is largely plausible, although it does require a bit of suspension of disbelief from time to time - for example, the flimsy reasons for not going to the police but investigating privately - but the story is involving and exciting enough for this not to matter, and it is good to have a decent story set in a believable, everyday situation.

Charlie Fox is an engaging protagonist, there is a decent smattering of humour and a good mix of tension, action and thoughtfulness. I would warmly recommend this book as an exciting, engaging and thoroughly enjoyable read.