Graham Norton - Holding

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An enjoyable novel

I enjoyed this book.  I like Graham Norton as a comic and TV host, but comics and TV hosts don't always make good novelists by any means.  However, Norton has written a very decent, readable book here.

Holding is the story of a small Irish village, in which an old body is unearthed by builders.  The Garda investigation drives the plot, but it is really a vehicle for character studies and a portrait of how oppressive moral attitudes of the past (some of which still prevail) have brought life-long consequences.  It is very well done; Norton creates very believable characters about whom we care, and he treats them with understanding and humanity – which, from someone who can be so waspish, I found a little surprising and very gratifying.  The fat, decent policeman, the alcoholic housewife, the trapped spinster and others are all very well portrayed and the social currents which run in a small community are also very convincingly done.

This isn't a ground-breaking masterpiece, but Graham Norton writes well and has produced an enjoyable, readable novel with some real content.  Recommended.

Forrest Leo - The Gentleman

Rating: 1/5

Review:
Lazy, unconvincing and unfunny

I don't like writing wholly critical reviews, but I'm afraid I hated The Gentleman.  I had expected to enjoy it as a clever comic romp, but – very unusually for me – I abandoned it in sheer annoyance after a few chapters.

The premise is good: it purports to be a first person account (edited by a friend) of the unwilling adventures of a Victorian Gentleman who is idle, profligate and vain, but entirely self-deluded as to his own prowess as a writer (and most other things).  I was hoping for wit and a clever parody of Victorian style and mores.  I'm afraid what I got was a lazy, careless pastiche of Victorian style by yet another US author who thinks that Victorian gentlemen said things like "which boggled the mind" or "has gotten worse" or "I can't figure out…" (all this in just the first few pages), or that an aristocratic Victorian young lady of sixteen would respond to unexpected news with "Oh my God.  Oh my *God*."  It was at this point that I really began to lose patience, and I bailed out a little while later – not just because she continually spoke like a present-day Californian teenager but because the whole thing is sloppy, unconvincing and nothing like as funny as it thinks it is.

I'm sorry to be so harsh, and it's unusual for me to dislike a book so vehemently, but I really don’t think this should be foisted on a British audience.  In order to work, even as a comic novel, it needs to have some degree of accuracy and verisimilitude.  It's as though I had written an action thriller about a daring US Marine sortie into present-day Syria, say, where the commander says things like, "I say, you chaps – buck up!" 

Enough.  Personally I'd recommend giving this one a wide berth.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Mark Lawson - The Allegations

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A readable, thought-provoking book

I thought this was a very good book.  It is very readable, Mark Lawson is a very acute observer of modern society and he raises important issues.

The story is of two colleagues in the History Department (now "Directorate") of a fictitious University.  One is accused by the institution of Bullying and Insubordination, while another is investigated by the police because of an historical accusation of rape.  The way in which these two things are handled and their effect on those involved is very well done.  Cleverly, neither character is particularly likeable, and one has behaved very sordidly in the past, which lends the story greater weight.  It is intercut with one character reading the literature of false accusation – Kafka, Böll, Miller and others – and their respective situations are well compared and contrasted with it.

It is hard to say much about the plot itself without giving away more than I would like to have known before starting the book, but the university's investigation into Bullying ("The Process") is wittily but chillingly depicted.  Lawson is especially good on the use of language; complainants being automatically designated as "victims" before any investigation, for example, or the evolution of departmental title from Personnel to Human Resources to People to Workplace Harmony.  This is a world (all too familiar) in which wit, irony, nuance or complexity are utterly unrecognised, and debate or criticism are readily designated as "bullying."  Lawson gets the use of management-speak very acutely in the way in which, like Owell's Newspeak, it is designed to make any dissenting thought (and sometimes any thought at all) impossible – and what happens when an academic institution defines itself as a "business" in pursuit of "customers" who must be satisfied.  The Process is tellingly described by a character from Workplace Harmony as "robust…fit for purpose," but by another academic as "processes as questionable to the humane as they are apparently unquestioned by the mob."  Lawson points out that just as it is unacceptable to dismiss dreadful harassment and genuine bullying as "banter," it is also possible to misuse the term "bullying" to suppress any debate or inconvenient truth-telling.

The plot surrounding the rape allegations is more problematic.  This is bound to provoke dispute and I see that the excellent Roman Clodia , whose views I respect greatly, says in her review that she was made angry by Lawson's approach.  I wasn't – but then I'm acutely aware here that I'm not female.  However, I do think it's legitimate to raise the issue.  Rape is among the vilest and most damaging of crimes, so does widening its definition to such an extent unfairly brand people as rapists, and ultimately weaken the dreadfulness of the crime in the public mind?

I don't mean to turn this into an essay, so I'll stop.  As a novel, I think this is readable, witty in places, very serious in others and raises important issues.  It is perhaps a little over-long, but I still found it engrossing right up to the end and I can recommend it warmly.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Tana French - The Trespasser

Rating: 5/5

Review:
More brilliance from Tana French

This is yet another excellent novel from Tana French.  She is one of the very best of contemporary crime writers and this is well up to standard.

The book is set, as always, in the Dublin Murder Squad.  This one is told in the first person by relatively new detective Antoinette Conway, in a brilliant narrative voice.  Conway is driven, determined and very, very angry with the contemptuous attitude to her which she sees in her colleagues.  She has a wonderfully cynical and angry attitude much of the time, which is superbly conveyed in an utterly convincing way.  The plot involves an apparently routine "domestic" which begins to reveal deeper forces.  It moves slowly but compellingly as Conway goes down blind alleys and begins to suspect corruption and cover-up in her own squad.

Tana French does it all brilliantly.  As ever, a large part of the appeal of the book is the psychology of her protagonist and other characters, and we get what turns out to be a fine portrait of the way in which the stories we tell ourselves affect the way we see the world and ultimately how we conduct our relationships and our lives.  This sounds very ponderous and worthy, but it's not at all.  It's an engrossing, readable book which makes its points with subtlety and as part of the story.  Don't expect lots of violent action or a fast-paced plot, but there's a fine, developing sense of menace and a couple of very unexpected developments.  I found it very gripping, and there are some especially brilliant interview scenes.

In short, this is an excellent novel of character as well as being a terrific crime novel.  I enjoyed it enormously and I can recommend it very warmly.

Shappi Khorsandi - Nina Is Not OK

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Very well done and very disturbing

This is a very good book.  It wasn't at all what I expected from Shappi Khorsandi: I've loved her comedy for years and I thought this would be an incisive but basically lighthearted and funny read.  It is very funny in places, but it's also disturbing, troubling and very upsetting in places.

It has these qualities because it is so well written.  It is the story of Nina, a young adult at college who, for reasons we come to understand, is drinking excessively, having random sex and regularly finds herself in a terrible physical state and unable to remember events of the night before.  Some of her justification for this is the "boys do it so we should too" ladette culture, which Khorsandi exposes very well here.  She draws on (some of) her own experience of that time, and I found Nina's voice and her behaviour chillingly believable.  She manages to juggle with our emotions very skilfully and Nina's descent and the eventual discoveries it brings are painful to follow.

Frankly, I'm struggling to review this book.  It's not a problem with the book; it's extremely well done, very worthwhile and exceptionally good for a first novel.  However, I found it so raw and disturbing, possibly because of some of my own family history, that I struggled to keep reading.  However, objectively this probably deserves five stars for its quality and courage and that's what I've given it.  It is very well done indeed, but do be warned that you might find it an emotional struggle.

(I received an ARC from Netgalley.)

Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

Rating: 3/5

Review:
A decent beach read

I thought this was a well written book which had its moments, but overall I found it rather implausible and unsatisfying.

Dear Amy is a psychological thriller:  Margot is an English teacher in Cambridge who also writes the "Dear Amy" agony column for the local newspaper.  One of the students at her school goes missing, and "Amy" begins to receive distressed requests for help…but from a different girl who disappeared many years ago.  It's an ingenious set-up and is quite well done, but the implausibilities and clichés did begin to become too much for me.  The sceptical police, the sexy, attractive (and, of course, entirely unattached) investigator, the Not Knowing Whom To Trust…and so on.  There are also quite long periods of irrelevant tedium at times (a description of the making of a reconstruction which goes on for pages and pages, for example), and I'm afraid I found both the explanation of the mystery of the letters and the inevitable Confrontation With The Killer In A Deserted Location Climax pretty hard to swallow.

That said, Helen Callaghan writes well, Margot is an engaging protagonist, the book is easy to read and I found the closing scene genuinely touching.  It's certainly not a bad book and plenty of others have enjoyed this more than I did; for me, though, it's a decent beach read but not much more.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)