Grayson Perry - The Descent of Man

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Readable, witty and insightful

All right – hands up all those who are mad keen to read a book about attitudes to men and how they damage society?  Well, quite.  I braced myself slightly before starting this, but I actually found it an excellent and – amazingly – an enjoyable little book.   It is readable, witty and very insightful.

Grayson Perry is a very acute observer of society.  He is intelligent and thoughtful and his (to use his own word) "other" status as a transvestite gives him an excellent viewpoint.  Here he talks about masculinity; how it is perceived by men and women and how those perceptions may shape the way in which men behave.  He analyses attitudes very shrewdly and says some very interesting things about how those attitudes influence and often damage society, leaving both men and women worse off.

Perry is perhaps not saying anything remarkably new here, but he says it with a clarity, humour and an often self-deprecating honesty which makes it easy and enjoyable to read.  This isn't and anti-men diatribe about how we're all dreadful people, but a recognition of how things are – including in his own behaviour both past and present – and how trying to change some ideas and expectations may make everyone rather happier.

I actually read a lot of this for enjoyment rather than as a book which I Ought To Read Because It Is Good For me, which is rather what I expected, and I can recommend it very warmly.

M.J.Carter - The Devil's Feast

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I received an ARC of this book via Netgalley.  This normally means that I feel obliged to finish a book, but I'm afraid that after 150 pages or so of The Devil's Feast I just got so bored that I decided that enough was enough.

It's not that it's terrible.  M.J. Carter can write well and she gets the Victorian voice sufficiently accurately to be pretty convincing – although some very modern, US-originated usages do creep in, like "Are we done, gentlemen?" or an oath beginning with "What the <expletive deleted>…" which grate very badly.  My real problem was that very little actually happened among the Sumptuous Detail.  We were introduced to a large cast of characters in whom I found I had very little interest; there are long, long descriptions of the workings of the kitchens at the Reform Club and rather clunky expositions of the politics of the time, for example; we get seemingly endless chapters in which Avery wanders around rather aimlessly talking to people while not knowing what to do, and so on.  There's also some business involving Blake which is so derivative as to be laughably transparent – except to Avery, apparently.

I'm happy to stick with a slow opening, but I'm afraid I need a little more than this by the time I've read over a third of a 350-page book.  Others seem to have found this involving and entertaining, and you may find that you enjoy it, too.  Personally, I'd had all I could take and bailed out.  Not for me, I'm afraid.

Anthony Horowitz - Magpie Murders

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An enjoyable read

I enjoyed this book.  Anthony Horowitz is a very good writer of detective fiction and he has created an ingenious vehicle here.

The narrator is Susan Ryeland, a present day publishing editor, who is about to publish Magpie Murders, the latest in a very successful series of Agatha-Christie-like mysteries, set in 1955.  The first half or so of the book is the manuscript of this book, while the second half is Susan's attempts to use clues and puzzles left in the book to solve a present day death.  It's a neat device, and Horowitz enjoys himself creating a slightly Poirot-esque character in the book-within-the-book.  He does it rather well and creates a neat pastiche of a Golden Age detective novel; it's a well-constructed mystery with fair clues and a rather engaging protagonist which does the period pretty well.  And, of course, the few little anachronisms can be blamed on the fictional author.  (A struggling mechanic going back to his mean little flat in 1955 and *showering,* for example? I think not – but there aren't many, to be fair.)

The present-day story mirrors the manuscript neatly and is also a decent mystery.  Writers writing about the business of writing can sometimes be pretty grim, but Horowitz does it very well, giving us a flawed but charming narrator and a good mystery (including the traditional rather silly climax), and he uses the literary setting to make some interesting observations on the nature of crime fiction and its role. 

For much of the book's length (which is quite considerable) I had a slightly detached enjoyment, but I was swept up in the climax of the story and didn't want to put it down.  It's not a classic but it's well-constructed, readable and enjoyable and I can recommend it as a good read.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Paul Beatty - The Sellout

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Utterly brilliant

What a fantastic book!  I don't normally gush quite so much, but I think this is one of the best, most enjoyable and most illuminating things I have read for a long time.

The story is narrated by Bonbon (just one of his names), a black man who owns a small inner-city farm in Dickens, a previously all-black city in suburban LA, which is being taken over by developments and losing its identity.  The outrageous premise is that he tries to restore the identity of Dickens and recover some of the pride and achievements of its black inhabitants by reintroducing segregation (and also keeping a slave…of sorts).  Paul Beatty uses this as a window on attitudes to race from all sides, which is perceptive, thoughtful and often very penetrating – but he does it in a way which made me laugh out loud regularly and also made me very involved with his characters.

The language is brilliant.  Be warned that there is liberal use of the n-word, the f-word and words from most other parts of the alphabet which some readers may find offensive.  I didn't at all; everything was exactly appropriate to the voice of the book and was often very funny in its effect. There is also some deep learning and wisdom here.  I found it extremely readable so that I wanted to get back to it when I wasn't reading, extremely thought-provoking and ultimately extremely wise.  (It reminded me a little in its form of Shalom Auslander's Hope: A Tragedy, another brilliant book which uses wit and an outrageous premise to shed light on attitudes to the Holocaust.)

I admit that I was dubious about the idea of opening the Booker Prize to US authors, but it's a delight to find such a wonderfully readable, funny, engaging and profound book on the shortlist and if this should win I will cheer out loud.  Very warmly recommended.