Mark Hill - The Two O'Clock Boy

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Very disappointing

I'm afraid I can't agree with the enthusiastic reviews for The Two O'Clock Boy.  I didn't think it was very good at all.

The book is a sort of police procedural, in that it involves a police investigation of a series of murders, but there's precious little procedure really, and lots of Maverick Cop, This-Time-It's-Personal, Threatened Investigator stuff.  Both central police officers have Family Issues, one has a Dark Secret In His Past Which Could Ruin Him…you get the idea.  The plot – who would have thought it? – centres around an abusive children's home in the 1980s, and frankly, it all felt rather unoriginal and well-worn.

The narrative is quite well structured at the start so I found myself carried along reasonably well for the first couple of hundred pages.  However, lazy cliché marred the prose too often: "he clung on for dear life", "she dragged them kicking and screaming", "the life and soul" and plenty of others, and the occasional solecism added to the sense of slightly careless writing.  It all seemed a bit stale and crudely done to me; I found that the story became more laboured and the implausibilities and rather unconvincing "thrills" mounted up.  Characters who had earlier been carefully introduced and given rather pointless little conflicts of their own which added nothing to the story were apparently forgotten.  I lost count of the number of times a phone rang or something else interrupted *just* as something dreadful was about to happen…and so on. 

The book became a bit of a slog, and then just silly – including a vicious mass murderer who said things like "I harbour a lifetime's resentment against your family," at which point I said out loud "oh, for heavens' sake!" (I paraphrase).  I got to the eye-rolling stage as the lead investigator was taken off the case, wondering whether any cliché was to be left out, and passed well beyond it as the plot and behaviour of central characters became simply ridiculous.  I finished the book out of a sense of duty and then wondered why I had bothered with what became simply ludicrous nonsense. 

So, this wasn't for me.  The reasonably good first half meant I gave it two stars rather than one, but only just.  This is the start of a series, apparently, but it's certainly not a series I shall be bothering with.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Laura Kaye - English Animals

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Readable and insightful

I didn't really expect to enjoy this book.  I read it on a friend's recommendation and in fact I enjoyed it very much.  It is very well written and very insightful.

The story of English Animals is narrated in the first person by Mirka, a 19-year-old woman from Slovakia who takes a job as a general assistant with a couple who run a small country house and estate where they hold weddings, game shoots and so on, and who becomes involved in taxidermy.  A love affair develops, and people's responses to it and to Mirka in general are very well observed.  I liked the skilful way that Mirka's history emerged and how her growing into herself and how events around her unfolded, along with a growing sense of menace and impermanence, so I won't give away any story, but I became very involved with the characters and how they interacted.

Laura Kaye is exceptionally good at the details of relationships and their subtleties and complexities.  She captures beautifully in some of her characters their simultaneous kindness and underlying selfishness and lack of awareness.  She also paints completely convincing portraits of a range of more minor characters, all of whom are so real as to be recognisable.  She has valuable things to say about the meaning of acceptance and bigotry, self-fulfilment and belonging.  I also loved (well, loathed, but you know what I mean) the excellent portrait of a blinkered man who is violently opposed to anything which might disrupt his ideal of England (including foreigners like Mirka), but who prefers to live in France. 

Mirka's voice is beautifully done; it is thoughtful, slightly naïve and completely convincing in its directness and lack of idiom as that of a young woman who speaks English very well but for whom it is not her first language.  I found the whole thing readable and very involving; it's an excellent read, which left me with much to think about afterward, and I can recommend it warmly.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Caroline Graham - Death of a Hollow Man

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A very enjoyable read

I have enjoyed all of the books in this series very much – and far more than I expected to. I grew tired of the Midsomer Murders TV series a long time ago, but the books are actually very different in tone and character from what the series became. They are very good novels of character with crime as their plot drivers.

In Death of a Hollow Man, Barnaby is dragged along to an amateur dramatic performance and ends up investigating a dramatic death.  However, at least the first third of the book is scene-setting and the establishing of characters, and it is this which makes the books such a pleasure for me.  She writes very well with a fine understanding of her characters and their motivations and there is genuine psychological insight here.  She paints them with insight and a penetrating wit, making this far more than the collection of rather hollow stereotypes which sometimes go to make up the characters in the TV programmes. It is this which makes the books so worthwhile; she paints some scathing (and sometimes very funny) portraits but others with genuine compassion and depictions of goodness, all of which I found very realistic.

As always with Caroline Graham, the plotting is very good and she weaves a beguiling spell which hooked me in. It's quite a long way from the slightly twee whodunit feel of the TV series – especially in the character of Sergeant Troy who is no loveable sidekick but a lecherous, ignorant bigot with a strong line in unfunny, unpleasant jokes.

The prose is a pleasure to read, with plenty of pithy phrases; it carries you along very nicely without ever getting in the way of the story.  I can recommend this very warmly as a very good, involving novel of character as well as being a very enjoyable crime mystery.

Sarah Perry - The Essex Serpent

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Rather unsatisfying

In the end I struggled quite badly with The Essex Serpent, and thought that there was a good deal less to it than meets the eye.

Set in 1892, the story is of Cora, an intelligent but oppressed woman released by the death of her husband whose curiosity about the natural world leads her to investigate The Essex Serpent.  This is a possibly mythical creature (not unlike the Loch Ness Monster) which she hopes may be a "living fossil".  It's a slow tale, with lots of local atmosphere and weather, but whose characters seem to be straight out of Creative Writing's Victorian Central Casting and whose intellectual content is much thinner than it seems to think.  The story is used to explore the conflict at the time between Darwinism and the prevailing Christian belief in Creation and also social reform, but it lacks much in the way of originality or new insight.  Characters  take up entrenched (and rather over-modern) positions and then preach at each other, so little of the genuine spiritual and intellectual struggle many people experienced at the time (as reflected in Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, for example) is evident.  All of this was done far, far better in Elizabeth Gilbert's brilliant The Signature Of All Things.

I also found the style quite hard to take.  The curiously mannered modern language of the narration ("would've"  "might've" etc. etc) and unsubtle attitudes of the characters began to grate badly and found myself plodding on but not looking forward to reading more.

The book is not actively bad, and some bits of it are pretty good (the description of an experimental surgical procedure, for example) but I had trouble wringing any real enjoyment or intellectual insight out of it.  Plainly, a lot of people have enjoyed this far more than I did, but I can't really recommend it.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Georges Simenon - Maigret and the Tall Woman

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A real pleasure

You just can't beat a good Maigret and I read this quickly and with great pleasure.  The two things are linked, because Simenon's unfussy, direct style means that each of the 70-odd Maigret books is brief but very satisfying.  This, like all of them, is as much about character and Parisian life as about crime, but it's done so well that you absorb it all while being involved in the story. 

Here, Maigret begins to investigate the story of a woman whom he arrested in amusing circumstances many years ago; she is concerned that her safe-breaker husband has vanished after seeing a body in a house he broke into.  The plot development is steady and secure but it is, as always, the characters, Maigret's means of confronting suspects and the Parisian atmosphere (here in a hot late summer) which linger.

The new translation by David Watson is excellent.  It is readable and true to the spirit of the original so that you forget that you are reading a translation which is exactly how it should be.  (The sole infelicity, "Boissier returned with a dossier," did make me smile but also pointed out how very good it was overall.)

Quite simply, this is a pleasure.  It's a fine translation of the work of a true master and very warmly recommended.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Marcel Proust - Swann's Way

Rating: 1/5

Review:
Oh, for heavens' sake!

I tried this because I thought that I really ought to read some Proust.  A friend suggested that we read it at the same time and discuss it, which sounded like a good idea at the time.  I have dutifully slogged my way through as much as I could bear. 

Someone said of Wagner's Parsifal that it's the kind of opera that starts at six o'clock and after it has been going three hours you look at your watch and it says 6.20.  Well, that's nothing to how I feel about Swann's Way.  Endless, endless pages about what he thought as a child when trying to sleep, some reasonably well observed but incredibly laboured social comedy (I use the word comedy in its loosest sense), monumental quantities of minutiae about uninteresting characters (in which I include the narrator) and an overriding sense of someone utterly self-obsessed – and who is determined to visit the obsession mercilessly on everyone else.  I was irritated and, frankly, bored witless; when I saw that, after a long, serious struggle through really quite a lot (it seemed to me), my Kindle said "8h 07m left in book" I heard Billy Connolly in my head saying, "Oh, d'ya bloody think so?"

I gave up.  Seven volumes of this? *Seven*?  Sheesh!  Does anyone know the French for "For heavens' sake get over yourself"?

And now, following the effortful and emotionally enervating distress of having composed this piece, reminding me irresistibly of the long years of suffering in education (the subject of volumes 23-47 of my proposed masterwork), I feel the distressing stirrings of the need to go and do something else.  And yet, I am in an agony of paralysed indecision, for I find that I am unable to move, to think, to live in any meaningful sense before I have received some response, some word, some show of acknowledgement from my readers, for without such approval (or it's simulacrum, at the very least) how may my very existence be continued?  My pulse beats and I become aware of inhaling and absorbing the exquisite torture of the realisation that no-one may read this, in the way in which, in that moment in which a maitre d' informs one that no table will be available for ten minutes, a torment of anguish and crushed hope gives way to the desire to repeat the request,  a desire which must be immediately suppressed as the impulse would…  (continué p. 794)

Spufford - Golden Hill

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Brilliant

Like almost everyone else, I think this is brilliant.  It's gripping, superbly written and quite remarkably evocative of a time and a place.

The time and place are November 1765, New York.  Into this small city of 7000 people arrives Richard Smith from England; charming, attractive and mysterious, he is there on an errand or mission which he reveals to no-one, including the reader.  His adventures and misadventures over the next couple of months are involving and exciting, and give us a wonderful portrait of the character of New York at that time.  Spufford paints very believable human characters, too, and has plainly immersed himself in the language and practices of the time, because the whole thing is utterly convincing and involving.  The language is quite brilliantly evovative – and the source of the narrative voice, revealed right at the end, is completely believable.

The story is good and quite gripping, but the real strength of this book is the completely involving sense of New York at that time, and the brooding, growing sense of menace and of being untrusted, alone and a very, very long way from home.  I thought it the whole thing was a fantastic read, and I can recommend Golden Hill very warmly indeed.

Salley Vickers - Cousins

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Another insightful book from Salley Vickers

The description "family saga" would normally be enough to send me walking briskly in the opposite direction, but I'll read anything by the excellent Salley Vickers, and although this is the story of several generations of a family it's not what would normally be described as a saga.  Much of it was excellent, although I did have some reservations.

The book opens with the account of 20-year-old Will suffering a terrible, life-changing fall.  The narrative at this point is by Will's much younger sister (recalling and writing in adulthood) and at different points we also get narratives by his grandmother and his aunt.  It is hard to give any idea of the story without giving away far more than I would have wanted to know before I started.  The book is concerned with relationships within the family from the 1930s to the present day, with Will's accident as the focus for how they developed and how the individuals changed.  It has Salley Vickers' usual penetrating but compassionate insight, with plenty of pithy observations and also some very thoughtful, understanding views of people – including the difference between how they see themselves and how others see them.

Each of the voices is excellently done.  I found it all very easy and enjoyable to read and the final section becomes quite gripping as the story comes to a climax while dealing with difficult moral issues.  However, the second section, narrated by the grandmother, didn't quite seem to fit.  It's concerned with earlier history which, while relevant, I found a bit of a distraction.  I also could have done with a family tree to keep track of the characters and their locations, especially as some characters are called different names by different people, which is very true to life but sometimes hard to keep track of.

At its best (which is most of the time) this is excellent.  Salley Vickers is a very fine writer and she has a genuine, thoughtful insight into how people work.  I can recommend Cousins as a very rewarding, if slightly flawed, read.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Nuala Ellwood - My Sister's Bones

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Decently written bu overdone

I'm afraid I struggled with this book.  It has some good aspects in that it deals with important issues and is decently written, but it tries to do too much and as a result is very overblown.

The bulk of the book is narrated by Kate, a war reporter suffering from PTSD who has recurring nightmares and hallucinations, who has returned to her childhood home to sort out her mother's estate.  We get the unreliable narrative, fragmented into three time frames, in which a tale of unmitigated misery and trauma emerges: a violent father, sibling hatred, a tragic death, alcoholism…and of course, PTSD.  It's all a bit much, frankly, giving the whole book a feeling of trying too hard and hence a slightly false air.  The story takes (via a convenient coincidence) a different turn about two-thirds of the way through; its development from then on felt very familiar and the denouement seemed contrived and rather silly to me.

It's a shame, because Nuala Ellwood writes well and I applaud her desire to portray PTSD and its effect on war reporters.  In the end, though, this felt to me like a rather contrived thriller whose overcooked tone detracted from any psychological insight.  It's not dreadful by any means, but personally I can't really recommend it.

Jeremy Paxman - A Life In Questions

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Interesting and entertaining

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  I don't read many autobiographies or memoirs because, frankly, so many of them are so dreadful, but I found this very readable, absorbing, witty and insightful.

The opening is OK, if not hugely inspiring, being a well written but fairly standard recitation of Paxman's early life and education.  Things begin to get really good as he almost falls into journalism, and especially his time in Northern Ireland during the "Troubles."  He is incisive and fair-minded – and scathing about some of the political cynicism and incompetence, but also generous to others whom he saw attempting to do their best in tough times.  This is true throughout the book; Paxman dishes very little dirt in the way of revelation about individuals but he leaves the reader in no doubt about his opinion of some people and groups of people, nor of his contempt for management bull-excreta.  The book is peppered with pithy phrases like "…[they] talked about a 'mission to explain,' which was apparently something far more important than telling people what had happened that day," or "those shuffling oxymorons, media academics."  But he isn't waspish for the sake of it and is almost equally often generous about people, too, describing Min Campbell as "the nicest man in politics," for example.  It is plain that, at bottom, he likes most people who behave acceptably, which gives the book an engaging underpinning of humanity.

It's beautifully written, and I found it a pleasure to read.  Part of this is the overriding sense that, while Paxman takes many of the things he talks about very seriously indeed, he has a healthy scepticism about journalists taking them selves too seriously and an excellent line in self deprecation and mockery.  Very unusually, it is worth reading the bit on the dustjacket headed Praise For Jeremy Paxman, for example, which includes "Stay well away from me, you sanctimonious, spineless little toad" – Piers Morgan.

I found this as entertaining, interesting and absorbing as a good novel.  I enjoyed it far more than I expected to and I can recommend it very warmly.