Devorah Baum - The Jewish Joke

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Hilarious and brilliant

This is just brilliant.  It is packed with genuinely very funny jokes and also has some very shrewd things to say about what they signify and how they are used.

The first thing to say is that The Jewish Joke is very, very funny.  I spent a lot of time laughing out loud and at times truly had to wait until I'd recovered and wiped my eyes before reading on.  Perhaps not one for reading in public, then, but it's just a joy and the book is worth buying for the jokes alone. 

Devorah Baum also adds some analysis of the significance of jokes to Jews and to other people, and she does it excellently.  She takes her subject seriously but never too solemnly and plainly loves the jokes as jokes, so her analysis is brief, witty and insightful.  I found that it really added to my enjoyment, when clumsy, over-earnest analysis would have killed any enjoyment stone dead.  Her analysis is very shrewd, too.  She is excellent on the slippery problem of what is acceptable and what is unacceptable, and on the enduring importance of humour to survival, among other things. There are lots of nuggets in this book, but here are just four little passages I marked:

"While it’s important to be mindful of sensitivities, it’s just as important to remain wary of the humour police, those punchline vigilantes who so often wind up silencing the very people they’re claiming to defend."

"What humourlessness always fails to recognise is just how useful a sense of humour can be for confronting what one finds offensive, including offensive jokes."

"Jokes…remain the most bearable form available for transmitting a traumatic history."

"There are few utterances more flush with unchecked privilege, after all, than the sneering sound of someone insisting, in the face of another’s hurt, that they really ought to be able to ‘take a joke’."

The Jewish Joke is hilariously funny and readably thoughtful, too.  It is one of the best things I've read this year and very, very warmly recommended.

Joanna Cannon - The Trouble With Goats And Sheep

Rating: 5/5

Review:

An excellent read 

I agree with the many hundreds of people who have enjoyed this book: it is thoughtful, engaging and exceptionally well written.

I won't go over the plot in detail again; briefly, this is set in the hot summer drought of 1976 in an unnamed small town near Nottingham, where one of the residents of a "respectable" avenue goes missing.  The fallout from her disappearance exposes some terrible secrets which slowly emerge, partly because two ten-year-old girls investigate in their naïve way.

It is a gripping story, but what makes it special is both Joanna Cannon's exceptionally good writing and her fine insight into her characters.  She captures beautifully the way in which secrets, often hidden by shame, lurk beneath a veneer of "niceness" and how this can manifest itself in hatred, bullying and bigotry.  Cannon is especially good on the workings of a herd mentality, how people will ignore evidence as long as what they believe fits in with the crowd and how this can lead to manipulation and sometimes appalling consequences.  Although this is very convincingly set 40 years ago, the messages remain very apposite.

In short, I thought this was excellent.  It is readable and intelligent, and I can recommend it very warmly.  (I can also warmly recommend Cannon's second novel, Three Things About Elsie.)

Joanna Cannon - Three Things About Elsie

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Enjoyable, humane and insightful

I thought Three Things About Elsie was excellent.  It is involving, humane and extremely well written.

This is the story of Florence Claybourne who is in her eighties, living in sheltered accommodation and her memory and other mental faculties are now pretty unreliable.  A man who supposedly drowned sixty years before arrives, creating a mystery and sense of menace which drives the plot of the book.

We get the story from three intercut points of view; Florence's unreliable first-person narrative and two third-person narratives from the points of view of two members of staff - Miss Ambrose, a supervisor and the handyman, Handy Simon.  It is extremely well done and has plenty to say about age, memory, attitudes to older people and so on, but it is Florence's voice which really stands out.  At times there are some strong echoes of Alan Bennett's A Cream Cracker Under The Settee, but for the most part Florence is an original and very engaging character with her own slightly eccentric but often profound take on things.  I marked lots of sentences and passages which I liked; these two brief extracts may give you a flavour:

"Elsie's father left for the war and came back as a telegram on the mantelpiece," and "I looked across the lounge and into the past.  It was more useful than the present.  There were times when the present felt so unimportant, so unnecessary.  Just somewhere I had to dip into from time to time, out of politeness."

I became involved in the mysterious plot, but it is the beautifully drawn characters, the book's humanity and insight, and Joanna Cannon's excellent writing which really counted for me.  I thought it all added up to an excellent book, which I can recommend very warmly.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Christine Poulson - Cold Cold Heart

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

Oh dear.  Almost everyone else seems to have loved Cold Cold Heart, but I'm afraid I couldn't get on with it at all.

The plot is in effect a classic Country House Murder mystery, moved to an Antarctic research station in winter: ten characters completely cut off from the outside world, one of whom is a killer.  Katie Flanagan, a young medical research scientist is flown in to replace someone after an accident just as winter cuts the station off for months.  Claustrophobic and sinister things begin to happen, and we are left to try to spot the killer. 

My problem with the book is that it all just seems so clunky and even crudely done sometimes so I just didn’t believe in the characters or the plot and couldn’t get involved at all.  We get bits of the story from far too many points of view (even that of a cat, believe it or not, which is wholly unnecessary and horribly twee) and everything is spelled out in plodding chunks of unconvincing exposition.  There is a lot of forced and sometimes patronisingly unnecessarily spelling out of obvious details, like  "Anything she didn't have now she'd have to do without, because where she was going, there were no shops, no mail, no Amazon."  Gosh, thanks - I'd never have known if you hadn't said! 

Elsewhere, characters give each other great swathes of information which they already know.  For example, early on Katie is talking to her best friend with whom, we are told, she has "talked it over so many times," but we still get:

"What'll you be doing there?" Rachel asked.

"I'll be taking over this guy's research project – I'm well qualified for it.  It's about the way human beings adapt to darkness and isolation.  Lack of light suppresses the action of the pineal gland with the result…" etc. etc etc.

Two close friends having a farewell chat about something they have "talked over so many times"?  Really?  The whole book reads like this and it all felt false to me; I felt I was just being clumsily set up for a puzzle (with "twists", of course) but wasn't the slightest bit convinced by the characters or the setting – which meant I wasn't very interested in the puzzle.

I'm afraid I got very fed up with the book and ended up skimming quite large chunks without feeling I'd missed much.  I'm plainly out of step with the huge majority of reviewers so don't let me put you off before reading other reviews, but I'm afraid I really didn't like Cold Cold Heart.

(I received an ARC vis NetGalley.)

Georges Simenon - A Maigret Christmas

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good Maigret stories

This is a good little collection of three Maigret stories set around Christmas. 

For me, the short stories aren't quite as satisfying as a full length novel; brief as they are, the novels allow Simenon to build more of a rounded story and to develop his characters more deeply, which is the real pleasure of the Maigret books.  Nonetheless, this is an enjoyable Christmas read.

David Coward's translation is very good, conveying Simenon's quiet power and Maigret's thoughtful approach, so the stories are an easy and involving read.  I can recommend this to anyone who enjoys Maigret.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Attica Locke - Bluebird, Bluebird

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent, insightful thriller

I thought Bluebird, Bluebird was excellent.  I approached it with some trepidation, half expecting it to be grim and turgid, but I found it exciting, readable and very insightful about modern racism in the southern USA.

Darren Williams, a black Texas Ranger investigates two deaths in a small Texas town; one of a black man the second of a white woman.  Attica Locke creates a phenomenally convincing atmosphere of uneasy peace with an ever-present threat from White Supremacists and an expectation among black people of bigoted law enforcement which cannot be trusted.  Her characters are excellently drawn and very believable, although I could have done without Darren's drink problem, suspension from duty and Complicated Personal Life.  The book and his character would have been just as powerful and interesting without such over-used staples of the genre – possibly more so.  Nonetheless, this is a gripping story with plenty of emotional and political meat to it, which kept me completely hooked.  (It has also got me to listen to some of my old Lightnin' Hopkins records again, for which I'm very grateful.)

Locke writes fine, readable prose with very natural dialogue and she throws in some brilliantly evocative observations.  For example, of a black woman whose husband has been killed: "This night had opened a valve past mere grief, had touched a fear that burrowed beneath the skin of any coloured person below the shadow of the Mason-Dixon Line."  The book is peppered with gems like this.

In short, Bluebird, Bluebird is both a fine thriller and a book with important things to say about crucial social issues.  I'll be waiting for the next in the series and can warmly recommend this one.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Dylan Jones - David Bowie: A Life

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Interesting and readable

This is an interesting and enjoyable collection of biographical recollections by people who knew Bowie and by Bowie himself.  Some knew him very well, others less so, but all have something to contribute.

Whether or not you like Dylan Jones (I definitely don't), he is a very capable journalist and has done a very good job here.  He knows the scene he is dealing with and has access to a lot of people that others might struggle to recruit for a book like this, so there are contributions from a lot (and I mean a *lot*) of high profile friends and collaborators of Bowie as well as childhood friends and others not in the public eye.  Jones allows them to speak for themselves (including Bowie's own words), giving their contributions verbatim (although presumably edited) rather than crafting them into a narrative written by a biographer.  I like this approach; others have called it lazy, but I like reading what people actually say rather than reading someone else's (particularly Dylan Jones's) interpretation of it, and it is structured in a way which gives it the coherence of a narrative.

It's a long book, and for me it's one to dip into a bit at a time rather than read straight through.  Some of it is a bit gossipy, but I felt it gave me a pretty rounded picture of the man and his milieu.  I don’t think this is the definitive Bowie biography, but given the nature of the man, I'm not sure there will ever be one.  However, it's an insightful, interesting and readable account of his life, his work and his influence, and I can recommend it.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Minette Walters - The Last Hours

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good story but historically questionable

I enjoyed The Last Hours overall.  Set in Dorset in 1348 at the outbreak of The Black Death, this is a story of the people - mainly bonded serfs - of a single demesne and the effect on them of the disease's devastation of the population elsewhere.  It is a fascinating time to set a story because it was a time of complete social upheaval and change as the old certainties of the feudal system broke down.  Minette Walters gives us a colourful cast of characters and she tells a very good story which kept me interested for the full 550 pages.

My difficulties with the book lay in the thinking and attitudes of these repressed 14^th-Century characters with almost no knowledge of the world beyond their village, who, for example, often espouse very modern social attitudes of equality and respect for all people – ideas which they would have found almost impossible to formulate, let alone articulate.  They also make medical and scientific deductions which eluded the most brilliant of minds until many centuries later – and this at a time when all learning came from ancient authorities like Aristotle and Galen;  the notion of actually observing what was happening and thinking about it was completely alien.  And as for the theological rebellions…  a friend of mine has summed this type of thing up as having "contemporary characters in mediaeval fancy dress," which I think puts it perfectly.

Nonetheless, Walters tells a good, compelling tale in very readable prose so I eventually tried to ignore the anachronistic problems (not always successfully) and just enjoy the story.  It is plainly the beginning of a long saga; I'm not agog for the next episode, but I'll probably read it when it comes out.  Cautiously recommended.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Janet Evanovich - Hardcore Twenty-Four

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Great fun

I thoroughly enjoyed Hardcore Twenty-Four.  Janet Evanovich has still got it – which is probably all you need to know, really.

The plot?  Oh, come on! - the plot is bonkers, of course.  It involves a giant boa constrictor and the apparent appearance of zombies in Trenton, among other things. In addition, Grandma Mazur is at the top of her eccentric game, Stephanie totals several cars which are duly replaced by Ranger and she has to choose which of three staggeringly sexy men she is going to sleep with.  (Which as Lula complains, is not fair as "I'm depending on battery-operated devices.")  No surprises there, then, which is just fine by me, because it's very funny and very readable.

After all these years and all these books, Evanovich is still coming up with great dialogue, well-painted (if somewhat implausible) characters and situations which are absurdly comic but just believable enough to make an engaging story.  It's the dry wit which really keeps me reading, though.  Little exchanges like this between Stephanie and Morelli, her cop boyfriend, for example:

"Do you have any leads on this?"

"Not a one," Morelli said.

"Lula thinks it's zombies."

"Okay, so now I have one lead.  Does she have an address for the zombies?"

The whole book is littered with this kind of stuff which kept me smiling and quite often laughing out loud.

It's not Great Literature, but who cares?  I had a great time reading this, and I can recommend it very warmly.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Lynne Truss - The Lunar Cats

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very enjoyable

I enjoyed The Lunar Cats.  Lynne Truss is a very funny writer who has genuine erudition beneath the humour an the combination works well here.  (The Lunar Cats follows on from Cat Out Of Hell, but it works fine as a stand-alone book.)

The set-up is silly but engaging.  There are some cats who are highly intelligent and capable of speech.  Some are plain evil and in league with Beelzebub, others are near immortal and are members of The Lunar Cats, a Learned Society formed in the enlightenment and Truss derives a lot of genuine humour from a bunch of cats conducting themselves like eighteenth-century gentlemen.  The plotis narrated by Alec, a mild-mannered retired librarian who gets caught up in all this.  It is enjoyably silly, involving an evil talking kitten, an evil stolen Tahitian idol, appointments with Beelzebub and so on and the battle by Alec and The Lunar Cats to thwart them.  It is amiable, readable fun.

There is also a good deal here about the voyages of Captain Cook and their subsequent chronicling and publication, which Truss manages to make engaging and very interesting, so there is a solid intellectual core which anchors the absurdity, making it witty rather than just silly.  I found that a very good aspect of the book which left me with a sense of having read something of substance as well as it just being plain funny.

Perhaps this isn't a classic, but it's a very enjoyable and engaging read, underpinned by proper research and learning.  Recommended.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Nicholas Blake - Head of a Traveller

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Well written but flawed

This is the first Nicholas Blake I have read and although I enjoyed aspects of it, I wasn't that keen overall.

Published in 1949, Head Of Traveller sees Nigel Strangeways in his role as a sort of unofficial police consultant called to a beautiful and ancient manor house to help in solving the murder of an unidentified corpse found close by.  It becomes plain that the family there are involved and an intricate puzzle is set involving complex time-lines and possible mistaken identities.

The book began excellently, I thought.  "Nicholas Blake" (i.e. Cecil Day-Lewis) was a fine writer and I enjoyed the style and set-up for the first 50 pages or so. Things did begin to pall a little after that, though.  Despite all the false trails and distractions, I thought the identity of the murderer was fairly plain quite early on, there is a good deal of psychologising which is largely pretty silly and in one case plain offensive, and some of the period attitudes and ignorance, especially toward a dwarf character, were pretty hard to take.

I did finish the book, which has a rather indecisive and unconventional ending, but I found it a bit of a struggle.  I can only give it a very qualified recommendation.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Jennifer Egan - Manhattan Beach

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Disappointing

I'm afraid I couldn't get on with Manhattan Beach.  It's decently written and Jennifer Egan has plainly researched the period meticulously, but I found it rather turgid, with unconvincing characters and, frankly, dull.

I wholeheartedly approve of one of the central themes of this novel, in which Anna grows up in the middle years of the 20^th Century and wants to become a naval diver, battling the attitudes of the time toward women.  The trouble is that Egan never managed to bring either Anna or the story truly alive for me.  I found her style rather plodding and off-putting, with the occasional sentence like "Beyond the windows of an adjacent front room, the sea tingled under a thin winter sun," which just felt mannered to me.  I also think that Egan is rather too keen on showing us exactly how much detailed research she has done, rather than simply using it unobtrusively to paint a convincing background, so wading through it all became a bit of a chore after a while.

As a result of all this, I found Manhattan Beach a real struggle.  I had expected to like it very much, but ended up skimming some parts and feeling rather relieved to have finished it.  Others have found it very good, but personally I can't recommend it.

Richard F. Thomas - Why Dylan Matters

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Interesting but questionable

Why Dylan Matters is undoubtedly very erudite and it has its interesting facets, but I do have my doubts about the thrust of it.

Richard Thomas is a classicist and Dylan fan who really knows his stuff about both.  In this series of essays, he analyses both the content and social impact of Dylan's music often (but not exclusively) with reference to its parallels with classical texts by people like Virgil, Cicero, Ovid and so on.  It's interesting for a while, but I have to say that I got a little bogged down in it, especially as I felt that some of what was being said was a bit tenuous.  It felt at times like the converse of one of those sort of "Virgil's Relevance Today" seminars; yes, we know that some central themes recur throughout literature and remain true through ages, but that doesn't necessarily make Dylan directly comparable to Virgil, even if some of the writings of each has echoes of the other.

I have only a reasonable general knowledge of Classics and am a Dylan fan rather than an expert, so I may not be qualified to judge, but my sense is that Dylan's lyrics are often so brilliantly out of the ordinary that it's almost impossible to pin them down with any exactitude.  This, to me, is much of their greatness, in that they convey and evoke profound ideas and feelings in a very oblique way.  Given this, I think it would be possible for someone in all sorts of disciplines to draw parallels; if a particle physicist claimed that the last verse of All Along The Watchtower discusses quantum indeterminacy, for example, or an economist said that It's All Over Now, Baby Blue is actually analysing the causes of recession, it would be hard to refute them completely.  I exaggerate, of course, but I did feel that there is more than a hint here of a classicist imposing his own discipline on the songs rather than allowing the songs to develop their own meaning.

These reservations aside, I did find the essays readable and quite enjoyable if I took them one at a time.  There is enough here to interest a Dylan fan, but I can only give Why Dylan Matters a qualified recommendation.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Ross Armstrong - Head Case

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An interesting start

I enjoyed Head Case.  It had an outstandingly good beginning which wasn't quite maintained throughout the book, but it's a decent crime novel with an interesting premise.

Tom Mondrian has just begun work as a PCSO when he is shot in the head, apparently by a stray bullet.  This disrupts his mental processes, of course: he cannot recognise or recall faces and his ability to behave normally in social interactions is limited, among other effects, but his senses work unusually acutely and he experiences synesthesia – all of which gives him an unusual and sometimes very acute insight into what is going on.

The book is narrated by Tom himself, and the description of the shooting and his subsequent struggle to recover is quite brilliant, I think.  I found this section fascinating and absolutely riveting.  Then, as he returns to work, he begins to involve himself in the investigation of missing girls.  Despite the unusual angle of Tom's account, I found this plot a little conventional, as well as having the implausibilities so often found in Maverick Investigator books: the failure to go to the proper authorities when it's the obvious thing to do, the deliberately putting himself in danger for the sake of a Tense Climax rather than make sure he has the obvious backup needed and so on. 

Tom's unusual perspective kept my interest throughout, but only just, to be honest.  The book, especially in the middle, could have done with a good deal of tightening up and rather more attention to believability.  However, I still enjoyed it and if there's another Tom Mondrian book in the offing I'll definitely give it a try.  So, recommended with some reservations.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

William Boyd - The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth

Rating: 4/5

Review:
very well done, but...

I thought this was a bit of a mixed bag.  William Boyd is one of our finest writers, so this collection of short stories is all beautifully poised and well done, but I'm not sure what it really added up to in the end.

The book begins with a collection of brief stories, each a sort of character study in which Boyd exposes and skewers the pretensions of various self-deluding characters, often in the world of art, books or film and often with a very unrealistic view of their own talent and character, and of their relationship with others.  This is also true of the  two later, longer stories in the first of which the eponymous Bethany has a deluded view of her own talents and drifts from one career idea to another without sticking to any of them – which was rather the way I felt about the story itself, in that it had some nice scenes which didn’t add up to much overall.  The book closes with a sort of Thirty-Nine Steps-like story which is well done and very gripping…until it just peters out with loose ends all over the place and no resolution.  This may be edgy and experimental, but for me it's a very unsatisfactory tactic in this genre and marred an enjoyable story.

It's all very neatly done.  The characters are well painted and believable, and Boyd's prose is elegant, poised and unflashy so that it's a pleasure to read.  However, I'm not sure how much there is in the way of new insight here - as though these were the author's initial character sketches and vignettes from the sort of longer, more profound books which we know Boyd can write.  As a result I enjoyed the process of reading, but I did get to the end with a sense of not really having gained a lot from the process.

This is definitely worth four stars because I did enjoy it, but I can only give it a qualified recommendation.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Joe Ide - Righteous

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another cracker from Joe Ide

This is another excellent crime novel from Joe Ide.  I loved IQ and approached this follow-up with a little trepidation in case he couldn't keep up the standard, but I needn't have worried.  It's at least as good as the first.  (It can be read as a stand-alone, but it helps a lot to have read IQ first.)

In Righteous, Isaiah is investigating the death of his beloved brother Marcus eight years earlier and gets a call from Marcus's ex-girlfriend who wants him to help her sister – a gambling addict in big debt and big trouble in Las Vegas.  It all gets tangled up with gangs, triads and moneylenders; the plot becomes convoluted but comprehensible and it's all reasonably plausible and very exciting.

Joe Ide's writing is excellent.  The dialogue, especially, is brilliantly realistic and often very funny while his prose just carried me along and hijacked my day because I couldn't stop reading.  Isaiah and Dodson are engaging, imperfect protagonists whom I am coming to love, the story is thrilling and there's some shrewd observation there, too. 

I think this series will be a real giant of crime fiction.  It's already excellent and I can recommend Righteous very warmly indeed - it's an absolutely cracking read.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Jonny Bairstow - A Clear Blue Sky

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good and important book

I thought A Clear Blue Sky was very good in many ways, but I did have some reservations.

The book is as much about Jonny Bairstow's dad David as it is about him, which is not only understandable, it is right and proper.  It is also a fine and important account of the effect of the suicide of a parent on a child and on the rest of the family which will give insight and comfort to a lot of people.  It's a tough, genuinely tragic story, recounted with emotional honesty and without any hint of self-pity  or over-sentimentality.  It is worth reading for this alone, bit there is also some very good stuff about David's character and influence on his son as well as a pretty decent account of Jonny's own progression in cricket.

If you're looking for big revelations about England cricket players or managers, you'll be disappointed.  Personally I wasn't; I thought Jonny's assessments of his fellow players was fair and although he is possibly generous at times I like that he refuses to give salacious or damaging accounts of people but concentrates largely on his own game and attitude to it.  He is honest about many things – like the catastrophic 2013-14 Ashes tour, for example, but doesn't use it to dish dirt or settle scores which makes it a good, very engrossing read.

My only real problem with the book is the prose style, which can be pretty hard to take at times.  The book is ghostwritten by Duncan Hamilton, who is obviously doing a decent job of recounting what Jonny has given him, but the voice is miles away from what I imagine Jonny's own words might be.  For example, Ian Bell at one point is described thus: "He'd sometime hold the final position of a shot, as though posing for a sculptor who was about to start chipping away at some vast block of stone," and Andrew Flintoff's arm around Brett Lee's shoulders was apparently "an act of Corinthian compassion."  And so on. Combined with some pretty stale clichés and contrived similes scattered throughout, it made for slightly tough going some of the time.

Nonetheless, what emerges is a good, honest book which has important things to say.  Jonny Bairstow is a man I'd want in any cricket team; I'm glad to have him on my bookshelves, too.  Recommended.

Ali Smith - Winter

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Disappointing

Oh dear.  I really liked Autumn and was looking forward to this a lot, but I'm afraid I didn't get on with it nearly so well.

After her post-Brexit state-of-the-nation assessment in Autumn, Winter sees Ali Smith considering issues like the depersonalisation through technology and disengagement from global issues which she sees (probably accurately) in Britain.  There are structural similarities to Autumn, with an older person whose mind may not be wholly reliable forming a relationship of sorts with a younger person with the consequent engagement of ideas and differences of behaviour.  There are also quite a few dream sequences (never a favourite of mine) and Smith's trademark quirky structures. 

Sadly, it didn't work for me this time.  The weirdnesses seemed an unnecessary distraction and the structural tricks – for example, giving the whole of one side of a conversation followed by the other side without interspersing them as they would have taken place – often seemed mannered and rather clever-for-the-sake-of-it.  Smith writes excellent prose, of course, creating convincing atmosphere and vivid characters so it's not hard to read.  This time, though, I just felt that in spite of some quite sharp pieces of observation there wasn't all that much original substance behind the style.  I agree with much of what she's saying, but for me it wasn't really worth spending so much time and stylistic effort in saying it again.

Plainly, others disagree and have enjoyed Winter very much, but I found it a let-down.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Khurrum Rahman - East Of Hounslow

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent read

I thought East Of Hounslow was excellent.  I half expected it to be yet another generic, slightly formulaic thriller, but it turned out to be gripping, witty and to make some very shrewd observations.

The set-up is good: Javid ("Jay") Qasim is a small-time drug dealer living with his mum in West London.  Through a series of entertaining and sometimes very exciting events, he is recruited by MI5 and also into a jihadi group on whom he is to spy.  This sounds like a pretty conventional basis for a spy novel, but it's very well done, taking unexpected turns while always remaining plausible – in fact, a lot of the unexpected turns are precisely because they're plausible rather than following the conventions of thrillers.

Two things make this stand out, I think: Jay's narrative voice and the thoughtful balance of the observations about the politics behind jihad and counterterrorism.  Jay's street-smart, often out-of-his-depth take on things was excellent and gave the book genuine wit in places and a terrific narrative drive so I found it genuinely hard to put down.  His predicament and other scenes in the book carry some very thoughtful reflections on behaviour on both sides of the War On Terror, and on things like the way both use the hateful actions of an extreme few on the other side to justify their own hateful actions.  Seeing it from the point of view of an ordinary young British muslim man gives a fascinating perspective which, because of Jay's character and style, never becomes preachy or heavy.

In short, this is an excellent espionage thriller with important things to say.  It is well written, very gripping and very readable.  Warmly recommended.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

NIcola Upson - Nine Lessons

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good, gripping read

I have come late to Nicola Upson's work; Nine Lessons is the first I have read although it is the seventh in the series.   However, it can be read as a stand-alone novel and I enjoyed it, albeit with a few reservations.

Set largely in Cambridge in 1937, there are two crime strands, a series of murders which eventually turn out to be linked and a serial rapist terrorising Cambridge.  These are investigated by DCI Penrose and his friend Josephine Tay and it makes for a good, atmospheric read.  Nicola Upson writes very good prose, she creates very good, human characters and evokes pre-war Cambridge very well.  I did find that, especially in the first few chapters, there were enough linguistic anachronisms to throw me out of the story rather and it's something which did spoil the beginning for me, but it seemed to settle down and I enjoyed the book overall.  The murder plot is rather ridiculously contrived, but as this is a sort of homage to Golden Age detective stories, I didn’t mind that.

Just on a personal note, I was in Cambridge at the time of the real Cambridge rapist and remember the terrible fear which affected many of my friends.  I was a little apprehensive about how Upson would deal with this in fiction, but personally (and as a man, I speak with great caution about this) I think she handles it very well.  It isn't exploitative in any way and I think she captures the atmosphere which pervaded the city then without trivialising or sensationalising.  And I like her dedication of the book to the women who survived the real Cambridge rapist.

I can recommend Nine Lessons (with some caveats) as a gripping and well written read.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Francis Spufford - True Stories

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Terrific stuff

I think this is a terrific collection of many of Francis Spufford's essays, articles and talks over the last 25 years or so.  Spufford is extraordinarily erudite, remarkably thoughtful, very insightful and writes prose which is dense but a real pleasure to read.  He has grouped the pieces into topics and they make a fine compendium of thought-provoking and enjoyable ideas.

He had me at hello, really.  The introduction opens with, " 'The imagination,' said Coleridge, 'is the power to disimprison the soul of fact.'  Except he didn't.  Say it, that is."  I loved that and the way he then traces the misattribution, illustrating precisely the point he is making.  This includes, just a page or so later "…fact that wants to be let out, from its literal prison of dates and documents, to roam free and have non-literal adventures.  As Tolkien said, who doesn't approve of escape?  Jailers, that's who."  It's a wonderful essay to start the collection; perhaps controversially in 2017, Spufford maintains the distinction between fact and falsehood while, also against current trends of instant judgement and opinion, maintaining that a fact or idea needs to be thought about and left in our heads until it begins to speak to us and reveal what it really has to say – possibly in the form of a story.

And so on.  This is a book to be savoured in smallish episodes, I think.  Spufford's writing and thinking is packed with ideas and images and I like to let a bit sink in and settle before trying more.  I come back to the book with renewed pleasure each time.

In short, this is a brilliant, hugely enjoyable collection by a brilliant thinker and writer.  Very warmly recommended.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Richard Flanagan - First Person

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Hard going

Although some of the final parts of First Person were pretty good, I found most of it very hard going.  It is the story of Kif, an aspiring writer who, through the need for money and his own ambition, reluctantly agrees to ghost-write the autobiography of Ziggy Heidl, who is awaiting trial as a colossal conman and thief on a scale approaching Bernard Madoff.  Heidl is utterly evasive and often a downright liar, so the project becomes almost impossible for Kif who also, somewhat implausibly, is drawn into his own dark identity crisis. 

First Person is written by a writer who is writing about a writer who is struggling to write, which should really have been enough to warn me off.  I read it because of Flanagan's reputation but frankly, I found most of it to be overwritten and rather tedious.  There is an awful lot of stuff like, "No graffiti had yet flowered on the grey concrete…nor damasked the umber and olive renders of the low-rise office buildings…" or "In the silence that followed silence followed," which simply irritated me and when, after 200 long pages, someone said of Kit's book, "Kif, there's interesting things here, but you need something to happen," I said "Exactly!" out loud and with considerable warmth.  And toward the end I raised a quizzical eyebrow at the irony of "Although I had nothing to say, I had read enough Australian literature to know this wasn't necessarily an impediment to authorship."

To be fair, the book does begin to pick up toward the end with some sharp observations about current attitudes to truth, deceit and dissimulation of several kinds, and also about cheap, self-important certainties, but it really was a struggle to get to this.  There is a great deal of Writing (capital W) but for me there was a good deal less here than meets the eye.  In the end, it's a book I was glad to have got out of the way, and I'm afraid I can't recommend it.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

David Yaffe - Reckless Daughter: A Portrait Of Joni Mitchell

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good biography

I wasn't sure what to expect from Reckless Daughter.  There are an awful lot of terrible showbiz biographies around, so as someone who has loved Joni Mitchell's music for nigh on half a century now I approached this with some trepidation – but it turns out to be very good.  Yaffe's style is readable and pretty straightforward and although it's a little over-written in places for my taste I never found that intruding too badly and I found the whole thing an enjoyable and fascinating read.

David Yaffe knows his stuff and covers the whole of Joni Mitchell's life in interesting but not excessive detail.  He has known Joni personally for a long time and has spoken to her extensively for this book.  He has also spoken to a very wide variety of others who know her from childhood friends to musical collaborators and the friends of older age; what seems like a genuine picture emerges of a stunningly talented musician who, partly as a result of formative experience is tough, thoroughly individual, headstrong and self-reliant.  As a woman, this has brought her a good deal of criticism over the years, but thank heavens she is who she is because it has enabled her to create and record a body of work which is among the finest of all musical creations of the last half century, in my view.  Yaffe doesn't skate over her less personable sides; he obviously likes and admires her very much but this is never a hagiography and it seems to me to be a pretty balanced portrait which thinks seriously about how Joni's life experience may shaped her and her music, but– praise be! – doesn’t go in for excessive speculative psychologising.

Part of the genius in Joni Mitchell's lyrics is that they are so often plainly intensely personal, but they speak to me of things in my own experience, often very indirectly but with great poignancy.  Learning more about the experiences which gave rise to many of these songs is fascinating to me, and only intensifies their significance.  Many, many years after I first heard and loved Little Green, I remember her revealing that it was about being forced by circumstance to give up her beloved baby for adoption.  Even after those decades, it gave it an added poignancy which I have felt ever since.  I'm not sure that there are revelations here which had quite the same impact on me, but it has certainly enriched my understanding and enjoyment of a lot of Joni's music.

The word "genius" is very over-used about artists of all kinds, but I think it may be justly applied to Joni Mitchell who is one of the very greatest of all songwriters and performers.  I think this is a biography which is worthy of its subject and I can recommend this to any Joni Mitchell fan - which, let's face it, ought to be everybody.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Daniel Handler - All The Dirty Parts

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good book

I thought All The Dirty Parts was very good in many ways.  It's well written and has some valuable things to say.  (It's worth saying at the outset that there is a lot of extremely frank talk about sex, often expressed in what TV announcers call Very Strong Language, so if you don't like all that then this won't be a book for you.)

The book is narrated by Cole, a young man at High School in a small US town who is, shall we say, sexually active.  It's an episodic narrative in short sections with no chapters which for me gave it a strong drive.  It is hard to say much about the story without giving too much away, but Daniel Handler captures well Cole's unthinking, exploitative sexism, his obsession with sex and the painful learning which that brings.

The book is short (only 140 pages or so) but Handler's style manages to cram a lot into it.  I was Cole's age in the early 1970s, which was a very different age indeed; I didn't think or behave as Cole does, so I can't really vouch for the authenticity of his present-day experience, but his voice, his internal experiences and his behaviour seemed very well drawn and plausible to me.  I found it an easy and compelling read and although the message was not an original one, it makes its points pretty well, although the later parts did seem just a little unsubtle.  Nonetheless, it held my attention to the last. 

It is almost impossible to quote from the book because of the subject matter and language, but one bit which I liked in language suitable for a review here was: "For every girl I thought I was uncomplicated sex, it wasn't.  Put it this way: if you can't see the complication, you're probably it."

Teenage boys especially should read this, but so should anyone looking for a portrait of a certain kind of modern teenage male mind.  It's not a groundbreaking classic but it's very readable and makes important points.  Recommended.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Amy Lloyd - The Innocent Wife

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I am out of step with the great majority of readers, but I'm afraid I didn't get on with The Innocent Wife.

Sam, an insecure and lonely teacher from England, falls for a man on Death Row in Florida with whose case she has been fascinated for years.  She visits him in the Florida jail, becomes involved in the making of a new documentary about the case and then delightedly agrees to marry him.  As the book and the research for the film progress, we get a psychological study of Sam and a "did he/didn't he?" plot which becomes very sinister and threatening.

My problem with the book is principally that I simply didn't find Sam's character  either interesting or convincing.  I can see the points Amy Lloyd is making, but I just didn't believe it, somehow.  Added to this a plot which felt very well-worn and, frankly, I just lost interest.

I'm sorry to be critical of a decently-written book, and especially of a first novel, but that's my honest reaction.  I seem to be virtually alone in this so don't let me put you off; plenty of thoughtful readers enjoyed The Innocent Wife very much, but it wasn't for me.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley)