Sidney Chambers and the Persistence of Love

Rating: 4/5

Review:
More good stuff from Runcie

I do like this series.  James Runcie writes very well in an easy, readable style, he creates decent mysteries and there is often some genuine moral and spiritual weight to the stories.  If you're not familiar with the earlier books in the series, I would suggest that you read at least some of them first; it's not essential but it will add to your enjoyment, I think.  If you have read them, you won’t be disappointed in this latest episode.

By now, we know pretty well what we're going to get with a Sidney Chambers book.  We have arrived in the 1970s; Sidney's marriage is well established, his daughter is growing up (she's six in 1971) and his personal life continues to develop.  Life in Grantchester and Cambridge continues to be peppered with crimes, including murder, with which Inspector Keating requires Sidney's help, as bodies, missing manuscripts and the like are interspersed with pastoral duties and Sidney's personal moral musings…all of which we have grown used to and which continue to be very well done. 

It's worth saying that although I haven't always been completely convinced by Runcie's period detail, especially in his characters' use of language, I think he captures the period very well here.  I was in Cambridge during this time and the picture he paints seems very convincing to me.

Probably all that really need be said is that this is an enjoyable addition to a very good series, which is well up to the standard of its predecessors.  Warmly recommended.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Hamilton Crane - Miss Seeton's Finest Hour

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An enjoyable read with convincing period detail

I hadn't read any of this series before and took a punt on this without a great deal of expectation, to be honest.  After a somewhat uninspiring opening, I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.

Set in 1940, Miss Seeton is an art teacher in her late 20s with, it transpires, an uncanny knack of seeing through to the heart of things in her drawings.  This, by convoluted means, leads her to be sent undercover by Military Intelligence to investigate possible sabotage in an aircraft factory. 

The plot itself is pretty negligible; it felt rather more like a fleshed-out short story to me, and after the opening 30 pages or so I began to wonder whether anything was actually going to happen.  However, a story does emerge, I began to warm to the characters, the writing is good and the period is very well conjured – far better than in a some books set in the Second World War which take themselves much more seriously than this does.  The light, often rather humorous tone is underpinned by some thorough research, very readable prose and decent character portraits, which makes the book more than just a bit of inconsequential fluff.  It's no masterpiece of literature – and nor does it intend to be – but it's rather involving and surprisingly enjoyable.

This probably isn’t the best place to start with Miss Seeton, but I can still recommend it even to novices like me and I'll almost certainly be trying more in the series.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Susan Hill - From The Heart

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Rather disappointing

From The Heart has its moments, but from a writer of Susan Hill's quality I found it rather disappointing. 

This is the story of Olive, an intelligent young woman in the post war years; it is a character study which examines the effect of the attitudes of the time on her life and its subsequent development.  We get accounts of restrictive views of "suitable" careers for women, sex, single parenthood, homosexuality and so on.  Hill writes superbly, as always.  She creates believable characters and is particularly good at conveying the recognisably subtle emotional nuances which sometimes cause Olive not to stop something she isn’t happy about, or to fail to act when she probably should, and which can have such a profound effect as a result.  She is very good, too, at conveying things like the sense of starting in a new college, or joining a school for one's first teaching job. 

For me, though, this wasn't quite enough.  There was a sense of going over very well-trodden ground, and however well done it was, I didn't think it added much to our insight into or understanding of the age and its effect on women.  I came away with the sense of having read a well-written story with a few memorable moments, but nothing much beyond that.

I'm sorry to be critical, but I think Susan Hill can do much better than this (in her brilliant Serrailler series, for example).  From The Heart is certainly readable, but I can't recommend it much beyond that.

(I received an ARC from Netgalley.)

Donald Jack - Three Cheers For Me

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Surprisingly good

I enjoyed Three Cheers For Me a good deal more than I expected to.  I  tried it because P.G. Wodehouse thought highly of it, but I didn't really know whether I would like it.  In fact (after a rather tedious opening chapter or two), I found it readable, funny in places and genuinely touching in others.  It had elements of Wodehouse himself, Jerome K. Jerome, Siegfried Sassoon and Cecil Lewis; to my surprise, as well as the humour it gave a powerful, exciting and sometimes moving picture of fighting in the First World War.

The story begins in 1916.  It is narrated by Bartholemew Bandy, a naïve, gauche Canadian who enlists in the army to fight in France.  He is, of course, hopelessly incompetent, but eventually enlists in the RFC and becomes a pilot.  He remains socially inept but finds that in the air he is a brilliant flyer.  This gives rise to both comic and genuinely exciting situations.

Although this is billed as a comedy and some parts are genuinely funny, it is the descriptions of life and action at the Front at the Somme and Ypres, and of aerial combat which I found the best parts of this book.  These episodes are, in a way, partly comic, but all the more affecting for being so.  "Bandy" talks in some places about out-and-out farcical events like wrestling with ancient plumbing in a country house, which reminded me strongly of Three Men In  A Boat.  In other parts, he uses a similar tone to describe a group of bewildered infantrymen fighting their way into an enemy trench and not knowing what to do, his own terror-induced clumsiness and ineptitude when taking off for his first flight into genuine action and the thrill of flying once he has become extremely skilled at it.  The deadpan style lends these things immediacy and real pathos, I think, and through it all Jack creates very believable characters about whom we come to care, and when some are inevitably killed, their loss – described in quiet matter-of-fact tones – genuinely saddened me.

I was surprised to find that these stories were written as late as 1962.  They have the feel of having been written by someone who was really there.  Jack was in the RAF in the Second World War so his knowledge of flying is intimate, but it is still a considerable achievement to have created such an intimate portrait of an earlier time.

So, this is a mixture of the farcical and the deadly serious.  It takes real skill to pull that off successfully, and Jack manages it very well.  He was a fine writer and this is an enjoyable and memorable book.  I'll be looking out for more by Donald Jack, and I can recommend this warmly.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

James Oswald - Natural Causes

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I read Written In Bones, the latest in this series, and thought it pretty average with some serious flaws.  I decided to give James Oswald one more go just to see whether I'd missed something.  I hadn't.

I'm afraid I didn't get on with this book at all.  Oswald's propensity for cliché in language plot and characterisation is well to the fore, I found the story pretty unconvincing and the whole thing just failed to engage me.  One of my biggest problems with Written In Bones was the ridiculous ending, and frankly, Natural Causes puts it in the shade; it's not just silly, it's plain bonkers in a supposedly serious crime novel.

So, James Oswald is not for me, it seems.  Plenty of others obviously enjoy his work very much, but personally I can't recommend this.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Richard Jones - Call Of Nature: The Secret Life of Dung

Rating 5/5

Review:
Interesting and very entertaining

Why isn't the whole world covered in an immensely thick layer of poo?  No, seriously.  All the countless billions of creatures who have ever lived spent their whole lives eating and producing dung as a result, so where is it all?  It's just one of the interesting questions addressed by Richard Jones in this brilliant book.

Although it seems like a thoroughly repellent subject for a book, Jones makes dung interesting and very entertaining.  He is a distinguished scientist, so the scientific content is top-notch while being very accessible to the layman.  We get authoritative information about different digestive mechanisms, dung's role in the ecosystem and the huge variety of creatures whose existence depends upon it, and it is all done with real flair and genuine wit, so the book is a pleasure to read.  This, from the first chapter gives a flavour of the style:

"We all have our diarrhoeal anecdotes, and in any other circumstances I'd keep mine diplomatically quiet.  But since this is a book about my own exploration of excrement, I cannot pass without at least commenting obliquely on the accident in the Temple of the Buddha's Tooth in Kandy, Sri Lanka in 1992, where it was forcefully brought home to me that not all of the world's drinking water is safely potable."

I knew I was in safe hands after reading that; the whole thing is beautifully written and I laughed out loud in several places while reading the book. 

Call Of Nature is nicely illustrated and very well structured; there are sections on things like the nature and process of digestion, sewage disposal, uses of dung, and so on.  I was constantly coming across little gems of interest – like why are cow pats and horse-droppings so different in texture and smell, when both of them feed by grazing grass?  It's not something I'd given any thought to before, but, like a lot in the book, once the topic had been raised I found it really interesting.

In short, I found the whole book thoroughly readable and enjoyable.  To me, this is what popular science writing should be: accurate, enthusiastic, in-depth and very entertaining.  I loved Call Of Nature and can recommend it very warmly indeed.

James Oswald - Written In Bones

Rating: 3/5

Review:

A bit cliché-ridden and very implausible

I thought this was a fairly competent but rather uninspiring police procedural.  It is the seventh in a series which I hadn't come across before but it can be read as a stand-alone book.

It's a good opening: a body falls and is impaled on a large tree in Edinburgh, and it's unclear how or why he got there and even who the victim is.  A story then unfolds of murder, drug gangs, suspicions of police corruption and so on.  To me the whole thing felt a bit clunky and artificial, from the hostile senior officer to "the press are going to be all over this" and the inevitable Maverick Investigator with Complications In His Personal Life in DI Tony McLean.  There are also some pretty gaping plot holes (What was the significance of the samples on McLean's handkerchief?  Why were places turned over? etc. etc.)  At one point McLean is explaining things to his team and we're told, "The more McLean spoke it out loud, the more outlandish it sounded." And the climax (you've guessed it, a One-To-One confrontation with the True Arch-Villain) is simply ludicrous, I'm afraid.  (It would be too much of a spoiler to list all the absurdities, but I honestly said "Oh, for heavens' sake!" out loud several times.)

The writing is OK but there is some very clunky structure and dialogue; for example, people say "You know as well as I do…" an awful lot (on one occasion it happens twice in the same conversation, in the space of just a couple of paragraphs).  Hardly anyone says that in real life; it's just a clumsy device to get information to the reader by having one character tell another something they already know.  An experienced author should be able to do better – and there are a lot of other things about which I felt the same.  Stale usages like "his bundle of joy" and "the bowels of the earth," for example, crop up far too often and dreadful clichés like "they were as different as chalk and cheese" really won't do in any serious piece of writing.

I did finish the book because I wanted to know the answer to the mystery, but it was so unsatisfactory that in the end I wasn't sure I should have bothered.  Penguin are shortly to reissue the whole series but after I don't think I'll be reading the earlier ones, and I can't really recommend Written In Bones.

Jane Casey - Let The Dead Speak

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Another good instalment from Jane Casey

This is another good instalment in a fine series. I find Casey's writing compulsive; her prose is unflashy and very readable, but she can create a fine sense of suspense and her plotting is extremely skilful. Maeve and the other characters Casey creates are generally very believable, too and the whole adds up to a gripping narrative.

This time the team are confronted with a bloodstained house and a young woman whose mother is missing, so it's not even clear whether a murder has been committed. The plot develops well, with surprises but no ridiculously implausible "twists," and it's a very engrossing and satisfying read.

This can be read as a stand-alone book, but it's probably best if you have read at least some of the previous Maeve Kerrigan novels. Either way, I can recommend this to both newcomers and old fans. You won't be disappointed.

Michael Farris Smith - Desperation Road

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Gripping, haunting and insightful

I thought this was an excellent book.  It is very well written, insightful and gripping.

Desperation Road tells of two apparently unconnected lost and half-broken souls whose stories emerge gradually.  They are Maben, a youngish woman, wandering with her young daughter, and Russell who is newly released from prison.  How their stories converge and intersect emerges slowly and compellingly.  The book is set in Mississippi, with a fine sense of place and oppressive heat.  It is hard to give a sense of the plot without saying more than I would like to have known before starting, but it emerges that Russell has just been released from prison and that Maben is driven to a desperate act to save herself and her daughter.  From there we get a powerful, building sense of menace for both of them as things close in around them.  We also get some wonderful portraits of compassion and decency, an examination of difficult moral choices and some thoughtful observations on the nature of guilt and of redemption.

The prose is excellent.  It is quietly, almost hypnotically compelling at times.  There is a deceptive simplicity to it with no similes but a lovely rhythm, somehow, which changes to suit the mood.  It has a quiet, unsensational tone; sometimes dreadful things are hinted at or explicitly told which have real impact when narrated in a quiet, matter-of-fact but rather beautiful way.  Although it's not really poetic, its powerful, realistic voice felt a bit like some song lyrics by people like Jason Isbell or Bruce Springsteen.

Michael Farris Smith is both clear-eyed and compassionate in his view of his characters, and I felt that I had read something haunting and important here, as well as being completely gripped by the story.  In short, I loved this and I can recommend it very warmly.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Alexander McCall Smith - The Woman Who Walked In Sunshine

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Another good Mma Ramotswe story

This is the 16^th No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency book, and by now we know exactly what we're going to get:  a slow, slow narrative pace; gentle, humane musings; celebrations of goodness and human warmth and some quiet detective work on cases both amusing and serious.  This doesn't disappoint.

The plot, for all it matters, revolves around Mma Ramotswe taking a holiday, leaving Mma Makutsi in charge of the agency.  Needless to say, this doesn't sit well with Mma Ramotswe and she soon takes responsibility for a young street-boy and becomes involved in a case…and you know the rest, really.  Our favourite characters all feature, including a small role from the wonderful Mr. J. L. B Matekoni and, of course, the dastardly Violet Sephotho.  The ending made me well up a bit, as it always does no matter how I resist. 

In among Mma Ramotswe's general, digressive musings on life and goodness is this, which seemed to me to have an especial resonance at the moment:

"Truth had a way of coming out on top – and it was just as well for everybody that it did.  If there ever came a day when truth was so soundly defeated that it never emerged, but sank, instead, under the sheer volume of untruth that the world produced, then that would be a sad day for Botswana and for the people who lived in Botswana.  It would be a sad day for the whole world, that day."

In short, this is yet another very good Mma Ramotswe book; if you've liked the others you'll like this.

Graeme Simsion - The Bset Of Adam Sharp

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Different but still good

I enjoyed much of The Best Of Adam Sharp, but I did have some uncomfortable moments with it.

The first thing to say is that The Rosie Project, this ain't.  This is a much more sober, reflective novel.  There are lighthearted moments and it's well done, but don’t expect a comedy.  The narrator is Adam Sharp, a forty-something, music-loving software engineer in a staid life and relationship in England.  As a young man he had a deep and passionate love affair in Australia with Angelina, a young, beautiful actress.  Out of the blue, she emails him, and we get accounts of both the old affair and present-day developments as old feelings and regrets are rekindled.  To say more about the plot itself would be to reveal more than I would like to have known before starting.

Graeme Simsion writes very well and I found the story involving and compelling enough to make me late for something in order to finish it – always a good sign.  He has some important reflections on what makes a good life and a good relationship, and how we sometimes fail to appreciate the things of real value in both.  I found Adam himself a very convincing portrait of a middle-aged man taking stock of his life so far and experiencing powerful pangs of nostalgia for lost love and youth – fuelled by a fine list of 60s and 70s songs, which is an aspect I enjoyed very much.

There are quite a few sex scenes, which aren't over-explicit and are generally well done.  There is one section, though, which made me very uncomfortable, not because of the sex itself (even though it's somewhat unconventional, shall we say) but because I felt the woman involved had become rather objectified as the prize in a competition between two men.  It may have been Simsion's intention to illustrate the wrongness of this, but it felt more like porn than the genuine human interactions we had been shown in other sex scenes and reading it made me feel rather grubby.

That may just be me, though, and overall I enjoyed this a lot.  It's readable, thoughtful and rather humane and I can recommend it.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Aldous Huxley - Brave New World

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A classic, but feels dated now

I first read Brave New World when I was 16 in 1970.  At the time it was still saying things which were less well explored and I was young and flexing my hippyish ideals, so it made a deep impression then.  I have recently tried re-reading it and it hasn't aged well.  (Although, to be fair, neither have I.)  It still contains good, important ideas which were pretty original and revolutionary for their time but I found the writing very mannered and hard to read now. 

In the end, I couldn’t face reading the whole thing again, but I do still like the exchange between Mustapha Mond and the Savage which ends:
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

"Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome,' he said."

I think one of the book's strengths is that it's not just a simplistic anti-authoritarian, liberty-cheering polemic, because Mustapha Mond isn't a cruel or self-aggrandizing man, and Huxley's world is very different from, say, Orwell's 1984 or T.H. White's depiction of an ant colony in The Sword In The Stone. There's a genuine discourse here which recognises the moral and practical problems in both views, not just the nightmare of an imposed "Utopia," even if it is a frightful prospect.

Sadly, though, I hadn't the strength to wade through a load of Huxley's writing to experience that discourse again.  I found it very hard to rate the book; in the end I've given it four stars because I thought it was brilliant first time around and it has some very important content, but I can't recommend it as a good present-day read.

Becky Masterman - A Twist Of The Knife

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very good crime novel

I enjoyed A Twist Of The Knife.  It is clever, both serious and witty, and is a gripping read.  It is the third in a series, but it works very well as a stand-alone book.

On the face of it, the plot sounds familiar and hackneyed, as a former FBI agent becomes involved in a friend's attempts to prove the innocence of a man before he is executed.  In fact it felt original and fresh, and it also has important things to say about capital punishment.  The plot develops in a credible way and avoids ridiculous "twists," but holds genuine surprises, some of which go very much against what one expects in a story like this.

The story is narrated by Brigid Quinn and it is her voice which makes this such a good book.  She is 60 years old and in a stable marriage to a sane, supportive husband and is intelligent, tough, has some ordinary human frailties and is often sharply witty.  It's a terrific voice which drives the story very well and also generates a very powerful sense of place in Florida.  I thought the first half of the book was exceptionally good; the second half became rather less original in tone and structure; it was still well done, but the climax didn't grip me nearly as much as the first part of the book.

Small reservations aside, I can recommend this as a gripping and entertaining read and I will be looking out for more in the series.

Mylis de Kerangal - The Heart

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

The Heart was originally issued under the title Mend The Living.  It 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.