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.)