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.)