Matt Haig - The Last Family In England

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not Matt Haig's best

I thought How To Stop Time was outstandingly good and I also enjoyed The Dead Fathers Club very much, but I'm afraid The Last Family In England didn't really do much for me.

The book is narrated by Prince, a Labrador who lives by the Labrador Code of Duty Before Pleasure and protecting his (human) family at all costs.  These tenets are challenged as other breeds undermine them and his family suffers emotional problems and comes under threat.  It's a good idea, which is loosely based on Shakespeare's Henry IV plays, and Matt Haig's humanity, compassion and insight are all there as he explores ideas of duty, responsibility, sacrifice and how far we can rely on faith and received wisdom.

Given all this, I'm not exactly sure why the book didn’t quite work for me.  Partly it's having a dog as narrator; I didn’t really find Prince's voice convincing - and I certainly wasn't convinced by the family cat, either.  If even Kipling couldn't pull off a book in a dog's voice (even this admirer of Kipling's writing would strongly advise avoiding Thy Servant A Dog) it must be very difficult indeed.  Also, I somehow didn’t find the outsider's perspective on the family persuasive, although it's something that Haig does brilliantly in other books.  Whatever it was, I found myself surprisingly unengaged.

There is a lot that is good about the book so it may well be worth a try if you like Matt Haig's work, but I can only give this a very qualified recommendation.

(My thanks to Canongate Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Simon Lelic - The Liar's Room

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

Most other reviewers loved The Liar's Room, but I'm afraid I really didn't.  Although Simon Lelic can write very well, I found this unconvincing and a little formulaic, in spite of its rather original structure.

A new client arrives in a counsellor's office and quite quickly it emerges that he is there to torment the counsellor with her past and with other threats.  Both have been untruthful in many ways – hence the title – and the ensuing dialogue is a battle of wits between them as some ghastly truths emerge, with the obligatory present-time peril, of course, and some jumping between voices and timescales.

Perhaps it's just me, but I just couldn’t get involved. The set-up seemed implausible, the voice of a teenage girl's diary didn't ring true at all and the inevitable and frequent "She remembered…" episodes just seemed tediously formulaic.  I'm sorry to be critical, because I thought that Lelic's first novel, Rupture, was powerful and original.  However, that came from a place of real rage about his subject (bullying) while to me this is just another manufactured psychological thriller.  As such, it's decently done but it didn't offer me much in the way of new insight and didn’t really grip me in the way it seems to have done with other reviewers.

If you're a fan of psychological thrillers you may well enjoy this far more than I did, but it wasn't for me.

(My thanks to Penguin Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Colin Watson - The Naked Nuns

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another cracker from Watson

The Naked Nuns is another excellently written, very enjoyable Flaxborough mystery – the eighth in the series.  As always, the mystery is well done and quite quirky, but the chief pleasure is Colin Watson's dry, witty and beautifully written take on his characters and the milieu they inhabit.

This time, there's a feud between two prosperous local businessmen, some dodgy goings-on at the club owned by one of them and anonymous letters from the USA warning of an impending "hit" in Flaxborough.  Watson has a lot of fun skewering the absurd use of language by Management Consultants, the shallow fakery around "mediaeval-themed" events and so on, plus some amusing involvement by American gangsters and the now traditional cameo appearance by the magnificent Miss Lucilla Teatime.  Eventually, after some engineered mayhem during a "Mediaeval Banquet" at the club, a body turns up and the redoubtable Purbright and Love work on the case.

It's classic Flaxborough.  Although perhaps not one of Watson's very best, it's readable, involving and hugely entertaining.  Personally, I'd recommend beginning at the start of this series with Coffin, Scarcely Used and reading them in order, but this will work as a one-off, too.  Whichever you choose, this is warmly recommended.

(My thanks to Farrago for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Francis Spufford - The Child That Books Built

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A delight

I think The Child That Books Built lives up to its reputation; it is readable, evocative, funny in places and extremely insightful about the activity of reading itself and the effects it may have.

This is more than a memoir of childhood reading.  Spufford does tell us about how he learned to read and became an obsessive bookworm, but there is also a lot of erudite and very interesting stuff about developmental psychology, philosophy and so on and the light they may (or sometimes may not) shed on children and reading.  I found the whole thing fascinating and engrossing, and the prose is beautiful. 

I think anyone who enjoys reading and can remember (or wants to be reminded) of the pleasures of being read to and then learning to read with the wonderful worlds which opened up for us would enjoy this book.  Very warmly recommended.

Tim Dorsey - The Pope Of Palm Beach

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Great stuff

I loved The Pope Of Palm Beach. 

Although there are 20 previous books in this series, this is my first Tim Dorsey and it worked fine as a stand-alone novel.  Set in Florida, it's a very amusing farce featuring the manically curious and furious Serge Storms and his drug-addled sidekick, Coleman.  They are a brilliant pairing, with Serge venting his righteous rage on various scumbags who do things like dump polluting materials in nature reserves or price vital medicines out of the reach of those who need them out of personal greed.  They all meet dreadful but appropriate ends, a bit like a modern-day, secular version of Dante's Inferno.  There is also an historical story intercut with this, whose relevance we don't discover until the last quarter or so of the book, but which works very well and leads to a thrilling (and amusing) climax which kept me reading well after I should have stopped for the night.

It's excellently done.  You really do have to get the tone right if you're going to make gruesome killing funny, and Dorsey gets it perfectly.  He writes brilliantly, creating an excellent sense of place, and the balance of excitement and humour in the narrative seemed perfect to me.  He also skewers many of the idiocies of modern life and especially in the character of Darby Pope, makes some quite profound human statements below the witty surface.

I'm delighted to have been introduced to Tim Dorsey and I'll definitely be looking into more Serge and Coleman books.

(My thanks to Farrago Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Asia Mackay - Killing It

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Well written but flawed

I tried Killing It expecting it to be either fantastically good fun or absolutely terrible.  It was neither; there were plenty of good things about it, but it wasn't great.

Lex Tyler is a new mum who returns to work as an undercover assassin for the British Secret Service, and the book is a comic riff on both action-packed spy adventures and the tribulations of motherhood, with their juxtaposition at the heart of both the comedy and the feminist message.  Asia Mackay writes well in Lex's very readable narrative voice and she creates a good setting for the action.  The spy plot is OK, if a little silly and is reasonably well done, as is the nightmare of Lex having a cover-story which means that, as well as some exciting action, she has to socialise with over-privileged, pretentious and competitive West-London mothers.

I did have some quite serious reservations, though.  The book could have done with a firm editorial hand; at 400 pages it is far too long.  The riffs on the Competitive-Mother setting and Lex's own sense of blundering along messing it up (common to most normal parents, I suspect) are often good but they are too numerous and too protracted so they really get in the way of the story.  Even though I'm wholly in sympathy with the feminist message, it is terribly crudely done at times – especially with the introduction of a caricature sexist pillock of a fellow assassin whom Lex has to confound, which felt so unreal as to weaken the point Mackay is, quite rightly, making.  I also felt uneasy in places about the overall issue of taste.  It is possible to make assassination a subject of some humour if it's done right, but there is a flippancy about torture here which seems to me to be beyond humour in any context.  Mackay oversteps the boundary of acceptability more than once, I think, and I didn't like it

I ended up skimming quite extensively, to be honest, and didn't feel I'd missed all that much.  There are some nice comic moments, like realising that forgetting her maternity bra pads might lead to her leaving DNA at the scene of a covert operation, for example, but overall, I can only give Killing It a very qualified recommendation.

(My thanks to Zaffre the publishers for an ARC via NetGalley.) 

Terry Pratchett - The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Classic Pratchett

Terry Pratchett wrote this for young adults, but this…er…mature adult also enjoyed it very much indeed.

The Amazing Maurice is a cat who suddenly found that he could think and to talk.  He now travels with a group of rats who have been given the same abilities and, with a young boy playing the pipe, travel from town to town doing a sort of Pied Piper act to con the townspeople.  However, they begin to develop a conscience about this and then arrive in a town where something sinister is plainly going on…

It's classic Pratchett: gripping, funny, ingenious and quietly full of some important human and moral considerations.  The portrait of Maurice's behaviour as a cat is very amusing, there are some great side-swipes at the conventions of fairy tales and so on.  And anyway, anyone who doesn't like a story featuring a thoughtful, moral rat called Dangerous Beans is, quite frankly, a wrong 'un.

I've managed somehow to miss out on The Amazing Maurice up to now.  I'm very glad to have put that right and can recommend this warmly to readers of all ages.

Domenic Stansberry - The White Devil

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Disappointing

I'm afraid I was disappointed with The White Devil.  It has won an award and some enthusiastic reviews, but it wasn't for me.

This is a modern re-telling of the 1612 play The White Devil by John Webster, set in 2005, largely in Rome.  The narrator, "Vittoria", is a married American woman with a very dubious past in which she and her amoral brother may have been involved in murder and all sorts of other things.  She begins an affair with a rich, powerful and corrupt Italian senator, from which gossip, intrigue and death follow; if you are familiar with Webster's play, you'll have an idea of how things play out.

I have to say that for me, the story isn't strong enough to bear this reworking.  It's a format which can work very well; some of the current series of Hogarth Shakespeare reworkings – like Shylock Is My Name and Dunbar, for example – have been brilliant, but they have been in the hands of outstanding authors who are working with plays of depth and insight into what it means to be human.  With The White Devil, it seems to me that neither the author nor the play fits those descriptions.  The writing is decent enough and Stansberry develops an oppressive atmosphere, but there's a curious emotional flatness to the whole thing which may fit the narrator's character but makes for a rather tedious, disjointed and unengaging narrative.  Also, something made me a little uneasy about this woman's voice written by a male author.  In principle there's nothing wrong with that, but although this is not particularly sexually explicit, the whole thing is steeped in sexuality and for me it's not quite well enough written to be convincing and therefore to avoid being slightly creepy.

Others seem to have found this very good, judging by some of the quoted reviews, but I'm afraid I really can't recommend it.

(My thanks to the publisher, Orion, for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Colin Watson - Broomsticks Over Flaxborough

Rating: 4/5

Review:
More Flaxborough fun

This is another very enjoyable instalment in Colin Watson's Flaxborough chronicles.  It's perhaps not one of the very best, but it has Watson's characteristically brilliant dry wit, excellent writing and comic but rather penetrating characterisation.

This time, some of Flaxborough's most respectable citizens are indulging in paganism and licentious "rites," when one of their number disappears and a mystery develops involving various of the town's worthies.  Watson uses this as always to puncture pomposity and to poke fun at the self-deluding grandiosity of many of his characters, while taking well aimed sideswipes at advertisers and their nonsensical jargon, the behaviour of the press and, of course, "devil-worship" and its associated pretensions.

It's a lot of fun, but the absurdity of the subject matter, oddly, makes this a little less amusing for me than some of its predecessors.  Also some of Watson's rather dodgy attitudes to women are rather more to the fore here, which I found a little uncomfortable in places, and Miss Lucy Teatime makes only a brief appearance, which is a slight disappointment.  Nonetheless, Watson's style is always a joy and the redoubtable Purbright and Love remain a unmitigated pleasure as characters.

If you're not familiar with Watson, this may give you a flavour of his style, as the slow-witted Chief Constable Chubb is informed of the identity of a suspect. " 'But he's…' Mr Chubb was about to say 'vice-chairman of the Conservative Club' when he remembered his inspector's perverse inclination to disregard the relevance of social lustre to a presumption of innocence.  'But he's married,' he said instead."  If you like that, you'll like Colin Watson's books.

Broomsticks Over Flaxborough isn't an absolute favourite Flaxborough Mystery, but it's still a very enjoyable read and warmly recommended.

(My thanks to Farrago for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Matt Haig - The Dead Fathers Club

Rating: 5/5 

Review:
Another excellent book from Matt Haig

I thought The Dead Fathers Club was excellent.  It's a very well-done reworking of Hamlet through the eyes of Philip, an 11-year-old boy whose father has been killed in a road accident, leaving his mother to run their pub in Newark, Nottinghamshire.  Uncle Alan, his father's brother has designs on both his mother and the pub and Philip's father appears as a ghost, telling him that Alan arranged the crash and demanding that Philip exact revenge.

I found the whole thing gripping, insightful and touching.  Philip's narrative voice is completely believable, as is the story with events and characters recognisable from Hamlet but very cleverly adapted to Philip's modern-day school and home life.  Haig doesn't follow the play slavishly (so we are spared the corpse-strewn finale, for example) but its themes and insights are there, including the question of whether Philip really is seeing the things he describes or whether they are the product of a disturbed mind.

In short, this is another excellently written, engrossing and very humane book from Matt Haig.  Very warmly recommended.

(My thanks to Canongate Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Seth Kaufman - Metaphysical Graffiti

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good in parts

I enjoyed quite a lot of Metaphysical Graffiti, but I do have some reservations.  It's a collection of essays about aspects of rock music which are fairly random, quirky and personal – something I liked the sound of a lot.  They are of rather mixed quality, though; at their best they are perceptive and entertaining, but I found some to be tedious and almost toe-curlingly unfunny.

Kaufman knows his stuff.  He's plainly a fan, he has listened widely and deeply and has thought about what he has heard.  This shows in the essay Beatles Or Stones? in which Kaufman discusses with considerable insight what factors dictate our answer to this sort of question, or his fine little appreciation of drummers, or a very nicely done piece on influences – and I'm always ready to applaud anyone who will acknowledge in public that, great though some of their music may have been, a lot of the Grateful Dead's output (especially live) is plain bloody boring.

On the other hand, there are some pretty frightful acts of whimsy which aren't nearly as funny as they think they are: What Kind Of Air Guitar Do You Play is not only pretty vacuous and unfunny, it's a load of absurd, pseudo-psychological tosh, too, and as for Kaufmann's rap rendering of Waiting For Godot…don't get me started.  He even feels the need to ruin already weak jokes further by explaining afterward why they are (allegedly) funny.  It's pretty grim stuff in places.

I've given this four stars, perhaps slightly generously, because Kaufman can write easy, readable prose and the good parts are genuinely enjoyable and insightful, but I did have to grit my teeth quite hard to get through other parts of it.

(My thanks to OR books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

James Smythe - I Still Dream

Rating: 3/5

Review:
A bit of a struggle

I struggled a bit with I Still Dream.  James Smythe is a very fine writer and I thought that The Machine was an outstanding book.  This didn't feel nearly as original or interesting to me.

The narrative begins in 1997 when Laura Bow is seventeen and a computer genius like her late father.  She begins to create Organon, a form of Artificial Intelligence which can learn and which she tries to imbue with her own human values.  Meanwhile, others have appropriated her father's work on SCION, a similar program but which has been "raised" very differently.  The narrative jumps a decade at a time and changes narrators as we see the way in which the two programs develop and each has a profound influence on the world, eventually ending up in an undisclosed year in the far future.  Smythe deals with important issues like the uses and abuses of data, the meaning of sentience and humanity and so on, but in spite of some very good writing and some interesting takes on human and artificial memory, it dragged very badly for quite long periods.

The book is too long, for one thing and sometimes felt more like a lecture on the potential of AI than a novel. The characters and human aspects of the story weren't really strong enough to carry the book and – surprisingly to me – it all felt a little familiar from other novels and programmes like Black Mirror.  It's readable enough, but I wasn't sure it was worth it in the end and I can only give I Still Dream a very qualified recommendation.

(My thanks to HarperCollins for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Colin Watson - The Flaxborough Crab

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another gem from Watson

The discovery of Colin Watson's Flaxborough novels has been a joy.   They are compact gems of wit, acute observation and plotting and every one so far has been an absolute pleasure.

The Flaxborough Crab is the sixth in the series, in which women of the town are subjected to thoroughly inept attempted sexual assaults (which they are often amusingly well able to deal with), apparently by an elderly perpetrator.  Things, naturally, become more complex and Purbright and Love find themselves widening their investigation as the magnificent Miss Lucy Teatime also becomes involved.

It's typical Watson – and I mean that as the highest compliment.  His portraits of the characters of the town are as shrewd and acerbic as ever and the writing is a masterclass in beautifully crafted prose and dry wit.  This, as a "Treat" is being inflicted on the elderly by some of the town's worthies, will give a flavour:

"The chief organiser of the treat bustled into the room, rubbing his hands and saying "Fine! Fine!" over and over again.  He hosed the Darbys and Joans with his smile and inflicted a vigorous handshake upon as many as lacked the presence of mind to feign earnest search for something on the floor."  ("Hosed".  Brilliant!)

Flaxborough Crab is a hugely enjoyable instalment in a wonderful series.  Very warmly recommended.

(My thanks to Farrago Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Terry Pratchett - Night Watch

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Possibly Pratchett's finest book

Terry Pratchett wrote a lot of truly excellent books, but if I had to choose one as his masterpiece, this would be it.  Night Watch has all his qualities in abundance: wit, an engrossing story, wonderful characters, deep insight and a great, great humanity.  (It really helps to be familiar with The Watch so I'd recommend reading the preceding Watch books first.)

In Night Watch, Commander Vimes gets caught in a temporal event (and quantum, of course) which transports him and the vicious criminal he is pursuing back to the time when the young Sam Vimes has just joined the Watch.  It's a clever and incredibly thoughtful story about power and its abuses, the moral complexities of policing and the law, and about decency, humanity and inhumanity.  There are scenes in a corrupt Watch House here which, even though they are not at all graphic, still haunt me and I have cherished for years the exchange between Vimes and his enraged, vengeance-bent younger self:

"You *don't* bash a man' brains out when he's tied to a chair!"

"He did!"

"And you don't.  That’s because you're not him."

That sums up the moral situation as pithily as I've ever heard it.

Night Watch has everything for me; it's a great, involving read, it's funny at times, it's very affecting at others and it says some very important things in a way which allows you to hear them easily and enjoyably.  Very warmly recommended.

Damon Runyon - Guys & Dolls

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Comic genius

This is a decent selection of twenty of Runyon's Broadway stories and would serve as a good introduction to one of the truly great comic writers of the 20^th Century. 

I first read some Runyon about 35 years ago and after a page or two of him was completely hooked.  It's a joy throughout with very neatly constructed short stories, memorable characters and, above all, writing which can make me laugh out loud just through its style.  If you need a sample of Runyon's wonderful, utterly distinctive prose, try this paragraph from the classic The Brain Goes Home:

"I once read a story about a guy by the name of King Solomon who lives a long time ago and who has a thousand dolls all at once, which is going in for dolls on a very large scale indeed, but I guarantee that all of King Solomon's dolls put together are not as expensive as any one of The Brain's dolls. The overhead on Doris Clare alone will drive an ordinary guy daffy, and Doris is practically frugal compared to Cynthia Harris and Bobby Baker."

Damon Runyon has been one of the joys of my life and, if you haven't already, I would urge you to try him.  For a much fuller selection, my advice is to get hold of a copy of the Picador paperback, On Broadway.  It's out of print (scandalously, in my view) but used copies are still readily available.  Failing that, you won’t be disappointed with the little gems in this Penguin selection.  Very warmly recommended.

Emma Healey - Whistle In The Dark

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I'm afraid I didn't get on at all well with Whistle In The Dark.  Plainly a lot of other readers did and I'm in a small minority, but I found it rather clunky, needlessly slow and not very original in its insights.

The book opens with Jen and Hugh's daughter Lana arriving at hospital after having gone missing for four days while on holiday in the Peak District.  Lana insists that she cannot remember anything about what has happened and we are left guessing about whether this is true or not.  Oh, and their other daughter chooses that day to announce that she is pregnant by donor insemination and that she has split up with her (female) partner.

The book develops primarily into an examination of the relationship between insecure, emotionally clumsy Jen and Lana, the classic rude, recalcitrant teenager with a history of depression, self-harm etc. for good measure.  There is also some sisterly infighting to help things along.  Meanwhile Jen intrudes further and further into Lana's life to try to find out what has happened to her as the narrative jumps back and forth in time (as seems near-compulsory these days) and a rather tame story eventually emerges.

I'm afraid I found it dull and unoriginal.  The relationships and characters seemed very familiar to me from other books and the story certainly didn't hold my attention.  It seems to me that there was an awful lot of Creative Writing but not much in the way of worthwhile content.  Plenty of others have enjoyed this very much, but I'm sorry to say that I really didn't.

(My thanks to Penguin Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Simon Brett - A Deadly Habit

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very enjoyable

I enjoyed A Deadly Habit very much.  Let's face it, you know pretty much what you're going to get from a Charles Paris mystery: a slightly implausible plot in which someone involved with Charles's current production mysteriously dies, some shrewd and often acerbic observations of theatrical characters and their behaviour, some slightly inept investigation by Charles himself and a lot of unflashy but very good writing.  This doesn’t disappoint at all.

This time, Charles is invited to appear in a West End production of a not-very-good play which is a vehicle for a big movie star whom Charles knew when they were both fresh out of drama school.  Sure enough, someone dies and Charles eventually pieces together what happened.  There is also a lot of background about alcoholism and its struggles, which I thought was well done; Brett is very good at tackling this sort of thing with a little wit but never trivialising, so it is honest without being too grim or sentimental.  The whole thing is a very easy, pleasurable read with a little more substance than many books in this genre – and one scene where Charles speaks to a retired, waspishly camp director made me laugh out loud more than once.

Simon Brett is a master at this sort of thing and he has done it yet again.  If you want an amusing, enjoyable read which nonetheless has a bit of substance to it, I'd recommend giving this a try.

Terry Pratchett - Making Money

Rating: 5/5

Review:
One of Pratchett's best

This is another Pratchett classic, I think.  It's best to read Going Postal first but it can be read on its own; here Moist von Lipwig takes on the finance sector and Pratchett gives us a typically witty but penetrating look at what banking and money are and how they work, wrapped in a hugely enjoyable and often very funny narrative.  Moist himself is a wonderful character, as is Adora Belle Dearheart, Vetinari is on outstanding form, there's an Igor and even cameo appearances from Carrot and Detritus…what more could you possibly want?

After at least two re-reads, this is still one of Sir Terry's best, in my view.  There isn't a much higher recommendation than that.