Patrick O'Brian - The Mauritius Command

Rating: 5/5

Review:
The fourth in a brilliant series

This is now my third time reading through this brilliant series and I am reminded again how beautifully written and how wonderfully, addictively enjoyable they are.

In The Mauritius Command, Jack is finding shore-bound domestic life somewhat less blissful than he had anticipated, but through Steven's machinations is given command of a squadron to fight in the Indian Ocean where French warships are playing havoc with the Company's trade.  As always, there is a gripping, varied narrative  and some thoughtfully drawn characters – especially the capricious and enigmatic Lord Clonfert, whom I found a real source of interest and subtlety in this episode.

Patrick O'Brian is steeped in the period of the early 19th Century and his knowledge of the language, manners, politics, social mores and naval matters of the time is deep and wide. Combined with a magnificent gift for both prose and storytelling, it makes something very special indeed. The books are so perfectly paced, with some calmer, quieter but still engrossing passages and some quite thrilling action sequences. O'Brian's handling of language is masterly, with the dialogue being especially brilliant, but also things like the way his sentences become shorter and more staccato in the action passages, making them heart-poundingly exciting. There are also laugh-out-loud moments and an overall sense of sheer involvement and pleasure in reading.

I cannot recommend these books too highly. They are that rare thing; fine literature which are also books which I can't wait to read more of. Wonderful stuff.

Lynn Truss - A Shot In The Dark

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Rather disappointing

Lynn Truss is an excellent writer with a fine comic sense and I have enjoyed a lot of her work very much, but I'm afraid I was a little disappointed in A Shot In the Dark.

The Book is a "crime mystery" but also essentially a farce.  Set in Brighton in the late 50s, a hopelessly stupid and vain police Inspector turns a blind eye to all crime, completely convinced that he has eradicated it from Brighton.  A brilliant, socially inept new constable arrives and upsets the normal order of things, just as murderous events take place around the opening of a new play by an Angry Young Man, and a comic investigation/imbroglio develops. 

Truss has a lot of fun at the expense of conceited but idiotic policemen, pretentious and narcissistic theatre folk and so on, and I enjoyed the first half of the book a lot.  However, it did begin to pall a bit; the plot moves slowly and rather predictably and the comedy is so broad-brush that it lost its appeal rather.  Inspector Steine's colossal idiocy and vanity became just annoying and the rest of the developments weren't funny enough to maintain the book.  I know that it is intentionally absurdly pantomimic and a parody of old-fashioned police dramas, but even Lynn Truss couldn't keep it going for me.

So, a decent beginning but overall I can't recommend this and I shan't be bothering with any more in what seems to be being set up for a series.

(My thanks to Bloomsbury Press for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Colin Watson - Plaster Sinners

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another Watson gem

Plaster Sinners is another Colin Watson gem.

This time, after Sgt. Sidney Love is slugged at an antiques auction, a rather Golden Age plot emerges (and is slyly winked at by Watson) involving the local "squire" and his family, long-lost jewels, dodgy inheritances and so on.  It's terrifically enjoyable, with Watson's trademark wry humour and penetratingly sharp characterisation.

This is perhaps more of a detective mystery and slightly less of a farcical comedy than some of Watson's others, but it's none the worse for that.  There's an excellent visiting Inspector from London and even the almost total absence of Miss Lucilla Teatime doesn’t dim the book's charm.  There's plenty of barbed social comment under the charm, too, with Watson having some very well-aimed swipes at the attitudes of the arrogant and privileged to others, including the police.

In short, this is a very good Colin Watson book, which is among the highest praise I can offer.  Very warmly recommended.

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

Claire Fuller - Bitter Orange

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good, but with reservations

I like Claire Fuller's work very much and Bitter Orange is a beautifully written novel of repression, loneliness, guilt and the quest for redemption.  It is good but I did have my reservations.

The book is told in the first person and set mainly in 1969 as an old and dying woman, Frances Jellico, recalls that time.  It is the story of how Frances, newly released from an all-consuming carer's role looking after her cruel and critical mother takes a job cataloguing some of the contents of a derelict country house.  An eccentric and rather bohemian couple are also working there and the stories of the three of them emerge as the summer progresses and Frances begins to experience new aspects of life.

It is very well done.  Fuller writes beautifully and again inhabits the mind of a thoughtfully and richly portrayed female narrator.  She creates a fine atmosphere of decay and a sense of impending catastrophe along with a wholly convincing sense of place, so the whole thing is very readable.  However, I wasn't always convinced by Frances's actions, the "twist" didn't come as much of a surprise and overall I wasn't sure Bitter Orange had said much new to me. 

I did enjoy Bitter Orange, but didn't quite grab me in the same way as the outstanding Our Endless Numbered Days and the very good Swimming Lessons.  Claire Fuller is a very fine writer and I can still recommend this, but with a slight note of reservation.

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

Colin Watson - Blue Murder

Rating: 4/5

Review:Very entertaining

Blue Murder is the tenth of Colin Watson's Flaxborough novels and it's another thoroughly enjoyable read.

This time, a celebrity journalist from a Fleet Street scandal-sheet and his small retinue arrive in Flaxborough intent, it seems, on exposing immoral goings-on in the town.  An almost farcical situation arises involving absurdities including a vindictive police constable, a duel and a dodgy kidnapping; eventually a death brings Inspector Purbright and his redoubtable team onto the scene and darker secrets begin to emerge.

As always, this is a decent mystery but it is Watson's dry, witty style and amusing but penetrating characterisation which provides the real enjoyment.  Just as a small example, as a young woman is trying to charm the editor of the local paper: "Mr Kebble found a chair for her.  She spiralled into it as if sitting down was a notable sensual accomplishment."  If you like that, you'll like the book.

The absence of Miss Lucilla Teatime meant that a little of the real zing of some other Flaxborough books wasn't there, but Blue Murder is still very entertaining and, like all Colin Watson's books, I can warmly recommend it.
 

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

Patrick O'Brian - HMS Surprise

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another brilliant instalment

This is now my third time reading through this brilliant series and I am reminded again how beautifully written and how wonderfully, addictively enjoyable they are.

HMS Surprise sees Jack given command of a small frigate, still evading imprisonment for debt and sent eventually to India and the Far East.  His and Stephen's troubles of the heart continue, but there is some thrilling action and plenty of absorbing other activity.  In other words, it's yet another fine, complex, involving O'Brian novel.

Patrick O'Brian is steeped in the period of the early 19th Century and his knowledge of the language, manners, politics, social mores and naval matters of the time is deep and wide. Combined with a magnificent gift for both prose and storytelling, it makes something very special indeed. The books are so perfectly paced, with some calmer, quieter but still engrossing passages and some quite thrilling action sequences. O'Brian's handling of language is masterly, with the dialogue being especially brilliant, but also things like the way his sentences become shorter and more staccato in the action passages, making them heart-poundingly exciting. There are also laugh-out-loud moments and an overall sense of sheer involvement and pleasure in reading.

I cannot recommend these books too highly. They are that rare thing; fine literature which are also books which I can't wait to read more of. Wonderful stuff.

Patrick O'Brian - Post Captain

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Quite brilliant

This is now my third time reading through this brilliant series and I am reminded again how beautifully written and how wonderfully, addictively enjoyable they are.

Post Captain is the second in the sequence and the book in which O'Brian really hit his stride, I think.  Jack Aubrey is a naval Commander during the Napoleonic Wars, struggling to find a ship, to avoid being arrested for debt and getting into all sorts of tangles with his heart, while his friend Stephen Maturin continues in his eccentric way to pursue his medical and philosophical studies and to work as an intelligence agent, while around them the politics, corruption and patronage of the time have to be negotiated.

Patrick O'Brian is steeped in the period (1803 in Post Captain) and his knowledge of the manners, politics, social mores and naval matters of the time is deep and wide.  Combined with a magnificent gift for both prose and storytelling, it makes something very special indeed.  The books are so perfectly paced, with some calmer, quieter but still engrossing passages and some quite thrilling action sequences.  O'Brian's handling of language is masterly, with the dialogue being especially brilliant, but also things like the way his sentences become shorter and more staccato in the action passages, making them heart-poundingly exciting.  There are also laugh-out-loud moments and an overall sense of sheer involvement and pleasure in reading.

I cannot recommend these books too highly.  They are that rare thing; fine literature which are also books which I can't wait to read more of.  Wonderful stuff.

Sofka Zinovieff - Putney

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Readable and insightful
 

I thought Putney was an excellently written book with a lot of very good things about it.  Ralph, a successful composer his late 20s becomes obsessed with Daphne, the 9-year-old daughter of his friend in a shambolic, bohemian early-1970s household.  This eventually develops into a sexual affair between them when Daphne is around 13.  Putney is therefore a story of grooming and child sexual abuse, which has now been so often used as a plot driver in books, sometimes lazily and exploitatively, that I am always very suspicious of it in a novel.  However, Sofka Zinovieff tackles a difficult subject with clarity, insight and thoughtfulness, and many things about the book are excellent. 

The narrative is from three points of view, those of Ralph, Daphne and her friend Jane and often in the form of memories recalled in the present day – again something which is very fashionable and could be very annoying, but Zinovieff writes so well and with such control that it works excellently.  In the first half of the book she generates a sense of the "affair" as it seemed to the two of them at the time, with Ralph's self-deluding justifications and Daphne's naïve excitement and adolescent love for him.  Around half way through there is a very clever change in tone about half way as it begins to be seen through clearer, adult eyes and the consequences begin to be revealed. 

It is convincing and disturbing.  I think Zinovieff is very insightful about the whole thing and sheds real light on historical sex abuse as a whole, including the often confused emotions of those involved and the responses of those affected by the revelations.  The prose is wonderfully evocative and readable and she creates utterly convincing characters, sense of place and atmosphere.  I did have some reservations: the first section was rather too long, so that I got bogged down a bit, and the ending had rather too much reliance on coincidence and a slightly sentimental conclusion which didn't really match the clear-eyed reality of most of the book.  Nonetheless, Putney is both an important and thoroughly readable book, which I can recommend.

Midas Dekkers - The Story Of Shit

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Badly flawed

I didn't like this book nearly as much as I had hoped to.  It's a genuinely interesting subject which, treated with real wit and the right tone can make a fascinating and readable book – as Richard Jones showed us in his excellent Call Of Nature.  As the style of the title here will tell you, Dekkers has written a rather different book.  New Scientist persuaded me to try this by saying that this "shows Dekkers once again to be in possession of a golden pen."  Well, maybe – but whatever his pen is made of, I wasn't keen on what he has written with it.

There are good things here.  Dekkers knows and has researched his subject, so there is a wealth of information on all sorts of aspects of defecation; the biological insights you'd expect, but also stuff about toilet paper, social aspects of toilet use, how defecating is treated in films and so on.  For me, though, this was swamped by the book's flaws.

One problem is  Dekkers's style which I found to be overblown and off-puttingly crude.  Obviously, this is not a delicate subject, and I can see that Dekkers is trying to break conventions and taboos – hence the deliberate coarseness of the title – but the book is so relentless in its use of crude language that it begins to grate, like a teenager setting out to annoy.  (This includes the c-word used as an anatomical descriptor, which, especially in a factual book from a male author, I find very questionable.)  Add to this a bombastic flow of sometimes very dodgy arguments and I really began to struggle.  Just as a single example:

"We still love with all our heart. That’s why we hate it so much when something goes wrong, and we’re willing to spend so much money to have our heart and blood vessels repaired. Heart surgeons and blood specialists share in the honour that accrues to their favourite organs.

Gastroenterologists gnash their teeth. They know that the only purpose of blood vessels is transport. Real life takes place in the intestines."

I'm afraid I find that plain silly.  We hate it so much when something goes wrong with our heart because it can kill us in short order – and then real life wouldn't be taking place in the intestines, would it?  Yes, the only purpose of blood vessels is transport, just as the only purpose of any vital organ is a small, specific but essential part of the complex processes of life – and that includes the intestines.  Dekkers asserts that "You are not your brain; you don’t love with your heart; and even the horniest man is more than his dick.  We are our intestines."  The first sentence is self-evidently true; the second is self-contradictory nonsense.  There was too much of this sort of stuff in the book for me to ignore.

So, not for me in either style or content.  The real and valuable science and analysis in the book were swamped by the flaws and I can't recommend it.

(My thanks to Text Publishing for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Alain Corbin - A History of Silence

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Slightly disappointing

I thought A History Of Silence was OK, but I expected more.  The book is a good idea and has a few nice illustrations, but it is essentially a large collection of quotations with only a little in the way of commentary.  Especially from a history professor, a greater degree of analysis and tracing of ideas would have made this a much richer book.

In his introduction…sorry, his Prelude, Corbin asserts that, "History has too often claimed to explain.  When it tackles the world of emotions, it must also and primarily make people feel."  Well, perhaps.  And even if true, I'm afraid Corbin didn't really do that for me.  There is a huge range of loosely grouped quotations about various aspects of silence, but presented in a way which, to me at least, was not so much about "making people feel" as showing how erudite the author is.  For example, on p.27 he paraphrases and quotes Saint-Exupery (a superlative writer who has often made me feel a great deal) on the silence of the desert: "When an aircraft flew over, the engine made a 'dense, all-engulfing sound behind which the landscape [streamed] by in silence, like a film '.  In the experience of this airman, the deepest silence was that of the telephone line signalling the loss of an aeroplane and its pilot."  Now, both elements of that are touching and thought-provoking, but the complete non-sequitur and lack of context of the telephone line robs it of almost all of Saint-Exupery's original power, I think.

When Corbin does analyse, it's by no means always credible, either.  On p.67, for example, talking of the present day: "A raised voice in a train is now seen as an irritant because travellers prefer peace and quiet.  This was not so right up to the middle of the twentieth century, when conversation in compartments seemed normal, even a sign of good manners.  Similarly, silence during a flight is welcome and breaking it can be seen as discourteous.  The same is true of the cinema."  Surely, few people object to normal conversations between neighbouring passengers; what is objectionable is the inconsiderate yelling into phones of people with no awareness of their immediate surroundings, but again Corbin fails to analyse or take context into account.  And bracketing the cinema with this is fatuous: we go to the cinema specifically to watch a film so it *is* discourteous to prevent others concentrating on or hearing that film.  It is wholly different from sitting on a train, where there is no common point of attention.

I could go on, but this review is already too long.  In summary, this is quite an interesting collection of quotations about silence, but little more.  As such, it's OK, but I can only give it a very qualified recommendation.

Colin Watson - One Man's Meat

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another Flaxborough gem

One Man's Meat, the ninth Flaxborough book, is another enormously enjoyable instalment in a marvellous series.

Here, following a death on a funfair ride which may or may not have been an accident, an elaborate story of marital disharmony, deception, double-crossing and skulduggery in the dog-food business unfolds.  It's perhaps slightly more of a crime mystery and less of a comedy than some of Watson's earlier books, but it's still very amusing and a great read.  Many of our favourite characters are here, doing what they do best – including the magnificent Miss Lucilla Teatime, who is a simply wondrous creation.  Watson's penetrating humour and shrewd, skewering observations are well in evidence and the book is written in his lovely, witty, readable prose,

If you've read Watson before, you probably won’t need me to tell you how good One Man's Meat is.  If you haven't, don't hesitate; this works fine as a stand-alone book but my advice is to begin at the start of the series with Coffin, Scarcely Used and savour the whole lot.  The series has been a truly joyful discovery for me and I can recommend this and all the others very warmly.

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