Bill Fitzhugh - Pest Control

 

 Rating: 4/5

Review:

Very entertaining

 

I enjoyed Pest Control. It is well written and amusing, if bonkers. It has some of the wit and craziness of Carl Hiaasen about it and I suspect if you like Hiaasen, you’ll like this.

Bob Dillon (!) is an entomologist who is somewhat obsessed with bugs and dreams of starting an environmentally-friendly pest extermination business. By a somewhat ridiculous chain of misunderstandings he is hired as a hit man (although he doesn’t realise it) and then becomes the target of the world’s top assassins. It’s a good story if you don’t expect grim realism and it is full of comic episodes. Some are very funny, some a little less so, but I found it very entertaining overall.

Bill Fitzhugh uses his character’s name to sneak in a huge array of references to Dylan titles and lyrics. Again, some are neat and smile-inducing, while the unsubtle gratuitousness of others does grate a bit. For example, I liked one trapped characters saying to another “There must be some way out of here,” and a reminiscence about being lost one time in Juarez in the rain, which fitted the narrative, but I could have done without a wholly gratuitous description of a passer-by wearing a leopardskin pillbox hat or character shooting someone and then yelling, “Those were shots of love! Infidel!”

Minor reservations aside, I did find this a very entertaining read overall and I’ll definitely try some more of Bill Fitzhugh’s books. Recommended.

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

 

Michelle Magorian - Goodnight Mister Tom

 

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

Involving and touching

 

I enjoyed Goodnight Mister Tom, but wasn’t quite as unreservedly enthusiastic as many reviewers.

The story is of an abused and traumatised young boy evacuated to a small village at the start of the Second World War, where he is taken in by a grumpy, reclusive old man and of how they both heal as they grow to love each other. It could have been sickeningly sentimental, but is very well done so that it is actually touching and humane. Tom Oakley didn’t actually seem that forbidding to me at the start, but William’s bemusement in the face of friendship and kindness was very convincing, as were his slow acceptance of the goodness of the people around him and his discoveries about himself.

The book isn’t all sweetness and redemption; there is sorrow and loss, plus one very dark episode, but overall but is a warm and fulfilling tale. I did think that it ran out of steam rather in the closing chapters; a seaside holiday was almost Enid Blyton-esque in its idyll and Will’s final coming to terms with what has happened to him didn’t ring nearly as true as the earlier parts. Nonetheless, this is an involving and touching book which I can recommend.

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

Richard Thompson - Beeswing

 

Rating: 4/5

Review:

A very readable history

I enjoyed Beeswing very much, although I did think there was something missing at its emotional core.

Richard Thompson writes very well, so the book is readable and enjoyable throughout. His account of his early years and of the formation and progress of Fairport Convention is fascinating, especially for those fans like me who spent their pocket money on What We Did On Our Holidays, Liege and Lief and the others as they came out. There is a fine picture of the life of a touring band in those days and Thompson’s friendship with and respect for many of his fellow musicians is plain – including Martin Lamble, whose tragic death in that terrible crash is very touchingly evoked. He also says straight out that the music business is full of...er...a vulgarity meaning the outlet from the digestive tract, although he doesn’t indulge in bitching about individuals. It’s all fascinating stuff to any RT or Fairport fan.

What we don’t get is much in the way of self-revelation. He talks about his personal life in a detached matter-of-fact way (other than about his Sufism, which is extremely interesting, if a little briefly dealt with). The well-documented family and marital upheavals are barely touched on, and although it’s probably unfair to expect too much here, this determined silence does leave something of a hole at the heart of the book, I think.

Nonetheless, this is a very good read which I can warmly recommend.

Edward St. Aubyn - Double Blind

 

Rating:2/5

 

Review:

Very disappointing 

I have enjoyed Edward St. Aubyn’s work in the past but I was very disappointed in Double Blind – so much so that I gave up before the end.

The story is of three friends and associated characters and is well summarised in the publishers’ blurb, as two of them embark on a deep love affair and another becomes seriously ill with a brain tumour. St. Aubyn uses this on which to hang a lot (and I mean a lot) of talk and internal monologue about the nature of science, the roles of genetics and environment in human development, psychoanalysis, ecology, mental illness, where and how brain activity becomes consciousness...and so on.

He writes well (of course), although I found the dialogue a bit clunky at times, with things like this when discussing memories: “ ‘I’ve heard that some people can catch a ride on a madeleine,’ said Hunter, ‘but the French already have the patent on that low-tech time machine.’ ” Really? As a spontaneous remark in a discussion? Hmm. I also found some of the characterisation a bit crude, especially the thoroughly unsubtle contrast between Francis, the poorly paid but sincere ecological researcher who is lovely, mindful and holistic, and Howard, the billionaire grasping, exploitative, drug-riddled, reductionist sexual predator.

What really got me, though, was the sheer hogwash talked about science in places. There follows a lengthy quotation from the book which both gives a flavour of its style and content and also illustrate why I got so annoyed with it:

“Space, instead of being a desolate interval between pinpricks of sentience, must be the conscious medium in which these more obvious forms of consciousness were concentrated. If matter was not inherently conscious, then one had to fall back on the official story that the pinpricks of sentience existed in an otherwise inanimate universe thanks to a mind-numbingly long poker game in which the elements of the Periodic Table had been dealt out again and again until one bit of deadness haphazardly acquired the Full House of life, and then only a few million hands later, the Royal Flush of consciousness. This Royal Flush Theory was defended by three rowdy musketeers: Randomness, Complexity and Emergence. Hurrah! They came with all the plumage and the inane bravado of swashbuckling heroes who love nothing better than to get themselves into an impossible position: fighting for reductionism’s attempt to subsume the irreducible. Despite all their rooftop antics, the only proposition they really had to offer was that luck multiplied by time transubstantiated matter. It was like claiming that if a child played Lego for long enough her mother might come down one day and find a blue whale emerging from the carpet. After the initial struggle to get her smartphone back from the whale in which enough consciousness had emerged for it to google the location of the nearest beach, and after telling her daughter to please stop playing with that Lego set, a certain perplexity might set in about how matter had rearranged itself so unexpectedly. The authoritative answer would be that it had become complex thanks to Complexity, and that once Complexity passed a critical threshold, consciousness emerged thanks to Emergence, and that it was forbidden to think that consciousness was involved at any earlier stage because Randomness had been placed there to banish superstition. This explanation might not strike the puzzled parent as entirely persuasive. It was, after all, a creation myth with many rivals.”

And:

“Science had swept away these childish stories of sneezing gods and dreaming gods, of divine artists and divine sperm, of golden rain and copulating swans, in order to place some thoroughly sanitised but equally non-explanatory concepts at the inception of its narratives.”

And

“How It Began, a subject to which the only coherent response was silence.”

This is not the place for a detailed thesis on the philosophy of science, but I will say that

a) Evolution is a mind-numbingly long poker game, but the theory stands up to every test to which it is subjected, and

b) Current theories about the origins of the universe are most certainly not Creation Myths. They have both a logical, evidential structure and, vitally, predictive power. The “non-explanatory concepts” are simply statements that our knowledge is incomplete - but one of science’s great strengths is that it acknowledges when it doesn’t know things but strives to learn more. The science which works on the origin of the universe has brought us, among many, many other things, the internet and Covid vaccines. Creation myths have not. And the idea that our only response to the question of how it all began should be silence...well, ironically, words fail me.

Enough. I ploughed on through a good deal more of this stuff in a wide range of subjects but found it deeply unsatisfying and sometimes thoroughly annoying. Eventually I decided that life was too short. There are some good things about this book, but there is also a good deal of utter hogwash. I expected better from Edward St. Aubyn and I can’t recommend this.

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

Oliver Harris - A Shadow Intelligence

 

 Rating: 5/5

Review: Very impressive

I thought A Shadow Intelligence was excellent. It is literate, exciting, very well researched and convincing.

Elliot Kane is an agent for British Intelligence. He is something of a superman, in that he speaks lots of arcane languages well enough to recognise regional dialects, has all sorts of technical and semi-criminal skills, knows a huge number of extremely influential people and so on. However, I didn’t find this too far-fetched; his background is sketched in skilfully and convincingly enough to account for his current abilities.

Kane is suddenly pulled out of a long-term spying mission in the Middle East to find that a colleague and lover is missing. He discovers enough to follow her to Kazakhstan where a very complex web of intrigue emerges in which Oliver Harris paints a very realistic picture of the clandestine complexities of modern geopolitics. Huge multinationals, governments, private security companies, local warlords and so on all jockey, cheat and lie for their own advantage and Kane becomes caught in the middle.

It’s a somewhat labyrinthine plot with a lot of characters and organisations in play, which can become a little bewildering at times, but it’s also very convincing. Harris portrays the background in Kazakhstan excellently. He is also very, very good on the information war and the use of fake imagery and stories to foment unrest and to justify unjustifiable actions. The writing is very good, the action plausible and the characters generally very believable. I was thoroughly engrossed and also relieved by the absence of many clichés of the genre. It was an excellent read with some real content, too, and I will definitely read Ascension, the next in the series. Warmly recommended.

Anita Loos - Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

Hilariously brilliant 

 

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is just brilliant. It’s a comic gem – and far, far better than the film even though the film is good.

Anita Loos writes in Lorelei’s voice as she takes advantage of her devastating good looks to charm men into doing whatever she wants including giving her gifts of diamonds to alleviate her headaches and acquitting her of murder after “Mr Jennings became shot.” It is consistently hilarious, from her visiting the Eyefull Tower to Dr. Froyd telling her that she needs to cultivate some inhibitions, with Lorelei’s solecisms and faux naiveté a constant delight. (James Joyce once told his publisher he wasn't making any progress on his book because he had been reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for three whole days and when George Santayana was asked to name the best book of philosophy written by an American, he is said to have answered “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”)

I first read this sometime in the early 1980s and it is still just as good after 40 years. Very, very warmly recommended.

Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

 

 Rating: 4/5

Review:

Extraordinary and haunting

 

This is another extraordinary and haunting book from Cormac McCarthy. It’s not as consistently brilliant as All The Pretty Horses, but it is still full of remarkable language, exceptional imagery and powerful depictions of youthful masculinity adrift.

 

There are similarities to All The Pretty Horses, as the young Billy, with and without his brother Boyd, ventures across the border from the USA into Mexico seeking various things, some tangible and some not. The plot is hard to summarise and it sprawls a bit sometimes, but it’s a story of a young man adrift in the world, unsure of whom to rely on and of what really matters. Much of the time he seems to be pursuing things or ideas of things which he thinks will bring him some peace. It is often bleak and often reflective; McCarthy never hammers any message home, but important reflections emerge strongly from his use of language and out of a fantastically evoked background. There is something completely compelling about the rhythmic, almost biblical prose whose only punctuation is full stops and question marks. There is also an almost Zen-like quality to the quietly insistent descriptions of both the minutiae and immensities of things and places giving rise to sentences like this, as Billy wakes in the night:

“He could hear the horse step in its hobbles and hear the grass rip softly in the horse’s mouth and hear it breathing or the toss of its tail and he saw afar to the south beyond the Hatchet Mountains the flare of lightning over Mexico and he knew that he would not be buried in this valley but in some distant place among strangers and he looked out to where the grass was running in the wind under the cold starlight as if it were the earth itself hurtling headlong and he said softly before he slept again that the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty.”

There are also beautifully painted contrasts between the great hospitality and generosity of the people and also the violence and lawlessness of Mexico in the time before the Second World War, the laconic language of the two American brothers and the lengthy philosophical discourse of the Mexicans, and much more besides.

I did find the first third of the book hard going at times and there are some longeurs later on, too – party because those discourses by random strangers became a bit much from time to time. However, I remained gripped and sometimes very moved and, after a suitable break to digest this one, will certainly read Cities Of The Plain, the third in the trilogy. Recommended.

Antonia Fraser - Quiet As A Nun

 

Rating: 2/5

 

Review:

Disappointing

 

This was a recommendation, but I’m afraid I was pretty unimpressed.

Jemima Shore, TV investigative journalist and presenter, is asked by her old convent school to look into the somewhat dodgy death of one of the nuns. Secrets emerge about wills, land deals and so on which may threaten the existence of the convent, and more skulduggery ensues as Jemima gets closer to the truth.

Antonia Fraser writes well (of course) and sets this mystery in a community of nuns and their pupils which is quite well drawn, if somewhat rose-tinted given what we now know about some convent education. However, I found Jemima Shore an insipid character and her narrative voice rather dull and uninspiring. The plot creaked pretty badly, with some obvious answers to “mysterious” goings on, some very hackneyed suspense which didn’t convince, an absurd confrontation with the villain (who speaks like a ridiculous caricature of a slimy villain) and an ending which is wholly predictable in its convenience.

I did finish the book, but I was glad to get to the end and probably won’t be going back for more. I can’t recommend it.

Pat Barker - The Women Of Troy

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

Very good

I thought The Women Of Troy was very good. It’s perhaps not quite as brilliant as its predecessor, The Silence Of The Girls, but Pat Barker has produced another superbly told, humane and completely real story here as she continues her retelling of the fall of Troy and its aftermath through the eyes of Briseis, once Achilles’ Prize Of Honour, now married to Achilles friend.

The events here are, of course, very well documented in the Iliad, the Aeneid and in countless retellings since. What makes this special for me is Barker’s remarkable ability to convey the human experience of her characters, most notably the Trojan women who are now enslaved by the Greeks. The Greeks themselves are stranded on the plain of Troy by a persistent hostile wind and the growing atmosphere of discontent, lawlessness and violence is beautifully evoked – partly in the behaviour of the men, but most powerfully in its effect on the women, who are never safe from male whim and violence. It’s a timely portrayal which has strong echoes today, but one which is never heavy-handed which makes its impact all the greater for me.

All of this is done in lovely, unflashy prose. It is writing which is extremely evocative without ever drawing attention to itself, so the real, day-to-day experience of these characters from a heroic tale is quite remarkably vivid. Briseis’s voice is especially good, with her intelligent observation of the monstrous inhumanity with which the women are treated, coupled with her fatalistic acceptance that she cannot resist it and her quiet, determined resilience. Once or twice there is a flash of genuine anger, for example when the Greek men are concerned because many women, including priestesses, were raped in temples and that the desecration of the temples has angered the gods. “B- that, I thought, what about the women?” is Briseis’s response and it hits you in the face. Her characters are excellently portrayed – especially the adolescent Pyrrhus, for me. There are also some genuinely moving moments, like the birth of a child to a slave and a long-delayed hero’s funeral.

Perhaps because the idea is now more familiar, this didn’t have quite the impact of The Silence Of The Girls for me, but it’s still an excellent, engrossing read with some very important content, expertly developed. Warmly ecommended.