Alastair Bruce - Boy On The Wire

Rating: 3.5/5

Review: 
Well written but flawed

I thought Alastair Bruce's Wall Of Days was excellent and I was hoping for great things from this novel.  It's not bad, and has some excellent things about it, but overall I found it a bit of a disappointment, I'm afraid.

It's a difficult book to summarize.  It is narrated from various points of view at different times - sometimes in the third person, sometimes in the first – and concerns John Hyde who is now a successful London banker.   At the age of eight he witnessed the death of his older brother in a fall and has always held his other brother responsible.  The book concerns his shattered family and his relationship (or lack of relationship) with them, and how returning memories may bring trauma and possible healing.

It's a haunting book, almost nightmarish book at times, in which there is little plot to speak of.  Bruce is concerned with the nature of memory, of how memories both false and true can affect our lives and of how lives may be impacted by shattering events, even events of long ago.  Beginning quietly, he creates a strange, semi-hallucinatory world in which reality, memory and illusion become indistinguishable – and if you've read Wall Of days you will know what I mean.  He's brilliant at it, using short, direct sentences with few adverbs or adjectives and almost nothing in the way of simile or metaphor.  It's extremely effective, but this time I think Bruce overdoes it.  The book is only just over 200 pages long, but even so, the lengthy central section narrated by John in the first person feels too long.  The atmosphere of isolated, nightmarish haunting by lost memories, never being sure what is real and what is imagined is built slowly and devastatingly, but blimey – it does go on.  Even the climax felt a bit dragged out, not least because it seemed fairly clear from early in the book what was likely to be revealed.  (And don’t look for neatly tied-up endings, by the way.)

I rather felt that this was a less successful attempt to tread similar ground to Wall Of Days, and although I am glad to have read it and some bits will stay with me, I have only reluctantly rounded 3.5 stars up to four on the grounds that it's very well written and three stars seems churlish.  I can only recommend this with reservations.

Peter Ackroyd - The Death Of King Arthur

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Disappointing

I have been an enthusiast for the Arthurian legends ever since reading Roger Lancelyn Green as a child, and I have enjoyed many of Peter Ackroyd’s previous books so was looking forward to this very much.  Sadly it was a considerable disappointment.  It is an abridgement and “translation” of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, but I am afraid that it doesn’t really capture Malory’s spirit, nor the high, myth-like drama of the tales of magic and flawed heroes.

Ackroyd’s prose is generally very flat which robs these odd stories of their magical air, so that much of the book seems like a series of rather similar vignettes involving knights jousting, enchantments and deceptions, ladies whose virtue is in peril and so on.  The Quest for the Grail and the Death of Arthur do work better, but still failed to grip or involve me in any way.  Part of the problem is a noticeable inconsistency in language – a real surprise from such an accomplished writer as Peter Ackroyd.  For example, in the same paragraph at the start of the Quest for the Grail we get Arthur saying in a flat modern vernacular “…you have come close to killing me by making that vow…” and then “Why should I not grieve?” – two wholly different styles.  A few pages later Galahad says “I await your return with interest,” which sounds more like the close of a modern business letter than a knight talking to a loved friend who is going to mortal peril.  I’m afraid it just didn’t work for me.

I am sorry to be so critical of a book I expected to like very much, but it’s not a patch on Malory’s original.  This will do as a serviceable summary of Malory for reference, but for a really involving (if eccentric and personal) re-working of the Arthurian legends, I’d recommend T.H. White’s fabulous The Once And Future King.

Natalie Young - Season to Taste

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Adventurous and well written, but unsatisfying

I had really hoped to like this book, but I'm afraid I didn't really.  It is well written had its moments but overall I found it quite a slog and didn't really think it amounted to all that much.

The book is certainly shocking, and all the reviews saying it will be one of the most talked about books of 2014 may be right for that reason.  The narrative begins with Lizzie Prain killing her husband of 30 years, dismembering him with axe and saw, freezing the parts and then gradually cooking and eating every scrap.  This is all described in detail – we get the severed bone and shiny bits of cartilage hanging out of a severed joint, for example – so it's not for the faint-hearted.  Interspersed with this are Lizzie's attempts to carry on her life and reminiscences of how she ended up here, and her "Notes to self" on how to cope, written rather like recipe instructions. 

As an idea it has real potential and Natalie Young can write very well, but after a few chapters I found it rather hard going.  The idea of roasting her husband's hand with olive oil and seasoning, for example, presented in a matter-of-fact way like any other recipe is very effective, and for the first couple of times it continues to have impact. However, as the narrative progresses Young describes how Lizzie feels horribly over-full of indigestible meat and fat - and I began to know what she meant as I had to read in detail about yet another piece being prepared, cooked and eaten.  There is precious little leaven of humour, humanity or even mordant wit to make it all more digestible, but my biggest problem with the book was that I couldn't see what the author was really driving at.  There is a good sense of a marriage gone stale and of a woman with little self-confidence whose life has reached a dead end, but there's not much new insight here, really.  Perhaps I am just an imperceptive reader but it didn't seem to have much real substance other than a few shrewd observations and real shock value and I couldn't really see the point in the end..

I'm sorry to be critical of an adventurous and well written book, but once I had finished it I was just glad to have managed to get through it and wasn't left with much…I was going to say "much to chew on," but perhaps that's not the most appropriate phrase.  Others have enjoyed this somewhat more than me, but I can only give it a lukewarm recommendation.

Kim Zupan - The Ploughmen

Rating: 5/5

Review: 
Readable and rewarding

I thought this was an excellent book. It is dark and often pretty bleak, but it is very well written and constructed. I found it involving and convincing and it left me with plenty to think about. The story is set in a small, isolated community in Montana where John Gload, an elderly serial killer, has finally been arrested and is awaiting trial. The core of the book is the conversations and relationship between Gload and Valentine Millimaki, a policeman whose marriage is disintegrating and whose job it is to guard Gload and to try to get him to reveal more about his crimes.

I admit that this may not sound the most tempting of prospects, but I found it very engrossing. Characters are exceptionally well painted, the feel of Montana is brilliantly evoked and there is a slowly building tension which sometimes made me keep reading after I should have stopped and done something else. Kim Zupan writes in rather heightened language which is generally very effective in conveying character, place and events. He does overdo it occasionally; the continual use of "atop" was a bit wearing, and having "roseous" and "griseous" within a page of each other might be thought a little OTT, for example, but such things are rare. Set against that are things like a character calmly looking at flowers while awaiting a grim fate and seeing, "…breaching the tulips, nodding trumpets of the daffodils, yellow beyond yellow in the sun." It's excellent prose put to the service of the story and I enjoyed it very much.

This is absolutely not a routine serial killer thriller. It is a dark, contemplative, thoughtful book full of the kind of moral ambiguity which leaves you thinking about all sorts of things. If you like a well-written, intelligent novel then I warmly recommend this. I found it readable and extremely rewarding.

Jim Read - Justin Fashanu: The Biography

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent, insightful biography

Football biographies are not something I normally read because so many of them are dreadful, but this is an excellent, readable and in places genuinely gripping book. It is a very well written and thoroughly researched biography of a highly complex sportsman and also paints a vivid and subtle picture of his influence on the history of race relations and of attitudes to gays and lesbians in Britain.

Fashanu's story is itself a fascinating one as a black player at a time when there were very few of them in Britain and crude racism was often unchallenged, and then as the only openly gay footballer anywhere in the world. Jim Read writes very intelligently and refuses to resort to assumption or stereotype in assessing the prejudices faced by Fashanu. He writes, for example, of the culture of banter in sport and of the difference between "...teasing intended to include and taunting intended to exclude." Insights like this give the book balance and a remarkable depth of understanding both of Fashanu himself and of other players, managers and fans. Read does not spare bigoted fans or people like Brian Clough whose homophobic bullying did Fashanu so much damage, but also reports times like when Fashanu played for Airdrie whose fans - a notoriously tough bunch - affectionately chanted "He's black, he's gay, he plays for Air-da-ray, Fashanu, Fashanu," and includes an eloquent photograph of his Airdrie team-mates embracing him after scoring. It is a real achievement to paint a complex picture so clearly.

Fashanu himself was equally complex. Evidence from a lot of people who knew him shows that he could be charming, generous of spirit and kind, but could also be a manipulative, grasping, cruel, self-serving liar. (A one point Read allows himself the wry comment, "When it comes to Justin Fashanu and The Sun it is difficult to figure out the truth.") These aspects are very well portrayed, as is the inner conflict Fashanu felt between his sexuality and his Christian faith, and the tragic story of the weeks leading up to his suicide held me absolutely gripped.

This is in a different league (sorry) to the average sporting biography and sheds genuine and sometimes moving light not only on the story of a unique sportsman but on attitudes in society. There is none of the wading through the endless inconsequential accounts of matches found in a lot of these books. Instead I found myself reading passages like this when Fashanu, playing for Torquay United against West Bromwich was subjected to virulent homophobic chanting by the opposition fans. He scored right in front of them which silenced them completely. Read writes, "...a more profound story was emerging from the action. Fashanu crashed the ball into the net and, in that one moment, the Torquay fans felt a little less bashful about their gay player, the West Bromwich fans a little less scornful. A stereotype was subverted. A brave man was pushing back prejudice." I found that genuinely moving, and the book is full of such insights.

I recommend this very warmly - and not just to those interested in football. This is a story of universal interest and importance, done full justice in a very fine biography.

Jane Shemilt - The Drowning Lesson

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Rather generic and unengaging

I'm afraid I got a bit fed up with this book.  It's competently written and has its good points, but overall I found it generic, a bit unconvincing and rather predictable in many ways.

The story is narrated by Emma, a high-powered obstetric surgeon who begins to realise that she is neglecting her family due to being so ambitious and driven at work, so agrees to go with the family to Botswana where her husband has been offered an important research post.  It is revealed in the first couple of pages that when they get there her baby son is taken from his cot, which drives the plot.

The book is written in the now apparently obligatory fractured time-frame with the circumstances leading up to the abduction intercut with events afterwards, with added flashbacks to childhood which give convenient pop-psychological explanations for Emma's driven competitiveness.  It all feels very formulaic, I'm afraid.  I do admire Jane Shemilt for creating a rather unsympathetic protagonist, which is a brave move, and the medical background is very well portrayed, but I eventually got rather bored.  The style felt like so many other creative-writing-course-influenced books, with the same little tropes and tics of vocabulary and structure, the plot wasn't that gripping and neither the characters nor the background were sufficiently well drawn to engage me properly.  And, of course, Emma learns her Important Life Lesson by the end.

This isn't dreadful, by any means. It is competently written and does have some merits, but overall I found it rather dull and I can't really recommend it.

Tom McCarthy - Satin Island

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Self-satisfied tedium

For some time, the Booker Shortlist had a reputation for obscure books which are inaccessible to most people and which a small clique claim to enjoy in order to make themselves look good.  This isn't fair because there have been some superb, readable novels on the Shortlist for years now – but I'm afraid I thought this was an example of just the sort of stuff that puts a lot of readers off the Booker nominees.  I am happy to work hard at understanding difficult but worthwhile novels which say something important, I certainly don't insist on a strong plot or likeable characters or any of that sort of thing, but some sense that I'm doing a little more than wandering around the author's head while he invites us to admire his own brilliance would be welcome.

Satin Island is narrated by a character who introduces himself as U – which rather sets the tone.  "Me? Call me U."  See what he did there?  Echoes Moby Dick, makes it sound like "call me you," gives the narrator a single-letter name like some famous characters in Kafka and other places – which is fine in a way, but the whole book has that same self-satisfied, show-offy tone and it really began to get wearing.

U is a Corporate Anthropologist, working for a rather sinister, nebulous Company (named only as that) who are themselves working on a rather sinister, nebulous Koob-Sassen Project.  This seems to be a global means of influencing everything somehow, but we never get more than a few obscure references…and so on.  Much of the book is U's reflections on what he sees around him from an anthropological point of view while he himself seems very disconnected from any human activity or emotion.  He will speculate for pages about the nature of parachutes, for example, but whenever he visits his partner he simply reports "we had sex" with no engagement at all.  (It's that old existentialist alienation again – oh good!)  There is an awful lot of this stuff.

There is, to be fair, real intellectual content here; McCarthy is extremely well read and knowledgeable about anthropology and a lot of other things – and he's very keen to let us know it.  There's also a lot of stuff that sounds profound but isn't, like, "Parachutes, as a rule, are badly treated by their human masters: granted false release and then immediately yanked back into servitude, into yoked bondage."  That is a lovely sentence, there's a clever interaction of yanked and yoked and so on, but as anything more than a poetic metaphor out of context it doesn't add up to much.  That's how I felt about much of the book.

I eventually got so fed up that I did something I never normally do; I read some other reviews to try to see whether I was missing something here.  I came across this from Duncan White in The Telegraph: "McCarthy positions us, as readers, with his characters: in pursuit of a fugitive epiphany we stage our own intricate re-enactment."  Well, if that sentence makes sense to you, then you may well enjoy reading this while pursuing your fugitive epiphany and staging your own intricate re-enactment. 

My translation of it is: "We have no idea what the point of this is and you have to make it up yourself," and ersonally, I eventually found this book so far up itself that it was gazing out between its own teeth.  It's fine to react against the Creative-Writing-Course-driven mainstream, but you do need to engage the reader on some level. This didn't engage me at all and, fine writing and intelligence notwithstanding, in the end I found Satin Island an infuriating waste of time.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)