Jarred McGinnis - The Coward

 

 Rating: 5/5

Review:

A fine novel and a very good read

I thought The Coward was excellent. It is a tough read in places, but also funny, refreshingly honest and uplifting in places.

This is part memoir, part fiction (although I suspect more fiction than memoir); Jarred was a troubled, rebellious teenager whose mother has died and whose father is alcoholic. The book opens with him in his mid-20s, in hospital after a car accident which has left him permanently unable to walk and using a wheelchair. He phones his father, who is now sober, after a 10-year estrangement because he has no-one and nowhere else to go to. The book deals with Jarred’s coming to terms with disability, his shattered but possibly salvageable relationship with his father and his dealing with his own demons – which quite often make him a hard character to like.

It sounds unremittingly grim, but Jarred McGinnis writes extremely well, he structures the story very grippingly and injects enough wit and humour to make this an excellent read. He manages to avoid (and parody on occasion) the toxic positivity which seems to pervade so much discourse these days; being disabled, especially at first, can be emotionally and physically very tough and McGinnis shows both the personal aspects of this and the reactions of others to someone in a wheelchair, both good and bad. It’s clear-eyed and powerful but never self-pitying and nor is it a righteous polemic; it’s just a good story which also has important things to say about attitudes to disability, masculinity, resilience and the possibility of redemption – and what that may actually mean.

For me, The Coward was a very fine novel and a really good read which I can recommend very warmly.

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

Bill Fitzhugh - A Perfect Harvest

 

 

 Rating: 4/5

Review: 

Witty and satirical, but flawed

 

I enjoyed A Perfect Harvest, but I didn’t think it was quite as good as Heart Seizure, the first in this tetralogy.

It’s a good set-up: Miguel has a terminal diagnosis and decides that he wants to die by allowing a harvest of all his transplantable organs to allow others to live. This kicks off a colossal legal debate, plus all the usual irrational nonsense on social media...and the making of Miguel’s story into a musical.

Bill Fitzhugh is very good at satirizing all these things and he does it well here, with a good deal of wit and a very sharp eye for the hypocrisies and ethical evasiveness which surround the issue. I did, however have a problem with the narrative voice, that of a character whose involvement in the story doesn’t become clear for quite a while and which didn’t quite ring true to me. He addresses the reader directly quite often which can be effective, but this time I found it intrusive rather than adding to the story. The songs for the musical, while suitably tasteless, weren’t really quite as funny as they might have been, and some of the banter between Miguel and his friends didn’t work for me (although some of it was genuinely funny, to be fair).

I certainly wanted to read to the end of the book and there was enough here to round a 3.5-star rating up to 4, but I can’t recommend it unreservedly.

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

Tim Harford - How To Make The World Add Up

 

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review: 

Fascinating and very readable

I thought How To Make The World Add Up was excellent. I expected to read a chapter or two, take a break and come back to it as I often do with dense books about science or maths, but in fact I was hooked and read it with huge enjoyment from beginning to end.

Tim Harford’s message is that statistics are a vital tool in understanding the world, but that we need to be informed, thoughtful interpreters of what we are told. We must be aware of the way in which statistics and their presentation can be misleading, either deliberately or inadvertently, and also of our own prejudices and biases in how we receive and respond to what we hear and see. Just as one example, he points out that we often respond to a statistic which supports a belief with “Can I believe this?” but to one that apparently contradicts what we want to believe with “Do I have to believe this?” which leads to very different standards of rigour when we consider them.

It’s a very important and timely message. I love that Harford isn’t just trying to debunk bogus or misleading statistical claims (although he is very good at pointing out some tactics used by those wishing to distort or deceive), but emphasises the essential role good, solid statistical data and their analysis play in our lives. He gives us ten rules to apply when confronted with a statistic to try to decide on its veracity and usefulness. They are excellent, thoughtful rules which have deepened my understanding of the world, for which I am very grateful.

Tim Harford is an excellent communicator about statistics, as fellow Loyal Listeners to his Radio 4 programme, More Or Less, will know. I think he is even better in writing, partly because he has a chance to develop his engaging style a little more and partly because the humour is genuinely humorous, while it can feel a little laboured in the broadcasts. Whatever the reason, this is a pleasure to read; it is clear, thoughtful, witty, wise, balanced and very, very interesting. Very warmly recommended.

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

Marisha Pessl - Special Topics In Calamity Physics

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

Exceptionally good 

 

Like a lot of people, I thought Special Topics In Calamity Physics was excellent, and it probably doesn’t need yet another detailed review from me, but for what it’s worth…

The outline and plot are given in the publisher’s blurb and I wouldn’t want to give more away; frankly, the idea of another book about adolescent students at a flashy American school and a charismatic, unorthodox teacher sounds thoroughly unprepossessing, but I was hooked from the start by the narrative voice of Blue, a geeky daughter of a political science lecturer who is incredibly charismatic but never stays anywhere for more than a year or so. I found her utterly engaging and her voice managed to make inner life and external events wonderfully convincing with her slightly eccentric but completely relatable view of things. There are also some profound observations about relationships, plus politics and other things as Blue consistently cites both real and imaginary authors and works – a quirk which I enjoyed very much.

I found the plot, which is very slow to develop, secondary to all this but Marisha Pessl is a very skilled storyteller so it held my attention very well and I was surprised by how engaged I was. I think she struggled a little with a plausible ending, but I liked the ambiguity with which she left it.

I suspect that this is a book which you will either love or dislike intensely, and that you will know which within a couple of chapters. I loved it and personally I can recommend it very warmly indeed.

Nigel Farndale - The Dictator's Muse

 

Rating: 3/5

Review:

I was slightly underwhelmed by The Dictator’s Muse. I enjoyed The Blasphemer very much but I didn’t think this had quite the same focus or impact.

I’m very cautious about reading novels about the Nazi era, but Leni Riefenstahl is an interesting and complex subject and I trusted Nigel Farndale to write a well researched and non-exploitative book about her. I was right in that the research and tone were good, but this book is only rather tangentially about Riefenstahl. She is a major character, but the real focus of the book is a tangled love triangle between Connie, an aristocratic woman, Kim, a working class athlete who is secretive about both his class and his Jewish roots and Alun, a passionate communist. These three become involved in the politics of the period leading up to the 1936 Berlin Olympics; Kim joins Moseley’s blackshirts because he needs their sponsorship to compete and Alun does the same to infiltrate and subvert the movement.

This dominates much of the novel, with Riefenstahl playing an important but not a central role. I was disappointed by this, especially as I found the fictional characters a little implausible; they’re certainly not stereotypes, but they do feel rather familiar and slightly artificial, as though they have been created specifically to illustrate the points which Farndale is making. He does have things to say about love, conflicts of loyalty, extremism and whether ends justify means, for example, but I wasn’t sure I was getting anything really new here. Add to this a slightly clunky structure of the 1936 action being framed by a 21st-Century researcher making some slightly implausible discoveries about Riefenstahl and the book wasn’t as insightful as I’d hoped.

On the plus side, Farndale writes well, the prose carries you along nicely, there are some very gripping scenes – a quietly terrifying visit from Heydrich, for example - and I did read to the end. It’s by no means a bad book and plenty of people will enjoy it, I suspect; it’s just that I’d hoped for more.

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

Annalena McAfee - Nightshade

 

Rating: 2/5

 

Review:

Not for me 

I’m afraid I gave up on Nightshade fairly early, which I seldom do. I just couldn’t be doing with a somewhat self-consciously “literary” novel about wealthy, arty people in London and there wasn’t enough content here to keep me going.

Eve is a successful botanical artist who was married to an extremely successful (and therefore rich) architect before things began to go horribly wrong. She is walking through London at night, thinking abut things...and walking and thinking and reminiscing and walking. I found it a forced device which became increasingly irritating. Not only that, what Eve was thinking about didn’t interest me much, either. Her life in New York, her gorgeous little place in Wales and so on, and then the rather self-obsessed way she destroyed it all and the “excesses of the contemporary art world”, as the blurb has it. None of it engaged me at all, nor did I find much original in what was being said.

The prose is just that bit too mannered and has a sense of giving the reader coy little glances every so often to make sure we’re noticing how terribly clever it is. For example, Eve stopping thinking about gardening in Wales is described as “Eve cast herself out of the garden, like her original namesake, turning her back on Arcadia to walk naked in the wilderness…”. It’s overdone for me, and I know it’s a metaphor, but “naked in the wilderness” doesn’t really work when she’s actually walking in London, warmly dressed at midnight near Christmas, does it? Or, in a paragraph beginning “There are so many ways of measuring a life,” we get this: “Velocity was another calculation – from the langorous slo-mo of childhood, cranking up to the adolescent’s brisk, bright Super-8 narrative, accelerating on to the breathless blur of old age, swift as a blink-and-you’ll-miss it credit sequence.” There’s a lot of this, and although I see what she means, it’s not very original and seems very contrived to me, from the unsubtle alliteration to “Super-8 narrative.”

Enough. I didn’t like it. I tried it partly because of warm endorsements from some fine writers; this was before I discovered that Annalena McAfee has been a literary editor at both the Guardian and The Financial Times, which may mean that the endorsements are possibly not quite as disinterested and objective as one may wish. Anyway, it certainly wasn’t for me.

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

Bill Fitzhugh - Heart Seizure

 

 Rating: 4/5

Review:

Very entertaining

 

I thoroughly enjoyed Heart Seizure. The plot is completely crackers but is still engaging and entertaining and there is some blazing satire of several aspects of life in the USA, most notably healthcare, politics and the media.

The story concerns Spence and his brother Boyd who have very different views of the world, and their mother Rose who is elderly and in immediate need of a heart transplant. She and the President have the same rare blood type and it turns out that the President suddenly needs the heart allocated to Rose. An imbroglio develops which snowballs to immense proportions as various security agencies and political interests become involved and Spence, Boyd, Rose and a growing number of others go on the run.

It works, in the way that completely silly plots sometimes can, and it’s buoyed by real wit, engaging characters, good dialogue (which is sometimes very funny in itself) and the aforementioned scathing satire. I found it a very enjoyable read indeed which also had some important points to make – some of which have become even more important in the almost 20 years since the book was written. I can recommend this warmly and I’ll be looking out for more in this tetralogy.

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