Joan Didion - Slouching Towards Bethlehem

 

Rating: 3/5

 

Review:

Excellent writing, less good content 

 

I find it hard to rate this collection of essays. In many ways they are excellent because Joan Didion was a very fine writer; her style is clear, precise, unsensational and very readable and she took a lot of trouble to talk to her subjects so there is real content here rather than a lot of authorial waffle as in a lot of such essays.

Nonetheless, I found the collection a bit unsatisfactory. I think this is because behind Didion’s flat style there is a lot of editorialising in her focus. There’s nothing wrong with that in an essay, of course, but there was a pretty persistent focus on a slightly mocking tone and on quotes which she chose to damn people out of their own mouths. For example, Where The Kissing Never Stops is a portrait of Joan Baez and her Institute, which Didion makes very damning without ever explicitly saying so. The same is true of the essay which gives its title to the book and of most others here. There may have been a good deal to criticise, but the persistent mocking and damning tone applied to people whose intentions were very decent, if naive, began to get me down in the end.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is worth reading for the quality of the writing and it does give a picture of an age, but it’s a very one-sided and cynical picture so approach with caution.

Bonnie Garmus - Lessons In Chemistry

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

Brilliant! 

 

Just to add my voice to the chorus of praise for Lessons In Chemistry. I loved it – it is funny, thoughtful, very clear-sighted, and a delight to read.

A book about the travails of a brilliant chemist and single mother enduring the sexism and crushing attitudes of the 1950s could be a grim struggle, but this is anything but. Elizabeth Zott’s genuine disbelief in the utterly illogical attitudes of the time and her determined, analytical approach to her life make for extremely entertaining and uplifting reading, in spite of the all-too-recognisable condescension and abuse she suffers. Bonnie Garmus manages to make the book genuinely funny while tackling these issues head on.

Part of the attraction is Garmus’s clever use of three different minds which look in shocked disbelief at the more absurd social mores. There is Elizabeth herself, her prodigiously brilliant 4-year-old daughter Madeleine who has a child’s innocent “But why?” approach to things, and their dog Six-Thirty, whom they teach to understand quite a large vocabulary (like “diary”, which he deduces is a book in which people write vicious things about their friends and family and then pray that none of them ever read it) and to whom a lot of the behaviour he sees is simply ridiculous.

The ending was just a touch cloying for me, but I still thought it was a brilliant, hugely enjoyable book that makes points which, as current events keep reminding us, still need to be made.

Christopher St. John Sprigg - Death Of An Airman

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

Very enjoyable 

I enjoyed Death Of An Airman very much. First published in 1935, it’s a good mystery, written in an engaging style.

An experienced airman is killed when the small plane he is piloting crashes at the aerodrome at which his flying club is based. It all seems like a tragic accident until some puzzling features become apparent and evidence of skulduggery begins to appear. The detectives on the case (and some civilian characters) eventually expose sinister malfeasance.

It’s all rather charming. The two detectives on the case are likeable and engaging (although one of them does seem remarkably slow on the uptake for a seasoned Inspector at times) and the other characters are neatly and quite convincingly drawn. The style is very enjoyable, with a wry humour often showing through. Just as a small example, one detective says of a possible suspect, “She is the daughter of a rural dean. That’s pretty bad, but not the sort of thing you can use in evidence against her.”

The narrative did get a little bogged down in what-ifs and hypotheses from time to time and the solution is just a trifle pat, but overall this is a very enjoyable Golden Age mystery and a fun read.

Alan Bradley - The Curious Case Of The Copper Corpse

 

Rating: 3/5

 

Review

OK, but rather unsatisfying 

This is a very short story, roughly the length of a single chapter in a full Flavia book, and as a result it’s rather unsatisfying.

Flavia receives a panicked not from a pupil at Greyminster School asking her to investigate the death of a copper-plated corpse in the bath. The familiar elements (see what I did there?) of Flavia’s chemical expertise and deductive skills are all there, but the depth of background, character and even her delightful narrative voice are all pale shadows of what we have come to love in the full novels.

This took me about 20 minutes to read. It’s perfectly acceptable, but not much more and I don’t think I’d have missed out on much if I hadn’t read it at all...and now I’m very keen to get back to the proper sequence of Flavia books.

Ajay Chowdhury - The Waiter

 

Rating: 3/5

 

Review:

Disappointing 

I wasn’t that keen on The Waiter. It’s OK, but overall I found it rather unengaging and a somewhat run-of-the-mill detective story.

Kamil Rahman has been dismissed from the Kolkata police and finds himself working as a waiter in the London restaurant of a family friend. Here, there is a murder at a party for another family friend at which he is working and Kamil becomes involved in the hunt for the killer and to clear a suspect whom he believes to be innocent. Intercut with this is the story of the high-profile case in Kolkata which ended in his dismissal, as it becomes slowly clear that the two cases may be linked in some way.

Frankly, as a thriller it didn’t do much for me. It plodded rather, I found the intercutting a bit off-putting, the prose was pretty pedestrian and if it hadn’t been for the interesting settings I would probably have given up. I did like the descriptions of life in the Bengali community around Brick Lane and in Kolkata, but they weren’t really enough to keep my interest and I did begin to skim without feeling I was missing all that much. The solution had more than a degree of implausibility – not least in the sudden friendly attitude of the British police Inspector – and I realised that I wasn’t all that bothered about it.

A disappointment overall, then, after a warm recommendation from a friend. The book has its merits, but I don’t think I’ll be reading on in the series.

Deon Meyer - The Dark Flood

 

 Rating: 5/5

Review:

Brilliant

I thought The Dark Flood was excellent. I have enjoyed all of the books I have read in this series but I think this is the best so far. This works as a stand-alone, but it would probably help to have read some previous ones – especially its immediate predecessor, The Last Hunt.

In the fallout from The Last Hunt, Benny and Vaughan are threatened with dismissal, but escape – just – with demotion and banishment from the Hawks to a provincial posting. There, they work on a puzzling Missing Person case; in the meantime disgraced millionaire Jasper Boonstra is involved in some shady property dealing and eventually the two become linked in a tangled web of deceit and corruption.

It’s brilliant. I was hooked from the start; the pacing and structure are excellent and there is a lot of genuine excitement (including a climax which is actually both plausible and thrilling). The background of South Africa in the last days of the Zuma presidency is excellently and subtly done in both the social set-up and the dreadful corruption of “state capture”. The relationship between Benny and Vaughan is realistic, touching at times and humorous at others, as is the progress of their personal lives.

I thought this was an exemplary police procedural. I was convinced by and completely engrossed in the story and I can recommend it very warmly.

(My thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Edward Marston - Murder On The Lusitania

 

Rating: 2/5

 

Review:

Disappointing 

 

I wasn’t very keen on Murder On The Lusitania. It’s a competently crafted cosy mystery with an interesting period shipboard setting, but it didn’t really work for me.

The book introduces us to George Porter Dillman, an American about to embark in Liverpool for the Lusitania’s maiden voyage to New York. It emerges that he is a detective employed by Cunard to be a security operative on the voyage and, sure enough, skulduggery and eventually murder require his professional attention, as a couple of attractive women vie for his personal attention.

The plot is pretty run-of-the-mill – although the identity of the killer is well concealed – and the characters are rather laboriously depicted. The shipboard atmosphere is pretty well done, although there is an awful lot of fact-sharing between characters to show how much research the author has done, and the language by no means always reflects the period. The prose is workmanlike but no more, with a sprinkling of rather lazy, stale usages like “gloomy prognostications” and “with consummate ease,” and there is an awful lot of what seemed to me like padding where pretty obvious things are explained at length and a wholly irrelevant and rather annoying side-plot. I skimmed quite a few passages and didn’t feel I’d missed anything. The denouement is quite well constructed, but the dialogue as it plays out is simply absurd and the subsequent struggle is wholly unconvincing.

If it weren’t for the setting I think I may have bailed in this one, and I’m not at all sure I’ll bother with more in the series. Others have plainly enjoyed this a good deal more than I did, but personally I can’t recommend it.