Periodic Tales - Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Subtitled "The Curious Lives of the Elements"

A curate's egg, this one - and how have I written 108 previous blog entries without using that dead image before now? (I have a horrible feeling that a blog entry on the origins of the phrase - a Punch cartoon, of course - might make a more interesting article than a review of Aldersey-Williams's long and thorough book.)

I am not sure where the starting point was for this book. Was it inspired by a genuine interest in the elements, and an urge to chronicle their discovery and role in society? This is what the author claims, but the less generous reviewer in me suspects the real inspiration was those "popular science" books that proliferate, especially around Christmas - "Do Penguins Water-ski?" and "Can Elephants Sneeze?" - you know the type, scientific investigation dressed as popular entertainment, all short chapters, illustrations, and amusing anecdotes.

We see some of that here, but this is at heart an intensely serious book. Not only is the author interested in the origins of the discovery of the elements, which to be fair are not new stories, but also the sociological place of the metals, gases, etc in our society and culture. He draws from a wide range of sources, sometimes extremely so - for example the exploration of various references to sodium street lamps in popular culture goes on for far too long, where the point is slim, unoriginal, and probably deserves only a few lines.

As well as being self-indulgent - the author travels internationally and extensively in his investigations, and follows threads and ideas without much if any justification - my main reservation about this novel is the apparent absence of an editor. A decent editor would have cut the length by at least a third, and imposed some sort of structure on the book - any would have been better than what we have, with seemed to be a random wander through the periodic table, flitting mid paragraph from one element to another without any clue as to where he was going. I found this deeply frustrating, reducing the book to a collection of moderately interesting anecdotes. I know more than I did when I started about the elements, their characteristics, discovery, place in history, etc, but I am convinced a far shorter book with some meaningful pictures and charts would have done the job in far quicker time.

The World Until Yesterday - Jared Diamond (2)

The central premise of this book is simple - there are tribal societies remaining in the world today that are similar to the way people lived before the rise of states (approximately) 11,000 years ago. We can learn lessons from these tribal societies that will help us live more successful, safer, longer and happier lives. So far so good - it would be surprising if we could not learn anything, even if to just thank our lucky stars we live in a world of antibiotics and flush toilets. But is what we learn original or useful? At two thirds of the way through the book (450+ pages plus notes) I have to say the jury is still out.

One of the reasons I enjoy books of this kind is that every few pages I read something that not only did I not know before, and that I find interesting, but that also makes me want to go off and read something else. A good example is Diamond's account of war in tribal society. Diamond argues that these "wars" (and the appropriateness of the term in the first place is unconvincing) are more lethal per head of the population per year than modern society. His manipulation of statistics to make this point creaks alarmingly, and the case is unconvincing. Which is a pity, because the underlying point - that life in modern society is a lot less violent that earlier forms of society - is demonstrably the case. For me, tribal war contains a lot of "theatre", posturing and demonstrating that you would not find in modern war. Even if we wanted to replicate this behaviour at a state level (as opposed to for example in the way gangs resolve their differences, which is much closer parallel) we could not. But the chapters on this topic still inspired me to read more on the tribal forms of warfare, and summaries of Steven Pinker's book on the changing prominence of violence in society.

Tribal people resolve their disputes in ways that "us moderns" (as Diamond telling puts it on page 348 of the Penguin edition) could learn from, but only by some very careful cherry-picking - circumstances force tribal people to look at conflicts in a very different way from complex societies with all their apparatus of judges, police, lawyers etc. Most of these techniques can be summarised as ways of avoiding the other chap killing you, usually by running away or killing him first. Imperfect though our dispute resolution (and avoidance) processes are, I think I prefer them to that.

If you hadn't read this book and asked yourself what aspects of tribal culture could tell us about our behaviour towards the elderly, I suspect you would attempt something about respect for their wisdom and knowledge and the tendency in the first world to consign the old to homes and then avoid visiting them. But that would be both wrong and to miss the point. Wrong, because although these things do happen from time to time, generally older people have fantastic life compared to even one or two generations earlier. They also wield considerable influence - for example the average age of Presidents of the USA on taking office is 54, not old in our terms I appreciate, but not young either. But the real point is that what we mean by old is completely different from how a tribal person would use the term. Obviously there are exceptions, but life expectancy in tribal society is around 40, almost half that of the West. Life expectancy in the West is increasing year on year, and accelerating. 54 for a tribesperson wouldn't be unheard of, but it would undoubtedly be very old. In any event, there is no commonality between the way old people are treated in tribal society, ranging as it does from virtual gerontocracies to active killing of the old, so we can pick and choose what version we want to learn from. It was in this discussion that I expected Diamond to return to "widow strangling", and indeed he did, in a section of the murder or killing by neglect of old people as a form of ensuring others do not die of starvation, very much in the same manner as infanticide is (he claims) widespread in tribal society. But there is very little additional commentary, just a reassertion that it was widespread until the 1950's, with one supporting quote from Jane Goodall. I remain unconvinced that the active co-operation of the widows was as simple or common as he suggests.

Care of the young is another unsatisfying chapter. Just as with the old, children are cared for in a very wide range of ways, across the whole spectrum from swaddling for months at a time to letting them wander completely unsupervised, taking alarming risks without the capacity to learn from experiences. It is not surprising that we see children in a different light from tribal societies; our conception of what defines childhood is not fixed and changing every generation (compare the 19th century approach to childhood that had no problem is sending working class children up chimneys or down mines with the differing approaches to childcare adopted today). Can a comparison with tribal societies teach us anything about how better to raise children? If we can Diamond doesn't present this convincingly.

Finally, thus far, there is a chapter on what Diamond terms "constructive paranoia". He doesn't define this term clearly, but it seems to mean little more than being careful with every day activities such as crossing the road. There is a strong hint in a reference to how his meticulous approach to every day life infuriates his friends and family that this is a personal issue, if not crusade, for him. The examples he provides where being careful was important are not very useful, to say the least, unless you habitually trek in virgin jungle. There are definitely different ways of looking at risk and probability, and I agree that we are unable to process these issues sensibly in the West (if we could we would never buy a lottery ticket). Nonetheless this felt like a frustratingly incomplete consideration of the psychology of risk.

Overall there is more than enough interesting content here to keep me reading, even if the overriding argument is far weaker than this book's predecessor.

Hamlet and The Lion King

I think it is widely accepted that the scriptwriters for the Lion King took some inspiration from Hamlet. The parallels don't run very deep, but in thinking about this I wondered whether the film provides any new ways of thinking about the play. New ways of thinking about Hamlet are pretty unlikely of course, but then again the world of Shakespearean scholarship traditionally draws little or no inspiration from Disney.

Apologies for the spoilers, but you will recall that in the film, Scar/Claudius kills Muphasa/King Hamlet, and tries, ultimately unsuccessfully, to kill Simba/Prince Hamlet at the same time. The question this suggested to me is why doesn't Claudius do the same? Granted he tries, eventually successfully, to kill Hamlet, but there is no suggestion in the opening scenes of the play that Hamlet feels his life is under imminent threat, even when he learns of his father's murder. So why didn't Claudius move swiftly to eliminate his only serious opponent for the throne of Denmark? Clearly he does not see Hamlet as an immediate threat. Hamlet is away studying in Germany when his father dies, and when he returns to the funeral Claudius has already taken steps to secure the throne. He has had himself crowned and just as importantly married Gertrude, quickly consolidating his position. Hamlet has a natural claim to the throne as the late king's only son, and although he is still a student he appears in his mid to late twenties, and is certainly old enough to take the crown.

The constitution of 13th Century Denmark is not, surprisingly, discussed in the play, and the audience is pitched into the middle of the action, so there is little time to consider the rights and wrongs of Claudius' "coup" before the ghost appears. Hamlet's distress is focused on his mother's rapid marriage to his uncle, rather than his uncle's assumption of power. So this question - why is Claudius king not Hamlet, and how long will that last before awkward questions begin to be posed - is not one that occurs to the audience.

Having concluded he represents no immediate threat, Claudius must have considered the risk of Hamlet at some point making a claim for the throne, gathering support at court and waiting for his moment. Claudius takes steps to kill Hamlet, but only once his erratic behaviour makes him fear for his own life (as opposed to his own position) and once the Mousetrap reveals that he is aware of the true cause of the old King's death. Hamlet is an inconvenience to be disposed of rather than a serious threat, and Claudius can take his time in dealing with him. Scar has no such luxury, which is in fact much closer to the reality of the natural world, where a male lion taking control of a pride will kill the cubs of the previous king of the pride.

Simply cutting Hamlet down where he stands isn't really an option for Claudius, but once the scale of the threat becomes apparent he acts quickly to dispose of the prince. So perhaps the parallels with scar are closer than they first appear.

One other issue not addressed in the play, nor indeed the film, but are suggested by the turn of events, is whether Gertrude was part of the plot to kill King Hamlet, and/or whether her relationship with Claudius pre-dates the murder. Her marriage to Claudius is unprecedentedly rapid, and suggests some kind of prior arrangement or involvement. She is not as disturbed as Claudius by the scenes in the Mousetrap, and seems genuinely puzzled by Hamlet's "madness" - the idea to call in Rosencrantz and Guildernstern to try to get to the bottom of Hamlet's melancholy is presumably hers. There's no suggestion she is complicit in the plan to kill Prince Hamlet. So she is not a convincing candidate for accomplice to murder. But she wouldn't be the first queen to stray into a brother in laws bed.

The World Until Yesterday - Jared Diamond

I reviewed Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel" last year and it is fair to say it made a significant impression on me. Readable but serious, refusing to duck some really challenging issues, I still find myself referring to some of the ideas and stories set out in this book. Guns Germs and Steel tried to answer the question why Western European countries were able to colonize large areas of the globe in the second millennium AD, and why other advanced civilisations were almost powerless to resist in the face of Western weaponry, bacteria, and technology. While I found many of the arguments in GG&S compelling, there were some sections that asked more questions than they answered. That's a good thing of course; anything that gets me reading more is to be welcomed. No academic book with such a broad and controversial range of subjects can hope to tie down every issue. So the end of the Easter Island civilisation, the Viking settlements in Greenland, and the future of Australia were all subjects which I read further on and on which I retain an open mind.

Diamond's overall thesis however was one which I found compelling, with one caveat. He argues Western dominance arose from our Guns Germs and Steel, but the development of these stemmed from an early move to city states, which in turn was caused by early advances in agriculture and domestication of livestock. He traces this to the fertile crescent in the middle east, a region that is now largely arid, and certainly not the home of super-powers. Is it simply that early civilisation arose here and spread to Europe where it took root and developed the ability to spread across the globe?

The World Until Yesterday is a natural sequel to GGS and opens with the observation that traditional hunter gatherer societies, where we lived in bands of at most a few thousand people, was an almost universal experience until relatively recently - in some case in the last few decades. He uses some striking images to make his point - for example in the introduction he surveys Port Moresby airport, and is struck by how much the Papuan New Guinean people have changed since first contact with westerners less than 100 years ago.

Diamond knows he is going to be taken on by many critical fellow academics, and in traditional style get his retaliation in first. He explains the terms he uses with care, and makes clear that generalisations can always be unpicked with individual exceptions, but still have value. He uses a measured, academic tone, writing more like a professor for a journal than a popular science writer writing for the mass market. This is not an academic paper of course ,footnotes aren't used, not every source is identified, and there is more personal anecdote than you would usually find, but it is written to appear as such. Certainly it is carefully researched and referenced compared to many other popular science books.

This is necessary - Diamond makes claims about traditional cultures and their practices which could easily been seen as being made from a colonialist, first world perspective that fails to understand the cultural differences between the West and the traditional societies he writes about. Survival International, a group campaigning on behalf of tribal peoples http://www.survivalinternational.org/ launched a strong attack on this book when it was first published in hardback, claiming that Diamond patronises tribal peoples by saying they represent life as it was once lived by westerners, ignores the impact of the west on these peoples, and manipulating statistics to show they are more violent than the West. The full case for the prosecution can be found here http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/30/savaging-primitives-why-jared-diamond-s-the-world-until-yesterday-is-completely-wrong.html

However aware Diamond is of the risk of sensationalism, he cannot avoid it completely. An example of this that jumped out at me was his description of the gruesome practice of widow strangling. Here's what he says, writing about the Kaulong people, a tribe of New Britain, just east of New Guinea.

"When a man died, his widow called upon her brothers to strangle her. She was not murderously strangled against her will, nor was she pressurised into this form of ritualised suicide by other members of her society. Instead she had grown up observing it as the custom, followed the custom when she became widowed herself, strongly urged her brothers (or else her son if she had no brothers) to fulfil their solemn obligation to strangle her despite their natural reluctance to do so, and sat cooperatively as they did strangle her" (Page 21 of the paperback Penguin edition).

As soon as I read this I was instinctively sceptical. What is the evidence that tribal peoples killed their sisters or mothers in this fashion, and that the widows passively accepted their fate? Obviously there are parallels with the well documented Indian sub-continental practice of suttee which stubbornly persists in one form or another to this day. But however disturbing suttee may be, widow strangling with the passive participation of the widow is hard to swallow (sorry). Was this an extreme case of men enforcing their control over women, treating them as inanimate property to be disposed of on the man's death? In this interpretation the acceptance of their fate by the women is less a case of indoctrination than a choice between the lesser of two evils - accept their fate or face a worse one, with the shame brought on your family to make things worse. Widow strangling would have been a strong disincentive to women murdering their husbands, and a way of maintaining population control in an environment where infanticide was also practiced to the same end. But did it happen? Was it an established cultural practice (the internet gives examples from other cultures including Fiji) or simply some isolated murders inflated into a cultural practice for the benefit of nosy missionaries and explorers? Something like this would be extraordinarily difficult to prove other than by weight of personal testimony, or possibly independent witness. But I can't resist the impression that Diamond introduces this topic for more salacious reasons - look at these weird people, aren't they brutal and unfeeling compared to us? Don't they need our civilising influence? Strangely the reaction to Diamond's book online has not focussed on this topic - his commentary on modern against tribal warfare has attracted much more comment for example.

I am still less than halfway through TWUY thus far, and I am sure I will have more to say. I don't usually write reviews before completing the book, strangely enough, but this is a bit of an experiment.

The Long War - Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

This is the inevitable sequel to the Long Earth, which I reviewed last year.

In case you have forgotten, in the first novel a multiverse of parallel earths - the Long Earth - is discovered, along with the ability for humans to travel quickly and simply along a sequential series of earths. Its not quite clear how people "step", nor why a process in Book 1 which is restricted to the movement of a small amount of material can now in Book 2 be accomplished at speed in great airships.

The novel charts a series of voyages across the Long Earth in search of various goals. And there's the first of many issues - the different journeys recorded here are not clearly linked. The narrative switches between them at frequent intervals but the process of drawing them together, both thematically and in terms of their eventual outcomes, is pretty tortuous. The novel also struggles to find a theme - is it the relationship between humans and the other sentient species it discovers? (Strangely man has never evolved other than on Datum (the original earth) even though the novel is insistent that each earth is very similar to its neighbour save for small deviations, which over time lead to more significant changes (e.g. sentient dogs).) Or is it a rerun of the colonisation of North America, where the settlers gradually asserted their independence from the tax levying home country? Other weighty themes, on mortality and the uniqueness of the self are introduced but not pursued with any determination. The Long War promised in the title, a war across the parallel universes between man and trolls or settlers and state fizzles out with a shot being fired, thereby acting as a neat metaphor for the novel itself.

When you think of a typical terry Pratchett novel what do you envisage? A well developed, in fact a probably very cleverly thought out, plot, inventiveness in language, ideas, characters and plot development, well written fun to read prose, and above all else, wit. Witty turns of phrase, characters, plots. Characters that having been developed over several novels have come to have a life of their own, be it Sam Vimes, Granny Weatherwax, or Lord Veterinari, all the way through to the minor characters such as Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler. None of which can be found here. No humour, no wit, no inventiveness, just more and more "stepping" and minor variations on the world before.

Clearly there is very little Pratchett here, or at least I hope so, and his name has been leased to build sales. Cynical but understandable. What worries me most is how many more volumes of this endlessly recyclable stuff is stored away for future publications, eventually becoming "based on an idea by". The Tolkien estate is still generating apparently new content under the JRR brand decades after his death, so I can only assume the same will happen here. Which is a pity, a real pity.

The Daylight Gate (2) - An afterthought

"When shall we three meet again" - daylight of course, it's such a nice witchy time of day isn't it?

What am I talking about? Something that has really bugged me about this novel, apart from everything else I wrote about earlier, namely the title of the novel. It tells you nothing about the subject matter, which is mildly irritating, but nothing out of the ordinary. But why daylight? In the novel there are a couple of relatively brief references to the time of day when witches' occult power is at its highest, and there is no mistaking the fact that this is intended to be a reference to twilight, the point at which day turns to night, and the creatures and spirits of the night begin to emerge. The "gate" in question is a bridge to this other world. "The Twilight Gate" as a title would have made some kind of sense, if only in the context of the novel itself.

But of course the "twilight" word has been thoroughly over-used in recent years, and pretty much franchised out to the werewolf/vampire community. So the editors of this novel must have thought to themselves, "how do we get a slice of that market without directly misleading people into thinking this is a book about teenage vampires with some kind of gate device? I know, let's use a time of day that sounds a bit like twilight but in fact is nothing to do with it!"

Now I know that doesn't make sense - if the wanted to just steal some of the teen vampire market they would have just called the novel "The Twilight Gate" and been done with it. This way they have the worst of both worlds - no direct reference to twilight and all the references that come with it, and a title that makes no sense, because daylight is the least witchy, occult, generally creepy time of day imaginable.

The Daylight Gate - Jeanette Winterson



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I thought long and hard about whether to write this review. On the one hand I have written far too many negative reviews this year, and would much rather write about things I had enjoyed reading. On the other hand, this is supposed to be a record of what I have read, and there's really no wriggling out of that. Anyway, it is written now so you can judge whether I should have bothered. I feel equally conflicted about the novel itself - while I read it in little more than a sitting, there are aspects of the book that are pretty repellent.

First, some background. Published in 2012, this novel (sometimes described as a novella, although at over 200 pages that isn't really right) is an imaginative recreation of the events of the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612. The more astute reader will have spotted the coincidence of dates. The Witch trials are probably the best known, mainly due to the record of the trial kept by one of the lawyers, of all the historic persecution of wise women, healers and the like which disfigures this period of history. Winterson mixes in the pursuit of catholics and Jesuits in 17th Century England a few years after the accession of James 1st and Gunpowder Plot. If this wasn't enough, we also get some references to the alchemists of the period, and almost inevitably Shakespeare has a walk on part.

Broadsheet reviewers really liked this book. The Telegraph reviewer called it a "poetically stylised and visceral read". The Independent thought it "beautifully written" (which it may well be, but….) and the Guardian reviewer liked it even more, describing it as having "the grisly freshness of a newly exhumed graveyard corpse." But they avoid some of the more obvious problems with the book. Where to begin? This is very familiar territory - the Pendle Witch trial has been documented in fiction and elsewhere many times. The novel is published by Hammer, the publishing arm of the film company which is known to people of my generation for its Horror B Movies. Hammer has no pretension to being anything other than sleazy, exploitative, salacious, horror. All the tired clichés of the genre are present, down to the Satanic rituals graced by the presence of a priapic "Dark Gentleman" . It almost writes itself, and any suspicion of originality or creativity are missing.

The problems pile up. The abuse of women accused of witchcraft deserves and has received serious feminist analysis. It disrespects the women involved to exploit their stories for titillation. The treatment of sex here is horrifying and hard to stomach, particularly the paedophilia, although the detailed portrayal of 17th century torture techniques is almost as bad. The unlikeliness of this is being written by the author of the wonderful "Oranges are not the only fruit" really confounds me - its like J K Rowling writing for Mills and Boon.

Winterson can't make up her mind - is this a portrayal of innocent women being tortured and killed as a form of social control, keeping people (obviously, particularly women) in their place? That would be the obvious narrative direction, but throughout the novel witchcraft and sorcery is portrayed as "real" and its invocation forms a central part of the narrative. This is not just a case of deluded old women believing their own confessions, but the reader being invited to accept the reality of magic in many different guises. The Telegraph reviewer mentioned earlier struggles with this, saying: "There is a slightly hallucinatory quality to their efforts to make an exhumed severed head talk that evokes both the macabre and a curious sense of horrified pity. Can their doll-stabbing curses really work? There is a suggestion that they can. But because these women are actually just a means for the authorities to try to get to grander targets – Catholic recusants – their filthy graveyard rites have the pathos of ultimate impotence". Not really - there is much more than a suggestion that their magic works, and the pain of the Magistrate being targeted by the witches only ends when the figurine they are using is taken from them. They are far from impotent in this novel, even though in reality they would of course have been powerless. (interestingly one of the accused Pendle witches was actually acquitted).

That's more than enough of the negative. Can I find anything positive to say? Some of the characters are briefly believable, and the quality of the writing is what you would expect of an author of Winterson's calibre. One simple example - hares stand in fields like question marks - which is exactly right. At points the novel looks as if it is going to break out of the constraints of the known story and have something interesting to say about the persecution of the central character, Alice Nutter, but in the end all the bizarre accusations about here prove to be accurate. I can't avoid the conclusion that there is a genuinely interesting story here which would respect the memory of those who died. But this isn't it.

The Death of Grass - John Christopher

 I am puzzled why I have never heard of this shocking 1950's novel before. The threat of nuclear oblivion inevitably had a strong impact on writers in this country, producing a whole crop (ironically, in this context) of post-Apocalyptic novels. Obvious examples are "The Day of the Triffids" and "Lord of the Flies", the two novels most commonly referenced in commentary on "The Death of Grass". Although it had previously been out of print for some time before being brought back by Penguin for this edition, it does not suffer from these comparisons. I can however understand why it is not a school text book (as with Lord of the Flies) - there are some shocking, brutal scenes of murder and rape, described dispassionately. 

The re-issue of this novel is timely, because the crisis that precipitates the flight across the country of the band of middle class survivors is not nuclear nor alien, but ecological. A virus arises in Asia that wipes out all forms of grass and remains resistant to any form of treatment. The famines that follow rapidly lead to a breakdown in social order. While grasses may not form the central part of our diet that the novel suggests, this is really not relevant - our food supply chains are stretched, vulnerable and fragile. Equally we may not resort to the lawlessness that engulfs the characters in this novel quite as quickly as appears here - but we might. It is on this issue that the comparisons with Golding are most interesting, because Golding's cast of characters - schoolboys, albeit mostly middle class, privately educated ones, - has led many to argue that the primitive instincts they give free rein to are only found in little boys, rather than all people. Christopher leaves us here with no such comforting evasions - even the best of us can quickly resort to murder and brutality to defend our families. The veneer of civilisation is frighteningly thin. The men in this novel go from comfortable middle class lives to people who murder innocent families for some breakfast, with hardly a pause for reflection. These are not isolated monsters - around them society fragments with frightening pace, and even the Government contemplates/resorts to (it is not completely clear which) using nuclear weapons on their own people.

The economy of Christopher's writing is striking, and the pace of the action is a strength of the novel - no time for pauses for breath are allowed. Despite my slow reading in recent months I read this in a sitting. There are some caveats of course - the brutality of the treatment of women in the novel is hard to stomach, even thought they are not all the 1950's stock characters you might expect, with some of them showing resilience and strength in the face of appallingly difficult circumstances. The digressions on leadership and its role in feudal societies are a little over done, although again at less than 200 pages there is not much time to find this irritating. This is definitely a period novel - post war behaviours, language and attitudes anchor the events of the novel in the 1950s. Class is still a powerful factor in the way people defer to their betters, the war is a very recent memory, and people are self reliant and practical in ways we would struggle with today. But the novel transcends this datedness.

We like to scare ourselves with stories of "What if...?", and cling to the comforting thought that we would face whatever is thrown at us with a stiff upper lip. That's the mythology that we used and fostered to help us survive the Blitz and the threat of German invasion in the 1940s. Christopher refuses to offer any comforting conclusion to his disaster novel - the ravaging disease isn't contained, the army doesn't arrive at the death to reimpose order. All we have left is family and, if we lucky, a gun.

Competitive Reading Lists

Every now and again lists circulate purporting to show the 50 best this or the 101 best that, inviting the reader to assess their worth by deciding how many of the books shown they have read.

I say "deciding" how many they have read, because this is rarely a binary decision. Have you read "A Christmas Carol"? You almost certainly know the tale from numerous film adaptations, but have you actually read the book? What if you have read some of the book but weren't able to finish? (An example in this category for me is Don Quixote - many years ago I made a genuine and sustained effort to read this, but failed miserably). The Bible, The Canterbury tales, and Moby Dick are other examples of "books" that often appear on these lists, but for most readers the prospect of genuinely reading them from start to finish is remote.

But these are just quibbles, because there are no rules in this game, and if the "reader" decides that owning the book, having seen the film, or read a summary on Wikipedia is sufficient to merit a "read it" tick, then no-one is really to know. My real concern is that these lists are designed to make you feel bad about your reading habits. No-one with a family and job will have ever read all of the meritorious heavyweight volumes of "A Remembrance of Things Past", "The Barchester Chronicles", or "A Dance to the Music of Time" ("God, no!", "partially", and surprisingly, "yes, but a long time ago", would be my answers). But should I really feel bad about all those Russian classics glowering at me from my bookshelves while I indulge in yet another Pratchett?

From previous entries in this blog it will be clear that I have made a concerted effort to fill some obvious gaps in my reading record - Frankenstein, Dracula, The Great Gatsby, etc - but despite this I still find myself admitting "not read" as I run through each list more often than I would have expected. The other trick played in this game is to include less popular works by popular authors - for example by listing "The Quiet American" instead of "Brighton Rock", or "Men Without Women" (which is a collection of short stories) instead of "For Whom the Bell Tolls".  

I know I am taking this way too seriously, but there is a point underneath all this - if people read these lists on FaceBook or wherever and think "I must be really dim because I haven't read any of these" they will be put off even trying them, rather than filling in the gaps. So let's start writing "These are really fantastic books that you should read if you like romance/thrillers/historical novels/etc" lists, which would be a much more constructive approach to list making wouldn't it?

The Jefferson Key - Steve Berry

I have had a really bad run in recent weeks - some sub-par McEwan and the execrable Amis - so what led me to pick this one up I am not quite sure. Certainly the cover told me pretty much all I needed to know - US flag on fire, presidential seal, White House with lone figure in background - this is going to be a derivative thriller. Interestingly the cover art for the US version had a much more prominent picture of the White House - I am guessing that American reader won't need the Jefferson link spelling out so clearly.

No surprises there then. This book is a lazy cash-in on Dan Brown's success with "The Da Vinci Code". Many of the components are copied without any attempt at disguise, from the supposedly impenetrable code (tick) to the reinterpretation of historical events (tick) and the secret society hiding in our midst, controlling historical events (tick). The narrative style - many very short scenes cutting from one location to another quickly - and the attempt to compress the events of the novel into as short a time period as possible, (forgetting people's need to nap, eat, etc,) to give a sense of pace and speed is also copied directly from Brown. And then there is the simple fact of the novel's name itself, following the formula "The (Name of figure from history) + (synonym for mystery). Expect the Michelangelo Conundrum, the Caravaggio Puzzle and the Newton Sudoku to follow.

For what it matters, the plot revolves around an American pirating community which had its origins in the American War of Independence, when privateers were encouraged to attach English shipping. These pirates were allegedly given Presidential authority - letters of marque - to operate with impunity as long as the work against enemis of the state. Successive Presidential attempts to rein them in had been countered with assassinations. This novel focusses on attempts by a President Daniels to curb the powers of the "Commonwealth" and the pirates attempts to fight back. The cast of leading characters includes Cotton Malone, who has appeared in six previous and I guess highly similar novels (from their titles) although the characters are not distinguished from one another in any marked way.

While the plot is a huge predictable disappointment, the writing is equally dire. The author seems to have been paid by the word, because the plot is ground out to its far foreseen conclusion without a hint of suspense or interest. For example, some characters die in a building ruin which floods todally - this is flagged as likely early  on, returned to many times, and finally claims the expected victims, almost in passing. Techniques such as having a character shot, followed by a switch of focus to another scene, then returning to the shooting scene only for the character to have amazingly survived through a misfire, bullet proof vest, blank shot etc happens at least three times. As the novel is seventh in the series the reader is in doubt that the principal character will survive. The writing is as turgid and cliche ridden as one would expect, although some phrases still jump out with their awkwardness - for example a stairway is said to "rightangle". I have no problem with using nouns as verbs, but this one is a step to far for me.

Novels of this kind - written for the "if you like this writer why not try this writer" Amazon recommendation algorithm - really shouldn't apear here - but I did promise to try not to censor myself, and to review my reading good bad or otherwise. Gosh I have even written about books I have read and not written about! So I return to the question I began with - what possessed me to read this? In part it was because this was a gift, and I didn't want to show disrespect to the giver. Also, I was hoping that this might be one of those "so bad it is good" novels, or even something that was unoriginal but had its merits notwithstanding the genre. Sadly, not - trust the cover.

P.S. One other quibble. One character uses the phrase "a sticky wicket" which as far as I know is not American vernacular. This is a clumsy attempt to give "colour" to a character with a Spanish background - and the text refers to her father funding several Spanish national cricket teams. Now they do play cricket in Spain, Google tells me, but it's not the traditional home of the sport. Another example of clumsiness which really jarred.

Lionel Asbo - Martin Amis

A few years ago Ben Elton, he of 1980's stand up fame, wrote a series of zeitgeist novels, each focussing on a different aspect of popular culture - Big Brother, (the TV programme, not the character in 1984), Friends Reunited, the effect of Internet porn and violence on people's behaviour, etc. These were all fairly lightweight and disposable, and the social/political commentary was mainly intended to provide humour rather than change minds.

"Lionel Asbo" is the novel about the poverty of working class culture that Elton wisely never dared to write. There isn't a cliche about working class life that Amis doesn't wildly embrace. His characters avoid any hint of subtlety. Cardboard cutouts would be giving them depth and nuance they don't ever approach. I was reminded of "Only Fools and Horses" rewritten as torture porn.

Amis's obsessive dislike of working class people is given full and free range here - this is a shout of hatred at the underclass of which Amis is clearly afraid. Lionel Asbo is indeed a psychopathically scary figure, capable of extremes of brutality. But his world is equally brutal and atavistic, devoid of any redeeming feature or figure, save the single exception of the pathetic Desmond, who responds to every racist barb thrown his way with a shrug.

I am struggling to find a single positive thing about this novel. Yes, I suppose some of the writing is not bad, but that is a bit like commenting on the lighting in a video nasty. The laziness of the plotting and characterisation is such that if this novel had not been written by Martin Amis I can't imagine it would have ever been considered for publication. Some critics have kindly assumed Amis is aiming for over the top satire of our celebrity, money obsessed culture. While that may have been the original intention, comparisons with any other form of satire quickly expose this as clumsy and ineffective. I did read to the end, partly out of some kind of morbid fascination. I wanted to know if Amis would have the guts to follow through on the plot lines he had been signalling wildly for most of the second half of the novel - he didn't, which is probably just as well, but by then I was long past caring. I am not going to spend any more time listing the many things that are wrong with this novel, when I really can't get past the class hatred.

If you think working class people are disgusting pigs with no feeling, no limits, no taste, no redeeming features whatsoever, this is the novel for you. I need a shower.

Enduring Love - Ian McEwan

The third of my recent McEwan catch up exercise, prompted by a Waterstones promotion - who says marketing schemes don't work?

The review I roughed out in my mind mid way through this novel is a very different beast from what I am now about to write. Let me explain.
The principal narrator of the novel, Joe Rose (there are other voices but the bulk of the novel is described from his point of view) is involved in a tragic ballooning accident in which a man dies. A fellow participant in this accident develops an obsessive delusion - that he is in love with Rose - and begins to stalk him.

There are consistent hints throughout the novel that Rose's account of the accident is flawed. Sometimes these hints are more heavy handed than others The accident victim's widow is torn apart at the thought that her husband was having an affair, and wouldn't have been at the site of the accident if he was not having a clandestine meeting with his lover. She sees the accident as a judgment on his fidelity, showing off to his young mistress. We later learn he was not having an affair, and the circumstantial evidence to that effect is explained away innocently. Later in the novel a shooting in a restaurant is shown through Rose's eyes, but the deconstruction of this incident by a police officer makes it clear that none of the witnesses saw the same thing, even down to what flavour ice cream they ate. There are many more subtle hints that perception is flawed, and that what Rose describes during and after the accident may not be the whole story - in fact, that he may be the delusional one. Even his partner struggles to believe his account of his being stalked, pointing out that the writing on the letters sent to him by his stalker, Jed Parry, looks remarkably similar to his own - one of many such strange coincidences.

I patiently waited for the reveal, the moment at which we learn what "really" happened, the extent of Rose's self delusion. Rose is a writer on popular science, and digresses at length about the mind's ability to deceive itself. Surely that is what is going on here - the accident didn't happen in a way in which he is completely blameless, and has excised any possible suggestion of responsibility from his account.

But it's not. In a classic double bluff, everything Rose tells us is true. The big reveal is that there is nothing behind the curtain. Everyone else in the novel is deluded or mistaken to some extent or another, including the police, his partner, the widow, his stalker, you name it. The police assume that an attempt on his life, in which a fellow diner is shot in error, was correctly targeted because the victim was the subject of a failed assassination attempt the previous year. Now there's a coincidence - a contract killing misses its target and instead falls upon a diner at the next table who only months before had been the target of an earlier murder attempt.

Is this McEwan messing with us, setting up expectations only to kick them out from under our feet? I have become so used to the sudden changes of focus in McEwan's novels, "Sweet Tooth" being a fantastically effective example of this, that to be deprived of one felt wrong.

The novel is not without merit of course. The relationship between Rose and Clarissa seemed genuine. I thought the "going to buy a gun from some hippies" scene was bizarre and out of character with the realism of previous scenes. The digressions on Romantic poetry, popular science, etc were undemanding and integrated well into the overall narrative.

Does love endure? Or is it one big delusion? The only love that lasts in this novel is the product of a psychiatric illness, a delusion that has no foundation in reality. Rose's relationship with his partner, Clarissa, the portrait of which is one of the principal strengths of the novel, is strong and loving, but does not survive the stress of the stalking and its denouncement. But this novel isn't an essay on love, more on big game of hide and seek between the author and the reader, with "reality" out there in plain sight all along.

Black Dogs - Ian McEwan

On a walking holiday (and honeymoon) in early post-war southern France, a young idealistic woman, June Tremaine, is terrified by an encounter with two menacing attack dogs. This incident leads in turn to a spiritual experience and changes her life. Surprisingly she decides on an apparent whim to live in France (very near to the scene of the attacK), in the process effectively separating from her new husband, Bernard.

This incident is the kernel around which McEwan winds this novel. Ostensibly a memoir written by June and Bernard's son-in law, written shortly after June's death, this novel has a complex narrative structure in which the telling of the tale is delayed time after time. The dogs themselves carry a heavy symbolic burden that they couldn't quite bear - we know from the early pages that however scary they may be they do not carry out their attack (or at least that June survives to go on and have a family). And in fact it is not the encounter with the dogs which is the turning point in June's life, but the spiritual epiphany which follows. While we can be gripped and menaced by the dogs, June's quasi-religious response is not one the reader can easily follow or identify with.

If you have been scared out of your wits, and feel that your survival is a result of divine intervention, and that you need to rethink your life choices as a result - fine - but June's response, essentially settling in a farmhouse in rural France and having a very nice, fundamentally selfish and not particularly spiritual life for the rest of your days, doesn't seem to be a coherent response.

The scenes in Berlin as the Wall is coming down, something that obviously has an especial resonance for McEwan, contrast strikingly with the views of France. If a point is being made here - other than the mundane "war is brutalising and nasty" I couldn't spot it. War has ravaged and damaged France, but the area the couple visit on their walking holiday seems largely untouched, even though the spectral presence of the black dogs is a reminder of the damage the war has done. But other than providing "colour" I didn't understand why the scenes in Berlin in which the narrator hears a different version of the story of June and Bernard's marriage needs to have the backdrop of the fall of the Wall.

McEwan can be forgiven some misses among the many hits. This isn't his worst novel - I still struggle to accept just how silly "Amsterdam" was and is - but others are far more coherent and interesting. I don't normally do this but one comment from an Amazon reviewer jumped off the screen as spot on - "there is also the idea that McEwan perhaps had a deeper vision he has failed to communicate."

The Innocent - Ian McEwan

McEwan is always strong when it comes to evoking a particular time and place, whether it be early 1960's in "On Chesil Beach", the Dunkirk evacuation (amongst others) in "Atonement", or early 1970's MI5 in "Sweet Tooth", just to mention a few. The thing that jumps out from that short list for me is how precise this timing is - it is not a decade, or a generation which is invoked, but a very exact point in time and place. In "The Innocent" the setting is Berlin, 1955. Berlin is an occupied city, still literally shell-shocked, reconstruction is barely underway although the Wall has yet to go up - again giving us a very exact moment in time, a turning point in the way "On Chesil Beach" is timed between the Lady Chatterley trial and the Beatles first EP. The city is a microcosm of the Cold War and into this volatile environment Leonard Marnham, the eponymous innocent, a British telephone engineer, is dropped. Leonard is an everyman figure, innocent in many ways - sexually, politically, socially - and although he is quickly absorbed into an American plan to tap Russian telephone messages out of Berlin, he makes a terrible, indiscreet spy.

As a standard Cold War spy story in the Le Carre model, the introduction of a femme fatale, Maria, who approaches Leonard in a night club, comes on cue. Maria seduces Leonard by the book, and very soon he is under her spell. Leonard is too young to have fought in the war, but 30 year old, divorced Maria, survivor of the brutalities of the occupation of Berlin, is a wiser, more mature character who quickly becomes the senior figure in the relationship. Leonard develops a fairly sick fantasy in which he is an occupying soldier who forces himself on the helpless, vulnerable Maria. When he tries to act this out in a disturbing scene she is unsurprisingly repelled, and their relationship only survives by the intervention of Leonard's American senior officer, Bob Glass.

The (protracted) climax of the novel comes with the return of Maria's brutish ex-husband, Otto, a bit of a Teutonic caricature. Leonard and Maria are the only ones surprised by his return, and the denouncement is equally predictable, albeit the brutality of the episode is detailed and relentless. There then follows a scene when Leonard tries to dispose of the body (sorry, spoilers) and ends up leaving it in two suitcases in the tunnel dug to intercept the Russian telephone lines, on the Russian side of the border. When he then passes on the secret of the tunnel to the Russians, in a desperate attempt to avoid the body being found by the Americans, his fall from grace is complete, his last innocence lost.

The post-script "30 years later" chapter, when Leonard returns to Berlin just before the Wall comes down, is probably unnecessary, but does give Maria a voice, finally.

Although this is relatively early McEwan, a little derivative in its setting and characterisation, his potential as a mature novelist shines through. if you want to explore early McEwan start here rather than the award winning but badly flawed "Amsterdam".

You are Not So Smart: - David Mcraney

Subtitled: Why Your Memory is Mostly Fiction, Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself.

This is a very gentle, easily digestible introduction to psychology. 48 chapters, each only a few pages long, covering all the basics of how the way we perceive the world is more complicated than we think. So far so good - this book began as a blog, and it shows, and who am I to pass judgment on bloggers taking their work further? Sometimes the dumbing goes too far - not all straightforward psychology points could be used to support the books central thesis, and they really didn't need to - they should be interesting in their own right. I also felt the central thesis itself was part of the problem - explaining that the way we perceive the world is filtered through our senses, our memory and a host of other filters to create our perception of reality is a strong enough point on its own without it being reduced to the conclusion that we are not as smart as we think we are - it's not about intelligence at all, it's actually much more interesting than that. I accept of course that there is a marketing strategy at work here, and it seems to have been effective.

There were a couple of other quibbles I had with this book, which I generally enjoyed and consumed quite quickly. Firstly, it focuses relentlessly on everyday perception. Whenever it tiptoes closer to the darker side of psychology - not all brains are the same, and although we can be gulled into doing things we wouldn't normally do, the point is we wouldn't normally do them - it quickly moved on. Some people would do abnormal things, and these outliers on the scatter graph of human psychology are probably another but much more interesting book entirely. Secondly the book had a strangely mid-Atlantic feel which was a little disconcerting - apparently this was because it was originally American and had been edited for the UK market. Lastly the research the author draws upon was largely fresh - to me - but there were a few old favourites (the prison guards/prisoners experiment for example) which I was expecting to crop up throughout the book, and which eventually made an appearance. I was hoping he would manage to avoid the obvious, but he didn't quite make it.

If you are looking for a simple and easy to read introduction to psychology you could do a lot worse. This doesn't claim to be an academic textbook, and you largely get what you have paid for, with that caveat about intelligence/perception.
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The Bachelor - Stella Gibbons

Oh dear. If you have read anything I have written previously about Stella Gibbons it will be immediately obvious that I rate Cold Comfort farm as one of the best books ever written. Hyperbole? perhaps, because I would recognise the book is not without its flaws, but if I had to chose one book for a life time of desert island living this would be it. It is by far and away the book I have reread the most in my life. But sadly nothing Stella Gibbons ever wrote approached the genius of CCF. In bringing her catalogue back into print Vintage have done us a mixed blessing - while it is exciting to read anything she wrote, the disappointment is inescapable. I will keep reading her to try to capture the magic of CCF, but with steadily decreasing expectation and hope.

The Bachelor is a perfectly decent romantic novel of manners set in 1940s wartime London and the Home counties (a thinly disguised St Albans).  The romantic entanglements of the lead characters and supporting cast is handled well, but it isn't where the interest of the novel resides. To be honest it was the strangely detached description of the war and its impact on the lives of the characters was were I derived my most interest in this novel. The war is a fact of life, a backdrop to pretty much everything the characters do - rationing, the blackout, characters missing on service, the Home Guard, refugees, prisoners of war and evacuees are all there - but everyone just gets on with their lives as if it was a temporary piece of nastiness that sooner or later will pass, which of course it did. The novel was published in 1944 and I suspect written near then, because the threat of invasion or defeat is not even hinted at. The portrayal of the middle class characters who oppose the war and appear to treat it as a case of a misunderstanding between countries taken too far was interesting - these are not conscientious objectors or pro-German or pro-Nazi supporters, more ideological pacifists who think the conflict can be talked away. This pacifism is tolerated as an eccentricity rather than disloyalty or treason.

Towards the end of the novel the war comes more into the foreground. Kenneth the bachelor of the title is in London looking for Vartouhi, the feisty refugee who is less than half his age, (this is not seen as a problem by anyone) who has left his employment after a row with his sister Constance, and is working in a milk bar. He tracks her down in a depressed, bombed out part of London similar to the streets where "Starlight" is set, albeit twenty years later. The extent of the bomb damage is depressing if not to say upsetting, and through this landscape comes Vartouhi, followed by her "boyfriend", a Canadian soldier with the unlikely name of Raoul who is clearly well on the way to being a psychopath. Although Vartouhi is cheerfully unafraid of the menacing Raoul, Kenneth quickly realises he is dangerous, and sees him off with a show of bravery that seems to draw upon his years in the trenches in the Great War. This section of the novel stands out as a compelling piece of narrative compared to much of the sleepiness of the rest of the book.

So why he "oh dear". Well first this novel is the reason for my prolonged absence from this blog - it was incredibly heavy going. More than a few pages a night would send me off. The plot consistent solely of the predictable romantic affairs which resolve themselves as expected from the beginning, but take over 400 pages to do so. Very little else happens. The major plot incidents involve an argument about a bedspread - albeit a bedspread loaded with sexual symbolism - and a Christmas visit from an aged relative.
Gibbons handled romance with a delightfully light touch in CCF - the relationship between Flora and Charles is covered in a few lines of text - but when she says "This is forever isn't it darling?" and he says something romantic about how nice her hair smells, it is utterly convincing. The relationships in the Bachelor are believable enough, but the characters take a very long time reaching the same point as Flora and Charles.
I remain Gibbons's ardent admirer, and won't give up on her back catalogue, but now for something completely different....

The Red House - Mark Haddon

The premise of this novel is very simple. Brother and sister Richard and Angela have recently lost their mother after a long and distressing illness. Somewhat out of the blue Richard offers to host (can host be used as a verb like this?) Angela and family in a week long holiday in a cottage in Herefordshire, the eponymous Red House. Richard brings his second wife Louisa and her daughter, Melissa. Angela brings husband Dominic, teenage son Alex, slightly younger but still teenage daughter Daisy, and eight year old Benjamin. (I wrote the sentence above without reference to the text, a good sign that the characters came to life for me).

Over the course of the week their back stories are filled in, childhood traumas revisited, (Richard and Angela's mother was an alcoholic, Angela had a stillborn child eighteen years earlier, and so on) and although very little of note happens in the course of the week (more than you might have thought from reading some reviews) the character development is more than sufficient to maintain interest.  One teenager slowly comes to a realisation that they are gay, another is embroiled in a cyber bullying/teen suicide scenario. There is some light shopping, cooking for eight, board games and jigsaws, a traditional rainy holiday.

The narrative style Haddon uses here sometimes makes the reader work harder than they might be used to - there's very little "Richard said" or "Angela drowsed off and began to dream" - instead we are pitched straight into the stream of consciousness or dream itself, and left to catch up from the context and content. Occasionally one has to back track once working out what is thinking or dreaming or talking. That is clearly a deliberate attempt to keep the reader focussed and paying attention, and it works well - the text is not so obscure that the reader can't eventually work out who is thinking, even if they have jumped associatively from what was being said a moment ago.

In "The Curious Incident" Haddon came very close to successfully presenting the world through the eyes of a  child with Asperberger's Syndrome. I had some issues with this - I thought the way Christopher navigated his way around the London Underground a bit too contrived and unconvincing - but here the ventriloquism reaches a new level. Each character has a convincing internal monologue. Benjy's eight year old perspective on the world was especially touching and convincing, but each character is given their own realistic voice. Haddon can show the world equally well through the narcisstic eyes of a teenage bully, lovers feeling children again through one another's touch, or a mother still grieving for a lost child after 18 years.

There are no heroes here - everyone is flawed one way or another, some more than others, but equally no cardboard villains, just real, convincing, vulnerable people. The detail is stunning - one character puts soft brown sugar on her frosties in a way only someone with weight issues would; another character has unsuccessful 20 second sex which ends violently, but still exults at having had sex. There are also plenty of reference to popular culture and literature here to keep the reader entertained, but the novel wears its learning lightly. All in all highly recommended, and I will be tracking down his second novel when a gap emerges in my reading schedule.

Skios - Michael Frayn

It must be, I would have thought, quite rare for a writer to sit down and sadistically decide "I am going to write a farce", as Frayn appears to have done here. Farce has an inflexible set of rules and protocols that can work well on stage, when in the course of a performance improbabilities can be disguised and belief suspended, but within the pages of a novel, set aside every now and then for reflection and consideration, the natural objections that spring to mind - "he wouldn't behave that stupidly!" or "She would check before doing that" - come to the fore and won't be ignored. I've long admired the artistry of successful farceurs, on the basis that farce is one of the most difficult forms of literature to pull off successfully, but trying and missing is a bit like jumping the Grand Canyon - failure even by a small margin is pretty catastrophic. So to mix my metaphors Frayn is on a highwire from the outset with this novel, and while the effort is impressive I would struggle to describe the performance as enjoyable.

The central premise of this novel is that someone collecting a guest speaker at an airport, picks up the wrong person. It could happen. Here the person picked up in error goes with the flow because - and there's no real nice way of saying this - he has a mental disorder that means he embraces chaos, not in a "Wouldn't it be fun" way, but in a way that has no regard whatsoever for the consequences of his actions. He lives totally in the moment, like a goldfish with a memory of a few minutes. We are invited to think of him as a charming rogue, a combination of Boris Johnson and Hugh Grant, but in reality someone like this would spend their life in A & E, picking their teeth out of the gutter. Checking she had picked up the right person doesn't occur to Nikki - presumably she has a file on him, or access to the Internet, - and no-one at the conference has ever read a book or article by this character that included his illustration.

This all has a strong period feel to it, and in the character of the academic travelling from one far flung conference to another, peddling his tired theories about nothing much I was reminded of the portrait in Larkin's "Naturally the Foundation..." from Whitsun Wedding. The other strong echo was of Carry On films - Carry On Conferencing. So spot the foreigner with the silly accent, who can't speak proper English, and has an identical twin brother, with much hilarity ensuing. Things are thrown in pools. Lonely secretaries yearn to be taken away from all of this. Russians are gangsters; Americans are fat and stupid. Someone even gets into bed with the wrong person and only realises their mistake when things start to get intimate. We only needed a matron and a bit of drag to complete the picture. I am not complaining - all these characteristics one would expect in a farce - but you do have to wonder who finds this funny in 2013?

Despite all this I was willing to give Frayn the benefit of the doubt. This was a gentle undemanding read, with what felt strongly like half an eye on the TV adaptation market. The jokes just about work, and the plotting was sufficiently tight to keep me reading. But there are only so many times the same plot devices can be used to keep the action moving, and ultimately Frayn completely ducks out of even trying to make the novel's ending work. Having orchestrated a big finale, with all of the characters moving towards a final scene in which all the threads are drawn together, misunderstandings explained, lovers reconciled etc, it all falls flat.

If you want a beach read and some gentle discourse on identity, academia and relationships, you could do worse, but you could do a lot better - David Lodge's "Small Worlds" for example.

Have you ever been stuck?

I am in limbo at the moment, struggling manfully with a novel I refuse to give up on (Stella Gibbons, The Bachelor) but with which I can make very limited progress. This was a spur of the moment, I must have something to read purchase, done in a spirit of optimism and refusal to acknowledge the evidence of Starlight and its predecessors. I have been here before - some novels almost refuse to be read, characters blur together into an amorphous mass of old ladies and "incidents" either flatly refuse to happen, or simply fail to raise any interest in the reader. text just slides off the eyes like unwanted homework.

I call this the "meh" school of literature.

If there has been one thing that has deterred me from ever trying to write fiction myself it is the fear that what I produce would be not bad, but boring. I don't under-estimate for one second the difficulty of writing a good novel, one with interesting characters and plot development, that entertains with incident, characterisation or humour, that has something original to say. The fact that the novels I have written about her in previous months ever got published let alone bought, read and enjoyed is a triumph.

But I will finish this novel, which bluntly has none of these things, to make the investment of however many hours of my life it is not completely pointless, and then take a cold look at my reading list selection from this point on.

The Drop - Michael Connolly

The Drop sees the return of Harry Bosch, Michael Connolly's grizzled Los Angeles police detective. Bosch is said to have seen action in Vietnam, and this novel appears to be set in the present day, so he presumably is getting on in years. Having retired and returned to work he now extends his service using a deferred retirement scheme - which gives us the title of the book. Yes, that's right, a police story using an acronym for deferred retirement as its title. Of course there is an intended pun, in that the primary investigation in the novel is a suspected suicide by high rise jump. There is a sub-plot involving a DNA hit on a long unsolved murder which is integrated nicely into the overall structure - Connolly is a very experienced writer with 25 or so books to his name, and it shows.

This is a guilty pleasure - there is no pretence at anything other than entertainment, and I have to be honest I found it a very easy, undemanding, and enjoyable read. Bosch conforms to the stereotype defined by Raymond Chandler long ago, a loner who struggles with relationships and authority, determined to do what is right irrespective of the personal cost:

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor - by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world..... He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks -- that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness....If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in. ” (The Simple Art of Murder)

That captures Bosch, and many other fictional detectives, so well.

In any long running series there are some challenges for the writer - how to avoid repeating yourself and being predictable while at the same time working within the recognised structure - avoiding gimmicks like relocating to different locations, (although the last Bosch novel did end up in Hong Kong). As a police detective there are constraints on where and how Bosch can work, limiting the writer's scope for innovation. And within these constraints you can only have so many angry confrontations with impatient supervisors, interrogations of over-confident suspects, intuitive breakthroughs from tiny clues, etc, etc. Connolly seems to have recognised these issues, but shrugged and thought people will keep buying the books so no real need to keep things fresh.

As a result this novel has a reheated feel, one of Connolly going through the motions. Bosch has a short term romance - but guess what, work gets in the way. City Hall politicians conspire to frustrate his investigation. A killer wonders who will play him in the film of his exploits. And a suspected suicide turns out to be, guess what, a suicide! There's nothing here to surprise or challenge the reader, but it is clear that the reader, even this one, sometimes wants plain undemanding fare. Same again please.

Connolly suffers from the comparison with Chandler, as every crime writer would, but if you want a murder story that aspires to be something that will just pass away a train journey, it's Chandler every time.

Starlight - Stella Gibbons

This is a curious novel. It follows two impoverished sisters, Gladys and Annie, living in a run down part of North London. Their landlord sells their home to a "rackman" - a phrase many people will be unfamiliar with, but used here to describe an unscrupulous landlord likely to drive up rents, harass tenants, and ignore the fabric of their properties. If you are interested in the original Rachman this makes an interesting read - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rachman.

While the new landlord does indeed appear to be closely modelled on the original, instead of turning the sisters out into the street he installs his ailing but apparently much loved wife in the neighbouring house. She has an au pair, a German refugee, Erika, and a daughter, Peggy. Peggy's parallel unhappy love story has all the hall marks of a short story worked into the longer narrative (nothing wrong with that by the way - Raymond Chandler did much the same thing to stunning effect in some of his novels). The sisters, drawn with some affection but no illusions as to their frailities (Glad is a gossipy fool, Annie a nervous hypochondriac), turn to the local clergy for assistance. The vicar and his curate are another pair in this story of couples, again drawn with affection but unblinkingly, their flaws and weaknesses shown without hesitation. The eccentric lodger living in the attic appears in the narrative occasionally adding a further element of mystery to the story.

As a novel Starlight has its limitations. We slowly come to like the central characters, more or less, are happy for them when their lives improve, and take pleasure in their small victories and enjoyments. The wider cast is equally well drawn, but are closer to caricature. The novel has some awkward moments which to me indicated some clumsiness in drafting - people behaving in ways that do not feel natural or convincing, such as the landlord Pearson being knocked down by the 60 year old vicar, or the (spoiler) motiveless murder of the old man from the attic.

It is probably as a period piece that this novel holds the most interest, a portrait of a time when one generation of English people were still looking back to the war, and the later generation warming up to the 1960s. We aren't told when the action of the novel occurs, and Gibbons uses this imprecision to show the different perspectives of her characters. One of the older characters refers in a slip of the tongue to drawing the curtains as "doing the blackout"; the older characters shop as if they were still subsisting on rations (in a way they are), and live in world where houses are still uninhabitable from damage from the Blitz. The younger ones go to a dance featuring the long-haired "Spacemen", locating the novel's events right up to the time of publication (1967), more than 20 years after the end of the war. Erika brings this gap being a refugee from a continent seemingly only just recovering from the war. The narrator, and the author, firmly sides with the older generation, having little sympathy for longer than collar length hair, drawing links between this debauchery and mindless street fighting and murder.
What makes the novel genuinely weird is the plot line about possession. Yes, demonic, head turning, green eyed possession, eventually cast out by crucifix wielding, holy water splashing clergymen. I've exaggerated for comic effect slightly here, but only a little. It is a decidedly odd element to introduce, and despite its centrality to the climax of the novel actually adds little to the overall impact of the story.
I bow to no-one in my admiration of the genius of Stella Gibbons, which peeps through here in many elements of this novel, but overall I can't deny that this is really for the completists amongst us. Many thanks nonetheless to Vintage for republishing these long lost novels.

Reading and Forgetting (or Cold Comfort farm, again)

Difficult though it is to admit, I often read novels and then forget what they are about. Not just minor details - whole novels slide past my eyes, to be quickly forgotten. Novels from the same author merge in the memory, and even relatively recently read books which I have written about here resist more detailed recollection. I am not sure this is just about quality, although that obviously is a factor - there are plenty of books I wish I never had to forget, quietly pressing the delete button in my brain minutes after the last page has been turned.


Why is this, and does it matter? I am not going to try an amateur dissertation on human memory here - that would be both arrogant and futile. I think we all understand at a basic level that the more carefully we read and consider a book, the more likely we are to remember it. Blogging about books I read is in part an attempt to anchor them in my memory and prevent them fading away, a bit like repeating one's lines in a play. But I also think that the way we read is more important. To illustrate this, an anecdote:

Stuck on a train recently I fired up my Kindle, and turned as I so often do the comforting arms of Stella Gibbons. I have written before and at length about the glories of Cold Comfort Farm, and it is probably the novel I would most like to read as I leave this earth, in the unlikely event I get that choice. Flora, as I am sure you know, goes to live with her bizarre relatives in darkest Sussex, and arrives to find the place largely deserted. She is shown to her bedroom, and describes it thus:

"She dressed in pleasant leisure, studying her room. She decided that she liked it.

It was square, and unusually high, and papered with a bold though faded design of darker red upon crimson. The fireplace was elegant, the grate was basket-shaped, and the mantelpiece was of marble, floridly carved, and yellowed by age and exposure. Upon the mantelpiece itself rested two large shells, whose gentle curves shaded from white to the richest salmon-pink; these were reflected in the large old silvery mirror which hung directly above it. The other mirror was a long one; it stood in the darkest corner of the room, and was hidden by a cupboard door when the latter was opened…..One wall was almost filled by a large mahogany wardrobe. A round table to match stood in the middle of the worn red and yellow carpet, which was covered with a design of big flowers. The bed was high, and made of mahogany; the quilt was a honeycoomb, and white."

So far as I can recall, for what that is worth, we don't revisit this rather sweet welcoming room again. Flora has an adjoining sitting room she uses to while away her time, but not this bedroom.

When I read this paragraph the other day what struck me was that I had never read it before. More precisely I had no memory, not the faintest echo, of having read this description before, despite the fact that I have read Cold Comfort at least once a year for more than thirty years - obsessive I know. How could that be? Had it been craftily inserted by some unscupulous Kindle editor for reasons unknown? Unlikely. Was this a case of the Eyre Affair coming to life? Even less likely. Or was this the first sign of early onset memory loss? My best guess is that I had read this paragraph before, but never really paid it any attention.

Why did it not stand out? The description is detailed and well written, and is noteworthy because it is not in the mock heroic form used for many other descriptive passages, nor the humourous style used for much of the rest of the narrative. It is not clear whether the narrator here is Flora or the author - the gentle appreciation of the room could come from either. There is nothing arch or judgemental about the description, which there usually is from Flora's descriptions of the farm. It occurs to me it might even be text from an abandoned alternative novel that Gibbons is recycling here. I have however edited out for reasons of brevity some comments about mirrors found in commercial hotel bedrooms that might give a different perspective.

I can only conclude I didn't remember this section because I have never read it properly. It doesn't matter that Flora has a nice bedroom at the farm, so I have mentally skipped this page to move on to the wonderful "porridge breakfast confrontation with Adam and his clettering twigs. 

What other gems might there be lurking unappreciated in CCF - I will have to re-read it to check......