Dominion - C J Sansom

Alternative history novelists are a pretty unimaginative bunch - the Second World War is I suppose such a compelling period of history, when tiny moments can be seen to have had, in hindsight, such momentous impact, that they rarely stray far from its grasp. The turning point in this version of German victory in WW2 is Chamberlain's resignation in 1940, and Halifax's acceptance of the premiership. Surrender on terms to Germany swiftly follows.

So far so pedestrian, but Sansom sets his novel 12 years on, in a downtrodden England when the resistance is gaining momentum, Hitler is ailing, and the never ending war between Greater Germany and the USSR is draining the life out of the Reich. This world is realised in a lot of detail with alternative histories laid out for the rest of the world, the British political establishment (including Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell, foreign secretary, and of course, irresistibly, Churchill, leader of the resistance) and various other British institutions.

What follows is a highly conventional spy narrative, with several strands closely interwoven, never more than a day or two apart. The principal character, David Fitzgerald, a fairly anonymous civil servant finds himself involved in a spy ring. By coincidence Frank Muncaster, a depressive university friend of his, becomes aware of some highly secret information which must not fall into German hands. This is all hugely unconvincing - it is never explained why the USA would want to try to smuggle Muncaster out of the UK when they already have the knowledge he carries. When the secret is finally revealed it is all one big "meh", and the novel fizzles out of a beach in Rottingdean, of all places. For much of the novel this implausibility doesn't really matter - Sansom drives the plot along convincingly and doesn't allow too much time for reflection. The period detail, clearly the result of a lot of research, gives the book the feel of a 1950s black and white movie.

This was an undemanding, very long, read, that was an interesting digression on the "what if" theme, with a reassuring "we win the war in the end anyway" conclusion which I would not be at all surprised to see televised sooner or later.

Moranthology - Caitlin Moran

You see what she did there? - the last two letters of her name are the first two letters of the word describing politely what this is, so she mashed them together to come up with the title. The good news is that this is by far the worst "joke" in the book, which is a collection of her recent articles, reviews, and gossip, the latter also being known as Celebrity Watch, which is usually the best thing about the Times on Fridays.

Moran can certainly turn a phrase. Her writing is always well constructed, easy to read, and worth reading. I have a few reservations, but these shouldn't detract from the overall appreciation of what is a good bedtime read. The review of the Great British Bake Off, and the squirrel scandal of 2011, is genuinely laugh out loud funny.

Those reservations: first, there are some sudden switches of tone, moving from D list celebrity gossip and euphemisms for body parts, to highly serious commentary about social issues. Moran is a genuinely passionate writer on issues such as poverty and mental illness, and to read these articles alongside what is undeniably amusing chatter about Katie Price sometimes struck a jarring note. Second, her defence of the Murdoch/Times paywall didn't ring true - I know she takes the Murdoch shilling, and has licence to speak her mind within certain no doubt unwritten constraints, and I am sure she would say she genuinely believes it is right to make people pay for some content on the Internet, but there is no serious discussion of consideration of the counter-arguments about setting the web free, user generated content, etc.

Aside from the social commentary, and in particular the attacks on the Government, Moran is at her best when writing about her enthusiasms - Lady Gaga, a quite historic interview, Sherlock, Dr Who. What struck me about many of these articles is that I had a clear recollection of reading them first time around - always a good sign, although it must mean I read the Times more often that I thought I did.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha - Roddy Doyle

Winner of the Booker Prize in 1993

I made a sincere effort to read as many of the Booker Prize winners as could reasonably be expected earlier this year (see a number of reviews) - but the award of this year's Booker to Hilary Mantel for Bring Out the Bodies, the sequel to the 2009 winner, Wolf Hall, may well have defeated me. Wolf Hall was a slog, and to have to go through it all over again is a read too far for me, now, when so many other books stand unread, waiting their turn. But one Booker winner that I have read recently is Roddy Doyle's 1993 winner, Paddy Clarke Ha, Ha, Ha. This novel is now on the GCSE syllabus. It is written entirely through the eyes of ten year old Paddy, the title character, a ten year old boy growing up in Ireland in the late 1960s.
The appeal of the novel, to teenage boys in particular, is obvious - Paddy is a bit of a sociopath, bullying his younger brother almost to the point of resignation, and running around the fields and building sites of his home town without little or no thought as to the consequences of his actions.

I think we are supposed to warm to Paddy because of his vulnerability, but that was hard - he is clearly a bright kid but other than that he has very few saving graces. As an accurate portrait of childhood, as it was then at least, this novel would appeal to teenagers feeling no-one understands their world, even if the world of a teenager in 2012 (or 1993) is much changed from the 1960s. The language used is authentic, even down to the amount of explicit swearing. I can understand that syllabus setters would have considered themselves quite radical, setting as a GCSE text a novel in which there is little traditional narrative, strong language, and lots of slang ("mickey", "spa", etc). Paddy is the classic flawed narrator - his account jumps in time and between themes with no warning, and the reader has to work hard to follow the text, being challenged to  keep up. Keeping up is relatively straightforward to an adult reader, but I can see how teenager would find decoding some of his puzzles either rewarding (as the GCSE people would have hoped) or irritating, as I suspect happens more often than not.
My only reservation about this novel was its authenticity. Paddy is a coarse, violent and totally self centred little thug, but he is acutely attuned to the ebbs and flows of his parents' relationship. While he bullies his brother relentlessly and seems to have no insight into the damage he is doing, when it comes to his parents he acquires an emotional intelligence way beyond his years. Doyle is emphasising the damaging impact of parental relationship breakdown on children, which is unarguably worthy, but my instinct is that while children pick up more than we expect, few are as finely tuned to the nuances of their relationship as Paddy Clarke.

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoievsky

Raskolnikov, a former student, having discontinued his studies through lack of money, lives a bitterly impoverished life in St Petersburg. His pride is wounded by receiving small amounts of money from his mother and sister living in the country. He hears from his mother that his sister has recently left her post as a governess in scandalous circumstances. She is rescued by an offer of betrothal by a wealthy local man, and accepts in the interests of financial security rather than any trace of affection. This dilemma mirrors his own, caused by his poverty. To break out of this situation he decides to murder and rob a local pawnbroker, which he does, killing the woman's sister along the way.

His state of mind during this killing, and thereafter during the months of the investigation of the crime, is the focus of this novel. The author reveals this to us mainly through the narrator's commentary. While the murder - with an axe - is brutally described, Raskolnikov never reflects on the details of his crime or expresses any remorse. Nevertheless the psychological trauma of the event cannot be suppressed, and he falls ill, and behaves in such as way as to arouse the suspicions of the police and his family and friends. He is blessed with very steadfast friends and family who stand by him, believing in his inherent goodness, right through to the end of the novel. Raskolnikov lies to himself, suggesting that the murder was something he never really intended to do, while simultaneously showing us the detailed and devious preparation he has made for the murder. He could easily have avoided detection or capture if he had the will to do so. Instead he crumbles and confesses, and is sentenced to eight years in a Siberian labour camp, where he is followed by his adoring prostitute lover, Sonya.

This was not an easy read. The translation, for me, was wooden, and the original language must have been very intense and complex to have produced such turgid prose. It was a struggle to finish and there was little doubt all along about the outcome - the title tells us Raskolnikov is not going to avoid eventual capture and punishment. The tendency for each character to have multiple names only added to the confusion.

Reviewing "classics" is never easy, even less so when the novel is a translation, and much loved by many readers. The entry point is hard to find - one's own reading and judgments risk being facile, plot summaries are available elsewhere online with much more detail than my memory can supply, and all that needs to be said has been said elsewhere, many times over. I prefer reviewing works that are less monolithic than this. But having read the novel it is in keeping with the spirit of this blog that I record some impressions, however simplistic.

The idea that a novel can be driven by a character who is both a murderer and someone the reader is invited to identify with, even like, was a dramatic shift from a world where only black and white positions existed, with no scope for any shades of grey. I couldn't warm to Raskolnikov, and as a result I found less and less of the novel to engage with. I did finish, but it was a challenge.

The Hound of the D'Urbevilles - Kim Newman

Why restrict yourself to one clever idea - the Holmes stories written from the perspective of Moriarty's Watson? - when two - mixing in themes characters and plots from 19th Century fiction - will be twice the fun? Well, perhaps on reflection the whole is less than the sum of the parts, if I can use my second cliché this early in the review. There are some problems with this approach. Let's start with Colonel "Basher" Moran, the character Newman creates to act as Moriarty's second in charge and his chronicler. Moran is a nasty piece of work, and while the author tries to give him all the roguish charm at his disposal, it is still impossible to like Moran, let alone feel any sympathy for him. Perhaps at the end of the novel, when effectively abandoned by Moriarty he takes his revenge in a clever twist, one is twinged, but by then it's a bit too late. Only in top class writing can we like mass murderers like Moran - here he is drawn as a cartoonish figure to help avoid any natural repulsion from his killing, whoring, and generally dissolute behaviour.

Secondly, in the Conan Doyle stories Moriarty is, deliberately, very lightly drawn. The absence of any detail about him adds to his sinister omnipresence. Here he comes across as less sinister master criminal as peevish schoolmaster - I exaggerate, but not much. Being second in command to a bloodless criminal mastermind might be an interesting job, but here Moriarty is just an inverted caricature of Sherlock Holmes - all his traits, quirks, and characteristics are reflected in the portrait of Moriarty, including the experiments with bees/wasps.
Lastly there is the use of stories, characters and themes from 19th Century literature. At first this seems like it might work - these stories provide a structure and setting for the Moran and Moriarty characters to develop. But it doesn't quite work. The first story used is a very obscure Zane Grey novel - the epitome of the trashy disposable pot-boiler. Later stories are stronger but the gimmicky impression is hard to shake off. While most of the borrowed themes are recognisable, inevitably one feels irritated if one spots a reference, but is unable to remember its source - particularly as Newman seems to prefer the more obscure quarters of 19th Century fiction. Sometimes it works, as with the Green Eyed Goddess chapters - but I was left wondering why not just invent your own story lines?

Sweet Tooth - Ian McEwan (2)

I said at the end of August I was going to revisit Sweet Tooth after a period of reflection. Having read a couple of interesting reviews of this novel, as well as some commentary on Atonement, which although utterly different from this novel in terms of setting has some interesting parallels, I have what I hope are some clearer thoughts on this novel, and in particular what McEwan does here.

To recap, Sweet Tooth tells the story of a relatively naive young woman, Serena Frome, going to university, having affairs, starting work with MI5, and meeting an author. The big twist at the end of the novel is that instead of this being a first person narrative from Serena's perspective, it is written by her author boyfriend in a mixture of anger and disappointment when he discovers that their relationship was based upon a lie - she was initially sent to meet him by MI5 to involve him unwittingly in a half baked attempt to win the cultural cold war. His exposure as a dupe is done with his collaboration.

This is all very clever - all of the inconsistencies in "Serena's" earlier narrative are immediately explained. There is an under-current of distaste for example in her descriptions of her earlier love affairs which only makes sense when we realise they are as imagined by her current lover. The portrait of her younger self as not as clever as she thinks she is, and frankly just a bit too generous with her affections, suddenly makes sense if they are a portrait by a jealous boyfriend, not a self portrait.

Is McEwan doing anything different here from what he did in Atonement - completely reframing a story and making the reader realise that this is all just a story, the people aren't real, these things did not really happen to them despite all the earlier attempts to give the narrative verisimilitude?

Where I am left feeling uncomfortable by this novel is in the author's portrayal of Serena's approach to literature. She is a mathematics graduate, but reads voraciously, indiscriminately, and has little or no interest in literary theory. To her books are just stories, to be consumed in a day and discarded. She - and remembering this is through the cynical and hurt lens of her author boyfriend of course - is not the kind of reader we think her boyfriend would want. And not really the kind of reader we would want to be. But have we been? Have we rushed through Sweet Tooth to its denounement without fully engaging with the text, without spotting the clues that Serena's narrative isn't as straightforward as we are led to believe? Are we guilty as charged?

In a recent interview McEwan has portrayed this novel as a traditional love story, suggesting that the central relationship will survive the trauma of deception and the subsequent damning judgement that is handed down. I certainly did not read the novel's ending in that way - there is little to suggest there will be a "happy" ending here other than our traditional desire to see one. But the romance is not really the driving force at the heart of the novel. Incidentally this is also definitely not a novel about espionage either, despite the setting - no spying is done, and anyone picking this up expecting a spy story will be deeply disappointed.

If not a romance, nor a spy story, then what is this? At the risk of sounding pretentious, this is a meta-fiction - a fiction about fiction. Of its kind it is one of the more sophisticated (yet deceptively simple), ambiguous species of novel, comparable to The Magus for example.

House of Silk - Anthony Horowitz

I would have thought that pastiches of the Sherlock Holmes oeuvre, of which this claims to be the first authorised by the Conan Doyle estate, would be one of the easiest to pull together. Each of the stories follows a fairly rigid pattern, and there are a series of boxes for any author to tick - Holmes with violin, tick, cocaine addiction referenced but not indulged, tick, London fog, rattling coach drives, cheeky Cockney urchins , Mrs Hudson making tea, Mycroft being inscrutable, and of course the dazzling deductions based on flimsy evidence (but never guesses, oh no). And with Dr Watson you have the most affable and gentle of narrators, always comfortably behind the pace, leaving the reader a sense of superiority - we can work out which is the Holmes in disguise character before he does, how the locked room is escaped from, etc. Horowitz sinks into the comfort of these clichés with an almost audible sigh, and the reader is granted 400 pages of predictable, unchallenging nonsense.

Another Conan Doyle tradition that Horowitz follows religiously is the tendency to not bother too much with plausibility. Raymond Chandler in the Simple Art of Murder famously described the Holmes stories as "mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue" and elsewhere, although I can't find it now after at least five minutes on Google, picks apart the plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles, pointing out just how many absurdities and improbabilities the plot contains. Horowitz maintains this tradition with a plot that depends utterly on people being in the right place at the right time - for example Holmes's escape from prison depends on him bumping into a prison doctor who he knows from a previous case, not to mention the bizarre behaviour of the Irish gangster who marries a man to exact revenge upon him, which as a plan has a number of flaws in it (ie a dependence on him being gay and thus not want sex with you, but prepared to marry you nonetheless!)

There is some updated knowingness here - we meet Moriarty, but he doesn't play a part in the plot - and the concern for the underclass (for example the street children Holmes uses as his eyes and ears in back streets) missing in the Conan Doyle. Watson's narration is set many years in the future, after Holmes's death, which as a device adds nothing to the novel. As a deviation from the Conan Doyle tradition of having a near contemporaneous narration this seems a strange one to choose.

Nevertheless, Horowitz does a competent job throughout, without at any stage dazzling or impressing - the nearest he comes is during the unveiling of the villain at the close, which as described above doesn't stand up to much if any scrutiny. In the back of my mind throughout the read was the way the recent TV series had grasped all of these conventions but not proven shackled by them, managing to remain true to the spirit of the original but reinventing Holmes for a modern generation. The House of Silk suffers significantly by comparison

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