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| 1635112869
| 9781635112863
| B076JNX4FX
| 4.10
| 222
| unknown
| Jan 16, 2018
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really liked it
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“To see oursels as ithers see us...” When his uncle Harry is invited to perform at the Magic Circle in London, Eli Marks takes the opportunity of “To see oursels as ithers see us...” When his uncle Harry is invited to perform at the Magic Circle in London, Eli Marks takes the opportunity of turning the trip into a holiday for himself and his girlfriend, Megan. But things take a dramatic turn when one of the magicians slated to appear with Harry dies on stage – killed by a “magic” contraption. As Harry falls under suspicion, Eli and some of Harry's magician friends must try to find out what happened... I love this series so approached this book with high expectations and it has a lot of the elements that make the series so enjoyable. Eli is a first person narrator (past tense) and it's always fun to listen in on his thoughts about the people he meets. Gaspard always presents the stage magic interestingly, without breaking the magician's code of not revealing how tricks are done. I love the interaction between Eli and his elderly uncle and, by extension, the older generation of stage magicians he knows from the days when stage magic was still bigger than TV magic. But the transplanting of the characters to London didn't work so well for me. Thankfully Gaspard doesn't go the funny accent route, but he does keep suggesting that perfectly commonplace English expressions are actually American in origin and therefore hard for us old-fashioned throwbacks to use confidently. And when Eli began to refer to his hotel as Fawlty Towers, it set my teeth on edge somewhat. It's such a cliché. I also can't help but get picky about factual inaccuracies that could have been sorted by a little research: for example, the suggestion that magistrates are responsible for charging people with crimes, or a police officer using the term 'capital crime' in a country that abolished capital punishment back when the Beatles still had short hair. Irritating errors like these, and there were several more of them, tend to throw me out of the flow of the story. I strongly suggest that if American authors want to write books based in Britain and publish them in Britain, they should hire a British editor to give them a final look over before sending the proofs to the printers. However, I doubt any of these things would annoy American readers, who will make up the bulk of Gaspard's audience, so hey ho! But I personally will be glad when Eli returns to Minnesota for his next adventure. Otherwise, the plot itself is quite fun with its origins back in Harry's past, leading to enjoyable reminiscing among the entertaining group of magicians who've assembled for the performances at the Magic Circle. It seemed to me to cross the credibility line more than usual in this series, and perhaps not to be quite as “fair play”. But there's plenty of humour in it and Eli is as likeable a hero as always. I know this review has been quite critical but I did enjoy reading the book overall, although it certainly isn't my favourite in the series. However, it was good to see the personal stories of the main characters move forward, and I look forward to meeting up with them all again in their next outing. 3½ stars for me, so rounded up. NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Henery Press. www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 25, 2017
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Dec 29, 2017
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Dec 25, 2017
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Kindle Edition
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| 1921834714
| 9781921834714
| B006YJO124
| 3.50
| 117
| Jan 01, 2006
| Jan 30, 2012
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really liked it
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A visit to the dark side... Jayne Keeney is an Australian woman working as a PI in Bangkok in Thailand. While she is recovering from an injury she rece A visit to the dark side... Jayne Keeney is an Australian woman working as a PI in Bangkok in Thailand. While she is recovering from an injury she received in the course of an investigation, she decides to visit her best friend Didier in Chiang Mai. After a rather strange and disturbing evening in the gay bars behind the Night Bazaar, Didier's Thai lover, Nou, is found dead and horrifically mutilated. Worse still, Didier is accused of the crime by the police, who shoot him dead, claiming he was resisting arrest. Jayne is determined to clear her friend's name, so must try to find out who really killed Nou, and why. I shall start with my usual disclaimer – I know the author, Angela Savage, via our blogs, so you should assume that there may be some bias in my review. However, as always, I’ll try to be as honest as possible. Although Angela has written three novels in this series, this one was her début and is the first one I've read. Despite the PI set-up, the book isn't really a mystery – we find out who and why quite early on. The real story is about how Jayne navigates her way through the corruption at all levels of society in an attempt to force the authorities to clear Didier's name. It's set amid the seamy side of Thai life – prostitution, including child prostitution, police corruption, and foreign sex tourism. Savage pulls no punches, making it something of a grim read, grittier than my personal taste normally runs to. There is also some graphic sex and a sprinkling of strong language. Didier has been doing outreach work to try to minimise the spread of AIDS not only in the gay community but in the wider Thai society. This has led him to become involved in a project to look at the underlying causes of the massive sex industry in the country and it's here that the motivation lies. Savage raises some interesting questions, especially around the subject of foreign involvement in the sex industry, as both providers and users, and the attempts of foreign law enforcement agencies to intervene. To be honest, the little I know about Thailand comes from the various horror stories surrounding sex tourism by sad old perverts and revolting paedophiles that have hit the British news over the decades and I had been hoping that I might get some insights into other aspects of Thai life (I assume there must be some!), but because of the focus of this plot, that wasn't the case here. I will be interested to see if the later books in the series will widen the focus to let us see a more enticing side to the country. It feels very well researched and the picture of this aspect of Thai life feels unfortunately all too believable. The character of Jayne is well developed – she's strong without having superwoman tendencies, independent but not a loner and, while she's courageous, we are also allowed to see her fear, which keeps her human and likeable. The writing is very good – happily it's written in third person, past tense. The story flows well, never dipping into 'soggy middle' territory, and Savage manages to keep Jayne's grief over Didier's death feeling real without wallowing in the angsty morass so beloved of some of our contemporary crime writers. The book paints an excellent picture of how corruption in the police force allows child prostitution and other forms of sex slavery to thrive, but Savage also highlights that not all sex workers are forced into it – many choose the life because they can earn more that way. Without getting overly preachy, Savage through her characters suggests that poverty is the root cause – while I don't disagree, I felt she took a rather more forgiving approach than I can to parents who sell eight and nine year old girls to the highest bidder, whatever the reason. The foreign sex tourists and the police come off as the baddies – personally I struggled to spot any “goodies”. I was a little disappointed that even Jayne seemed more concerned about Didier's good name than about the abuse of children, although I do think that's more realistic than if she'd been portrayed as a moral crusader – a foreign white knight riding to rescue the Thai people from themselves. The subject matter meant that for me it was more of a thought-provoking read than an enjoyable one. But on the whole, Savage gets a good balance between the examination of the social issues and the telling of an interesting story, and none of the grittier elements feel gratuitous or voyeuristic. A well-written and intriguing look at the seamier side of Thai culture that will appeal to those who like their crime fiction dark. Recommended, and I look forward to seeing how the series develops. www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 22, 2017
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Dec 25, 2017
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Dec 22, 2017
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Kindle Edition
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| 1909954071
| 9781909954076
| 1909954071
| 3.74
| 19
| unknown
| Oct 01, 2016
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it was amazing
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Say nothing of the dog... When a client turns up at Baker Street, she is accidentally shown to 221d by mistake – the room upstairs from the famous con Say nothing of the dog... When a client turns up at Baker Street, she is accidentally shown to 221d by mistake – the room upstairs from the famous consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. This room is occupied by J. Yes, that J. The one from Three Men in a Boat. He's there that day with Harris and George, to say nothing of the dog, Montmorency. And when the lovely Miss Briony Lodge appeals for his help over some mysterious letters she's been receiving, he's so taken with her that he decides to play along with her belief that he is Holmes and investigate the mystery himself, with the rather dubious help of his friends. So begins this mash-up pastiche of two of my favourite bookish delights of all time. When I was offered a copy of this my first impulse was to shudder violently and issue a haughty thanks but no thanks – nothing is more guaranteed to make me froth at the mouth than people messing with my literary idols. However something made me glance at the 'look inside' feature on Amazon. The first line made me laugh out loud... “To Montmorency she is always the woman.” One good line doesn't necessarily mean the whole thing will be good though, so I read on... “Young men such as ourselves, with active minds (naturally I excuse you from this generalisation, George) and active bodies (forgive me, Harris, I don't mean you, of course) do not need rest. Rest for us is the mere counterfeit of death. There will be time enough for rest when the Grim Reaper taps us on the shoulder and asks to see our ticket.” This is followed by a delightfully silly argument between the three men on the subject of how many servants a knight of yore would have had as he went off to “try his valour against all manner of foe”... By now I was sold! And I'm happy to say that the entire book lives up to the promise of these first few pages. Bagchi clearly knows the originals inside out and loves them, and he replicates J.'s voice with impressive accuracy and warm affection. Holmes himself is an off-page presence, but there are zillions of references to the stories and it's great fun trying to spot them all. I'm pretty sure Bagchi must also be a Wodehouse fan, because there are occasional touches of his kind of humour in there too. The plot is a mash-up of several of the Holmes stories combined with a trip down the Thames to some of the places that appear in Three Men in a Boat. If I have a criticism, it's that occasionally Bagchi veers too close to the original – such as in J.'s musings on the mysterious working of the British railway system. But for the vast majority he achieves that difficult balance of staying true to the source while stamping his own originality on top, and the story all hangs together very well. It's mostly told by J. in the first person, but it turns out that by coincidence Holmes has sent Watson to follow a chap who happens to be involved in the mystery too (being deliberately vague here). So, in the manner of The Hound of the Baskervilles, we get to read Watson's reports to Holmes along with extracts from his personal journal, and Bagchi has totally nailed Watson's style too. My dear Holmes, Today's proceedings have been as full of incident as we could have wished or feared. I only hope that my pen can do justice to the high drama of the day. Deliciously, even the chapter headings match the style of the originals. Here's Chapter 2, a J. chapter... Of the power of female beauty upon the male brain—A decorated ceiling—On the supernatural abilities of dogs—The railway guide a threat to public morality—On the glorious freedom of God's special creation, the locomotive—Harris has an idea—The moral degeneracy of the downstream man. It's 155 pages – long enough to be satisfying without reaching the point of outstaying its welcome. I've said snootily in past rips of dreadful pastiches and follow-on novels that writers shouldn't set themselves up for comparison with the greats unless the quality of their own writing is up to standard. Bagchi's is – there are bits which, if taken out of context, I'm sure would fool most of us into thinking they had genuinely been penned by either Jerome or Conan Doyle. I enjoyed every minute of the couple of hours it took me to read, laughing out loud many times along the way. Highly recommended – a better cure for the blues than cocaine, liver pills or clumps on the side of the head... NB This book was provided for review by the author. www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 20, 2017
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Dec 22, 2017
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Dec 20, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0198702647
| 9780198702641
| 0198702647
| 3.83
| 323,840
| 1898
| Oct 10, 2017
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it was amazing
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The Martians are coming!! London, at the tail-end of the nineteenth century, is the largest city on Earth, the centre of the world's greatest empire; i The Martians are coming!! London, at the tail-end of the nineteenth century, is the largest city on Earth, the centre of the world's greatest empire; indeed, the centre of the world. As its population grows, its tentacles are spreading out to incorporate the various towns and villages around it into suburbs for the middle classes. A vast swarm of humanity, scurrying busily to and fro, like ants around an ant-heap. A tempting eat-all-you-want buffet for hungry aliens... The story of The War of the Worlds is so well known that it requires very little in the way of blurb. Martians invade and use their vastly superior technology to destroy everything and everyone in their path. The only question is – will they ultimately win, or will they be defeated? On the remote chance that anyone doesn't know the answer, I won't say. The book is far more interesting for what it says about Wells' world than for the story itself. The unnamed narrator is on the spot when the first Martian spacecraft lands. He sees the creatures emerge and watches as they fiddle about with equipment. Then he's as surprised and shocked as everyone else when it turns out they're not here with peaceful intentions and have no desire to communicate with humans. Instead, they set off on a course of massive destruction. The British Army – the greatest army in the world, the army that has defeated and massacred untold thousands of people in its imperial triumphs around the world – is crushed, its best weapons as ineffective against the Martians' as a native spear against a machine gun. As the narrator wanders the countryside trying to find his wife from whom he's become separated, he describes the horror of this invasion – death and destruction only the beginning of the Martians' terrible plan for the inhabitants of earth... Britain's psychological relationship with its empire never ceases to fascinate me. When Wells was writing this, the Empire was at its height, seemingly invincible. But already there were signs of cracks appearing – uprisings, demands for self-rule. Plus there was the question of its moral justification, beginning to be debated. Were we bringing civilisation to the barbarian, or exploiting him? Could we even be sure he was a barbarian? Was victory in war still glorious when one side had weapons the other side had never even dreamt of? Wells turns the whole question on its head by doing the unthinkable – he makes London the centre of the invasion rather than the home of the invaders. He brings onto our village greens, our city streets, our familiar landmarks, the kind of destruction Britain itself had been perpetrating around the world. Invasion! Perhaps Britain's biggest fear and biggest boast. This tiny island nation with its massive navy, supreme in its confidence that it was able to defend itself against all comers. No invader had set foot on British soil in almost a thousand years. Our naval supremacy was our protection and our pride. But the Martians don't come across the sea... they come from above. Was it coincidence that Wells was writing at the time that man was about to successfully take to the skies, creating a new threat that would lead eventually to the massive destruction rained down on us in the middle of the twentieth century? To us, the idea of invasion from space is almost laughable. We know there's no life on Mars, or if there is it's not of the kind that builds spacecraft; and distance alone makes the likelihood of invasion from other solar systems seem negligible. But to the late Victorians, the idea of life on Mars was real. Schiaparelli had seen the 'canals' and some scientists believed they were a sign of a technologically advanced species, trying to harness what little water remained on a dying planet. What more likely than that a species who could do that could build spacecraft? And that, seeing the lush blue and green of planet Earth, they would want to colonise it, exploit it, as we exploited other nations? The whole idea of evolution, Darwinism, was also at the forefront of the late Victorian consciousness. Suddenly it isn't quite so clear that humanity is the ultimate species, born to dominate all others. Maybe, just maybe, there are other species out there that have evolved further, or faster. And who's to say they'll necessarily be peaceful? Evolution is a recurring theme in Wells' books – he'd already addressed it extensively in both The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Time Machine. In this one, he makes the double suggestion that there may be more evolved species out there in space, and also that ultimately man may not be the most resilient form of life here on earth. Scary stuff for a society that had been so sure of its mastery of all it surveyed! As a story, I might only rate this one as 3 or 4 stars. It tends to be more description than action and the ending is somewhat anti-climactic for modern tastes. But for what it says about the British psyche of its time it fully deserves its place as a classic and the maximum 5. And I haven't even talked about how influential it's been on science fiction in books and films over the last century. I read the new Oxford World's Classics edition which includes an interesting and informative foreword and notes by Darryl Jones, who is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Trinity College Dublin. He goes into much more depth on the themes I've mentioned and more, and puts the book into its historical and literary context. I highly recommend these OWC editions – I find the forewords, without being overly long, pack in a lot of information and add a huge amount to my appreciation of the books. NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Oxford World's Classics. www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 17, 2017
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Dec 20, 2017
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Dec 17, 2017
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Paperback
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| B01N4C7V52
| unknown
| 4.35
| 235
| unknown
| Dec 09, 2016
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it was amazing
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The Spirits of Christmas... It's been my habit for many years to revisit Dickens' best known Christmas story over the festive season each year. Sometim The Spirits of Christmas... It's been my habit for many years to revisit Dickens' best known Christmas story over the festive season each year. Sometimes this will be for a re-read but in recent years I've been enjoying some of the many adaptations of it in film or on audio. This year I went for Audible's full cast dramatisation, having enjoyed several of their other productions in recent months. I knew going in that it had some great competition to beat – Patrick Stewart's abridged narration has been my go-to for years, and Tom Baker's unabridged version is up there at the same standard. But this one has Derek Jacobi as Dickens/the narrator, and anyone who's read my reviews will know I am a huge fan of his audio narrations... This follows the pattern Audible have been using for their Original Drama series of being part narration, part dramatisation. I love this approach. The dramatised elements make it a livelier listen which holds my attention better than even excellent straight narrations sometimes do, while the narrated bits allow for the depth and background that sometimes gets lost when a book is reduced to only dialogue in a full-scale dramatisation. It allows the listener to hear the author's voice come through in the writing which, especially when the author is as brilliant as Dickens, is an essential. Jacobi is undoubtedly the star of this production, having by far the biggest role as narrator of the linking pieces between the relatively sparse dialogue. He is excellent, of course, but not having the chance to create any of the wonderfully larger-than-life characters meant I felt his talents were a tiny bit wasted. Personally I'd have preferred him to be performing Scrooge, especially since I felt Kenneth Cranham's performance in the role was a little too understated for my taste. However that's purely a subjective opinion – I love the big, booming, overblown performances of Stewart and Baker, but Cranham's quieter interpretation may work better for many people. The division between narrator and main character in this dramatisation leaves Cranham with a far smaller role than either Stewart or Baker, since they have the fun of creating their own dramatic interpretation of the non-dialogue parts too. All the other performances are good, with no weak links in the chain. The standouts for me are Jamie Glover as Bob Cratchit and Miriam Margolyes as The Ghost of Christmas Present. Glover's Cratchit is less down-trodden than he is sometimes portrayed, somehow – I can't quite put my finger on why, exactly, since as far as my not always reliable memory could confirm there were no changes to the words Dickens gives him. But Glover's performance conveyed him to me as a strong, good-humoured man, limited by his poverty, but not broken by his miserly, bullying boss or the circumstances of his life. I enjoyed him very much. Margolyes is an old hand at Dickens, not just appearing in many of the BBC serialisations over the decades, but also having performed in her one-woman show, Dickens' Women, for some years (a wonderful performance that's also available on audio and which I highly recommend). So she 'gets' him, and is not afraid to exploit the huge emotional range he allows to those who perform his work. For me, a successful Dickens performance is when I can imagine it might be done as he himself would have delivered it at one of his famous readings, and Margolyes is one of those actors who always achieves this. She frightened me and moved me – when she talked of Ignorance and Want I believed utterly that she meant every terrible, warning word, sadly as relevant today as when Dickens wrote them. "They are Man’s," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" If the adaptation by RD Carstairs is abridged at all, it must be very lightly. I noticed nothing missing and the running time is similar to an unabridged narration. It may be that there are minor changes to the order of some parts – there's quite a lot of quick cutting between Jacobi's narration and Scrooge's inner thoughts as delivered by Cranham that worked very effectively to bring the two parts together. But there are certainly no significant changes to either tone or meaning and all the words, I think, are Dickens' own. So, in conclusion, a hugely enjoyable dramatisation which, while it might not quite have replaced Stewart or Baker as my favourite audio version, is certainly up there in contention with them. Highly recommended. 4½ stars for me, so rounded up. www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 16, 2017
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Dec 19, 2017
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Dec 16, 2017
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Audible Audio
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| 0571334377
| 9780571334377
| 0571334377
| 3.75
| 11,409
| Oct 06, 2016
| Oct 06, 2016
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it was amazing
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Festive felons... PD James was one of my favourite crime writers for many years, so much so that for a couple of decades she was one of my elit Festive felons... PD James was one of my favourite crime writers for many years, so much so that for a couple of decades she was one of my elite group of “must read on publication day” authors even back when this meant paying expensive hardback prices rather than waiting for up to a year for the paperback to come out. It's been a long time though since I revisited her, so I was keen to see if her magic would still work for me in this collection. There are four stories in the audiobook, each quite substantial in terms of length. They were originally written as special short stories for Christmas editions of magazines and newspapers and cover a wide time period from the late '60s to the mid-'90s. As one would expect, the quality is variable, but only within the range of good to excellent. I listened to the audiobook version, with two stories each narrated by Jenny Agutter and Daniel Weyman, both of whom give excellent performances. There is also a short introduction, narrated by Agutter, in which James considers the differences between writing in short and long form, and discusses the place of the short story in the history of crime fiction. (I believe there's a further introduction from Val McDermid in the paper book, but that's not included in the audio version.) The Mistletoe Murder narrated by Jenny Agutter, first published in 1995 A country house mystery with the traditional body in the library! This is told from the perspective of a first-person narrator, a war widow who is visiting her grandmother over Christmas while WW2 is still underway. An unexpected and unpleasant guest arrives and is promptly murdered. The narrator uses her status as a family member to uncover the secrets that led to his death. While very well written, I found this a rather uneasy mix of traditional golden age style with a storyline that felt too modern in its concerns to quite fit that approach. It's also very dark and somewhat depressing for a Christmas story, I felt. Murder is always fun, but the war aspect and the bleakness of the motivation aren't. I admired this story more than I enjoyed it. A Very Commonplace Murder narrated by Jenny Agutter, first published in 1969 This is James at her best. Gabriel, a respectable middle-aged lawyer's clerk, witnesses something that would be vitally important evidence in a murder trial. But since he was doing something he shouldn't have been at the time, he finds himself reluctant to come forward. This is a deliciously wicked tale where we see Gabriel twist his conscience into knots to justify his actions – a beautifully constructed psychological study of a weak and not very nice man. James maybe goes a little far at the end, but I found this added the touch of melodrama the story needed to make it into a shivery chiller – perfect seasonal entertainment! The Twelve Clues of Christmas narrated by Daniel Weyman, first published in 1996 The first of two stories featuring James' long-running detective, Adam Dalgleish. In this one, Dalgleish is still a young copper with his name to make. He is driving through the snow to spend Christmas at his aunt's Suffolk house when he is stopped by a man who asks for his help. The man's uncle, the curmudgeonly old owner of Harkerville Hall, has apparently committed suicide, but Dalgleish soon finds clues that suggest it may have been murder. Again, James is trying to reproduce golden age style here and openly nods to Agatha Christie, as she also did in The Mistletoe Murder. This one works better in that the motivation is more appropriate to the golden age era, and it's certainly entertaining, but for me it doesn't have the depth that James achieves when she sticks more to her own style. The Boxdale Inheritance narrated by Daniel Weyman, first published in 1979 Dalgleish is asked to look into an old murder by his elderly godfather, Canon Hubert Boxdale. The Canon's grandfather died of arsenic poisoning way back in 1902. His young second wife was tried for the crime but found not guilty. Now she has left the Canon some money in her will, but his conscience won't let him accept unless he is sure she didn't acquire it by murder. Again a much more traditionally James-ian story in this one, concentrating more on the psychology of the characters than on clues and tricks, though there's some of that too. In the short space available, James hasn't much time to develop a cast of suspects, so Dalgleish's detection seems a bit too slick. But this is well outweighed by the storytelling and characterisation. Another excellent one to end on. I found it interesting that I enjoyed the two early stories considerably more than the ones from the '90s. This chimes with my feelings about James' novels – that she lost her spark towards the end of her career and began to get too involved in 'issues' or general 'cleverness' at the expense of her real strength – excellent psychological studies. Her 'gentleman detective' also started to feel rather out of place among the more realistic police officers of modern crime fiction, and her later books felt somewhat anachronistic – almost out-dated. But she retained her story-telling skills throughout, and this shows through in the later stories from this collection too. Of course, even when she may have gone off the boil a little, a writer of the stature and skill of PD James was still head and shoulders above most of the competition. A thoroughly enjoyable set of stories overall, then, that would work just as well for newcomers as established fans. 4½ stars for me, so rounded up. www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 15, 2017
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Dec 16, 2017
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Dec 15, 2017
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Audio CD
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| 1911332295
| 9781911332299
| 1911332295
| 4.12
| 339
| May 18, 2017
| May 18, 2017
|
really liked it
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A unique life, uniquely told... Goblin is an old lady now, working as a Reader in an Edinburgh library. But when the newspapers report that a strange p A unique life, uniquely told... Goblin is an old lady now, working as a Reader in an Edinburgh library. But when the newspapers report that a strange pile of objects have been unearthed – bones, bits of a doll, a shrew head and a camera – she is thrust back into memories of her early life as a street urchin in wartime London. The camera still works and when the police develop the pictures they determine they could only have been taken by a child, and now they want Goblin to come in for an interview. Although there is a mystery around the photos and why the police want to interview Goblin, this is rather secondary. The book is really the story of Goblin's life – the events in it, but also her inner life, her imagined reality. This gives it the feel of some kind of magical realism though, in fact, there's no actual supernatural element to it. It is a strange book, dark in places and with some truly disturbing aspects, but because of the beautifully drawn central character it has a warmth and humanity that helps the reader to get through the tougher parts. There's also kindness here, and love, so while some parts are distressing, the overall effect is of compassion rather than bleakness. Goblin's mother disliked and neglected her daughter, calling her Goblin-runt, hence the nickname that stayed with her throughout her life. As a result, she ran almost wild, spending most of her time outside playing with her friends and her beloved dog Devil. Dundas evokes this childhood superbly, showing how important imagination is in childish games, how children form little societies of their own with their own hierarchies, detached from the adult world, and how they view the life of the adults around them from a unique perspective, sometimes only half-comprehending, sometimes perhaps seeing more clearly than older people who have wrapped themselves in society's conventions. She also shows how scary the world can be and how children build their own mental defences from things they can't properly process. Goblin the child is a wonderful creation. When war begins, Goblin is sent off as an evacuee to the country. Dundas presents a dark view of evacuation, with some of the children being used as no more than unpaid workers – one could almost say slaves – and subject to various forms of cruelty and abuse. I don't want to give away too much of the story, so I'll skip ahead to say that at a later point Goblin finds herself working in a circus, and later yet, as a woman, she spends time in Italy before ending up in Edinburgh. Each part of her story is told well, although for me adult Goblin never became as beguiling a character as the child. As she grows, we hear far too much graphic detail about her sexual experiences for my liking, with the emphasis firmly on anatomical mechanics rather than emotion. There is also an unfortunate descent into repetitive foul language, sexual and otherwise, including frequent and entirely unnecessary use of the 'c'-word. (I've said it before, but I'll say it again – in years of reading thousands of reviews, I have never once seen a reviewer complain that a book would have been better if only there had been more foul language in it.) There's also a not entirely successful stream-of-consciousness or experimental section in the middle, but fortunately it's not too long. I admit I came near to abandoning it at this point, which would have been a shame because it returns to a high standard in the latter parts. Goblin is an animal lover, her life filled from childhood with various creatures she has rescued. For those sensitive to the treatment of animals in fiction, there are some difficult scenes, a couple of which have left me with images I'd prefer not to have. But these are essential to the book and not presented in a gratuitous way. They go towards explaining who Goblin is, and they are grounded in the truth of wartime; aspects we may have chosen to sanitise or forget over the years, but which deserve to be remembered as much perhaps as the effects of war on humans. Except for the section in the middle that I've already mentioned, the writing is of a very high quality and altogether this is an intriguing début. I enjoyed some parts of it hugely, some less so, and some not at all, but I thought that overall it shows immense promise and a refreshing originality. The author is clearly someone willing to take a risk, to avoid following the herd, and I am interested to see where she heads in the future. I suspect she may go to places too dark or too graphic for me to want to follow her, but I also think she has the talent and intelligence to develop into a major novelist of the future. This book won the Saltire Society Literary Award for First Book of the Year (2017) – a well-deserved winner in my opinion. Despite my somewhat mixed feelings, I recommend it not just for what it is but as an enticing introduction to an author with great potential. NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Saraband. www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 14, 2017
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Dec 17, 2017
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Dec 14, 2017
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Paperback
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| 3.80
| 3,623,296
| Jul 16, 1951
| Mar 04, 2010
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liked it
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Adolescence is lousy... A rich, privileged teenage boy moans, whines and whinges for roughly forty-eight hours. I had high hopes of this one. Either it Adolescence is lousy... A rich, privileged teenage boy moans, whines and whinges for roughly forty-eight hours. I had high hopes of this one. Either it would stun me by being wonderful and achieving that rare feat for a mid-twentieth century book of actually deserving its status as a classic, and I'd have the joy of writing a glowing review; or it would be as dire as I anticipated and I'd have the even greater fun of mocking it mercilessly. Sadly, it's neither. It's merely a lengthy character sketch of a depressed teenager. Fine, but not scintillating fun, as anyone who has had to spend much time in the company of depressed (or even undepressed) teenage boys will know.* It's very well done. The character of Holden Caulfield feels believable and Salinger maintains his (annoying) voice without a blip throughout. It made me laugh – well, sorta smile, at least – several times and even made a tear spring to my eye... once. But mostly it bored me. I could, I suppose, chunter on about how it says something about the time of writing – like, for example, that it foreshadowed the beginning of the post-WW2 cultural upheavals, or that it was the era when authors began to mistake the parroting of verbally-challenged swearing for literary merit, or something. But that would be kinda phony, goddam** it, because really I don't think it says anything terribly deep about anything much. Or else I was just too bored to notice. Well, that's a little unfair, maybe. I think it does say something about how rotten it is to be a teenage boy, especially when forced to deal with one of life's tragedies. But I think it's a bit sad (and perhaps typical of the then American obsession with psychoanalysis) that what seemed to me like Holden's perfectly normal feelings and mini-rebellion were implied to be some form of mental illness. If so, then I guess we have to assume that being a teenager is a form of lunacy... hmm! Yep... got nothing more to say about this one. * That comment's a bit phony – I worked with teenage boys for years, depressed and undepressed, and found them all far, far, more fun than poor Holden. And less whiny. ** That's the way Holden spells "goddamn" – odd, isn't it? Makes me think of some kind of weird matriarchal sheep deity... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 08, 2017
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Dec 14, 2017
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Dec 08, 2017
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Paperback
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| B003VPWWQQ
| 3.89
| 100,637
| 1924
| Aug 31, 2010
|
really liked it
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The problem with happiness... Our narrator, D-503, is a cipher in the utopian One State. He is the Chief Builder of the Integral, a rocket ship that is The problem with happiness... Our narrator, D-503, is a cipher in the utopian One State. He is the Chief Builder of the Integral, a rocket ship that is to be sent out into the universe, bringing uniformity and happiness to all alien species who may be out there still messily living with free will. All ciphers have been encouraged to prepare something for inclusion on the mission – poems of praise to the Benefactor who serves as a replacement for God in this society. D-503 decides to keep a journal of his daily life – this journal that we are reading – as his contribution. But D-503 is about to meet a woman – I-330 – who will disrupt his contented existence and lead him to reconsider just how utopian life in the One State really is... First a word on translations. I started with the Momentum publication of this which as far as I can see doesn't credit the translator by name. It's dreadful – so bad I found it almost unreadable and was about to abandon the book completely at the 30% mark. However, I then changed to the Vintage Classics edition translated by Natasha Randall, which is excellent – like reading a different book. So if you decide to read this, make sure you check the translation first. Even given the much better experience of the good translation, I'm afraid I can't bring myself to be as fulsome in praise of this as I'd like. D-503 is a mathematician, so his narration is full of mathematical metaphors and everything is described in vaguely mathematical terms. It's well enough done, but I found it tedious. Zamyatin also has a technique of leaving sentences unfinished and uses ellipses even more than I do... This gives a sensation of the speed of events, of the increasing confusion D-503 is feeling, but again I found it got pretty tiresome after a bit. It also has an issue that I think may be really more my problem than the book's, an issue I've found with other early dystopian fiction: namely, that I think the societies they describe sound considerably more attractive than the savage societies they hold up as the better alternative. What exactly is so wrong with being happy? I get it – I really do – that they achieve their happiness at the expense of free will, that their lives are unexciting because everything is decided for them, that art and literature have no real place in such societies; and no, I don't aspire to that kind of society. But the flaw, if it is one, is that the characters are happy in their lives until they discover how much better it is to be miserable, chewed up by desire and jealousy, living lives that are nasty, brutish and short. In We, the savage society has reverted almost to chimp lifestyle – I don't aspire to that either! Current dystopian fiction is much more likely to have the characters be fundamentally unhappy in their regimented societies, to be aware of how restricted and unfulfilling their lives are, and to have something more appealing to aim for. This works so much better for me. I had exactly the same issue with Huxley's Brave New World when I read it at school – the characters liked their lives and were happy, until savagery burst in to make them realise what they'd been missing – unregimented sex, mainly, which is pretty much what sets D-503 off too... This book, written in post-revolutionary Russia in 1920, has an eerie familiarity about it. This is because it has basically the same story as both Brave New World and Orwell's 1984, both of which have borrowed so heavily from it it feels close to theft. Personally, I'm a bit baffled by the timing – I wouldn't have thought Bolshevik Russia had reached anything close to this kind of society as early as 1920, while the civil war was still being fought. Zamyatin was either very prescient or he was writing as much about the general philosophical zeitgeist of the time as about the realities of his society – I suspect probably a bit of both. Marxism was on the rise, some authors were presenting utopian societies as a good thing, and Zamyatin references Taylorism more than once – something I wasn't familiar with but which seems to have been an extreme form of regimentation within the workplace; what in my youth we called 'time and motion studies' – the desire of management to turn workers into unthinking, exhausted drones or human robots. (That's not necessarily how management would have described it, but I was a worker bee back then... ;) ) The book therefore feels as if it's arguing against philosophical ideas about utopias rather than reality, as does Brave New World from what I remember. 1984, on the other hand, while using the same basic story, is very specifically arguing against the actual rise of totalitarian regimes in the mid-20th century, and Orwell's characters give no impression of being in any way “happy”. This makes it by far the more powerful book of the three from my perspective and it's also much better written (though obviously Zamyatin is at a disadvantage with me on that score because I have to rely on translators). In fact, We feels to me much more like North Korean style totalitarianism than the Soviet version – both may have been aiming for the same, but possibly North Korea's smaller size and more uniform population has enabled the Kim clan to more fully achieve and sustain a completely regimented society entirely dependent on the whim of its God-like “benefactor”. And I doubt anyone thinks the North Koreans are actually happy, however much they're forced to appear to be. Had I read this first, the ideas in it would have felt more original, as indeed they were when it was written. So although I didn't find it the most pleasurable reading experience, I still highly recommend it as a classic that has helped to shape so much later literature. Maybe the secret is to read all the world's literature in strict chronological order. Now isn't that a nice dystopian thought to end on? www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 02, 2017
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Dec 08, 2017
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Dec 02, 2017
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0755103564
| 9780755103560
| 0755103564
| 3.80
| 812
| 1911
| Jan 01, 2001
|
it was amazing
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“Horrible discovery in a watercress-bed!”
One November day in 1902, John Bellingham disappears from the study of a friend's house where he had been “Horrible discovery in a watercress-bed!” One November day in 1902, John Bellingham disappears from the study of a friend's house where he had been waiting for his friend to return home. Two years later, there has still been no sign of him and his potential heirs are left in limbo, unable to execute his rather strange will. And then pieces of a dismembered skeleton begin to show up in odd places. Meantime, young Dr Paul Berkeley, our narrator, has fallen in love with Ruth Bellingham, the missing man's niece, whose father is one of the potential heirs. He persuades Ruth's father, Godfrey Bellingham, to allow Dr John Thorndyke, an expert in medical jurisprudence, to look into the case. It's up to Thorndyke to find a way to identify the remains and to find out what was behind Bellingham's disappearance. I've read a couple of Thorndyke short stories before, but this was my first full length novel, and it turned out to be not at all what I was expecting. Because of the heavy emphasis on Thorndyke being a scientific investigator, I thought it might be rather dry; and I knew that Freeman was famous for the “inverted” story, where the reader gets to see the villain commit the crime before watching the detective solve it. But this novel is laid out as a traditional mystery and is full of wit, with a charming romance between Berkeley and Ruth to give it warmth. I loved it. Actually, don't tell anyone but I fell a little in love with young Dr Berkeley myself. The plot is complex, not so much as to whodunit – the pool of potential suspects is very small – but as to how it was done and perhaps more importantly why it was done in the way it was. There's a lot in it about Egyptology since several of the characters are linked by their involvement in that field, and a lot more about methods of identifying bodies when there's not much left of them but bones. The missing man's will provides another level of complexity, since he specified conditions with regards to where his body should be buried – not easy to fulfil unless his corpse turns up and can be convincingly identified. I believe Thorndyke's sidekick, Jervis, is usually the narrator of these books, but although he appears in this one he only plays a small part. Berkeley acts as the main sidekick and major character – as a medical doctor he's ideally placed to act as Godfrey's representative at inquests, etc. In his discussion of this story in The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, Martin Edwards says that “the 'love interest' did not appeal to every reader; even Dorothy L Sayers – a fervent admirer of Freeman – deplored it.” Edwards also says “the prose lacks sparkle”. Oh dear! It appears I have to disagree with both Sayers and Edwards – I loved the elegance of the prose, which reminded me quite a lot of Conan Doyle's easy style, and the wit in Berkeley's observations of the other characters made me chuckle aloud several times. And I adored the romance! Ruth is a lovely love interest – she's humorous and intelligent, strong and self-reliant. She feels remarkably modern considering the book was written in 1911, and Berkeley's initial admiration is of her brain and character rather than of her looks or feminine delicacy. And Berkeley's own realisation that he's falling in love is done with a lot of beautifully self-deprecating wit and charm. Considering Ms Sayers is responsible for one of the sappiest romances in the history of crime fiction, with the adoring Lord Peter Wimsey languishing after his ladylove for several books, I think she has a bit of a cheek, quite frankly! 😉 “'Orrible discovery at Sidcup!” In among the more serious characterisation and the scientific stuff, there are a couple of great humorous set pieces that provide a bit of light relief, such as the obstreperous jury member at the inquest, or the maid servant incapable of giving a direct answer to any question, or the various patients Berkeley sees in his professional capacity. Admittedly these smack a little of the golden age snobbery that tends to mock the working classes, but here it's done with so much warmth I couldn't find it in me to take offence. I did guess a couple of pieces of the solution but was still in the dark as to motive and exactly how the intricate details of the plot all fitted together until Thorndyke explained all in a typical denouement scene at the end. All together, a very enjoyable read that has left me keen to get to know Freeman and Thorndyke better. www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 27, 2017
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Dec 02, 2017
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Nov 27, 2017
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Paperback
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| 0007504136
| B06XGHX1NW
| 3.78
| 6,915
| Oct 19, 2017
| Oct 19, 2017
|
it was amazing
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Pursued by a bear... A new playhouse is opening in London and the owners are determined to make it a huge success. Actors are easy to get hold of but n Pursued by a bear... A new playhouse is opening in London and the owners are determined to make it a huge success. Actors are easy to get hold of but new plays are the magic that bring in the playgoers. Over at the Theatre, Richard Shakespeare is struggling to survive on the measly wages he receives. He's getting too old to play women's roles and his older brother Will won't promise him roles playing men. He seems like the perfect target for the new playhouse – offer him regular well-paid work and perhaps he'd be willing to steal the two new scripts Will is working on – A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet – and if he won't, maybe another member of Shakespeare's company will... This is a fairly light-hearted novel set in the world of Shakespeare's London. Cornwell has undoubtedly taken some fictional liberties with the characters of Will and Richard Shakespeare, so it may not be one for purists, but otherwise it feels well researched to me, though I'm certainly no expert. Richard is a likeable character and it's his voice that tells us the tale. Will is not likeable and seems to really resent his younger brother, for reasons that I felt were never made totally clear, though I think we are probably supposed to assume that he feels Richard is trying to cash in on his success. Whatever the reason, the story is as much about these two men learning to respect each other as it is about the actual plot. And in the course of the book, Richard falls in love, so there's a romantic sub-plot too. The company are rehearsing Will's new comedy which has been commissioned by their patron Lord Hunsdon to be performed as part of his daughter's wedding celebrations. Cornwell gives an interesting and often amusing account of how a play would have been developed back in those days, with parts designed around the talents of the regular cast and due attention paid to flattering patrons while ensuring that no reason could be found to ban it. He shows how the powerful Puritan lobby were against theatre in principle, but that Queen Elizabeth's love of it meant they were frustrated in their desire to have it prohibited. Shakespeare's company were in the privileged position of having the Lord Chamberlain as patron, but they still had to be careful not to cross the line. Cornwell takes us not only behind the scenes in the playhouse but also into the houses of the rich who could afford private performances, and even into the presence of Elizabeth herself. I found the details of how the plays were staged fascinating, from the creation of costumes to the need for regular intervals to trim the wicks of the candles that were used to provide lighting. Cornwell also goes into detail on the story of A Midsummer's Night Dream. This is quite fun at first. It's a play I've never liked or revisited since being forced to study it while way too young to properly appreciate either the language or the comedy, so I was surprised when Cornwell sparked in me a desire to give it another try. However, unfortunately, after a while the detail becomes too much and somewhat repetitive, and it begins to feel more like a tutorial on the subject than a novel. It also slows the thing down too much – the fairly lengthy book is well over halfway before the main plot of the baddies' attempt to steal Will's plays really kicks off. Once it does though, it becomes a fine action romp. There is some violence but on the whole it remains light in tone – not nearly as graphic and gory as the only other Cornwell I've read, his Viking-world The Last Kingdom. We also get to see the religious persecution of the time – at this period, of the Catholics by the Protestants – but again Cornwell keeps it light though hinting at the darker aspects of it off-stage, so to speak. And the ever present threat of plague is there too – a threat not just to life but to the actors' livelihoods too, since any upsurge in the plague would lead to a closure of the theatres to prevent its further spread. Cornwell lets us glimpse the crueller aspects of Elizabethan entertainment too – bear-baiting, etc. All of this together adds up to what feels like a realistic picture of life in London at that period. Cornwell opts not to attempt some kind of faux Tudor language – Richard talks in standard English but has what felt to me like reasonably authentic 16th century attitudes for the most part. After a fairly slow start, then, I thoroughly enjoyed this entertaining venture into Shakespeare's world. I don't know whether this is a one-off or the start of a new series from the prolific Cornwell, but I'd certainly be happy to read another. 4½ stars for me, so rounded up. NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, HarperCollins. www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 24, 2017
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Nov 27, 2017
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Nov 24, 2017
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Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||
| B074BPHKX6
| 4.25
| 32
| unknown
| Nov 16, 2017
|
it was amazing
|
Whom the gods would destroy... A man escapes from a secure psychiatric hospital to find his little son, sweet William, and run off to a new life, just Whom the gods would destroy... A man escapes from a secure psychiatric hospital to find his little son, sweet William, and run off to a new life, just the two of them, in the south of France. This is the story of the next forty-eight hours... And what a story! A complete roller-coaster during most of which we're stuck inside the head of Orrey, the father, whose frequent assertions that he's not mad somehow fail to convince us! Dark and disturbing doesn't even begin to describe it. By all rights, I should have hated it – I've bored on often enough about my dislike of using children to up the tension in crime fiction. But it's a tour de force piece of writing with one of the most brilliantly drawn disturbed central characters I've read in a long time – think Mr Heming (A Pleasure and a Calling) or The Dinner or Zoran Drvenkar (You). Then add in relentless pacing that drives the book forward at a speed to leave you gasping – the definitive page-turner! I don't want to say too much about the plot since it's always best to know as little as possible in advance when reading thrillers, but I will mention that little William, who's only three, goes through a lot, so if you really struggle with bad things happening to fictional children this may not be for you. There is no sexual abuse however. The book is written in two voices. One is a third-person, past tense narrator who tells us the events of this forty-eight hours as they happen to William's new family, who adopted him after his mum died and his father was put in the hospital. Although we do learn the names of these characters, for the most part the narrator refers to them as 'the young woman', 'the old man', etc. This is a fantastic device for keeping us distanced from them – in fact, they're not even particularly likeable in the beginning – so that somehow we're not sucked in to being 100% on their side – not for a while, anyway. I can see her, evil cow, trying to keep up with Veitch. She's holding William's hand and every time he stumbles, because she's going way too fast for his little legs, she pulls him to his feet and keeps walking. Orrey however tells us his own story in the present tense, talking directly to us (or maybe talking to another voice inside his head, but the effect is the same). He doesn't have much of a plan and has to react to each event as it happens. Frequently, a chapter will end with him summing up what he thinks his options are and then asking what would you do? Now, it's perfectly possible I'm a very sick person because I found myself being forced to agree that sometimes the most extreme option was really the only possible one. When I discovered that at one point I was agreeing that he really had to do something that no normal person would ever dream of doing, I laughed at how brilliantly the author had pushed me so far inside Orrey's insane world view that he'd made it seem almost logical. Despite the darkness of the story, Maitland keeps the graphic stuff firmly off the page for the most part, though that doesn't stop it from seeping into the reader's imagination. But it does make it a bearable – dare I say, even an entertaining – read, which wouldn't have been the case for me had every event been described in glorious technicolor. The oblique references to what has happened during the gaps in Orrey's narration actually frequently made me laugh in a guilty kind of way – there's a thin vein of coal black humour buried very insidiously in there, I think, in the early parts, at least. Although the stuff relating to William is difficult to read, if Orrey has a redeeming feature it's that he truly does love his son, which somehow made it possible for me to remain in his company if not on his side. However, as the book goes on, the darkness becomes ever deeper and Maitland changes the focus with a great deal of subtlety and skill so that gradually our sympathies become fixed where they should have been all along – with William and his adopted parents. But we are left inside Orrey's unreliable mind right up to the end, so that the book might end but our stress levels take a good deal longer to get back to normal. I finished it four days ago, and I'm still waiting... I believe this is Maitland's fictional début – well, I'm kinda speechless at that. While the subject matter might make this a tough read for some, for me the quality of the writing, the way the author nudges and pushes the reader to go exactly where he wants, and the utterly believable and unique voice of Orrey, all make this a stunning achievement. Set aside a few hours to read it in a block though – you'll either stop for good very quickly or you won't want to stop at all... NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Saraband. www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 23, 2017
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Nov 24, 2017
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Nov 23, 2017
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0140434461
| 9780140434460
| 0140434461
| 3.71
| 6,260
| 1889
| 1997
|
it was amazing
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Brotherly love? When Bonnie Prince Charlie arrives in Scotland in 1745 to reclaim the lost Stuart crown, the Durie family of Durrisdeer must decide whe Brotherly love? When Bonnie Prince Charlie arrives in Scotland in 1745 to reclaim the lost Stuart crown, the Durie family of Durrisdeer must decide where their loyalties lie. If they make the wrong choice, they could lose everything, but pick the winning side and their future is secure. The old Laird has two sons. Jamie, the eldest, known as the Master of Ballantrae, is attractive and popular but evil, while Henry, the younger, is dull but good. The family decides one son should join Charlie's rebellion while the other should declare loyalty to the Hanoverian King George II, a kind of hedging of bets in which many noble families would indulge (so says Stevenson, and I have no reason to doubt him). By rights, as the younger, Henry should have joined the rising, but the Master thinks this is the more exciting option so claims it for himself. When the rising fails, word reaches Durrisdeer that Jamie died in battle. Henry gains the estate but is vilified by the townspeople for, as rumour has it, betraying his more popular brother, while his father and Alison, the woman he is to marry, make no secret that they loved Jamie best and mourn his loss extravagantly. So things are bad for Henry... but they're going to get worse when news arrives that Jamie didn't die after all... I freely admit I thought this was going to be a story about the Jacobite rebellion, but it isn't. The enmity between the brothers had begun before long before the rising, and although it is used to set up the conditions for further strife between them, in fact it's a minor strand in the book. This is actually a story of two opposing characters and their lifelong struggle against each other. It's told by Ephraim Mackellar, steward to the estate of Durrisdeer and loyal supporter of Henry, who was present for many of the main events and has gathered the rest of the story from witnesses and participants. It will involve duels, smugglers and plots, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal; it will take us aboard a pirate ship and all the way across the Atlantic to the little town of New York in the far away American colonies. And it will end with a terrifying journey through the wilds of (Native American) Indian country on a quest for treasure! It would be possible to read this, perhaps, as some kind of allegory for the Scotland of the time, divided in loyalty between the deposed Stuarts and the reigning Hanoverians, but I don't think that can be taken too far since neither brother seems actively to care who wins, nor to be loyal to anything or anybody very much, so long as they come out of it with their lands and position intact. The things that divide them are personal, not political. There's also a kind of variant on the Jekyll and Hyde theme going on – the two brothers opposite in everything, one tediously decent, the other excitingly bad. However as we get to know the brothers over the long years covered by the story, we see that the contrasts between them are not as glaring as they first appear. The same flaws and weaknesses run through all members of this doomed family (not a spoiler – we're told they're doomed from the very beginning) – they just show themselves in different ways. Poor Mackellar – while his loyalty to Henry never fails him, as time goes on he becomes a solitary and unregarded voice of reason in the middle of their feud, and grows to see that, to coin a phrase, there are faults on both sides. Stevenson always writes adventure brilliantly and there are some great action scenes in the book, many of them with more than an edge of creepiness and horror. But there's much more to this one than simply that. The characterisation is the important thing, of the brothers certainly as the central figures in this drama, but equally of the other players – the old Laird, Alison and not least, Mackellar himself. Stevenson does an excellent job of showing how the various experiences they undergo change each of them – some becoming stronger, better people, others giving way to weakness and cruelty. I admit none of them are particularly likeable, (though despite myself I developed a soft spot for poor, pompous, self-righteous Mackellar – he had a lot to contend with, poor man), but they're so well drawn that I was fully invested in their fates anyway. Each of the settings is done brilliantly, from the life of a middle-ranking Laird of this period to the growing settlements in the New World. The pirate episode is especially good, as is the later voyage to America – Stevenson always seems to excel once he gets his characters out on the ocean wave. There are dark deeds a-plenty and not a little gore, but there's also occasional humour to give a bit of light amidst the bleakness. There's a lot of foreshadowing of doom, and a couple of times Mackellar tells us in advance what's going to happen, but nevertheless the story held my interest throughout and the ending still managed to surprise and shock me. Though the adventure side means it could easily be enjoyed by older children, it seems to me this has rather more adult themes than Treasure Island or Kidnapped, in the sense that the good and evil debate is muddier and more complex, and rooted in the development of the characters rather than in the events – again, the comparison to Jekyll and Hyde would be closer. Oh, and there's very little Scottish dialect in it, so perfectly accessible to non-Scots readers. Another excellent one from Stevenson's hugely talented pen, fully deserving of its status as a classic, and highly recommended! www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 16, 2017
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Nov 19, 2017
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Nov 16, 2017
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| B004FTFJ5S
| unknown
| 3.95
| 6,130
| Sep 02, 1990
| Oct 01, 2010
|
it was amazing
|
Of chimps and humans... As Hope Clearwater sits on the beach outside her home in the Republic of the Congo, she looks back over the circumstances of he Of chimps and humans... As Hope Clearwater sits on the beach outside her home in the Republic of the Congo, she looks back over the circumstances of her life that have brought her here: her marriage to mathematician John Clearwater, and her later work at Grosso Arvore, a chimpanzee research project run by the world-famous primate expert, Eugene Mallabar. The two stories, though separate, have the common theme of the pursuit of scientific fame and the toll that can take on those who fail. There are other themes too – the war that rumbles on in the Congo, the evolutionary and genetic links between human and chimp – and a third story, of Hope's love affair with Usman Shoukry, an Egyptian mercenary pilot fighting on the pro-government side in the war, though this strand has less weight than the other two. While each strand is told linearly in time, the book cuts between them so that the reader is following them all simultaneously. Hope's marriage to John is happy at first. She is contentedly working as an ecologist mapping ancient hedgerows, while John is immersed in the study of chaos theory – a subject Hope can't even pretend to understand but she does understand John's passion for it. Gradually though, as John repeatedly fails to achieve his own goal to make a unique contribution to the subject, his mental health begins to show the strain. Jumping from one mathematical discipline to another, alternating between heavy drinking and total abstention, John's behaviour becomes progressively more erratic and their marriage comes under ever greater strain. The reader knows from the second strand, at Grosso Arvore, that the marriage ended, but doesn't know how or what was the final straw until towards the end of the book. But we see Hope, still young, now researching chimp behaviour in Africa. Her task is to observe a small group of chimps who have broken away from the main group. Eugene Mallabar is about to publish what will be his magnum opus – the last word on chimpanzees – and his reputation is what brings in the grants and donations that make the research possible. But Hope begins to see behaviour in her chimp group that doesn't tie in with Mallabar's research. At first, she tells him about this but he dismisses her – he doesn't want his research threatened. So she begins to conduct her own research and is increasingly disturbed by what she discovers. Hope sees Usman whenever she goes to the nearby town for supplies for the project. But on one trip, she and a colleague are taken captive by a group of rebels. Although this is a fairly small part of the overall story, it's one of the most powerful – Boyd gives a compelling picture of the chaos of this kind of indeterminate warfare which is so commonplace on the African continent. This is a book that could easily be read on two levels. The ideas in it about scientific ambition and evolution may not be particularly original, but they are very well presented, and Boyd even manages to make the maths discussions comprehensible and interesting, with something to say about the wider world. But put all the ideas and themes to one side, and the book becomes a simple but compelling story of Hope's life. She is an exceptionally well drawn character, a strong, intelligent, independent woman, self-reliant sometimes to the point of coldness, but I found it easy to empathise with her nonetheless. While I found the stories of Hope's marriage and her later relationship with Usman absorbing and emotionally credible, what made the book stand out for me was the story of the chimp research in Grosso Arvore. For those particularly sensitive to animal stories, I will say that Boyd pulls no punches – he shows us nature in all its gore, sometimes graphically. But this is all animal to animal interaction – there is no suggestion of human cruelty towards the chimps – and I therefore found it quite bearable, like watching a wildlife documentary. Hope is professional in her approach so that the chimps are never anthropomorphised, but clear parallels are drawn between the behaviour of the chimps and the war going on in the human world. And because the chimps are such close relatives to humans, they gradually develop personalities of their own that we care about as much as if they were human. The other aspect of the chimp story is Mallabar's reaction to the threat to his life's work, and I found this equally well executed and believable. For me, this is Boyd at his best. The book sprawls across time and geographic location, bringing each to life and never allowing the reader to become lost. Each separate strand is interesting and engrossing and they are well enough linked that they feel like a satisfying whole. The writing and storytelling are of course excellent – when is Boyd ever anything less? I listened to it on audio, perfectly narrated by Harriet Walter. I found it took me ages to get through (mainly because I tend to listen while cooking and eating, and frankly a lot of the chimp stuff just wasn't suited to that activity!) but I remained totally absorbed in each strand, never having that irritating feeling of wishing he would hurry up and get back to the other storyline. It feels perfectly balanced, a story about chimps that has much to say about humanity, and says it beautifully. Highly recommended. www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 13, 2017
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Dec 15, 2017
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Nov 13, 2017
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Audible Audio
| |||||||||||||||
| 1464208999
| 9781464208997
| B075M8WBQ5
| 3.17
| 58
| 1976
| Nov 07, 2017
|
it was amazing
|
Beware the spider! Leo Selver's marriage has never been the same since his young son died, and he has taken to having a string of short affairs. When w Beware the spider! Leo Selver's marriage has never been the same since his young son died, and he has taken to having a string of short affairs. When we meet him he is just about to embark on a new one, with a beautiful young woman called Judy Latimer. But Leo is worried about some business deal he seems to be involved in with a man he doesn't really trust. Soon things are going to turn nasty – very nasty – for Leo and his business partner. And it will be up to Ed Buchanan, former policeman and old family friend, to try to work out what's going on before things get even nastier... This may be one of the vaguest little intros I've ever written and that's quite intentional. One of the things I've noticed most since I've being reading some of these older crime novels is that authors were far more willing to mess with the reader's expectations and play with structure than we tend to think. This book is a prime example of that. The beginning follows a fairly conventional pattern for a thriller – ordinary man caught up in a situation that brings him into danger – and it looks as though it will go on in the traditional way, with him struggling to extricate himself from the mess he's in. But then the author turns it on its head, and the book suddenly veers off in an entirely unexpected direction. I was taken aback, I must admit, but it works well, lifting this out of standard thriller territory into something a little more original. Published in 1976, the book is set only a few years earlier in 1973, mostly in London though with trips out to the countryside and also over to Amsterdam. As with most thrillers (back in those happy far-off days, before turgid soggy middles and endless angst became obligatory), it goes at a cracking pace but, despite this, the author creates a good feel for the time period through references to some of the music and clothes, etc., and his sense of place is just as good. The characterisation is also very good, achieved with an admirable brevity of description. Leo isn't exactly likeable, especially to a modern (female) audience who might feel that he should have spent a bit more time thinking about his wife's feelings rather than indulging in sad, middle-aged fantasies about young women, but his grief over the death of his son is real and makes it possible for the reader to sympathise. He's no hero, as he discovered himself during the war, but when the chips are down he does his best. Ed, who becomes the main character as the book progresses, is however an excellent hero! Ex-boxer, ex-policeman, all round nice guy with a bit of a romantic streak, he manages the tricky balancing act of being tough with the baddies but gentle and caring with the women in his life – not just his romantic interest, but with Leo's wife, whom he looks on almost as a surrogate mother. And remarkably for the period, he doesn't patronise them! It's a short thriller, but Sims still finds room for Ed to develop over time, so that in the course of the novel he gets to know himself better and make changes in the way he lives his life. There's plenty of action and a plot that hints at what I discovered later from Martin Edwards' intro to be true – that Sims himself had connections to the code-breaking facility at Bletchley Park during the war. There are some seriously chilling moments and some touching ones, and a dash of humour from time to time to keep the thing from becoming too bleak. The writing is very good and the pace never falters. Bearing in mind that it's the '70s, Sims seems to be quite forward-thinking, managing to avoid the usual pitfalls of blatant sexism, etc., and he in fact paints a positive picture of the burgeoning multi-culturalism that was beginning to really take off in London at that period. All-in-all, I thoroughly enjoyed this, and will certainly look out for more from Sims. I hope the British Library will resurrect more of these thrillers – from this example, they'll be just as enjoyable as the mystery novels they've been re-issuing. NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Poisoned Pen Press. www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 11, 2017
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Nov 13, 2017
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Nov 11, 2017
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| B072K13BPV
| 4.22
| 697
| Jul 18, 2017
| Jul 18, 2017
|
it was amazing
|
Horridly excellent! Northanger Abbey is the most deliciously light of all of Austen’s books, filled with humour as Austen pokes gentle fun at her own c Horridly excellent! Northanger Abbey is the most deliciously light of all of Austen’s books, filled with humour as Austen pokes gentle fun at her own class and gender. Catherine Morland is our naïve 17-year-old heroine, leaving her country parsonage home for the first time to visit the bright lights of Bath in the company of her generous neighbours, the Allens. Starry-eyed and romantic, and with an obsessive love of the Gothic sensation fiction of the day, Catherine is ready to be thrilled by everything and everyone she meets. They arrived at Bath. Catherine was all eager delight – her eyes were here, there, everywhere, as they approached its fine and striking environs, and afterwards drove through those streets which conducted them to the hotel. She was come to be happy, and she felt happy already. Having reviewed the book before, I'm concentrating here on the production and performances in Audible's new dramatisation of it. This is done as half narration and half dramatisation. The narration is done superbly by Emma Thompson, someone who truly 'gets' Austen as anyone who has watched her performance in the wonderful 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility will know – a film for which she also wrote the script. In this one, she goes all out to bring out the humour in the script, and her affectionately ridiculing tone and excellent comic timing had me laughing aloud time and time again. It truly feels to me as if she's channelling Austen – I suspect if Jane read her manuscript aloud to her family, she'd have delivered it just like this, with the same fond teasing of our delightful Catherine and the same gasping drama over the Gothic horror elements, played strictly for laughs. Thompson verges perilously close to going over the top at points, but is far too masterful to actually do so. Part of me wished this was a straight narration – and I really would like her to narrate all the Austen novels, please, when she has a moment to spare. That's not to suggest I didn't enjoy the dramatised elements too – I did, very much. The young cast were largely unknown to me, since I don't watch much TV or film, but several of them have impressive lists of credits to their names already. Each turned in a fine performance here with no weak links in the chain. The role of Catherine is vital, and Ella Purnell does an excellent job in portraying the youthful naivety that sometimes leads her into foolish behaviour. She brings great charm to the role, with the same infectious good humour that makes Catherine such a likeable heroine on the page. Henry, I always feel, is a harder role to pull off, since frankly he's so patronising to our lovely Catherine and his sister Eleanor that I often have an uncontrollable desire to hit him over the head with a well-filled reticule. So I was very impressed with the way Jeremy Irvine was able to navigate that aspect with such a degree of warmth in his tone that I found it easy to forgive him and to understand Catherine's attraction to him. (And bear in mind, girls, that I didn't even have the advantage of being able to see him... except perhaps in my mind's eye... ;) ) Douglas Booth and Lily Cole are both nicely unlikeable as the baddies John and Isabella Thorpe (Boo! Hiss!), Booth managing with aplomb all John's boastful silliness about his horses and so on, while Cole drips delicious insincerity with every word. As the sensible one, Eleanor Tilney can tend to be somewhat dull as a character, but Eleanor Tomlinson gives her some much needed vivacity, while in the big dramatic scene near the end, she brings out beautifully all her distress and embarrassment. My other favourite is Mrs Allen, played by Anna Chancellor. Again she can be a tricky character; her rather silly empty-headedness and obsession with clothes could easily be annoying in the wrong hands, but Chancellor brings out her affectionate nature and the true warmth of her feelings towards Catherine, and the script is very humorous at showing how she allows her husband to form all her opinions for her. Directed by Catherine Thompson, the production itself is fun with all the appropriate sound effects of carriages rattling along the roads, dramatic music for the Abbey horror scenes and delightful dance music during all the various balls. The balance between narration and dramatisation is good and I find this format works particularly well for audio – better than either alone for me. The bursts of dramatisation hold my attention in a way that an unbroken narration, however good, sometimes doesn't; while the narration gives an opportunity to hear the author's voice and fill out the background that's sometimes missed when a book is reduced completely to dialogue. The script too, by Anna Lea, is excellent, sticking as it should entirely to Austen's own words. I felt it had been a little abridged, not just for the linking parts in the dialogue to make it work as a dramatisation, but also in some of the narrated parts. But if so, the abridgement is done smoothly and none of the important elements have been cut. So another excellent audio drama from Audible, who seem to be producing more and more of these, and casting them with some of our top performers. Keep them coming, I say! And as for this one – highly recommended! NB This audio drama was provided for review by Audible UK via MidasPR. www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 29, 2017
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Nov 10, 2017
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Nov 10, 2017
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Audible Audio
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| B072KM4SLP
| 3.54
| 2,541
| Oct 05, 2017
| Oct 05, 2017
|
At the time that I requested this from NetGalley there were no reviews, and there is nothing in the blurb to indicate that it's actually a follow-on n
At the time that I requested this from NetGalley there were no reviews, and there is nothing in the blurb to indicate that it's actually a follow-on novel to Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady. Had I known that, I wouldn't have taken the book, since I haven't read the James novel. Having read 25% of this one, I find I'm entirely detached and disinterested, the stream of characters being mentioned (but mostly not met with) meaning nothing to me. Is the writing a good or bad take on James'? How would I know? It reads to me like a rather stodgy version of Virginia Woolf, so if that sounds like a good description of James' style then I guess he's doing it well. It's pretty well-written, stylised and as I say a touch stodgy, and there is depth in the main character of Mrs Osmond. It gives a decent picture of the restrictions society still set on upper-class women in the late 19th century*. But I feel that not having read the book it's based on is leaving me frustrated and rather peeved - it seems like an important omission from the blurb, presumably because the publishers didn't want to limit purchasers only to fans of the earlier book. A mistake or worse - a misrepresentation, perhaps. I may one day read The Portrait of a Lady (although this one has given so many spoilers for that one I now wonder whether there would be any point); and then I may also return to this one. But my strong recommendation would be, don't try to read this without having read the James novel first. Abandoned at 25% and not rated. (*I originally wrote 'early 20th century' here, and then decided to check when the original was set, and realised it was several decades earlier than I had thought from this one. So I guess I'm not overly impressed by the sense of time either...) ...more |
Notes are private!
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0
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not set
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not set
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Nov 10, 2017
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Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||||
| 1447245857
| 9781447245858
| 1447245857
| 3.89
| 1,833
| Nov 01, 2016
| Jan 01, 1962
|
liked it
|
Saint or sinner... Douglas Smith starts his biography of Rasputin by laying out the two competing claims about him that were current during his life an Saint or sinner... Douglas Smith starts his biography of Rasputin by laying out the two competing claims about him that were current during his life and still rumble on today: that he was the 'mad monk', the 'holy devil', debauched and wicked, practising profane religious rites, and with an unhealthy grip on the Tsar; or, that he was a true holy man and visionary, so much so that some groups within the Orthodox church are attempting to have him made a saint. He begins by telling us what little is known of Rasputin's early years in a peasant village in Siberia. Smith shows how difficult it is to sift through the layers of later accounts to get to the truth, especially about someone who lived in a largely illiterate milieu. Some accounts describe him as dirty and uncouth, a thief and a horse-thief, but Smith says the original records don't support these claims. What is true is that he married and had several children, of whom many died. In his late twenties, he took to going off on pilgrimages, apparently a common occurrence in the Russia of that time. However, he looked after his family in financial terms and continued to return to his home village throughout his life. He gradually acquired a reputation as a starets, a kind of religious elder sought out for spiritual guidance. At this early stage, the book is very well written. Notes are kept out of the way at the back, so that the main text maintains a good flow without too many digressions into the minutiae of sources. Smith then takes the tale to the Romanov court, giving the background to the marriage and relationship of Nicholas and Alexandra. He gives a fascinating picture of the various strange religious sects that grew up in late 19th century Russia, and how susceptible the Romanovs and high society in general were to the latest 'holy man' to come along. Rasputin was not the first visionary to be taken up by the Royal couple. But because of the timing, when the state was already cracking, war was on its way and revolutionary fervour was building, he became a focus of much of what people despised about the ruling class. Unfortunately, once these excellent introductory chapters are out of the way, the rest of the book gets bogged down in a morass of rather repetitive detail. It tends to take the format of Smith telling us about reports of some unsavoury episode in Rasputin's life, and then going back over it to show that either it couldn't be true or that it can't be proven. As is always a problem with this period of Russian history, there's a constantly changing cast of characters near the throne, so that names came and went without me feeling I was getting to know much about them. When the book concentrates specifically on the Romanovs it feels focused, and I did get a good impression of how detached they were from the Russian people's opinion of them, especially Alexandra. But Rasputin himself felt ever vaguer as every story about him was shown to be at best misleading and at worst untrue. I felt I learned far more about who Rasputin wasn't than about who he was. Maybe that was the point, but it made for unsatisfactory reading from my perspective. There is a lot of information about the various efforts to persuade the Romanovs to give Rasputin up. For years he was under investigation and being tracked by the authorities, while the newspapers were printing ever more salacious details about his alleged debauchery. Again Smith goes into far too much detail; for example, on one occasion actually listing the names of the eight secret service men who were detailed to monitor him – information that surely should have been relegated to the notes if it is indeed required at all. And again, far more time is spent debunking false newspaper stories than detailing the true facts. I found this a frustrating read. Smith's research is obviously immense and the book does create a real impression of the strange, brittle society at the top of Russia and its desperate search for some kind of spiritual meaning or revelation. But the same clarity doesn't apply to Rasputin – I felt no nearer knowing the true character of the man at the end as at the beginning; if anything, I felt he had become even more obscure. Smith often seems like something of an apologist for him, although he never openly says so. But when, for example, he treats seriously the question of whether Rasputin was actually a genuine faith healer, then I fear the book began to lose credibility with me. The question of whether Rasputin was a debauched lecher living off his rich patrons or a holy man sent by God to save Russia seemed relatively easy to answer, and I found the book tended to overcomplicate the issue in an attempt to portray both sides equally. A bit like giving equal prominence to climate change deniers as to the 97% of scientists who know it to be true. The book has won awards, so clearly other people have been more impressed by it than I was. I do think it's an interesting if over-long read, but more for what it tells us about the last days of the Romanovs than for what it reveals about Rasputin. For me, the definitive biography of this uniquely intriguing life remains to be written. www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 09, 2017
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Dec 17, 2017
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Nov 09, 2017
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| B073TZ8ZJN
| 3.55
| 1,927
| 1936
| Jul 17, 2017
|
did not like it
|
I simply Kant take any more... When Dr Umpleby, the President of prestigious and ancient St Anthony's College, is found murdered, Inspector App I simply Kant take any more... When Dr Umpleby, the President of prestigious and ancient St Anthony's College, is found murdered, Inspector Appleby of the Yard is rushed to the spot, as the local plods will clearly not be well educated or cultured enough to deal with such a sensitive affair. Fortunately Appleby can quote major and minor philosophers with the best of them and has more than a passing knowledge of all the arcane subjects covered in a classical Oxbridge education, all of which will no doubt help him to uncover who killed the President and why. The tone of my introduction may have been somewhat of a spoiler for my opinion of the book, so I may as well jump straight to the conclusion – I abandoned this at just under 40%, finally throwing in the towel when one of the characters hinted that the clue to the mystery might be found in an anecdote about Kant quoted in a book by De Quincey. This, only a couple of pages after the following passage... And he [Inspector Appleby] sipped his whisky and finally murmured to Titlow [a suspect], with something of the whimsicality that Titlow had been adopting a little before, “What truth is it that these mountains bound, and is a lie in the world beyond?” I couldn't help but feel it might have been more useful had Appleby asked whether Titlow had crept into the college garden in the middle of the night and shot the President, or searched his rooms for the gun, but each to his own, I suppose. And certainly, my method wouldn't have allowed Innes to show his vast erudition and superior intellect, which appears to be the main purpose of the book. The actual plot is based on there being a limited number of people, almost all academics, who could have had access to Dr Umpleby's rooms at the time of the murder. Sadly, this aspect becomes tedious very quickly with much talk of who had or didn't have keys, where rooms are in relation to each other, where walls and passages are. I felt a desperate need for a nap... oops, I mean a map... after the first several dozen pages of description. Oddly enough, Innes claims Appleby is happier dealing with problems on a “human or psychological plane” and then proceeds to have this great intellectual wandering around in the (literal) dark, playing hunt the missing key. By 40%, only one possible motive had emerged, largely because Appleby seems more interested in listing the academic tomes on the suspects' bookshelves than in trying to find out where they had been at the time of the crime. This is one of Martin Edwards' picks in his The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, and I've seen several positive reviews of other books of Michael Innes' recently, so I'm willing to accept that my antipathy to this style of writing isn't universal, or perhaps Innes improved in later books – this, I believe, was his first. However, the only emotions it provoked in me were tedium and irritation at the perpetual intellectual snobbery. Having been made to realise my own status as dullard, I shall take my inferior intellect and defective education off into the dunce's corner now... but don't feel too sorry for me, for I shall take with me an ample supply of chocolate and some books by authors who may not have achieved a First in Classics at Oxbridge but who nevertheless know the definition of the word “entertain”... In truth, I think my rating of this one is harsh – had I been able to convince myself to struggle through it, it may have earned three stars for the quality of the writing and plot. But since I couldn't bring myself to finish it, I fear I can only give it one. PS Appleby and Umpleby? Seriously?? NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Ipso Books. www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 05, 2017
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Nov 10, 2017
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Nov 05, 2017
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 1910192872
| 9781910192870
| 1910192872
| 3.54
| 2,221
| Oct 02, 2017
| Jan 01, 2017
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it was amazing
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When the ordinary becomes extraordinary... When Bertrand Barthelme runs his car off the A35 into a tree one evening and dies, Inspector Georges Gorski When the ordinary becomes extraordinary... When Bertrand Barthelme runs his car off the A35 into a tree one evening and dies, Inspector Georges Gorski has no reason to think it was anything other than an unfortunate accident. But Barthelme's widow thinks there's something odd about her husband having been at that spot at that time and asks Gorski to look into it a bit more. Mme Barthelme is an attractive 40-something with more than a touch of the femme fatale in this first meeting, so Gorski finds himself agreeing. Meantime, Barthelme's 17-year-old son Raymond starts a kind of investigation of his own, in an attempt to learn more about the father with whom he had always had a rather cold, distant relationship. Both investigations will head off in unexpected directions. This is on the face of it a crime novel, but the quality of the writing, the depth of the characterisation, the creation of place and time and the intelligence of the game the author plays with the reader all raise it so that it sits easily into the literary fiction category, in my opinion at the highest level. There is an introduction and an afterword, and it's essential to read them both. The book is presented as a manuscript come to light years after the author's death, and translated by Burnet from the original French. This device is crucial in getting the full impact of what follows, but I'll go no further than that since the journey is best taken without a roadmap. This is actually the second book featuring Inspector Gorski. I haven't read the first one, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, but didn't find that presented a problem – this one works entirely as a standalone. The setting is the small town of Saint-Louis, in the corner of France that borders Germany and Switzerland, some time in the 1970s. A drab and dreary little town from the author's account of it, a respectable backwater. It is brilliantly drawn – I could see the streets and the little run-down cafés and bars, where people have their regular tables and drink their regular drinks each day. I could smell the Gitanes, feel the rain, visualise each person, their class and social standing indicated with subtlety and authenticity. No wonder Raymond thought the next town along the road, Mulhouse, was an exciting metropolis in comparison, with its shops and cinemas and life! Both towns are important characters in the book but it's the human characters who make it such an absorbing story. Gorski is a middle-aged man in something of a rut, but without the ambition or desire to find his way out. He is content to be the Chief of Police in Saint-Louis – a medium-size fish in a tiny pool – even if he's not particularly liked by his subordinates nor respected by those at the top of the social heap. He's less happy with the fact that his wife has just left him – he's not altogether sure why and he's not convinced that he wants to change whatever it is about himself that's led her to go. He's a decent man, but rather passively so – neither hero nor villain. It's the skill of the writing that makes this ordinary man into an extraordinary character. Raymond is on the cusp of adulthood and, faced with the sudden death of a father with whom his relationship has never been close, is unsure how to react. Burnet does a wonderful job of showing how hard it can be for a young person to know how to deal with these great crises that life throws at us. Raymond struggles to conform to other people's expectations of how he should behave and seems at first rather unaffected by his father's death. But as he gets sucked into trying to discover more about Bertrand's life, Burnet quietly lets us see how grief is there, deep within him, perhaps so deep he can't make himself fully aware of it - grief either for the father he has lost, or perhaps for the father that he felt he'd never really had. But at that time of life grief is rarely all-consuming – Raymond's quest leads him into new experiences and new desires, and as he discovers more about his father, so he discovers more about himself. All the other characters we meet along the way are just as well-drawn, building up a complete picture of the two neighbouring societies at the heart of the story. Despite the relative brevity of the book, the secondary characters are allowed to develop over time, making them feel rounded and true. Short sketches of people who appear only for moments in a café or on the street all add to the understanding of the culture, which in turn adds to our understanding of how it has formed and shaped our main characters, Raymond and Gorski. Not a word is wasted – with the briefest of descriptions, Burnet can create a person who feels real, solid, entire, as if they might be a neighbour we've known all our life. For me the place and people are what makes this book so special, but there's an excellent plot at the heart of it too. There are definite undertones of Simenon's Maigret in the writing, a debt Burnet acknowledges, and lots of references to the greats of French literature. There's also a noir feel to it, though in line with the town this noir is greyish rather than black. As Raymond and Gorski each come to the end of their separate quests, I found it fully satisfying as both a story and a brilliant display of characterisation. And then the afterword made me reassess everything I'd just read... Not a word of criticism in this review because I can find nothing to criticise. I loved every lean and beautifully placed word of this slim book, and was wholly absorbed from beginning to end. It deserves and gets my highest recommendation – superb! NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Saraband. www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 03, 2017
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Nov 05, 2017
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Nov 03, 2017
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.10
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really liked it
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Dec 29, 2017
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Dec 25, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.50
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really liked it
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Dec 25, 2017
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Dec 22, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.74
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it was amazing
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Dec 22, 2017
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Dec 20, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.83
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it was amazing
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Dec 20, 2017
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Dec 17, 2017
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|||||
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| 4.35
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it was amazing
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Dec 19, 2017
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Dec 16, 2017
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| 3.75
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it was amazing
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Dec 16, 2017
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Dec 15, 2017
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| 4.12
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really liked it
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Dec 17, 2017
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Dec 14, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.80
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liked it
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Dec 14, 2017
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Dec 08, 2017
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| 3.89
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really liked it
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Dec 08, 2017
|
Dec 02, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.80
|
it was amazing
|
Dec 02, 2017
|
Nov 27, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.78
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 27, 2017
|
Nov 24, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 4.25
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 24, 2017
|
Nov 23, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.71
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 19, 2017
|
Nov 16, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.95
|
it was amazing
|
Dec 15, 2017
|
Nov 13, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.17
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 13, 2017
|
Nov 11, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 4.22
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 10, 2017
|
Nov 10, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.54
|
not set
|
Nov 10, 2017
|
||||||
|
| 3.89
|
liked it
|
Dec 17, 2017
|
Nov 09, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.55
|
did not like it
|
Nov 10, 2017
|
Nov 05, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.54
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 05, 2017
|
Nov 03, 2017
|
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