A Reading Marathon with some Recommendations

Since winter arrived I have found more excuses to ‘curl up with a book’.  That and listening to selected titles on my trusty Audible App.  I’ll give a brief rundown of some books without a lot of comment and then say a bit more about recommendations.

Continuing with my discovery of the British Library Crime Series I read Cornish Murder by John Bude and Christmas in White by J. Jefferson Farjeon.  Both enjoyed as comfort blanket 

reading.  Perfect over the Christmas interval.  Feel free to borrow!

I read my first Ken Follett, The Man from Moscow, a thriller set in London in 1914.  https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/ken-follett/the-man-from-st-petersburg/9781509862344

Other titles include Exile by James Swallow, sequel to Nomad  which I thought was much better. If you like biographies you might be tempted by Becoming by Michelle Obama.  This has been widely acclaimed and very popular amongst my reading friends but I am somewhat embarrassed to say that, even though her achievements are phenomenal,  I found it a bit too self-promoting.  Perhaps it was not such a good idea to listen to it read by the author herself.

Three to recommend:

The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman

Pullman’s second trilogy following His Dark Materials is The Book of Dust. 

I read volume 1 La Belle Sauvage where the baby Lyra Silvertongue is rescued by Dr Malcolm Polstead, and enjoyed it because I do get swept up into the alternative world around which the novels are based.  Volume 2, The Secret Commonwealth finds Lyra, now twenty years old and her daemon Pantalaimon finding their relationship is put to the test in a dangerous world that finds Lyra travelling through Europe and to the Middle East in a quest to be reunited with Pantalaimo whilst Malcolm now a man with a strong sense of duty and an attachment to Lyra is sent on a journey to find out more about the mysterious roses with special properties that only grow in a desert referenced in the diary of a murdered man.  Rose growers of any kind, even those growing “normal” roses, are being terrorised and murdered by mysterious attackers from the mountains.  Both travel far beyond Oxford where the earlier novels are set to uncover secrets and solve the mystery of the Dust.  I’m not a fan of magical realism but when an author works really hard to make his narrative credible I cannot help get swept up into it.

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

I read this for my French group.  This was a rewarding novel to read. 

Ondaatje’s prose grabbed my attention and interest : the opening sentence ‘In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals’ suggests all manner of outcomes might be possible. From the beginning I could not be sure in what direction the narrative might lead. The Moth and then the Darter seemed to be doubtful and rather dangerous adults to be left in charge of two children. Were they going to be mistreated? This seemed a likely plot. The school arrangements were decidedly dodgy, the children deciding they would rather live at home than board as the parents had directed that they should. The Moth acquiesced and his supervision of the children seemed very lax, as the house filled up with a group of eccentric, mysterious, maybe even nefarious characters who came to populate the children’s milieu in postwar London. The narrative unfolds but the reader is never sure where the story is going. In the background I was wondering where the parents were and why they, and in particular the mother, had left so suddenly. What important reasons were there for the parents’ continued absence? I found certain notable scenes and passages particularly memorable when I came to think about the book after I finished it.   For example the greyhound runs on the Thames, and Nathaniel and Agnes’ encounters in the London house. I thought the narrative was cleverly plotted and then unveiled as a story of espionage activities with which Nathaniel and Rachel were necessarily involved.   There were no dramatic twists and turns as often is the case with novels in this genre. Events and explanations were nicely understated in the concluding part of the novel. I liked the book all the more for that.

Second Sleep by Robert Harris

I’ve read most of Robert Harris’s novels (except the Cicero trilogy) and have never been disappointed.  His latest offering is described as a genre-bending thriller: ‘All my books are about power’ he says. What connects them all is a preoccupation with power at its  apogee, on the brink of collapse.

“Late on the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of our Risen Lord 1468”. A young cleric, Christopher Fairfax, is making his way resentfully to a remote corner of Wessex on the orders of his bishop to officiate at the burial of a village priest. In his opening pages Harris conjures a lost England in its mix of religiosity and brutishness. When Fairfax discovers a display cabinet in the dead priest’s study, its shelves crammed with illegal artefacts, the truth of this world is revealed. Among the plastic bottles, banknotes and toy bricks displayed there, Fairfax discovers “one of the devices used by the ancients to communicate”, its back marked with the ultimate symbol of their “hubris and blasphemy – an apple with a bite taken out of it”.  Abruptly everything shifts, slotting those strange anachronisms into place. Fairfax’s 15th century is not ours but part of a new calendar that had been reset to 666, the numeral of the Beast of Revelation. In Harris’s imagined future, God has brought down the four riders of the apocalypse on the satanic civilisation of the 21st century and the church has reasserted itself at the centre of the state. “Scientism”, the curse of the ancients, is a heresy, a mortal sin. Stripped of the medical and technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, life is once more nasty, brutish and short.

To say more would truly be a plot-spoiler.  I found Harris’s writing so easy on my reading mind, a book that was enthralling.  With a great ending.

The Darkness and Our House

The Darkness by Ragnar Jonasson

I love the Nordic Noir genre of novels and Iceland, a country I have visited, provides perfect settings for crime thrillers.

A young woman is found dead on a remote Icelandic beach. She came looking for safety but instead she found a watery graave. A hasty police investigation determines her death as suicide. When Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir of the Reykjavik police is forced into early retirement, she is told she can investigate one last cold case of her choice - and she knows which one. 

What she discovers is far darker than suicide . . . And no one is telling Hulda the whole story.

When her own colleagues try to put the brakes on her investigation, Hulda has just days to discover the truth. A truth she will risk her own life to find.

A neatly plotted thriller with a striking end.  Read more about this book and the author in a review written by a fellow fan of Nordic Noir:

https://www.on-magazine.co.uk/arts/book-review/crime/the-darkness-ragnar-jonasson/

Our House by Louise Candlish

Suggested by Liz of Splinter this turned out to be an archetypal page-turner, and much more.

On a bright morning in the London suburbs, you see a family move into the house they’ve just bought on Trinity Avenue.  Nothing strange about that. Except it's your house. And you didn’t sell it.  

Amazon says:

When Fi Lawson arrives home to find strangers moving into her house, she is plunged into confusion. She and her husband Bram have owned their home on Trinity Avenue for years and have no intention of selling. How can this other family possibly think the house is theirs? And why has Bram disappeared when she needs him most?  Unable to see his wife, his children or his home, he has nothing left but to settle scores. As the nightmare takes grip, both Bram and Fi try to make sense of the events that led to a devastating crime. What has he hidden from her – and what has she hidden from him? And will either survive the chilling truth – that there are far worse things you can lose than your house? 

What I thought:

It is a bit of a nightmare scenario, I think any house-owning reader will relate to that.A day and a half in bed nursing some sort of virus enabled me to read Our House pretty much from cover to cover because this was a page-turner where you would promise to finish at the end of the chapter and then think, I’ll just read one more……

The plot is ingenious and I’m not sure there is another novel in this genre which comes close to matching the series of events that leads up to the moment when Fi arrives home to find her home is no longer her own. 

The plot is plausible with twists and turns which never stray beyond the realms of the believable and the coincidental.  It hinges around the arrogance of a man who thinks he can ignore a driving ban and continue to drive with excess alcohol in his system to boot.  One cover up leads to another and in the end Bram and Fi are both guilty of believing they can get away with ‘murder’.

Bram makes that initial mistake which will have such unfolding and catastrophic consequences and he must then pay the price.  So, the irony in the final paragraph……. Bram still goes on thinking he can make it right and in doing so seals his wife’s fate. 

A true page-turner and I would not be surprised to see it made into a film.

Paris Settings: Works of contemporary and historical fiction by two Master Novelists.

Two novels, each of which features some action set in Paris, each written by one of my top 10 authors.

Love is Blind by William Boyd

Set at the end of the 19th century it tells the story of Brodie Moncur, his life as a young musician turned piano tuner, and the woman he falls in love with, Lika Blum, his battle with tuberculosis and his flight from Lika's vengeful suitor. 

What Amazon says:

When Brodie is offered a job in Paris, he seizes the chance to flee Edinburgh and his tyrannical clergyman father, and begin a wildly different new chapter in his life. In Paris, a fateful encounter with a famous pianist irrevocably changes his future - and sparks an obsessive love affair with a beautiful Russian soprano, Lika Blum. Moving from Paris to St Petersburg to Edinburgh and back again, Brodie's love for Lika and its dangerous consequences pursue him around Europe and beyond, during an era of overwhelming change as the nineteenth century becomes the twentieth.

Love is Blind is a tale of passion and revenge; of artistic endeavour and the illusions it creates; of all the possibilities that life can offer, and how cruelly they can be snatched away. At once an intimate portrait of one man's life and an exploration of the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Guardian Review: 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/love-is-blind-by-william-boyd-review

Boyd is one of my favourite authors, this is not his best but it is a heart-warming love story.

Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks

Francophile Sebastian Faulks made his name with bestselling France-set period pieces. Birdsong transported readers back to the trenches of the First World War, while Charlotte Gray told the story of a British agent working with the Resistance in Vichy France during the Second World War. As such, it’s fitting that his new novel, although ostensibly set in the present, is thoroughly steeped in history. The author’s affection for Paris drives the stories of a French-Algerian teenage immigrant and an American academic in the city.

The Literary Review has said that "Faulks has the rare gift of being popular and literary at the same time"; the Sunday Telegraph called him "One of the most impressive novelists of his generation ... who is growing in authority with every book". Faulks' 2005 novel, Human Traces, was described by Trevor Nunn as "A masterpiece, one of the great novels of this or any other century."

Paris Echo is a novel about and composed of tangled threads. Faulks has two central protagonists: 19-year-old Tariq, a runaway from Morocco; and the 31-year-old American postdoc researcher, Hannah, whose box room Tariq ends up lodging in. Hannah is in Paris to examine the testimonies of women who lived through the German occupation. She listens to the extraordinary witness of the women in her desire to understand their lives. Through them she finds a city bursting with clues and
connections. Tariq, meanwhile, has some vague idea of finding out more about his mother’s history. She died when he was 10, but was brought up in Paris, born to a French father and an Algerian mother. Though all the more pressing is losing his virginity. For him in his innocence, each boulevard, Métro station and street corner is a source of surprise.

As the narrative flits back and forth between them, so too the stories Hannah spends her days listening to – which Tariq sometimes helps her to translate – become part of the book’s narrative, while also slowly infiltrating the characters’ experiences of the contemporary city.

Traversing the city on the Metro, Tariq finds himself in a strange shadow land of such “daylight ghosts” – at certain stations he sees passengers littering the ground, their used tickets folded into the “V” for victory that so angered the Germans during the war.

It is in the passages that relate to wartime that Faulks finds himself, yet again, in that territory about which he writes so graphically and movingly. For example, passages towards the end of Where My Heart Used to Beat, another of his historical novels, are heart-rending.

The Guardian Review:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/03/paris-echo-sebastian-faulks-review

Gone to Earth

Gone to Earth by Mary Webb

A potted bio:

Mary Gladys Webb (25 March 1881 – 8 October 1927) was an English romantic novelist and poet of the early 20th century, whose work is set chiefly in the Shropshire countryside and among Shropshire characters and people whom she knew.

Her writing in general was reviewed as notable for poetic descriptions of nature. Another aspect throughout her work was a close and fatalistic view on human psychology.  She won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse for Precious Bane. After her death Stanley Baldwin, then Prime Minister, brought about her commercial success through his approbation; at a Literary Fund dinner in 1928, Baldwin referred to her as a neglected genius. Consequently her collected works were republished in a standard edition by Jonathan Cape, becoming best sellers in the 1930s and running into many editions.

Stella Gibbons's 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm was a parody of Webb's work, as well as of other "loam and lovechild" writers like Sheila Kaye-Smith and Mary E. Mannand, and further back, Thomas Hardy. Literary critic John Sutherland refers to the genre as the "soil and gloom romance" and credits Webb as its pioneer.

Gone to Earth  tells the story of Hazel Woodus, a child of the wilds who comes from the earth. and, in the end, returns to it.  She is the daughter of a Welsh gypsy and an eccentric harp-playing bee-keeper. She is happiest living in her forest cottage in the remote Shropshire hills, at one with the winds and seasons, protector and friend of the wild animals she loves. But Hazel's beauty and innocence prove irresistible to the men in her orbit. Both Jack Reddin, the local squire and Edward Marston, the gentle minister, offer her human -- and carnal -- love.

Hazel's fate unfolds as simply and relentlessly as a Greek tragedy, as a child of nature is drawn into a world of mortal passion in which she must eternally be a stranger.

What I thought:
I loved the lyrical descriptions of the wild landscape in which Hazel lived and roamed, her familiarity and passion for the animal life. These make up a substantial part of the text and some might be tempted to describe it as purple prose. 

There is a delightful passage where it describes her sucking the nectar from the beautiful, translucent bilberry flowers.  She is a naïve child of nature, gullible in her dealings with the two men who vie for her affections.  As she vacillated between the two, ambiguity a part of her character, I sometimes found myself feeling impatient with the choices she made.  Silly girl I found myself thinking.  I also had to concentrate when reading passages of dialogue in the rural Shropshire dialect which voices are wholly authentic and bring much to the atmosphere and mood of the narrative.

Calypso, Cockroaches, Praxis

So much reading accomplished in the past month or so, and less time to find my blogs.  So, three short accounts of three books, 'yer' mixed bag of titles, and here goes:

Calypso by David Sedaris

Certainly a book to delight me for David Sedaris is a raconteur par excellence whom I have heard on Radio 4,.  He is an American humourist, comedian, author, and radio contributor. He was publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "Santaland Diaries." He published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994. Much of his humour is ostensibly autobiographical and self-deprecating and often concerns his family life, his middle-class upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, his Greek heritage, homosexuality, jobs, education, drug use, and obsessive behaviours, as well as his life in France, London, and the English South Downs.   I have enjoyed the Sedaris radio series for years so was delighted when my Splinter friend Jan recommended the book.  Sedaris is at his best, for me, when he is on family stuff, notably his father! 

For good measure, here is what Amazon has to say:

If you've ever laughed your way through David Sedaris's cheerfully misanthropic stories, you might think you know what you're getting with Calypso. You'd be wrong.

When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it's impossible to take a vacation from yourself.

With Calypso, Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation toward middle age and mortality. Make no mistake: these stories are very, very funny - it's a book that can make you laugh 'til you snort, the way only family can. Sedaris's writing has never been sharper, and his ability to shock readers into laughter unparalleled. But much of the comedy here is born out of that vertiginous moment when your own body betrays you and you realize that the story of your life is made up of more past than future.

This is beach reading for people who detest beaches, required reading for those who loathe small talk and love a good tumour joke. Calypso is simultaneously Sedaris's darkest and warmest book yet - and it just might be his very best.

What I say: Recommended.

Praxis by Fay Weldon
The only thing this book has in common with Calypso is the etymology of the title word, sharing as it does with Calypso, an ancient Greek origin.

I had not read any Fay Weldon before but this book fell into my pot because it was Shortlisted for the Man Booker and is therefore, for me, a 'set book'!  I could not possibly say in a short paragraph or two what the book is about or what I felt about it.  It is variously described as 'a powerful marvellous novel.... about madness, deceit and the will to survive' and perhaps most succinctly 'Fay Weldon has compressed in her account of the life of one woman an entire spectru of women's lives.'  

Praxis tells the story of a woman from childhood to adulthood. The book begins in wartime Brighton and follows Praxis in her various personalities - whore, adulteress and finally murderer. 

Praxis Duveen is a survivor. At five years old, in 1920s England, she is still innocent, the product of an unstable mother and a flighty father who abandoned Praxis and her half-crazy sister, Hypatia. As the decades fly by, Praxis experiences many incarnations, from prostitute to rape victim, wife to adulteress and eventually becomes the accidental leader of an international women's movement.

Now, from her dingy basement apartment, where she's attempting to write a memoir, Praxis tells about the story of her remarkable journey – peppered with more than a few detours along the way...

Now in her ninth decade, Fay Weldon is one of the foremost chroniclers of our time, a novelist who spoke to an entire generation of women by daring to say the things that no one else would. Her work ranges over novels, short stories, children's books, nonfiction, journalism, television, radio, and the stage. She was awarded a CBE in 2001. 

Do I recommend this book?  I actually found Praxis rather bleak and depressing.  It really did lower my mood whilst reading it.  The book seemed to contain no joy, other than the sexual gratification which Praxis derived from her various relationships.  And even there joy might not be the most apposite word to use.  However, it was one of those books that reads itself, and is a social document of the period that it covers.  

Cockroaches by Jo Nesbo

I like Jo Nesbo's thrillers.  So, evidently, do the Norwegian people.  More than 3 million copies of his novels have been sold in Norway, which has a population of 5,300,000.   

His novels have been translated into over 40 languages. He has his official website

https://jonesbo.com/

and is best known for his protagonist, the Oslo detective Harry Hole.  His books are listed in publication order here:

https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/jo-nesbo/

Synopsis: Detective Harry Hole arrives in steaming hot Bangkok. The Norwegian ambassador has been found dead in a seedy motel room, and Harry has been sent to investigate. It’s clear that the Ambassador’s family are hiding some secrets of their own, but few people are willing to talk. 

When Harry lays hands on some incriminating CCTV footage, things only get more complicated. The man who gave him the tape goes missing, and Harry realises that failing to solve a murder case is by no means the only danger that faces the unwary.  But in an unfamiliar city, who can you trust?

I enjoyed it.  It was time to read a thriller and this fitted the bill.  That's it.  

La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust - Volume One

My second great read has caused me to rethink a statement I made in an earlier book review.  I wrote that I had little time for 'magical realism' and 'fantasy' writing.  That would be true for a large part of the body of literature in this genre.  But when it is good, really really good, then the genre can enthral and transport the reader into a world of surreality which feels plausible.  So it is with: 

La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust (Volume One) by Philip Pullman
This is a fantasy novel, a prequel, the first volume in a planned trilogy named The Book of Dust. Set around 12 years before the start of His Dark Materials, Pullman's previous trilogy, the story covers the events leading up to Lyra Belacqua's arrival as a six-month-old baby at Jordan College, Oxford. 

Amazon says:  

Malcolm Polstead's Oxford life has been one of routine, ordinary even.

He is happiest playing with his daemon, Asta, in their canoe, La Belle Sauvage. But now as the rain builds, the world around Malcolm and Asta is, it seems, set to become increasingly far from ordinary.

Finding himself linked to a baby by the name of Lyra Belacqua, Malcolm is forced to undertake the challenge of his life and to make a dangerous journey that will change him and Lyra for ever . . .

Setting

The setting is a world dominated by the Magisterium, also commonly called "the Church", an international theocracy which actively suppresses heresy. In this world, humans' souls naturally exist outside of their bodies in the form of sentient "dæmons", in animal form which accompany, aid, and comfort their humans. An important plot device is the alethiometer, or symbol reader, of which just six are known to exist. By setting three of the alethiometer's hands to point to symbols around a dial a skilled practitioner can pose questions, which are answered by the automatic movement around the dial of a fourth hand. 

Interestingly Pullman conceived The Book of Dust before the publication of Lyra's Oxford in 2003, originally as a single volume. Writing was under way by 2005, but by 2011 Pullman said that he was considering splitting the novel into two volumes, one set before His Dark Materials and the other set afterwards. In February 2017, Pullman announced that The Book of Dust had become a 'companion' trilogy.

Reception

The novel received positive reviews. The Guardian described it as "worth the wait", calling it "old-fashioned and comfy". The Independent said that "La Belle Sauvage has the feel of an extended preface; thrillingly entertaining and beautifully written, but ultimately something of an introduction to the story proper we know follows thereafter". The Washington Post was extremely positive, stating that "too few things in our own world are worth a 17-year-wait: The Book of Dust is one of them". The A.V. Club said that "even without the deep well of context of those other books of Dust, La Belle Sauvage stands on its own as a singularly beguiling work of fantasy. It's sure to be devoured by readers young and old alike". 

The New York Times felt the book to be "full of wonder" in spite of some longueurs and long stretches of flat dialogue. While acknowledging that "as a tale of flight and pursuit, it’s altogether enjoyable", The Spectator suggested that Pullman's larger aspiration — 'to see off Christianity' — was an impediment to his storytelling, and that the metaphysical ideas around which the narrative revolves were its least successful part.

Postscript: It is a rare thing these days for reviewers in periodicals to be quite so unanimous in their largely unqualified praise for a book.  After all, a 17-year wait brings huge expectations.  That La Belle Sauvage has proved to be a delight to readers is accolade indeed.

A Gentleman in Moscow

In the past month I have read two brilliant books.  By my reckoning.  The first took me a good while to get through.  Four hundred and fifty plus pages of text in a small font, and beautiful, rich writing to savour.  This is not a book you speed through.  

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

There is an old world elegance about this novel, which is set in an era a few years after the Russian an Revolution in a period of violent upheaval. A handsome count named Alexander Rostov has been summoned before the Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs and accused of writing a counter-revolutionary poem. The trial transcript offers an indication of the count’s blithe resistance to the spirit of the times.  Asked to state his occupation, he replies, “It is not the business of a gentleman to have occupations.” Only high-ranking friends keep him from being thrown against a wall and shot. Instead, he’s declared a “Former Person” and sentenced to life imprisonment in Moscow’s Hotel Metropol.   Count Alexander Rostov nonetheless lives the fullest of lives, discovering the depths of his humanity. 

The Hotel Metropol is a grand Art Nouveau palace — an actual place, still standing. It was constructed at the turn of the century and soon seized by the communists to house bureaucrats and impress foreign guests. The count, though, is consigned to a tiny room on the top floor, crammed with a few pieces of his fine furniture and a set of porcelain plates. This is a character who has “opted for the life of the purposefully unrushed.” He was raised to appreciate the great conveniences of life, such as keeping “a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another.” Now, that extravagant life must somehow be adjusted to the tight confines of a servant’s bedroom. No matter: The man makes the home, not the other way around, and the count is convinced that “by the smallest of one’s actions one can restore some sense of order to the world.” 

Spread across four decades, this is in all ways a great novel, a nonstop pleasure brimming with charm, personal wisdom, and philosophic insight. Though Stalin and Khrushchev make their presences felt, Towles largely treats politics as a dark, distant shadow. The chill of the political events occurring outside the Metropol is certainly felt, but for the Count and his friends, the passage of time is "like the turn of a kaleidoscope."

This is not a novel of thrilling conflicts so much as charming encounters.  As the years pass, the count always behaves as a perfect gentleman. He never complains about his confinement — never even admits that it is a confinement. He entertains attractive guests. He spars good-naturedly with a staff member who resents his refined manner. A man of refined taste in wine, food, and literature, he strives to maintain a daily routine, exploring the nooks and crannies of the hotel, bonding with staff, accepting the advances of attractive women, and forming what proves to be a deeply meaningful relationship with a spirited young girl, Nina. It is the relationship with Nina that ultimately delivers to the reader a suspenseful and thrilling denouement with an ending that allows the reader to speculate as to the fate of the two principal characters in the book.