Browsing the Bookshelves

Fund raising efforts for the Royal Marsden's cancer campaign are going way better than I expected! People have been so generous in supporting this excellent cause. I fear I shall have to make good on my promise to ride in fancy dress! Sadly work on the my latest essay for isn't going so well. Still scrabbling around to decide what question to address, let alone how to answer it.  But the bright spot has been Mark Mills The Savage Garden which I read last night when I couldn't face anymore to do with Salman Rushdie or V S Naipaul (on offence, I was just tired and need a change of pace and topic) was truely enjoyable.

On 28th October 2007, I'll taking part in a sponsored ride to raise funds for The Royal Marsden's Cancer Campaign.  The Royal Marsden Hospital strives to develop a positive partnership with patients to help them deal with cancer. Through this, patients not only receive the latest treatments, but also rehabilitation and assistance at many levels.  We all know someone who has been affected by cancer. If you can spare a pound (or dollar) or two, please sponsor me and help us to help the Royal Marsden Hospital to help combat cancer.  You can do so online, quickly, safely and easier through my sponsorship page on justgiving (which is just like the US firstgiving website). I'm aiming to raise at least £500 towards the overall target for the sponsored ride of £15,000.  If I raise more I'll do the ride in fancy dress and promise share the photos after!

I stumbled across The Writeout Club's website today. Superficially, it's a place where new and established writers can showcase their work and, it seems, chat among themselves.  But what struck me about this site was the emphasis on show casing 'new' writers. Seriously, it's not only you that will not have heard of these guys before, amazon apparently hasn't either.  Anyone can request e-copies of some of the showcased works - although a brief glance at some of the synopsis offers indicates that a degree of selectivity might be wise - read and then review them. So, tired of the same old, same old in Waterstone's 3 for 2 offers? Bored with Borders cautious offerings? Stick to the back teeth with the poor selection of commuter fodder for the brain dead in John Menzies? Try the writeout club. You can bet your bottom dollar most will be drivel writ long and large, but you've a better chance of finding something new, exciting and fresh there than in many high street chain stores.

Well done to Francesca and Joe Gil for creating such an interesting, and might I add seductive-looking, website for all us booklovers, even if we're not writers. I might have requested one of the books myself, except that I happen to have a copy of one of then - Joe Blues' Teaching the Headmaster - sitting right in front of me already. I wonder how that happened...ever been anywhere near the South Bank?

The Dead Father's Club by Matt Haig

Disturbing and at times darkly humorous, Dead Fathers Club is a grittily and sometimes gorily real portrayal of a young boy struggling to maintain his sense of right and wrong as the adults around him fail him time and time again. Philip, an immature eleven-year-old growing up in Newark, has his very average world ripped apart when his father is kills in a traffic accident and his mother rapid succumbs to the dubious attractions of oily Uncle Alan. His father’s ghost, who no-one but Philip can see or hear, rides to the rescue, offering Philip a way of ‘saving’ his mother and assuring his father of eternal rest and peace. But, bullied at school and neglected at home, Philip is increasingly torn between his sense of right and wrong and loyalty to his father: he is manipulated further and further into a mental and behavioural decline.

This isn’t a bad book: Haig has a good story to tell, but he delivers it with a workmanlike detachment, that offers little to engage the reader. An initially engaging style, if one can get over the mildly pretentious tone, the story becomes increasingly and wretchedly predictable. Leah, the serene and slightly mystical centre of Philip’s awakening sexuality, provides some light reveal but is left undeveloped as other, less interesting, characters take centre stage. My main reaction to this book was ambivalence: it’s good, but not that good and mildly derivative with strong reminders of the numerous stories of troubled childhood which seem to fill the bookshops at the moment. If that genre of fiction appeals to you, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, or We Need To Talk About Kevin are both much better. Dead Fathers Club is a depressingly sad picture of modern childhood in a world where everyone seems to believe that something has gone wrong. Pity the reader who takes it too seriously.

The Gardens of the Dead by William Brodrick

Father Anselm is an unlikely hero in detective fiction. The former barrister turned monk displays remarkable tenacity and loyalty but he is fallible, often prevaricating, often drawing false conclusions. In this regard, he is engaging human, without any of the gritty roughness so often associated with literary sleuths. Yet, in The Gardens of the Dead, William Brodrick has created an eminently English, eminently likeable, detective. Reminiscent of Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair, the novels unfolds with gentle twists and turns that gradually reveal the truth behind the lie, beneath the deceit. Elizabeth Glendinning QC is a barrister on the track of a criminal who out-manoeuvred her a decade ago. Her task becomes harder when she succumbs to a genetic heart condition and dies in her car in London’s East End. Her legacy is to pass the mystery on to her former colleague, Father Anselm, and she leaves him a series of pieces of information and tips which try to map his route through a labyrinth of deception. Written in lucid, sophisticated style, the plot evolves in with rigid constancy. Gripping and intriguing, this is one of the best mystery novel of the year.

The End of Alice by A M Homes

This is not a book for the lily-fever. Bold, courageous and confrontational, The End of Alice is most disturbing. It is also very, very good. There is absolutely nothing engaging or delightful in this story which relates, through correspondence, the exploits of an imprisoned paedophile and his young, wild prototype. It is uncomfortable reading: repulsive and gripping in almost equal measure. Deliberately shocking, Homes forces unpleasant questions, at each and every turn of the page judging perfectly how readers are likely to react, catching them in their own doubts with scary precision. The erotic correspondence, delicious to the letter writes, works well in revealing how a paedophile, imprisoned twenty three years old is also witty and intelligent, manipulative and guiltily complicit. Turning the final page comes as a relief: can’t imagine anyone actually enjoying reading this novel but it is rewarding in its own way. A unforgettable literary questioning of liberalism and modernity, it deserves attention.

A Conspiracy of Violence by Susan Gregory

Set in a Restoration London, bursting with vibrancy and licentiousness after a decade of puritanical abstinence during the Commonwealth, Susanna Gregory’s A Conspiracy of Violence, is an atmospheric and tightly interwoven tangle of murder, mystery, political intrigue and buried treasure. Thomas Chaloner has returned to London in search of employment in his chosen profession – as a spy. But as the former employee of Cromwell’s spymaster-general and the nephew of a regicide, he struggles to secure a position. Driven by the nagging of his Dutch lover, he is forced to accept a mission which is unattractive and dangerous and he soon finds himself hunting for gold in the Tower of London. But everywhere he turns he finds signs of plots to kill a king and, struggling to make sense of coded information, he no longer knows who to trust.

Gregory’s novel evokes an engaging and warm, if one-sided, vision of Restoration London and many of her characters are exploitations of the slim facts known about real people. Between the historical facts, she has cleverly woven a complex, compelling and utterly believable fabric of betrayal and treason. The plot is intriguing and, despite what some reviews have said, it is not heavily weighted down with a history lesson, but rather by a vast array of critical characters. Each is nicely drawn and some has characteristics, like Kelying’s love of animals and Evett’s passionate hatred of wild beasts, which Gregory exploits mercilessly to extract the humour, but there are so many it is difficult to keep track of them all or of who has said what to whom. As a result the plot unfolds only slowly and at times one has to flick back a few pages to check who’s who.

There is a historical note at the back of book which is helpful in tracking which parts of the book are fictional and which are based on fact. For those who are interested in such things, I’d suggest turning to it first. My favourite part of book was the inclusion of the bookselling Leybourn brothers – a lovely touch since the Leybourns were responsible for producing the maps of Restoration London from which, surely, Gregory must have drawn much of her landscape of London.

An enjoyable, and finely written mystery, that would have been better slimmed down to the bear bones.

Jane Austen by Claire Tomalin

Claire Tomalin offers a radical re-assessment of arguably the nation’s favourite author in her account of the life of Jane Austen. There is no room her for the prim, endearing and content ‘Aunt Jane’ that was the core of her image for most of the 20th century. In tracing Austen’s life from her birth in a Hampshire parsonage in 1775 to her untimely death in 1817, Tomalin reveals first a home-loving child unhappily sent away to school and then an independent minded young woman who resents her dependence on wealthier relatives and prizes the rare times when she has the luxury of leisure to write.

Eminently readable, this biography places Austen not only within a family and locality, reveals the extent to which her connections provided close links to the politics and social trends of her times. Aunt to the illegitimate daughter of Warren Hastings, Governor General of Bengal and the loving cousin of a French émigré, Austen had no opportunity to live a life constrained to the round of local society. Tomalin shows that, schooled with the sons of West Indian slave owners and her father the trustee of an Antiguan sugar plantation, Austen cannot have been unaware of the contemporary debates on abolition and chattel slavery, as some her most ardent admirers would have it. Tomalin’s brief but thorough analysis of each of Austen’s major work’s shows how such issues, fair from absent from Austen’s novels, are subtlety worked through by a sophisticated and socially aware, professional author.

One of the real delights of this book is the account of the all too brief time in which Austen could enjoy the fruits of her talents, following the publication of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice: the small income she derived from her novels gave her a degree of personal freedom while the recognition of friends and family provided satisfaction, even if the limited public recognition she obtained made her uneasy.

Many of Austen’s letters and her diaries were destroyed by her family – her sister Cassandra and, later, her niece, Fanny, but Tomalin exploits the available material to the full, studying not only what is left of Austen’s correspondence and notes but also the correspondence and journals of those who knew or met her. And yet this is more than a mere history. With intelligence and sympathetic deduction and Tomalin provides a more rounded, and more credible, picture of her subject than many Austen biographers have managed, something which amounts to a fresh, revealing and intimate biography.

The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld

I enjoyed reading The Interpretation of Murder but for all the wrong reasons. Rubenfield writes reasonably well and the atmosphere he evokes of turn of the century high society in New York is engaging even if it’s one-dimensional. The interweaving of the (historically inaccurate) break up between Freud and Jung is interesting and the application of psycho-analysis to otherwise straightforward detective fiction is just about enough to make it stand out from the crowd. But all these good points are side issues – or at least should be – to really strong detective fiction, and it’s this aspect of the novel which lets it down. The plot is utterly unbelievable, the development too slow-weighted down by far too much discussion of Hamlet-and the end is like something out of a b-rate comic whose editor finds he has to cut the last 4 pages.

The high point of the novel for me was the interesting take on the relationship, albeit contracted, between Freud and Jung. Surely there was enough material there alone for a good, short novel? But it’s dealt with within a few pages, randomly dotted across the course of other devious, often pointless, plot turns. And the character of Detective Litttlemore is enjoyable, but he’s left a carbon cut out while attention is given to far less interesting and less plot-dependent characters.

If you like your thrillers intermingled with history, try Michael Frayn’s Headlong instead.

Edward Trencom's Nose by Giles Milton

Edward Trencom’s Nose, debut novel from the popular history writer Giles Milton, is funny, witty in a neo-Wodeshousian sort of way and full of delightfully engaging characters.  The Trencom family have been the acknowledged masters of cheese for 10 generations, running their London cheese shop since before the Great Fire of London and passing it done from father to son for over 300 years.  Each eldest son also inherits a remarkable nose, a large aquiline nose with a prominent bridge and an extraordinary talent for smelling cheese, which Milton exploits too capacity.  Weight-watching cheese-lovers should avoid this book or the numerous evocative, aromatic scenes describing the finest cheeses from around the world will have you diving to the fridge for more than one too many wee morsels. 

This is a novel fashioned with style and elegance. An elaborate plot structure is interwoven with an account of Greco-Turkish conflict and delicately balanced with a narrow group of amusing, if somewhat one-dimensional, characters.  The plot develops as Edward, the current owner of Trencom’s Cheese Shop and possessor of the finest nose in generations, discovers a package of family papers in the cellar. His discoveries, together with the machinations of friends and foes, start him off an a path of adventure – adventure that is in 1960s middle class sub-urban style – which eventually both exposes and ties him to the fate of his forebearers. And here we come to the weakness of the novel: the way in which Edward’s adventures play out is utterly, utterly ludicrous and the farcical denouement is deeply unrevelatory – a brave and not wholly unsuccessful attempt, one suspects, to match the well conceived plot to the mindset of its average players.  Yet the overall result is unsatisfying.  Make no mistake, this is a good and fun book to read, with lots of laughs and lots of cheese throughout, but the ending just doesn’t quite live up to expectation.  Read the book for the pleasure of the journey, but don’t expect to enjoy the party when you reach your destination.