"Ideality" by Kai Alyx Sarus

Aurora's ex-husband is controlling and manipulative? Is her new boyfriend the same?

At 50, Aurora is a successful team leader when her company goes bankrupt and her ex-husband announces that he wants her back. Can she make a go of her new career as a music journalist? After all, when she was a teenager she was an ardent fan of heavy metal group Morpheme. 

I thoroughly enjoyed the start of the book because there were some nice phrases showing that the author can use words to create excellent images (see the selected quotes which come mostly from the early chapters). I also enjoyed discovering the mundane reality of Aurora's daily life which make a nice counterpoint to her memory-focused dreams. Aurora loses her job and starts a new career. But suddenly there was a major turning point at the 50% mark and we were into a love story in which the male leads were control freaks. It almost seemed like a new book and significant moments in the first half, such as the collapse of the company pension scheme, became virtually irrelevant to the plot.

It was written in the third person past, almost entirely from the perspective of the protsgonist but occasionally straying into the interior monologue of another character. 

There are some crucial moments of conflict in the second half of the story; these are moments when the story comes alive. But there are also large areas where conflict seems entirely absent. For example, Aurora has almost instant success when she begins a totally new career as a music journalist. Not only is her work widely read, the  quality of it is so hugely respected that her first critical review of her work is "in-depth and flattering." (Denial). It seems unlikely.; this aspect of the story lacked verisimilitude. As Aurora thinks: "Don’t get me wrong, but this all seems a bit quick." (Displaced)

The characters were divided into goodies and baddies. Three characters were more than puppets. Protagonist Aurora as a character seems to have been developed from wish-fulfilment. Does this heroine have a flaw? David, the ex-husband, is melodramatically horrid: I could almost hear the readership booing each time he appeared on the page. At least Oliver has two sides to him although by the time this reader appreciated this we were so close to the end that there was little opportunity to explore how these two sides can work together. I wanted complex nuanced characters and I was disappointed.

On the whole, the dialogue was a little clunky. No character had any dialogic tags or mannerisms that made them sound unique. No matter how much stress they were in, characters seemed to be able to express themselves coherently and articulately, making use of normal grammatical conventions. To give two examples picked almost at random: 

• "Don’t think like that. Enjoy it, make the most of what you’ve built up and live it. You’re the only person who has made this happen. No one else can take that away from you" (Dialectic)
• "Oh, Lesley, it’s good to see you. I’m fine, but I need a favour. Is there any way that you can let me leave the pharmacy by the back door?" (Desire)

The book was enjoyable and easy to read - the pages turned quickly - but in the end there seemed to be two different stories, hinged in the middle. 

Selected quotes: 

• "She felt the day stretch out before her like a tarmac runway." (Dream)
• "Despite the alarm going off, time leaked, minute by minute, and Aurora had to rush to the tube station." (Dream)
• "The train stopped suddenly and she pushed and pardoned her way off the carriage." (Dream)
• "She was emotionally exhausted, but relieved. She had got Jacqui through the dark tunnel and out the other end, but it had cost her a little bit of herself and she felt it, like a chipped porcelain statue." (Decision)

July 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Utopia Avenue" by David Mitchell

 I loved it. It's a big book but it kept me hooked all the way from the start to the finish. Well before the end I was so worried about whether these four characters would survive that I literally couldn't pout the book down.

Utopia Avenue is a rock band formed in 1967 by bassist Dean, a working-class lad from Gravesend with a troubled home background, keyboardist Elf, a folk singer from a posh family, jazz drumming no-nonsense northerner Griff, and poshboy Jasper, a brilliant lead guitarist with a history of mental disease. Each chapter is given the title of the song that one of them is writing during that chapter. They progress from penniless obscurity, playing in student bars, to stardom. They meet, on level terms, the icons of the day: Hendrix and Brian Jones, John Lennon and David Bowie (still working in an office and waiting for his big break), Marc Bolan and Leonard Cohen to name bust a few. But every step of the way is filled with danger, from drug busts to paternity suits, family tragedies to psychotic episodes. 

I think it is fundamentally about Dean whose songs top and tail the book but for me the most fascinating character was Jasper, despite the chronological weirdness of his dip into madness. I loved his polite honesty and his insistence on taking everything literally. 

But the book revolves around four different personalities who, despite their individual rivalries and jealousies, gel because of their shared passion for music, and the music itself becomes one of the characters. Yes, Dean is the 'typical' rock star, taking every drug going and sleeping around but fundamentally each of them is a musician and even Dean forswears cocaine before a gig after discovering the effect it has on his performance. 

It was brilliantly structured, with a wonderful plot (although I spotted the foreshadowing and guessed the ending) and perfectly drawn characters. There were incredible episodes - I think my favourite moment was Jasper sitting at the wrong table at Elf's sister's wedding - and endless great lines.

The story of Jasper clearly has links with other David Mitchell novels: his girlfriend has an LP of the Cloud Atlas Sextet, from Cloud Atlas, and Jasper himself is a descendant of Jacob de Zoet, from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. 

So many selected quotes:

• "Outside, rain bombards the crocuses to silky mush." (A Raft and a River)
• "'Life has chapters,' says Imogen. 'One ends, another begins'." (A Raft and a River)
• "Sunday evening pools in London's gardens, seeps through cracks and darkens streets." (A Raft and a River)
• "Keeping track of each of us would drive God quite insane." (Darkroom)
• "Writing is a forest of faint paths, of dead-ends, hidden pits, unresolved chords, words that won't rhyme. You can be lost in there for hours. Days, even." (Darkroom)
• "Charm in a guy is a warning sign. Like black and yellow stripes in nature mean, 'Watch out, there are stings near this honey'." (Mona Lisa Sings the Blues)
• "At the end of its eight minute journey from the sun, light passes through the stained glass of St Matthias Church in Richmond, London, and enters the dual darkrooms of Jasper's eyeballs." (Wedding Presence)
• "Jasper notes the Jesus's disciples were, essentially, hippies, long hair, gowns, stoner expressions, irregular employment, spiritual convictions, dubious sleeping arrangements and a guru." (Wedding Presence)
• "They listened to a Cambridgeshire morning's unscored music: a tractor in a nearby field; cars; crows." (Wedding Presence)
• "Jasper felt what you feel after someone leaves the room." (Wedding Presence)
• "Birdsong is chromatic and glinting." (Wedding Presence)
• "The last track, 'A Day In The Life', was a miniature of the whole album, like the way that the Book of Psalms is a miniature of the whole Bible." (Wedding Presence)
• "Dean hated his dad, hated himself for not standing up to him, and hated his dad for making him hate himself." (Purple Flames)
• "If I can play ... it's because I practised in lieu of living. It's not a method I recommend."  (Purple Flames)
• "Dean never saw the point of church. 'God works in mysterious ways' seemed no different from 'Heads I win, tails you lose'."  (Purple Flames)
• "Marriage is a prison, funded by the prisoners."  (Purple Flames)
• "A dustcart drove by. Bare-chested bin-men clung to the side, one with an Action Man's physique, one with a darts player's." (Unexpectedly)
• "Burn the candle at both ends, and soon you've got no candle." (Unexpectedly)
• "Every lover is a lesson and Angus's lesson is that kindness is sexy." (Unexpectedly)
• "She's all nag, no shag." (The Hook)
• "Love's blind ... and is no fan of eye-doctors." (Last Supper)
• "Grief is the bill of love, fallen due." (Builders)
• "For a brief spell, we share a stage. Others are coming to kick us off. But while you're here, write yourself a good part. Act it well."  (Builders)
• "A soggy winter sky, like sodden toilet paper."  (Builders)
• "People say 'While there's life there's hope', but every saying has a B side and this one's is 'Hope stops you adapting to a new reality'." (Roll Away the Stone)
• "Elf's father and Mrs Sinclair exude uncertainty about what to exude." (Even the Bluebells)
• "Small talk, thinks Elf, is Polyfilla you fill cracks with so you don't have to watch them widening." (Even the Bluebells)
• "Grief is a boxer, my sister's a punchbag, and all we can do is watch." (Even the Bluebells)
• "When he played, he forgot he was a scared dropout wasting away in a psychiatric facility in the Netherlands. When he played, he was a servant and a lord of Music." (Sound Mind)
• "Unfortunately, Dean now realised, unwritten contracts have as much fine print as the written variety."  (Look who it isn't)
• "The word 'faster' is becoming a synonym of 'better'. As if the goal of human evolution is to be a sentient bullet." (Chelsea Hotel #929)
• "Do you ask a book for permission before you read it?" (Who shall I say is calling?)
• "The world has too many mystics and too few scientists." (Who shall I say is calling?)
• "Elf considers how the metaphor of life as a journey underplays how the traveller herself is changed by the road." (What's Inside What's Inside)
• "Disaster is rebirth, seen from the front. Rebirth is disaster, seen from behind." (What's Inside What's Inside)
• "You know how ... when you go abroad, you learn more about where you're from than where you're visiting?" (What's Inside What's Inside)
• "Labels ... They're easy to use. They save you the bother of thinking." (What's Inside What's Inside)
• "Art's made by artists, but artists are enabled by a scene." (What's Inside What's Inside)
• "If ethics aren't grey, they aren't really ethics." (Timepiece)
• "The only people who actually live in dreams are people in comas." (I'm a stranger here myself)
• "A girl walks by, leaving a trail of herself in her slipstream." (The narrow road to the far west)

This is such a good book that, having borrowed it from the library, I am now going to buy a copy for my shelves.

April 2022; 561 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter

I first read started reading this book shortly after its publication in the early 1980s. I gave up. I started it again in the 2000s. I gave up. In 2016 I started and finished it.

Was it worth it?

In 20 chapters Hofstadter attempts to teach the elements of Typographical Theory and therefore to (a) explain Godel's Incompleteness Theorem (b) lay down some rules for developing Artificial Intelligence. Along the way he tries to explore the concept of Strange Loops, recursive propositions that are self referential and paradoxical, such as "This statement is false". In order to help the general reader get anywhere near these difficult ideas he uses the art of Escher, which is full of self-reference and paradox, and the structure of a musical fugue such as those developed by Bach. He also intersperses every heavyweight chapter with a diversion, such as a dialogue between Achilles and a Tortoise (also involving a Crab, an Anteater and the Author) or the Jabberwocky in three languages.

Well I really enjoyed the diversions, which gave me some basic understanding of Hofstadter's arguments, and I enjoyed a lot of the more heavyweight stuff, although I skipped quite a lot too and there were bits that I frankly didn't understand.

A lot of the music stuff was really interesting and I learned about fugues, hemiolas, canons, organ points, strettos and fermatas. 

He made a lot of interesting points such as that "Intelligence loves patterns and baulks at randomness. For most people, the randomness in Cage's music requires much explanation ... whereas with much of Bach, words are superfluous.In that sense Bach's music is more self-contained than Cage's music." (p 175)

A brilliant attempt to make a really hard subject accessible which nearly worked for me and no doubt has enlightened many cleverer than myself.

August 2016; 680 pages



This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Playing with Fire" by Tess Gerritsen

This thriller starts brilliantly. The protagonist, Julia, a second violinist, finds an unpublished waltz in a Rome junk shop run by "a little gnome of a man with eyebrows like snowy caterpillars." The shop is unnaturally cold and as she reads the music "the hairs suddenly rise on my arms". As she leaves the shop she notices "twin gargoyles perched above the pediment" and a "brass Medusa-head knocker". Spooky!

Back home in America she starts to play the music as her three year old daughter, Lily, plays with the cat. When the music has stopped she discovers that the cat has been stabbed with the garden fork that the daughter is holding. All this happens in the first eight pages and, if you aren't utterly hooked by now, you will be when Julia plays the music again and finds herself stabbed with broken glass. There is mental illness in her family (her mother killed her baby brother) and psychiatrists start testing Lily to see whether there is any reason for her to be doing this. Julia is starting to believe that it is the music that is causing the problems (it uses "devil's chords [which were ] ... considered evil and banned from church music" in the middle ages), perhaps supernaturally, and she starts an obsessive quest for the composer. Julia's husband Rob (he absolutely has to be an accountant so there can be instant and easy conflict between a numbers type and an arty type) is worried by this obsession, convinced of his daughter's sanity (shades here of We Need to Talk About Kevin) and, suspecting that Julia herself might be imagining the attacks, wants to send her to a mental hospital.

This is gripping stuff.

And then we suddenly break from this thrilling tale to go to Venice in 1936 where Jewish violinist Lorenzo is practising for a duet with Laura Balboni, falling in love as the fascist storm clouds gather. Lorenzo is, of course, the author of the music. This is a sweet interlude, with menacing overtones, but the change of pace is so sudden. I was racing along scherzo furioso and suddenly we switch to adagio dolcissimo.

It never really regains the intensity of those first few chapters. We switch back to Julia and thriller mode as she travels to Venice to find the answers and out of the blue she is being shot at by hoodlums and there appears to be a conspiracy against her. Classic thriller territory. Which, given the excitement and the potential of the start, was actually a little bit disappointing.

August 2016; 314 pages

"The Piano Tuner" by Daniel Mason

In 1887 Edgar Drake, a Londoner who tunes Erard grands, is recruited by the War Office to travel to the Burmese frontiers of the British Empire to tune a piano for Dr Anthony Carroll, a British Officer who commands a remote outpost.

Immediately one suspects parallels with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (the inspiration for the film Apocalypse Now). Is Carroll another Mr Kurtz, gone native and megalomaniac and perpetrating unspeakable evil on those he autocratically rules?

The journey to Burma is delightful. Drake, who has never left England before, travels by boat and train and pony, recording his impressions in letters to his much-loved wife. The descriptions are brilliant and bring an exotic flavour of the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of the East. Drake loves Burma. He adores the hill-top village of Mae Lwin in the Shan Hills where the Doctor lives. The Doctor is very civilised and believes the music will bring peace to this troubled region; certainly the natives in the village are peaceful and happy and seem to adore the Doctor. Edgar falls in love with the people, the countryside, and especially Burman woman Khin Myo. He has tasted the lotus and stays longer than he should.

But there are darker undercurrents. The Shan princes have formed the Limbin Confederacy which may oppose British rule. Enigmatic dacoit warlord Twet Nga Lu lurks in the jungle, ready to pounce. Who attacked the village before Drake arrived? And where does the Doctor go on his many diplomatic missions?

This is a haunting and lyrical evocation of Burma. There are seductive descriptions of the beautiful sights of town and countryside. As a piano tuner, Drake is particularly sensitive to sound and the description of notes and tunes are wonderful and exotic. Mason uses a particularly interesting technique of reporting some dialogue as though it were stream of consciousness.

Beautiful magic. August 2013; 348 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God