"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

"Half of the Human Race" by Anthony Quinn

This historical boy-meets-girl  romance ticks all the genre boxes.

1911. He's a wealthy public school boy and talented cricketer. She's a suffragette wannabe female surgeon. They fall in love. But. She is fighting against the entrenched values of the patriarchy; he is the establishment. He wants to marry her but  he is appalled by her militancy; she wants to marry him but she won't to give up her independence to become a wife and mother. Guess who changes?

There's nothing you can fault in this book. The author has clearly done his research (it shows). He can turn a good phrase (see the selected quotes). It is carefully plotted (though it rather relies on coincidences) and well-paced. The main characters are nicely fleshed-out and believable. But it is all so predictable. I foresaw every twist. The characters are so stereotypical (feisty female, disapproving elder sister, battleaxe mother, naughty granddad). And it targeted only low-hanging fruit. Who now can argue against women having the franchise? Isn't it terrible to force-feed a hunger striker? Who isn't aware that the generals in the first world war were intransigent fools whose tactics caused huge numbers of needless deaths? I longed to be challenged by this book but I was soon aware that Quinn's popularity depends on him expressing sentiments that everyone else agrees with. He's a good enough writer to be controversial but, unlike his heroine, he copped out. I felt as Connie felt in chapter 4: "Disappointment touched its limp hand to her heart."

The Rt Revd Lord Harries, ex Bishop of Oxford, said in a Gresham College lecture in 2008 that what distinguishes literature from propaganda is that it can entice us to “enter into the minds of people with fundamentally opposed views or characters.” On that basis, this novel is propaganda.

Selected quotes:

• "It was the snailing tedium of the weeks in hospital that most excruciated her." (Prologue)
• "She detested picnics: essentially, one took a pile of sandwiches for a walk, settled oneself on a scratchy tartan rug, then waited for the wasps to show up." (Ch 1)
•  "How could so many consciousnesses be contained in one world, she wondered, each of them believing themselves to be the centre of the universe?" (Ch 7)
• "She sensed trackless swathes of dead time in prospect, like an Arctic explorer looking out upon a tundra and suddenly daunted by the isolation." (Ch 10)

July 2024; 483 pages

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

"Cicatrice" by Jo Boyle

This is an exceptionally well written thriller in which the villain, Amir, pursues Mel aka Vika aka Malavika Lal, an Australian born in India from a Hindu family, seeking to discover the whereabouts of her brother so he can have vengeance for the murder of his family in the aftermath of the riotous destruction of a mosque. The first half of the book is set in Melbourne as Mel, traumatised after having been held captive by Amir, renews the friendship of Jamie (who is in a lesbian partnership with Suzanne) after a five year interlude. This half is mostly about trust, betrayals and perceived betrayals, and will-she-won't-she as their relationship develops. The second half is more straight thriller.

Regular followers of this blog will know that this is really not the sort of book I read but I was mightily impressed. I know nothing about fighting but the 'blow-by-blow' meticulous descriptions of fights were wonderfully energetic and really well written. I know even less about girl-on-girl sex but these moments were also excellently described. In this sort of escapist literature it is difficult (at least for me) to suspend disbelief but the grounding of the characters at the start of the book in relatively normal settings and the beautiful descriptions (as mentioned) and the great dialogue all added to the verisimilitude. Even though the time-shifting in the first part of the book was slightly disruptive of the narrative, I really appreciated the PTSD flashbacks: they seemed very real to me and made the character of Mel significantly more three-dimensional than she might otherwise have been.

There were times when I thought the book was a little bit too long. There were perhaps too many tiffs between Mel and Jamie in the first part, and right at the end there was too much concern to tie up every loose end. But fundamentally this is a superbly written book and fans of this genre should thoroughly enjoy it.

Selected quotes:

• "The gleaming sun had brought the strollers out in force: the loping adult kind and the rolling baby kind." (Ch 2)
• "one of the misgivings of the technological age, is that chance and happenstance have been rendered virtually impotent by a world… so thoroughly and intimately connected." (Ch 4)
• "The commanding tenor that sounded in her brain, emitted as barely a whisper in the execution" (Ch 10)
• "if past was prelude, she knew exactly where she was going." (Ch 11)
• "Alex had an ephimany then. An epitome. Fuck, he had a moment of clarity." (Ch 11)
• “Hey, people think the most alluring thing about being a paramedic is the blood and guts. And don’t get me wrong, blood-and-guts is a rollicking good time" (Ch 16) I loved paramedic Annie. What a wonderful cameo role.
• “Crack addiction. But he’s just an alcoholic now. Progress, right?” (Ch 16)
• "He squirmed like sperm in a petri dish" (Ch 23)
• "scuttling him like a high-rise at a demolition." (Ch 28)
• “Heroes aren’t afraid of coffee shops." (Ch 30)
• "the most reckless thing I’ve seen you do under the influence is mix vodka with Nesquik.” (Ch 30)

March 2023

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

"A Long Dark Rainbow" by Michael Tappenden

 An absolutely wonderfully delightful story about love between two old people.

Alex has never really fulfilled his potential. He felt inadequate as a young art student and abandoned drawing to become an art historian; he had an academic career but never became head of department. His love life lies far in the past and he now doubts his potential virility. Nevertheless, he talks to a statue of Dionysus and gains sufficient confidence to pursue Samantha, a divorcee, who is herself convinced that her her body can no longer attract men and that her days of romance are over. Can these two old people, emotionally and physically marked and shaped by their experiences, find shared sexual satisfaction and love?

There is a certain amount of plot involving people from Alex's unhappy past who threaten his present and future happiness but the core of this story (perfectly paced with turning points precisely at the quarter, half and three-quarter points) is an intense exploration of the developing relationship between the two protagonists. Towards the end there were even flashes of Lady Chatterley's Lover!

I was captured right from the start by the brilliantly drawn character of Alex who has an inner monologue that is fundamentally self-deprecatory and at the same time can be astute and sometimes very funny:

• "Fear. Embarrassment. Ignorance. What effective contraception they had been." (Prologue)
• "It was as if his brain and key parts of his body were no longer talking to each other. Not that that was anything new. In the past they had often ignored each other, preferring instead to go their separate ways, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Maybe now, they were sulking."  (Prologue)
• "From flaccidity to awareness to virility to ignorance to repression to chronic masturbation to lust and fever to permitted access and more ignorance to mutual disappointment to adultery to abstinence and back to flaccidity. That’s how it was destined."  (Prologue)
• "Coming up to seventy. Didn’t feel like it though. As long as he kept clear of mirrors and passport booths and didn’t bend to stroke pets. Sometimes he forgot his own age."  (Prologue)
• "Sometimes he would talk to younger friends or relatives, see them laugh and chatter and wonder if they would be at his funeral. Which ones wouldn’t get the time off? Which ones would have the flu? Which ones would just make excuses?"  (Prologue)
• "It’s all in there. He tapped his head. Just a bit reluctant to come out."  (Prologue)
• "‘That’ll be seven pounds please. Special rate for senior citizens today.’ Oh God. Is it that obvious? You could have lied. Pretended you couldn’t tell. Charged the full amount and hoped my vanity would pay it." (1. In the Beginning)
• "Bloody memory. You spend your life filling your brain. Hour after hour after hour, learning and understanding, feeding its voracious appetite, packing tons and tons of knowledge into the bottomless pit of brain cells and then later, when you want something back… nothing. Maybe his brain was now feeding on all that information piled inside it and would only let you have the scraps it doesn’t want, like bacon rind and cherry pips. Maybe it was simply composting." (1. In the Beginning)
• "And that jaw – once it had the clean, sweeping lines of a racing yacht. Now look at it, bumbling around the coast, lumpy with barnacles." (1. In the Beginning)
• "Do I need to find my higher self? If I’m honest, I’m having enough trouble with this lower one." (2. Samantha and the Wolf)
• "Courting? That sounds so old fashioned. Do they still do that, or do they simply go to bed and conduct a road test?"   (6. Journeys)
• "No wonder old people don’t smile much. Not because they’re miserable. Just trying to keep it all taut." (7. Steam)
• "I just walked about following what felt like a permanent hard-on. It was an obsession that stirred me constantly. An all-consuming driving urge. I felt like a permanently on-duty pole vaulter."  (8. Tantra)
• "They seemed to have wall-to-wall foreplay crackling in their minds. It had nothing at all to do with age or having a young, smooth body. It was like being in the middle of a permanent Cole Porter song laced with liberal doses of Viagra." (12. Sad News and a General)
• "Now, however, he felt as if he was learning again, learning to swim again. Not convinced he wouldn’t drown. Still needing to hang on to the pool side." (14. Clues and Confession at last)

The author is particularly good at using actions and observations to represent a character's thoughts. For example, when Alex draws, his drawings represent his manhood. For example, he looks at some sketches he made when he was younger and he thinks: "This was a different me. So confident, so strong, so aware. Suddenly he felt a wave of panic wash through him. I can’t do this anymore." (6. Journeys) Later, he decides: "It will come back. Maybe the line, the marks I make will be different, not so confident but maybe I’ll see things differently now, after all this time."  (6. Journeys) And Samantha wonders: "Did his pencil, long and hard and penetrating, really represent much more to him?"   (6. Journeys)

Even furniture and washing up can be used to trigger thoughts regarding the effort required to start up an new relationship: "Samantha’s chair was quite different. Soft, young, excitable, waiting for the next walk in the park. Welcoming? Yes, or was that devouring? And now I’ll have to learn it all over again."  (6. Journeys) "On the large oak table were the remains of their meal. She stood and looked for a while. Those were the clean, bright plates she had proudly carried in, to be enjoyed. All now stained and cold and empty. She moved to the sink, turned on the tap and placed the plates and cutlery in the hot soapy water. Something ticked nervously in her throat. She picked up the plates and slowly washed them clean; washed away every trace, made them new." (5. Secrets and Understanding)

Other selected quotes:

• "The flame of the nearest candle, startled at his appearance, moved abruptly, and then settled, reassured."  (Prologue)
• "The flotsam of kitsch washed up here." (1. In the Beginning)
• "He had stared at the colourful students each dressed in their own non-conformist palette" (1. In the Beginning)
• "I do try to be tidy and I am in my own way. Just… not your way. I do know where everything is, trouble is, it’s usually underneath something else." (5. Secrets and Understanding)
• "there was that woman with the heavy make-up that stopped at her neckline. Undressed, it looked like a sunset over a polar icescape." (6. Journeys)
• "Without doubt it was her, but it was not someone she had ever seen before. It was not the portrait of an old woman that she had expected but of a woman who had matured with experience and understanding. There was a strength that she never knew was there and yet a softness at the same time. A few marks, carefully selected, indicated the passing of time but in a way that was sensitive, almost celebratory and without flattering." (6. Journeys)
• "He stopped and then very carefully ran his very fingertips over her shoulders, feeling the tiny blemishes left by the sun and wind and time that made her who she was. A human patina of priceless experience." (7. Steam)
• "People see that and all the other blemishes as faults. Imperfections. But they are her journey. Her experiences. Bit like that old oak table downstairs. Full of cracks and knot holes and covered with age. And people love that in a table. But not when it comes to each other. How fickle. How strange." (8. Tantra)
• "She could see the brown patch on his crown where his hair had retreated and red points on each elbow as if the bone was trying to push through."  (8. Tantra)
• "‘Just be smart and relaxed.’ ‘I do have problems with both of those concepts.’" (11. Father and Daughter)
• "Ejaculation City. Frequent visits but never stayed long.’ (13. Funeral and Suspicion)
• "Above them, the same stars looked down on this man and woman, two incongruous bodies, creased and roughened, their bones and blood worn and weakened by time, learning at last to be themselves." (14. Clues and Confession at last)
• "How easy it had been to get lost, to follow the stony path trodden by so many other elderly feet, not to query, simply to accept. He had wanted to move, heard the old stallion whinnying desperately but had ignored it." (14. Clues and Confession at last)

This was an utterly delightful character-driven look at love from a perspective that is all-too-often ignored. 

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

"Children of the Mist" by Hywela Lyn

Having colonised an icy, mountainous planet and used names from Norse myth to map it, earthlings have developed telepathy and telekinesis but renounced rocket science and modern medicine. So when a mysterious sickness starts to kill people they have to gather together to send a telepathic message into space to summon their old friend Jess who has a space ship to come and help them. But when she arrives she is accompanied by her husband Dahll who was the previous love interest of Tamarinth (who, however, is now falling for the extraordinarily handsome Vidarh who himself is developing the ability to teleport). Then slavers arrive on the planet and kidnap Tamarinth and others. Can Jess and Vidarh and Dahll, together with Tamarinth's siblings and her pet icecat find and free Tamarinth at the same time as discovering a cure for the illness?

A carefully plotted and fast paced science fiction romance although sometimes the potential for conflict between the characters was not fully developed. Goodies are goodies and baddies are baddies. The only two goodies who appear to do something bad are quickly killed off and what they actually did is never fully explored. The love triangles could have been exploited more fully as could have the tension between Vidarh's loyalty to the mission and his desire to return home to save his family. And the deus ex machina at the end was just a little audacious. Nevertheless, a perfectly readable example of the genre.

June 2018; 218 pages

"The Monk" by Matthew lewis

This classic of Gothic romance was written in ten weeks by a nineteen year old and to some extent it shows: he throws everything at this story and is always ready with some new deus ex machina to extricate his characters or to plunge them deeper into torment and despair.

After this immediate best seller, Lewis left the novel in favour of the theatre, producing best-selling plays and melodramas (he was also an MP!). You can see the influence of Shakespeare. A young girl is given a potion to make her unconscious and put into the burial chamber where her seducer will be waiting for her with a knife: a beautifully dark twist on the already dark Romeo and Juliet. He also quotes Measure for Measure. Faustus by Marlowe may also be here: when one character is to be killed she pleads for "another month, or week, or day" as Desdemona in Othello pleads: "Kill me tomorrow, let me live tonight ... But half an hour ... But while I say one prayer" and also as Faustus pleads "let this hour be but / A year, a month, a week, a natural day"; perhaps the more obvious parallel with Faustus is the summoning of demons (although in The Monk it is Lucifer rather than Mephistopheles) and the signing away of the soul in blood.

Lewis was rather sceptical of religion. In many ways The Monk is an attack on Roman Catholicism (although, it has been remarked, Lewis's sense of the dramatic  could only really be fuelled by the showy Roman tradition rather than the more lacklustre Anglican church) from the point of view of Whig Protestantism but he also has a wonderful bit (which had to be removed for later editions after a criminal trial) where Elvira (the heroine's mother) preserves her innocence by only allowing her to read a bowdlerised Bible which has been rewritten to take out the naughty bits.

The plot revolves around Ambrosio, famed preacher and abbot of a monastery, who is tempted by a woman in a scene straight out of the Garden of Eden (and then another one) and the evil Mother Superior of a convent who seeks to punish one of her nuns who has got herself pregnant. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Inevitably everyone ends up in the catacombs where imprisonment, starvation, rape and murder, not to mention satanic rites, jostle for room amidst the corpses of long-dead nuns and monks. Within this narrative is also the story of a traveller waylaid by robbers in a lonely forest and the tale of the Bleeding Nun.

One of the things that marks this story out is the way that Lewis confounds our expectations. We expect the villains to be caught, tried, punished and eternally damned. This doesn't necessarily happen. We expect our innocent heroines to be rescued seconds before their rape or at least before their murder. Not always! In fact the innocent suffer more than the less innocent and this applies both to heroes and villains. Lewis seems to be saying that to be innocent (in the true sense of ignorant) is not a very good defence in a wicked world.

Two things life this novel above pulp fiction. First is the obvious relish and gusto with which the story is told. This leads to brilliant plot twists that came completely out of the blue and consequences which one is sure won't happen, do. The second is the wonderfully comic characters of two minor characters: the Aunt and the Landlady both of whom are garrulous lower-class (by birth) women who cannot keep to the point of a discourse. In contrast the young romantic leads are stock characters and the only really interesting characters are the female victims and the male and female villains. I'd love to see Alan Rickman give an over-the-top portrayal of Ambrosio.

Brilliant quotes:

• "None sleep so profoundly as those who are determined not to wake."
• "The delirium of passion being past, He had leisure to observe every trifling defect." This is a bit like the 2nd verse of Bring Back That Loving Feeling: "Girl you're starting to criticism little things I do."
• "Possession, which cloys Man, only increases the affection of Woman."

For an old book this is wonderfully easy to read.

December 2015; 442 pages

"Paper Towns" by John Green

This is a teen novel set in the US. The hero, Q, is in his last year of high school. One night his next door neighbour, Margo Roth Spiegelman, whom he adores from afar, takes him for a whirlwind all-nighter of revenge on her boyfriend who is cheating with her best friend. The next day she has disappeared. Q, with his nerdy friends Radar, obsessed with editing Onmictionary, and Ben, obsessed with losing his virginity, have to solve the clues that Margo has left to find her, or her dead body.

This book has an unusual structure. After a prologue of a few pages when 9-year-olds Q and Margo find a dead guy in the local park, there are 13 pages of setting the scene and introducing the characters during a day at school followed by the revenge night which continues for about 60 pages. We are now a quarter of the way through the book and we have been having fun, even though very little has actually happened. Then Margo disappears although no one really worries about that for another 15 pages. Then the clue hunt starts and goes on for another 36 pages before a clue is found which can move the narrative on and we are now nearly half way through. But the last clue points to a deserted minimall at Q is convinced that all the clues are a way of Margo telling him where to find her dead body after she has committed suicide and so the three friends break into the derelict minimall. At this point I was so excited I had to keep my eyes firmly on the left hand page because I wanted but dreaded what might be written on the right hand page. This was as exciting as the middle of the brilliant Room and again it was more or less bang in the centre of the book. But then we enter a phase where nothing much happens again. We have a very funny bit where Ben gets very drunk at the prom party and Q goes off him a bit but they plan to go to graduation naked underneath their gowns.  But the flatness extends for nearly a quarter of the book before Q finds the vital clue and he and his mates have to drive for twenty four hours in a camper van. The road trip is brilliant. There are some very funny moments and some moments of tension but there is very little contribution to the actual plot. Then comes the final ten per cent of the book which brings the bitter end.

So much for the plot. In many ways it was a stop start sort of book. There was enough to keep me going when the momentum flagged slightly. But it was episodic. The night of revenge did not seem to link up particularly well with 'Where's Margo' theme and the wonderful road trip was, in many ways, a separate event.

The characterisation was neatly done. They were introduced quickly and given more depth as and when they needed it. They had interesting story curves although they were rather dropped at the end of the book when they had served their usefulness.

There was plenty of humour. The way that it alternated with the tension was very clever. The three nerds, Q, Radar and Ben, laughed and joked like three really good mates, even though Q seemed to be the permanent outsider. There are some brilliant wisecracks:

• "It's a penis," Margo said, "in the same sense that Rhode Island is a state: it may have an illustrious history but is sure isn't big."
• When his therapist parents give Q a key for a new car and he goes outside and finds that it is a minivan just like his mum's and he is so disappointed that he thinks 'these people specialise in the analysis and understanding of the human psyche.'
• After Q and Radar have restrained Ben who has attacked someone who called his girlfriend a bitch, Ben shouts: "I have a lot of anger right now! I was enjoying punching the guy! I want to go back to punching him!"

And there were moments when the images were wonderful: Radar, naked underneath his graduation gown, persuades Q to buy him a tee shirt in a fuel stop on the road trip. There are two problems with this: L means extra extra large in this state (Georgia) and it has a confederate flag on the front. Radar is black.

Flicking through it again I find that there are so many funny moments. When Ben has just kissed his girlfriend and asks Q for advice as to whether he did it right, Q tells him that "The human tongue is like wasabi: it's very powerful and should be used sparingly." He then discovers that Ben's girlfriend is standing behind him. She tells him that "Ben's tongue is like sunscreen ... It's good for your health and should be applied liberally." Wow. And wow and wow and wow.

This is a very funny comic novel with some very exciting moments and some tragic teenage angst. A great read.

September 2015; 306 pages

Other teen fiction books by the brilliant John Green include An Abundance of Katherines , Turtles All the Way Down, and the stupendous  The Fault in Our Stars
You might also enjoy teen fiction The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chobsky

"Frenchman's Creek" by Daphne Du Maurier

If you're going to write slushy romantic fiction, write well and write hard. This is the ultimate. Set during the Restoration (romantic enough already!) this is the tale of a headstrong lady escaping from her husband to live on her Cornish estate. She encounters a French (of course) pirate and she falls in love. But the local gentility  are searching for the pirate and the noose is tightening.

Classic and very enjoyable. October 2014; 253 pages

"Second honeymoon" by Joanna Trollope

When actress Edie's last child leaves home she gets a dose of empty nest blues. On the other hand, husband Russell (a theatrical agent) looks forward to discovering his wife again. So when his daughter Rosa gets the sack and finds herself in debt and asks to come home he says no. Then elder son Matt breaks up with high-powered business woman girlfriend Ruth and returns home, Edie gets cast in an Ibsen play and offers her son on stage a room in her house and soon the house is full again. But a house full of resentful rent-paying adults isn't quite as comfortable as a family home and tensions rise.

Essentially a well written Mills and Boon saga without the muscles and heaving bosoms and with one or two of the characters nicely drawn. It lacks depth but it certainly kept me turning the pages.

June 2012; 382 pages