"Murder at the Seaside" by Brian Gee

 Perhaps the ultimate in police procedural: this is a whodunnit from the perspective of the man who writes the forensic strategy. The level of detail is so overwhelming, so authoritative, that I can only presume that the 'other job' for this author is as a forensic scene of crime officer. Given the almost equally detailed setting, I'm also pretty sure that he lives in or around Eastbourne on the south coast of England.

This level of detail have the story a huge degree of authenticity and was frequently fascinating. Sometimes this went over the top: I didn't really need to know about who made the tea. But on the whole, the slow and steady account of how a police investigation proceeds was hypnotic and kept me reading. 

However, what it did mean was that a lot of what was recounted was irrelevant. There were three interwoven stories at the start of which two were relevant and one ended abortively about half way through. I'm not sure what the purpose of this story was, other than to introduce us to the SOCO team.

On the other hand the pacing was spot on. There were major turning points at the quarter, half and three-quarters ("That was when the screams started"); the key murder is about one third of the way through.

The story is told from the point of view of each of the major players in the drama, although in the third person and the past tense. There is no sense of the character's voice in their chapters; the narration is uniform and almost as pedestrian as a stereotypical police statement in court. This flat delivery ensured that there was no sense of melodrama despite the murder plotline.

It is difficult to evaluate it as a book because I have never encountered a novel that was less of a novel. It didn't feel like fiction. It's not a whodunnit or a mystery: the only suspense is around whether or not the murderer will get away with it. But if you want to grapple with the real mundane nitty-gritty of forensic investigation, this is the book for you.

Selected quotes:

• "It was, he mused, one of those places that you wiped your feet on the way out rather than on the way in." (Ch 4)

August 2024

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

"How Life Works" by Philip Ball

This book radically transformed my understanding of cellular biology. 

I'm not a biologist but I was a science teacher and I taught that the genome programs cells; that sections of DNA unwind and are used as templates to make strands of messenger RNA which then float out into the cytoplasm and are in turn used as templates for making proteins. That's not false. But, as Ball points out, that doesn't explain how some of my body cells develop into neurons and others, which have exactly the same DNA, into skin cells and others into blood cells and others into heart, lung, liver, spleen ...

By describing recent research on protein synthesis and embryo development, Ball shows that:

• Genes rarely have a unique function. The same gene which does one thing in a fruit fly can do something totally different in a human.
• Many morphologies are the result of combinations of genes.
• Genes can be 'switched' off or on by proteins. 
• Messenger RNA molecules seem to be made up of bits of heterogeneous nuclear RNA fragmented and then stitched together.
• The cells in multicellular life forms operate differently from bacterial cells.  
• Proteins fold because some sections of the protein chain attract water, others repel it. This also means that proteins can embed themselves into a cell wall.
• Changes in gene function can be caused by signals coming from outside the nucleus or even outside the cell itself. These signals can be electrochemical (as in neuron transmission), chemical (eg hormones), or even mechanical (eg when a cell is stretched). 
• Many developments involving proteins are combinatorial. This reduces 'noise' and makes the system more robust. If one enzyme doesn't work, another may be found to do the job. Molecular promiscuity with combinatorial fuzzy logic might be the only way for genetically identical cells to work together in diverse but specialised states. This also means that protein networks can develop new functions without losing old ones, which enables evolution to happen.
• Multicellularity has only happened twice: for plants and for animals (fungi don't count). There were significant changes in the ways that genes developed and communicated after the evolution of mammals and particularly placental mammals.  
• The epigenetic landscape is composed of a variety of bifurcating river valleys down which the cell tends to progress in a process called canalization. This landscape develops as the cells grow producing "a delicate dance of contingency and inevitability” like the growth of a city. (Ch 6) The valleys in the landscape can act as 'attractors' but genetic changes can alter where these attractors are.
• Cells have an awareness of their environment. Perhaps awareness of one’s surroundings is a fundamental feature of life.
• A random mixture of two morphogens, one an activator and one an inhibitor, in which the inhibitor diffused faster than the activator, creates patches in which one or the other morphogen predominates. This is responsible for eg patterned skins, the arrangement of hair follicles or feathers, the fractal branching of lung tissue, and even fingers (and fingerprints). 

This book also explained how a living cell, which appears to flout the second law of thermodynamics which insists that in an equilibrium system randomness tends to increase, can become increasingly organised. It points out that there are systems in physics, such as phase separation and crystallisation, which are inherently organised and that life appears to use these.  

I also learned:

• How tortoise shell cats get their markings and why 2999/3000 are female. 
• Why identical twins can be different from birth.
• Why planarian flatworms are effectively immortal. 
• How a human embryo develops and how an undeveloped embryo can be found inside the brain of itself developed twin. 
• That there is a gene called Sonic hedgehog. 
• How cells can 'request' the blood system to provide them with capillaries.
• Why humans mostly have their liver on the right, and their stomach and spleen on the left.

It was hard work. The information is very condensed and I needed to concentrate and take notes. But in the end I was rewarded in spectacular fashion. This is one of those books that provokes a paradigm shift, a revolution in the way one thinks.

Other brilliant books by Philip Ball that I have read include:

• Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another 
• H2O: A Biography of Water
• The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
• The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China
• Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different 

Selected quotes:

• “Looking to the genome for an account of  how life works is rather like ... looking to a dictionary to understand how literature works.” (Prologue)
• “There has never been a machine made by humankind that works as cells do.” (Prologue)
• “Life is a hierarchical process, and each level has its own rules and principles.” (Prologue)
• “The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.” (Ch 1)
• “Cells commit to fates by noticing and assessing what their neighbours are doing. It's rather like voting with a show of hands: we might sneak a look at how others are voting before deciding.” (235)
• “Life doesn't make systems that can do or construct a single thing, that produces entities ... that embody a wide range of options ... In normal circumstances, the system converges on the outcome(s) favoured by natural selection, while still maintaining enough phenotypic variability to be evolvable. Evolution does not know ... what it is going to need tomorrow - so it must keep its options open.” (Ch 7)
• “Life ... can be considered as a computation that aims to optimise the acquisition, storage, and use of ... meaningful information.” (Ch 9) 

A superb book. August 2024; 460 pages

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

"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

"Journey to the End of the Night" by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The life journey of an Everyman teaches him to be a cynical misanthropist.

Ferdinand Bardamu joins the army at the start of the First World War; after being wounded he is invalided out although he spends some time at a psychiatric hospital to be assessed as to whether his developed reluctance to be killed is a mental disease or cowardice. He then travels to colonial Africa to become an agent. Escaping, he is shanghaied and made to work as a galley slave before finding freedom in New York. Returning to Paris he becomes a doctor in a poor suburb and becomes embroiled in a plot to murder an old lady. Throughout he does his best to avoid being killed, to earn enough money to survive, and to have sex as often as possible. 

I was reminded of Voltaire's Candide in which the eponymous hero travels the world having repeatedly dreadful experiences, except that Bardamu is the very opposite of Dr Pangloss, seeming to espouse the philosophy that everything is for the worst in this the worst of all possible worlds. Perhaps more obvious influences would be Rabelais and Jonathan Swift.

Incredibly this long, difficult book with its unstructured picaresque plot was a best-selling debut for the pseudonymous author (a real doctor who had been wounded and decorated in World War One and spent time in French colonial Africa). This was, perhaps, the reason why this rambling discursive style influenced later writers such as Jean Genet, Henry Miller and William Burroughs. 

Here's an example of his work which captures both his negativity towards the world, his discursivity, and his gloriously original description. “Leaving the delirious gloom of my hotel, I attempted a few excursions in the main streets around about, an insipid carnival of dizzy buildings. My weariness increased at the sight of those endless house fronts, that turgid monotony of pavements, of windows upon windows, of business and more business, that chancre of the world, bursting with pustulant advertisements. False promises. Drivelling lies.” (p 169) 

At various intervals on this odyssey he encounters his alter ego, a sort of negative doppelganger, Leon Robinson, first during the First World War, as a fellow soldier, again in Africa, and again when he is working as a doctor. Robinson does what Bardamu dreams of doing.

Bardamu is haunted by death. This starts with the first world war but he is repeatedly reminded of death, of course, when he's a doctor. Death is the night at the end of the journey. Almost exactly halfway through, in New York, trying to keep up his spirits, Ferdinand thinks to himself: “What with being chucked out of everywhere, you’re sure to find whatever it is scares all those bastards so. It must be at the end of the night, and that's why they're so dead set against going to the end of the night.” (p 182) This is repeated at the 75% stage: “The clock at the top of the little church started striking the hours and more hours, and on and on. We had reached the end of the world, that was becoming obvious. We couldn't go any farther, because farther on there were only dead people.” (p 297) Then, at the end: “The bar opened just before dawn for the benefit of the bargemen. As the night draws to an end, the locks open slowly. And then the whole countryside comes to life and starts to work. Slowly the banks break away from the river and rise up on both sides. Work emerges from the darkness. You begin to see it again, all very simple and hard. Over here the winches, over there the fences around the work site, and far away on the road men are coming from still farther away. In small chilled groups they move into the murky light. For a starter they splatter their faces with daylight as they walk past the dawn. All you can see of them is their pale, simple faces ... the rest still belongs to the night. They too will all have to die someday. How will they go about it?” (p 408)

Trigger warnings should include a negative attitude towards black people with the occasional use of racial slurs including the n-word  although on the whole this is in the context of his damning descriptions of French colonial Africa. Celine developed far-right political views and wrote anti-Semitic polemic in occupied France during world war two.

Selected quotes:

• He has some stunningly original descriptions:
• “His face like a rotten peach.” (p 23)
• “When he walked, it was with nervous, pigeon-toed steps, as though walking on eggs. Seeing him in his enormous greatcoat, stooped over in the rain, you'd have taken him for the phantom hindquarters of a racehorse.” (p 27)
• “Outside the kiosk the soda-water lady seemed to be slowly gathering the evening shadows around her skirt.” (p 48)
• “The rickety dribbling children with nosefuls of fingers.” (p 80)
• “People moved flabbily about like squid in a tank of tepid, smelly water.” (p 94)
• “An old man crumpling under the enormous weight of the sun.” (p 117)
• He doesn't like the countryside!
• “One thing I'd better tell you right away, I've never been able to stomach the country, I've always found it dreary, those endless fields of mud, those houses where nobody's ever home, those roads that don't go anywhere.” (p 11)  
• “Nature is a frightening thing, and even when it’s solidly domesticated as in the Bois, it gives real city dwellers an eerie anxious feeling.” (p 46)
• Other quotes:
• “You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex.” (p 12)
• “That blackness ... was so dense you had the impression that if you stretched out your arm a little way from your shoulder you’d never see it again.” (p 20)
• “In this business of getting killed, it's no use being picky and choosy; you've got to act as if life was going on, and that lie is the hardest part of it.” (p 29)
• “Anybody who talks about the future is a bastard, it's the present that counts. Invoking posterity is like making speeches to worms.” (p 29
• “In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavour, it's indispensable.” (p 52)
• “We have got into the habit of admitting colossal bandits, whose opulence is revered by the entire world, yet whose existence, once we stop to examine it, proves to be one long crime repeated ad infinitum, but those same bandits are heaped with glory, honours and power, their crime are hallowed by the law of the land, whereas, as far back in history as the eye can see ... everything conspires to show that a venial theft, especially of inglorious food stuffs, such as bread crusts, ham or cheese, unfailingly subjects its perpetrator to irreparable opprobrium, the categorical condemnation of the community, major punishment, automatic dishonour and inexpiable shame, and this for two reasons, first because the perpetrator of such an offence is usually poor, which in itself connotes basic unworthiness, and secondly because his act implies, as it were, a tacit reproach to the community.” (p 56)
• “There were several young ladies from the entertainment world - actresses and musicians - who came with more debts than clothes.” (p 64)
• “She had no doubt that poor people like her were born to suffer in every way, that that was their role on earth.” (p 80)
• “That tropical steam bath called forth instincts as August breeds toads and snakes on the fissured walls of prisons. In the European cold, under grey, puritanical northern skies, we seldom get to see our brothers’ festering cruelty except in times of carnage, but when roused by the foul fevers of the tropics, their rottenness rises to the surface.” (p 94)
• “When you stop to think about it, at least a hundred people must want to dead in the course of an average day, the ones in line behind you at the ticket window in the Metro, the ones who look up at your apartment when they haven't got one themselves, the ones who wish you'd finish pissing and give them a chance, your children and a lot more.” (p 97)
• “Fear is probably, more often than not, the best means of getting you out of a tight spot.” (p 101)
• “Men have a hard time doing all that’s demanded of them: butterflies in their youth, maggots at the end.” (p 122)
• “In Topo the raw, stifling heat, so perfectly concentrated in that sandpit between the combined polished mirrors of the sea and the river, would have made you swear by your bleeding buttocks that you are being forced to sit on a chunk of sun there's a just fallen off.” (p 126)
• “The war had burnt some and warmed others, same as fire tortures you or comforts you, depending on whether you're in it or in front of it. you've got to work the angles, that's all.” (p 179)
• “Medicine is a thankless profession. When you get paid by the rich, you feel like a flunkey; by the poor, like a thief.” (p 217)
• “The prevailing smell by far is cauliflower. A cauliflower can beat ten toilets, even if they're overflowing.” (p 220)
• “Well, anyway, all those sons of bitches had turned into angels without my noticing! Whole clouds full of angels, including some very far-out and disreputable ones, all over the place.” (p 298)
• “‘You're a bourgeois!’ I told him finally (at that time I could think of no worse insult).” (p 319)
• “He looked as if he were trying to help us live. As if he had been trying to find us pleasures to go on living for. He held us by the hands. One hand each. I kissed him. That's all you can do in a case like that without going wrong. We waited. He didn't say anything more after that. A little later, maybe an hour, the haemorrhage came, internal and profuse. It carried him off.” (p 403) Even the death bed scenes are different.

A fascinating and original book. July 2024; 405 pages

Other works by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

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

"The Inheritors" by Nadeem Zaman

 

The Great Gatsby, relocated from 1920s New York to the bustling capital of Bangladesh in the 2010s.

But it's more than that. The Inheritors is a beautifully written critique of the gulf between the partying rich and the toiling poor; it explores the shallow relationships among the rich not-so-young things and the deeper but sometimes exploitative relationships between the wealthy and those who work for them. There are genuinely three-dimensional characters and a nice touch of mystery as Nisar the outsider tried to make sense of a world he didn't fully understand.

The Plot:

Nisar, the narrator, travels to Dhaka, which he left as a thirteen year old, thirty years earlier, to sell his father's properties. His next-door neighbour, Junaid, who holds lavish parties every Saturday night in an otherwise empty apartment block, is still in love with Nisar's cousin Disha even though their previous marriage ended; she is presently with Tarek. Bit by bit, Nisar discovers more about Dhaka and Junaid. As these rich young(ish) Bengalis live an opulent life-style, their various relationships fracture and reform until tragedy strikes.

The parallels:

The parallels with The Great Gatsby are clear and start with the characters' names, whose initial letters are identical:

• Narrator Nick Carraway becomes narrator Nisar Chowdhury. Nick comes from the midwestern US; so does Nisar. Nick gives a potted account of his ancestry: “The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch...” (TGG Ch 1) Nisar gives himself a rather more explicit ancestry, including his mother’s side, but it starts: “The Chowdhurys were of Yemeni Arab stock. They travelled to Bengal in around the 14th century and never looked back” (Ch 1) A difference is that Nick in TGG has his thirtieth birthday while Nisar is "flirting with my forties" (Ch 1) Another is that there is no suggestion that Nisar has gay sex.
• Protagonist Jay Gatsby becomes protagonist Junaid Gazi. Fitzgerald’s introduction to Gatsby is: “There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’” (Ch 1) Zaman’s introduction to Gazi is: “He existed in a kind of beauty that was undeniable. He exemplified the mysterious coexistence of opposing forces in one single being. He was as attuned to the universe as much as to his world, like an all-purpose machine, and picked up on the changes that took place miles ahead of others. His state of mind or any grand ability to tackle life with any special creative force towards the creative had nothing to do with it.” (Ch 1) Like Gatsby, the enormously rich Gazi lives next door to the narrator in a huge building empty except for the servants and himself. Like Gatsby, Gazi throws extravagant parties which he himself scarcely participates in. Like Gatsby, Gazi is in love with the narrator's cousin. Gatsby calls Nick 'old sport', Gazi calls Nisar 'boss'. Their ends are similar. Near the end of the book, Nick meets Gatsby's father, so Nisar meets Gazi's dad.  
• Daisy is Nick's second cousin, once removed; Disha is Nisar’s first cousin. Daisy had a romantic relationship with Gatsby and is now the wife of Tom Buchanan. Disha was married to Gazi but is now in a relationship with Tarek Bashir. 
• Antagonist Tom Buchanan, Daisy's husband, is a millionaire; he has a mistress. Tarek Bashir is still married but presently in a relationship with Disha. He is "running around with Maisha" (Ch 14)
• Jordan Baker is Nick Carraway's girlfriend for most of TGG though they grow apart towards the end. Nisar has a platonic relationship with Jasmine until nearly the end of TI.
• George Wilson is a garage owner.  Gowhar Wasim's family owns car dealerships.
• Myrtle Wilson is George's wife. She is Tom Buchanan's mistress. Gowhar's wife is Maisha Wasim. She is in some sort of relationship with Tarek.

There are other parallels. For example, in TGG, there is a billboard on a highway that runs through a desert of ashy wastelands that represent industrial America. On the billboard is an advertisement for an oculist which consists of a monstrous pair of eyes overlooking the desolation; the symbolism of the all-seeing eye of God (and perhaps a reference to the eye atop the pyramid on the dollar bill) is blatant. In TI, the character Gowhar is obsessed by the idea that the stars in the night sky are God's Eyes. Nisat says: “God's Eyes. I had a literal image of eyes wearing horn-rimmed spectacles staring down from the sky. A billboard along an American highway portending the end of days while those eyes watched and judged.” (Ch 18) Another visual image is that Gazi bought his apartment block because from its roof he can see where Disha lives; Gatsby bought his house because he can see, across the Sound, a green light on the jetty at the end of Daisy's lawn.

The famous last line of TGG is "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."; the last line of TI is “The past beats on, louder sometimes than the present, clearer than any visions of the future.” (Ch 28)

But there are differences. For example, Nisar has problems with a lawyer, Ehsan Kibria, who seems to have swindled his family. Both this solicitor and Meyer Wolfsheim (a friend of Gatsby's) have been involved in betting scandals; otherwise this plot line seems distinct.

I have no issues with a modern novelist mining and reforming an old source like this; Barbara Kingsolver did the same in Demon Copperhead. The only problem that I had, as with DC, was that once I had noticed the similarities, I started paying more attention to the parallels and less attention to the modern text; I was distracted from properly enjoying The Inheritors. Because this novel had a lot of great things going for it. The sense of placed was superb. The character of the narrator Nisar was much stronger than the original, Nick (a feature it shared with Demon Copperhead). There was a much stronger sense that the rich hedonists were parasites upon the poor. But the ending seemed a little rushed and, because of the parallels, it was highly predictable, even though Zaman tweaked it slightly.

Summary:

It was a fascinating glimpse into high society in Bangladesh and an entertaining story with some great characters.

Selected quotes:

• “Flirting with my forties, I'd reached a sort of morally stringent stance about the world. It had to stand upright, it had to pay unflinching heed to what was wrong, and I couldn't be bothered to understand its wayward, unruly ways, or care about the nuanced tendencies of human nature.” (Ch 1)
• “If bosses were that good there'd be no need for God.” (Ch 7)
• “His face was sunken into his cheeks, and half-moons of ashen blue hung under his eyes.” (Ch 8)
• “Dhaka isn't an easy place.” (Ch 12)
• “Old times are just that and no more. They're no longer the living, breathing present, they’re dead, not to be revived.” (Ch 14)
• “Disha and Gazi sucked the oxygen of ten people, and they didn't need to be present to do it.” (Ch 16)
• “If there’s a hell, it's right here - we’re standing in it. Heaven is the way out of it.” (Ch 18)
• “But there was no discomfort, no awkwardness, and we sat together as two people with a long and complex history, of many cycles of ups and downs, back once more to equilibrium.” (Ch 22)
• “Home isn't just one thing. it isn't a country, a city or a place of dwelling. Home is a going away, contained in loss, obscured by the brushstrokes of memory.” (Ch 28)

July 2024; 249 pages

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

"The Bone Clocks" by David Mitchell

In this typical David Mitchell, the forces of good and evil fight a supernatural battle which impinges repeatedly on the life of an Englishwoman. 

It is divided into six parts in each of which the protagonist, Holly Sykes appears. 

• Narrated by Holly, A Hot Spell is set in northern Kent in 1984. The teenage Holly runs away from home,  has strange visions and encounters savage murder.
• Narrated by Hugo Lamb, Myrrh is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume is set around Christmas 1991. Hugo meets a weird woman, exploits his friends and lovers, commits theft and goes on a skiing holiday.
• The Wedding Bash is set on the south coast of England in 2004. Ed, Holly's partner, has to choose between caring for his daughter and returning to war-torn Iraq where he is a journalist. 
• Narrated by Crispin himself, Crispin Hershey's Lonely Planet is the once-best-selling author's a five-year Odyssey around the world from 2015 until 2020.
• An Horologist's Labyrinth set in 2025 is when the fantasy element of the book is given full throttle with a war between different types of immortals. It is narrated by one of them.
• Holly as an old woman returns to narrates Sheep's Head, set on the coast of Ireland in 2043 after the social order has broken down in Europe.

David Mitchell's strength is writing wonderful characters. Holly Sykes is first encounter as a delightfully stroppy teenager running away from home after a bust-up with her mum but she is just as real as a grandmother. Hugo Lamb is cultured and charismatic but amoral almost to the point of psychopathy; he reminded me of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis. Ed Brubeck is addicted to danger. Crispin Hershey is a glorious creation: a spiteful, disillusioned, frequently drunken novelist sliding down the best-seller charts. Each of these is as real as the person you are standing next to.

I'm not a fan of fantasy. The 'Horologist's Labyrinth' was my least favourite part of the book. It reminded me of watching a horror film which is excruciatingly tense up until the moment that you see the monster, at which point you realise that it is an actor dressed up and the spell is broken. 

But the real-world parts of this novel were magnificent. Following Holly's journey from Gravesend to the Isle of Sheppey was as real as anything I have read for a long time; not only was I thoroughly immersed in the story, and convinced of Holly's reality, but I could see the jeopardy she was in at every step of the way. It needed no supernatural element. It was as tense as anything. And it was followed by Hugo Lamb, the most charming and debonair outright villain I have encountered for ages. As for Crispin: he was superbly Rabelaisian. Add these characters to superb writing (just look at the selected quotes below!) and you have another Mitchell masterpiece.

Longlisted for the 2014 Booker, it's just as good as the 2004 Booker shortlisted Cloud Atlas and nearly as good as the superb Utopia Avenue. 

Selected Quotes:

• “Mam was right. I loved Vinny like he was a part of me, and he loved me like a stick of gum. He’d spat me out when the flavour went, unwrapped another and stuffed it in.” (A Hot Spell, 30th June)
• “The wind unravels clouds from the chimneys of the Blue Circle factory, like streams of hankies out of a conjuror’s pocket.” (A Hot Spell, 30th June)
• “I drink until the sun's a pale glow through the thin bottom of the plastic.” (A Hot Spell, 30th June)
• “The sea-breeze and bike-breeze slip up my sleeves and stroke my front like a pervy Mr Tickle.” (A Hot Spell, 30th June)
• “Love’s pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at lone-shark prices.” (A Hot Spell, 1st July)
• “It's a black sea, utterly black-black, like darkness in a box in a cave a mile underground.” ((A Hot Spell, 1st July)
• “His pupils have morphed into lovehearts and, for the nth time squared I wonder what loves feels like on the inside because externally it turns you into the King of Tit Mountain.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 13th December)
• “I rescue the condom before its gluey viscera stains her purple sheets, and wrap it in a tissue shroud. Coupling is frenzy: decoupling is farce.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 20th December)
• “He sighs through hairy nostrils.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 23rd December)
• “A terminally ill bus hauls itself up Charing Cross Road.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 23rd December)
• “Penhaligon hears his future, and it sounds like a bottle-bank heaved off the roof of a multi-story car park.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 13th December)
• “Human beings ... are walking bundles of cravings. cravings for food, water, shelter, warmth; sex and companionship; status, a tribe to belong to; kicks, control, purpose; and so on, all the way down to chocolate-brown bathroom suites. Love is one way to satisfy some of these cravings. But love’s not just the drug: it's also the dealer. Love wants love in return ... Like drugs, the highs look divine, and I envy the users. But when the side effects kick in - jealousy, the rages, grief - I think, Count me out. Elizabethans equated romantic love with insanity. Buddhists view it as a brat throwing a tantrum at the picnic of the calm mind.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 29th December)
• “I emerge from the cubicle like the Son of God rolling away the stone.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 31st December)
• “Empires die, like all of us dance in the strobe lit. See how the light needs shadows. Look: wrinkles spread like mildew over our peachy sheen; beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat, varicose veins worm through plucked calves; torsos and breasts fatten and sag.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 31st December)
• “While the wealthy are no more likely to be born stupid than the poor, a wealthy upbringing compounds stupidity while a hard-scrabble childhood dilutes it, if only for Darwinian reasons. This is why the elite need a prophylactic barrier of shitty state schools.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, New Year’s Day 1992)
• “I left my old accommodation a la Spiderman. And landed a la sack-of-Spudsman. My scout pack did the Leaping from Buildings to Escape Violent Pimps badge the week I was away.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, New Year’s Day 1992)
• “Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. love is greedier.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, New Year’s Day 1992)
• “Half of me wants to hit you with something metal ... So does the other half.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, New Year’s Day 1992)
• “The Great Envoy couldn't cook his own testes in a Jacuzzi of lava.” (The Wedding Bash, 17th April)
• “To dub Echo Must Die ‘infantile, flatulent, ghastly drivel’ would be an insult to infants, to flatulence, and to ghasts alike.” (Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, 1st May 2015)
• “Men marry women hoping they'll never change. Women marry men hoping they will. Both parties are disappointed.” (Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, 11th March 2016)
• “As the Arabic proverb has it, not even God can change the past.” (Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, 14 March 2016)
• “Whither humanity sans youth? Whither language sans neologisms?” (Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, 14th March 2016)
• “A torch-through-a-sheet sun.” (Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, 20th September 2019
• “ A poet inhabits a poetic tradition to write within, but no poet can singlehandedly create that tradition. Even if a poet sets out to invent a new poetics, he or she can only react against what's already there.” (Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, 23rd September 2019)
• “Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well ... and beware of the verb ‘seem’: it's a textual mumble. And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below ... if you can't decide ... it's only a three.” (Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, 23rd September 2019)
• “Your characters potted life histories. Whom or what your characters love and despise. Details on education, employment, finances, political affiliations, social class. fears. Skeletons in cupboards. Addictions. Biggest regret; believer, agnostic or atheist. How afraid of dying are they? ... Have they ever seen a corpse? A ghost? Sexuality. Glass half empty, glass half full, glass too small? Snazzy or scruffy dressers? .... Foul mouthed or profanity averse? ... When did they last cry? can they see another person's point of view?” (Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, 23rd September 2019)
• “ Heresy is fissiparous.” (An Horologist’s Labyrinth, 5th April)
• “Titles, titles, they drag behind one like Marley's chains, Jacob’s not Bob’s.” (An Horologist’s Labyrinth, 7th April)
• “If you could reason with religious people there wouldn't be any religious people.” (Sheep’s Head, 27th October)
• “She could think of three laws of physics that Marinus had apparently broken but, given time, she was confident of coming up with a few more.” (Sheep’s Head, 27th October)
• “For one voyage to begin, another voyage must come to an end, sort of.” (Sheep’s Head, 27th October; final sentence)

Wonderful! July 2024; 613 pages

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

"A Pearl Amongst Oysters" by John Silverton

Married Chris encounters Fong from Hong Kong in a Chinese restaurant in Grimsby. Can true love overcome the obstacles to their relationship?

The novel is written in the first-person and past tense from the perspective of Chris. The plot adopts a classic four part structure with major turning points at the quarter, half and three-quarters marks. There’s plenty of incident and the pace is kept up right to the end; I certainly didn’t guess the final twist.

There were moments when the narrative flow was interrupted for one of the characters to impart some nuggets of background research, for example on the history of Chinese food in Britain and on graphology. Research can add verisimilitude to a fiction but it can also undermine a character when they take time out from the story to discourse on the history of chopsticks like a professor in a lecture hall.

My fundamental problem was with the protagonist. I found him obnoxious. He is determinedly misogynistic. He seems to see women purely in terms of whether they are physically beautiful or not. They are either Aphrodite or an ogress. He is horrible about women who get in his way. Cynthia is described as "the once handsome woman withering on the vine of life ... [with] the frigidly anaphrodisiac effect of a sexless maiden aunt." (Ch 15) who is "maliciously creating mischief because she thinks we are responsible for Robert's suicide" (Ch 16) Cynthia has just lost her husband. Chris’s wife is a "hysterical vixen" (Ch 17); Chris manages to sound peeved when “conjugal services of ironing and laundering and some meals were curtailed.” She has just discovered he is committing adultery.

Even the woman he professes to love is considered almost purely in physical terms. His first impression of Fong is her “thrilling mouth with lips enticingly proud asking to be kissed ... the landscape of her blouse” (Ch 1). When he hears of her marriage, is he sympathetic to the compromises she has been forced into? No. He has visions of “this randy taxi driver prising Fong open night on night, fucking her every which way, cackling with lust as he mauls and defiles her body beautiful.” (Ch 23) When he imagines her growing old the description is again primarily in physical terms (“all images too ghastly to be willingly conceived”; Ch 27) and only afterwards does he talk, briefly, in a single sentence, about her personality.

It is really difficult to believe Chris when he professes to love Fong, given that he deceives her repeatedly in the first half of the book. All he wants is sex. He repeatedly reminisces about his pre-marital lovers. He has sex at every opportunity, even after a cremation and again before the burial of (different) ashes.

He’s never sorry, except for himself. Nothing is ever his fault. He excuses his adultery: "I was lonely ... Most of the men I know have had affairs ... I've been faithful for six years of marriage. After the previous decade acting a Lothario I'm deserving some sort of credit ... Monogamy is an artefact of religious doctrine and cultural conditioning." (Ch 17) Both in his inner mind and in dialogue he blames his wife.

His shallowness extends to his career: “I admit to not being a natural salesman ... I was seduced by the regalia of swish suits and current model company cars and the prospect of a better life.” (Ch 1) 

It's not that I mind that the protagonist is misogynistic and unlikeable. I've used unpleasant anti-heroes myself, even as narrators. The problem comes with his superficiality. Because it is difficult to build a three-dimensional character if all the reader is told is the surface. It's possible. I think that Ivy Compton-Burnett achieves this in Parents and Children, using little more than (very formal) dialogue but she uses a third-person perspective. Having a non-empathetic narrator means, I think, that the only character who can take on solidity is the narrator themselves. And in this novel, while Chris does take on a life as a character, as you can see from my rant above, the others, even Fong, appear to be puppets. They didn’t feel real.

This is a shame because there were a lot of good things about this book, such as the incident-stuffed plot and the pacing. It’s entertaining. The settings are well-described and, as the selected quotes show, the author has a way with words. But the flimsiness of the characters made it hard for me to care what happened in the second half of the book.

Selected quotes:

• "Stooped raincoats with upturned collars and downturned heads scurried past, candidates to model for the last Lowry painting." (Ch 1)
• "A half-mug of cocoa had died waiting to be drunk, the thick skin its body bag." (Ch 2)
• "I rocked from foot to foot as if waiting for a bus on a cold day" (Ch 5): the protagonist's attempt to dance a waltz.
• "Motes from the bedding surfed on the sunrays streaming across the room." (Ch 6)
• "Her head was drooped like the bloom of a rain burdened flower." (Ch 16)

July 2024; 266 pages

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