Richard Flanagan – First Person

Tags

Book Review, First Person, Richard Flanagan

Supping, or ghost writing, with the devil …..

I love Richard Flanagan’s writing, and the compassion which is evident in the writer, from his ability to see the redeemable in the flawed, and the flaws in the heroic. Flanagan’s characters never fit easily into a perceived stereotype, even when we think they might. This writer is one at home in nuance

Although I will admit that the extraordinary height and depth of Narrow Road to the Deep North is not reached in First Person – and, in some ways, such a very lacerating exploration into what it might be to inhabit the best and worst aspects of humanity – might not be a journey which could be made again by a writer. In a way, I suspect it might be necessary to swim in shallower (though perfectly interesting) waters for a while.

Not that First Person is in any way, superficial, but it is certainly games-y, the writer writing about writing, being savage and mocking and funny about the whole ‘business’ of writing, publishing and its commodity status. And Flanagan plays with the reader too, making us wonder just what is autobiographical here, how much is Flanagan his central character Kif Kehlmann? It is the early 90’s Kif is an aspiring literary fiction writer in his twenties from Tasmania, who, having difficulties getting published, and with an impending family to feed, accepts with misgivings something which feels like a betrayal of his Art – to ghost-write the memoirs of a criminal. Siegfried, ‘Ziggy’ Heidl is a high end corporate fraudster, and his memoirs, in these days of success often belonging to the tawdriest and loudest figures, will be gold-dust.

Flanagan, as he has made clear, is to a certain extent, mining his own past. In the early 90s, Flanagan, a Tasmanian, an aspiring writer in his 20’s, finding it difficult to get published, ghost wrote the memoirs of a corporate fraudster, John Friedrich. And some further parallels to Friedrich are mirrored in some of Heidl’s story, as I discovered, doing a bit of research after I had finished this book

Still from movie Thalaiva

Ziggy is a complex, dangerous, controlling man and Kif is very quickly out of his depth. Ziggy is a somewhat charismatic figure, in a frightening way. He has hidden depths of thought and perception in some ways, whilst having completely unhidden, bombastic, narcissistic, mendacious shallows in many others.

Caught between the devil of the publisher and his advance, the need for the ghost written book to be published yesterday, whilst the story, Heidl, and potential sales are hot, the deep blue sea is Ziggy himself . Struggling to do proper journalistic investigation to flesh out a rather evading, evasive story and the turgid detail of Ziggy’s memoirs which Kif is being hired to polish, Kif is progressively getting drawn into something quite dark. If you like, biographical detection work is going on, and cans of disgustingly wriggling worms will pour forth.

And, for Kif, he is going to be irretrievably changed by this encounter, with this having knock on effects in his personal, family life, and with a significant childhood friend who has been the means of getting Kif involved in the Heidl project in the first place. Past, present and future will all get cracked.

The structure of the book is not linear (it often isn’t these days!)

An older Kif, now working in reality TV (another kind of manufactured lie) looks back on the young Kif, making a Faustian pact, accepting the business deal to ghost write these memoirs, rather than ‘literature’. Difficult to tell whether Mephistopheles, in Kif’s case, is evasive trickster Ziggy, or the publishing house hiring him on the cheap to ghost write. A publishing house whose supremo :

was frightened of literature. And not without good reason. For one thing, it doesn’t sell. For another, it can fairly be said that it asks questions that it can’t answer. It astonishes people with themselves, which, on balance, is rarely a good thing. It reminds them that the business of life is failure, and that the failure to know this is true ignorance

The book does contain challenges for itself – Kif is possibly not a very good writer (though Flanagan is!) So, writing not very good writing (there are excerpts where Kif is trying to hone his manuscript) is inevitably a bit of a tightrope.

This is a book which has certainly divided readers – both professional reviewers and us happy readers and reviewers for pleasure.

It is certainly one I’m recommending, but do find myself in a slightly curious position of being not sure, amongst my bookie friends, of knowing who will love it and who will be utterly bemused by my recommendation of it

Look inside, browse, take a punt.

It is a very different book indeed from ‘Narrow Road’ and that in part is my appreciation of it – Flanagan doesn’t rest on his own laurels, but is a writer who explores other paths – he is not a ‘play-it-safe’ writer, even with his own strengths and success

Now, I am never sure how useful it is to know anything about an author’s own nature, but I must reveal that what first drew me to read Flanagan at all (Narrow Road) was hearing an interview with him on Radio 4. What i picked up was : here was someone who was not sucked into media hype – or even into any media hype about himself, with having been nominated, and then winning, the Booker with that book. This was not a man who answered glibly, rather, revealingly, thoughtfully, spaciously. I liked his stillness, presence, and felt that he listened to the interviewer, listened to how he understood the question, and tried to answer from an honest place. That was what drew me to read Narrow Road, as much as its nomination and subject matter. And I found what I detected in the man, in the writing.

Late last year, having just read, and still in the process of digesting, First Person, I accepted an invite from BBC World Service Book Club, to attend a broadcast interview with Flanagan, where Booker winning book would be discussed with him, and questions taken from around the world. And I was even more impressed by what I experienced as an authenticity in this writer. And his ability to be talking about wider, deeper matters than what he is directly talking about. I was scribbling frantically, interesting things said, which have given further reflection – quotes below are not from the book, but from that interview and Q + A. I felt I had been present at something quite unusual. It was the first such World Service Book Club event I’d attended, but, talking afterwards to some people who regularly attend, that feeling I had was verified by others

“It is the job of the novelist to describe. It is the job of the reader to judge”

“It is the job of the novelist to journey into the soul”

“Memory is an act of listening and creation”

He said that he was against the idea that literature can ennoble or save us, but that  it (literature) is OF life – chaotic, mysterious, and not separate from life

He referenced Nietzsche, who said hope was the cruellest emotion, to which Flanagan’s response was “without hope we are nothing….the highest expression of hope is love”

“(A) work of art – their great strength is close to their great weakness”

“If we take our compass from power, we will find only despair – if we take our compass from those around us we will find hope”

Of course, these were all reflections arising out of discussion and Q + A about Narrow Road, but I took away a lot of sustaining stuff to mentally and emotionally chew on

There was one point where I disagreed profoundly, bur did not leap in to interject something I wanted to continue to mull over – that idea that literature cannot ennoble or save us – personally, I think that it is BECAUSE good literature is prepared to be chaotic, mysterious – like life itself is, and therefore, sometimes deeply uncomfortable – that it can take us to places where we refuse to go, and make us inhabit chaos and mystery, that is, inhabit life itself, the life of others, the life of other, in ways we sometimes do not want to. It is in our living that we sometimes try to separate from what life is – reducing to the easy soundbite, the pat response. Literature, art itself says, “Listen, Look, and makes us WAKE UP!” And waking up, surely is what may save us?

I received this as a digital review copy from the publishers, via NetGalley

First Person UK
First Person USA

Advertisement

Kamila Shamsie – Home Fire

Tags

Book Review, Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie

And if you have no place within you to call home……….

Kamila Shamsie’s thoughtful, immersive, disturbing book starts with an emotional punch, and does not let up

Isma is a British Muslim. She is on her way to take up an academic post in Massachusetts. And is stuck in interrogation at the airport :

Isma was going to miss her flight. The ticket wouldn’t be refunded because the airline took no responsibility for passengers who arrived at the airport three hours ahead of the departure time and were escorted to an interrogation room……She’d made sure not to pack anything that would invite comment or questions – no Quran, no family pictures, no books on her areas of academic interest…The interrogation continued for nearly two hours. He wanted to know her thoughts on Shias, homosexuals, the Queen, democracy, the Great British Bake Off, the invasion of Iraq, Israel, suicide bombers, dating websites

Shamsie immediately drops the reader into the experience of being regarded with suspicion, because of ethnicity

Home Fire is on one level just a very human story about a family, and a love story. Older sister Isma takes up her academic position in the States. She meets a vibrant, interesting fellow academic whose path kind of crossed her family’s, back in her teens. Ayman has become Eamonn:

so that people would know the father had integrated…his Irish-American wife was seen as another indicator of this integrationist posing rather than an explanation for the son’s name.

Isma and Ayman/Eamonn become friends, though Isma finds herself harbouring deeper feelings for the man whose affection for her is merely brotherly.

Isma is the plainer, studious eldest sister, who has become surrogate mother to her younger siblings, twins Aneeka, fiery, creative, beautiful, and her less sure, less confident brother Parvaiz.

Circumstances will bring Aneeka and Ayman together, initially without Isma’s knowledge, and a story of the love, jealousy and heartache will play out.

But this is far more than a kind of fairy story of the prettier youngest sister. There are deceptions, deliberate obfuscations and a distinct sense of always living with the potential of menace and misunderstanding because of the real history and the perceived history of race and religion

Parvaiz has vanished, and is not spoken about. He is a family secret, and what has happened to him is on one level obvious.

Isma’s family has a past regarded as suspect. Eamonn/Ayman’s family has integrated so well that his father became an MP. But at the end of the day, integrated or not, ‘identity’ will be recognised by appearance.

This is a hugely uncomfortable (in the very best way) read. It made me feel long and hard about identity. Many of us trace our complex history back with pride, discovering perhaps a history of different European immigrations across the centuries. But where geography is written in skin colour, assumptions, not our own, will be made about who we are.

I shall certainly read more of Shamsie. On this showing, she enters into the psyches of a range of characters, and, whatever the positions, we do get presented with the human complexity within

Antigone – Theatrical Poster

One of the strands within this book is a working of the story of Antigone, whose dead brother is denied burial, on the grounds of being seen as a traitor. To be honest, as someone drawn to Greek myth and history, it was one of the reasons I requested this title, but the connections are there if you wish to acknowledge them, but do not in any way reduce the power of the book’s effect upon the reader if you don’t. All it really shows is that these ancient myths and histories have their uneasy power to move us because we seem to repeat our history, with different names, but, effectively unchanging motifs, across the millenia

I received this as an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley

Home Fire Amazon UK
Home Fire Amazon USA

John Boyne – The Heart’s Invisible Furies

Tags

Book Review, Irish writer, John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

Warm hearted narrative: a 70 year span of changing attitudes towards sexuality.

John Boyne’s beautifully titled ‘The Heart’s Invisible Furies’ reminds me not a little of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart/ The New Confessions. A central character, fictional, with some connections to the artistic world, is taken through a lifetime’s sweep of cultural and attitudinal shifts, often around personal relationships. The individual life story is set within the wider story playing out. Fictional characters within the book, who are artists of some kind, with a body of work, are nudged by comparison with real works, and ‘real named characters’ flit through on the sidelines as passing players. This gives a hook to make the reader feel they are reading ‘reality’ rather than the fiction they are actually reading, but the ethics of making ‘real’ characters do things they didn’t do, is not transgressed, as the ‘real people’ are left as minor, background, chorus.

There are a couple of important characters in this book, written about at length, both of whom are writers, and though I did know these were ‘fictional’ their work was described so well, and their history and psychology seemed so authentic and believable that I did have to Google their Wiki pages, and search for the titles of their works on Amazon, laughing at my foolishness whilst I did so.

The Heart’s Invisible Furies takes place primarily in Ireland, but also in the Netherlands and America, from 1945-2015. It follows the life of, and is narrated by, Cyril Avery, the adopted son of a rather unusual couple, the writer Maude Avery and the successful (but sometimes fraudulent) financier Charles Avery. Maude and Charles are both self-obsessed, eccentric and larger than life. They are not cruel parents, though they are rather indifferent and laissez-faire ones, absorbed in their own pursuits. Cyril, narrator of this story, begins his first person narrative at the age of 7, in 1952, a rather shy and lonely little boy. He has, from this early age, even without quite understanding its importance, had a kind of falling in love with a much more extrovert, defined and assured little boy, whom he briefly meets, the son of Charles Avery’s solicitor.

Friendships and loves, sometimes in the unlikeliest of guises, are going unfold across a lifetime, in a kind of tapestry of many colours and textures in this book : tragic, heart-breaking, joyous, accommodating, kind, bitter, reconciled, and at times amusing and surprising.

However……Cyril’s story starts before his birth, when he is still in his mother’s womb, and he does not learn this part of the story till he is in late middle age, when it is recounted to him. This is the story he tells us, in reflection, and it starts the book, with surely a most wonderfully hooking, seductive paragraph :

Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Munroe stood on the altar of The Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore

I was utterly hooked by the rhythms of that opening sentence and by the carefully exploded bombshells, and had to read on. Nor was I disappointed. Here is a writer, a story teller, who bowled me along for nearly 600 pages, and the journey itself, long as it was, did not seem so. It was a full, eventful one; a grand one

Pulling me back for complete 5 star surrender: very late in the day, Cyril turns out to be a dry and witty man, particularly in conversation, not something he had displayed much of earlier. This did feel, a little, as if the writer had felt the need to inject some wit, humour and banter in the dialogue as we neared the end of the journey.

If I’m being hypercritical, there are a lot of coincidences which drive encounters and plot along – though I must say Boyne manages them with wonderful charm. I think this is because the reader (but not the central character) is kept aware that there will be meetings and connections which will drift in and out until their final connections become clear to Cyril, in the patterns of his own story. The sense of it seemed to me like some courtly, formal dancing in sets – partners change but all will meet again as the dancers move around the circle, and down the line of sets. And like this kind of dancing, there is a joy in the lovely pattern of changes, repetitions, and the form itself.

This is a book the reader can happily lose themselves in. Lock the door, take the phone off the hook, ignore interruptions, they will only annoy

I was delighted to receive this from Amazon Vine UK

The Heart’s Invisible Furies Amazon UK
The Heart’s Invisible Furies Amazon USA

Philip Roth – American Pastoral

Tags

American Pastoral, American politics and society, Book Review, Novels about America, Philip Roth

Endlessly reflecting mirrors

Philip Roth’s Pulitzer prize-winning American Pastoral is beautifully written, deeply disturbing and at times offensively misogynistic. It is also bitter, angry, sharply incisive about the frailty and illusion of the American Dream – and, heart-breakingly tender about the ties that bind us, particularly the love of a parent for their child, however wayward, however lost.

And, as well as all this, it is a fascinating series of challenges about the nature of writing and the nature of the writer. Roth throws down the gauntlet from the start, asking us not to forget that one of the central characters is his continuing alter-ego , Nathan ‘Skip’ Zuckerman. The story we reading, presented by Zuckerman, into the life of Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov, Zuckerman’s childhood hero, is possibly Zuckerman’s invention. Certain events happen to Levov, but the reason they happened, the psychoanalytical unpicking of them, may be only the writer in the book (not to mention the writer of the book) shaping a chimera.

Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov, whose story Zuckerman tells, was a gifted athlete, an inheritor and emblem of the aspirational dream of America’s European immigrant community. Looking like a WASP, he is Jewish, his family, a generation or so back, by hard work, dedication and talent, rising in the Promised Land. Swede’s success at football, basketball and baseball, and his upright, hard-working personality have made him envied and adored, a kind of hero to others. One of whom is the slightly younger Zuckerman. Meeting again, in late middle age, it is now Zuckerman who has achieved fame, as a writer, and he is long past a time of adulating the seemingly much more simple character of a former sporting hero. Zuckerman in fact perceives the apparently settled straight as a die, unthinkingly patriotic, successful businessman, husband and father that Levov has become as a bit of a simp. The writer rather takes a position of intellectual, metropolitan, sophisticated arrogance. Though written in 1998, there are definite pointers and echoes here of the roots of our divided nation – both here and in the States, between the cultural intelligentsia and those who ‘seem’ as if they inhabit and engage with nuance less. Zuckerman indulges in various fantasies and theories, trying to worm behind the simple, satisfied persona Swede seems to represent. There are several writerly inventions Zuckerman engages in, each of which, again and again, proves wrong. Finally, Zuckerman, sophisticated in his cynicism, dismisses Levov

There’s nothing here but what you’re looking at. He’s all about being looked at……..He always was…..You’re craving depths that don’t exist……The guy is the embodiment of nothing

And then Zuckerman finds out how wrong, how very wrong he has been, and how he knew nothing of Swede, nothing of his life.

Swede had reached adulthood and maturity shortly before the end of the Second World War. Enlisting as a marine, trying to meet the manly, right, patriotic challenge of the war, he was still going through boot-camp training when the bomb was dropped at Hiroshima. He took his desire to serve his country into the post-war world. A model citizen, he worked hard, had a developed awareness of social responsibility, married his childhood sweetheart, Dawn, entered and successfully ran the family glove-making business, and fathered a beloved daughter.  Meredith, the daughter, was a teenager in the 60’s, at the time of the Civil Rights movement and resistance to Vietnam, and she became intensely radicalised, revolutionary.  Merry, the apple of Swede’s eye, committed a shocking and violent act whilst still at high school, and then went on the run, hunted as a terrorist. Swede’s family, marriage, business and life suddenly shattered.

Belatedly discovering these events, Zuckerman then weaves this into story. He creates a narrative of motive, a narrative to ‘explain’ how this normal family, and privileged, loved child could have so violently changed. However……because of the constant reminders earlier in the book that narrator Zuckerman was inventing stories and sub stories which were wrong, Roth is reminding us that this too is narrative, story, invention. We know certain facts happened, but the interpretation of why Swede, Merry and Dawn got to where they did, may not be right. Zuckerman ‘blames’ a childhood event for Merry going to the bad – but the event is Zuckerman’s imagined narrative, and may never have happened.

     Patty Hearst kidnapping/Symbionese Liberation Army – a kind of sign of those times

Going forward, to after Merry has gone underground, is a deeply disturbing, highly misogynistic section in the second part of the book, with the introduction of a young Jewish woman who may have been responsible for Merry’s violent radicalisation. This is a section distasteful to read, and highly unsettling – are we being shown an unconscious misogyny, particularly towards Jewish women, which comes from Roth himself, through his alter ego as Zuckerman – or is the author placing himself firmly and consciously on a slab, for the reader to dissect Roth himself?

And then, at the point where the reader might think they have been able to negatively ‘get’ Roth himself, as the creator of all this, comes a section, where, after many years of searching for his vanished daughter in hiding from the law, Swede finds her, living in utter degradation, weirdly, most weirdly, transformed. This is a section of utter heartbreak, riven tenderness and almost unbearably painful humanity. Roth took my breath away in this raw exposure of all our suffering, poor, magnificent, broken complex humanity. Like Zuckerman with Swede, we get it wrong with each other, again and again.

American Pastoral rightly won its Pulitzer prize. It is not in any way an easy book; it is a greatly, painfully challenging one – by turns horrible, horrific, stony, violent, hating and hateful – and full of compassion and suffering. Published in 1997, looking back over a roughly 50 year sweep, it is far from dated, and seems horribly pertinent today.

I shall for sure, read more of Roth’s later work, though I am still, months after finishing this one, processing it.

Radical Group of the times, The Weathermen, took their name from a line from this Dylan song as featured in the film Don’t Look Back

Finally I have been a long, a very long time coming to this one. FictionFan strongly, strongly endorsed this, in her GAN quest, indeed naming it as The Great American Novel. I bought it, and there it sat on my bedside table for a couple of years. I think I had been too riven by other GANs to be able to handle further deeply uncomfortable, brilliant GANnish journeys. I got to it via a small subsection of my book group, who have embarked on some challenging American titles, and a slow, sectional read of them. This was my choice. Lacerating, and amazing, all together as FictionFan suggested, You can read her review

American Pastoral Amazon UK
American Pastoral Amazon USA

Amanda Craig – The Lie of the Land

Tags

Amanda Craig, Book Review, The Lie of the Land

Something nasty in the woodshed………

I have long been an admirer of Amanda Craig’s writing. It has been a long time waiting between her last novel, Hearts and Minds (2010) and this one, The Lie of The Land. Illness, not writer’s block was the culprit.

This book, like the previous, is both literary and contemporary fiction: Craig uses the novel form to examine, indeed, the lie of the land – political, social, marital, plus the deliberate double meaning of the title, dealing, as it does, with a metropolitan family, supposedly one of the ‘haves’, in the middle of marital break-up who move out of London to the West Country. Lottie, an architect, and Quentin, a journalist, both recently redundant, are forced into putting their home up to rent, to generate income, and downsize to a cheap, mysteriously rock bottom priced rented property in Devon, till the property market recovers enough to sell their very des res London home.

Like all her books, this can be read as a stand alone, but dedicated Craig readers will as ever be pleased to discover that some of her characters pass through more than one book.

Craig is a writer who deals with serious, complex issues, but has a light touch, an incisive, crafted intelligence and wit in her use of language. Hence : this lovely contrast between how Lottie sees herself and her chosen profession, compared to Quentin, and his :

Waking with fortitude, living with compromise and sleeping with stress is normal for an architect in Britain….waking with optimism, living with laxity and sleeping without self-reproach is normal for a journalist

Craig is always a writer with intelligence and wit – and also with warmth and compassion.

Although we certainly have more sympathy with Lottie than with Quentin (who has, not to put too fine a point on it, been dipping his wick) challenges inevitably come to marriages with the arrival of children, and some of the difficulties between the two stem from how parenting changes the relationship between lovers. Trapped in a terrible place in their relationship, Quentin, Lottie and their family must struggle to find a new, and very different community in the country. There is suspicion, misunderstanding but also connections between locals and the incomers. Lottie throws herself more into making good connections than Quentin.

           Paddington Station, Gateway to the West Country

Wrapped up in a very topical narrative of unease, especially politically, between cosmopolitan cities and more insular, but also, perhaps, more rooted in longer lasting communities, country-dwellers, is also a subplot crime thriller, which begins to come more prominently to the fore, with devastating effect.

To be honest, the dramatic denouement of this (it is probably going to be obvious who the villains of the piece are going to be) was the weakest aspect, for me, and I did not always completely believe the credibility of the arch villain. However – I have never read a book by Craig which I would not want to recommend. She always has interesting, important things to say, and says them in a most interesting, entertaining manner. Intelligent page turning, with wit and pain along the way

I received this as a copy for review purposes from Amazon Vine UK. It will be published, UK and Stateside, in June 2017
The Lie of The Land Amazon UK
The Lie of the Land Amazon USA

Joel Dicker – The Baltimore Boys

Tags

Book Review, Joel Dicker, The Baltimore Boys

“Lives only have meaning if we can fulfil these three destinies: to love, to be loved, and know how to forgive”

I had been captivated by Swiss writer Joel Dicker’s first book, the runaway critically and reader acclaimed The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair – both a murder mystery/investigation and a book about writing, writer’s block and matters literary. So I was delighted to be offered his second as an ARC, here translated from the original French by Alison Anderson.

The Baltimore Boys stands as both prequel and sequel to ‘Harry Quebert’. The central character Marcus Goldman (the writer of Harry Quebert) looks back to the original genesis of his writing inspiration – his childhood, and his friendship with his cousin Hillel, and a less privileged boy, Woody – the Baltimore Boys, and in present time, he has already published ‘Quebert’ and, once again, is finding the process of writing hard.

Why do I write? Because books are stronger than life. They are the finest revenge we can take on life. They are the witnesses from the impregnable wall of our mind, the unassailable fortress of our memory

In fact, he has taken himself away from the distractions of the city (New York) to a quiet, suburban house in Florida, where his neighbours are affluent and retired, and nothing happens. He is in search of tranquillity to help the creative juices flow.

A chance encounter with a stray dog causes Marcus’ boyhood, as a third member of the Baltimore Boys gang, to come flooding back to him, as the dog’s owner is a significant figure from his past.

Marcus was the only son of the ‘Montclair Goldmans’ . His father Nathan was the less successful Goldman Brother. The star brother, and the one whom Marcus hero-worshipped, along with his beautiful wife Anita, was Saul. Saul and Anita were wealthy, golden, successful and admired. They and their only son Hillel were the Baltimore Goldmans.

However, as we discover, at the start of the book – the Golden Baltimores somehow became mired in tragedy. Jumping back and forth in time-frames from 1989 to the present day, Marcus is writing his past, his present, and, perhaps his future. This book, The Baltimore Boys, will be a celebration of the people he loved whose lives were less blessed than he thought, and will also be a way to come to terms with accepting loss, and broken illusions.

I loved ‘Quebert’ though at times I found it a little over tricksy. Baltimore Boys, despite all the jumping back and forth in time, seems a much more traditional progression – Goldman lets us know what he intends to reveal to us, before we ever get there – the books very first sentence, its prologue, tells us that in 2004 his boyhood friend, his adopted cousin Woody, is about to start a 5 year prison sentence the next day. We are then immediately taken to Part One, which begins in 1989, The Book of Lost Youth.

I found The Baltimore Boys intensely moving. Marcus, for all his acclaimed fame, has a kind of bruised, attractive diffidence, and a much greater warmth and integrity than he believes he has. This is both a love story, a loss story, and a celebration of the importance of friendship, and of family, those difficult, sometimes impossible ties between siblings and close kin.

And it is full of delicious observations. The back and forth time frames also pinpoint subtle and not so subtle changes in society

There was a time when astronauts and scientists were the stars. Nowadays our stars are people who do nothing and spend their time taking selfies or pictures of their dinner

Above all, Joel Dicker knows how to tell an old story, the rite of passage from child to sadder, wiser man, freshly and engagingly

The Baltimore Boys will be published in English on May 18th It has already been a popular success in the original French, published in 2015, and in Spanish translation.

The Baltimore Boys Amazon UK
The Baltimore Boys Amazon USA

Noah Hawley – Before the Fall

Tags

Before the Fall, Book Review, Noah Hawley

A rich, nuggetty slice of thoughtful thrillery : sensation seeking society in the dock

Noah Hawley does far more than craft a page-turning thriller. He is a writer who makes the reader think about the ethics of the society we live in, how it might be, to inhabit the lives of his creations, and, what choices WE might make, in helping to create the ethics of our world.

I first found him with the troubling The Good Father, a novel written from the perspective of a loving father whose son carries out an assassination on a respected presidential hopeful.

So, when offered Before The Fall, as a digital ARC, I was interested BECAUSE the author was Hawley, and thought the novel itself would be rather more interesting than the blurb suggested . Any book with any kind of sensationalist story, might be written purely as a ratchet tension, or, might ratchet, and have more about it. And, of course, Hawley being Hawley, it does.

The CEO of a populist news channel, who promotes, rather, edgy conspiracy driven, whip up feelings programmes, which are not necessarily blazing with the light of truth, is travelling back from Martha’s Vineyard to New York, with his family, in a commissioned private plane. He is the kind of man who warrants 24 hour private protection. Also on the plane is another member of the superpowerful, superwealthy, from the financial makers and shakers of society, wheeling and dealing, skating close to the edges of the law, and not always holding the moral line. In fact, possibly off centre a lot. On board also, is someone quite different. An artist, possibly a good one, a man with a bit of a bad boy personal past, someone who appeared to show more promise than he ever realised, but, now, on the verge of having found his vision again.

Inexplicably 18 minutes into the flight, the plane plunges off radar and crashes into the ocean. Even more seemingly improbably, two survive; Scott Burroughs, the artist, and the CEO’s youngest child, 4 year old JJ. That survival is almost impossible to credit or imagine, and happens because Burroughs, influenced when a small child by the media star figure of Jack LaLanne, had taken to ‘you can do anything if you really put the work in’ challenging swimming. With busted shoulder, in fog, wreckage and darkness, he takes the heroic path, hearing the child crying out somewhere near him in the ocean and gets the two of them to shore, several miles away.

Jack LaLanne – a role model from simpler times

The high profiles, power and wealth of David Bateman, the TV man, and Ben Kipling, finance supremo, suggest that the crash may have been more than ordinary mechanical failure. So contrasting investigative teams are drawn in. One, searching purely for evidence about aircraft and its safety, the other, part of an investigation into motive, and lawbreaking, not to mention, terrorism.

In these days, conspiracy theories are always of far more interest than rational explanations. Scandal, we all know, sells. So there are also far scummier motivations at work. Bateman’s populist channel has a rabble-rousing, fake-news peddling, soaring ratings presenter, Bill Milligan. So…….whilst some news outlets present more sober, as factual-as-the-can-be-till-we-know-more accounts of what happened, and are pretty sure that Scott Burroughs is a good, old-fashioned hero, others have more of an ear out for the whisper of conspiracy.

Burroughs is by nature a private man, and unwilling anyway to become the fodder of a feeding frenzy of ‘how did it feel?’ ‘how did manage to do that?’ interest, however benevolently curious. This, in part, feeds Milligan’s natural tendency to hone in on any jugular going – invented or not  – blood-letting, sleaze, slime gets massive ratings. Some journalists exploit our seamier desires.

Stylistically, Hawley gives us the inside stories, the in the head viewpoints, of all who were on the aircraft, passengers and crew, all involved in the investigation, and others drawn into the fallout of tragedy.

This is thriller – why did this happen, is there a hidden agenda beyond the obvious – which is wonderfully page-turning, but, all through, it also makes the reader think. How responsible are we, when we consume sleaze stories, for the continuation of sleaze? There are other topics thrown in for good measure, often little more than asides, Hawley casts pearls, and we must hope we are not swine! A classy, thought provoking thriller.

Before the Fall Amazon UK
Before the Fall Amazon USA

Mick Herron – Dead Lions

Tags

Book Review, Dead Lions, Espionage, MI5, Mick Herron, Spy thriller

“Grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind” (Ode: Intimations of Immortality, Wordsworth)

So………having encountered Mick Herron’s first in his Jackson Lamb series, a bare week or so ago, I was utterly unable to resist downloading and compulsively devouring book 2. And (whispers): it might be even better

In Dead Lions, Mick Herron’s second Slough House/Jackson Lamb series spy thriller, Herron has further sharpened his pencil, turned up the dry wit, turned up the reverses to wrong foot (justifiably) the reader. And he has turned up the shock and the darkness, having softened up the reader by the effortless amusement in the earlier part of the book.

there was something about him, even leaving aside the secondhand clothing, the stained walls, the desperate address. Something off, like that gap between the use by date, and the moment the milk turns

But, be warned, killer punches are coming

Of course I recommend, highly, starting with Book 1,Slow Horses, getting to meet the characters, as different members of the second division of MI5 (or, perhaps even relegated lower than that) will come to the forefront and centre of Herron’s focus, and you will be deepening your knowledge of, and appreciation for, the spooks you meet (old and new) in Dead Lions

However, Herron has constructed his books well, and finds a way to introduce any needed back story and character details for new readers picking up book 2 by chance.

The storyline in this book, published in 2013, has Russia at its centre (and how topical might this be?) But this is a new Russia. Some of the spooks who have been around for a while are still stuck in an old Cold War scenario, where communism and capitalism square up against each other. Russia, as many have noted of late, has moved markedly rightwards, and its interests may no longer be in helping the workers of the world, who have nothing to lose but their chains, to unite.

An old, not very high flying, not very valuable, spook from the days of the fall of the Berlin Wall, sees a face he recognises. This (British) cipher clerk, was too lowly, too incompetent, even to merit deployment to ‘Slough House’ where spooks who have fouled up, get shafted to end their days as pen pushers, CCTV footage perusers, in order for government to avoid redundancy golden handshakes. In the fullness of time, is the thinking, the demoted ones will get fed up, and hand in their notice, saving payouts.

The ex-spook seeing a face from the past decides to trail the man from the other side, he last saw, memorably, at the end of the 80s. And so begins a whole, complex, twisty tangle of information, disinformation, plots, sub-plots, and things which are very much not what they seem.

It is set partly in the epicentre – London, and partly in that most English of English, safe, old fashioned, cosy part of the country, the Cotswolds – though a part of it not quite mainstream tourist destination:

Upshott has no high street, not like those in nearby villages, with their parades of mock-Tudor frontages gracefully declining riverwards….;whose grocery stores offer stem-ginger biscuits and seven kinds of pesto….. Because Upshott doesn’t invite the epithet ‘chocolate boxy’ , so often delivered through gritted teeth. If it resembles any kind of chocolate box, it’s the kind found on the shelf at its only supermarket: coated with dust, its cellophane crackly and yellowing

Some of the characters met in the first book are here again – but some are not. Espionage, even for the Slow Horses of Slough House is a dangerous game. And the more Herron invests the reader in each of the characters he develops, the more, I suspect, will reading subsequent books be a mixture of feverish page turning pleasure – and pain.

Yes. I cried, where I had laughed before.

Book 3 is now downloaded on the eReader, and I have book 4 (the latest) as an ARC Herron is THAT compulsive, THAT good.

Dead Lions won the 2013 CWA Gold Dagger Award, and was a ‘Best Crime Novel of the Year’ for BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, and A Times crime and thriller book of the year. And I wouldn’t argue with any of that

Dead Lions Amazon UK
Dead Lions Amazon USA

Mick Herron – Slow Horses

Tags

Book Review, Espionage, Jackson Lamb series, MI5, Mick Herron, Slow Horses, Spooks, Spy thriller

Borstal for spies; Herron trips, feints and cleverly deceives the reader every step of the way

Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, the first book in a series set in ‘Slough House’ a kind of transfer to the bottom stream for spooks from MI5 who have made mistakes, is stunning. Absolutely stunning.

This is a highly intelligent, tautly written, compulsive page-turner, with a plot as highly charged and twisty turny as any reader could want, wonderfully complex, believable characters, and founded in a reality which seems terrifyingly plausible. It is bloody, violent – and, at times, very very funny.

He was aiming for a carefree delivery, with about as much success as Gordon Brown

I have found my series to compulsively read on – book 4 comes out this year and I’ve been fortunate to have bagged a copy as an ARC, but, 2 and 3 will be read in order first – if I can stop the dizzy spin I’m left in, reading this one.

The unfortunate challenge of writing a review, is that really, there is almost nothing I wish to say about plot – or even the cast of characters, because the best way to read this is to know as little as possible about the journey, other than to make it.

All that might be useful to know, is that the title, ‘Slow Horses’ is a kind of dismissive word play, accorded to the Z lister spooks, fallen from grace, who now work at Slough House. One and all, they were operatives who, for different reasons, had been attracted to the boxing-at-shadows work of MI5, recruited for their spook-needed skills, trained for this, but, in each case somehow failed the grade, dropped a catch, failed to tick the right box. Now, they all do the grunt work associated with counter terrorism, the endless checking of videocams, CCTV, paper trails. And all are resentful and yearn to be back at the high, respected levels of the job.

The only name I will provide is that of Jackson Lamb – as in, this is the first in Herron’s Jackson Lamb series. He heads up the crew of misfits, who have ended up here. Bullying, and shambolic, disliked by his subordinates and superiors, he is none the less as devious, intelligent, astute at pulling wool over eyes and mastering dissimulation as a spook must be.

He resembled, someone had once remarked, Timothy Spall gone to seed (which left open the question of what Timothy Spall not gone to seed might look like)

Having finished this one, I have no real idea where Herron might go with the later books in the series. My instinct is that we will certainly be meeting some of the ‘Slow Horses’ denizens of Slough House – not to mention the MI5 high flier section, – again, and I suspect different characters will, in subsequent books, come into sharper relief, and take place centre stage. In this, the closet parallel I can find is to the magnificent Tana French, who does a similar ‘Greek tragedy chorus’ effect with her Dublin Murder Squad series – each book focuses on different central characters in the squad, some of whom may have made passing appearances earlier, and are now centre stage, and may well pass through again in a later book, as a minor character in someone else’s story. When I first found French, I did a kind of total immersion and read all her books in the space of 6 weeks.

I can see myself heading the same way with Herron.

But, I have to hold back from saying even the most basic about plot, or other central characters beside Lamb because Herron starts the dissimulation and confounds the reader’s expectations right from the start, and you will be best pleased to read as an innocent, without knowing or second guessing in advance.

this particular block seemed ordinary enough in the early morning, with its shared entrance and its buzzer system that blinked continuously. Only the sign promising CCTV coverage hinted at Big Brother’s world, but signs were cheaper than the actual thing. The UK might be the most surveilled society in the world, but that was on the public purse, and building management companies generally preferred the cheaper option of hanging a fake camera

All I will say is that none of the sleights of hand, the cutting between different stories all heading in the same direction, deviously and twistily, is a gratuitous authorial series of tricks, coinicidences too far etc. The territory of the book, after all is one where no one is quite what they seem, because the territory of intelligence, counter-intelligence and their friends and enemies is, of its nature – hidden, deceptive, shadowy.

However…..this book was first published in 2010. There is a remarkably foresighted view of the future, and a thinly disguised character readers will ‘enjoy’ recognising. I guffawed out loud on a silent tube carriage………….Of course, humour gets laced with horror these days.

I wonder what else Herron is predicting in later books in the series, and sincerely hope book 4 (published in 2017) won’t have World War 3 in mid-throes.

Slow Horses Amazon UK
Slow Horses Amazon USA

Zadie Smith – Swing Time

Tags

Book Review, Jeni LeGon, Swing Time, Zadie Smith

I liked Zadie Smith’s Swing Time a lot but couldn’t love it

Smith’s story inter-cuts the unnamed narrator, growing up in 1980s Kilburn with a present some thirty years later, jet setting across continents, mainly America, Europe and Africa.

The novel begins with the narrator hiding out for some reason, in disgrace, pursued by newshounds :

It was the first day of my humiliation. Put on a plane, sent back home, to England, set up with a temporary rental in St. John’s Wood…..It had been chosen, I think, because of the doorman, who blocked all enquiries. I stayed indoors. The phone on the kitchen wall rang and rang, but I was warned not to answer it and to keep my own phone switched off.

An arresting beginning then, and for sure we want to know more. Smith gives us a story to pursue, not in a straight backwards or forwards linear fashion, but as an inter-cut between the recent past and the earlier past. This is a story of friendships, and particularly female friendships, betrayed. It is a story of race, of class, of cultural appropriation, of fame, of aspiration, of different ways of making changes in the wider world.

The story begins with the friendship between 2 young girls, united by a ballet class and by their colour. The narration, and her ‘bestie’ Tracey, meet at a local ballet class. Both are mixed race, Tracey is the child of a white mother and a mainly absent black father, round whom she weaves myths and stories. The narrator’s mother is a fiercely intelligent black woman, learning from life experience and from her own inquiring nature, lessons about political consciousness, particularly around race, class, gender. That drive to learn, however, also imposes a certain chilly emotional distance :

More than she knew or cared to know, she was someone who lived in her own dreamscape, who presumed that everyone around her was at all times feeling exactly as she was

The narrator’s white father is steady, laid back, devoted to his wife and daughter but without ambition. The relationship between her parents will founder over the mismatch between drive and passivity.

Jeni Legon, the first African-American woman to be given a long term Hollywood contract : an inspiration to the central character of this book

The little girls are talented ldancers, but Tracey is exceptional. The narrator’s gift is more connected with singing, but education will take her into academia (her mother’s fierce longing as the way to make changes) Tracey is the stronger character, and the one with the most gifts, however her struggles are as much because of class, as ethnicity. The relationship between the two girls is a central one. As is that between parents (particularly mothers) and their daughters

Jeni LeGon, Bill Robinson and Fats Waller in “Hooray for Love” 1935 

Later, the narrator will be precisely placed in time and space to be ‘cool’ and on the edges of the musical scene, ready to be swept up by Aimee, a global singing and performance superstar, a kind of amalgam of Kylie Minogue (she is Australian) and Madonna. The selfishness and self-absorption of the fame machine means Aimee gathers her up as part of her entourage. Aimee sets herself a laudable ‘eradicate poverty’ goal, but her methods, and persona, lead to as many problems as solutions when she descends, whirlwind like, from the skies, to found an education project for women in a West African village. It is the narrator who will learn most, and be forced to question much about herself, the village community, the project itself, and the sometimes arrogance of white ‘do-gooding’

The nature of female friendship will be explored here too, the friendships the narrator makes with some of the village women, and particularly, friendships where differences in power set up inequalities : the narrator is less crucial to Aimee than Aimee is in her life.

Zadie Smith of course, writes beautifully, intelligently, vibrantly. The problem I found however, which accounted for the like not love, was in part a difficulty in really embracing and feeling the central character. I wondered how much her ‘un-naming’ set a distance between her and us – plus, the feeling that in the main she was observing and outside and more passive in the lives of the other, more powerful characters – mother, Tracey, Aimee. She has something a little disappointing at the core, a sense of not achieving her potential (her mother feels this about her, too) And part of that ‘not quite achieving’ is a kind of emotional lack of dynamism. She does not vibrantly, fully, engage with those around her – or her own creativity. The story is built around this unnamed ‘best friend’ type character – if this was a movie, she is ‘best friend’ not hero – but she is not particularly good at being best friend, either. In a way, Smith doesn’t offer us much hope for friendship!

Perhaps the problem, why I couldn’t ‘love’ is that whilst engaged, interested, my experience was more of being told, than truly experiencing the emotional inside of the central character. It was the narrator’s mother who was the most fleshed out, whom I came closest to ‘feel’

I do recommend this for an interesting, absorbing, though rather long book – narrative drive did falter slightly. I am pleased I read it, but not transformed.

I received this as a copy for review from NetGalley

Swing Time Amazon UK
Swing Time Amazon USA