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Books 2017.It’s January 1st 2017. I can tell that a good year lies ahead. Well there surely can’t be more positive contributors to the human condition taken from us in 2017 than 2016. Obituary followed hard on obituary. Poor Rick Parfitt got short shrift because George Michael went the following day. Too young. Need time to think, to read.The Cuckoo’s Calling. Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling) Our introduction to Cormoran Strike the private detective with the usual hallmarks: damaged in love, damaged by his time in Afghanistan (minus half a leg); damaged by a druggy mother and rock-star father etc etc. He has a failing business until John Bristow asks him to investigate the curious suicide of his sister, a famous model. With only his temporary secretary Robin as ally, Cormoran hobbles to his cause to reveal a mesh of damaged families, murky pasts and fragile egos. Well-plotted and very deliberate in setting up the private dick for further tales. OK but not rivetting.3The Sellout. Paul Beatty. First American to win the Booker. Savage satire on race and America. It’s almost plotless but the ‘sellout’ is a black guy wanting to reclaim a suburb (Dickens) of LA from gentrification. The tale is loosely woven round a Supreme Court defence but each page is a digressive polemical rant covering as many cultural subversions that beatty can manage. ‘Nigger’ is repeated on every page (almost very line). Cultural references rain down in an unsettling and all-encompassing way. Blackness, whiteness is exposed in savage, humiliating and very funny ways. The plot gets lost in the diatribe.I haven’t read anything like it. It’s a book that needs time to sink in. 4The Noise of Time. Julian Barnes. His follow up to The Sense of an Ending which won the Booker. This is a fond and weird fictionalised life of Shostakovic. A life spent expecting Stalin’s men to take him away to ‘the house’ for his proletarian mind-numbing music. The narrative plays in his head as he waits at the lift in his block of flats. Then he is on a lecture tour of the USA, now more in the thrall of the CIA. Finally he reflects on a life beyond his artistic control in a chauffeured car. JB collapses time to cover the composer’s whole life and speculates that Shostakovic was always under the control of others as he tried to exercise his genius. Sad and odd and funny. A real insight into the forcesat work when power meets art. Brilliant, really. 4+The Picador Book of Love Poems. John Stammers. Ed. Picked this up as a bit of an afterthought when in the library. It’s a recent edition and a very eclectic mix of poems that aren’t all about love. Plenty of remembered and forgotten standards sit alongside wacky and thought-provoking modern stuff written by a host of poets I’d never heard of. Roddy Lumsden wrote a quirky thing called Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, while Thomas Spratt, The Bishop of Rochester wrote a lament for his drowned mistress. I dipped in over a few nights and enjoyed myself. 3+Forensics, the Anatomy of Crime. Val McDermid. This is a very readable digest of where we are today with crime scene forensic investigation. VM has added to her exhaustive novel-research to provide a manual for geeks who want to delve further. Landmark breakthroughs – going back centuries, millennia even – are told in captivating fashion. Stories of the great, the scandalous and the perplexing cases from all over the world. The great forensic innovators from the past to the sci-fi present that our forensic forbears could hardly have imagined. 4The Nix. Nathan Hill. Samuel Andreson-Anderson is the awkward hero of this tremendous polemical novel of America. Sam’s mother abandoned him at 10 and now she is in the national headlines for a political protest. Sam has an awkward reunion and commits himself to writing her story. Back at his college he is under investigation for suggesting that he might fail a feckless student, Laura, for serial plagiarism. The two stories interweave as Samuel traces his mother’s life – and his own. The exposure of America’s underbelly and paranoia is transfixing. It’s a tremendous ‘journey’ story in the Human Stain mould..in terms of identity and deliberate blotting out of the past. 4++Heatwave. Penelope Lively. A rather forgotten author these days. I am always taken by her insightful, moving stories and the nuanced interplay of characters. Here we have Pauline who lives next door to her daughter,Theresa and grandchild Luke. It’s World’s End, a hamlet in the sticks protected from the vice-world of London, not too far away. Maurice, Theresa’s older-writer-hubby, on whom she dotes, is a man who needs to feel that he is charismatic. Pauline watches her daughter repeat her own love-mistakes over a long hot summer. Moving, clever and, at the end, surprising. 4The Accidental Tourist. Anne Tyler. Macon is a man on the spectrum. He’s addicted to routine. His wife, Sarah has, temporarily left him and he takes up with Muriel, a younger single mum and dog-trainer who wants a man. Macon’s job is to write travel guides for businessmen. The solo life suits his condition but both women want him. This is an Asperger’s comedy with the pervasive sadness of the death Macon and Sarah’s son, Nathan. Having read The Rosie Effect, Curious Incident etc, the style was a little too familiar but there is a profundity to the ménage a trios which I found poignant. 3Aiming High. Will McGeorge, aka my old Loughborough buddy, Rich McTaggart. This is a story of teen love and hopes for the future. Amy and Steven are sixth formers in love. He an athlete who is desperate to fulfil his dreams of Loughborough; she, a starry-eyed academic who will follow him to the ends of the earth. We see life, largely through Amy’s eyes; a tricky job pretty well-done. It’s fast read even though it needs pruning. There’s an authentic and autobiographical voice behind it. A certain 2011 zeitgeist too...but the tale of teenagers doesn’t quite deserve 600pages. Editing needed Rich! Those doing A levels and making univ./career choices will enjoy.2 The Chequer Board. Neville Shute. After I’d moved on from Enid Blyton, Neville Shute was one of the few who kept me engrossed through teenage. His 1950s take on damaged men (mostly) who had survived the war but had compelling tales to tell were the stuff of my heroic imagination. Simple elegant prose and heroes. This recently reprinted editon brought it all back and it sooooo holds up for me today. Jackie Turner is a dying man who wants to track down three men with whom he was hospitalised after a 2nd W W plane crash. He wants to atone for a mischievous life, somehow. His search takes him as far as Burma and he finds each man has found redemption in some way. The novel is both hard-hitting (for example the exposure of racial hatred amongst American servicemen) and eloquent. It speaks loudly today and yet at heart it is a simple tale of a man wanting to make amends as he nears the end. 4 The Reader on the 6.27. Jean-Paul Diderlau. Very French and very engaging. The tale of Guylain Vignolles who operates a vast book-pulping machine under the malevolent beady eye of his boss. His only friends are a legless invalid (legs lost in the pulping machine) and a theatrical wannabe who mans the security gate- and talks in Alexandrines (12 syllable lines of poetry). Guylain gets his kicks by reading to commuters from the pages of books which have missed pulping. His readings are popular, particularly when the extracts are racy. When Guylain finds a the diaries of a female toilet cleaner he sets out to find her. Well, from this improbable scenario there is humour, pathos and a weirdly compelling feeling that the writer knows a lot about the human condition. Captivating. 4 The Past. Tessa Hadley. I’m new to TH but will be returning. This is a family psychology novel and a coming of age. Harriet, Roland, Alice and Fran are siblings who meet up for a reunion holiday in the country house they grew up in. Each has a lifetime of baggage and their assorted youngsters, the randy Kasim, his prey the sexy Molly and the younger children somehow mirror the tussles of their elder counterparts. TH takes us back to 1968 in the mid-section and we see how the playing out of previous lives, particularly their mother Jill, affects the present. Sexual tension ripples throughout and, latterly, melodrama. Insightful elegant prose. A compelling story. ?The Hard Way. Lee Child. I needed another fix of Reacher. I’m up to 10 now. Irresistibly indistinguishable from the others. The Status Quo of thriller writers. 3+The Comfort of Strangers. Ian McEwan. A re-read of this noir tale of Colin and Mary, lovers on holiday in an unnamed place with all the nook and cranny characteristics of Venice. Here they encounter Robert and Caroline a predatory, obsessive couple who ensnare the lovers in a labyrinth of heat and bars and sexual perversion. Weird and wonderful. Compulsive reading. 4Shark-Infested Waters. Michael Whitehall. The actors’ agent’s memoir of a life he stumbled on, having failed at teaching, the law and other things. Early chapters best on his young life – then it becomes a series of funny name-dropping anecdotes of a life filled with petulant luvvies. A who’s who of actors in the second half of the 20th century. MW’s turn of phrase is acid and engaging. A superior showbiz chronicle. I await his next volume detailing his next career – that of TV chat-show star, husband to my buddy Hilary and father to Molly, Barnaby and the ubiquitous Jack. More fun in store. 3+Saturday’s Silence. Richard Mclaughlan. A PhD thesis-turned-book of the theology of R.S. Thomas’s poetry. An Xmas pressie from my son Charlie, this is a scholarly tome exploring the evidence of the link between the ‘silent’ Saturday of Easter and the aural and textual nature of the poems. Leavisite and thorough, it seemed rather tortuous at times but I suppose wrestling with the complexity of it all is part of the idea. Richard had Rowan William as a supervisor for his thesis- and other big guns on his side. I enjoyed applying myself to the analysis but was reminded that scholars use too much parenthesis, dashes and endlessly compound sentences. A change from Lee Child anyway. 3 The Summons. John Grisham. I had read this before but found myself without Kindle and other reading matter on holiday, such had been the voracity of my consumption. It’s the usual legal caper. Ray Atlee, a law Prof. and his druggy brother Forrest are summoned by their father, the revered Judge Reuben, as he lays dying. In fact he is dead by the time they get there. Ray finds over $2million stashed in the house. How could his charity-mad giveaway father have amassed it all? He keeps the trove a secret but is followed wherever he goes. It’s a thin story – even for JG. 2 Little Deaths. Emma Flint. Another offering sent by Alice Dewing. Thanks again, Alice! Ruth’s children, Frankie and Cindy are abducted from her chaotic New York apartment in Queen’s. Her estranged husband Frank returns to pick up the pieces. Cindy is found strangled and Peter Wonicke, rookie reporter, see a chance to nail his first big story. Ruth beguiles Peter – and others – and he becomes obsessed enough to dump his job and seek redemption for her, for himself..The story meanders somewhat following the discovery of the children’s bodies. It is part whodunit, part exploration of Ruth’s grimy, impenetrable life. What is it that grips Peter so? Based on some sortof fact this isn’t an entirely convincing thriller but a very good first novel. The acknowledgements are huge. Just how many people help a novel on its way? 3Fathers and Sons. Howard Cunnell. This memoir is gripping in a visceral and impressionistic way. There is a stream of consciousness which drives the narrative – the story of HC’s life being a father and not having known his own. Laced with the fecklessness of a drug and booze-fuelled young adulthood, the author explores through the classic oedipal yankee authors (Hemingway, Whitman, Kerouac et al) his own difficult path without Jason (his father) but with Jay, his transgender stepson. A compelling read, not least because of the crispness of the prose. Sentences short and clear. Unusual. 4 Code to Zero. Ken Follett. I remembered Pillars of the Earth and how good a story-teller KF is. Yes, Ok he is the father of Lee Child and other pulp-pacy-narrative types. Like them, his research is impeccable. Code to Zero was written about 20 years ago and tells the story of a group of clever friends at Harvard in 1941 whose lives of war and science and espionage and love bring them together again in 1958 as the space race is hotting up – with Russia in the lead. Dr Claude Lucas, a rocket-scientist, is brainwashed and left with amnesia in the gutters of Washington. He sets out to find who he is, who has conspired against him and if he can stop the double-agent plotting of his oldest friend to sabotage the rocket launch from Cape Canaveral. Stirring stuff. A fast read. 3Redemption Road. John Hart. Picked almost at random from the library shelves. Praise from David Baldacci and Harlan Coben drew me to it. John Hart is an American award-winner for crime/thrillers. This is a grisly Stephen King-like tale of multiple murders, multiple rapes, bent cops and prison officers and perverted Christians. At its centre is Elizabeth Black, experienced but still young cop, raped in childhood, who stands accused of murdering the abusers of Channing an innocent 12 year old. Her colleagues distrust her for her unstinting support of Adrian – another cop – who has spent nine years in a brutal prison for murders he didn’t commit. A long and complicated tale is told as damaged characters struggle down the road to redemption and those entangled in evil come to sticky ends. It’s a gothically violent read - murder victims are found draped over the altar of the local church – and rather incredible, of course. But hey, I got to the end of it and there is love at its heart. Of course. Don’t go out of your way.3A Complete and Utter History of Art. John Farman. A 200page race-through the history of art from cavemen to now. Readable and funny and informative. 4 Dark Places. Kate Grenville. Indeed a dark tale of Albion Gidley Singer a boy grown to man whose father’s Gradgrindian ways has turned him into a Jekyll and Hyde who ‘watched himself in mirrors’. Now bastion of the community; now dark, deep and tormented. This is the tale of a man whose narration jumps from first to third person, whose outward life is demonically fed by inward calculation and sexual drives. Singer becomes a pillar of the community and calculates everything he does in detail: his ruthless handling of business, his choice of wife, the training of his children and the predatory satisfying of his needs. His clever daughter and favourite child, Lillian, dotes on her father’s superior general knowledge. Her brother John is an emasculated dunce to Albion Gidley Singer. Both come to realise the shallow cruelty of their father and the repercussions of their rebellion are dark indeed. A clever and hauntingly readable gothic tale of an Australian businessman who is not what he seems. I’ll read more of KG. 4 The Pier Falls. Mark Haddon. A readable if unusually dark set of short stories from MH.The title tale, about a collapsing pier, deaths, survivors and blame is rather prescient, as are many of the sad tales in the collection. It’s a clever collection albeit rather unremitting. 3 A Decent Ride. Irvine Welsh. Again unremitting. Two unlikeable characters, taxi driver Terry and Bawbag, his sometime client of a porn star, rampage their way round Edinburgh. ‘Juice’ Terry is a shagging granddad, a Welsh mouthpiece for loads of phonetic unpleasantness. Women or birds are ‘rides’ or ‘fanny’: Fuck off means naw, naw means mibbe, mibbe means aye n aye means anal. There may be something ‘honest’ about it all and it is true and sometimes funny but it is also relentless. There are sombre messages too but they get lost in the crude grandstanding. At 500 pages it was too long. 3 Stasi Child. David Young. A cold war thriller, part of the Oberleutnant Karin Mueller series. Investigating the brutal murder of a young girl, Karin stumbles on the historic abuse (and cover-up) of child abuse by high-ranking politicians, prison governors and the Stasi. Her job and marriage become under serious threat. The atmosphere (somewhat propagandised) is chilling and corrupt as the level of corruption by men in high places is exposed. Karin’s belief in the East German regime takes a pummelling. Effective and, for me, instructive, as I know little of life behind the iron curtain in the second half of the 20th century. 3 First to Kill. Andrew Peterson. The Nathan McBride series. Cheap on the Kindle and I know why. It’s Lee child copycat stuff. Easy reading as Nathan, the damaged war veteran, helps out the FBI in tracking the monstrous killers, the Bridgestone brothers, importers of semtex and drugs on an industrial scale. Violent, unpleasant...but readable. 2+The Return Home. Justin Huggler. Set in Jersey (where my son lives) this novel has an evocative sense of the Channel Island identity, as seen through the eyes of successive generations of Islanders. The Nazi occupation is somehow echoed in the experiences of Uncle Jack, recently back, minus one leg, from Afghanistan. A fair synopsis is below, copied from somewhere!The uniqueness of a boyhood spent growing up in Jersey is conveyed in some memorable imagery in this novel, intersecting the German wartime occupation of the island, the Afghan resistance to the Russians in the 1980s and present day conflict in Syria. Ben, now working internationally for a human rights advocacy organisation, flits back and forth between reflections on his boyhood and his adult self, He is both attempting to solve the mystery of what became of his uncle Jack, who had a brief but lasting impact on him as a child, and trying to decide how to save his disintegrating marriage. For the first few chapters I enjoyed these time shifts back and forth, advancing with Ben in understanding the meaning of events which as an eight year old he could only partly grasp. Ben also develops a deepening appreciation of the choices he has made in life, such as his choice of career, by examining the influences on his childhood self. It’s worthy and compellingly human. If you have an interest in the island, I would recommend it! 3 Let Go My Hand. Edward Docx. Louis and his father travel to Switzerland. His father wants be helped to die. They are joined by Ralph and Jack, half brothers to Louis from their father’s first marriage. This is the tale of that journey. The light and considerable shade of their lifetimes are exposed in cruel, funny and loving interactions. The dark stuff of families is all here. It’s compelling.A powerful examination of fathers, wives, lovers, sons, half brothers and, well quite a lot of other stuff too.4 Venice. Donna Leon. I really enjoyed Donna Leon’s oddball but direct take on her life and observations of Venice and – later in the collection – America. It’s a collection of short essays which are excellent and easy to pick up and put down. 4 Forced to Kill. Andrew Peterson. Identical to the first of this Nathan Macbride series. A poor man’s Jack Reacher. See comments on 27 above. I wouldn’t have read it but I downloaded two on to the Kindle. No more...but I was by a pool in Ibiza at the time. 1 Nomad. Alan Partridge. Aka Steve Coogan. Priceless. Has to be read in small doses as it’s hard to keep up Partridge’s voice inside your head for hours on end. Very funny – and disturbing. For fans – and I’m one. 4 The Storyteller. Jodi Picoult. Not read one of hers before. I know she is beloved of book clubs and Richard and Judy. Hmm. This is about a Nazi war criminal, now 95, living in the US. He wants the daughter of a jew to help him die as some form of atonement. She, damaged herself by her own past, struggles with a moral dilemma: to help him atone or bring him to justice. The central part of the novel takes us to Auschwitz and the awful and necessarily repeated story of the inhuman hell that so many went through. JP tells a harrowing tale of a young Jewish girl’s walk through hell. Set against this is not only the modern-day pursuit of a war criminal, but also the dark, Grimm-like allegorical fairy tale that the young girl writes as she suffers the hells of the concentration camp. It’s a story that captivates one of the officers, whose brother is a beast, whereas he has some humanity despite his uniform.The narrative is strong and the tale well-told. JP ‘sells’ the moral dilemma deal in her books, it seems. What would you do? What would you have done? Then and now. 4 A Colder War. Charles Cumming. Back with Thomas Kell for the second in this intriguing espionage series. Bang up to date with Erdogan in charge of a changing Turkey with Kell in pursuit of an American mole/double agent who threatens to tip the balance of power in that volatile region by giving the Russians a leg up. The death of a colleague in mysterious circs rings alarm bells and Kell falls fatefully in love..3++ Swansong. Damian Boyd. 4th in the DI Nick Dixon series. This is a better-than-average damaged male cop crime series but this is a bit of a clichéd let-down. A school murderer has struck in similar fashion to when Nick himself was at school and his teen-love was brutally killed. The trauma of the past is repeated and 18years later another girl suffers similarly. The crime stuff is well-researched but the schools represented are woefully out of date. Browning-version versions. Poignant at times but under par. 2 The Whistler. John Grisham. His latest effort about a bent Judge who squirrels millions (along with others) from gambling and real-estate scams on native Indian land. Federal investigator Lacy Stoltz has to get involved when a whistleblower, Greg Myers, seeks reward and revenge for giving information. Usual sharp Grisham stuff but I’d have found it less entertaining had I not still been by the pool. 2/3 Fifty Two Beds. (An adventure before dementia). Alex Presnell. My old friend Prez has written the tale of his ‘gap’ year with his wife Maggie. Thinly veiled as fiction this is a travelogue tale of two people discovering the world and rediscovering their marriage. It’s witty, un-PC and informative. Anecdotes fly off the pages. The prose is clear, plain, without literary artifice. A real story, well-told. 3The Cupboard. Rose Tremain. Ralph, an American journalist seeking a breakthrough piece about a long-forgotten English novelist, travels to London to interview the curious and reclusive Erica March. His obsession means that he extends his stay long enough to get sacked back in New York. Erica’s itinerant life, mostly in France during the Hitler years and, mostly, with her life-love, the artist Gerard, is told by the old lady in flashback, intermingled with excerpts from her fantasy novels. Add to this her time as a buddy of Emily Davidson in the suffragette years and we have a historicalbackdrop to intrigue and enliven the curious plot. It’s a weird combination but RT as ever, hold the reader’s attention. We care about her characters and seek their destiny. 4Rather Be the Devil. Ian Rankin. Another Rebus tale. The retired detective is brought in when a cold case and the murder of an old colleague seem to link with the beating-up of crime boss Darryl Christie. Rankin moves his well-known characters around in the usual skilful way but I couldn’t raise much enthusiasm. 2David Jason. My Life. I know that he has recently published ‘Only Fools and Stories’ but on the basis of this one, I won’t be reading it. 2 Interior. Justin Cartwright. JC’s third novel, set in deepest Africa. It’s a heady mix of Evelyn Waugh (Handful of Dust) and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, without too much of the darkness. James, a documentary maker leaves the apparent civilised safety of life in the UK in search of his father, lost in the interior of Banguliland some thirty years earlier. James’s erstwhile wild sexy wife Magda is suing him for divorce. Escape into Africa is his best bet. Magda’s native excesses and contempt for conformity chime strangely with what James will find in the wilds of Banguliland. Armed with diaries from Mrs de Luth, his father’s disciple who was present when he, allegedly drowned, James searches for the truth of his father’s disappearance. The journey takes us into a primitive, comic world where reality and myth are confused. A fascinating, compelling story unfolds. JC takes the reader to a place and state of mind which we of normal western types can only dream. 4 The Girl on the Train. Paula Hawkins. About time I tackled this much-trumped book – and film. Weirdly compelling to read even though the situation is so bizarre. Rachel, a crazy,alcoholic loser creates a fantasy life about a couple whose apparent domestic bliss she observes on her daily rail commute into London. Rachel used to live a few doors down with husband Tom before he kicked her out and remarried another basket case – Anna, with whom he has a little child, Evie. The interweaving of fact and fantasy through the diary-style narrative of Rachel and Anna is compulsive. The tensions of the group, which include Rachel’s long-suffering flatmate Cathy, the ‘fantasy couple’ Megan and Scott and Megan’s psychotherapist Kumal, spill forwards and backwards in time, revealing horrors of the past and the murder of one of the cast. Far-fetched it certainly is but the dynamics and jealousies of close relationships are finely observed; the first-person narrative is twitchingly effective. It’s a rapid read and effective noir-ish hokum. 4The Gustav Sonata. Rose Tremain. Another moving, affecting story from RT. Gustav and Anton forge a school friendship which will last a lifetime. Post war Switzerland is recovering but Gustav’s mother, embittered by the early death of her husband and the coldness shown by her own mother, deals harshly with the her young son. She doesn’t approve of his friendship with the young Jewish, piano protege Anton. After all her husband was sacked and outcast for his efforts to help Jews fleeing from Austria and Germany.RT takes us on the journey of all their lives. Love beyond friendship is at the heart of the novel and each story informs and links the story of the two boys as they grow into manhood and, later, old age. 4+ Back When We Were Grown-Ups. Anne Tyler. Rebecca was a shy college girl, affianced to the dull-but-clever Will Allenby before she chucked that life away and married divorced Joe, 33 and with three young kids. When Joe dies unexpectedly, six years after their whirlwind romance and marriage, Rebecca is left to run the family house, business (party-hosting) and bring up the, now, four children. The early chapters introduce a great list of family characters at different life-stages. Poppy is about to turn 100 while MinFoo, Rebecca’s youngest daughter is about to give birth. In her early 50s when the novel starts, Rebecca reflects that she ‘turned into the wrong person.’ She sets about searching for her real self – meeting up again with the stodgy Will, amongst other things. Perhaps she realises, by the end, that life is what you make of it – and that there is no ‘wrong person.’ Funny and poignant but not one of her best. 3Great, Small, Things. Jodi Piccoult. Ruth, a black nurse stands accused of murder. White Supremacist Turk has made her responsible for the death of his newborn son while in hospital care. Typically JP examines the deep-seated culture and attitudes of a slice of American society, through the eyes of Ruth, her mother and son. Throw Rebecca, a campaigning , white lawyer into the mix and we have a courtroom drama overlaying many unanswered questions about how we live and what we think. I found it a compelling tale – the best of JP’s tub-thumping examinations of what makes America tick – or tock. 4 ................
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