Wild places, or, reading and not blogging

I’ve fallen into a blogging hole again, and it’s not because I haven’t been reading. Oh no. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been reading too much, and it’s seemed like much more fun to go pick up another book than to write about the one I’ve just read. However, I do intend to review the books I’ve read in the intervening time, so apologies for the wait!

I read five of Ann Cleeves’ crime novels set in Shetland. I’d read about the recent television adaptation of the third of the series, Red Bones, starring Douglas Henshall as the very un-Spanish-looking Jimmy Perez, and failed to watch it (normally I only watch TV online, and ‘Shetland’ was unavailable on the BBC’s iPlayer). I spent a month in Shetland back in 1994 collecting specimens of chromite for my undergraduate dissertation project, and, although I’ve never been back since, I keep meaning to do so, and explore more than I managed then. The Shetland Quartet books are set mostly on the mainland (the fourth, Blue Lightning, on Perez’s home island of Fair Isle), and are wonderfully evocative of the isolation and scenery of the islands.

Then, still on crime, I’ve been reading John Dickson Carr, available on e-book, including once farcical adventure, The Blind Barber, set on board a trans-Atlantic liner, and a couple of Nicholas Blake’s crime novels which don’t feature Nigel Strangeways.

Lastly, Little Red Reviewer’s recent read-alongs of Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men and Hat Full of Sky have inspired me to pick up all four of the Tiffany Aching series, and they are excellent! I really enjoyed the mix of humour and genuine menace. So now I’ve read those, I’m now re-reading more Pratchett…

REVIEW: Penguin Lines – various authors

The London Underground is 150 years old this year. In commemoration of this, Penguin have issued a series of books, one for each of the Underground Lines (the East London although not now in existence, has its own book, Buttoned Up, by the oddly named Fantastic Man, and the Docklands Light Railway is ignored), each by a different author. I’ve acquired three:

John Lanchester’s What We Talk About When We Talk About The Tube, about the District Line; John O’Farrell’s A History of Capitalism According to the Jubilee Line; and Danny Dorling’s The 32 Stops, about the Central Line.

Penguin 2013 paperback cover

Each book is a not inexpensive £4.99, which means a considerable outlay if one buys all twelve in the series. However, they’re well-designed and have simple, common aspects. Each has a trim of the colour which represents it on the Underground map (itself an iconic design): green for the District Line, light grey for the Jubilee and red for the Central. Each writer takes a different aspect, a personal take on what’s important or interesting about each line, as well as giving some history about it, too.

The writer John O’Farrell takes the Jubilee Line and imagines a dream on a train; in a situation of potential danger, there’s a debate about the strengths and disadvantages of capitalism as to how it relates to construction of the Jubilee Line, so that the passengers can determine which way to escape. It’s quirky and sometimes amusing – though I found it a lot less funny than I think the author intended.

Penguin 2013 paperback cover

Geographer Danny Dorling takes a different tack in his book about the Central Line. As we travel with him from West Ruislip to Woodford, west to east, we call in at typical households at each of the thirty-two stops, and see the drastic and not so drastic changes in circumstances – average GSCE pass scores, the numbers of children living in poverty, the percentage of people working in banking, and so on – between stops. It illustrates sharply the inequalities and oddnesses of life in London, such that using the underground line seems like an excellent starting point for this demonstration. Dorling provides a lot of references for his examples, from the families worried about schools in west London to the very rich of central London, to the elderly people of east London who see families in flight from the city. Thought-provoking and entertaining.

2013 Penguin paperback cover

John Lanchester, a journalist and writer, writes perhaps the most overtly historical summary of the Underground lines by taking the District Line as an example. The book is full of facts about the Underground in general and about the District Line in particular, and is nerdishly entertaining.

“The first District Line train out of Upminster in the morning is the first train anywhere on the Underground network. It leaves the depot at 4.53, the only train anywhere in the system to set out from its base before 5 a.m. That’s a kind of record: if you catch that train, you might be tempted to say, Ta-dah! – except you probably wouldn’t, because nobody is thinking Ta-dah! At seven minutes to five in the morning, certainly nobody on this train. People look barely awake, barely even alive. They feel the same way they look; I know because, this morning, I’m one of them.”

(p1, What We Talk About When We Talk About The Tube)

Lanchester also makes the distinction between the Underground and the Tube – terms often taken to be synonymous, even to regular users – but the Tube is the deep-tunnelled part of the Underground, and the District Line, although a large part of it does run underground, is not deep tunnelled and is fairly shallow.

The series is an interesting conceit, and I shall probably try to collect them all: next one up will probably be Camila Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company’s Mind the Child, on the Victoria Line.

Published by: Penguin (2013)

REVIEW: Original Sin – P. D. James

2010 Faber paperback cover

This is the tenth of P. D. James’ crime novels featuring her Metropolitan Police detective Adam Dalgliesh. Dalgliesh is a direct fictional descendent of Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn, though James’ novels are much more modern and less concerned with the crime novel as simple investigation or the solving of a puzzle, and rather with examining present-day life through the lens of a criminal investigation.

The story begins at Peverell Press, a publishing firm based in an imitation Venetian palazzo, Innocent House,  by the edge of the Thames in Wapping. The managing director, Gerard Etienne, has relatively recently stepped into the post: he is clear-sighted about the firm and what it should do in order to stay afloat in the current economic climate. However, he is not tactful or considerate, and his way of doing things is upsetting a lot of staff and his fellow partners: his sister Claudia; Frances Peverell, who is the last of the Peverells; James de Witt; and Gabriel Dauntsey, a now elderly but formerly well-regarded poet. Various things have been going wrong lately – illustrations being lost, proofs vandalised, the suicide of senior editor Sonia Clements – and all of this comes to a head with Gerard’s murder.

James has a relatively large cast of characters, but a fairly simple plot; although Dalgliesh is the senior officer, most of the responsibility for the investigation rests on Kate Miskin, now a Detective Inpector, and Daniel Aaron – also a DI but less senior than Kate. James cuts out the minutiae of a police investigation, focussing on certain aspects only, and sometimes surprising the reader by what she leaves out.

There’s a lot of background to the characters – Mandy Price, temporary short-hand typist, for example, or Daniel Aaron – but I’m not sure that all of this information is judiciously employed. Daniel’s on his way to his parents’ anniversary celebration when he gets called in to work, and I think that the dialogue could equally well have indicated his inner dilemma without the reader having to be presented with it. I feel that James can be a bit heavy-handed when describing her characters – telling, rather than showing – particularly when some of that detail adds nothing to our understanding of their character nor advances the plot in any way. She expends a lot of description on Innocent House, which strikes me as somewhat self-indulgent. And although Gerard Etienne considers one of the ways to save money is to sell Innocent House, he doesn’t also seem to consider that – even before that’s done – stopping the launch service which brings staff from Charing Cross to the office by water might also save some money.

While James doesn’t write boringly, and her plot is well-structured, I get a sense of chill, of disengagement – even when people are doing the right things or for reasons which appear to them to be right, there’s always some phrase or moment of self-knowledge which undercuts all that. Most of these characters seem to live detached lives – detached of circumstance or of choice – and none of them appear to have real, warm, loving feelings for anyone else – de Witt is possibly the only exception, and even he’s presented rather detachedly. Even the murderer seems unlikely – not perhaps in the despatch of Etienne, which is cleverly worked out, but the method of the two later murders seems wrong. And the ending bothered me, too. It all seemed overly melodramatic, and pointless.

As with many of James’ novels, because she sets them very closely in the time they were written, they seem to date very quickly. It isn’t something that I’ve noticed before, but James likes writing about her characters’ homes – as if by describing where they live gives us a short-cut to their inner lives: Kate Miskin’s new flat near the river near Limehouse, Daniel’s attachment to his family’s old home in East London rather than to his parents’ current home in Ilford, and his current problems with the flat he bought with a former girlfriend; James de Witt’s elegant Georgian house; the Etiennes, each with their flat in the Barbican, and so on. I’m not so sure that the minute description of, for example, Kate’s flat – although its location and size does demonstrate that her efforts to leave her poor, rather deprived roots behind have largely succeeded – really adds anything to the story or indeed to the reader’s understanding of Kate as a person and as a police officer. I’m also not sure whether Dalgliesh actually does a disservice to his team by heading the investigation, since with his increasing seniority his presence both in the investigation and this novel seems almost irrelevant.

I wouldn’t want you to think that this was a bad novel – James has a well-deserved reputation for crime fiction – it’s just that I’m not sure that I like this book much, nor do I even have much sympathy or liking for any of the characters. What was James trying to achieve here? Crime novel or general fiction? It seems an uneasy mix of the two.

Published by: Faber and Faber (2010, originally published in 1994)

REVIEW: Unfinished Tales – J. R. R. Tolkien

1982 Unicorn paperback cover

This was the first of the several books to be published by Christopher Tolkien about his father’s stories and conceptions of Middle-Earth after he edited The Silmarillion into a relatively coherent narrative. Unfinished Tales contains drafts of stories which Tolkien worked on from time to time and are presented in a relatively complete form, even if, like ‘Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin’, these narratives were included in a cut-down form in The Silmarillion. The range of histories covers the First Age, with Tuor and a long version of the Narn I Hîn Húrin, versions of which he wrote and re-wrote many times, with further details of the island of Númenor and the story of Aldarion and Erendis (an anti love story, maybe), drafts of the contradictory story of Galadriel and Celeborn; and more detailed essays about the ambush at the Gladden Fields where Isildur lost the Ring, the stories behind the Oath of Eorl, the quest of Erebor, the hunt for the Ring, and the Battle of the Fords of Isen, which form background to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Essays about the Istari, the Drúedain and the Palantíri are also included.

Like the other Histories of Middle Earth, it’s interesting to see how Tolkien’s creation – particularly of events in the First and Second Ages – rarely achieved a static, set in stone, this-is-how-things-were canon. When it came to events of The Lord of the Rings, things seem a little more settled, as though he had fixed ideas about what lay in the background of the mutually beneficial relationship between Rohan and Gondor which is so clearly stated in The Ride of the Rohírrim, even if these were never included in the published text. The inclusion of text describing the Battle of the Fords of Isen, for example, which although never achieving a final fixed definitive version, does nevertheless provide a useful background to what Gandalf was doing in between leaving the king and his followers at Edoras and before rejoining them outside Helm’s Deep, as well as providing a lot more information about the Rohírrim than is in the Lord of the Rings.

Being extracts and unfinished works, the book is very bitty-piecey, and won’t interest anyone who hasn’t read The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit or The Silmarillion – and maybe not all of those!

“Much of this book will be found unrewarding by readers of The Lord of the Rings who, holding that the historical structure of Middle-earth is a means and not an end, the mode of narrative and not its purpose, feel small desire of further exploration for its own sake, do not wish to know how the Riders of the Mark were organised, and would leave the Wild Men of Drúadan Forest firmly where they found them. My father would certainly not have thought them wrong.”

Introduction, p1-2

Some of the bits are more interesting than others – I can’t bring myself to feel great sympathy for Túrin, for example, and the Narn is the longest chunk of text in the book – but having recently watched the films made me think the bits about the Rohírrim much more interesting than when I first read this book back in 1986. The description of the oath-taking between Cirion and Eorl, for example, is actually moving, particularly an awe-struck Lord of Dol Amroth viewing Elendil’s tomb for the first and only time.

There’s also interest to be gained from the brief essay about the Istari – Wizards – which does a lot to explain the antipathy Saruman has for Radagast, and Gandalf himself if it comes to that, in The Lord of the Rings. However, it’s not a book with a single complete or finished narrative, and can be frustrating in that regard. Tolkien’s writing tends mostly to the style of The Silmarillion – it’s certainly not chatty or colloquial – and is best read as a companion to the orthodox texts.

Published by: George Allen and Unwin (1982)

REVIEW: Witches Abroad – Terry Pratchett

1992 Corgi paperback cover (image from Amazon)

This is one of the earlier Discworld novels, and features Pratchett’s trio of witches – Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick – who previously appeared in Equal Rites and Wyrd Sisters. In the small kingdom of Lancre, in the Ramtop Mountains, Desiderata Hollow, witch and fairy godmother, awaits Death with the confidence of one who knows exactly when she’s going to die. She sends her magic wand – though it’s not named as such – to Magrat, with the instructions that she is to go to Genua, make sure that Ella Saturday does not marry the prince, and on no account to take Granny Weatherwax or Nanny Ogg with her.

Needless to say, the three witches set out for Genua, and encounter or subvert several stories – there’s a lovely bit where the three witches, plus Nanny Ogg’s cat Greebo, manage to destroy a vampire in the Count Dracula mould, though it’s never stated as such. Once they arrive in Genua – which is like a Discworld New Orleans – they find that making sure that Ella does not go to the ball is not as easy as it sounds, and they have a formidable opponent, as well as allies.

This is one of my favourites of Pratchett’s books. Here he’s deconstructing stories, and it’s fantastic to see how he has the witches subverting them, while their antagonist, Lady Lilith de Tempscire, tries to use the stories for more power. There are nods to Dracula (as previously mentioned), The Wizard of Oz, the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and Cinderella, most noticeably, and probably to Hemingway’s descriptions of the bull-running of Pamplona in The Sun Also Rises. Magrat’s struggles with the wand – it has a tendency to reset to pumpkins – lead to some amusing predicaments, as well as being of some use. What he’s also interested in is free choice – Genua under Lilith’s governance is a fairytale city, where “people smiled and were joyful all the livelong day. Especially if they wanted to see another livelong day…” but people are not stories, and people are messy creatures.

There’s also a theme of identity – Magrat wants to “find herself”, for example, though the other two witches, so serenely self-confident and content in their own skins, can’t see why she’d want to do this – she is who she is, surely? Quite apart from the transformations which occur in the novel – wolves thinking they were men, the Duc who’s nominally in charge of Genua, horses to rats, Greebo into a human (which is a fantastic passage) – there’s the knowledge that Granny Weatherwax has to face on encountering Lilith, that she herself has forged some of her identity from having to be someone other than a bad witch.

This is a very entertaining mash-up of fairy-tale deconstruction and travel novel, and is very funny.

Published by: Corgi (1992)

BOOK TO SCREEN: The Lord of the Rings

I was off work last Friday with an immovable neck, and since I couldn’t do anything useful, I sat down and watched the extended DVD editions of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King (I don’t have The Two Towers, though I have seen it). It’s been a while since I last watched them. While I agree with the view that Tolkien’s novel is probably unfilmable as written, and that Jackson mostly did a pretty good job of filming the book, they didn’t capture my imagination as the book did. Admittedly, I was around nine or ten when I first read The Lord of the Rings, and the films came out twenty years later, but there is a magic about the book which I don’t feel was there in the films, particularly now, ten years after their release.

There’ll be spoilers, so be warned if you haven’t seen the films or read the book.

The good points. The look of the films was generally fantastic – the costumes, the landscape both natural and computer rendered, the simple attention to detail (particularly noticeable in the copious DVD extras). The acting was generally good, even if very few of the characters actually looked how Tolkien described them or how I’d envisaged them. And the action scenes and battles were exciting, though not particularly realistic. I thought that The Fellowship of the Ring was the better film, both as an adaptation of Tolkien’s text, despite the omissions and changes, and as a film: there were fewer longueurs and it hung together more cohesively. It helps, of course, that until the breaking of the Fellowship, there’s mostly a linear storyline, which isn’t the case with the other two films or the rest of the book.  There were a lot of fan complaints at the time of the first film about Arwen’s considerably beefed-up role – she barely appears in the book – which didn’t bother me too much, at least, not in the first film, where she basically takes on the role that Glorfindel played in the book. Of what Tolkien wrote about Elves, too, this isn’t entirely unrealistic.

However, there were a lot of things I really disliked about the films, particularly Return of the King, which were mostly to do with characterisation, and for which I place most blame on Jackson as director, and he, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, the screenwriters. Firstly, the hobbits were portrayed as comic characters who lucked out, and whose strength of mind and resilience – particularly of Frodo and Sam – were nowhere to be seen. Merry and Pippin just happening upon Sam and Frodo as they leave the Shire, and their appearance at the Council of Elrond reinforces this idea that they’re feckless and silly. The omission of The Scouring of the Shire – where they discover that war has effects at home as well as far away – from the end of the third film completely diminishes their achievements (this omission of course explained the different gifts given by Galadriel in the first film – poor Sam gets fobbed off with a coil of rope instead of his box of earth, for example). It also makes Aragorn’s remarks at his coronation in the third film that the hobbits should “bow to no-one” seem utterly absurd, particularly since he was addressing Merry and Pippin as well, and they hadn’t actually contributed that much to the defeat of Sauron.

Secondly, Aragorn’s uncertainty and doubt about the kingship and his relationship with Arwen did not ring true, and made him – of all people – seem less heroic and even uncertain of himself. In the book he has moments of self-doubt, it’s true, about what he should be doing, but he never loses sight of the ultimate goal, and it’s never implied anywhere that Arwen had any second thoughts about marrying him once they’d become betrothed. I think this was a general issue with the adaptation – that no-one was allowed to be absolutely honourable and heroic. Denethor, for example, was portrayed in the third film as already sunk in despair, so much so that he couldn’t even be bothered to have the beacons lit which would call for aid from the Rohirrim (though the bit where the beacons were shown lighting, one after another, was very stirring to watch): one of the interesting things about book!Denethor is that he is honourable, and cares for his people, and he only succumbs at the last to despair when he sees, as he thinks, inevitable defeat sailing up the river. And I’m not even going to go there with Faramir, my favourite character from the book (though the worst part of what the films did to him was in The Two Towers). Poor Gimli was treated as a comic turn (as were Merry and Pippin, mostly), there for light relief. Although in the book there are amusing moments which involve him – his rivalry with Legolas in killing Orcs at Helm’s Deep, or Boromir’s ironic remark about everyone being tired “except, no doubt, our sturdy dwarf”, when Gimli is half-asleep – he is a serious sort of person and one whom I can’t imagine engaging in a drinking contest with Legolas.

And there was an awful lot of plot tomfoolery. I won’t go into everything that bugged me, but will mention the most egregrious example. Since Narsil was not reforged before the Company left Rivendell, Aragorn had to wait until after the battle at Helm’s Deep to receive Andúril from Elrond, who turned up casually in Rohan to deliver it, and then disappeared again. I mean, what? And things which were changed then led to other changes, which led to illogicalities. The fact that Aragorn saw in the palantír of Orthanc Arwen dying, rather than the fleet coming north to wreak havoc on Gondor, removed all the urgency from his long, brutal journey through the Paths of the Dead and into southern Gondor (which is thrillingly recounted by Gimli and Legolas in the book), and again undermined his utter self-confidence in his destiny. The Mouth of Sauron, for example, implied in his parley with Aragorn and Gandalf that Frodo had been killed by torture – if so, then they would have absolutely no incentive to agree to Sauron’s terms. And so it went on (though my rant stops here).

Maybe I am too much attached to the book after thirty years to like any film which could be made of The Lord of the Rings, and I’m being unfair to these adaptations. Having re-watched two of the three, however, reinforces my conviction that I would not enjoy Jackson’s The Hobbit films. The BBC did a fantastic version on radio back in 1981 – which took a little less than 13 hours (though the three extended edition films are together almost 11-and-a-half hours long) which remained much more faithful to the plot and the characterisation, though omitting certain parts, such as the bits with Tom Bombadil, understandably. Although I dislike some of the voices (Jack May as Théoden, for example), it was generally very well cast, and its use of music was very well integrated into the dramatisation. Of course, it doesn’t have the visual power of Jackson’s version, but it does let one use one’s imagination.

REVIEW: The Everyday Dancer – Deborah Bull

Faber paperback cover (image from Amazon)

Deborah Bull was formerly a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet, and her aim in this book is to give an idea about what a typical day (if one exists) in the life of a professional dancer in a large company. The day runs from the first class of the day to going home after the performance finishes, and takes in rehearsals of all sorts, together with preparations for the next ballet.

Bull writes in a readable, conversational style, being realistic about the hard work required, but also giving interesting insights into the life of a professional ballet dancer. It’s rather eye-opening to read about a life ruled by notice-boards, being prepared to hang around at the theatre until just before curtain-up in case one of the soloists is injured, and one’s career almost entirely dependent on the whims of others (I read recently that Adam Cooper, for example, left the Royal Ballet because of the lack of control he had over the roles he danced).

While talking about a dancer’s day, Bull also gives snippets of ballet’s history – mentioning Pierre Beauchamps, Louis XIV’s ballet master, and Arthur Saint-Leon in a discussion about notation, for instance – and since she danced in a company with a relatively long history, she writes about previous dancers who have inhabited the roles in the past, and previous productions.

To an outsider, the first rehearsals of a ballet would probably appear to be rather slow and inconsequential, fractured movement phrases interrupted by some head scratching and sections repeated over and over again as we struggle to claw back the physical sensation of choreography that has not been danced – or even thought about – for months, if not years. It’s hard – even for the dancers involved – to see the connection between these early studio calls and the polished performance of the first night.

p55 (Faber paperback edition)

Bull doesn’t use a lot of unfamiliar terminology, and when she does, takes care to explain it. This book could be read by anyone who knows almost nothing of ballet, but is simply interested. It’s one of the best books about ballet I’ve read, which gives a really good idea of what life in a ballet company is actually like, the good and bad parts alike.

Faber paperback cover (image from Amazon)

I also read recently another book by Bull about ballet, written in conjunction with the critic Luke Jennings, The Faber Pocket Guide to Ballet. This is a fantastic guide, being both a brief history of ballet from its earliest beginnings to the present day, and a summary of ballets (their plots, summaries and often a “dancer’s view” of the ballet from Bull) performed by various companies which Bull and Jennings considered ‘classics’.

From the reader’s point of view, there’s not nearly enough of Bull’s personal views about what it’s like to dance in some of these ballets – interestingly, she has much more to say about William Forsythe’s Steptext and in the middle, somewhat elevated than she does about classics such as Coppélia. And of course, Bull is limited in her remarks to the ballets in which she herself appeared (thus swathes of Ballet Theatre and early Ashton repertoire lack her insight). She’s amusing about the ‘bad girl’ roles she tended to dance – Lescaut’s mistress in Kenneth Macmillan’s Manon, for example, or Gamzatti in Petipa’s La Bayadère. Jennings also isn’t an impartial guide: his remarks about Macmillan’s The Judas Tree, for example, are trenchant:

My personal feelings are that whatever MacMillan’s allegorical and religious intentions, the absurdity of the onstage scenario makes it difficult to take them seriously.

p195 (Faber paperback edition)

Published by: Faber (2011 – The Everyday Dancer; 2004 The Faber Pocket Guide to Ballet)

REVIEW: Murder Actually – Stephanie McCarthy

Attica e-book edition cover

Elspeth Gray, a romance novelist in her mid-thirties, has been living in All Hallows (a small town in New York) following her divorce. She treads safe and unthreatening ground with her books, and proclaims her distaste for crime novels. However, following a reading of her latest book at the local bookshop, Inkwell Books, she finds a dead body: the body being that of Jasper Wade, a successful and wealthy writer of crime fiction who lives in the town. The way the body’s been killed and left seems to mirror the method used in one of Jasper’s own novels, and the police soon come to the conclusion that Jasper’s put-upon wife, Nora, whom he was about to divorce for his assistant, Violet, was the culprit. Reluctantly, Elspeth and her much more enthusiastic friend, Julia, investigate for themselves.

Naturally, the potential suspects are a fairly tight-knit bunch and could include Alex Ware, Jasper’s brother, whose real estate business was on the verge of crashing, or Crispin Wickford, proprietor of the local newspaper who had been gambling; or Sabrina Elliot, once engaged to Jasper but later humiliatingly jilted by him. Complicating Elspeth’s personal life is the re-appearance of Grant, her ex-husband, and his fiancée, Ainsley, a reporter, and a new arrival in town, Edgar Archer, as well as Bootsie Spright, whose own efforts at the romance genre head more into the Fifty Shades of Grey territory than Elspeth’s tamer efforts.

This was an entertaining book, rather wry, with Elspeth openly mocking her chosen genre, and some amusing moments (such as the bits which poke fun at the crime-solving-cat kind of mystery novel). In explaining to Jasper the hackneyed plots which characterise the mystery genre, Elspeth in fact sets the tone for this novel itself. The tone is thus a bit self-referential and also rather schizophrenic: the narrative remarks seem to imply a contempt for the genre which the novel itself evidently does not. This ironic view, instead of amusing the reader, instead gives a sensation of the whole book being rather calculated: almost, but not quite, a pastiche of the genre. Elspeth and her friends are stuck in a hackneyed situation but fail to recognise it, though they do make reference to the clichés of the mystery genre. Although the plot is workmanlike enough, and some of the characters are entertaining, Elspeth herself is a bit bland. While this is quite realistic for a writer (and there are a couple of touches which bring her character momentarily to life), it seems wrong for a mystery novel’s protagonist and narrator to be so passive and – dare one say it – boring.

While this may be a convention of the ‘cosy’ mysteries (of which Julia, for example, is a fan), I also felt that there were a few problems: characterisation is subordinated to the conveniences of the plot, except in the minor characters such as Elspeth’s agent Paula and the cheerful Bootsie, or Mrs Jennings, who appears to have crept into the narrative from another novel. Secondly, the romantic triangle in which Elspeth finds herself seems forced; and thirdly, the cast of characters is overwhelmingly white and middle-class (apart from Mrs Jennings). My knowledge of New York commuter towns is culled almost entirely from Joyce Carol Oates’ far less cosy My Sister, My Love, so maybe this is entirely accurate, but it seems to me that it would have worked better in a small town in the Mid-West where the population is more homogenous.

So, in short, it’s a bit of a calculated effort, but worth reading if you like this kind of mystery novel, and with potential for more if McCarthy can disguise the artifice.

Published by: Attica Books (2013)

I received a free copy of the e-book from the author.

REVIEW: Ysabel – Guy Gavriel Kay

HarperCollins paperback cover (image from Amazon)

Ned Marriner is in the south of France with his famous photographer father, who’s taking pictures for a new book. Also along for the ride is Edward Marriner’s ultra-competent assistant, Melanie, and Greg and Steve, who also help out by driving the equipment van, loading and unloading of equipment, and other tasks. The first day in Aix, Ned’s keeping out of the way inside the cathedral when he meets Kate Wenger, an exchange student from New York about his age, and the two of them encounter, firstly a carving of a woman who Ned instinctively knows isn’t the Queen of Sheba, and then a lean, bald man in a grey leather jacket who is subtly threatening.

Before long, Ned and Kate – and then the rest of the Canadian crew – are dragged into the reiteration of a very old story: a love triangle in which two men endlessly replay the same drama of fighting for the same woman, though who wins her is not always the same. Two characters from Kay’s earlier Fionavar Tapestry books appear, and their presence, as well as his father’s and the others, helps Ned to face down the very real dangers that exist in his meddling with the story, and to help him come to terms with this crashing in of the past and a possibly supernatural ability into the real world.

Kay uses the locations of Provence and its history beautifully in telling the story. Ned’s a realistic character, and his shy and uncertain interactions with Kate are nicely done; likewise, Kate’s a nice girl, intelligent and bookish, and more knowledgeable than Ned. The actors in the love triangle are interesting, too, though I had more sympathy for Phelan than for Cadell – maybe because he’s the one presented first in the narrative, and whose point of view Kay more clearly articulates than Cadell’s. He also seems a bit more complex, certainly, and more tired of the endless rivalry through the centuries which has never reached an end or definitive conclusion. Ysabel herself is a bit more of a cipher, understandably. There are glimpses of Celtic mythology, in particular, with the presence of a druid, wolves, and a gigantic boar, but the history of Provence, and its varied conquerors and occupiers – and the conflict between the Roman and the Celtic cultures there – form the basis of the book.

While it’s not as sweeping or epic in scope as most of his other novels, Ysabel is well-written and evocative, both of landscape and history. There’s a very jarring bit at the end, where I think Kay forgets exactly how old each of the characters is, but otherwise the characterisation is well done and Ned remains realistically centre-stage of the action. The bits specifically involving photography, and the techniques thereof, seem realistic and I found them interesting, even if they don’t advance the plot significantly (aside from Ned’s first visit to Mont Saint-Victoire). The appearance of two characters from Kay’s previous novels doesn’t over-balance the narrative, though obviously it does give more resonance if you’ve already read about their previous history and thus know why they’re so confident (or can act that way) in their confrontations with Cadell and Phelan. Most of the characters are visitors to Provence, and there are very few interactions with locals, apart from the two women who cook and clean at the villa where the Marriners are staying, and a security guard at one of the sites visited in the search for Ysabel. It may be that this is realistic – visitors do tend to keep to themselves when abroad – but it does give less depth to the narrative.

A bit of a departure for Kay, but an entertaining ‘fantasy in the real world’ kind of novel, nevertheless, with realistic and sympathetic characters and a believable teenage hero.

Published by: HarperCollins (2007)

I purchased this as an e-book.

REVIEW: The Last Light of the Sun – Guy Gavriel Kay

HarperCollins paperback cover (image from Amazon)

This novel, set in the same world as the Sarantine Mosaic duology and The Lions of Al-Rassan, takes as its starting point the reign of Alfred the Great and his struggles against the raiding Danes. In Kay’s world, the Danes are the Erlings, the English are the Anglcyn and the Welsh the Cyngael. Despite the length of the book, there’s not a vast amount of plot: Kay is more concerned with portraying character and culture, and particularly the culture contrast and clash between the three peoples.

Bern Thorkellson is a young Erling with limited prospects since his father’s exile for murder and consequent confiscation of his lands. Determining to leave Rabady Isle after the death of the governor who proclaimed Thorkell’s exile (and married his wife), Bern steals a horse and seeks magical aid of Iord, seer of the isle, to get off it unseen and unfollowed.

Alun ap Owyn of Cadyr, prince of one of the three Cyngael provinces, travels with his elder brother Dai, to raid cattle from a farm which only later they realise is owned by Brynn ap Hywll, renowned for defeating the Erlings, and the legendary Siggur Volganson in particular. Luckily prevented from going to almost certain death thanks to the intervention of the Jaddite cleric Ceinion of Llywerth, Dai’s men instead find themselves fighting Erling raiders on Brynn’s behalf. Alun later accompanies Ceinion, along with Thorkell, one of the Erlings, into the land of the Anglcyn, to the court of King Aeldred.

The plot really consists of Bern, Alun and Thorkell getting to Esferth, Aeldred’s capital, and thwarting the plans of the deeply unpleasant Ivarr Ragnarson, grandson of Siggur Volganson. Also wound in amongst this are glimpses of the faery world, since Alun, Brynn and Aeldred can see spirits, and despite the teachings of the Jaddites, even Ceinion is forced to acknowledge their existence, much though he wishes he could not. There are interesting reminders of otherworldly powers mentioned in Sailing to Sarantium (particularly Crispin’s encounters in the Godwood on the Day of the Dead), and the extreme fear of the primeval forest which the Cyngael and the Anglcyn have as home of the faery. Kay doesn’t really explain their presence, though one, nameless, faery becomes important to the plot and to at least two of the characters.

The pleasures of Kay’s writing is the writing itself, and the detail and care which he renders his world. While he takes a great deal from history, his version is nonetheless realistic and well-realised. Since the three cultures he depicts are rather male-dominated, there aren’t so many strong female characters as in some of his other books, but he does give them roles and responsibilities: he’s a bit hard on Rhiannon, I think, who’s Brynn’s daughter, and who knows rather too well how beautiful she is and can’t help but enjoy her power over men, but she is realistic and admirable in other ways. It’s not her fault that Dai falls for her, after all, even if Alun blames her for the consequences. The only truly unpleasant character is Ivarr (Iord does a malicious thing, for example, but she has a reasonable motive for her malice): it’s just a shame he’s described as deformed, and one of the other characters explicitly comments that the deformed in body are deformed in spirit. While this view was probably period-accurate, Kay undermines the point, I think, by making Ivarr such a psychopath, since it seems to endorse the view without comment.

I do like the way Kay contrasts the two daughters of Aeldred, Judit and Kendra. Judit is hot-tempered, rebellious, fond of fighting with her brothers, and shortly to be betrothed to the son of the King of Rhegen (possibly analogous to the Scots). Kendra, quiet and not at all rebellious, makes the wry comment that, after all, where did that rebellion actually get her sister, since it hasn’t achieved anything that she really wanted. Kendra’s a delightful character, and I particularly liked her quiet courage and her developing relationship with Alun.

The ends are rather more neatly and happily tied up than is usual in Kay’s books. Although the book is quite long, and although the plot isn’t involved or sweepingly epic, it’s very readable, and the main characters are portrayed very sympathetically. The world-building is excellent, and the cultures of the three main countries are interestingly contrasted.

Published by: HarperCollins (epub 2010, originally published 2004)