Manhattan Beach

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan is a multi-award-winning American novelist and short story writer.  She won the Pulitzer in 2011 for A Visit from the Goon Squad.  Manhattan Beach is her fifth novel.  

Amazon says: 
Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression.

'We're going to see the sea,' Anna whispered.

Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles.

Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career as a Ziegfield folly, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a night club, she chances to meet Styles, the man she visited with her father before he vanished, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father's life, the reasons he might have been murdered.

Mesmerizing, hauntingly beautiful, with the pace and atmosphere of a noir thriller and a wealth of detail about organized crime, the merchant marine and the clash of classes in New York, Egan's first historical novel is a masterpiece, a deft, startling, intimate exploration of a transformative moment in the lives of women and men, America and the world. Manhattan Beach is a magnificent novel by one of the greatest writers of our time.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/29/manhattan-beach-jennifer-egan-review

What I thought:
Much of the action is set in the New York dockyard during World War II.  The narrative is a female voice.  Well constructed, the novel moves between the characters and timescales.  Some of the most vivid writing centres around Anna's attempts and ultimate success at becoming a sub aqua diver.  I did feel, as did a fellow reader when we discussed it, that the ending was rushed.  As the Guardian reviewer notes, the author decided to withhold crucial scenes until late in the book and I found this unsatisfactory.   It seemed to be late in the day to have those revelations.  It was this that gave the impression of an abrupt ending. 

  

TWO MERMAIDS: The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock and Elijah's Mermaid

A couple of days after fulfilling my obligations to book group etiquette and ploughing through my duo of thrillers I am able to refind good writing.....

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar

I stumbled upon this title whilst searching on the internet for information about The Essex Serpent. I think probably it was mentioned in the context of being another novel about a mythical creature, set in a similar time-frame as the 'Serpent' and written with a real feel for the language and mores of the time.  It is authentic to the ear.  Once I had pulled up an image of the cover I was smitten ............ in shades of grey and yellow it features a scallop shell, one of the most beautiful forms in nature to my mind, and the shell which features most prominently in my shell collection.  The shapes, colours are so various.  There are some 300 species of scallop extant, and to read more about this fascinating shell and the way it features in our lives nutritionally and culturally (think architecture, furniture, décor, jewellery, utensils, religion) check out Wiki.

But to return to the book, here is what Amazon has to say:

‘A brilliantly plotted story of mermaids, madams and intrigue in 1780s London and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it become the Essex Serpent of 2018’ - The Pool'Imogen Hermes Gowar is a soon-to-be literary star’ - Sunday Times

THIS VOYAGE IS SPECIAL. IT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING.

One September evening in 1785, the merchant Jonah Hancock hears urgent knocking on his front door. One of his captains is waiting eagerly on the step. He has sold Jonah’s ship for what appears to be a mermaid.

As gossip spreads through the docks, coffee shops, parlours and brothels, everyone wants to see Mr Hancock’s marvel. Its arrival spins him out of his ordinary existence and through the doors of high society. At an opulent party, he makes the acquaintance of Angelica Neal, the most desirable woman he has ever laid eyes on… and a courtesan of great accomplishment. This meeting will steer both their lives onto a dangerous new course, on which they will learn that priceless things come at the greatest cost.

Where will their ambitions lead? And will they be able to escape the destructive power mermaids are said to possess?

In this spell-binding story of curiosity and obsession, Imogen Hermes Gowar has created an unforgettable jewel of a novel, filled to the brim with intelligence, heart and wit.

And for an extract of the book you can find the opening chapter here:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/find-your-next-read/extracts/2016/jun/the-mermaid-and-mrs-hancock-by-imogen-hermes-gowar/

And this is what I thought:

By way of introduction, well over twenty years ago, a friend and fellow conchologist with a special interest in curiosities of natural history asked me if I would arrange to go to the Booth Museum in Brighton and take photographs of the 'mermaid' they were holding in their collections.  He, David Heppell, was compiling a book of unnatural curiosities of natural history.  Often these would be Chimerae, imaginary monsters compounded of incongruous parts.  The Brighton mermaid was no exception being the melding of an ape head and torso complete with its forelimbs and the tail of a fish.  Extremely ugly but some of these artefacts were so well made they were convincing.  The first mermaid in Gowar's book is clearly of this type.  

In many ways a companion volume to The Essex Serpent of Victorian East Anglia, this debut novel steps back further, to Georgian London, and features as one of its principal characters, a 'mermaid'.  Gowar's  human cast is cleverly set in its various hierarchical milieu, with appropriate vocabulary, turns of phrase,  speech fashions and behaviour according to social class, and their respective susceptibilities and superstitions.

Gowar has written with wit and panache and in particular delivers a masterly interlude when the 'Madam',Bet Chappell, hires the wizened little mermaid to draw customers to her upscale brothel, the grotesque curio only emphasising the beauty of the women who frolic round it, draped in pearls, their privities dyed bright seaweed green, in a masque of the sea that turns into a carefully orchestrated orgy.   Without doubt this is an erotic piece of writing but with so much taste.......  Another vivid and moving passage occurs towards the end of the book when Bet Chappell faces retribution for connivance in pandering to the public appetite for sins of the flesh.

So I thoroughly enjoyed this book on many levels.  I found the notion of mermaids and the public fascination with the possibility of their existence, which flows through the narrative, to be captivating and, in a sense takes me full circle since the day I first gazed upon that ugly monstrosity in a glass case in Brighton Museum. 

LATER

…… Some time after reading this book my attention was drawn to another 'Mermaid' novel by Katharine.  Only too eager to indulge my fascination with mermaids I settled to read:

Elijah's Mermaid by Essie Fox

Check out this blogspot for a beautiful site about this book with some captivating illustrations:

http://elijahsmermaidreviews.blogspot.com/

This short blurb appears on Amazon:

Saved from the Thames one foggy London night, Pearl grows up at the House of Mermaids - a brothel that becomes the closest thing to home. But despite being cosseted and spoiled by the Madame, come her 14th year, Pearl is to be sold to the highest bidder. 

Orphaned twins Lily and Elijah are on a rare trip to London when they meet the ethereal Pearl. And the repercussions of this chance encounter will bind all their fates together, in a dark and dangerous way.

Bewitching, gothic and sensual, this is a tale of love and betrayal in a world where nothing is quite as it seems.

There is a longer synopsis/review on the web page of the author, Monique Mulligan

https://moniquemulligan.com/2013/03/02/review-elijahs-mermaid-by-essie-fox/

This review inevitably contains plot spoilers so should be read with that proviso. 

And what did I think:

Well...……… if you like seriously gothic, Victorian London, under-belly aspects of a demi-monde life in a story of love and betrayal , obsession and guilt, you may well find this an engaging read.  Women and children are exploited as victims of poverty, a male culture and the world of the Madame and her brothel.  There are family bonds that tie and relationships to be revealed as the story unfolds.  

What I do like is the several sections at the end of the book where Fox mentions real historical characters who have influenced those in her novel, real places which have influenced her settings, including the Grotto at Margate which I know well, and other themes relating to photography, health.  She also provides a glossary of Victorian slang which occurs in her prose.  I like it when authors bother to give that information to their readers.  This contrasts with an absence of such ancillary information in Imogen Hermes Gowar's book.  I thought she ought to have given a nod to the 'mermaid' which must have in part inspired The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock.  She has worked as a curator in the museum world, surely she must have come across an example of the 'monkey-fish' monstrosities that were contrived and passed off as genuine mermaids.  I am always impressed by authors who give the reader some background as to the origins of their works of fiction or non-fiction.

I found this novel sat quite nicely in the context of other recently-read titles such as the Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, also The Essex Serpent.  It also picks up on themes in A Year of Marvellous Ways.  Sometimes it is fun to read a gaggle of books whose plots and themes echo each other in some ways.  

Then again I am always a sucker for the stuff of mermaids...…..

Lone Wolf

Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult

My neighbour Claire offered me this book as a serving suggestion.  Jodi Picoult is a best-selling author of twenty three novels.  And yet I had never read one of her books.  Somehow one of her titles has never been suggested by my fellow readers, nor as a chosen book for one of my book groups.  With a stack of books awaiting my attention I was very tempted to set the book politely aside.  And then I thought I owed Claire to at least investigate.

Amazon says:  

Following a terrible accident, Luke Warren lies comatose in a hospital bed. His family have been told he might never wake up. 

After seven years of estrangement, Edward has come to face his father for what he believes to be one final time before he discontinues his life support. To Edward, this is a painful but necessary decision which his father would have wanted.

However, this one decision throws the Warren family into bitter conflict and it isn't long before long-kept painful secrets are forced into the light.

Number One bestselling author Jodi Picoult casts a sensitive and humane eye on the question of what makes and breaks a family in this compelling, emotional bestseller.

Synopsis

Cara, 17, still holds a grudge against her brother, since his departure led to her parents’ divorce. In the aftermath, she’s lived with her father – an animal conservationist who became famous after living with a wild wolf pack in the Canadian wild. It is impossible for her to reconcile the still, broken man in the hospital bed with her vibrant, dynamic father.

With Luke’s chances for recovery dwindling, Cara wants to wait for a miracle. But Edward wants to terminate life support and donate his father’s organs. Is he motivated by altruism, or revenge? And to what lengths will his sister go to stop him from making an irrevocable decision?

Further notes:

LONE WOLF looks at the intersection between medical science and moral choices. If we can keep people who have no hope for recovery alive artificially, should they also be allowed to die artificially? Does the potential to save someone else’s life with a donated organ balance the act of hastening another’s death? And finally, when a father’s life hangs in the balance, which sibling should get to decide his fate? 

So what I thought:

Having initially thought that I must attempt to read this book as part of the reciprocity between readers - I'll read your recommendation if you'll read mine! - I enjoyed the narrative as being thought-provoking, topical, in view of a recent case concerning a small child  with an undiagnosed neurodegenerative disorder who is on ventilatory life support, and excellent material for discussion within the forum of a book group.  I also really enjoyed the chapters giving Luke's voice as he describes his path to understanding and adopting wolf behaviour.  To be recommended to Splinter. 

The Leopard

The Leopard by Jo Nesbo

Jo Nesbo is a Norwegian writer, musician, and former economist and reporter. As of March 2014, more than 3 million copies of his novels have been sold in Norway, and his work has been translated into over 40 languages, selling 30 million copies worldwide.  He is known primarily for his crime novels featuring Inspector Harry Hole.

Following the traumatic Snowman case,  a forerunning novel featuring police inspector Harry Hole, Hole  has exiled himself in Hong Kong. Kaja Solness, a new Norwegian Crime Squad officer, tracks down Hole and asks for his help investigating possible serial killings in Oslo. Hole is convinced to return when told that his father, Olav, is seriously ill and will not live much longer. Hole returns to Norway to find that the Crime Squad is in the middle of a power struggle with Kripos and its power-hungry head, Mikael Bellman, who seeks to puts his agency in sole charge of the country's murder cases. Hole finds himself the target of Bellman's hostility, though Bellman is keen to take credit for the result of Hole's work. 

Goodreads says:
In the depths of winter, a killer stalks the city streets. His victims are two young women, both found with twenty-four inexplicable puncture wounds, both drowned in their own blood. The crime scenes offer no clues, the media is reaching fever pitch, and the police are running out of options. There is only one man who can help them, and he doesn't want to be found. Deeply traumatised by The Snowman investigation, which threatened the lives of those he holds most dear, Inspector Harry Hole has lost himself in the squalor of Hong Kong's opium dens. But with his father seriously ill in hospital, Harry reluctantly agrees to return to Oslo. He has no intention of working on the case, but his instinct takes over when a third victim is found brutally murdered in a city park.

The victims appear completely unconnected to one another, but it's not long before Harry makes a discovery: the women all spent the night in an isolated mountain hostel. And someone is picking off the guests one by one. A heart-stopping thriller from the bestselling author of the The Snowman, The Leopard is an international phenomenon that will grip you until the final page.  

Compared to the other novels in the series, The Leopard has a more cinematic and action-oriented style, taking place across three continents. The Leopard also contains excessive violence. Nesbø has expressed regret for a couple of scenes in the book.  

What I thought:
As with the Nordic Noir genre of tv series, I enjoy crime thriller literature located in Scandinavian settings.  The chill and dark of the northern landscape and the gritty temperaments of the characters in those landscapes add to the brooding atmosphere in which the detective action takes place.  The Leopard is a fat paperback, some 600 pages in length, and I did find the novel was a shade longer than it needed to be with one or two red herrings leading to false endings as bit by bit all possible candidates for the killer were dangled in front of the reader and then ruled out.  All the same it was a good read and at the time of reading, the violence in the narrative did not particularly strike me as more excessive than that which I have come to expect of a Nesbo crime novel.

The Boys from Brazil

The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin

Amazon says:  In this classic thriller, Ira Levin imagines Dr Josef Mengele's nightmarish plot to restore the Third Reich. Alive and hiding in South America, thirty years after the end of the Second World War, Mengele gathers a group of former colleagues for a sinister project - the creation of the Fourth Reich. Ageing Nazi hunter Yakov Lieberman is informed of the plot but before he hears the evidence, his source is killed . . . Spanning continents and inspired by true events, what follows is one of Levin's most masterful tales, both timeless and chillingly plausible. Praise for Ira Levin: 'Levin is the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel' Stephen King 

A brief plot summary:

As well as being a successful playwright, screenwriter and composer, Ira Levin has written several bestselling and well-known novels including these classic thrillers: Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives, A Kiss Before Dying, as well as The Boys from Brazil. All these books have been made into equally successful films.  

Published in 1976, The Boys from Brazil opens with the outline of a compelling plot: six men are instructed by a white-suited, evil kingpin to kill 94 men across the world on certain dates, all of whom are civil servants around the age of 65. It seems a strange target demographic, but then we discover that the operation's guiding hand belongs to Dr Josef Mengele, the German SS officer and physician who earned the epithet "Angel of Death" from his gruesome medical experiments in Auschwitz.

Yakov Liebermann, an elderly Jewish Nazi-hunter (Mengele's nemesis who is a conflation of Nazi-hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal and Serge Klarsfield, who attempted to capture Mengele in South America) uncovers the plot at an embryonic stage. He proves to be an unthreatening – but very tenacious – protagonist, whose patience and brainpower finally unravels the horrific and insane reason for the murders.

In some ways the book is now fairly dated - it was first published in 1976 - and at the time of publication the inclusion of real or near-real characters must have added a chilling dimension. What scares today is Levin's premise based on biological engineering: in the 1970s, although scientifically possible, Mengele's plan belonged firmly in the realm of fiction; now it's not nearly so far-fetched.

Ira Levin's narrative is a compelling page-turner and makes chilling and disquieting reading in the light of genetic advances and also in the context of political upheavals and machinations in the current day.   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_from_Brazil_%28novel%29

The Travelling Cat Chronicles

The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa

"Anyone who has ever unashamedly loved an animal will read this book with gratitude, for its understanding of an emotion that ennobles us as human beings, whether we value it or not," so writes Lynne Truss in her excellent review of the book in The Guardian.  

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/17/travelling-cat-chronicles-hiro-arikawa-review

At its simplest level it is a 'delightful tale of loyalty and friendship' , so writes John Boyne in Irish Times. 

Amazon says:

It's not the journey that counts, but who's at your side.Nana the cat is on a road trip, but he is not sure where he is going. All that matters is that he can sit beside his beloved owner Satoru in the front seat of his silver van. Satoru is keen to visit three old friends from his youth, though Nana doesn’t know why and Satoru won’t say.

Set against the backdrop of Japan’s changing seasons and narrated with a rare gentleness and humour, Nana’s story explores the wonder and thrill of life’s unexpected detours. It is about the value of friendship and solitude, and knowing when to give and when to take. TRAVELLING CAT has already demonstrated its power to move thousands of readers with a message of kindness and truth. It shows, above all, how acts of love, both great and small, can transform our lives.

'Arikawa has a lightness of touch that elevates her story to a tale about loyalty and friendship ... while speaking to our basic human need for companionship'  

What I thought:

Preamble:  I have been the owner of three cats during my life.  All very different and my parting from each was different.  Kitty the black cat, who came to live with us when I was pregnant with our first child (46 years ago), lived into old age until she suffered a stroke and it was kindest to ease her out of life.  Taffy, the beautiful ginger and white cat turned up on my doorstep.  He was young, barely a year the vet thought, and despite a phone call to the local police station and the Cats' Protection League, I did not find out from where he came.  Sadly he was run over in the road right in front of our house when he was about 6.  I wept buckets when I buried him at the top of the garden.

And then there was Rooney.  Ah...... dear Rooney, he lives on but not with me.  I had promised myself a cat when I completed my PhD in 2004 and so I sought a kitten through the good offices of our local vet, and as it turned out the veterinary nurse there had a female cat expecting kittens.  Rooney was born in June, one of a litter of 3: 2 male tabbies and a black female.

 Not long after he came to live with us we bought out house in France.  I had him vaccinated against Rabies and he travelled back and forth across the Channel with us for 6 years.  I thought he coped with this quite well; the only time he showed distress was when he had to endure a car journey trapped in his basket.  On the ferry he would hunker down in his basket and sleep the crossing out.  Upon arrival at either home, he settled into St Vaast and Winterborne Kingston readily.  True the day of departure, or the day before, would be somewhat stressful as we would have to trap him in a room so he should not disappear at the critical moment.

And then, through a set of circumstances, there arrived a moment when our granddaughters' desire to have a kitten, and Nick's need to liberate Rooney and himself from the rigours of travelling with a cat, conspired to bring about Rooney's move to Hackney in 2011.  Rooney is now 14 and lives a contented life with our son's family.  They love him dearly and he has no doubt made the enclave of walled gardens which form a core within the the streets of houses there, his own.  But when I see him I realise how much I would love a cat in my life again and like to think that in time there will be a fourth.

So Arikawa's books was bound to find favour with me and what reviews I have read seem not to make much of is the degree to which, through giving Nana a voice, she shows an understanding of the body language of cats, little items of behaviour, their contrariness and from this to deduce what makes a cat tick.

I did not guess where the story might be going, but looking back, of course the signs were there in the text.  Prepare to shed a tear.

Home Fire

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

• WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018
• SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD 2017
• LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017
• A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017
• AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017
• A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017
• A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017
• AN EVENING STANDARD BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017
• A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017

Review from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/10/home-fire-kamila-shamsie-review 

‘The book for our times’ Judges of the Women’s Prize

This is a powerful exploration of the clash between society, family and faith in the modern world

Isma, after years spent raising her twin siblings in the wake of their mother’s death, is finally able to study in the USA. But she has concerns for her sister, Aneeka, beautiful and headstrong who lives in London and for their brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared in pursuit of his own dream: to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew.

Then Eamonn, son of a powerful British Muslim politician, enters the sisters’ lives. Handsome and privileged, he inhabits a London worlds away from theirs. As the son of a powerful British Muslim politician, Eamonn has his own birthright to live up to – or defy. Through his relationship with Aneeka he might be the means of Parvaiz’s salvation? The two families’ fates become inextricably and dangerously  entwined in this troubling novel that asks: what sacrifices will we make in the name of  love?  This is a story of divided loyalties, misunderstanding on several fronts which ultimately leads to tragedy.  No happy endings here.