Not Exactly a Tour de Force

Force of Nature by Jane Harper

This was a popular choice for my Dorset Book Group, Splinter, and was suggested by Gina, as we had all read The Dry by Jane Harper as a set book for an earlier meeting.  That was Harper's debut novel and won awards.  We enjoyed that read although I seem to recall we had some minor quibbles with it.  But essentially the plotting was good and we did not guess the perpetrator of the crime.

Sadly I found Jane Harper's second novel a disappointment, a damp squib of a crime thriller.  The premise seemed to start well, five women go into The Bush and four come out.  In a nutshell you have a plot and the potential to build engagement with characters and suspense.  But it was such a slow boiler and the narrative got bogged down in minutiae both in terms of conversations between characters, and the flitting between chapters, the Searched and the Searchers, far from building suspense just became frustrating.  I wanted to get on with it, after all this was no great work of literature.  It was a whodunnit, let's keep it moving.  So it was all rather dull.

When a body did not turn up fairly promptly I thought well this is getting interesting, there is a mystery to unpick.  You can usually expect the body fairly early on, then it is about solving the identity of the perpetrator.  But no, just the unrelenting squabbling and bitching going on between the women with some fuzzy sub-plots relating to the company they all worked for.  Throw in a history of substance abuse and drinking on the part of the one flawed twin, an anorexic daughter, an explicit video shared by teenage schoolchildren on their mobile phones.  Some of the usual suspects to inject a bit of drama.  But it did not spice up an essentially very plain dish.  Even the death of Alice, had to be a composite effort by the various women in the party.  It seemed to me that the author was trying to make the denouement a bit complex but it did not work for me.  And ultimately I thought the showdown at the waterfall was just silly.

Oh dear, I do sound rather pompous about this but I just feel it was all a disappointment.

The Light of Day by Graham Swift

The Light of Day by Graham Swift

Graham Swift is a writer who is held in very high regard by his peers. He was born on 4 May 1949 in London, educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York.

Some of Swift's books have been filmed, including Waterland (1992), Shuttlecock (1993) and Last Orders (1996). His novel Last Orders was joint-winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the 1996 Booker Prize, owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

The prize-winning Waterland is set in The Fens. A novel of landscape, history and family, it is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English literature syllabus in British schools. 

Of The Light of Day Amazon says:  On a cold but dazzling November morning George Webb, a former policeman turned private detective, prepares to visit Sarah, a prisoner and the woman he loves. As he goes about the business of the day he relives the catastrophic events of two years ago that have both bound them together and kept them apart.
 
Making atmospheric use of its suburban setting and shot through with a plain man’s unwitting poetry and rueful humour, The Light of Day is a powerful and moving tale of murder, redemption and of the discovery, for better or worse, of the hidden forces inside us.


Synopsis - contains spoilers!
George Webb's detective agency is run from an office above a tanning studio on Wimbledon Broadway. He's used to snooping: as a child, he spied on his father's adultery. His assistant, Rita, is also, occasionally, his mistress, and he hasn't missed his opportunities with some of his lady clients. No St George in shining armour, then, but a "corrupt" cop thrown out of the force for coercing a witness, his marriage a failure, his daughter only recently back in his life after a long estrangement. (He makes her nice dinners; he's a "cooking detective".) Sarah Nash, a language teacher and translator, enters his life, and changes it for ever, when she comes to ask him to spy on her husband. He's a gynaecologist who's been having an affair with a Croatian refugee they've taken in. The affair is over, Kristina is going back to her war-scarred country, but Sarah wants them followed to see if she really does get on the plane. Slowly, and, it seems, inexorably, this chain of events leads to a death. Now, two years on, George is putting flowers on a grave and visiting Sarah in prison.

What I thought:
Of this novel a Guardian reviewer wrote:  

The Light of Day has a brilliantly slow, precise, careful structure, covering "every hour, every minute, every detail" of its case with as much control as it lays out its geography and deals with its parts of speech. Within this tight little map, the story it has to tell is wildly extreme, sensational and romantic: completely out of hand. Its characters "cross a line" into savage places. In this banal surburbia, they "fall through space"; in this quiet corner of the civilised world, there are no safe houses. 

The style of the writing gives the impression of spoken word.  A stream of consciousness, the events that the novel describes being played and replayed in the narrator's head.  The book is crafted in such a way that it moves back and forth in time to build suspense.   It makes for open text on the page, deceptively accessible and an invitation to read at speed.  But that would be to lose the sense of the rather flat and repetitious narration with spare use of vocabulary.  I am not sure if this is a consequence but the reading of this novel had a lowering of mood as I followed the text and absorbed the story.  Lugubrious is the word that springs to mind.  The style does not suit everyone.  One reviewer wrote:  

"It is difficult to reconcile the fact of so much writerly achievement with the feeling that the novel is somewhat underpowered" and that the author "has become a master of word-paring, phrase-clipping and scene-whittling, and the austerity of his style feels like a perfect fit with the voice of his laconic detective. Yet in cleaving to this scrupulous technique, he has skimped on the more obvious satisfactions of excitement and suspense. The pages turn, but the pulse never quickens."

A Page of Quickies

Here follows a series of concise reviews of books that I have read. They did not warrant my normal treatment because either they were books I did not quite manage to fathom, or were what one might classify as 'holiday' reads - what I would call fast food novels.

First up is Conclave by Robert Harris.

Even a seasoned reviewer in The Guardian was moved to write "I am about to use a word I have never knowingly used in any review of any book ever. During my 25-odd years of writing about books I have done my best to avoid cliches, slipshod summaries, oracular pronouncements and indeed anything else that might appear emblazoned on a book jacket. Nonetheless, there is only one possible word to describe Robert Harris’s new novel, and it is this: unputdownable."

In a nutshell, the pope is dead and cardinals are gathering to elect his successor in this portrait of power, corruption and deceit.  There you have it.  With a fabulous denouement.  I recommended this to my discerning doctor friend, in French translation.  

                                                                   ↝↝↝↝↝

When I was browsing bookshelves in a charity shop I spotted 

After Me Comes The Flood by Sarah Perry.

I recognised it as the debut novel of Sarah Perry.  She of The Essex Serpent fame.  It is a short novel and looked accessible 200+ pages, pages not densely printed.  For me the novel was a conundrum which I never got into because I could not quite make sense of the story, such as it is.  There is one section which takes place on a beach, near a saltmarsh which involves a lost child.  Here Perry is clearly at home: saltmarshes, tides which ebb and flow, once again an upturned rowing boat.  This environment in the natural world is clearly familiar to her.  (Perry grew up in Chelmsford, Essex, alongside the Thames Funnel)  When she is in that milieu where the land meets the sea she is utterly at home in her writing.  Later she describes a powerful rainstorm which brings about the climax of the novel, again her powers of description of natural phenomena are on show.  

The novel garnered some favourable comment from the likes of Sophie Hannah, Sarah Waters (whose writing I rate highly).  Adjectives like unsettling, intriguing, eerie, dream-like, creeping, gripping are used by reviewers.  I think the novel might warrant a second reading with attention to the calibre of the writing and less focus on a search for a story.  But not just now!

My Purple Scented Novel by Ian McEwan

Amazon says:  
A jewel of a book: a brand new short story from the author of Atonement. My Purple Scented Novel follows the perfect crime of literary betrayal, scrupulously wrought yet unscrupulously executed, published to celebrate Ian McEwan’s 70th birthday.

"You will have heard of my friend the once celebrated novelist Jocelyn Tarbet, but I suspect his memory is beginning to fade…You’d never heard of me, the once obscure novelist Parker Sparrow, until my name was publicly connected with his. To a knowing few, our names remain rigidly attached, like the two ends of a seesaw. His rise coincided with, though did not cause, my decline… I don’t deny there was wrongdoing. I stole a life, and I don’t intend to give it back. You may treat these few pages as a confession.

This is short story published as a stand-alone booklet.  It's a quick read and deals with plagiarism.  Everything you ever wanted to know to pull it off!

It was first published in The NewYorker Magazine in March 2016.  You can read a full transcript here:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/28/my-purple-scented-novel-fiction-by-ian-mcewan

And the transcript of an interview with McEwan about the story in the same periodical here:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-this-week-ian-mcewan-2016-03-28

Little Fires Everywhere

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

A caveat for members of Val de Saire Book Club for whom this title is the November read: this review contains Spoilers

I had a love hate relationship with this novel as I read it. I started to read it rather grudgingly; it is a book club choice and my respect for the code of conduct in a book group means that I will read it.  Even though the person who chose it has left the group! 

It is described as a tale of morals and motherhood and there is an awful lot of Anne Tyler about it.  I have read most of Tyler's novels and I could feel that I am somewhat played out on small town American domesticity and family sagas.  Tyler has written about different families but I sometimes feel, and especially with so many books out there that I want to read, that once you have read one you have read them all. 

Set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of America’s first planned communities, order and harmony are prized. The author spent some of her formative years growing up there and this helps to reinforce a sense of time and place -the 1990s. 

Someone has burned down the Richardson's house, the youngest of four children is blamed. We wait until the end to find out who the culprit is and what motivated the act of arson. 

Because the novel is more about babies and the extremes of busybodiness and meddling which can be an overarching part of the lives of some self-righteous people. Namely Mrs Richardson. There is the matter of an abandoned baby, an adoption which might not have taken place as it should have done,  through the proper channels. There is a custody battle which goes to court. During this process I found some of the writing on motherhood overly sentimental and cloying. I allowed myself to be irritated by this and then I questioned my ability to feel compassion. (I had to question myself on this when I read Eleanor Oliphant)  Was I being unfeeling? I think it is within the power of writers to connect with the feelings of their readers and extract the reactions that they themselves recognise and feel to be appropriate. Or to fail in that and leave the reader cold. Certainly though as Ng writes about the custody issue she left me feeling ambivalent as to for whose plea the judge should find favour, the birth mother or the adoptive parents. 

There are many aspects to the narrative: race, class, privilege, teenage sex, abortion, surrogacy. It's all in there. It is a rich list of ingredients but I did not ultimately find it a tasty dish.

Nocturnes

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguru

Warning: Contains spoilers.....

Preamble:  The Observer called this work 'Heartbreak in Five Movements'.  I think that is a bit bleak and an exaggeration; each story has a character who is a victim, who is let down, betrayed perhaps but surely not heartbroken?  

Nocturnes is Ishiguro's first collection of short stories, after six novels. He has said in interviews that he conceived the book holistically, almost as a piece of music in five movements. Like a cycle, the collection begins and ends in the same place – Italy – and it contains modulations of tone that would be awkward within a single narrative.  There is also linkage of one character across some of the stories. 

In Nocturnes, Kazuo Ishiguro writes about a cast of characters who range from young dreamers to café musicians to faded stars.  This quintet of short stories deals with some of the superficialities in human behaviour and there is manipulation by some characters of others which gave each story at least one 'victim'   At times I thought why can these victims not see through the opportunists, that they are being used and played with? 

In the opening story, "Crooner", a mood of quiet melancholy is established and this mood pervades the book. From the moment you meet Tony Gardner's wife, Lindy, and from the cleverly constructed dialogue between her and Tony you know that things between the couple are not good. Jan, the narrator, is a guitarist with a band who are street performing and he is thrilled to be in Gardner's company; his records, he tells Gardner effusively, were one of the only sources of comfort to his beleaguered single mother as she was raising him in communist Poland. The Gardner's trip to Venice is not as the musician supposes it to be, it is not an anniversary, probably more of a rescue mission.  No wonder Tony Gardner is amused at the idea.  We find out why towards the end of the story.  In the end it is a moment of disillusionment for the musician who has been delighted to meet a musical hero.  

In 'Come Rain or Shine' Raymond is dragged into a sordid bit of theatre played out by Charlie and Emily whose marriage is apparently a bit wobbly.  There were moments of high farce in this story that made me laugh out loud, at the same time as I was willing Raymond to grow a backbone and stand up to the couple's devious actions.   

In 'Malvern Hills', the third story, I heard the Ishiguro's voice clearly in that of the narrator.  Told in the first person I heard the questioning introspection  and self justification that Ishiguro conveyed in his portrayal of the butler in The Remains of the Day.

The fourth story, "Nocturne", reintroduces an element of absurdity where a talented saxophonist, whose wife has left him, is persuaded to have facial surgery to make him more marketable. He meets Lindy Gardner from the opening story (recently divorced from Tony) in the exclusive wing of the hotel where they have both been sent to recuperate. The story contains the collection's funniest moment, as the saxophonist finds himself embarrassed on a stage with one arm up a turkey.  This was reminiscent of a scene in one of the Mr Bean episodes - the Christmas one - where Rowan Atkinson is obliged to answer the front door wearing a turkey on his head!

In "Cellists", the final story, an American woman pretends to be a world-famous cellist and agrees to tutor a promising young Hungarian in her hotel room in an unnamed Italian city. It soon emerges that she cannot play the cello at all: she merely believes she has the potential to be a great cellist. "You have to understand, I am a virtuoso," she tells him. "But I'm one who's yet to be unwrapped." But she is a shallow person. In the end, she marries someone she does not love, while the young Hungarian takes a second-rate job playing in a chamber group at a hotel restaurant. They both remain unfulfilled. This is, perhaps, what most binds these stories: the conflict between what life might have promised and what life ultimately delivers.

On Expeditions and Polynesian Colonisation...... Kon Tiki and Easter Island

“Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.” – Thor Heyerdahl

Thor Heyerdahl is one of history’s most famous explorers.  The Kon-Tiki expedition was a 1947 journey by balsawood raft across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands, led by Heyerdahl. The raft was named Kon-Tiki after the Inca sun god, Viracocha, for whom "Kon-Tiki" was said to be an old name.

Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so. Although the expedition carried some modern equipment, such as a radio, watches, charts, sextant, and metal knives, Heyerdahl argued they were incidental to the purpose of proving that the raft itself could make the journey.

Kon-Tiki is also the name of Heyerdahl's book; upon which an award-winning documentary film chronicling his adventures was based, as well as the 2012 dramatised feature film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.  He later completed similar achievements with the reed boats Ra, Ra II and Tigris, through which he championed his deep involvement for both the environment and world peace.

Walking round the Kon Tiki Museum in Oslo recently, I was captivated by the story of the expedition, how it came into being, the sometimes unlikely chain of events. I had a copy of Heyerdahl's book for a good while before I eventually sent it, along with a number of other books which I selected whilst pruning my collections at Winterborne K, to a charity shop.  My trip to Oslo and the museum re-kindled that instinct that caused me to buy the book originally.  There are numerous editions with a variety of dust jacket designs.   I easily found a second-hand copy and read it. 

What I thought:
I thoroughly enjoyed Heyerdahl's account.  It was so very readable.  I was amazed at the courage and resourcefulness of the six men...….. and the parrot!  Of course they would neither have seen themselves as courageous, or particularly resourceful although it was fascinating the way they managed to source everything they needed and the support of foreign politicians, dignitaries and naval services.   There was almost a Swallows and Amazons feel to an adult escapade!  They survived the crossing with some tales to tell, and the account of their landing on the other side of their 4000 mile sailing was heart in the mouth but humorous too.  For something different, a read out of your normal boxes, try this book.


Also in the Museum there is a section given over to Easter Island.  The connection between Heyerdahl and Easter Island centres around his investigations into the mystery of the Easter Island giant statues, or moai, (created by the early Rapa Nui people)  how they made, how they were oved and what was the origin of the native legend that the statues walked.  Easter Island is one of the most remote places in the world and Heyerdahl wanted to determine whether the island had been originally colonised by people who sailed from South America across 2,000 miles of ocean. 

Returning to the island over thirty years later Heyerdahl investigated the ruins of the island’s unique statues: monolithic human figures carved from rock, and experimented with techniques that could have allowed a pre-industrial culture to create and move such enormous figures. Heyerdahl wrote a unique history of Easter Island, based on his own research, and an interpretation of the mystery of the island’s statues that presents an individual view of world history. 

I have wanted to visit Easter Island ever since I saw a fascinating TV documentary by David Attenborough, entitled The Lost Gods of Easter Island  .  Attenborough’s documentary starts with a small wooden carving which he buys at auction and which he identifies as being one of a pair, that are figured in a publication that links the carving he acquired to another, and which he tracks down to a Museum in Russia (from memory), both being associated with Captain Cook.  Now is the time to revisit this documentary……
  

In the course of scrolling around the internet I found a novel called Easter Island by Jennifer Vanderbes.  Checked it out.  Here is the Amazon blurb:  

Set on the cusp of World War One, and in the 1970s, EASTER ISLAND tells the passionate, heart-breaking and ultimately redemptive story of two remarkable women.

Elsa, an Edwardian Englishwoman, is forced by circumstance to leave the man she loves and agree to a marriage of convenience. The marriage enables her to fulfil her great dream: to visit Easter Island and to study its mysterious history. But as Elsa becomes bewitched by the island and engrossed in her work, she fails to notice that her beloved sister Alice is becoming caught up in desires of her own, that will threaten not only their work, but also their lives. 

Sixty years later, Dr Greer Faraday, recently widowed, makes her own journey to the island. Born into a different time and country, Greer nevertheless shares Else's passion for this strange and haunting place. Troubled by unhappy secrets, Greer takes solace in her work, making an island of herself. But as the two women's stories begin to entwine and passions are played out, both Greer and Else must struggle against what society expects of them, and what fate has planned...

This title was a lucky find.  It has archaeology, biology, anthropology ………….. themes that interest me very much.  It is also a book that keeps you turning the page, and a rather clever ending I did not see coming.

I Am Pilgrim

I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

One of my fellow Splinters has been banging on about this book!  I hadn't taken the bait as the title didn't grab me; somehow the Bunyanesque handle put me off.  800 pages of someone on a pilgrimage?  I didn't warm to the idea.  So get the idea out of the head, quite simply this novel is a gripping thriller.  It's scary, an inventive spy/terrorist narrative with plausible plot-lines.

Terry Hayes is a former journalist and screenwriter.  He has been an investigative reporter, a political correspondent and columnist.  He is writing on his own territory.   If, like me, you like to intersperse seriously good, top notch, intelligent writing with a well-written and compelling page-turner then Pilgrim fits the bill.  Think Jack Reacher, but so much better on all fronts!

Amazon says:

Pilgrim is the codename for a man who doesn’t exist. The adopted son of a wealthy American family, he once headed up a secret espionage unit for US intelligence. Before he disappeared into anonymous retirement, he wrote the definitive book on forensic criminal investigation.

But that book will come back to haunt him. It will help NYPD detective Ben Bradley track him down. And it will take him to a rundown New York hotel room where the body of a woman is found facedown in a bath of acid, her features erased, her teeth missing, her fingerprints gone. It is a textbook murder – and Pilgrim wrote the book.

What begins as an unusual and challenging investigation will become a terrifying race-against-time to save America from oblivion. Pilgrim will have to make a journey from a public beheading in Mecca to a deserted ruins on the Turkish coast via a Nazi death camp in Alsace and the barren wilderness of the Hindu Kush in search of the faceless man who would commit an appalling act of mass murder in the name of his God.

WHAT I THOUGHT

‘Two psychos enter, and one psycho leaves. Good entertainment for readers with a penchant for mayhem, piles of bodies and a lethal biochemical agent or two.’ Kirkus Reviews

This is certainly a page-turner, a race against time between two sharp minds, determined to prevail.  In a nutshell, a former intelligence agent who wrote a book on forensic pathology becomes involved in a case where someone uses his book to commit untraceable murders. Because of the agent’s earlier career, he also gets involved in another case involving a threat involving an ex-Afghan fighter who uses the network he established fighting the Soviets to reverse engineer a virus which threatens humanity.  The fighter is turned as an eleven-year old boy when he witnesses the public beheading of his father in a Saudi Arabian square.

In trying to get inside the mind of the Saracen, Pilgrim has to use his intuition and intelligence from the highly sophisticated technology which is available to the intelligence agencies, i.e. the FBI.  From all the data that is gleaned from signals, mobile phone calls etc that are being picked up by the FBI ultimately there is one trace that the human intelligence machine determines is likely to be ‘the one’.  They run with that link.  Then there is the coincidence of the relationship between the meeting of the policewoman Leyla Cumali in connection with the murder of the American woman in the run-down apartment.  She happens to be the sister of Saracen.  These threads spun just so make for clever plotting.   

What I admire about this thriller is that Terry Hayes switches between providing detailed character studies of the two protagonists with a narrative of roller-coaster action which shifts across continents leading to the denouement where there is the inevitable encounter between Pilgrim and the Saracen in Turkey.

Terry Hayes is an author, screenwriter and film producer who started work as a journalist in New York.  He surely wrote I am Pilgrim with an eye to a film. 

Here is a review by the New York Times which is not a plot-spoiler.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/books/i-am-pilgrim-by-terry-hayes.html