Something's Gotta Give: Slimline Reviews

My edits have now arrived, proving once and for all that this agent thing is really real and not something I made up in an overexcited moment.

I am preparing myself for the great task ahead of me: wantonly destroying all the characters and scenes in the book that are lovely but completely pointless to my plot. This will obviously take some time, and time is something that seems to be in short supply in my life already.

Therefore, I am proposing a change to this blog's reviewing rules. I just can't do a full blog post on every novel I read any more (and was anyone reading them anyway, my grandmother excepted?), so from now on I'm going to be doing lists of snap reviews.

Like this!

Before the Fact by Francis Iles

Alas, this was a good idea, lamely executed. Iles (pen name of Anthony Berkeley, a slightly less ingenious contemporary of Agatha Christie) was interested in making up new ways to write crime novels. This one is set before the crime actually happens. You'd think that this would be a promising concept. A woman wakes up one day convinced that her husband wants to murder her. But is she right?

Well... yes. As is painfully evident from the first page, her husband is going to murder her. We have to trail painfully through years of their life together, until we get to the day when he actually kills her. Believe me, by that point you will be begging him to go ahead and do it.

There's a very interesting question buried in Iles's premise, about whether we can ever really know what kind of person we're spending our life with, but he does absolutely nothing interesting with it. Frankly, this is one of the most boring thrillers I've ever read.

 If you want a book that does run with that idea in an awesomely clever way, try Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (which I just happened to read for The Bookbag the week after I read this). It's amazing. This isn't.

2 stars.

The American Boy by Andrew Taylor

Now this one was good. A creepy historical murder mystery (it's Taylor, what else would you expect?) that's based on events during the childhood of Edgar Allen Poe, it's well imagined and satisfyingly well executed. It's got a nice, big, engrossing plot, full of mistaken identities, big chilly houses and lots of gloomy weather.

Taylor's novels aren't just mysteries, they're stories, and often quite involved ones - novels that happen to have murders in them, rather than novels about murder. The star of the show is always the setting, the (very accurately rendered) historical moment, and I thought that the world of The American Boy (Regency England) was particularly well imagined.

This is a book that you can get your teeth into, a blockbuster production that's good down to its smallest details. It's delightfully dark and twisty with just the right level of nastiness - basically, this is vintage Taylor. The sequel (prequel?) is out next month. Let me tell you, internet, I am excited.

4 stars.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Let me sell you this book in a single sentence: it's about a magical Victorian circus. A MAGICAL. VICTORIAN. CIRCUS. And not just any magical Victorian circus, either. It's pretty much the slickest, the most sideways and in all ways the best vision of the best possible circus you could ever imagine. Only it's better.

Morgenstern's cirque des reves assaults all your senses at once. Her writing makes you slaver over the burnt-caramel smell of popcorn, taste cinnamon pastries and light up your mind's eye with fire and fluttering ribbons. There's a circus tent that's a garden made entirely of ice, a tent where you climb up into a labyrinth in the clouds and one where you can smell stories.

The circus itself is the setting for an absolutely beautiful love story. The two main characters of The Night Circus are a boy and girl who have been brought up knowing that they have to fight a mysterious and fatal magical duel - except that when they actually meet, they realise that all they want to do is spend the rest of their lives together. Can they manage it? Or will the power of the circus, the setting for their great game, send events spinning out of their control? Morgenstern plays with time and place masterfully, messing with the lives of her wonderful characters in a way that's like watching an illusionist carry out a virtuoso magic trick.

When I finished this book, I physically missed it. I wandered tragically around my house hugging it to me and whispering, what do I do with my life? I loved The Night Circus heartbreakingly much. I can do nothing else but give it

5 stars.

Ketchup Clouds by Annabel Pitcher

I have been itching to get my hands on this one for a long time. A teenage girl writes a series letters to a convicted murderer on Death Row, confessing to a terrible crime that she's kept secret from everyone she knows.

I loved this idea from the moment I first heard about it (you know how I love terrible secret crimes), but, more importantly, on closer acquaintance the story stands up to its premise.

I think what Pitcher has done with her hook is exceptional. She doles out the suspense - what did Zoe do, and who did she do it to? - in perfectly pitched little sips. I was going completely mental trying to work out which of the two possible victims Zoe has actually killed, so much so that I read half of the book on the train to work, and the other half on the train on the way home. Was the actual moment of the crime a let-down? Slightly, but that's just because I was keyed up to such a pitch that I would have been disappointed with anything that wasn't as insane as what I had been picturing in my head.

Zoe is a wonderful narrator, though, so realistic and funny that the book's success doesn't rest on the reveal of her crime alone. She's a real presence, and her words bring her world to life. Cleverly on Pitcher's part, one of the book's most engaging and present characters never actually appears in the text or says a single word. Zoe's murderer, Stuart Harris, never replies to her letters (he can't, since Zoe writes from 'Fiction Drive' to keep her story secret), but nevertheless he becomes an incredibly important person in her life. Zoe has made up a totally romanticised concept of him, the magical persona she needs to listen to her and understand the awful things that she's done. Like the rest of Ketchup Clouds, it's a perfectly pitched little detail that will break your heart and make you feel absolutely complicit in even the worst of Zoe's actions.

4.5 stars.

Delicious Death: Some Quickfire Crime Reviews

First, some links to my latest reviews for The Bookbag:

Desolation Island by Adolfo Garcia Ortega (short answer: very very good)

The Story of English by Joseph Piercy (short answer: very very mixed)

Now I don't know if you've heard, but I like crime. Theoretically, of course. This blog does not endorse wrongdoing in any way, shape or form, and in fact would encourage you all to be nice to other people and not kill them.

Nonetheless, in the abstract, crime soothes me. Here is a round-up of my latest toothsome murder selections.

Sovereign by C. J. Sansom.

I've said before that I like Sansom's books a lot. Not only does he have a very good, very full-blooded line in historical recreation, he's becoming a technically better writer as he goes along. Sovereign is the third in his series of novels about a crime-solving hunchbacked lawyer struggling to stay alive among the political intrigue of Henry VIII's court. It's set in 1541 and concerns two of the aging Henry's more disastrous decisions: his marriage to hot young thing Catherine Howard (the second beheaded, according to the rhyme) and his royal Progress around a very tetchy and still rebellious North of England.

Matthew Shardlake and his sexy assistant Jack Barak are sent to York on a mission to look after the safety of a political prisoner. Of course, Shardlake gets royally mixed up in Henry's progress and ends up uncovering a plot to destabilise the entire Tudor succession. As you do. It's all a bit ridiculous (although based on real events and real intrigue, like all the best fiction) but thoroughly fun, and the story carrys you along at a breathless pace all the way to the end. It's a 650 page book that reads like a 250 page novella.

Poor old Shardlake is a good man in a bad world. He doesn't know when to leave well enough alone and who has a lot of trouble remembering that most people are a lot nastier than he is. Each book sees him sinking further into his pit of emotional despair, and each culminates with the inevitable announcement that this will be ABSOLUTELY HIS VERY LAST CASE. Since I know that Sansom has written at least two more Shardlake novels I can smell the lie and be very grateful for it. This series ticks both my crime nerd and  history nerd boxes, and long may it last.

I see I originally gave the Shardlake books 3 stars. I must have been feeling mean that day. For this outing, I'm revising upwards to

4 stars.


The Affair of the Mutilated Mink by James Anderson

Before I actually read it, I had suspicions that The Affair of the Mutilated Mink might be a silly book. Imagine my joy when I realised that it is precisely that. Its pages give off gusts of the purest, most exquisite Golden Age foolery (in case you are wondering, this rare substance smells like leather-bound books, pearls, rolling acres and gunshot wounds, and Agatha Christie used to spray herself all over with it every morning).

The second in Anderson's series of pastiche Golden Age detective novels (my library didn't have the first), its English upper class characters bray and blether delightfully, its American characters say HOWDY and chew cigars and everyone has utterly creative secret backgrounds involving JEWELS and MISTAKEN IDENTITIES and TRAGIC DEATHS. The dippy set-up (American producer wants to shoot movie on location at the film-mad Earl of Burford's scenic pile) is an excuse to drag a motley cast of movie star types, aristocracy, long-lost relatives and the obligatory troubled artist together for a country-house weekend party that ends (surprise surprise) with MURDER MOST FOUL.

The Affair of the Mutilated Mink never makes the mistake of taking itself seriously. Even the characters know they're being ridiculous, and there's an extremely meta joke-that-knows-it's-a-joke atmosphere to the whole thing that reminded me a lot of P. G. Wodehouse. Fans of Golden Age detective fiction will have their hearts melted by throwaway references to Ariadne Oliver and Inspector Alleyn (who, in this world, are real people), as well as spot-on recreations of stock characters like the officious Scotland Yard man (complete with trusty valet), the prima donna actress and the American movie producer extraordinaire. At the same time, though, Anderson's doing something quite intelligent with the familiar tropes. The man sent from Scotland Yard turns out to be too smart for his own good and the mystery is actually solved by Wilkins, one of those adorably modest country detective who are always totally snubbed in Christie and Sayers novels. The leading girl is not only suitably plucky and resourceful but also quite a rounded human being, the Earl's bluffness is all for show... and so on, and so on. It's a really witty variation on a well-known theme that feels new and old at the same time - which, coincidentally, was what all those Golden Age crime novels were trying to do in the first place.

This book is wonderful. It affectionately embraces all the flaws of its parent genre, pokes gentle fun at its worst excesses and on top of that manages to put together a fairly tidy and inventive murder mystery. The reveal may not blow your mind, although there are some great twists in the tale, but the joy of any good Golden Age murder mystery is the silly, over-the-top journey to that final denouement, and this journey is ridiculously fun.

Another 4 stars.

Image from banisbooks.blogspot.com

Scales of Justice by Ngaio Marsh

By the way, in case you're wondering, I did not mistakenly smash my fingers against my keyboard to come up with that first name. Marsh was from New Zealand, so her parents gave her a name that's the Maori word for a kind of tree. The G is silent so it's pronounced like Naio. There you go, that's your fascinating trivia for the day. You're welcome.

Before I actually discuss the content of this book, I would like to direct your attention to the FANTASTIC cover of my edition. It is purest essence of the 1970s, when publishers had just discovered photography but were not yet conversant with realism. This image has it all: fake plastic trout, puzzled dog, daub of red paint where the blood should be. It is so ugly that I can't stop staring at it.

Unfortunately, though, it turns out that the best thing about Scales of Justice is that cover. A lot of Golden Age writers (apart from Dorothy Sayers, who got bored and turned to translating Dante instead) carried on relentlessly beating the dead horse of the 1930s setting well into the 1960s, and this book, published in 1955, contains themes so stale that they're practically suppurating.

The female characters wear twinsets with their tweeds and the male characters talk about Nazis, but apart from that you'd never guess that the year was no longer 1935. Retired colonels and dusty earls still perambulate around their small English country town, huntin' and shootin' and fishin' and sleepin' with each other. The murder itself is an example of the worst excesses of the clue puzzle format, which states that if the killer does not do the deed while balanced on one leg, wearing a swimming costume and a lion mask and wielding a melon borer the writer is NOT TRYING HARD ENOUGH.

Marsh is trying hard, all right, but the effect is of insanity and extreme hideboundness rather than any kind of real invention. Add to that the tiresome upper-class honour displayed by all the characters, which pointlessly derails the investigation for 100 pages, and you have a murder mystery so idiotic that I could barely finish it. And when I did, the reveal was stupid. Nul points, Marsh. Nul points.

2 stars.

Delicious Death: The Detection Club

I am currently recovering from a dissertation about crime. So naturally, the only thing I want to read about is crime.

I bought Ask A Policeman as an extremely tenuous bit of dissertation 'research' (because Agatha Christie wrote the introduction and Dorothy Sayers wrote one of the chapters) but also because it is extremely relevant to my interests. I am competely and tragically obsessed with Golden Age detective fiction. My father gave me an Agatha Christie novel when I was twelve; I read one page of it and realised that this was what I wanted to do with my life.

Not that it hasn't had competition. In the extensive game of Imaginary Historical Friends that I've been playing for years, I've never been able to decide whether I'd prefer to be a Pre-Raphaelite Brother or part of the Byron/Shelley Sexual Licentiousness and Monsters tour of 1816. Or maybe a beat poet. So many choices. But I have come to realise that all this is kind of contingent on me suddenly becoming a man, because the ladies in each group tended to get a raw deal. I am now, therefore, beginning to think that what I would really like to have been is a member of the Detection Club in the 1930s.

The more I read about The Detection Club, the more I discover how awesome it was. If you're a Christie fan, you've probably read about it (in a thinly disguised form) in her book of Miss Marple stories The Thirteen Problems. Basically, it was made up by a group of crime novelists in 1930 to 'further the cause of the clue puzzle form' ie. hang out, get squiffy and talk about murder. Not only were quite a few of the principal members women (Dorothy Sayers even wrote the official oath, which is hilarious), but it's pretty clear that the club members had a totally great time together, as witnessed by the fact that one of their favourite activities was making fun of each other in the things they wrote. Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case has a spot-on send-up of Agatha Christie, and in Ask a Policemen, one of the club's collaborative efforts, the writers all swapped detectives in order to be able to take the piss out of each other with even greater ease than usual.

Now, even though I know its authors have done this (because the blurb says so), I didn't find Ask a Policeman quite the humour-fest they clearly intended it to be. This is because, apart from Lord Wimsey, most of these detectives (and their authors) mean absolutely nothing to a reader from 2012. Certain things age well, and certain things don't, and although I would like to make the case for Anthony Berkeley (if you're interested in him, he also wrote as Francis Iles for some incomprehensible reason), Helen Jackson and Gladys Mitchell ... have gone deservedly into that good night. Without any idea what was being riffed on I could sense the presence of jokes, but that was about it. I didn't know who Mrs Bradley or Sir John Saumarez were, and because of that a large part of Ask a Policeman's central premise fell flat for me.

I felt kind of bad about this - what kind of Golden Age crime novel buff am I? - but I would have felt far worse about my bewilderment if the entire novel had not been such a swirling maelstrom of well-bred confusion. The four writers were each given the same information about the murder and then told to go away and solve it without consulting each other, and the result is that none of the timings match up, people miraculously fall ill and get well from one chapter to the next and there are lots of bizarre plot threads left dangling in the breeze.

Now, to an extent this is par for the course for the genre they're writing in. The main criticism of Golden Age crime novels is that their plots are - to put it bluntly - bloody ridiculous. In the words of Raymond Chandler, they all feature 

the same utterly incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poignard just as she flatted on the top note of the Bell Song from Lakmé in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests.

For me, that's one of the most charming aspects of them, but if that annoys you, you should definitely not come within one hundred feet of Ask a Policemen. Ridiculousness oozes out of its every pore. 

Consider its set-up. Evil media mogul Lord Comstock (think Murdoch before Murdoch even existed) has been shot in his study while surrounded by a motley and unlikely list of haters who include a Bishop, an upper-class twit, a mysterious lady, a Police Commissioner and the inevitable effeminate male secretary. In a twist of fate so painfully unlikely that it makes my brain ache, the Home Secretary decides to call off the police force and draft in four amateur detectives to solve the case. Because when a major public figure has been murdered, the people I want investigating his death are an old rich woman, an actor, a Lord and... some sort of wealthy jobless person (I've read a few of Berkeley's Sheringham books by now and I like them but I STILL haven't been able to work out what he does). 

Where do you go from there? How can you make the whole thing not crushingly stupid? The answer is, you can't, and none of these authors even tries. Each detective comes to a different (and totally whacky) conclusion from their version of the facts (I use the phrase 'their version' advisedly), and the result is brain-melting non-linear information stew with lashings of super-British jolliness.

Ask a Policeman is the result of a lot of people having a lot of slightly elitist fun with each other. I really wish I had been one of those people, and it was clearly hysterically funny to write, but the result is the purest silly froth that doesn't translate well out of its original moment. When you read a Golden Age crime novel, even a daft one, it's hard not to be infected by the sheer joy of it, but I cannot underestimate what an enormous pile of nonsensical nuts this particular book is. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then Ask a Policeman is a camel with five humps, zebra stripes and a tail made out of moustaches.

This is a book for the very specialised reader. I found the Sayers and Berkeley sections charming (if crazy) because I know their work, but the other two parts were absolutely lost on me. It's a period piece that's aged like Poundland cava, a glimpse of a craze that was weird at the time and seems even weirder now. I love this genre like nothing else in the world, but I still have to give this particular novel

2 (affectionate) stars.

Swiss wine and cheese reviews part 1: A Dark Anatomy and The Colour

Last week my boyfriend and I went to Switzerland, where we shocked our bodies by alternatively pounding up and down large alps and eating our bodyweight in Gruyere. We also visited the chateau where Byron wrote one of his tragic poems; went to a St Bernard dog museum (complete with real dogs, all lying lazily upside-down with their eye-folds drooping); and (in my case) read a lot of books.

First was A Dark Anatomy by Robin Blake, a trashy historical murder mystery that reminded me why I'm usually cautious about reading trashy historical murder mysteries.

I’ve said before that there are several different ways to make your historical novel seem properly historical. You can either go ploughing through actual accounts from your chosen period and come up with scrupulous background detail about roofing materials and recipes; or you can read a lot of contemporary literature to make sure your characters sound right; or (and funnily enough, this is often the most successful method if you’re trying to write a crowd-pleaser) you can sit down and brainstorm vague popular concepts about your period and then make sure you name-check every single one of them. For example, if you’re writing about the middle ages, at least three of your characters must die of the plague; if it’s Victorian you must feature a fat cruel overseer whipping poor people and screaming “TO THE WORKHOUSE!” and if your story is set in Pompeii you must have someone turn to his friend and say, “Goodness, hasn’t the mountain been quiet recently?”

Different as they are, all of those methods nevertheless rest on the basic understanding that History is not just some vanished place where all the people had bad teeth and ate a lot of radishes. As every historical novelist should know, 1540 is not the same as 1640 which is not the same as 1740, just like China is not the same as Japan which is not the same as Korea. 

I wish someone had explained this to Robin Blake before he sat down to write A Dark Anatomy. I very much suspect that Blake (who does grave discredit to the noble first name that he and I share) saw C. J. Sansom’s sales figures and decided that he wanted a piece of that action. Obviously, he couldn’t set his own historical detective series in Tudor England, so he slammed his hand down on the number section of his keyboard, got ?17!40* and went with it. 

I am making this up, of course, but it would certainly explain the bewildering contents of A Dark Anatomy. I tried so hard to make the outfits, speech patterns and background detail chime in any way with what I know about the eighteenth century, but it just did not happen. There were no stomachers or tricornes. There was no political humour, or, in fact, humour of any kind. There was vague acknowledgement that British people occasionally travelled overseas, but no mention of them bringing back anything other than improbable wives – no sugar, for example, or silk, or tea. Even the poor old Enlightenment, which was sort of the defining idea of the entire century, got barely a look-in. The microscope, for example, gets a single mention (in the same sentence as molly-houses: Blake pretty much uses up his entire fund of historical detail in that one paragraph). I might be wrong – Blake might be perfectly evoking 1740s Preston, which I admit I know nothing specifically about – but none of it seems right, and when you’re writing cheap, fun historical fiction, seeming right is almost more important than being right.

Allegedly, the whole plot takes place in and around an eighteenth-century country house, and yet the characters talk and behave as though they’ve been shot through a worm-hole from (heavily stereotyped) 1540. There’s a hilariously mud-encrusted and motley cast of halfwit peasants and flatulent local officials who all stagger around praying randomly and screaming about werewolves like medieval idiots. Even local doctor Fidelis, who admittedly does have new-fangled notions about ice keeping meat fresh, is bewilderingly ready to believe that the devil might be hanging out round the back of the privy. At least coroner Cragg is reassuringly bad at detecting things. The notion that there might be MORE THAN ONE POTENTIAL MURDERER, i.e. MULTIPLE SUSPECTS, is so shocking that it blows his mind for about five chapters. He barely comes back from it in time to solve the murder.

The plot’s cookie-cutter: when Squire Brockletower’s wife Dolores is found nastily slain in some woodland, it is up to Cragg and Fidelis to work out whodunit. Blah blah blah, etcetera. There’s exactly the proscribed number of shock discoveries and suspicious characters who all turn out to be innocent, and if you’ve ever read a historical murder mystery, you’ll have essentially read this one. It’s nothing more than an ugly and fundamentally awkward serving of History Stew, written by someone who doesn’t understand how to use the material he’s been given. 

Trash, and not the good kind.

2 stars.

After A Dark Anatomy, Rose Tremain’s The Colour was a total delight. A book by someone who knows how to use words! Where the characters do not speak like Ye Olde Knocke-Offe Shoppe cut-price human beings! Where a historical period is well-imagined and made to seem interestingly different from both our own and any other! I kept turning to my boyfriend and exclaiming, “Did you know books could still be GOOD?”, and he would reply, “Yes dear,” which I knew meant that he was very happy for me.

The Colour - on the 1001 Books list, by the way, and deservedly so - is all about the New Zealand gold rush of the late nineteenth century (hence the title: in this book, gold is always referred to as the colour, which can be a bit puzzling at first if you inadvertently picture blue, or pink). Awful human being Joseph Blackstone has dragged his aged mother Lillian and reluctant new wife Harriet (who is reluctant about being a wife, not about going to New Zealand) halfway around the world to start a farm in the wilderness. When he finds a tiny bit of gold in the creek near his house, though, he loses his mind and decides that he has to have ALL THE GOLD, otherwise his life will be worthless. So he abandons Lillian and Harriet (who is way too good for him in every way possible) and goes to seek his fortune in the goldfields across the mountains. 

Of course, he doesn’t find any more gold. He ends up a horrible beardy skeleton, scrabbling around in the bottom of muddy pits and weeping (which is no more than he deserves). The farm, meanwhile, goes to pot, and Harriet is forced to go trekking awesomely across the New Zealand landscape, slowly realising as she does so that her husband is awful and she would be so much better off without him.

It’s a great plot, nicely and intelligently written, and Harriet is a wonderful main character. Admittedly, the book wastes time on a puzzling sub-plot, in which a white child and his Maori nurse slowly and mystically fade away because of something magical and Spirit-Worldy. I suppose it's all very tragic and romantic, but reading it I just wanted them to stop messing about, get up and have a sandwich. I don’t think I’m a very Spirit World kind of person.

Concentrate on the Harriet part, though, and The Colour is great, clever and fun, with a satisfactory strand of commonsense morality underneath it: don’t go chasing after gold, because you will end up losing everything and feeling really stupid. I approve of that message, and I thoroughly approve of the world Tremain has so carefully and imaginatively constructed. After I win the lottery, my next holiday will be in New Zealand.

4 stars.

Reviews - Arthur and George and Detection Unlimited

NaNoWriMo 2011 is over, and I am officially a winner. Phew, look at that handsome purple colour on my stats. It was actually - strange as this is to admit - not that difficult to do. Maybe I write too much. Now that I'm done, though, I'm wondering what I'm I supposed to do with all my extra time I have. Leisure! What is it? I feel like a medieval scribe on day release.

Anyway, the final part of my November was busyness as usual. I did an interview with the talented and most interesting Polarbear - whose latest show finishes on the 3rd, but whom you should keep an eye out for in the future. He's a very nice guy and I only blanked out and said UM while I was talking to him once. Or maybe twice.

The Literary Review's Bad Sex Award shortlist 2011 has also been announced! Oh joy, oh happiness, oh crowning moment of my year. My personal favourite The Blue Book didn't make the cut (read my review of it for some choice examples of why I thought it should have), but there's some pretty choice stuff all the same. I've written an article about it for Litro (and for the record, I'm now backing David Guterson's Ed King. It's - wow. Just wow.)

And on to the reviews. This week's theme appears to be detective fiction (which is never far away, for me. I've got a bit of a thing for it, and when I start my dissertation in a few months' time you are all going end up SICK of me talking about crime and detection and people doing gruesome things to each other in barns and privies and country manors). The two books in question are from two writers who came at the concept of writing a mystery novel from two very different perspectives, and with - I think - varying degrees of success.

First up is Julian Barnes's Arthur and George. Admission time: this has been on my shelf for years. My mother bought it for me when it first came out, and with typical fifteen-year-old insularity I didn't see why I should bother with a book about people who didn't even have last names. So I ignored it until last week, when a friend informed me that it was a crime novel in disguise. I read it immediately.

It turns out that both Arthur and George do have last names, one of which is a very famous last name indeed. I'm not going to spoil it for you (although I was told myself) because there's a very nice little oh! moment when you realise who it is you've been reading about. In fact, who Arthur and George both are turns out to matter just as much, and both of their identities are central to the direction of the plot. It's a very clever bit of narrative engineering from Barnes.

At the heart of Arthur and George is the retelling of the story of a real-life late-Victorian trial (again, I'm not telling you which one, although if I did I doubt you'd be enlightened - this has slipped very much out of the frame of general knowledge, one of the reasons why Barnes has picked up on it). Barnes uses a brilliant mixture of detailed research and sensitive imagination to write an account of the crime and its consequences that feels both compelling and real. What he's got to tell is fascinating, if awful - an account of spectacular police bungling and a terrible miscarriage of justice - and the first 200 pages or so had me completely gripped.

From there, though, things got a bit more murky in terms of enjoyment. Arthur and George is one of those books in which, by the middle of the text, the main event has already taken place . It always strikes me as a very bad idea, structurally, because no matter how well you write, what you've got to say after this point is essentially the world's longest postscript. And so it is here. After the trial, Arthur and George suffers a crisis of identity. Is it about the life of a great man? Is it an examination of a religious movement? Is it the story of an affair? Is it a crusade for justice? It's all of those things to some extent, but none of them are enough to give it focus and direction.

Now, it's possible that I feel this way because I was sold Arthur and George as a crime novel. Crime novels are expected to snap along like nobody's business, whereas the mood of this book is far more restrained and introspective. All the same, I'm not sure if Barnes is technically accomplished enough to convey all the insight he's trying to pack in in lieu of plot. He's at his best when he's describing events, not musing on human nature.

Arthur and George was clever and interesting, and I definitely enjoyed it more than anything else I picked up for the first time last month. But all the same, it has its flaws, which are enough for me to give it a

3.5 stars.

Next, we've got Detection Unlimited by Georgette Heyer. These days, Heyer's more famous for her Regency romances - and, in fact, I only had the dimmest notion that she wrote crime novels too until I was reminded of it by long-time fan and fellow blogger Desperate Reader. 

Detection Unlimited is a murder mystery very much in the tradition of the English Golden Age, a froth of high artifice and extraordinarily impossible circumstance, what Raymond Chandler describes in his (brilliantly jaded) essay 'The Simple Art of Murder' as 

the same careful grouping of suspects, the same utterly incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poignard just as she flatted on the top note of the Bell Song from Lakmé in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests.

It's one of those books that you have to accept on its own terms, otherwise you'll go mad from plotholes and the sort of trickery-for-its-own-sake that 99% of actual human beings couldn't dream up in fifty years even with a gun (or a solid platinum poignard) being held to their throat. It's fun enough, it's ridiculous enough and at the denouement it's revealed that Heyer was playing a much bolder and more interesting hand of cards than I thought she was.

All the same, though, I had what can politely be described as Problems with it during my reading. While a mannered writing style is expected and to some extent even required, I'm not sure there is a book in existance that needs to use the word 'besought' to indicate speech more than three times. In fact, I think that once is one time too many. Heyer's detective, Inspector Hemingway, also caused me a lot of concern. Most Golden Age detectives have characteristics that give a modern reader serious pause in their attitude to those human beings unfortunate enough to be poor, odd or foreign, but Hemingway does it with such blissful license and obvious intention of being incredibly light-hearted and funny that he makes Josephine Tey's fearsome bigot Inspector Grant look like Albert Schweitzer.

It's ironic - and telling - that Inspector Hemingway bears a very close resemblance to the (real-life) Inspector in Barnes's novel whose insularity and narrow-mindedness ruins George's life. Inspector Anson decides that the schoolboy George is 'not a right sort', and from then on there's nothing George can do done to save himself. Similarly, when Hemingway hears that there's a Pole involved in the case he judges him before he even sets eyes on him (although as Not Guilty - in Hemingway's bemusing universe Poles are infuriating but totally irrelevant). In fact, everyone who is not upper class and in possession of at least a nice little historic red-brick in town does not matter in the slightest, nor are they suspects in the case - even though we're never really told why they should be so definitely ruled out. Hemingway works on whim and caprice, and though it's presented as a joke it feels at the very least like dangerously bad police work.

There's just a lack of logic here, a skipping over from A to G without any basis for the leap, and I ended up feeling completely swallowed up by the gaping plot holes that Heyer barely even bothers to paper over. I can't give it more than

2 stars.

Holiday Review - The Marriage Plot

Preamble first. This review is of a proof edition of The Marriage Plot (and many thanks to the kind colleague who managed to bag me a copy of it), and so anything I write about here may not resemble what makes it into the finished work, may be totally off base, etc, etc. Don't sue me.

With that said, on to the review.

What I am about to say makes me very sad. Believe me, no one wanted Jeffrey Eugenides' new book to succeed more than I did. Middlesex was a big delicious chocolate cake of a novel and The Virgin Suicides was a perfectly creepy little masterclass in how to create an atmosphere. My assumption was, therefore, that his third book would be as awesome as the first two. I certainly thought so. Man was I excited about reading this book. But - oh readers, I am filled with sorrow - this book was not very good.

Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides both had such clear, clever ideas behind them, but it's a bit difficult to understand why Jeffrey Eugenides thought he needed to write The Marriage Plot. The story of three college graduates, who consider critical opinions about love while falling unsuitably in love with each other, it is very much lacking in a central point.

Jeffrey Eugenides seems to have based the entire book in reaction to a school of thought (mentioned early on in the text) that says that the marriage plot as a novel genre (think Jane Austen and Mr Darcy's acres) died with the introduction of divorce and women's rights - marriage stopped mattering in the way it used to, That's all very well, except it's also completely and utterly not true. Recent lyrical masterpiece Single Ladies is essentially a paean to great big white dresses; the entire world went absolutely potty when Prince William decided to get hitched; and I don't know what Twilight is if it isn't a marriage plot. You could argue that Twilight isn't high literature, and of course it isn't, but I don't think when visitors came to Jane Austen's door she ever responded with "I'LL BE OUT IN A MINUTE, I'M JUST WRITING SOME HIGH LITERATURE!" What I'm trying to say is, there's no point being arrogant and thinking that just because no really good people are doing something, it isn't being done. Of course it bloody is. Three people, all in love, wanting to get married to each other? You might as well write a book where the Pope is Catholic and bears shit in the woods.

Jeffrey Eugenides is also reacting to novels where there are no solid, real-world characters, only people drifting in and out of a room mournfully talking about Sartre. Fair enough. Except the problem with this is that his solid characters aren't people that I'd willingly spend any time with at all. Madeleine, the heroine, is a attractive young WASP with a debilitating personality disorder: half the time she is a vapid sexpot, and the other half she is a serious-minded English student specialising in Victorian literature. To let us know when she is about to do something serious-minded, Jeffrey Eugenides has her put on a pair of nonsensically beat-up nerd glasses (we are told about a thousand times that her family is obnoxiously rich, so why can she not afford new ones? I suspect it is meant to be endearing. It is not endearing). Madeleine's 'unsuitable' love interest, Leonard, actually does have a debilitating personality disorder, depression, and I find it more than mildly disturbing that this is put forward as pretty much the only reason why he is so unsuitable. He's an asshole, sure, but that seems to be presented as just another of his symptoms (I think the people I know with depression would be rather offended at this). The other suitor, Mitchell, is unoffensive but also not particularly interesting or much involved in the plot. He spends most of the novel in India, reading scholarly works about religion. These are quoted in large, painful chunks throughout the novel. Because in case you hadn't noticed, this is HIGH LITERATURE.

That's another of The Marriage Plot's major flaws. Whereas most novels with pretensions to Great Thoughts are happy enough to namecheck a critic or thinker, and then get on with it, The Marriage Plot rams each mentioned critic down your throat. READ THIS! CONNECT WITH IT! HAVE YOU CONNECTED WITH IT YET? IF NOT, YOU ARE PROBABLY STUPID. I began to feel frightened and confused, as though in not recognising and comprehending Derrida's theory of love I had failed as an English student and also as a person. What if (I thought) I go into my first MA seminar next month and I don't understand any of that either? What if I am stupid? What if everyone else realises that I am only pretending to be an English scholar? WHAT THEN?

And if that's the way I felt, as a person who has quite recently completed an English BA and thus exactly the target audience of most of The Marriage Plot's frame of reference, then I can't imagine who else might be able to truly get this book in the way it wants to be understood. Who is it for? Who does Jeffrey Eugenides imagine will read it? This is one of the most unashamedly elitist novels I've come across in quite a while, and there's not even a reason for it. It's about getting married, for heavens' sake. It ought to at least be engaging.

The front cover of my proof copy tells me sternly that it is NOT FOR RESALE OR QUOTATION, and since I am bad at arguing, and especially bad at arguing with lawyers, I am going to obey the big black text. This is a pity, though, because I would very much like to share some of The Marriage Plot's choicer quotes with you all. At one bewildering point, around page 350, it takes a sharp right turn, abandons narrative completely and goes barrelling down Bad Porn Lane (this is adjascent to Awful Literary Sex Avenue, which is where most of The Blue Book takes place). It is all very horrible and intricately described.

This was the moment that I finally gave up trying to love The Marriage Plot. I had been trying so much, really giving it the benefit of the doubt, following it faithfully as it wallowed along like our oversize American rental car trying to turn a corner, but then page 350 happened and I hit the wall. Things did not get any better after that. The ending was not only randomly and stupidly postmodern but completely inefficient: it left about thirty loose ends waving in the breeze, entirely ignored. Poor things. They had to be in this silly novel and then they didn't even get to be resolved.

And poor Jeffrey Eugenides, too. I feel so bad for hating this. I love his books! I'm sure he is a very nice person! And yet. This book is a failure. With all the will in the world, I can only give it

2 stars.

Reviews - Lavinia, The Blue Book

The two books I'm reviewing today could, I've realised, make rather nice illustrations for a guide on How To Write A Good Romance. Lavinia would be in the 'books that manage to get it really quite right' part, and The Blue Book would be in the section called FOR GOD'S SAKE, JUST MAKE SURE YOURS DOESN'T TURN OUT LIKE THIS.

Anyway. 

The Lost Books of the Odyssey obviously started me on a mini classics kick, because the next thing I read was Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin. This is a retelling not of the Odyssey but of the Aeneid (which is itself, actually, a sort of retelling of both the Odyssey and the Iliad, only with Roman gods instead of Greek ones. So this is all very meta).

I wasn't sure if I was going to like Lavinia, mostly because of its less-than naturally great subject matter - Aeneas, as heroes go, is a tiresome protagonist who spends half his time being excessively pious and the other half abandoning women; the second half of the Aeneid is by far the dullest part of it, all lists and stabbing; and Lavinia herself, as seen in the Aeneid, is possibly the dullest female character ever created, a bit of living furniture permanently set to 'obey'.

It's even more than usually impressive, therefore, that Le Guin has not only managed to create a book that you actually want to keep reading but to turn two annoying characters who, in the original, thoroughly deserve each other, into two nice people who you would seriously consider inviting over for dinner. Aeneas in Lavinia is a rather sweet over-analyser who desperately wants to look after everyone and do the right thing, and Lavinia herself is not dull at all, only quiet and thoughtful, a sensible person who makes difficult but good decisions. They very unironically do deserve each other here, and their relationship is unexpectedly lovely and romantic in the nicest sense of the word. Like all the best romances, their love is doomed (as always, it's a case of cruel fate) but Le Guin retells their story in such a cool, understated way that it never turns into silly cheap opera - Aeneas's death, when it happens, is genuinely affecting, even though you've been preparing for it almost all the way through the narrative.

The only problem with Lavinia is that it has a very odd central conceit - this Lavinia, we are repeatedly reminded, is not only telling her story as a historical figure, but as the character from Virgil's poem. She's both real and made up, and she knows it - she meets the dying Virgil in a dream and he tells her the plot of the Aeneid, from which she learns that she must meet and marry Aeneas and rule Lavinium with him until he dies. It's the oddest prophecy scene I've ever come across. The rest of the story is so clean and simply told that the whole reality/poetry concept seems oddly jammed in, and all Lavinia's existential pondering about whether or not she's fundamentally real or just the figment of someone else's imagination seems like something out of an entirely different novel.

Once you're past that, though, Lavinia is an absolute pearl among retellings, a confident, beautiful book that conveys its time and place perfectly and something that actually made me see the point of the story it's reworking. Which, as I've already said, is no mean feat.


4 stars


And now, for something completely different, we have The Blue Book by A L Kennedy, to be published in August. I read an advanced proof  of it, so bear in mind as always that what I'm reviewing isn't necessarily the finished version - everything subject to change, no guarantees of content or quality and so on.

So, this book. This book made me struggle. I picked up the proof because I heard it was about fake mediums, which, let's be honest, is a topic that's difficult not to find interesting. It's magic with a side of fakery and a nice (or nasty) bit of death to ogle at from a safe distance. That I didn't just hurl The Blue Book into the nearest abyss is largely a tribute to how damn interesting its subject matter is.

This is the kind of book that can't be experienced alone. It must be shared. "LISTEN TO THIS!" you want to cry, in the state of wild, delighted incredulity that comes only from the realisation (usually experienced when reading Mills and Boone romances) that an actual human being truly believes that the words you see before you are elegant and in no respect humorous ways to describe someone's naughty bits. It is a testament to how truly dreadful the sex scenes in The Blue Book are that I was actually moved to stop reading at one point and look up how one would go about nominating a book for the Bad Sex Awards. I want to go out and campaign on its behalf. Victory in 2011 must be its, for The Blue Book is not only bad but really smugly arch about its badness, proud of all the clever new ways it has thought up to make sex truly intellectually realistic.

Consider, if you will, the following word choices. Where others will only use the blandly descriptive word 'penis' to convey the presence of a male member, A L Kennedy has daringly considered the penis's very essence and given to the world the phrase

softesthardestlostestnakedest thing

Sex, in Kennedy-speak, becomes

chasing the cum

and a blowjob is

everything and sorry and angry and sorry and perfect and tongue and mouth and needs and take him in and keep and lose and keep and play and the first taste of almost and almost... and he's dancing and taste the dancing

My god, I'm exhausted just writing that out.

In fact, A L Kennedy's crimes against the English language are many and varied, and not only confined to descriptions of nudity. As a frequent swearer, I never thought I'd say it, but I became almost physically tired of seeing the word 'fucking' insinuating itself into at least every third sentence, appearing in the middle of otherwise unrelated words and phrases with all the subtlety and appositeness of a pair of light-up plastic breasts at a wake.

The Blue Book, by the way, is the story of Beth, ex-fake medium and owner of the sort of tedious, disjointed stream of consciousness that you might hear if you put a radio on scan, who gets on a cruise liner with one tall slender man and gets off it a week later with another. This other man just so happens to be her ex-partner in crime and One True Love, and the novel follows them as they tediously break up and make up and have strange, disjointed conversations and even stranger, more disjointed sexual encounters. (People in The Blue Book all talk like robots in the last stages of of running down, in weird little jerks and verbal tics. This makes you feel vaguely as though you are having encounters with a quite different species). Things happen, backstory is revealed and it all peters out in a damp fart of an ending in which you realise that you care not a bean for either of the two main characters. They really do deserve each other, the pointless sods.

I can't help feeling as though A L Kennedy has taken something that is conceptually a rather good idea and absolutely mangled it in her desperate urge to be very clever all the time. She absolutely wraps herself in knots trying to describe the world in COMPLETELY NEW AND FASCINATING WAYS, and it never quite works out. About a third of The Blue Book, for example, is written in the second person, directly addressing the reader, which is an incredibly difficult literary trick to get right. I can see what she was going for - recreating the universalised 'personal' patter that fake mediums use - but the problem is that Kennedy can't quite make it work. She repeatedly gets too precise, and instead of feeling like she knows what you're thinking, you realise that she's got no idea at all. It all stinks a bit of desperation, and that isn't really the main emotion you ought to be having when you're reading a novel.

As I said, I did finish The Blue Book, but out of a sense of masochistic fascination with its pure badness rather than anything else. It's certainly not something I'd want any other person to have to suffer though - except, that is, for the sex scenes. You should all read those sex scenes and weep.

2 stars.