February Reading

The manuscript revision, as Poirot would say, marches. It marches fairly well. And when it does not march so well, I am getting a wonderful opportunity to learn the art of absolute Zen-like acceptance and calm in the face of metaphorical lions and tigers and bears.

Nothing matters! It's all fine! In fact, it's GREAT. An entire subplot has to be cut? Great! The last third of the book does not make sense any more? Great! The title may have to be changed? GREAT! I cry. WONDERFUL! YES! BRILLIANT!

(No, really, it is all wonderful, and it will all be fine.)

Anyway, I have another very good piece of news to share with you all. Ladies and gentlemen of the internet, I finally have a job! As of last week, I work in the magical emporium of words that is Orion Books. I now spend all day working on other people's books and then come home and write my own. Basically, my inner twelve-year-old thinks I am THE BIGGEST STAR IN THE UNIVERSE.

I should, however, probably make some disclaimers before I carry on: despite what happens in my professional life, this is still very much my personal blog. Nothing in it has anything to do with the official opinion of Orion and the Hachette Group at large. Likewise, anything I may previously have said about an Orion or Hachette title is my own view of it, and springs from my crabbed soul alone.

Luckily the titles I'm reviewing today are nothing to do with Orion at all. So, with a clear conscience, I will now have at my February book list.

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

Alas. Rarely have I ever read a book that I appreciated so much in the abstract but which bored me so heavily in practice. The writing in Moon Tiger is hauntingly lovely, its premise clever (the whole stretch of history viewed as it relates relation to the life of one woman, the tempestuous Claudia) and that premise well-executed. And yet, it had all the emotional effect on me of a lukewarm glass of milk.

Have I gotten too used to books with punchy, linear plots? Probably. I kept longing for stuff to blow up already - and then realising that the whole book was about the horrors of World War II and feeling crass.

I don't know what happened. There's a dreamy underwater aspect to this book, and maybe I wasn't in the mood for dreaminess. Objectively, I have to say that this was a beautiful book. Subjectively, it took me two weeks to get through its 200 pages and I resent it utterly as a result.

3 stars.

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

In terms of actual technical accomplishment, this is far inferior to Moon Tiger. Subjectively, though? I enjoyed it a whole lot more.

Also (oddly enough) about the horrors of World War II, Code Name Verity is written as the account of a British spy who has been captured by the Nazis during her very first mission to occupied France. Verity (not her real name) has been ordered to write down everything she knows about British intelligence in exchange for her comfort in prison, but what she actually writes is a sort of third-person love-letter to Maddie, the girl who piloted her into France.

This is being marketed as YA, mainly because the two main characters are quite young. I'm not sure it should be. I get the feeling that someone said to Elizabeth Wein, "This is great, but because this is now for teens you need to make it LIGHTER! We need to LAUGH!" This is the only explanation I can find for the frankly weird tone of parts of the novel. The bits where Verity is recounting the story of her friendship with Maddie is both sweet and perfectly convincing, but around those we get passages about Verity's treatment in prison which can best be described as 'I've been captured by the Gestapo! LOL!'

This is horribly offputting, not to mention extremely unlikely, and although in later parts its inclusion does begin to make more sense, Verity would have been a markedly better book without it. I think Wien became a bit of a victim of her own admittedly good plot idea (I don't want to give anything away, but if you've read it you'll know what I mean). I see why Verity's story is the shape it is, but all the same the editor in me sat up and said, I want to cut ALL OF THIS PART.

Basically, this was an intensely mixed bag of a text. I loved parts of it, I disliked other parts. But overall I enjoyed myself, and that counts for something.

4 stars.


Armadale by Wilkie Collins

I have nothing to say about this book other than YES. I've registered my love for Wilkie Collins on this blog before. For me he's Dickens sans draggy social conscience and plus a lot of extra murder and bigamy and pirates. Basically, he's Dickens BUT BETTER.

This highly ridiculous, hugely fun novel is entirely based on the premise that everyone in it is called Allan Armadale. OK, I'm slightly exaggerating, but not much. There were two men called Allan Armadale who hated each other and swore an eternal feud, and then they both had sons, and they both got called Allan Armadale, and now they're meant to carry on the eternal feud - EXCEPT - they meet unexpectedly and become Best Friends. Are Allan and Allan fated to do ill to each other? Can their loyalty to Allans peres overcome their loyalty to each other? And what will happen when they both fall in love with the same (evil) lady?

Cue idiocy and fabulously manufactured mayhem. In a Wilkie Collins novel, six impossible things happen before breakfast in every single chapter, but he's so good at creating plot twists that you don't even notice how brain-achingly stupid all of them really are. Yes, all his heroic characters are sappy fools. Yes, his villainous characters are so evil that they might as well come with fangs and a pointy tail attached. But his stories are AWESOME.

As a side-note, Armadale gave me additional joy when I realised that wicked quack make-up artist Mrs Oldershaw is a fantastic caricature of real-life quack make-up artist Madame Rachel, subject of a biography I read last year. I love it when books connect. Anyway, Armadale was daft but great, a rollicking souped-up sensational yarn where everyone runs about crying and screaming and having prophetic visions. My favourite.

4 stars.

Size 12 Is Not Fat by Meg Cabot

I cherish a deep and abiding love for the romance novels of Meg Cabot. Their protagonists are delightfully sweet, if very dim (I can't tell if Cabot does this ironically or not. I have the bad feeling that she does not, but I am not going to pry into it in case I confirm my suspicions), and they all fall in love with lawyer prince vineyard owners and live happily ever after. I cannot even tell you how many times I have read the Queen of Babble trilogy (hint: many). They are so soothing and lovely, like mental ice-cream, and sometimes we all just need some mental ice-cream in our reading. So me going on holiday last week was the perfect excuse to buy one of the Meg Cabots I hadn't already read, the first in her series of gentle-murder-mysteries-that-are-secretly-romance-novels.

Heather Wells is a washed-up teenybop sensation (with weight issues) who's been forced to take a job as deputy building manager for a New York University hall of residence. When a girl falls to her death down one of the elevator shafts, Heather is the only one who suspects that it might not actually be an accident. Can she find the murderer?

Can she heck. Heather does eventually solve the murder (it's pretty easy), but throughout the book she is waaay more interested in getting into the pants of her preternaturally attractive and super-rich (of course) private detective roommate Cooper. Sure, this is a romance-thinly-disguised-as-a-murder-mystery, but REALLY I think that someone investigating a murder would not spend 95% of her waking life wondering whether or not a boy liiiiikes her. Jeeze, Heather. He likes you. Now go work out who is pushing girls down lift shafts.

I think that maybe pairing a romance with a murder mystery is a less good idea than it seemed a first. I like Meg Cabot romance novels. I like murder mysteries. And yet I sensed many flaws in this particular marriage of the two genres.

2.5 stars.

Blacklands by Belinda Bauer

I reviewed Belinda Bauer's latest crime novel, Rubbernecker, for Litro last week and LOVED it. If I had been handing out stars, it would have been a 4.5 grading to 5. So obviously I had to buy her first book to make sure she was that good all the way through.

And she is. Blacklands is the story of 11-year-old Stephen Lamb, whose uncle Billy was the victim of a high-profile white-van paedophile called Arnold Avery. Billy never came home, and never grew up, and his loss (his body has never been recovered, although Avery has admitted to his abduction) has devastated the lives of Stephen's mum and grandma. Neither of them have time for Stephen, and so Stephen hits on a plan to bring the family back together - he's going to go out on Exmoor and find Uncle Billy's body. When his search does not seem to be coming up with the hoped-for results, he tries a new tactic: contacting Avery in prison to ask where Billy can be found. But it turns out that Avery is more interested in Stephen himself...

This is an incredibly terrifying and ballsy premise, and it gets even more shocking from there. About a third of the book is written from Avery's perspective, a man who's Humbert Humbert crossed with one of Terry Pratchett's grinning psychopaths. Bauer writes a chillingly logical justification of his actions that feels disgustingly likely. He's a realistically evil character, just as Stephen (almost more impressively) is an absolutely realistic 11-year-old boy. It's rare to read a book not for children that bothers with getting its child characters right, but Bauer's really done it here. I loved Stephen and I was completely gripped and freaked out by his story. I think Belinda Bauer's my new crime writing hero.

4.5 stars.

We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Last week, while I was reading this, I tried to explain it to my boyfriend by saying, "I'm reading a book about a serial killer."

"You're always reading a book about a serial killer," he replied, at which point I realised that he was completely right and felt terrible about it. The only vague justification of my reading habits I can give is that they're not all this gruesomely harrowing. I actually, er, prefer the funny ones. Or is that a worse admission?

Anyway, Kevin is all about a truly horrible high-school shooting. It's written from the perspective of the mother of the perpetrator, as she tries to come to terms with what her son has done and her own culpability for his actions. A lot of it is startlingly, unpleasantly realistic, and Shriver has done an excellent (maybe too excellent) job of bringing Eva's fear and distress and guilt to life. Likewise, Eva's marriage to the dopey but well-meaning Franklin is similarly well imagined - Shriver is a really good and very meticulous writer.

What I honestly just could not buy, though, was Kevin himself. We're meant to understand Eva as a flawed narrator, but even so I just could not believe for a second that even a version of her slit-eyed snakelike Son of Satan could ever possibly exist. In her mind, he literally is Rosemary's baby but without the little horns and cloven hooves. The rest of Shriver's world is so banal, so full of things that are just OK (and only if you squint) that Kevin the Evil Genius doesn't seem to fit into it.

I read about - and write about - murder because I don't understand why anyone could commit atrocities, and I think Shriver's asking the same questions here. I don't really agree with her answers, and I think that's because what interests (and terrifies me) is the idea of sliding scale between not-killer and killer, the connections between a good, moral, kind person and someone who eats babies. Yes, Shriver does try to show similarities between Eva and her son, but Kevin's so soaked through with cartoon villain evil that it doesn't really work.

That's not to say I wasn't heavily upset by Kevin. It's a harrowing read, and one that I don't want to go through again. If you want to attempt it yourself, make sure you have someone on hand to give you a hug at the end of each chapter.

3.5 stars.

1001 Books Review - Surfacing

Margaret Atwood is a very good writer, isn't she? A very good writer. That is not in any doubt.

But oh I hated this particular book.

This is partly due to over-exposure. I've now read almost all of Atwood's books, and I feel like I know her much, much too well as a result. If this was a real relationship we would be over the honeymoon stage, way past easy fondness and at that awful place where every word that comes out of the other person's mouth sounds like a broken record. You hear them start to tell THE SAME STORY like it's still brand new information, and all you want to do is leap up and scream, "THIS IS NOT FUNNY! IT HAS NEVER BEEN FUNNY! WERE YOU ALWAYS THIS BORING?"

I mean, GOD, Margaret Atwood, is there some line in your contract that stipulates that every single one of your novels must contain a man repeating the phrase 'Beans, beans, the musical fruit, the more you eat, the more you toot!' and then laughing like it's funny? Is there? IS THERE REALLY? Because if not, why do you keep doing it? Why? And why are your main characters always you, and why do they all have the same childhoods, and why do they all hate themselves, and why are all the men in your novels hideous penis-brained idiots? WHY?

I'm overreacting, and I know I am, but I just can't take it any more. I am Atwooded out.

Surfacing is the story of Narrator X (many of Atwood's narrators don't have names, because 1. they are secretly just Margaret Atwood, and 2. they are simultaneously Everywoman and a big woman-shaped vacant space), who goes into the Canadian woods with her three friends to look for her missing father. Of course, what she discovers is that culture is terrible, humanity is terrible and she has spent her adult life as a TOOL OF MEN. So she goes crazy, rips off all of her clothes, smashes some mirrors and returns to nature. Sigh.

The sad thing is that I technically agree with a lot of what Atwood has to say. Humans are destroying the natural world. A lot of men do treat women reprehensibly. We haven't solved any of the problems that feminism was created to combat. Thinking about all of that makes me incredibly angry. And yet, Surfacing just left me wishing profoundly that Margaret Atwood would write one novel at least that didn't read like a big old cloud of unrelieved despair.

The one bright spot, for me, is that Surfacing (first published 1972) does inadvertantly prove that, for all the awful sexism that women still have to deal with on a regular basis, relationships between men and women (or at least some men and some women, or at least the men and women that I know) have improved immeasurably since it was written. I found myself really struggling to connect with the mindset of Atwood's characters. There's Anna, who can't ever take off her makeup in case her husband David hates her, and then there's the narrator's boyfriend Joe, who keeps trying to rape her while shouting "DO YOU LOVE ME YET?" I just can't imagine a group of my own friends behaving the way they do, and more importantly, I can't imagine my boyfriend or my male friends behaving the way Joe and David behave. Yes, the men in my life still sometimes insist on making pointless sexist jokes, but they do it sheepishly, like they know at a base level that they're being bad.

I've suggested before that this disconnect between Atwood's lived experience and my own is because it has taken (and will still take) a long, long time to create a sensible and automatically feminist pool of potential husbands. Atwood was writing in the second-wave 70s, but the men she was surrounded with had been brought up in the 40s and 50s, when women were mostly housewives and made meatloaf and stared at the wall and cried. My own men, by contrast, were brought up in the 80s and 90s, when women mostly wore power suits and were Prime Minister. My boyfriend's mother is a GP, so it would have been pretty difficult for him not to grow up knowing that women were capable of being intelligent and effective public figures.It's a process of tiny baby steps, is what I'm saying, but all the same those baby steps seem to have led us somewhere.

I feel very lucky that the battle of the sexes in Surfacing didn't ring true for me, because of the effect that it has on its narrator. The hate X receives from the male characters has been internalised and turned in on herself. She despises herself. She sees herself as intrinsically wrong and lacking and stupid, and Atwood's pretty clear that this is because she's been surrounded by people feeding her this nonsense every day of her life. If you get hate, hate's all you know, and you can't possibly like yourself as a person if you're constantly being told how inadequate you are. In a way, Surfacing is an updated 'Yellow Wallpaper' - the woman takes what men imagine her to be and twists it into a really terrifying monster version of herself. Again, I know that this is a problem that has nowhere near been solved for all women, but I'm so glad that, for me, that updating feels in need of another update. Baby steps!

By rights, I should probably like, or at least agree with, Surfacing. But I can't. I see that it's beautifully written, I see that it's got views that I am intrinsically on board with, but all the pleasure I might have had in actually reading it fell down that tiny gap between Atwood's point of view and my own and was lost for ever.

Purely on enjoyment, I have to give this

2.5 stars.

Oh, and my 1001 books progress? 20.48%

Dickenstown review: Girl in a Blue Dress

I don't know if you've heard, but I moved recently. I now live in Rochester, a town whose greatest claim to fame is that it was once touched by the heavenly hand of Charles Dickens. Our greengrocer's is called Pip's, the clothes shop opposite is Estella, there's an Indian restaurant called Two Cities and the real Satis House (aka Restoration House) is just off the High Street. Also, if you're on the way to the library you can stop off at Charles Dickens' writing shed, which for some reason is stitting in the garden of Eastgate House with bits of paint peeling off it.

Here, look I took a bad picture of it on my phone just for you. Sorry about the quality. Just imagine that Dickens is just about to emerge from it in a blaze of heavenly light and disclose the real ending of Edwin Drood. Also, please note that whereas for most writers a writing shed would mean just that, Dickens required a two-story writing chalet with applique lion on the front (you can't see the lion, but it is there). This seems like unneccessary literary bling to me. After all, how do you write on two floors at once?

Basically, around here, Dickens is the man. We even have Dickens World in the next town over, where I hear they have mechanical Miss Havishams bursting into flames every half hour. (I might have made that up).

I am not sure I am entirely comfortable with all this jazz. Yes, I once wept openly in the car over the ending of A Tale of Two Cities, but I have a funny feeling that in person the Great Man may not have been that great. Not only do I suspect that spending more than half an hour in his hyperactive, egotistical presence would have sent me crazy, but there's that whole leaving-his-wife-of-forty-years-for-a-teenage-actress thing, and also his weird penchant for hot dead teenage girls.

Kate Beaton's excellent take on the situation

No, I do not exaggerate. I have explained the hot dead girls here in an article I wrote for Litro a few months ago. Suffice it to say: think about how many hot teenage girls there are in Dickens novels. Think of how many of them subsequently die. Now think about how much hotter they are presented as being once they are dead angels in heaven. See what I mean?

Essentially, Dickens liked his women daft as brushes, dead as doornails and fifteen forever, and so his real, not-dead, not-teenaged wife seems to have had a fairly awful time of it. I stress seems. Since she never actually wrote anything about her life, we don't actually know, and this leaves a lot of room for people to speculate.

That's exactly what Gaynor Arnold has done in her Girl in a Blue Dress, a book about the neglected wife of a very thinly disguised Great Victorian Writer who, yes, kicked her out years ago to make way for his youthful actress broad. The novel opens on the day of Charles Dickens' Alfred Gibson's funeral, as his wife Catherine Dorothea reflects on her past life and tries to decide once and for all whether her husband was an out-and-out heel or whether he just behaved like one sometimes.

At first, all the evidence is on the former side. Arnold's Great Writer Gibson was a man with a manic need to be SUPER FUNNY AND INTERESTING 100% OF THE TIME, something presented as superficially charming but secretly extremely exhausting and annoying. But, of course, it's not all that simple. Over the next few weeks, as Dorothea reunites with her estranged children, meets the queen (note: this part was stupid) and hangs with her husband's mistress we hear the whole story of their life together, which turns out to have been somewhat good and somewhat bad - essentially, as standard and non-surprising as this book.

What I liked about Girl in a Blue Dress was that it didn't really try to turn Catherine/Dorothea into a lurking feminist superwoman. I recently read Lilian Nayder's biography of Catherine Dickens, and it was basically just Nayder desperately trying to reclaim her for the feminist cause on really tenuous (read: absolutely no) evidence. There were many, many women from history who lived fantastically interesting lives, and who deserve recognition, but just as most rich white men (despite all those advantages from running the world) still managed to be normal and boring, most women just existed, being nice and thoughtful and good but not necessarily doing anything that needs to be written about now.

In another time, those women might have been able to accomplish something awesome. If she had been alive today, Catherine Dickens might have been one of the world's great human beings. I don't know what she was capable of. But what she actually did with her life was pretty much a) stare at the wall and b) have babies. The strength of Arnold's novel is that she doesn't try to add random suffragist canvassing or a passionate fling with a sympathetic gentleman. She goes with the ordinary material she has, and in the process shows that small domestic activities can still make up a valid life, if not a totally satisfying one for the person living it.

Girl in a Blue Dress was never going to be a rip-roaring adventure book. This is partly because its subject matter's pretty staid, but more because Arnold's not a fine enough writer to make chatting about not doing anything seem gripping. But it's mumsily enjoyable, and probably fairly close to the emotional truth of what went on in the Dickens household. Yes, everyone in the novel has an irritating tendency to talk in dramatic capslock and quotation marks, and yes, it's all a bit cute at times, but on the whole this was both pleasant and admirably ideologically restrained.

2.5 stars.

Swiss wine and cheese reviews part 2: The Riddle of the Sands and A Single Man

First, I would like to share some good news with you. The furniture has gone. It has ALL GONE. There are NO MATTRESSES IN THE HALLWAY ANY MORE and there is NOT A WARDROBE IN THE BATHROOM EITHER. I am euphoric but also slightly suspicious, in case this is all too good to be true and I wake up tomorrow and discover that it has returned, bringing friends.

I seem to recall that I only reviewed half of the books I read on holiday. This is because the furniture made me too angry to think. But now it has gone, and I have room in my brain to get angry about books again.

Actually, neither of these books made me particularly angry. One did make me sad (you'll see why), and one just confused me, but both of them turned out to be not at all well-chosen holiday reads. Oops.

First up, The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers.

If this book was a person, and I met it on a singles website (go with me on this), we would immediately flag up high uncompatability and any date we were forced to go on would be a disaster. If it was a dog, it would be a short-haired chihuahua and I would be looking for one of those dogs that look like an enormous toilet brush. What I am saying is, this book was not the book for me.

If you want to find out whether or not you will enjoy The Riddle of the Sands more than I did, you need to ask yourself one important question. Do you like boats?

For me, boats are like horses: I find them pleasant from a distance, but quite puzzling close up. They have lots of bits to them, like jibs and booms and all manner of little clippy things (?) that need constant attention, and I am daunted by this. This is not to say that I am incapable of getting on board with aquatically-themed novels. I read the whole Swallows and Amazons series in my youth (although I did mentally look away during the more naval parts), and I think boats are excellent places to put a plot. But there are books featuring the sea and there are books where THE WHOLE STORY is people belaying the fore-top-poop-sail and then letting it out again. (Or is belaying letting it out? Answers below please). And the second is the case in The Riddle of the Sands.

Unfortunately, my duffer of a brain does not allow me to focus properly on seafaring terms, meaning that I was only able to take in approximately one-third of the words in The Riddle of the Sands. To me, a typical paragraph looked something like this:

"??? the ??? ???!" said Davies. I quickly ???? ???? and jumped into the ?????. "Quick!" cried the normally taciturn Davies, turning a violent shade of puce. "We only have three hours until the ??? fills up the ??? and we are left in the ????" "But what of the villainous Germans?" I asked. "Surely their ??? must ???? on the ???? at ????." "Nonsense," said Davies. "Remember the ??? ???? ????? ???? at eight ????. Also, canals."

The narrator, Carruthers, is a twerp - he begins the story by complaining about how BORED he is of London because all his friends are away and both(!) of his clubs are being cleaned - but even though the real hero is sweet, silent Davies, he is still too nautical to make me feel like I had discovered a kindred spirit. Our intrepid heroes (?) have to foil some sort of plot to do with Germans and canals, which they are either in, or not in, or in the wrong ones, or something. Anyway, the important point is that they are VILLAINOUS, like all Germans in British novels at the beginning of the twentieth century.

If you want a good tonal comparison for The Riddle of the Sands, think The 39 Steps but with boats. It's got the same jolly-ho British gentlemen, casual racism, open-air chases and random but very dangerous danger. I think I would have found The Riddle of the Sands gently amusing in its own unintentionally offensive way had I not been so befuddled by all the boat words. If you do like boats, I think you'll find it charming but dated, but because I don't I have to give it

2.5 stars.

My last holiday book was A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. So far, I have had 100% success with Isherwood. Even though I'm not sure Isherwood's someone I'd like to hang out in a pub with, I love his prose style, and both of the books I've previously read by him were pretty dark but unfailingly funny. In this novel, though, he has magnificently lost his sense of humour.

It's clear that Isherwood was going through a very, very bad time when he wrote A Single Man. Every page of it washes you with utter black despair of the kind I haven't experienced since the last time I read The Bell Jar (which I keep doing because I love it, even though I know that afterwards I will have to crawl into bed and stare at the ceiling for a while thinking about doom). Like The Bell Jar, it feels intensely personal in a way that makes you want to phone the Samaritans on the author's behalf.

Set in sixties America, it follows one day in the life of George, whose life-partner Jim has suddenly died. Because George is a man and Jim was one also, he can't acknowledge his grief, he can't properly mourn and he has no physical or legal claim on the person he loved. (Sounds familiar? Of course it does. And the worst thing is that it's not just ancient history. In the kind of life-mirroring-art that you wish would never happen, George's exact story played out again last year. That last link, by the way, is to a youtube video made by the surviving partner, and you should probably be in a strong mental state before you click play.)

Feel depressed yet? It gets worse. If that whole scenario wasn't awful enough on its own, A Single Man is set in Los Angeles, the most grim city in the universe, where the roads are neverending circles of hell, the sky is a permanent weird shade of yellow and everyone is starving hungry and hates each other. Everything is horrible, George hates everyone and his life is just A LITANY OF DESPAIR. And that is how this book goes.

I felt uncomfortable and upset while I was reading it, and disliked George intensely, which I'm sure is exactly what what Isherwood wanted to happen. The idea he's trying to get across- and it's an extremely powerful one - is that if you're subjected to hate all your life, you will become a hateful person. If you simply feel soggily sorry for George, you've missed the point. He's not a tragic martyr, he's a painfully angry, sad man, and that's the fault of all the people who have made sure that he can't be open about the life that he's lived. Isn't that a jolly holiday thought?

A Single Man was incredibly powerful, but also incredibly embittered. Rage and sorrow just shoot out of it in waves. I think it'll stay with me, and I know I agree with what it's got to say, but I didn't actually enjoy the experience of reading it.

I just wish it wasn't still so completely relevant.

3.5 stars.

More moving reviews: Beautiful for Ever and Sea of Poppies

The move progresses. I would not say it was done. That would be far too optimistic, and not take into account the extra mattress and bed frame currently reposing in our hallway. This upsets me so much that if someone, at this precise moment, were to ask me which I would prefer, mattress removal or world peace, I would have to really struggle with myself for a long time and I STILL can't guarantee I'd come out for world peace at the end of it.

The good(?) thing is, though, that I now live in a town with a large population of second-hand bookshops. I keep seeing signs that say things like ALL BOOKS 75P, and then my brain short-circuits with delight and I come back to myself five minutes later clutching three history books and the complete works of C. J. Sansom. I also keep nearly buying a complete set of the Forsyte Saga books, even though I know perfectly well that I WILL NEVER READ THE WHOLE OF THE FORSYTE SAGA (except that I might! I could! I could do that instead of getting a job! I COULD JUST SPEND THE REST OF MY LIFE READING AND THAT WOULD BE MARVELLOUS). These are the dilemmas in my life right now.

Anyway. I have read two books. If I'm perfectly honest, neither of them lit up my mind with joy, but they were both extremely comforting in that neither of them were about furniture at all.

Shall we?

First up is Helen Rappaport's Beautiful for Ever. It's the history of Madame Rachel, Victorian quack cosmetician extraordinaire, who rose from the depths of a London slum to become beautician, moneylender and (maybe) pimp to the rich and famous. Madame Rachel was practicising at a time when make-up was frowned upon, and women had no control over their own incomes (if you happen to be a woman, look up the 1882 Married Women's Property Act and bless every one of your lucky stars that it exists), but despite those apparent hindrances she cheerfully managed to become extremely rich. She tricked, coerced and blackmailed her way through several fortunes, and then she got spectacularly done for fraud by a particularly aggrieved customer.

It's an extraordinarily fun story, and one that we're lucky to be able to read at all - according to Rappaport, it had been largely forgotten about before she came across a newspaper mention of the trial hearing and began her investigations. All the same, though, I feel like Madame Rachel might deserve a better narrator. Rappaport is neither an exceptional story-teller or a particularly rigorous academic. She has a slightly lackluster and unimaginative writing style, and what she's got to say feels incomplete and a bit off. Loose ends are left hanging, the thread of the story is dropped and picked up again at random and she leaves out explanations that would have been fascinating.

We never hear, for example, exactly how Rachel carried out her beauty treatments, or what the day-to-day life in her shop was like. Rappaport hints that it might have been used as a brothel, and then doesn't really elaborate. Come on! When you're writing the history of a scandal, there needs to be some scandal. That's why your readers have bought the book. They want to hear juicy things about the Marquis of Gosh and Lord Ooh's daughter frolicking in a canopied bed while people peer at them through the keyhole. I got the sense that those stories might have been there, but for some reason Rappaport decided not to elaborate - and without that her tale falls flat.

Given its material, this book could have been a whole lot better than it was - but it wasn't, and on the basis of what I actually read I have to give it

2.5 stars.

Next, we have Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. It was nominated for the Booker the year that White Tiger won, and I still hear people complaining that Sea of Poppies should have taken it. To which I say: no. No, it should not, because Sea of Poppies is not a particularly great book.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy it. I totally did. It's a big fat comfortable story, with an interesting setting (India in 1838, with the Opium Wars about to kick off) and lots of exciting and slightly awful things happening in it. All the characters start off in unpleasant circumstances, and then more unpleasant events occur, but they are the sort of unpleasant events that leave you knowing in your heart that Everything Will Be OK and everyone will evenually rise through adversity to happiness and riches and lots of attractive babies.

Sea of Poppies could be described as epic in that it's very long (it's the first volume in a proposed trilogy; the second book, River of Smoke, came out last year and the third is presumably gestating) and full of stuff. But unlike fat tomes by, say, Tolstoy or A. S. Byatt, its contents don't stand up particularly well to careful examination. Ghosh's writing is perfectly good, but there are no fireworks of verbal wonder, and if you wipe away all the unpleasant attempts at 'gritty realism' from the book's plot (attempted sexual abuse with a horse; bloody whippings; the consumption of animal dung), you're left with a story that's pretty much all about gooey wish-fulfillment romance.

Appropriately enough, many of the characters have distinct Mary Sue tendencies. Granted, the book is all about people whose life in India is so nasty that they are forced to emigrate to Mauritius, but I found myself marvelling at just how special every one of the characters turned out to be. Several of them have astonishingly coloured eyes, one has prophetic visions, and there is even a free-spirited white girl who just wants to wear saris and learn science. If I was playing Stereotype Bingo she would be a full card all on her own.

But that really doesn't matter. In Sea of Poppies, characters are just there to hang plot on, and it's the plot that keeps you going. I read it so fast that you could have used my eye movements to produce energy, because even though I logically knew that Paulette was going to get on the boat (I kept looking up from my reading to yell SHE IS TOTALLY GOING TO GET ON THE BOAT at my boyfriend) I had to make absolutely sure she did it. I was skim reading so hard that by the end I think I actually saw three words a page, but that was pretty much all I needed (spoiler: she gets on the boat. In other news, the Pope is still Catholic).

Sea of Poppies is pretty much enjoyable highbrow trash, a blockbuster novel for people who like to think of themselves as serious, educated readers but still want a good bit of forbidden love on a boat. And who can blame them? We all like a bit of forbidden love, especially when it is aquatic.

All the same, though, in terms of what the book actually is vs. what was promised to me, I've got to give this

2.5 stars.

The Shadow Line, Exercises in Style and Good Morning, Midnight: Three skinny book reviews to get me back in the 1001 Books game

My failure to get on with my 1001 Books goal has been concerning my friend Boadicea. She does not like to leave problems unsolved, and especially she does not like to think of people not reading books, and so a few weeks ago she arrived at my flat bearing an enormous pile of the thinnest titles from the List she could find in her house.

I thanked her profusely, and then gratefully proceeded to read something completely different. I know, I felt bad. But now I have been getting through my lend-pile, and as a consequence I now bring you three short reviews of three extremely slender tomes.

First up, The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad.

Have you ever read any other books by Joseph Conrad? You have? Well, imagine that book, and then imagine that it is called The Shadow Line, and you will pretty much have a handle on what is going on here.

There's the same grotesque, vaguely hallunicatory atmosphere, bringing with it the sense that the world is rapidly tipping out of control into TOTAL CHAOS. Whatever dialogue comes out of people's mouths, you get the feeling that what they really want to say is "THE HORROR, THE HORROR!"; everyone's cheek is haggard and wan; and you get the definite impression that their doom is rapidly approaching.

The Shadow Line may be brief, but it punches far above its weight in terms of sheer creepiness. There's a prefatory note by Conrad asking readers to please remember that this is not a ghost story, thereby ensuring that everyone for ever more will read it as a ghost story. I have the feeling Conrad knew that. Smart guy.

It's all about a young European sailor in the Far East (read: Conrad in his youth) who unexpectedly gets given his first naval command. But his new ship's last captain died a mean and nasty death on board, and the first mate is now convinced his spirit is still floating about, bringing plague and destitution and DOOM on all of its remaining crew. They set sail against his advice, and what follows is a lot of illness, confusion and despair. And DOOM, of course. Plenty of that.

Is it all because of a vengeful ghost? Who knows. Whatever the cause, the whole thing is vintage Conrad, but, maybe because ships as a setting always leave me slightly cold, this just felt like a less-interesting riff on something of his I'd read before.

3 stars.

And now for something completely different: Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style.

How do I even begin to explain this book?


A man's on a bus one day when he notices a guy with a really long thin neck and an ugly hat. He gets into an toe-treading argument with his neighbour and then makes a dive for a suddenly free seat. A few hours later, the man notices the guy again, walking with his friend, who's telling him to move a button on his coat.

And that's it. Queneau takes that single boring little incident and retells it in 99 different ways. We get it from the points of view of different bus passengers (a Cockney, a bigot, a neurotic, a statistician), different literary styles (an ode, a sonnet, the vocative), different senses (only touch, only smell, only colour) and then some really crazy conceits, like the one where he sets himself the challenge of describing the episode using only the names of animals, or (my favourite) only botanical terms.

Sounds kind of stupid, doesn't it? That's what I thought. In practice, though, it's brilliant. It's so pedantic that it's almost delicious, a perfect little manual for almost every way it's possible to write a scene. It's also unexpectedly funny. I began it in a very suspicious frame of mind but, once I had really got with the programme, kept finding myself laughing out loud.

Best read in little bits, because every retelling deserves your full attention, it's a perfect tool for writers who want to be reminded of the limits of what can be done with writing, and it's also just a delight for anyone who loves language. It's worth noting that this was originally written in French; it's been stonkingly translated into English by Barbara Wright, who probably deserves almost as much credit as Queneau for the text I read.

Stunningly smart stuff.

4 stars.

There is, though, a problem with Exercises in Style, and it became apparent when I picked up Jean Rhys' Good Morning, Midnight straight afterwards: after you have read it, you will automatically put everything else you read into one of Queneau's categories.

Good Morning, Midnight is full of sentences like

Ah yes, that's life... those blank-faced rooms, those cruel cafes... sometimes it makes me want to sit down and weep. Yes, just weep!

and what they made me think was, ah, an example of the modern style. And then I laughed, which was awkward.

Good Morning, Midnight is a sozzled ramble round 1930s Paris in the company of narrator Sophia, a lady d'une certaine age who reeks of despair and Pernod. As Sophia wanders, falling in and out of the company of unsuitable men and crying a lot, we hear disjointed reminiscences from her tragic life story. We also get a lot of drunken, paranoid stream-of-consciousness that is, frankly, bordering on the insane. Since Jean Rhys went on to give the world Wide Sargasso Sea, a retelling of Jane Eyre from the point of view of insane alcoholic Antoinette Cosway (you'll know her better as Bertha Rochester), it's not a vast stretch of the imagination to suggest that all this insanity and alcoholism may be emanating from the character of Jean Rhys herself. She, like Sophia and Antoinette, was probably not someone who you'd want to invite over for a dinner party.

Anyway, Jean/Sophia's boozy, lonely stay in Paris unravels in a way that's deeply depressing but not particularly surprising. In fact, it may leave you wanting to lock up your drinks cabinet and throw away the key. Ladies and gentlemen, this is not an upbeat novel.

My dislike of Good Morning, Midnight boils down to pure personal preference. It's one of those books that, even though I objectively saw that it was well-crafted (if a bit heavy on the elipses),  I subjectively couldn't enjoy. It felt a bit wandering, a bit self-indulgent and, frankly, really, really crazy.

Sorry, Jean Rhys.

2.5 stars.

Delicious (Historical) Death: The Devil in the White City

Another day, another book about historical crime. This time it's the turn of fact instead of fiction, and the Victorians instead of the Tudors: I'm reviewing The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson.

The Devil in the White City is set in Chicago, a place where I spent a lot of time as a child watching chicks get born in the Museum of Science and Industry. And that story is even vaguely relevant to today's review. The book's chosen moment is the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which was very important for America and History and so on, and directly led to the Museum of Science and Industry being built, allowing me 100 years later to stand and watch chicks get born while my mother and grandmother failed to get me at all interested in any of the other exhibits.

It was also important for a man called H. H. Holmes. This charming human being decided that the World's Fair was the perfect opportunity for him to build a murder hotel and kill large numbers of young women, and so he did, while everyone around him totally failed to notice that anything shifty was going on.

And that, essentially, is the story told by this book. It's a gallop through two parallel stories, the creation of the World's Fair by visionary architect Daniel Burnham, and the criminal rise and fall of visionary murderer H. H. Holmes. The World's Fair happens (good!) and people get murdered (bad!). The end.


The Devil in the White City has at least a tenuous link to reality, in that all the things in it did actually happen, but at the same time it reads like particularly ridiculous and racy fiction written by someone who's got a strong sense of a good story but a very bad idea of how to put that story into words. It is the true-crime equivalent of really seductive but bad quality junk food: a double-chocolate whipped-cream Tesco Value cake in novel form.

My feelings on the subject of populist versus scholarly historical writing are sort of contradictory. While on the one hand I believe fervently that history is extremely interesting and should be written about like the crazy epic blockbuster it is, I also believe that bad writing - and bad research - makes the gods weep.

In this case, the research is there, but the writing's just not up to it. Larson can, at least, string a sentence together, but that's the least of his problems. Knowing that he is writing A FUN BOOK FOR NORMAL PEOPLE seems to have sent him off his head with self-importance, and The Devil in the White City is comically over-egged, filled with sparkling 'scene-setting' turds like

As [Holmes] moved through the station, the glances of young women fell around him like wind-blown petals

and

his eyes deposited a bright blue hope.

How I wish my eyes shed coloured emotion. Alas! All they do is allow me to see.

This is the moustache of a murderer

I admit, I do perversely enjoy this kind of thing. Bad writing can be delicious (there's my cake metaphor again), and as bad writing goes, this one's a winner. It's possible to ignore it and focus on the story, but if you do choose to be cruel (and I did) you're in for many hours of riotous amusement of the sort not at all intended by Larson.

On to the content. Larson obviously means Holmes to be the dark side of Burnham - Burnham's building the White City while Holmes is building the black; they both have blue eyes but one has the blue eyes OF A KILLER, etc, etc - but he's not really good enough to pull the comparison off, and so the book just ends up being about two very interesting and not particularly connected lives. And that's fine. History is amazing enough (and awful enough) to carry this one on its own. Fires, Ferris Wheels, belly dancers, Buffalo Bill, tornadoes and torture chambers all make starring appearances as everything that could go wrong for the Fair does, and everything that could go wrong for Holmes... doesn't, and the whole thing is rounded off with a nice cross-country manhunt for your reading pleasure.

There are also lots of fun Facts About the World's Fair to pick up for future use at boring parties. Did you know, for example, that it brought belly dancers to America for the first time, that Walt Disney's father worked on it and that it was the reason the Pledge of Allegience, the Ferris Wheel and that annoying snake charming music were invented? Well, now you do. See what this book has given you already!

I can't be a total snob about this. I can absolutely see why The Devil in the White City has sold all the copies it has - it's completely addictive reading, historically fascinating and presented in a way that's gloriously awful. It's cake! Delicious historical murder cake! And I ate it all. Oops.

Despite the best efforts of history, though, this gets 2.5 stars as a form of post-binge guilt, and also for that sentence about the petals.

Two super-speedy reviews while I am supposed to be writing my essays

So, the essays are going well, as is the internship. I was let out on day release to go to the London Book Fair on Monday, at which I felt very junior and unimportant (who knew there were so many men in publishing? Where do they hide for the rest of the year?), but I did wander past the Hachette booth, which, in honour of The Casual Vacancy, had a GIANT POSTER of J K Rowling's face staring down at passers-by like a benevolent dictator and/ or a mid-level deity.

This made me quite suspicious, probably because I just finished reading Wild Swans by Jung Chang and now I am seeing cults of the leader everywhere (including in North Korea, but that's not just me).

Wild Swans is one of the only non-fiction titles on the 1001 books list, a biography/autobiography combo about three generations of Chinese women who collectively lived through the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, World War II, the rise of Communism and the increasingly crazy machinations of Chairman Mao. Their historical CVs are amazing - Chang's grandmother was one of the last warlord concubines (a dubious honour), Chang's mother was one of the first Communist party sympathisers after World War II and her father was a high-up party official who governed a couple of provinces. As you do.

I have to say, Wild Swans isn't particularly well written - most of the time, it's perfectly functional, but sometimes she lapses into a badly-done contemplations of the beauty of the universe and the result is just tiresome. But it's a bestseller not because of the way it's written but because of what it's written about. It's an incredible (and totally terrifying) inside record of what went wrong with Chinese communism and why.

Before I read Wild Swans I had only vague background knowledge about recent Chinese history, so I sort of knew that the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution had happened, and were Bad Things. Well, now I know the details, and it turns out that Bad doesn't even begin to cover it. At one point, for example, Mao decided that China should make more steel, so he got everyone in the entire country (including children - as a six year old, Chang had to pick up scrap metal on the way to school) to stop what they were doing and obsessively make steel, with the result that the crops failed and millions of people just died of starvation. And everyone had been so indoctrinated by Mao that they honestly believed it was all for the best.

The number of people who are tortured and killed in this book is staggering, as is the number who just committed suicide out of sheer shame and horror at what was going on. At times I actually felt like I was reading a dystopian sci fi novel - the mind control, the street gangs, kids beating up their teachers, families forced to live separately and so on. It's almost unbelievable to me that what she's writing is - or very recently was - all true. (On that note, the writer part of me thinks that if you are considering publishing your own dystopian novel, Wild Swans is a must-read background text. You don't even have to make this stuff up.)

My only warning is that if you want to be at all surprised by the fate of Chang's family DO NOT FLIP TO THE PICTURES in the middle of the book, because you will be horribly spoiled by captions like 'The last picture of Blah Blah, who died unexpectedly in 1949'. I did, and I was, and I was cross.

Long as it is (and I admit, it is somewhat over-long), it's absolutely worth a read. Mind-blowing and extremely eye-opening, both from a historical and a human-nature point of view, it's everything you never knew about Communist China and didn't think to ask because it didn't occur to you that human beings could possibly do those kinds of thing to each other in the real world.

3 stars.

After all that heartbreaking suicide, I wanted some more light-hearted death (I typed that sentence and realised what an awful person I am, but there's no other way to say it), and so I moved on to P D James's The Murder Room.

I'm always on the fence about James as a writer. On the one hand, she's a good mystery writer, she makes up interesting cases and her detective is, you know, a perfectly fine individual - but on the other, she is the most gloomy person in the world. I grew up on Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, so I have a baseline assumption that written murder should be jolly, a nice minty after-dinner puzzle with body parts for effect. It's a point of view I think crime writers are coming back to more and more these days, but there was obviously a time in the 70s and 80s, when James was forming herself as an author, when everyone was reacting against silliness and trying to show how very serious the business of death really is, etc etc.

As a result, everyone in a P D James book runs around tiresomely contemplating THE YAWNING HOLE AT THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE and their INABILITY TO BE HAPPY. It gives me a stress headache. Yes, yes, the world is very terrible, but it's also quite funny and stupid, and there's no acknowledgement of that in a James mystery. Every single one of her characters feels alienated and unfulfilled and has family who are awful and they hate. One or two such people might be understandable, but an entire book full of them leads me to believe that something Freudian is going on. I'm willing to bet the James family is not a barrel of laughs at Christmas time.

Because of all this, I never end up enjoying a P D James as much as I really should, given the ingredients involved. The Murder Room is all about someone copycatting 1930s murders (James, like me, is clearly the most enormous historical murders geek), it takes place in a museum and a girls' school, and it's a murder mystery. All my favourite things! And yet, at its heart it's joyless and a bit functional. The most interesting bits for me were (unsurprisingly) the descriptions of the original '30s murders. They made me want to ring James up and talk to her about my dissertation, which happens to be about real Victorian murders and their influence on 1930s crime novels. I think we'd get on better through the medium of fact than we do with fiction - no coincidence that my favourite James book is her true-crime recreation of the Ratcliff Highway Murders, The Maul and the Pear Tree.

But anyway, The Murder Room was fine. Acceptable. Functional. It passed the time. And it made me crave a nice bit of Agatha Christie. Now there's a woman who knows what to do with murder.

2.5 stars.

Review - Flaubert's Parrot

Oh readers, I am tired. As the wise man never said, but should have, if you fly to another country for 24 hours, and then immediately get on a train to the Midlands for another 24 hours, do not expect, when you finally get back to London, to be able to do anything more meaningful than sit and stare blankly at the wall. This week I had things to do and people to see, and I ended up just lying in a prone position and reading all 500 pages of Tipping the Velvet, because it was near me and I couldn't move and it turned out that my brain needed an enormous helping of delicious faux-Victorian literary comfort food to recover itself properly.

Whilst I was on my travels, though, I read something that (to continue the food metaphor) was not so much bountifully delicious as thin and sandy and requiring a lot of mental digestion. Flaubert's Parrot is by Julian 'Arthur and George' Barnes, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984 and appears on the (accursed) 1001 Books list. It is a book with pedigree, and from the very first page you can tell that it is going to be Very Clever.

To be fair to it, I think it required the kind of attention and brain-power that, at that particular moment in time, I wasn't able to give, and so it merely left me feeling Very Confused Indeed.

I have to admit, I thought Flaubert's Parrot was actually going to be about a parrot. Obviously, I am not postmodern enough. Fool that I was, expecting a linear story with a single viewpoint to the narrative! Actually, it's a clipped up and deconstructed let-me-dazzle-you-with-my-playful-erudition quasi-biography of Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary and also other less famous books.

Every chapter is presented differently - one's Flaubert's key dates done three ways, for example, and another's his life from the perspective of his mistress. The title comes from the fact that Gustave not only enjoyed comparing himself to animals, but may or may not have owned (or borrowed) a parrot, which may or may not now be on display in a museum, and may, in fact, be more than one parrot, which may (or may not) be in itself an amusing story. Julian Barnes thinks it is. I'm not so sure.

I think I found this book so difficult to like because of an early and never remedied failure to care about either Flaubert or his parrot(s). I suspect that Flaubert's Parrot would have worked an awful lot better had I come to it knowing anything at all about Gustave Flaubert apart from the fact that he wrote Madame Bovary. The reader (I think) is meant to experience a delighted recognition - ah! Flaubert, that old rogue! I never knew he liked camels/ wrote about soup/ went to Egypt! How jolly! - whereas all I experienced was a low-level but persistant annoyance and a general sense that I was Missing Important Jokes.

Flaubert's Parrot is one of those books in which an academic makes snippy, sniping in-jokes about other academics. This tends to either work beautifully (see: Possession) or go horribly, horribly wrong (see: most other books with this plot device). In this case, I think it went the way of the latter option. True, there are some good digs at critics who are needless nitpickers (I've read far too many articles like the 'What Colour are Emma Bovary's Eyes?' one he takes the rip out of), but the general effect is both elitist and oddly stressful. There's a particularly mad chapter where the narrator frantically defends Flaubert's honour as a writer against the (theoretically) hostile reader - but since I don't know anything about Flaubert, I personally don't have any complaints to raise against him. So why (I wondered) am I being yelled at? The whole project, in fact, comes over (or at least it did to me) as being just a little too cranky to be fun, too much of some random dude riding his weird little hobby horse all over my brain.

Actually, the narrator's slightly more interesting than I just made him sound. Geoffrey Braithwaite - a Flaubert enthusiast/maniac, of course - starts off seeming like he's just going to be a Julian Barnes avatar, an older middle aged white man who's a bit lonely and pedantic. But, just like in Arthur and George, Barnes pulls a smart little identity trick, and who Geoffrey is, and why he's writing about Flaubert at all, turns out to be, to some extent, the point of the book. I admit, it's clever, and when I finally got it I looked back on what I'd just read in an entirely different way.

But all the same, my overall impression of Flaubert's Parrot was of something far too clever-clever for its own good. I came out of it feeling, not that I was friends with Flaubert, but that Geoffrey Braithwaite was, and that Geoffrey Braithwaite was slightly crazy.

Not one to read lightly.

2.5 stars.

Review - Love and Mr Lewisham

Happy 2012, readers! Felicitations, fireworks, champagne and all that. Indeed, I may have had too much of that - but now it is the 4th I can look life in the face again and tell you about the first book of my year, and the first book from my towering Christmas present pile, Love and Mr Lewisham.

I guess the good thing about getting through Love and Mr Lewisham first is that it leaves definite room for improvement as far as my reading material goes. I've already had the situation, with the new episode of Sherlock, where I sat down afterwards and wondered if anything could ever be that good again, and for that to happen with a book as well as with a TV show in the first four days of 2012 would be asking too much of the universe. 

Love and Mr Lewisham was - fine. It was perfectly good, and even quite sweet (which I found a bit weird, conceptually - you think H. G. Wells and you think of angry metal objects exploding violently while invisible people do experiments on animals in the background, rather than a story about two people falling in love and arguing about it, which is Love and Mr Lewisham's basic plot).

Actually, Love and Mr Lewisham is more technically relevant to my interests than anything else I've read by Wells. It's all about being young and poor in London, which I have vivid personal experience of, and also about being in love, which has happened to me too, whereas I have never personally travelled to the future or been shot at by an alien death ray. And yet, if you go into a novel expecting death rays and end up with 200 pages of people having misunderstandings about bunches of flowers you are going to feel slightly cheated, plot-wise, and so I did. Allegedly Love and Mr Lewisham is about spiritualism (another reason why I was interested in it, I love a good bit of chicanery and/or haunting), but it turns out that Wells just wants an excuse to have an ethical discussion about whether or not faking seances is cheating (yes), and if so whether or not that is wrong in the grand scheme of things (still yes), and that's fine, but to be brutally honest I prefer it when he writes about invisible people.

That's not to say I didn't get something from Love and Mr Lewisham. It proved to me rather neatly that 1) I should thank every power in the universe for the rise of women's education, because (all jokes about the earning power of English Literature graduates aside) it means that I can go out and earn cold hard cash rather than having to sit all day staring at the wall and being a drain on my (fictitious) husband, only for him to (fictitiously) come home and talk about things that I don't understand, like Science and Politics and Spelling. And 2) I am really glad that I did not get married aged 21 just because I wanted to cohabit with someone. It works for some people, of course, but it has the potential to go hideously wrong, especially if you are both poor and living in London, and so, in Love and Mr Lewisham, it does.

Things turns out OK in the end, in a sappy sort of way, but all the same Mr Lewisham and Ethel's trials and tribulations (will he choose his Woman or his Career? Will she escape her trickster father in law? etc) are just never going to be as interesting as a death ray. Maybe I'm shallow. Maybe I misunderstood the kind of book Love and Mr Lewisham is. But I have to say that if you're looking for a good (less famous) H. G. Wells novel, don't read this. Read The Island of Doctor Moreau, because that has insane conflicted half-human half-animal lab experiments in it, and it's also set on a desert island, and as I have said many times before ('m lying, I've never said this before but it's true anyway) a desert island setting means that things are going to be AWESOME. Also, you should watch Sherlock, because it was amazing.

Welcome to 2012.

Love and Mr Lewisham gets 2.5 stars.

Review - Birdsong

OK. Readers of the world. What has Sebastian Faulks done to you? What dark arts has he been employing? Because that is the only reason I can think of to explain Birdsong's inclusion on numerous Best Of booklists (including my very own 1001) and for the glowing, goggly-eyed review snippets that are plastered across my edition's back cover.

Honestly, what did he do to persuade an actual human being (and a literary critic, at that) to declare that 'This is literature at its very best'? Because, dear readers, this is not literature at its very best. This is a bad book.

Actually, I don't think the writing is particularly terrible. It's just lazy - a random firing of adjectives and adverbs that don't fit and don't make an awful lot of sense. Sebastian Faulks seems not to understand how to make language work for him. Words aren't just collections of letters, they mean something, they have connotations and nuances, but Faulks appears to have missed this important creative writing lesson. How else do you explain his description of a husband in the middle of arguing with his unfaithful wife as rejuvenated, or mentioning that someone bursting into a packed meeting hall to start a riot has candid eyes? Yes, candid means open, honest, but it also (at least for me) has overtones of calm and friendly. Which I don't think you get much of at a riot.

When I was reading I had huge difficulty getting any sort of mental image from the scenes at all, because all those wrong words kept bursting in and disrupting my thoughts. Possibly as a result of this I found it very difficult to connect with any of Faulks's characters. 504 pages of Birdsong later, I would be hard pressed to give you any sort of explanation of what sort of person the hero Stephen actually is. What is he like? Well, I suppose I could say that he's got dark hair, he's weirdly mature for his age, the war makes him angry - but those things don't add up to a character. He's just a human-shaped word blur. But if Stephen is a blank slate, don't even start me on his 'love-interest' Isabelle. Her hair is strawberry-chestnut coloured (really. Seriously. We get told this more than once) and, er, she has really great skin (also repeatedly described), but in terms of a personality she's just a big hole for Stephen to put his issues and his penis into. I've read better love stories in Hello!

As far as plot goes, it's supposed to be a sweeping and tragic account of World War I, an epic romance, a tale of one woman finding out who she really is, and so on. Love story, soldiers, suffering, you know the sort of thing. But whatever the plot is at a macro level, most actual scenes can be summarised as follows:

The room was quiet. They looked at each other. Emotions passed between them. They shared an experience, such as sex or a dramatic and unlikely conversation, described using many unsuitable adjectives. The structure around them creaked ominously, because all life ends in death. Outside, the birds were singing.

 Oh god, the birds. The birds are EVERYWHERE, fluttering and cheeping and being meaningful - except that they're inserted as a metaphor so often that they cease to have any particular meaning at all. I guess Faulks meant to make some point about freedom and natural life, but all it did to me was to make me really hate birds for a while. 

Actually, for a book that's all about emotion, I don't think I felt moved by it (in the ways I was obviously meant to) once. The characters either have the responses they ought to feel - which inevitably tend towards the melodramatic 'Alack, my love, the tragedy of our lives!' sort of thing - or they have bizarrely over-experienced, over-understood thoughts on the universe that, for me, ring equally false - because who ever heard of an Englishman saying, "I saw the void in your soul, and you saw mine?" No, when they want to convey that sort of deep love towards another human being they pause for a long time and then say something like, "Should be a nice day tomorrow." Now that's a conversation I could believe in.

I found Birdsong without suspense, without interest and without soul. The twists didn't suprise me, the story didn't carry me and the sex scenes just made me snigger on the Tube. Give the man a Bad Sex award by all means (he more than deserves it), but don't, for heaven's sake, read this book.

2.5 stars.

(My latest Litro blog, by the way, is getting into the Christmas spirit by singing the praises of books as gifts. This is not, in case you are wondering (or my family) a hint. I'm just, as you may have noticed, a fairly pro-book kind of person. Enjoy.)

1001 Books Review - The Leopard

Housekeeping again:

If you are assuming I have not been posting very much lately because I have been hard at work on my MA, you are very sweet and I admire your belief in human nature. Obviously, you are right. Yesterday, for example, I went to the British Library, where in the course of some very serious essay research I read the following sentence:

In February 1847, two elephants performing at Astley's Amphitheatre were presented with lots of bouquets. The elephants, we are told, had rather hoped for carrots and turnips.

(This is, in case you are interested, taken from The London Stage in the Nineteenth Century by Robert Tanitch, and I HIGHLY recommend it to you if you're interested in theatre history. It is not only factually fascinating but also delightfully snide). And if you are interested in what else I found out about the weird and wonderful on the London stage, you can read all about it over here.

During my time off from all this strenuous academic activity, though, I have been doing NaNoWriMo. If you don't know what this is, I have handily written a Litro blog about it. As of today I am 18540 words up and someone just died, so things are Going Well in that respect.

In the interests of linked-in completeness, I have also recently blogged about your furniture coming to life and eating you and written a (scathing) review of Richard Ellmann's biography of Oscar Wilde. Enjoy! Oh, and I also read a book! Look at that. I haven't been totally wasting my time.

I have to admit, though, that I had a very major case of Not Getting Along with The Leopard. I could probably have finished it in a few days, but I'd read a few pages of it and then realise that BY GOD the bathroom could do with a clean and I needed to bake bread for lunch and how about that essay due in next week. I had to keep reminding myself that I was reading this for fun.

I think this is a prime example of the huge difference that exists between knowing that something is written well and actually liking it on a personal level. With the English MA student side of my brain I can see that The Leopard is meant to be a haunting evocation of the beauty of a vanished system and the transience of an individual life, but what I actually thought when I finished the novel was that Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa is kind of tiresomely self-indulgent, and that keeping a badly stuffed dog beside your bed for fifty years is gross.

Part of this has to be that The Leopard's atmosphere - and the novel is practically all atmosphere - really annoyed me. The whole thing takes place in an overwhelming state of rococo decay. Whenever characters appear they have to fight their way past profuse mountains of rotting roses and moulting silk sofas and five thousand Blessed Virgins with their paint coming off; and doing battle with all this scenery means that the poor things are exhausted and morose before they even begin to talk. Add to this the fact that they're in Sicily, where it's exhausingly hot all the time, and it's not entirely surprising that most of the scenes are variations on the theme of one character turning to another and saying, "Dude, I can't. Let's go lie down."

The plot of the novel is basically Prince Fabrizio (the Leopard of the title) not doing things, and then feeling sort of morose about it, but not morose enough to do anything except lie down. Occasionally he lies down with whores, and then he feels vaguely bad about it, which makes him have to lie down, which makes him realise that he is OLD and THE LAST OF HIS KIND and DOOMED TO DEATH, which is coincidentally a lot like LYING DOWN FOR EVER. Woe.

It's possible that I'm not that sympathetic to the Sicilian mindset (it was very heavily stressed that this attitude to life is Very Sicilian). It's also possible that I suffered from not understanding what on earth is going on historically - I just about know that Garibaldi was a man as well as a biscuit, a state of ignorance in a reader that obviously never occurred to Lampedusa. There are very few handy hints about historical background, and to make it worse Lampedusa has sort of half-assed an attempt to make the novel a knowing piece of post-modernity. What this means in practice is that the text will be totally immersed in the idioms and references of the 1860s and then all of a sudden a character's state of mind will be explained by reference to a MOTORWAY or an AIRPLANE or something equally weird and out of place. I think Lampedusa was going for a 'clever and humorous' angle, but to me it just felt awkward and half-way-to-nothing, like a fish with a human face stuck on it.

I'll admit, there were some moments that did work - there's a chapter about a weird erotic game of hide-and-seek through an enormous house that I thought was gorgeously written - but overall The Leopard just didn't do it for me. People are, of course, perfectly entitled to say that it's the greatest Italian novel ever, but I am likewise entitled not to agree with them at all.

Anyway, thank goodness, it's over now. One more 1001 Books book down! Only hundreds and hundreds to go! And for my next trick, I'm going to read something fun.

2.5 stars.

Reviews: Roots of Betrayal and City of Bohane

Customers are very strange. Yesterday afternoon:

Customer: I would like Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Me: That'll be downstairs in Philosophy.
Customer: Can I borrow it?
Me: We're a bookshop. All our books are only for sale.
Customer: So I can't borrow it, then?

And later:

Me: Do you need a bag for your purchase?
Other Customer: Yes, I do.
Me: Our large plastic bags are 10p.
Other Customer: That's outrageous! How dare you! Charging me to cart away your items! Disgusting.
Me: I'm very sorry, but it's company policy.
Other Customer: DISGUSTING.
Other Customer: *reaches into coat, pulls out plastic bag, puts in his purchases and storms out*
Me: I see that you really did need that bag, then.

Anyway, today I have two reviews - The Roots of Betrayal by James Forrester (who, interestingly, is actually the historian Ian Mortimer in disguise) and City of Bohane by Kevin Barry (who, if you believe the book's blurb, is James Joyce in disguise. As far as I can tell, this is not at all true.)

On Historical Accuracy (Or, How To Write Like Josephine Tey But Without All The Racism)

I've just finished reading Angel With Two Faces by Nicola Upson, a murder mystery set in 30s England... which is particularly relevant to me, since I currently happen to be writing a murder mystery set in 1930s England. Obviously, since I haven't personally experienced life in the 30s, I've been worrying about how to get all the historically relevant bits right, and so reading Angel With Two Faces felt a lot like being that person at a party who sits in the corner and says cryptic, slightly rude things about how if I was the host I don't think I would have let those people spike the punch with Windex, but of course that's just my personal feeling and I'm sure it'll work out fine.

My sour little internal monologue on this occasion went something like: "Ooh, Nicola Upson, did people really say shit in 1935? I'm not sure they would have used fucking in quite that way, either. And if it were me I'm not sure I'd have my characters react to the revelation that someone was gay with "Really? Poor man. It must be so terribly difficult to be a homosexual in such a small country community.""