March reading round-up

Good weekend, Internet! I have several things to share with you today.

First, the two reviews I wrote for The Bookbag last month.

- The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes. It's not out until later this month, but I got my hands on it early, and I can tell you now that is is terrifying, weird, gross and totally brilliant. I loved it.

- Blessed Are Those Who Thirst by Anne Holt. Many, many reviews ago, I wrote about Holt's novel 1222 on this very blog, and now I have reviewed her earlier (but more recently translated) effort. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't a patch on 1222, but it was an intriguing and far more than competent novel. Still definitely worth a read.

I also read a few books in my own time. Now, before you think that I'm falling down on the job, please know that not pictured are the thirty or so Orion Children's and Indigo titles that I've powered through with vast enjoyment. It feels a bit too odd to review work books on this very much non-work blog, so I'll just say that they were all extremely wonderful. I love our list.

Not on our list, though, were these - and they too were all fantastic, in very different ways. I think I've been lucky with my recent reading.


The Coronation by Boris Akunin

I have really worshipful feelings towards Boris Akunin. Recently, I went to a lecture he gave and came away dazzled by his literary genius. He looks like a twinkly silver-haired criminal mastermind, and he thinks so beautifully about what he writes and how he writes it.

In Akunin's lecture, he talked about the snobbery he encounters from people who think he's wasting his talents (he used to translate literary fiction) on silly, populist crime novels. You probably know what I think about that. To me, the Fandorin books are pretty much the epitome of what a really good reading experience should be - a book that's very well-written but also exciting and fun. They aren't afraid to enjoy themselves, and as a result they're a joy to read.

In Russia, Akunin's novels sell more than J K Rowling, and in my opinion they absolutely deserve to. Although each one features sexy aristocratic detective Erast Fandorin, they are all about very different types of crime, told in very different ways, and so they never stop feeling fresh and smart.

The Coronation is a racy tale of kidnap and jewel theft. It's narrated by stuffed-shirt butler Ziukin, who becomes Fandorin's unwilling stooge as they race to save both a child's life and the reputation of the Romanov family. As always, it was hugely entertaining and very clever, and as always, I loved it.

4 stars.


The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin

I have very high standards when it comes to science fiction. Yes, I want to feel transported to somewhere entirely different, but at the same time I want to feel absolutely connected to the characters who are seeing those strange sights. Because they're having such alien experiences, their essential humanity (even if they're aliens themselves) needs to be in no doubt. They have to be more human than human.

That's why I love Ursula le Guin so much. She's meticulous about creating her alien worlds - everything from geography to politics is beautifully thought through - but she's also fantastic at creating places and characters that feel real. The main character, Shevek, is both clearly from an alien culture and someone who you might meet on the street any day, and although she's obviously using our own world to inform Urras and Anarres, they're more than just allegorical Earths. They're places with distinctive characteristics of their own.

Be warned, though: if you're looking for a pacy sci fi read, you won't find it here. In fact, in terms of its actual contents, The Dispossessed is slightly boring. The story of mathematician Shevek and his quest to discover the principle of simultaneity, there are a lot of scientific concepts and very little action. But somehow, in the hands of Ursula le Guin, this dull material is made to sing. Shevek is such a believable main character that I passionately wanted him to succeed, and when he does - in a scene where he finally writes out the equation he's been searching for his entire life - it was such an emotionally recognisable moment that (I am not exaggerating) I had tears in my eyes. Yes. Ursula le Guin made me cry over some maths.

I'm pretty sure that, in terms of sci fi, no one does it better than le Guin. I loved this, and the only reason why I'm not marking it higher is because, when I read it many years ago, I remember loving its companion novel The Left Hand of Darkness even more.

4.5 stars.


Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

One of the best things about writing fiction is that you're allowed to decide what's true. In the world you create, you make up the rules - and as soon as you've made them up, they become the peculiar reality of that part of fantasyland. Philip Pullman, for example, made up a world with daemons partly because he saw paintings of people with their pets and thought but what if they weren't just pets? What if they were really part of those people?

Much along the same lines, Ransom Riggs looked at a series of weird old staged photographs that he and his friends found in charity shops, of sepia people dressed up in faceless clown costumes, or hovering five inches above the ground, or with an extra reflection, and thought, but what if these weren't staged? What if they were real?

So he wrote a book in which they were. As I tweeted at the time:

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children by @ransomriggs. Like the scary weird-smelling back of an old junk shop. But a book. LOVED it.
— Robin Stevens (@redbreastedbird) March 31, 2013

 If Miss Peregrine's was just a great story I would still have loved it. I mean, a group of superpowered children living a secret existence on a hidden island of time? I'm sold. But Miss Peregrine's is a great story intertwined with an amazing (and totally terrifying) series of images that lifts it into being something even more special. It feels and looks precious, and it's very, very clever.

I'm all for ebooks in general, but this is one book that needs to be touched as you read it. It's very different from anything else I've read for a very long time, and - as I said in my tweet - I adored it.

4.5 stars.


Amity and Sorrow by Peggy Riley

There's been a lot of talk about this book lately. This always makes me a bit trepidatious, in case it turns out to be a case of mass hysteria. Having now read Amity and Sorrow, though, I think that in this instance the crowd has wisdom. It's an extremely well-written and weird take on sex and God in the American midwest, a novel that evokes its setting so vividly that, even though the weather is struggling to get into double figures in England at the moment, I was transported straight to the dust-dry heart of the Oklahoma summer.

The novel follows ex-cult member and first wife of fifty Amaranth, on the run from her abusive husband with her daughters Amity and Sorrow in tow. When Amaranth crashes her car at a remote gas station, the three are stranded, forced to assimilate into what is, for them, an alien world. But while Amity is happy to learn that it's OK to do things like read and go inside houses, Sorrow (who was the cult's oracular wunderkind) reacts to her freedom in a way that, to most readers, is going to seem completely insane. She spends half of her time crouched over a pot of water trying to have a vision of God (also known as her father), and the other half setting fire to things to bring about the Apocalypse. But although this may seem crazy, I think Riley has a point. Her story gives a balanced and intelligent look at the effects of brainwashing that doesn't (as many such books do) just show its ex-cult member characters shouting "Hooray!" and embracing the wonders of A&W's and network cable with open arms.

Plural marriage really fascinates me, partly because I just can't wrap my head around the emotional weirdness of it, and also because I have had to trot out the same no-actually-the-Church-of-Latterday-Saints-has-not-condoned-polygamy-since-1890-so-my-mother's-family-in-no-way-resembles-the-one-on-Big-Love explanation approximately one thousand times, whenever someone finds out that most of my relatives are Mormon. I think this is a sensitive and believable exploration of the issue that understands why someone would get into that kind of situation while it still concludes that it's a pretty terrible idea. I'm impressed.

4 stars.

Delicious Death: Boris Akunin edition

As you may have noticed, I love crime novels. The dissertation that I should currently be writing (but I'm not, because I'm writing this) is, in essence, an excuse for me to read a lot of awesome detective fiction. I can't quite believe that I've managed to trick my department into letting me have so much fun.

For the love of god, never read this book

Now, as far as British detective fiction (and my dissertation) is concerned, the Golden Age is where it is at. Most recent British writers seem to me to be either Trying Too Hard To Be Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayer,  or Trying Too Hard To Not Be Like Them At All, and it makes for awkward, slightly painful reading (see: James, P. D.; also Rendell, Ruth, a writer so dreadful that even remembering the book I read by her makes me feel ill). In my opinion, the best stuff being written today as opposed to seventy years ago is not only not coming from Britain, it's not orginally in English at all.

Now, I know you think that's the lead-up to me starting to go googly-eyed over Scandinavian crime, to which I say: hah. Tricked you. I read a Henning Mankell once, and the experience was enough to last me a lifetime. For 450 pages, Wallander slowly stared up at the birds in the sky and slowly thought about the slow inevitability of death. Slowly. By page 100 I was hoping someone would do him in.

In fact, apart from the works of Anne Holt I've come to the conclusion that I'm not a very pro-Scandinavian person at all, and my two favourite contemporary crime writers are not from Sweden or Norway at all. They're Fred Vargas (French) and Boris Akunin (Georgian/ Russian), and they're awesome.

One day I will give Vargas (don't be fooled into thinking she's male, like me she is just trying to trick you with her name) a proper write-up, but today I'm mainly blogging about Boris Akunin.

If Akunin isn't known much around these parts, he more than makes up for it in Mother Russia. Think about our attitude to J. K. Rowling, imagine her as a writer of adult crime novels (which won't take much doing after September, actually) and you've pretty much got the way Russians feel about Akunin. Over there he is a god of popular fiction, and his detective, Erast Fandorin, is a literary hero, like Poirot but sexier.

The Fandorin series is set in late nineteenth century Imperial Russia (think Tolstoy with stabbings), and it follows the life of State Councillor Fandorin (his official title changes a lot, and trying to remember it makes me bewildered, but the essential point is that he is The Business, beloved of kings, emperors and actresses alike). Each novel lets us drop in on Fandorin at a certain point during his life - the first, The Winter Queen, is set when he's twenty and not yet cool, and by the time we get to Special Assignments, the one I've just read, he's about thirty-five and owns a very large house and several demanding mistresses.

The series (apart from being about crime and nineteenth century Russia) has an overarching theme, which in my view makes it especially cool: Akunin has identified thirteen subgenres of detective fiction (locked room, espionage, consipracy, country house and so on) and has written a Fandorin title for each of them. It's a brilliant idea, and means that the formula of the novels never begins to feel boring. In one book, Fandorin is creeping through back alleys in search of a mysterious evil, and in the next he's galloping about during the Russo-Turkish war. He goes on boats, he goes on trains, he goes to Japan and learns fabulous fighting moves and then he presumably does a lot of other stuff, but in later books that I haven't got to yet.

To be fair, Akunin's more a charming writer than a great one, and I'm also forced to conclude that there's stuff going on with the character of Fandorin's Japanese servant Masa that, if it isn't overtly racist, is definitely teetering on the edge of it. But all the same, the books are an enormous amount of fun to read. Their scenes are interesting, their plots are clever and they're laid out in a sharp, engaging, fast-paced way that means you can read 100 pages of one without even noticing.

It also doesn't hurt that Fandorin himself is a top-notch detective creation. He's got just the right balance of endearing quirks (he stutters and is somewhat strange) to sexy mystery (he has a troubled past and a startling ability to win every game of chance he plays), making him familiar but essentially unknowable and therefore insanely cool. He's even got that essential Man of Mystery accessory, a lock of pure white in an otherwise black head of hair. Ooh, Erast, you saucy thing.

As I said, I've just read Special Assignments, and I've got The State Councillor sitting on my bookshelf waiting for me to finish Moby Dick (sharp-eyed readers may have noticed the new 'currently reading' widget in the top right corner. At the moment I am on page 212 and Cap'n Ahab is being a FEROCIOUS CRUSTY DEVIL, but so far the White Whale is just rumour and hearsay). I am having surprising amounts of fun with Moby Dick (more on that later, and don't be so dirty-minded), but all the same the thought of Erast Fandorin pursuing wrongdoers on a train is a lot more enticing than 300 pages more of salty sea dogs harpooning each other (at this stage, the jokes are writing themselves). What can I say? Crime novels are fun, and good crime novels are things of endless delight.

In conclusion, if you like Russia, history, mystery and dark-haired men (and who does not?) you should put down your Scandinavian crime and your P. D. Jameses and read these books. Agatha Christie would definitely approve.

Review - 1222

As of Friday I will be the proud renter of the WORLD'S SMALLEST KITCHEN. There is a flat that goes with it, which is also exciting but not as worthy of note as the WORLD'S SMALLEST KITCHEN. I shall be making tiny insect meals and eating off children's plates, like the slow-eating-tiny-bite-taking child from that Mrs Piggle-Wiggle story. Perhaps I shall invest in some miniature cupcake moulds.

Anyway. I read another book! 1222 by Anne Holt was the perfect antidote to the painfully meaningful, sloshily dull Marriage Plot - it quite cheerfully meant nothing at all, and enjoyed itself while doing so. Perfect. If I ever get onto the Booker prize committee I shall repeatedly nominate crime novels until everyone else's head explodes from thwarted snobbery.

1222 (before you ask, that's the altitude, not the date - we don't have another medieval mystery on our hands) reads like a smartly updated, delightfully sour Miss Marple mystery, if Miss Marple was a wheelchair-bound Norwegian lesbian with a Muslim girlfriend. And if that last description seems wearily right-on, don't worry. Anne Holt is a sharply ironic writer (and probably quite a fun person to be around), and not only that, but she manages to make Hanne (our heroine) seem like a believable person instead of just the perfect storm of positive-discrimination ticky boxes that she ought to be.

My favourite Anne Holt fact (actually my only Anne Holt fact, but it's a good one) is that she used to be Norwegian Justice Minister. Of course, her publishers are most interested in the fact that she's Norwegian, because this allows them to plaster her front covers with things like THIS IS EXACTLY LIKE JO NESBO AND THEREFORE STIEG LARSSON! and SAME REGION? BASICALLY THE SAME AUTHOR! A snow storm plays a fairly central role in 1222, so I suppose it is literally Norwegian, but if I had to compare styles I'd say that this reminds me much more of Fred Vargas (side note: read Fred Vargas. She's genius). Norwegian crime, to me, is full of dour, fatalistic people who bleed a lot, and this is funny and delightfully off-beat. It also pays a lot of tribute to Agatha Christie: it's pretty much a country-house mystery (with added cabin-fever thrills since all the characters are trapped inside their hotel by a blizzard), with a slow drip of puzzly clues and people being bumped off in the night.

The central mystery - who's killing off the survivors of a train crash while they're trapped in a mountain hotel by the snow storm of the century - is a lovely balance of Hans Christian Andersen grim (oh, the bit with the dog. You will squirm) and tongue-in-cheek fun. I'm not sure Anne Holt lays her clue trail quite right - the ending wasn't quite the oh! of course! moment that makes a really successful crime novel for me, and there's a rather odd sub-mystery, too, which is both distracting and annoyingly Relevant To Today's Culture. However, 1222 is still a great read, a fun novel and a hell of a lot better than most of its Scandinavian competition. I think I've become an Anne Holt fan.

3.5 stars.