Number 68 - The Piano Tuner - Daniel Mason

 

This month's book group read.  I knew nothing about the author before I picked this up on Amazon.

It's an attractive looking book, a perfectly pleasant picture on the front, nice quality paper, and it's just the right size for my coat pocket.

I have a few more compliments for it, but not many.

The opening line was appalling.  the rest of the prologue/chapter 1 not much better.  With an opening as weak as that, it was going to need something special to recover.

The story concerns a Piano Tuner who is commissioned by the army to travel to a remote corner of Burma to tune the piano that was sent out to Anthony Carroll, a somewhat eccentric Dr General in the army, to help him civilise the natives.

Edgar, the eponymous tuner of erard pianos, is a rather dull character. His wife is slightly less charismatic.  She only exists in the story so that Edgar can feel guilty later on when he is predictably attracted to a native girl in Burma. 

There are segments of the book that work very well.  At times the prose is truly a thing of beauty, evoking place and time with what feels like scalpel precision.

Unfortunately, much of the prose is merely workmanlike, and some of it is pretty bad. There are frequest tense shifts, the strory shifting from past to present tense for a couple of pages and then back again for no particular reason.  He also uses quote marks for 60% of the the dialogue in the book, but for the other 40% he Cormac MacCarthy's it - abandoning quotes and other punctuation - but without MacCarthy's skill at still making the dialogue easy to follow.

The precision of the descriptive passages is spoilt by things like stating that the scenery is passing to quickly for him to see - whilst riding in a horse drawn carriage. How fast exactly is that hose traveling? When I'm in a car doing 70, I can still watch the scenery go past.  Similarly, at one point he is galloping along on a pony, his fancy woman is sitting on the back of the horse in front, behind the driver(?) of the horse as it gallops along at high speed - except she is apparently riding sidesaddle and holding a parasol in one hand - WHILE ON THE BACK OF A GALLOPING HORSE.  

In the section where she is demonstrating this trick riding ability, we hear twice within three sentences how Edgar is excited by the "thrill of the speed" using the exact same words three sentences apart in the same paragraph. That's bad writing. Despite the book being set in the latter half of the 19th century, there are some remarkably 21st century attitudes on display.

The storyline meanders slower than the river he travels down for half the book. There are pages and pages of info-dump about the different tribes of Burma, about the history of the Erard Piano, detailed descriptions of how to tune a piano, etc. The second half of the story is slightly faster paced. After the build up of how amazing the Doctor is, Anthony Carroll was actually a fairly engaging character and certainly the saving grace of the story.  

However, Mason chooses to obfuscate and avoid telling us a lot of what Carroll is doing, trying to foster in the reader a sense of mystery and eventually ambiguity about the revelations at the end of the book. However, it reads more like he didn't know which side to come down on so he left bits out.  

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did.  However, the lack of a strong storyline, the clumsy attempts at artful writing that come off as pretentious tosh, and the dullness of the central character are not redeemed by the occasional flashes of good writing.

A lowly 5.5/10.  If  you like your historical fiction to be pretentious, go for it.  You can buy this from most online booksellers.

Number 67 - Fight Club 2 - Chuck Palahniuk/Cameron Stewart

 

How would you like your sequel done sir?  I think I'll have it surreal, metaphysical with a side order of what the fucking fuck is going on, please.

I've read some weird stuff, much of it by Chuck Palahniuk.  I've read some metaphysical stuff where the author has inserted himself as a character - Paul Auster and Stephen King spring immediately to mind. 

This has to take the biscuit for sheer bizzarreness. The first book is hardly "normal" but this is in a different league. 

It starts with a brief recap of the final couple of chapters of the original novel 

We then jump about 10 years, the nameless narrator from the novel is now called Sebastian and is amarried to his girlfriend, Marla, from the first book.  They have a 10 year old son - who is nameless.

Sebastian thinks he has Tyler under control through strict medication. However Marla has been swapping out his medication for sugar pills because she's bored of the surburban life and is cheating on him with Tyler. 

By the end of chapter one, the house has been blown up and the boy apparently kidnapped. To get him back, Sebastian must rejoin Project Mayhem to try to track him down.

After that, things get weird. 

A few chapters into the book, Marla contacts an author with a weird name who's composing a story at a "Write Club". These characters develop a more and more prominent role as the story continues.  To say more would be spoilerific in the extreme. Suffice to say, this is on a par with Paul Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium for meta writing, maybe even more meta.

The artwork is impressive throughout. The cover art from the original issues of the comic is stunning. The writing is funny, fast paced and exciting, even if there are many places that make me say WTF.

 I still think the film is better than the first book, and I really liked the first book, and I have to say I think the first book is better than this one. Mainly because it was easier to work out what was happening.

 It's still well worth reading.  If you like Palahniuk, you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

Number 66 - The Walking Dead 18 - What Comes After

 

This is certainly a lot faster paced than season 7 of the TV show.

The main difference is that in the TV show they broke Rick for real and then had to spend half the season getting him back into fighting shape.  In this he's blufing Negan and planning behind his back.

Several key notes from the TV show are taken direct from this volume - Carl sneaking back to the Savior's compound being the most notable. Remembering that he's maybe 11 years old in the comic, unlike the 17/18 year old in the tv show, there's a whole element of wrongness there.  Great stuff.

 I recognised several of the best lines of dialogue from the tv show as they popped up in this volume as well.

Negan is easily the best human villain of the comics so far.

 Not much more to say.  The writing is as good as ever, the artwork is maybe a little dicey in places (although Carl without the eyepatch is suitably gruesome and really well done), and the threat levels keep rising...

And of course, this is the volume where we first meet King Ezekiel. Although he seems radically different to his tv counterpoint in personality, I must say the tv version is a great double for the comic version in looks. 

Number 65 - The Outsider - Stephen King

 

Unless I just miscounted on the Wikipedia bibliography page, this is King's 59th novel.  That's good going by any standards.  But some would argue that King is quantity over quality.

I disagree,

While there are a very small handful of King novels I don't rate as highly as others, There are none where there's not been something to enjoy about them.  Even From a Buick 8 - which is my least favourite - opens brilliantly.  

In this one, I think he's close to his top form for most of it.

It opens with the discovery of the horribly mutilated body of a young boy. At least five eye witnesses identify the local well loved junior baseball coach as the person who took him away in a van on the day of his death. One saw him walking away from the site of the murder covered in blood.  His fingerprints are found in the van in the child's blood.  His DNA is at the scene.

However, he has a cast iron alibi.  He was over 100 miles away at the time of the killing and can prove it.

Something strange is going on. The front cover seems to hint at a Stranger Things type alternate dimension body double but that's misleading.  The answer to the mystery is scarier than that.

 This was the most unpredictable thing I've read from King in some time.  The big bad is genuinely creepy and dangerous and I totally failed in my game of "guess who'll still be alive at the end". At least one character death was completely from left field and unexpected.  After that, all bets were off. He admits in the course of the story exactly where the source of the idea came from, but has put his own spin on it.     

 It's written in King's usual easily readable style and builds the characters with the usual efficency. For fans of the Bill Hodges trilogy, there's a guest appearance by one of the Finders Keepers cast.

It's not his best book.  There are a couple of chapters loaded down with exposition which slow the narrative down a touch in the second half of the book. However these are necessary as the monster isn't anything instantly recognisable.

He also spends a lot of time persuading the central charcaters that the big bad is real and supernatural in nature.  Again, this is necessary as I think most readers would have complained if they'd just accepted the more outlandish plot details without question.

 I've raced through this book in under 5 days, which for a 550 page book is fast paced.  It's a tense and frightening addition to King's canon.  It might not challenge Cujo or the Shining for the top spot but it's well up to his usual standards.  The steady reaveal of what was actually going on was brilliantly done.  The opening chapters in particular, with the build up of evidence mounting, only to be smashed to pieces, were masterful.

Easy 8/10 - It contains spoilers for the Hodges trilogy, so probably best to read that first if you haven't already.

 

Number 64 - The Walking Dead 17 - Something to fear

 

And the saga moves on apace.

After setting us up in Alexandria and giving hope of rebuilding society and joining with other local commnities, things come crashing down around the ears of Rick and co.

This is the volume where Negan makes his first appearance so one of those things crashing down around at least one character's ears is Lucille, his pet baseball bat with barbed wire wrapped around it.

As a side note, I've seen several shops selling Lucille as memorabillia for the show.  I've never been quite certain about how advisable it would be to have that on display in your house...

The plot is moving so much faster than the TV show did at this point. That's probably a good thing.  

One of the biggest differences between the two versions is Carl.  This couldn't be helped I suppose, they were on season 6 when the events in this episode happened so they'd been going for 6 years and the actor had refused to stay 10 years old.  In the comics, he's still a small child and that makes some of the stuff he's involved a lot harsher than the TV ever could have done.

Just like the season opener of series 7 - this is one of the toughest and most intense to date. The famous death from this episode is, if anything, more brutal than it was on TV.  We really don't have many of the original charactyers left now.

This is one fictional world where absolutely anyone can die.  There are no characters we know will live. And that's part of what makes this so compelling.

Number 63 - Squeeze Me - Carl Hiaasen

 The first time I read a Carl Hiaasen novel, I thought I was reading a sequel since the characters had such well developed backstories that were insinuated throughout the book.  It turned out it wasn't a sequel, it's just that Hiaasen can flesh out his characters to an insane degree, giving them entire life stories without ever slowing the pace of the story.

This one is no exception.

His political leanings have always been obvious in his books and he's an expert at not letting the environmental message get in the way of the story, and yet keeping it strong and obvious.

He's never featured the actual president of the USA as a character before though. He gets more openly political than anywhere outside of his newspaper columns in this riotous new offering. It's set in a fictitious timespan in between the end of the pandemic and the re-election campagn of the POTUS.

This opens, like so many of his other books, with the violent death of a random character.  In this case, it's Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons, 72 years old, "twice widowed and wealthy beyond a need for calculation". She vanishes from a fundraiser for the IBS Wellness foundation and is next seen as a large lump in the stomach of an 18 foot long Burmese Python.

 Kiki is (was) a member of the Potussies (short for POTUS Pussies), a group of dowager ladies who idolise the president and everything he stands for.

When the manager of venue hosting the fundraiser decides that the news of a giant snake eating the clientel might be bad for business, he decides to hide the truth. This kicks of a typically Hiaasen domino effect that gets wilder and funnier as it moves on.

Angela Armstrong is a wild animal removal expert. She was once a ranger but once dealt with a poacher in a somewhat overzealous manner. She is dragged into the procedings when she's asked to remove the snake - this is before the manager knows the location of the sweet(?) little old millionaire. It turns out she's every bit the typical Hiaasen protagonist, tough, princiipled and with an imaginiative take on natural justice.

Throw in a president (who's never named directly) who seems all too familiar, his wife and an amorous secret service agent, lost pearls, a pair of small time hoods, a falsely accused illegal immigrant and a psycho stalker, and you have a recipe for chaos. The multiple plot lines weave in and out of each other leading to a hilarious conclusion.

This is one of his most unpredicatble books in years, typically fast paced and funny and laced with a hefty dose of satire.  I can imagine this book will make a lot of people very angry, depending on their views about 45.  That's a good thing.  They deserve it. Those with a sensible view of the current incumbent will be laughing as loud as I was.

 Easy 8/10

Number 62 - The Stone Buddha's Tears - SP Somtow

As any regular readers of this blog will know, I'm a big fan of SP Somtow (aka Somtow Sucharitkul).  So when I needed a quick cheat read, where else to turn but this slim volume that I picked up online a couple of months back.

This was written for younger readers but doesn't stop it from being a very easy and entertaining read for a slightly older person like me.  After all, an adult is just a child with an extra decade or two (or three) worth of experience. 

Based on the true story of when the city of Bangkok erected a high fence to hide the slums contained within from the delegates at an IMF conference, this is a shaggy dog story about the meeting of two boys from polar opposite ends of society.

The narrator is simply known as Boy because his mother never thought it worthwhile to name him.  He is a beggar in the tourist district where one day he runs into Lek, the son of a prominent politician. Lek is spending his time as a Buddhist monk in order to create a photo opportunity to assist his father's political career.  He has learned the lessons of the monastery a bit too well for his father's good though. A friendship strikes up between the two boys which will have long lasting impact on both their lives.

This being a children's book we can forgive the wish-fulfilment elements of the story.  Everything works out for all the poor characters and the corrupt rich are exposed for what they are.  However, on the way to this slightly unbelievable conclusion there is some real darkness and the closing chapters are tinged with a genuine sadness despite the success of their plans. 

There is also a strong fantasy element sewn through the book with the Buddha (or a stone version of him at least) appearing in several dream sequences. This of course lends the book its title.

Somtow was a Buddhist monk himself for a while so I have to assume the depiction of life in the temple and the multiple loopholes in their regulations is accurate.

The city is a character all of its own, though distinctly schizophrenic.  The sights and sounds and smells are evoked brilliantly.  The human cast are all equally well depicted.  Somtow's prose, although it's been toned down for the youthful audience, is as lucid and evocative as ever.

Highly recommended, and available online from various sources.  an easy 7.5/10.

Number 61 - 10 minutes 38 seconds in this strange world - Elif Shafak

This month's book group read.  I'd never heard of Ms Shafak before, but the title of the book was certainly evocative.

Some of the other titles in the By the Same Author are equally evocative - I particularly like The Happiness of Blond People, and The Saint of Incipient Insanities.  So she definitely gives good title... Does she give good book is the next question.

10 Minutes and 38 Seconds refers to the length of time it's reckoned brain activity can continue after a person dies.  The first two thirds of the book tell us about what goes through the mind of a murdered prostitute in those minutes.

What does go through her mind is her entire life.  Basically, it's a slightly more interesting format for telling us the character's entire back story leading up to her death and the subsequent dumping in a dustbin in the alleys of Istanbul.

She does have some memories that couldn't possibly be hers - for example, the thoughts of and conversations between her birth mother and her father, also a brief flashback of her birth mother's life and how she came to be the second wife of her father... 

That's being a little picky I admit.  The story of her life is well told, despite having very few surprises.  We know where she's going to end up so we know this isn't going to be a particularly joyous existance and the story beats are familiar, but written well enough to be excused.

Along the way through her life journey, we are introduced to five of her friends, known imaginatively in the text as "the five".  These are important charcaters because, after she's finally gone and her brain activity has ceased permanently, the narrative switches to these guys and girls.

This is where the book starts to fall down a little.  Although there had been moments of levity in the first section, to balance out the misery,  once we're following the Five, things take a tonal shift that grates badly and there are scenes of slapstick comedy. 

We also get a couple of random chapters that don't seem to have any point.  The narrative switches for one chapter to a seller of late night snacks who recognises that his customers in the nice black car have probably killed someone - due to the highly visible bloodstains spattered throughout the car's interior.  We also witness a scene where her last client goes to see his father to challenge his father over the deaths of four out of five of the ladies of the night that his father has sent his way.  Neither of these scenes is ever followed up on and I wonder why they're in the book as the potential storylines opened in these chapters simply never materialise.

The Five are not paricularly well drawn characters.  They seem to have been chosen just to shoehorn in social issues and don't have much of a personality beyond their particular social sub-group.  Here's the trans girl, here's the dwarf, etc. Their quest to give their friend a more appropriate resting place occupies most of the last third of the book.

The final section attempts to tag a happy ending onto the story of the dead prostitute.  It either works or it doesn't depending on how spiritual you're feeling at the time of reading.

Overall, this was a good book, despite the jarring tonal shift, it kept me entertained and I sped through the 300 pages in a couple of days.

I think 7.5/10

Available from all good, and bad, booksellers.