Number 37 - Oxblood - Tom Benn

 This month's book group read is this family sage set in the mean streets of Manchester. It follows the wives and children of a family of crime lords in Wythenshawe from the 50s to the 80s.

When the story opens, it's 1984. the husbands are dead in a car crash a few years earlier. The daughter (Jan) is 14 and completely out of control evidenced very strongly by the fact that she's recently had a baby of her own and spends three quarters of her segments in the book giving sexual favours to any man or boy who so much as glances at her. The oldest son (Kelly) has just been released from Strangeways after doing time for a drugs offense.

Their mother, Carol, is still mourning her lost lover who was beaten to death by her husband and father-in-law 14 years ago when they were released from prison themselves for another violent crime.

The grandmother, Nedra, wife to the ex-head of the syndicate now looks after the local children to make ends meet but still thinks her family rule the area.

The style of writing is brutal and frequently deliberately vague.  There are pages I had to read three times to try to work out what was going on.

There are occasional flashes of brilliance in the writing, but overall I didn't get on at with this book.

I read primarily for pleasure.  This is not a book to read for pleasure.  It's too miserablist and bleak. That's not necessarily an issue as long as there's enough to admire about the writing, or the characters are compelling enough to drag you through the book regardless, or the storyline is strong enough to drag you. Money by Martin Amis was a great example of all three of those. 

This isn't.

Amis gave us an astounding display of literary ventriloquism and presented us with an unlikable but compelling character who a savvy reader would see was being played for a fool, and this reader at least found the tightening grip of the trap Amis's patsy was caught in to be compelling in much the same way as watching a car crash in slow motion. 

Benn gives us writing stylised to the point of obfuscation. I didn't find much to admire in it for the most part, although, as mentioned there were some flashes of greatness. The characters were all equally unlikable and the plot, such as there is, was kitchen sink drama with some underage shenanigans. I had no emotional connection to any of them, and creepily, the only man in the book presented with any degree of sympathy was the 30 year old teacher who took 14 year old Jan for a dirty weekend in the lakes.

Did it accurately portray time and place? That's a matter of opinion, but I personally didn't find it particularly convincing. The writing was too off-putting in its weird syntax which is nothing like I've heard in 30 years of living in Manchester myself.

I scored this 5/10 at the book group meeting last night and I think I might have been generous.

5 pages of glowing reviews before you start the book aren't always correct.

Number 10 - Quichotte - Salman Rushdie

 

This month's book group read, and the meeting had to be postponed last week because only one person had actually finished it.

This is the first time I've read a Salman Rushdie novel. Obviously I've known the name ever since the Satanic Verses inspired the slight overreaction from some groups, but I'd never got around to reading any of his books. Apart from something highbrow, I had no idea what to expect.

This is a modern day take on Don Quixote. The eponymous character is on a foolish quest for the love of a woman he has never met, only seen on television. he lives his life according to tv and reality has become a blurred concept for him.

He's accompanied on his quest by Sancho, his son who he has literally imagined into existence. 

The other lead character is Sam DuChamp, a writer of tacky spy novels, who is trying his hand at writing an existential novel about a man called Quichotte who can't tell fact from TV and who is on a quest to win the hand of a beautiful celebrity with the help of his imaginary but somehow corporeal son, Sancho.

Yes, it's gone all meta and Quichotte is a novel within a novel with lots of commentary about the nature of writing and the relation between a writer and his characters.

Of course the lines between Sam's life and his book also begin to blur.

It's all very clever and knowing, but in a way I found to be too obviously trying to be clever. The magical realist elements don't seem to fit naturally into the story when they appear.  It felt overwritten and "try-hard" and for me, it didn't quite work. The mastodon chapter particularly felt ridiculously out of place.

There are sections that are very good indeed.  The chapters from Sancho's POV are excellent, and the emotional highpoint of the book for me was the end of Sancho's journey. The title character though, is vaguely irritating. 

The ending of the book would be better if it wasn't stolen from an old twilight zone episode (also from a joke in HHTTG). It was also foreshadowed far too much, and gave us one of the sources he stole it from.

It may be that if I knew more about Don Quixote apart from the tilting at windmills I might have enjoyed it more... but we will never know.

My first Salman Rushdie novel, and I can't say that I'm overly enthused to rush out and buy his back catalogue. there were flashes of greatness, but overall I'm not hugely impressed. It was a chore to pick it up some days and that's never a good sign.

6/10, don't try so hard

Number 4 - After Sappho - Selby Wynn Schwartz

 

Number three in my Galley beggar Press themed month. There is one (now two) more but ehy may have to wait.

I've had this in my TBR for nearly a year and I have to admit to not being too keen on it from the description.  It really didn't sound like my kind of book - a feminist LGBTQ tract (with emphasis on the L) detailing the lives of assorted early campaigners.

However, it's always good to move out of your comfort zone - one of the reasons I decided to theme books this year, to deliberately force myself to read some I might not have read otherwise.

After the florid writing in the last two books, the return to short sentences and a simple vocabulary was a really welcome change of pace.

This is one of the most eye-opening books  I've read in many many years. Told in short segments, rarely if ever more than one page long (very rarely more than three paragraphs), each segment headed with the relevant name/date/title, it gives us glimpses into the lives of dozens of real life campaigners for women's rights.

With this structure it does feel very bitty, and there's not much of a n obvious central story to hang your attention to. However this doesn't stop it from being an engrossing read throughout. The struggle for recognition is the central character/theme of the book.

Schwartz manages to celebrate the women in the history without blaming ALL men for the problems, just the men in charge. And those women she celebrates had to put up with far more than I ever imagined. The details of the law that meant a man could rape a teen girl and she would be forced to marry him were shocking. Along with this, Schwartz makes it clear how women weren't even citizens of turn of the 20th century Italy (and elsewhere).

The title comes from the unifying factor in the early segments that the women are inspired by the writings of Sappho, and extracts from Sappho's surviving works are scattered throughout. We read of their efforts to emancipate themselves (in some cases through sheer disregard of the rules society expects them to adhere to) from the systems holding them back and the eventual formation of the Bloomsbury Group.

I did have some minor annoyances with this book. The style gets a little grating after a while, and I'm sure I missed a lot of references that any feminist would see a mile away. The writer admits in the text late on that she has deliberately excised any men from the narrative -and even names a few of the allies to the cause that she has removed from the story. The segment that bemoaned the number of women who died in World War 1 was the most annoying part. Not a mention of the generation of young men dying in the fields.  

I suppose male centered histories have erased women's contributions, but is it maybe a little bit petty to not only excise men from the story and then admit to doing it deliberately? 

These are minor quibbles though. This book was so much more than I thought it would be, and has changed my way of thinking on several fronts. On that level, this is a definite success.

Number 3 - My Mind To Me A Kingdom Is - Paul Stanbridge

 

Secomd book in my Galley Beggar Press themed month...

This is an odd one. 

It's a book about distraction. It's about an awfui lot of things, but they're all distractions.

In 2015, Paul Stanbridge's brother hanged himself. This book is a sort of a journal/biography of Paul and his attempts to deal with the loss.

And he does that through distraction.  There are a mountain of facts and figures about a myriad of topics.  It starts off with his research into how and when the Germanic Sea was renamed the North Sea, complete with diagrams and digressions and mini-biogs of noted historical cartographers (also some obscure and hitherto un-noted cartographers).

At the heart of it all is his not wanting to deal with his loss.  The various rabbit holes of research he throws himself into, all the obsessions he creates for himself are shields against his feelings.  The only thing he never researches directly is the suicide that lies at the heart of the book like an unwashed and festering sore.

The style of writing is longwinded, never using one word when an entire lexicographer's toolkit of thesauruses thesaurii) will supply alternative extraneous clauses and sub-clauses to suffice in its place, and run on sentences are common, sometimes taking up entire pages with complex and occasionally almost incomprehensible additional verbiage.

However, this doesn't stop the book from being a fascinating read.  The endless stream of facts and figures and random trivia is really interesting to read. There's something almost soothing about the rhythms of the writing. 

It's possibly a bit too emotionally distanced from the source of his grief. As much as I'm aware how traumatic the event must have been, there was never the palpable sense of loss that I've felt in other books dealing with similar subject matter.

Back to my fist point, it's an odd one. Is it a beautifully written book despite its long-windedness? Yes. Did I enjoy reading it?  Yes. Is it intellectually engaging? Yes. Did it emotionally engage me - I'm not sure.  Probably not.  Would I read it again?  I don't think so. Was it worth reading? A definite yes.

Your mileage may vary. 

Number 99 - Chump Change - Dan Fante

 

Dan Fante is the son of Jon Fante.  As any people who read these reviews regularly will know, I discovered Jon Fante entirely by chance a couple of years back because I liked the title of one of his books (1933 was a bad year). he rapidly became a firm favourite of mine. 

I'm close to having read everything Jon Fante ever published and I wondered if the talent ran in the family. So I ordered this online - his books don't show up in Waterstones the way his dad's do - and I'm so glad I did.

The unflinching gaze at the underbelly of life is well and truly present in the writings of both father and son. 

This book is one of the most disturbing things I've read this year.  I find myself hoping that it is complete fiction and not based on Dan Fante's real life.

However - the lead character is Bruno Dante.  His father is Jonathan Dante -  a novelist and screenwriter dying from diabetes. We meet him in the book, lying on his deeathbed, a shriveled husk of his former self with no lower legs due to his illness, and only breathing through a sheer refusal to die just yet. Jon Fante died of diabetes - he too had lost his feet to the disease. 

 Jonathan Dante's book that is referenced in this is called Ask the Wind.  The last of the Bandini novels was Ask the Dust. There are so many similarities between Jonathan Date and Jon Fante it's impossible to surmise anything other than Dan wrote his father into this book under a very thin veil indeed.

Given that the father character IS his real life father, how much of the character of Bruno is Dan Fante?  

Bruno is not a nice man.  He's an out of control alcoholic with a mean streak a mile wide and totally self destructive.  We meet him first when he's released from rehab a few days early so his wife can take him back to LA to see his father before he dies.

What follows is a compulsive and horrifically readable account of alcoholism and a crash to the bottom. I'm not sure Dante makes one good decision at any stage of the book. We certainly can't root for him and his behaviour. We can't sympathise in the slightest.  But Fante's prose makes us understand him and empathise. We can hope that he might turn a corner somewhere, but it never seems likely. This spiral is a bad one. The only thing close to a redeeming feature is his attempts to look after the dog, and he's not even very good at doing that.

This book messed with my dreams and gave me a sleepless night. Most horror novels I read don't manage that. His depiction of broken humanity is so convincing that it hits on a deep deep level. However there are shafts of humour shining through. This isn't a misery memoir.  It's compelling in part because of the jet black humour used to illuminate the darkness.

I will certainly be tracking down more of his work.  He truly manages to carry on his father's legacy.

Number 45 - Lean, Fall, Stand - Jon McGregor

 

The award for worst book cover of the year so far goes to this book.  If I hadn't been following Jon McGregor's career since we read his debut novel If No One Speaks of Remarkable Things at my book group several years ago, I would never have given this a second glance. It doesn't stand out on the shelves and from a distance the title is remarkably difficult to spot. 

That's the negative over with.

As mentioned, McGregor is one of those writers I've been following since his debut over a decade ago.  I own all his books and there isn't a bad one in there.

This one is no exception. 

It opens in Antarctica where, on a quick trip out from the research base to get some photographs, things start to go horribly wrong.  A storm descends quickly and the three members of the party are separated. to compound the problem, the most experienced member of the team (Doc) falls very ill.

The story shifts from there to follow Doc's recovery.  This is told from the point of view of his wife initially before expanding in the final section.

As usual McGregor's prose sings from the page. His writing truly is a thing of beauty. When I say it sings from the page, think ethereal heavenly chorus rather than dodgy karaoke bloke down the pub after seventeen pints. 

In this book, in addition to the beauty of the writing, we have his strongest narrative to date. in most of his other books, he tells big picture stories. In his debut, he painted the picture of a very normal street and made the mundane seem magical. In Reservoir 13, he followed the lives of an entire village in the wake of a tragic disappearance, but crucially, never definitively tried to solve it, just showed us the impact on the people affected.

Here, he manages to follow the ripples of the events in in the first chapters but keeps it personal, and aims for closure at the end of the story. It's the closest to traditional beginning, middle, end that he's written.

He manages to keep up with his usual playfulness with structure and form and word choice. 

The book is split into three parts, called Lean, Fall, and Stand. The separators used to denote time shifts between paragraphs in each of the three segments of the book are \, _, and | in that order. it took me far longer than it should have done to make the connection.

The depiction of the onset of Doc's illness is shocking and brilliant in the way his language becomes more and more confused.  

When he finally returns home we truly feel the exhaustion of his wife. She's a career woman who's used to spending anywhere from 4 to 12 months of the year with her husband pretty much as far as he could possibly be away from her.  Now she's his full time carer. 

For several chapters nearly every line begins with the same phrase, "She had to", hammering home the impact this is having on her. This lessens off as he gains his independence again.   

This is a real contender for best book of the year. A beautifully told told story of disaster and recovery. He manages to be moving and funny and sad all at the same time, frequently in the same sentence.  That's how good McGregor's writing is.

Buy. 

Read. 

Enjoy.

Number 43 - insignificance - James Clammer

 

This is the latest book from one of the best small presses in the UK. From the books I've read so far from this publishing house, their roster is made up of some of the most talented writers at work in the UK today.

James Clammer is another completely new name to me.  This edition comes with no cover blurb so I basically went in completely blind and not knowing what to expect.

Insignificance is the story of one hellish day in the life of a down on his luck plumber in an unnamed town in middle England. He's recovering from a nervous breakdown, the reasons for which become abundantly clear as the narrative continues, and he's out on his first job since his recovery. We also meet his born again Christian wife and their estranged son. To say much more about the story would be a spoiler.

Clammer writes in an unusual and almost poetic style, and it's that that makes this book so compulsively readable. If you'd told me that a man trying to drain a boiler could be as immersive a reading experience as this, I would have laughed in your face.  But the power of Clammer's prose makes the mundane seem strangely significant and meaningful. The sentence structure is deeply unusual and wrongfoots the reader (in a good way) on a regular basis.

The early part of the novel puts us firmly in the man Joseph's head. It's not the happiest place in the universe to be. this is an unimportant man who things just happen to and he knows it. his recovery is not yet complete. The writing is so good we feel his physical and mental wounds equally.

 

For a book with a distinct lack of real action, this really put me through the emotional wringer - especially in the latter half of the book. The man Joseph is an everyman and totally relatable. His relationship with his wife and son are heartbreakingly rendered.

Being just a snapshot of one day in his life, this book does leave many threads hanging in the air.  Fans of a closed narrative with a clearly defined resolution to any drama will probably find this frustrating. Fans of good, intelligent writing about people who feel real will love it.

Number 40 - Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens

 

This month's book group book. It's obviously a popular choice - 5 million copies sold before this printing alone, and most book groups on Facebook, it seems to crop up in someone's listings at least twice a day.

Does it deserve the attention and the sales?

I think it probably does. But there are some definite flaws to the story. Unfortunately, some slight spoilers will be needed to say what these flaws are. I'll try to be vague as possible but you might want to skip this review if you don't want clues.

Kya is better known to the locals as the Marsh Girl.  She was abandoned by her family one by one until she was left alone living in a run down shack in the marshes aged about 9.  Since then she's fended for herself with only the help of one or two friendly locals - from the black people's side of town.  this story being set between 1953 and 1970, means it's deep in the American racist era.

As she grows up aloe in her run down hut, she catches the attentions of two local boys, one nice, one not.

The book opens with the not nice one found dead in 1969, before flashing back to 1953 when Kya's mother walked out.  the chapters alternate randomly between the sheriff's investigating the death, and Kya's growth from child to young adulthood. 

It's all very nicely written. the characters are drawn so well you can almost see them, We have full sympathy for Kya. We understand fully her first encounters with love from her two suitors. there's real tension in the scenes set in 1970. we don't want to see an innocent person suffer.

I really enjoyed this book and was ready to class it as one of the best I've read this year until the revelations in the final three pages which undermine all the messaging in the rest of the book. All the good work up until that point is spoiled.  And the worst thing is, it wasn't necessary.  They could have picked a number of other people, or just left it as a tragic accident and the ending would have been so much better.

It's Owens's first novel, so I will let her off on this occasion. It's a fascinating and moving read with a genuinely sympathetic protagonist. But she fluffs the ending so badly... it's worse the more I think about it. It doesn't actually make much sense as a solution to the events for several reasons.

a generous 7.5/10.  If I think about this much longer, that may slip 

Number 35 - the Devil's Paintbrush - Jake Arnott

 

My 200th blog post! It's come around fast - only 2 and a bit years.  

Jake Arnott is best known for his crime novels set in the latter half of the 20th century - The Long Firm, He Kills Coppers, Truecrime.  That's the trilogy that made him famous and rightly so.

This is very surprisingly an embellished true story about the night Aleister Crowley, the infamous practitioner of black magic, ran into Fighting Mac, a very famous general of the British army in the Boer war, in a bar in Paris where he was hiding from a scandal that was about to break regarding his recent posting in Ceylon.

I assumed it was all a flight of fancy and Arnott had just thrown these real life characters together to see what might have happened, but in the afterword, it's explaimed that on the night in question, the two really did meet and spend the evening together.

Arnott used Crowley as a character in The House of Rumour as well. that book is well worth seeking out, it's got a truly unique structure to the story, based on the tarot deck and the story incorporates the Joestown massacre, Rudolf Hess flying to England in WWII to try to negotiate a truce, and Aleister Crowley being hired for nefarious purposes by British intelligence in WWI among many other threads. But I digress.

This is a young Crowley. The year is 1903. The scene, Paris. He is looking to take control of the magick order he is in, and he decides that Fighting Mac (Major-General Sir Hector MacDonald - one of the very few majors to have risen to that rank from being a private with no connections) can help him. 

The chapters alternate between the viewpoints of the two very different characters.  Through flashbacks, we learn of the chain of events that led to Fighting Mac's disgrace, but they're tied into the narrative so well that they become an integral part of the story rather than feeling like info dump.

I made the mistake of googling Fighting mac when I started the book, to find out if he was real, and as a result, I found out quite a major spoiler for the ending.  However, it didn't spoil my enjoyment of the book.  Arnott is a great writer.  I'm not a great fan of historical fiction, but this is briliantly done.  It swept me through the story, I could almost smell the battlefields. 

There were sections so well written I reread the page just for the pleasure of the way the words flowed. 

I recommend this, and all Arnott's work without any reservation.

easy 8/10 maybe higher

Numbers 22,23,24 & 25 - the Bandini Quartet - John Fante

 

I wondered when I picked this up if I should count it as one book or 4.  After reading it. it's most definitely 4.  The lead character may be Arturo Bandini in each, but they are at least three different people with the same name. 

The Bandini in Wait Until spring bandini might well be the bandini from Ask the dust, but he certainly isn't the same character as in the other two books.

If it had been one continuous story across 4 novellas, I would have said one book, but with there being no continuity in personality or history or family memers between the books, it has to be 4 separate books.

Wait Until Spring, Bandini 

One of the few book titles I recall with a comma in it. This is the youngest Bandini we meet.  He's 14 and a bit of an arsehole. Actually, in the opening chapter he's 14, then 12, then 14 again and back to 12 before reverting back to 14 and staying that age for the rest of that particular story. There's no flashbacks or anything in the first chapter, just seriously dodgy copy-editing on behalf of the publishers.

He lives in a very poor area.  His family are desperately poor and his parents struggle to feed him and his two younger brothers. He has a crush on a pretty girl in his class who barely knows he exists.  His father goes out drinking and doesn't return for days. All in all, it's a pretty miserable existence.

This was the first of the Bandini novels to be published - way back in the thirties. The attitudes on show are a product of their time and I imagine there are a lot of people might take offense at aspects of the story.  That's their prerogative. Personally, I find books about flawed characters to be far more fascinating than books about perfect people who never put a thought wrong. 

It follows young Arturo through a few eventful weeks in a frozen Colorado winter, where he's unable to even play his beloved baseball - receiving no reply but the title of the book whenever he suggests it.  His father's longest disappearance to date, the most miserable christmas day in literature and a deeply unrequited first crush serve to batter the young man over the course of 200 pages. 

The writing is deceptively simple yet emotive. This version of Bandini actually raises some sympathy from the reader despite his flaws and his lapses into unforgivable behaviour - especially the way he treats his mother on occasion. 

As an example - this is a quote descibing Svevo - Arturo's father - taken from the first chapter.

"Svevo Bandini's eyes watered in the cold air. They were brown, they were soft, they were a woman's eyes. At birth he had stolen them from his mother - for after the birth of Svevo Bandini , his mother was never quite the same, always ill, always with sicly eyes after his birth, and then she died and it was Svevo's turn to carry soft brown eyes."

That's just gorgeous writing.  It's mirrored later on in the narrative with a reference to Arturo's eyes.  There's subtlety happening in this book behind the brashness of the title character. 

This was a great opener to this omnibus edition even with the continuity error with his age in chapter 1.

The Road to Los Angeles

This was the first Bandini book written, but the last to be published.  It was printed posthumously in the mid 80s. That should be a clue that there were maybe reasons that Fante didn't think it should be published.

18 year old Bandini in this book lives in California with his mother and 16 year old sister.  His father has been dead for some years. If the 14 year old Bandini was a bit of an asshole (excusably though since he's 14, he's struggling to cope with his home life and his changing body), this incarnation of the character is almost irredeemably nasty. 

He's self absorbed, lazy, completely egostistical, possibly psychotic and entirely impossible to sympathise with. There's humour to be found of a very wry type in the disconnect between his proclamations of greatness and the reality of his life. The level of delusion he operates on are quite disturbing to be honest. He tells everyone he's a great writer despite not having written anything. He reads Nietzche and the like constantly (although it's clear he understands very little of what he absorbs) and imagines himself to be superior to everyone around him.  He can't keep a job and of course this is everyone else's faiult, but nothing to do with him. He's racist throughout the book and talks down to absolutely everyone.

His behaviour towards his mother and sister is horrific throughout.  In the first book, despite his outbursts he always loved his mother and treated her with respect when he wasn't stealing from her or trying to avoid doing what she asked. In this book, his behaviour is abusive at best. He has decided he's the boss in the house, he treats his mother like dirt and never says anything even remotely nice to his sister. Screaming verbal abuse at her is the best he ever treats her. Violence creeps in for no good reason later on.

Since this book went unpublished for so long I don't believe it was meant for publication.  I don't think this is the Bandini that Fante wanted the word to see. The prose is not as nice as the first book and the character is too annoying.

I actually think I would have enjoyed it more as a separate volume with Bandini's name changed.  The sudden personality change from the first book (along with the move halfway across the continent and other changes) maks this one unsatisfactory.  There were still glimmers of the great prose and as a portrait of a delusional psychopath, it's actually pretty good. 

Ask The Dust

This was the second Bandini novel published - also in the 30s the year after Wait Until Spring.

Bandini is back to his relatively sane self for this one and there's no reason to believe that this isn't the same characcter from book 1 but almost grown up. Once again he's 18.  he's moved across the country to live in LA where he's striving to become a writer. 

Prior to moving to LA he had a short story published. that's the proudest achievement of his entire existence. He lives in a run down hotel in Bunker Hill and spends his time doing anything he can to avoid the task of actually writing. He develops a very disturbing relationship with the barmaid at a nearby bar. I did find myself wondering what she saw in him since he was rarely if ever nice to her, yet the relationship develops in any case.

His racial attitudes haven't improved that much, even though the object of his affections is not exactly of aryan descent. There is some self-awareness in this this book that his attitudes are wrong and that they stem from his own treatment at the hands of racists as a child on account of his Italian ancestry. This self awareness is both a good thing, as it almosts lends him some sympathy, and deeply frustrating since he fails to learn the lessons from it. He's certaimnly a more complex Bandini than the Bandini from Book 2.

Once again, the prose sings off the page. The wry humour is back.  His visit to a lady of the night was a particularly funny sequence. The story takes a dark turn towards the end and it closes on an extremely sombre note.

One amazing thing is how much he gets paid when he does finally sell another short story.  

After an iffy second book, the omnibus was back on track.

 Dreams from Bunker Hill

The final Bandini book - written in the mid eighties, shortly before his death. He narrated this book to his wife from what would be his deathbed.  He could no longer type because diabetes had robbed him of his sight years before.  Weirdly, in the three volumes written in the thirties there were references to Bandini worrying about his sight.  I wonder if his family had similar issues as he was growing up.

Bandini is now 21. However it's a different Bandini again since, when he visits his family at one point, he is a middle child with an older brother, a slightly younger sister  and a younger brother (all of whom he gets on well with). He's hustling for writing work in LA still, but with more success than his Ask the Dust alter ego.

This book is much more episodic than the first three (and 50 pages shorter) and hence the overall story arc is less satisfying than books 1 and 3.  I'm not sure book 2 had much of an arc to it at all. The character's racist tendencies, whilst still present, are pretty much kept to his thoughts rather than his actions and are that bit more palatable as a result. 

He bounces from job to job and does his usual trick of winding up everyone he comes in contact with.  This time the jobs are all in writing related circles and he seems to be making a success of his stay in LA at last. The ego is still there but also toned down.  He still thinks he's God's gift to women (a trait he has in all 4 books despite his notable lack of success). 

He also still has a treat 'em mean attitude that does not sit well with a modern day lead charcter - however, see my comments on the first book in the quartet.  It's an uncomfortable read through a modern lens, but art should aim to disturb the comfortable. All 4 volumes in this omnibus achieve that aim.

Overall this has been a great read.  Books 1,3, and 4 were particularly good, but book 2 just didn't seem to fit.

I'm a bit worried what the book group are going to say next week as this was my choice for them to read...

Number 16 - Love After Love - Ingrid Persaud

 

This month's book group read.  There is no way I would ever pick up this book through my own choice.  As regular readers of this blog know - romance is not my chosen genre.  To put the word love in the title twice is unforgivable. It makes the book look like something twee and horribly icky.

Because of the title alone, this is one of those books that when you put it down you can't pick it up again.

It's not as twee or icky as it sounds.  It's actually fairly well written and contains some quite tough subject matter.  

But that cover just makes me cringe and not want to pick it up.

The story follows a Trinidadian "family", Betty and her son Solo, and the lodger Mr Chetan.

Betty is a single mother because she pushed her alcoholic wife beating husband down the stairs when Solo was very young. This is told in the first chapter so I don't count that as a spoiler.

Mr Chetan is a local teacher who moves in and becomes a part of the family although, for reasons of his own, he can never have a proper relationship with Betty. When the family secrets are revealed, the unit breaks apart and we follow the three on their separate tangents through life. Will the rifts between them ever be healed?

Each chapter is written in the first person from the POV of one of the three characters.  It's good that each chapter is headed by the name of the character because all three voices are very similar and could easily be confused. The lilting rhythm of the trini dialect it's written in is very easy to read, but should vary for the different voices.

The book paints a good portrait of Trinidadian life. Persaud must be a fan of Trini cooking because there are pages that feel like a recipe book.  Sadly, those are some of the most interesting sections.

It might be an easy read, the prose might be almost poetic, but there's something not quite there for me. I never really connected with the characters. They don't lead particularly fascinating lives. The ending is very emotional, but I wasn't that bothered because of my lack of connection to the characters.

I've read several books about ordinary people doing ordinary things and loved them. But here, it doesn't work. Despite that quote on the front saying that this is Unforgettable, I think I'll have trouble remembering anything about this in a few weeks.

Maybe if it had a title that didn't make me cringe every time I picked the book up, I might have enjoyed the contents more, because, other than the similarity of the narrative voices, there isn't that much wrong with the book.  I can't deny that the prose is good. When she writes about cooking, you can almost smell the spices. She deals with some tough subject  matter without flinching. Objectively, this is an admirable book. I feel like I should have liked this more than I do. But I don't.

Number 10 - Carol - Patricia Highsmith

 

I keep saying I don't like romance novels.  And I genuinely don't.  There are only two endings to a will they/won't they scenario and I've always contended that that's ok for a subplot but not for the whole central drive of the story.

However, this is by Patricia Highsmith and this is one of three of her books that I hadn't read yet. I've been reading her books since I was in my teens and I've not found one I disliked yet.

Originally published as The Price of Salt, under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, this is Highsmith's second novel. It was released in 1953 and is very much a product of it's time. 

By today's standards the plot is unremarkable. But back when it first came out it was quite revolutionary.  It's credited as being the first lesbian romance novel with a happy ending (although the sacrifices one of the characters has had to make somewhat undermine that score)

The plot is fairly basic. Therese is working part time in a department store when she serves Carol and is immediately fixated with her. This being New York in the early 50s, she tries to keep her feelings under wraps even while a relationship develops between them and they start spending lots of time together.

Highsmith's greatest talent was always her ability to drop you in the heads of her protagonists. This book is no exception. The whole book is told in close third person from her point of view.  We know every thought in Therese's head from the first stirrings of love to her full acceptance of the way she feels.

Guilt is always a primary motivator in Highsmith's novels, and again, this is no different. Only this time it's not guilt over some act of violence, it's over her feelings for Carol.  Again, this is 50's America.  Lesbians were something "other", a love that dared not show its face.

The prose is dry in places. I'm not sure Highsmith was at the height of her talent with this book, but it's still fairly compulsive reading. 

In the afterword in this edition, Highsmith describes Therese as a bit of a wet blanket and I pretty much agree with that.  But, as Highsmith also points out, it's a result of the time and place and her upbringing.  Despite her wet blanket qualities, she never comes across as a whiner or annoyingly self-centred. 

An interesting thing to note is that Highsmith recounts her inspiration for the story being when she herself worked in the dolls department of a large store and found herself transfixed by a customer - a scene we read in chapter two of the novel.  When Highsmith calls Therese a bit of a wet blanket, how much self-deprecation is going on there?

This isn't the novel to convert me to romance reading.  It is however still a damned good read. From a historical viewpoint it's a great portrait of a moment in time and the attitudes that were prevalent. And, being written contemporaneously, we can be assured there's no looking back through any tinted goggles. We also know it made a huge impact at the time.  The two leads didn't have to die for their sins and were allowed to love each other.  That makes this a hugely influential book.

Since the film was released a few years back, this is easily available again in any reasonably good bookstore. If you want a copy of The Price Of Salt with the original pen name on it, you'll be looking in the region of £300-£500. You're probably better off going with a modern copy.

Number 8 - Grace - Alex Pheby

 

As regular readers may or may not recall, I read Mordew late last year and was mostly enthusiastic about it. On the strength of that book, I ordered a couple from his back catalogue including this, his first novel.

If it didn't say on the back cover that this was his debut I would never ever have guessed. This is astonishingly good. I have loved pretty much every page of this book.

An escapee from a secure hospital is injured and taken in by an old woman and her granddaughter in their house in the middle of the forest. The relationship between the three of them grows into a strange family dynamic as he recovers. However, the idyll that develops is only temporary and he has to leave and take the girl to the city where danger lies in wait.

Other than the name of the secure hospital, no place names are ever given for the main thrust of the story.  The city is only ever referred to as The City. Likewise the timeframe of the story is uncertain, probably late 90s given the backstory for the old woman. There is no identifiable technology for any given era in the story.

This lack of identifiable time and place lends a timeless quality to the story. It places everything on the edge of our reality and adds to the vague surrealism that occurs throughout.  There's a strange link between this and Mordew in that the name Anaximander appears in both. I'm wondering if this is deliberate or coincidental.

I would struggle to place this in any genre since it has elements of at least four totally disparate ones. And it does it in style.

The writing is of a uniformly high standard throughout. Although the broad strokes of the story might be predictable, the minutiae of plot details are extremely unpredictable. Pheby doesn't follow any conventional path through the story, particularly in the later chapters. He allows a lot to happen off camera that some readers would prefer to be told direct. But this reader here loved the approach.

Alex Pheby has shot straight to the upper tiers of my must read authors list. This is a remarkable book in every aspect. I slowed my reading near the end because I wanted to delay putting the book down for the last time despite the tension inherent to the story. It's very rare that happens to me. 

Get hold of a copy and read it if you like your writing intelligent and compelling. I can't recommend this highly enough.   

Number 99 - Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo

 This is a classic of pre-WWII literature that I've managed to somehow not read until now, despite having had this copy on my shelves for a good couple of years.

I wasn't sure what to expect from it. I know of the film, but haven't seen any more of the film than we see in the video for THAT Metallica song. KNowing its reputation as a classic and once banned anti-war novel, I was worried it could be a little too polemical for my tastes.

I needn't have worried.

Having read the book, I really need to see the film, just out of morbid curiosity about how to transfer this to the screen. It's written in the very close third person and follows Joe Bonham as he falls in and out of consciousness after sustaining horrific injuries on the front line in the first world war.  

As the pages fly past, the extent of his injuries becomes clear.  There's nothing left of him other than the absolute necessity to keep him alive.  He has no limbs, he's deaf and his face is also missing. This obviously leaves him as alone and as close to death as possible without actually dying - and totally unable to communicate with the world.

It's as close as a third person narrative can come to true stream of consciousness writing. He drifts in and out of fever dreams and reminiscences.  He tries to make sense of the world/ward around him based on the only senses he had left.

I started the year with a novel about a boy trapped inside his head (Patience - Toby Litt) and I've almost ended it with one too.  It's difficult to say which of the two is better as they are so different in their approach. This one is certainly the most devastating. In Patience, the narrator can celebrate his personal victories.  Joe doesn't have that option. He does have small victories, but the ending is

Slight spoiler - This was surpringly seasonal at the end, I accidentally chose the perfect time of year to coincide with the events.  In fact, this book could be seen as a perfect metaphor for 2020. Obviously, not intentional on the part of Mr Trumbo. but it's there nonetheless.

I raced through this in a couple of days.  The prose is spot on, colloquial enough to accurately depict the character, hallucinegenic in places and truly emotional.  I let out more than a few tears while reading this one.

Available in all good bookshops, I highly recommend this one to anyone.

Number 83 - Mordew by Alex Pheby

 

You have to hand it to the fellows at Galley Beggar Press, these black paperback editions are rather handsome and distinctive.  The postcard in the picture shows the artwork on the hardback edition they sell and is a thing of beauty in itself.

GBP are a small press who release only 4 books a year normally.  Unlike a lot of small presses, they don't charge through the nose for the books, even the signed  limited editions (which the black paperback copies all are).

Any company only printing 4 books a year, you have to assume is applying strict quality control on the writing contained therein.  So far, I can only agree with the editor's fgood taste in the few of their books I've received so far.

Alex Pheby is a new name to me, but has been published through GBP before.  This is the first book of a new trilogy, set appropriately enough in the city of Mordew.

As you might guess from the picture on the postcard, it's a fantasy novel. Mordew is an unusual place.  The mud in the slums is living mud which births strange creatures at random, known as flukes. This is because of the corpse of God which is buried deep beneath the surface after it was murdered many many years ago.

Our hero is Nathan Treeves, a womb-born boy who has a spark inside him. This is a source of incredible power. The first we learn of this is when he can create his own flukes in the living mud rather than randomly fishing for them like all the other peasant children.  Unknown to him, forces are gathering that want to use his power and he soon finds himself an unwilling pawn in battles he struggles to understand.  He encounters new friendships, betrayal and double-crosses.

A lot of the individual ingredients in this are admittedly cliches of the genre - young boy with magical powers - check.  Family secrets - check. Magical spellbooks - check. Evil overlord - check. Or is the overlord evil or just misunderstood? - check.

However, the execution of the storytelling is really very good indeed. The prose is never less than a pleasure to read.  Before this book I never thought that a narration could feel so whimsical, almost twee in places, but have such a dark heart at the centre of it all. Nathan is a magical Oliver Twist, passed from pillar to post, conned and cheated and betrayed by the people he should trust.  Despite the familiarity of the concepts and the plot details in the story, I was constantly wrong-footed - and the ending of the novel itself left me begginig for more, which is always a very good sign.

 I'm not sure that the glossary at the end of the book is strictly necessary - the length of it cries a little of pretentiousness, but there are some really nice hints about future developments which make me want to get the next book in the trilogy even sooner.   

This is one of the more memorable books I've read this year and scores an easy 8/10.

I should have another GBP book on the way very soon and I can't wait.  They have a buddy scheme, where for less than the price of  a p[late of fish and chips a month, they send you every one of their books as they're released.  And that's a really good deal.  You can find them here.

 https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/ 

Alternatively, you can just buy the individual books as they come out.

Number 58 - The Brotherhood of the Grape - John Fante

One of the last books I read last year, if not the last, was 1933 was  a Bad Year by John Fante.  I'd never heard of him before and only bought it because of the Charles Bukowski quote on the cover.  It became my favourite book of the year.

Therefore, another of his books was on the cards.

When Henry Molise, a 50 year old writer, is called by his brother and told his parents are on the verge of a divorce, he returns reluctantly to his home town to try to help sort the problem.

While he's there, he is persuaded (read emotionally blackmailed) to help his father on one last building job.  His father's alcoholism is not likely to help with the building process.

This is a slim volume at a shade over 200 pages. However by the end of it I knew Henry and Old Nick (his dad) inside and out. Even the slightly more background characters were fleshed out fairly well.  These were complex and well rounded characters.

This is one of the most moving and funny novels I've read this year.  The father/son dynamic is by turns hilarious, sad and infuriating.  His relationship with his mother is equally good.  She is a great comic creation and I'm grinning now just remembering the scene where she takes the phone off henry while he's talking to his wife.

His brothers and sister aren't as rounded, but as supporting cast they do their job well.  The running joke with Mario gets funnier every time it appears. The brotherhood of the Grape - aka Nick's drinking buddies - are similarly great comic supporting cast.

It's told in a very easy prose that has true hidden depths. I raced through this book in two days and it's well and truly restored my failth in the written word to be entertaining after the drudge that was The Year's Midnight.  In a third the number of pages, this book gave far more entertainment and characterisation.

This made me laugh, it made me wipe a tear from the corner of my eye,   Books like this are the reason that I read.  I really can't praise it any higher than that.

Number 56 - The Year's Midnight - Alex Benzie

This is one of those books I picked up second hand almost completely at random.  Mainly because the cover looked interesting and the story sounded intriguing. I'd never heard of Alex Benzie before so this was a stab in the dark.

It's a long book, probably the longest thing I've read this year, but it felt a lot longer than it is.

This is the first time since I started this blog that I've been tempted to give up half way through a book.

It's not that the prose is bad.  The prose actually has quite a lot to recommend it in places.  It's so dense though, and very overwriiten.

The dialogue is written in such a broad scottish dialect that it was nearly 200 pages in before I could relax my brain into translation mode and read it direectly.  Prior to that I was having to read and rerread the dialogue to try to work out what the hell was being said.

 From the prologue -
Fits a fine loon like yersel deein here, at the hin end o' the fair? Id've thocht ye'd be awa lang ere the noo, gin ye'd nae mind me askin.

That's one of the easier lines of dialogue in the prologue.

You can tell Alex Benzie fancies himself a serious literary author.  None of the dialogue is in quote marks, copying Cormac McCarthy and others, he never uses one word where twenty nine paragraphs will do the job.  There are chapters that go on for ten pages, where the most that happens is a man says hello to a woman. This was heavy going.

We hear about show don't tell - this takes that to the extreme.  Instead of a short chapter telling us some key points of our central character's childhood, after the prologue, we go to his birth, and follow him from small baby, to toddler, to his early schooldays etc etc.  It's showing us why he is the way he is as he gets older, but it really takes its time.

The story isn't even that interesting.  The blurb makes it sound like there's going to be intrigue and conflict.  Instead it's actually nearly 600 pages about a lad in his late teens fixing a clock and having a crush on a girl.  And the clock repair doesn't enter the story till well over half way through.

The "villain" of the piece doesn't get even the slightest bit of come-uppance. And, yet another story where the first time the innocent young girl "becomes a woman" she gets pregnant. I'm sure it happens sometimes in reality, but why does it happen nearly every time in fiction?  

Having dragged myself through the 571 pages, do I feel a better person for reading it?  Have I been offered any great insights into life? Am I sad that these characters are leaving my life now I'm moving on to another book?

No, No and No.

I'm sure there are people out there who will gasp at the beauty of the prose (which to be fair - is very easy on the eye as dense literature goes - despite going on a bit) and will wax lyrical about the book's depiction of a microcosm of society  on the cusp of technological change and its metaphorical resonance.

Yeah sure, it has got that. The town is drawn well and we do know the characters well by the end of it.  We dislike the charcaters we're meant to dislike but... I felt no real connection to any of the characters we're supposed to like.  Despite following him through almost his entire childhood, Watchie is a bit of a wet blanket as characters go. He has no real personality.

Somehow, the surfeit of description has left him, and most of the side characters, with only one dimension visible.  The villain of the piece is the only one who feels even slightly fleshed out, mainly because of the difference between the way he presents himself publically and the depiction of his inner world.

I don't think I will be reading anythiong else by Mr Benzie.  If you wish to do so, this is available through the usual places where you can buy books. Hell, you can have my copy for the cost of postage if you ask me before I take it to the charity shop.

One good thing about the length of this, when it leaves my shelves, I've got rooom for two regular length books.

Number 33 - from a low and quiet sea - Donal Ryan

This month's book group read

I'd never heard of Donal Ryan before.  However, from the number of award nominations this book has had, and the four full pages of glowing reviews before the book starts, it's fair to say that he's well thought of as a writer.

And from the evidence on offer in this book, that's easily understandable.

This is very short - only 180 pages - yet it manages to tell the stories of three very different men, and join the three stories, almost satisfactorily, together.

The first man is Farouk. He's a happily married doctor in war-torn Syria, with a young daughter.  As the danger increases  in his village and the fighting draws closer, he chooses to throw his lot in with a people smuggler and get him and his family to safety.

The second is Lampy, a bit of a simpleton no-hoper from the back end of nowhere, somewhere in rural Ireland.  He drives a minibus for the handicapped at a local care home, taking them out for day trips. 

The third is John.  This is the first first-person narrative we hear.  He's telling us about his life, counting down all his sins in a final confession.

There are a couple of other narrators in the last 30 pages, but they all serve to fill in the gaps in the stories we've heard to date, and to join the dots between them.

The ending of the story does rely rather too much on coincidence and the strangest minibus design in history. Plus, at one point our doctor character is described as taking a pulse with his thumb and diagnosing an old man's illness.  As anyone who's ever been trained to take a pulse will tell you - YOU DON'T TAKE A PULSE WITH YOUR THUMB, your thumb has a palpable pulse in it.  You can take a pulse from a marble statue with your thumb, it will be your own pulse.  The fact that he diagnoses the old man with an irregular heart rhythm is not surprising since his own pulse is getting in the way. This guy should not be a doctor.

If you can forgive the minibus design flaws and the medical inaccuracy. this book works very well indeed.  The prose is never less than very very good indeed.  The first sequence in particular utlised very long run on sentences to good and strikingly beautiful effect.  It was reminiscent in this way to Patience by Toby Litt, my first book for this year.  I think Toby's prose was better overall though.

Lampy's section, after a while, had me reading in a strong Irish accent.  It was similar in flow to Farouk's story, but with the different dialect backing it up.  The only thing that I found segregated the writing in John's segment was the first person narration.

However, despite the flaws this is a very well written and fairly moving book.  I'm not sure it's as heartbreaking as the reviews n the opening pages suggest, but this is just my hard hearted opinion.

Still an easy 8/10