Number 62 - The Good Earth - Pearl S Buck

 This month's book group read was this relatively obscure novel from 1930. Pearl Buck grew up in China, the child of missionaries, and spent most of her life there. She taught in Chinese universities when she wasn't writing. As she says on the back cover of this rather old penguin edition, her chief pleasure  and interest had always been people, and since she lived amongst the Chinese, Chinese people.

This is a story of the Chinese, told in microcosm through the story of a farmer Wang Lung. Wang Lung was a peasant who bought a slave girl from a local great house to be his bride.  The bride, O-lan, sorts his house out, bears him lots of children, and her decisions are instrumental in his rags to riches story. 

I'm sure there are a lot of parallels and references I don't understand since my knowledge of Chinese history is sketchy at best.

This covers the life of the farmer from a desperately poor peasant in his twenties, working his fields, to his dotage as a very old man.  In that time he deals with droughts, villainous relatives, second wives and moody offspring.

What is quite disturbing in this book is the attitudes towards women.  If this was written by a man it would be somewhat unbelievable, but since it isn't, it's worrying how close, historically  speaking, this book is set. O-Lan is directly responsible for Wang-Lung's success.  All the decisions that instigate his rise in society come from her.

But he treats her like a slave and only shows concern when she falls ill. And then it's mainly worry about who will clean and tidy. he still criticises her for having too big feet.

The writing in the book makes no judgements on any of the characters though, even when Wang Lung starts cheating on his wife and spending all their money on his new woman. The writing remains impartial and arguably quite dry. The reader is left to judge the characters based on their actions and Wang Lung is frequently frustrating.

Her missionary background shows through in the prose.  It frequently reads like the King James Bible- "And thus it came to pass..." and similar phrasing used throughout.

One distinct flaw in the book is a classic case of Women Writing Men, where the motivations she ascribes to Wang Lung are totally unbelievable with regards to his love life.

It may be that that is down to an allusion to Chinese history that I've missed entirely, but without lots of research, I have no way of knowing. And I do have a life outside of reading and writing this blog.

Another thing that bugged me was how many children she had for him.  Even when they were living for a year in a lean-to made of a half a dozen mats slung against the wall of a great house in a city in the south, she still fell pregnant. Where were they finding alone time? They already had at least two children living with them (and Wang Lung's decrepit father). This is especially strange given the revelation in chapter one that no person had seen Wang Lung unclothed for several years. It seems that his shyness must have evaporated somewhere down the line.

This is an absorbing and interesting (if occasionally frustrating) read throughout. I'm glad I read it and I'm tempted to find the sequels.

It's available from most good bookshops and online in much more recent versions.  Although this edition does win the best smelling book I've read this year by a country mile.

Number 50 - The Cold Summer - Gianrico Carofilglio

 This month's book group read was this Mafia thriller novel by Giancarlo Carofilglio.  I need to take a good run up before I say that name out loud.

I crossed out the word thriller above because that's one thing this book definitely isn't. It's a police procedural about the search for the kidnappers and killers of the son of a Mafia boss, but it falls short on the elements that thrill this particular reader.

That's not to say it's a bad book, it just doesn't fit with what I would normally expect from a novel about Mafia hitman and the police.

In 1992, just after the (real life) murder of a prominent judge  (who'd recently helped take down one of the largest Mafias in Italy), the son of a Mafia lord in Bari is kidnapped.  After the boy's dead body is discovered, despite the ransom being paid, Marshal Fenoglio of the Carabinieri has to track down the killers in the midst of a local mafia war.

All the ingredients are there for a fantastic and exciting cat and mouse chase between killers and targets with our brave hero showing off his skills as a detective.

That's not what we get though. Carofiglio is an ex-prosecutor for organised crime and government advisor on the anti-mafia committee so he knows the subject matter inside out and we can assume that what he's written is probably more realistic. Whether it makes for an exciting read is another question.

I managed to read this book in 3 or four days despite it being 350 pages.  It's a very quick and easy read. I was never bored with it, but I do have issues.

There's no mystery element to the story.  there's no hints for the reader to second guess the narrative.  We're given all the information unambiguously at the same time as the detective character.

At no point in the story does Fenoglio do any detective work. Quite literally, in both of the plotlines- the mafia war and the kidnapped child- one of the bad guys just decides to tell him everything he needs to know. Fenoglio himself does very little indeed to impact the story despite being the central character who's on nearly every page of the book. The closest he gets to detective work is when he takes a comment made by an associate and mentions that to a colleague.  The colleague then works out who the bad guys are, and one of them spills the beans on the other. It's the colleague and not Fenoglio who plays a substantial role in bringing the bad guy to justice too.

The pacing is slowed somewhat by sandwiching chapters with plot with chapters where the characters discuss how morally ambiguous policework is.  Probably half the book is philosophical musings about what is needed for effective policing.

The most interesting bit of the book is the central sequence where the Mafia guy is telling his story in the form of his police interviews and we learn how a small time thief can rise through the ranks and how Mafia's operate. One of the points made at the book group meeting was how this section feels more horrific because of the matter of fact way that the character talks about truly vicious killings and the correct techniques for disposing of the bodies.

There is an occasional nice turn of phrase and clever description.  All in all, I'm glad to have read it, but I'm not going to rush out to buy any of his other books. Despite the mafia being the subject of so much fiction, this book doesn't feel cliched and does feel like it's probably more grounded in reality than some others. Whether achieving that realism by all but ditching the thriller and mystery elements that normally accompany crime fiction is a good thing or not is up for debate. 

Number 27a- Delicatus - SP Somtow

 

This was a review copy i was sent in exchange for the usual fair and unbiased review. 

This is 27a because I started this whist still reading book 27, partly because I realised i had to leave feedback before the end of the month, and partly because cat's Cradle was such a bad book, I needed some quality fiction at the same time.

Fortunately it still fits with my "cat on the cover" theme I've been using to select books this month - look between "Deli" and "Us" in the title...

I'm always happy to review a Somtow novel since he's been an absolute favourite writer of mine for decades.

This is part one of a new sequence and I hope the next part comes out soon.  It's based on the remarkable true story of a slave boy in ancient Rome who became Empress to two Emperors.

The story is told in flashback n a conversation between Sporus and a make up girl making him ready for a very public execution. This makes for an unusually dramatic framing device that made the book speed along at a rapid rate of knots.

We start his story with his kidnap from an unnamed village and his experiences on board the pirate ship transporting him to Rome. Once in Rome he finds a kindly master in the form of Petronius, writer of the Satyricon. We find out he bears a stunning similarity to one of the most beautiful women in the land, the Lady Poppea, the wife of Senator Otho. She has her own eyes on the position of Empress and Sporus quickly becomes a pawn in her game.

This is compulsive reading and all the more remarkable for being broadly speaking a true story. All the key players in this story are genuine and the story follows real events in their lives. The book feels very well researched but the research is used to fuel the story rather than slow it down.

Somtow's writing has rarely been more compulsive than this. It's a fast, and incredibly easy read despite the complexities of the politics woven into  the narrative. 

The only negative I have about this book is that it finishes on an enormous cliffhanger, both in the flashback storytelling, and the discussions with his make up artist. Book two needs to come out sooner rather than later... As well as the cliffhanger, there has been a lot of foreshadowing towards events in the next volume/s and I need to know what happens!

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

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 7 - West - Carys Davies

 

This month's book group book. A debut novel by a writer with a certain amount of talent.

She apparently has a short story collection or two out and I'm in two minds as to whether I should check them out.

This isn't much longer than a short story itself.  I think it's more of a novella, 150 pages with many blank pages between the very short chapters.

It tells the story of Cy Bellman, a man in wild western times USA who decides to leave his young daughter and travel westwards in search of dinosaurs after he reads and becomes obsessed by a newspaper article about giant bones found in a valley.

The chapters alternate between his travels and the life of Bess - his daughter - on the farmstead.

The prose is pared right back to the absolute minimum, which is a good thing in this instance. His journey stretches for a couple of years and detailed accounts would have become very irritating with the sheer pointlessness of his trip.

It's a very quick read and seems to buzz with layers of metaphor about life's journey.  However, because the prose is so sparse, it's difficult to feel any sympathy for the plight of any of the characters.  It's certainly impossible to sympatyhise with Bellman.  I just thought he was a horrible father, and a rather pompous and stupid character. The motivation we were given for him just wasn't convincing enough to justify what he put himself through.

The two men in the hometown section of the book are suitably creepy with their intentions but I felt no sense of wanting their intended victim to escape.  I didn't really care. This section of the story maybe needed more physical depth than the sparing detail we were given.

Having said all that I was really enjoying the read.  the pacing was fine, the prose actually quite accomplished.  It was reminiscent of Annie Proulx for most of the book. Then the ending came and she let herself down entirely with at least three really stupid coincidences, totally impossible action and a huge and gaping plot hole.

If the ending had been satisfactory, I would have no issue with looking up more of her books.  However, when she tanked it he way she did... I'm having major second thoughts.

Number 4 - The Keep - F Paul Wilson

 Another of those old 80s paperbacks with the glorious covers I have lying aound the house.

I wish some publishers would go back to this type of cover.  They really do have a magic about them.

This is one book that fulfills the promise of the cover as well. 

Nazis versus vampires. It's certainly the first time I've come across this combination. Thrown into the mix are an elderly and infirm Jewish scholar and his daughter, and a mysterious stranger.

 It opens with an SS officer, swiftly rising through the ranks, being called into his commanding officers office and sent to help a major in a remote outpost in Transylvania. the Major has sent an urgent plea for help "Request immediate relocation, Something is murdering my men"

So off he goes with his squadron of Einsatzkommandos to render their assistance in their own inimitable way. 

The scene is set for a showdown between human evil and a centuries old force of nature.

The Major in charge of the Keep is not a member of the party. The only reason he still has rank is because of his record for heroism in the previous world war. His refusal to join the party is the reason why he's been shunted off to a remote outpost where it's not expected anything will happen. Out of sight, out of mind. How wrong the high command were... This gives us a relatively sympathetic German character to follow in the first third of the book.  It also provides a more balanced view of the Germans that at least one of them is a good guy at heart and not all Germans were nazis. As we find out later on, his reasonable nature has more influence on the plot than we realise.

The truly sympathetic characters (the Jewish scholar and his daughter) don't make much of an appearance early on in the book, and it's over a hundred pages in before they are taken to the Keep so we need someone we can actually not want to see immediately slaughtered to follow early on. 

The novel is surprisingly well written (apart from a laughable sex scene) and very well paced. This is one of the few books to reference Vlad Tepec and Dracula as a central plot point without making it a hackneyed cliche. 

The supernatural villain is genuinely scary and the human villains suitably nasty and cowardly.  It's a pleasure to read of the gradual thinning of their ranks. 

The story takes a few unexpected twists and turns, and with 10 pages to go, I had no idea if good was going to win over evil.

Apparently this is book number 1 in a 6 book series.  I have one other in my TBR.  I will certainly be tracking down the others.

Number 70 - Miriam: Memoirs of a Goddess 1: Annunciation - SP Somtow

 

I was honoured to be sent a sneak preview of this new book by SP Somtow.

As my regular readers know, I am a big fan of his work and have been since reading Vampire Junction in my mid teens.

This is a book he started over twenty years ago but couldn't find a publisher for. To be completely honest, I can understand why an American publishing house wouldn't touch it. That's nothing to do with the quality of the writing though, more the subject matter.   

The subject matter is quite obvious from the cover artwork. In this book, Somtow does to the Christian mythology what he did to Greek myths in the Shattered Horse.  I can imagine a large chunk of bible belt America wanting to burn this book for what they would describe as blasphemy.

Note the distinction there - "WHAT THEY WOULD DESCRIBE AS"

Taking an alternate viewpoint on the beginnings of Christianity is always going to annoy some people.  As a Catholic I feel that I am supposed to be outraged by this book.

But I'm not.  

It's not an offensive book in the slightest. It's an alternate history to the established lore, dealing with the life of Mary, mother of Jesus. I hesitate to say fantasy novel since so far there have been no unambiguously supernatural events. Everything has been in the realms of the possible despite the talk of Gods and the wild religious ritual which occurs.

Somtow has used Mary or alternate versions of her before. In his Riverrun Trilogy, the mother of the central character is called Mary and just happens to be the mother Goddess in quite literal terms. Here, he's going to the source of the myth, joining the story of the ever-virgin (although even the Bible tells us Jesus had brothers and sisters) Mother of Christ with the other deities common at the time.  Remember that the Romans were in charge at the time of Christ and they, along with the Greeks had their own religions which were contemporaneous with Mary's upbringing. 

At least one element - Miriam's age at the time of the birth - seems wrong to western ears, but was probably entirely normal 2020 years ago. The rather less than virgin birth could be a sticking point for some easily offended religious types. This is the family of Christ as actual people and not just religious cyphers.

This is part one of a much larger novel.  It opens with a 40 something Miriam being visited by P/Saul who wants to use her for his new religion. There is a meeting with the disciples where P/Saul tries to sell them his new vision with rather limited success. We also have flashbacks to her early life and the events that happen close to her betrothal to Joseph and the birth of her first son. It finishes at a fairly random point, but this is, as previously mentioned, only part one.

If it was written by some hack, you could argue that the more potentially controversial elements of the story are there for effect and to garner publicity, but that's not true here.  Somtow has a powerful story to tell and these are necessary elements. 

I can't wait for part 2 as this has well and truly piqued my interest and I really want to know what happens next.

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.