The Children Act - Ian McEwan

I’m going to admit something from the start here.  I don’t like Ian McEwan’s books.  I have nothing against him personally, in fact I have some admiration in how he manages to put pen to paper when his head is so stuck up his backside.  I find his writing style overly pretentious for the kinds of books that he writes.  Prose will be peppered with laboured metaphors and unnecessary digressions, and his characters have an unfailing ability to irritate me in a way I’m not always able to put my finger on.

Therefore when my book club chose to read his latest book, The Children Act, I immediately resolved to find literally anything else to do on that day – but I changed my mind.  Perhaps I was a giant ball of prejudice here, unfairly tarring a book by its predecessors; maybe in this book I’d finally see what his legions of fans have been raving about for decades.  It was also helpful that the book is short.

The Children Act is about Fiona Maye, a high court justice who works in family law whose marriage is breaking down.  So far, so Hollywood.  Her husband of 35 years, frustrated at their near-extinct sex life, wants to have an open marriage.  This request she denies, causing him to run off with a statistician and ultimately have rather disappointing sex.  While this all plays out, a case comes before her regarding a Jehovah’s Witness family who are refusing a blood transfusion for their critically ill son on religious grounds.

That would seem to provide for an interesting story, but the narrative is desperately overworked.  McEwan time and again falls into the trap of showing off all the knowledge he has gleamed of the legal profession, instead of weaving the necessary details into the story.  When Fiona walks to work, McEwan feels the need to describe every turn, every landmark she passes.  In such a short novel these unnecessary digressions and embellishments are deeply distracting.

Indeed part of the problem in many ways is the book’s brevity.  The legal case itself is over fairly quickly, but the personal story of her marriage needed more time to develop. As it is, this part of the plot seems tagged on, when really that should have been the real meat of the dish.

That is not to say that there isn’t good stuff going on in The Children Act.  The scenes with Fiona and the Jehovah’s Witness boy Adam are really quite beautiful, as is a scene at the end where she is giving a piano recital – it’s just that the whole thing is swamped by a very heavy-handed, ham-fisted style of prose, and a plot that isn’t given the space to develop.  There was an interesting story in there, but McEwan completely missed it.  In other words, it’s a classic Ian McEwan novel.

6/10

Favourite Quotes


“Worth remembering the world was never how she anxiously dreamed it.”

“Religions, moral systems, her own included, were like peaks in a dense mountain range seen from a great distance, none obviously higher, more important, truer than another. What was”

“In the minds of the principals, the history of the marriage was redrafted to have been always doomed, love was recast as delusion.”

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The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

One can judge a book on a number of different levels (plot and characterization to name just two), but writing I find is often the most contentious of all of them.  Some believe that for a book to be considered well written it must be full of complex literary devices, or it should utilise language that is alien to all but the most verbose and lexically gifted readers.  Others think that a book is well-written if it meets its audience at a level that it is pitched while still challenging them, and I have far more sympathy with that view. But sometimes writing can have a true beauty – a transportative aesthetic that transmits more than just images, but smells, tastes, sounds and tactile senses that totally envelop you.  An impenetrable book cannot achieve this, but neither can something populist – it needs to be something special.  Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North is very very special indeed.

The book is set in the Burma death railway during the Second World War, where an unflinching Australian army doctor battles with his Japanese captors to try and allievate the suffering of his rapidly decaying soldiers. It has its core in this horror but it flits between this and flashes backwards and forwards, focussing on the man he was before and after his traumatic ordeal, showing the effect that it had. 

Before the conflict he was a man from the sticks in rural Tasmania who became a doctor and marries a society girl, but fell in lustful love with his uncle’s young wife.  After the war, he is an adulterous and neglectful husband and a cold and distant father, haunted by his war and his love.  The book is marketed as a love story, but I found this the least compelling part of the book.  The descriptions of his marriage are powerful, but they don’t stand out from the rest of the literary field.

Where this book excels and envelops is in Burma on the railway.  It is a pitiless tale of human suffering, with a quality of writing that truly beggars belief.  Flanagan has an ability in a sentence to paint a the most vivid of portraits, but one that engages all the senses.  The mud, the stench, the rot and the screams are all there.  It is totally horrifying and engrossing, and makes you truly wonder the depths of human cruelty and wonder just what could drive someone to do such a thing.

And then he answers, by writing sections from the perspective of his Japanese captors.  This is another of this book’s triumphs, because it shows the prison in which these men were held by their country and their emperor.  Their martial conditioning causes their sociopathic personalities and in the passages of their post-war lives, we compare their lot with that of the few surviving Australians and find that at a basic human level, they were not all that different.

Perhaps great writing is a bit like love. Ineffable, but you know it when you see it.  Buy this book and you’ll see it all right.

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The Bone Clocks - David Mitchell

The release of David Mitchell’s book The Bone Clocks was quite possibly the most eagerly awaited of the year.  Bibliophiles the world over could be found champing at the bit to dig into the latest offering from the author of the brilliant Cloud Atlas as well as the acclaimed Ghostwritten and number9dream.  Having dipped his toes into science fiction in the past with visions of a dystopian future in Cloud Atlas, we all could not wait to see how he would deal with a book that promised to be his first all-out fantasy work.  

The result?  Well… it’s complicated.

The Bone Clocks has two narratives.  The first is the tale of Holly Sykes, a teen-runaway turned author who finds that she has the ability to know things that she should not – premonitions of the future and of the present.  Much like in Cloud Atlas each chapter is from the POV of a different character but the story is bookended with ones from her viewpoint and every chapter features a different stage in her life through the eyes of other characters that encounter her while on their own journeys. 

The second narrative is of a war between two immortal/regenerating groups: the quasi-vampiric Anchorites and the rather Time Lordy Horologists.  Until the penultimate chapter these two are kept very separate with the first dominant and the second one teasing us with brief glimpses of narrative leg, filling you with questions and a sense of unease.

This genre-bending is very much Mitchell’s style and this is certainly a novel that has ambitions and pretensions beyond that of almost anything I have read before.  Each chapter of the book has its own distinctive flavour, feeling like a mini-novella within the wider narrative, and there are some - the Ed Brubeck and Crispin Hershey chapters in particular - that I felt could have been expanded to be a novel in their own right.   

There is also a tremendous sense of humour through the whole story, and this is best shown in the Crispin Hershey chapter.  Crispin is a middle-aged author with the selling power of a police box but an ego the size of the inside of a TARDIS.  In this chapter Mitchell takes aim at reviewers who barely glance at the book before castigating a book, pretentious authors who refuse to move with the times, and even at his own book: "a book can't be half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half-pregnant". 

There is also Mitchell’s trademark of slipping in minor characters from old books into his newer ones.  I have a link here to a flow-chart documenting this here.  This reuse of characters gives added value to those who have been avid fans of Mitchell for a while and show how this new work fits into the rest of this work. 

No writer can weave as complex a tapestry as this quite like Mitchell and it comes so very close to being pulled off.  The chief problem that I have with this book though is its length.  If a book is going to stretch to over 600 pages then it needs to have a very good reason for doing so, and I am thoroughly unconvinced that this book needed to be so very long.  The chief culprits behind this for me are the middle chapters of the story.  The chapters concerning Hugo Lamb, Ed Brubeck and Crispin Hershey were indeed good fun to read in of themselves and as I said could easily be expanded on their own into enjoyable novels, but they are all unnecessarily long.  

For all of them the parts that advance the over-arching narrative come at the very end of 70-100 page chapters where the bits before seem only to be present to advance you to that point.  They are the fat of the book, and though we all know that the fatty bits are always the tastiest, in a book that is borderline obese you feel that perhaps a diet would be more advisable.  This book just isn’t particularly tight, with far too much exploration of characters that very soon will be barely referenced again. 

The final chapter too really annoyed me.  The second facet of the narrative completed, Mitchell takes us into a very bleak future where everything has gone disastrously wrong and proceeds to waste 40 pages of my time on something that should have been a short epilogue.  The ending was sweet, but getting there was one hell of a slog.  The author’s concerns for the future of humanity are well documented, but this felt very much bolted on – an appendix adding little but additional weight and the potential to irritate.

It’s all very well saying that these are enjoyable and well written, but if a part of a book is not relevant to what the story is trying to achieve, then it should be removed – especially true in a brick like The Bone Clocks.  Much like The Goldfinch, I think this is a case of cowardly editing and an over-powerful author preventing some painful, yet necessary weight-shedding.

These problems aside, there is no doubt that Mitchell has achieved something truly remarkable in this book.  My problems listed above could all have been solved so very easily with better editorial discipline – which part of the reason why it is so maddening to me – and do not in any sense detract from what is a very good novel.  Mitchell is surely one of the great authors currently writing, and this book thoroughly deserved its longlisting for the Man Booker, though equally its omission from the shortlist. 

7.5/10

Click here to order The Bone Clocks via Waterstones

Add The Bone Clocks to your reading list on Goodreads

Favourite Quotes

“Love's pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.”

“He was doing quite well until the last sentence, but if you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one.” 

“This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator.”

“Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers.” 

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GUEST BLOG: Wolf in White Van - John Darnielle

As many of you will know, I never studied English beyond GCSE level and thus my reviews are not so much a literary criticism as a stream of feelings.  I thought it only fair therefore to expose you all to someone who is probably a lot better at this than I am.  Kaitlyn Kane, noted cravat enthusiast and Art blogger with a questionable taste in men, has written about the latest book that has caught her eye and was kind enough to allow me to put it on my little blog.  Enjoy!

            

It’s difficult for me to know where to begin with Wolf in White Van. It’s a book that became incredibly close to my heart very quickly, and so to talk about it feels like exposing something private and sacred. And yet at the same time, as with all things that John Darnielle* creates, it filled me with a zeal to share it and with the conviction that it deserves to be widely read. So here I am, struggling to put into words what makes this book so special.

            At its most basic level, Wolf in White Van is about an incident in the life of teenage boy, Sean, which left him permanently and obviously physically disfigured. As he carries those scars into his adult life, the reader gets glimpses of what it’s like to live with such a disability— how strangers react to seeing him, how everyday actions such as trips to the grocery store are nearly impossible, how he’s had to learn to make himself appear unobtrusive and nonthreatening. The exact circumstance of the incident aren’t revealed until the end of the book, but as the story unfolds, small hints are revealed; a suspicion begins to creep into your mind.  While you are slowly uncovering the truth, Darnielle explains through flashbacks what brought Sean to that point and how he manages to go on living with trauma.

            In that respect, Wolf in White Van is about how the single choices we make have the ability to forever change everything in our lives. It’s about learning to accept the path those choices put you on and learning to let go of futures that can now never happen. Wolf in White Van is a book that makes it clear that for some, recovery isn’t an option. Not everyone gets better. As Darnielle writes, in that situation, as in all situations you have a choice: “either you go forward or you die.” Sean goes on.

            How he manages this is what makes up the second part of the novel. While in the hospital, Sean creates a mail order RPG game called Trace Italian. Through the game, in which the player must quest through a post-apocalyptic world seeking the safe heaven of a fortress known as Trace Italian, Darnielle explores how stories can shape and save lives and how they can be a form of shelter. However, throughout Wolf in White Van, stories and means of escape are consistently questioned— indeed, one of the major actions of the novel is a trial that takes place after two young players of Trace Italian take their game out of the world of fantasy and into their real lives. As the creator of the game, Sean’s guilt comes directly into question. The ambiguity of the novel allows the question of blame to remain at least partially unresolved while exploring what moral responsibility, if any, is existent in the creator/fan relationship.

           

            For a short book without all that much action, Wolf in White Van is full of these types of uncertain and unresolved questions. It isn’t, as much of Darnielle previous work is, a cry of triumph. It isn’t a map that shows the reader the path to salvation— to the Trace Italian, if you will. It’s a mediation on the meaning. With his his constantly commanding and arresting prose, Darnielle compels his reader to think about the aspects of life most of us would rather leave undiscussed.

            Because for all that Sean’s case is highly specific and unusual, it’s familiar. Even if most people’s scars aren’t physically displayed on their bodies, everyone carries their past around with them. Everyone takes solace in stories. We are all constantly asked to consider our next move, to decide between left and right, right and wrong. We are all faced with the same ultimate choice: either go forward or you die.

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*John Darnielle is in a band, but I’m not going to talk about that for a few reasons. First of all, there’s a lot of people out there that don’t like his band, and I think this book has the chance to speak to those people as much as his long time fans. Second of all, Wolf in White Van doesn’t need John’s history and his music to prop it up.

Click here to order The Best Thing That Never Happened To Me via Waterstones

Add Wolf in White Van to your reading list on Goodreads

Kaitlyn Kane, along with having many complex and emotional feelings about John Darnielle, has an art blog called Artfully Ambling. Go check it out, you will also find some stuff written by yours truly

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The Best Thing That Never Happened to Me - Laura Tait & Jimmy Rice

We’ve all been there.  Two people that we know who clearly are itching to get in each other’s pants but who have the situation reading skills of Louis XVI (anyone? French Revolution metaphors? Look it up).  No matter how close they get to actually going out, they get a vibe or cosmically overanalyse and decide that the other person is giving them the romantic stink-eye, and so they bottle it.  You just want to get them both, shove them into a room with a double bed and smooth jazz and shout “USE YOUR WORDS!”

It is that exclamation that really sums up the predicament of the characters in The Best Thing That Never Happened To Me.  The two main characters Alex and Holly are childhood friends from a town in Yorkshire who had the hots for each other but never actually got around to getting together.  Each tried to make a move, but read the tarots wrong and ended up thinking that the other was rejecting them.  Holly went to London for university and never left, while Alex (who is the worst reader of people in the history of literature) decided to stay because he felt like the people around him needed him.  Eventually he moves to the Big Smoke and he and Holly take up where they left off. 

I won’t bother telling you more of the plot because it is as predictable as it sounds.  Anyone who has seen literally any sitcom/rom-com involving the stock characters above will know how this ends.  It even has the obligatory ‘race-to-the-airport-to-tell-person-that-they-love-them-but-can’t-get-there-because-of-traffic scene’. 

This story’s strength is not in originality for sure, but then again I wasn’t expecting it to be.  The real test of a book like this is whether you engage with the characters, in whether it made you laugh, and if it surprised you in some way – if it transcends the trashy-ness of the genre and actually leaves you with something that lingers beyond the final page.  The answer to these questions are: sorta, yes, and no.

Holly and Alex are moderately developed stock characters in a book such as this: the hyper-organised woman in a boring job that yearns for something more, and the stoic, brooding guy who finds it hard to engage with people but opens up around friends.  These are clichés, but they are so for a reason.  Their quirks and traits are fertile ground for the book’s comedy, which rarely makes one laugh out loud, but is certainly enough to make one read on.  The writing style is modern and dynamic, clearly written by two young-ish writers from a journalistic background.

The central problem of the book, however, comes with the answer to that final question.  The book is utterly unmemorable and fails to transcend cliché and average in really any way.  It has the same feeling as a Bella Italia pizza – it’s nice enough, but it’s pretty much the same as one that you have had a million times at home on your sofa.  It never totally emerges from the huddled mass of similar books.

That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy reading The Best Thing That Never Happened To Me – it’s just that even whilst I was reading it I was fully aware that this book was not original and not special.  It was comfortable and unchallenging – and if that is the sort of thing that you’re in the mood for then this is as good as any.

6/10

I'd like to thank Transworld Publishers for giving me a free copy of this book through Net Galley

Click here to order The Best Thing That Never Happened To Me via Waterstones

Add The Best Thing That Never Happened To Me to your reading list on Goodreads

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Landline - Rainbow Rowell

Is it reasonable to be disappointed by the quality of a book that thoroughly engaged you?  Find lacking something that you devoured in a single sitting?  Can a book, which elicited a huge variety of emotions from laughter to tears and many in between, leave one feeling a tad let down?  Confused as I am?

The source of my jumble of assorted views is Landline, the new book from one of my favourite current writers Rainbow Rowell.  Best known for her Young Adult novels like Eleanor and Park and Fangirl, Rowell also publishes books for adults, and Landline is aimed squarely at this audience.  The books centres around Georgie McCool (what a name eh!) who is a successful comedy writer in LA, and  is desperately struggling to balance her work with her family life. 

Her husband Neal, a full-time house-husband, has been feeling neglected by his wife, and the last straw is when that Georgie announces that she has to work through Christmas on a brand-new show that will better fulfil her artistically.  Neal departs with the kids to Omaha (for those of you unfamiliar with US geography, that’s like really far away), leaving Georgie in California. 

Distraught, Georgie goes to stay with her mother and, while calling Neal on an old phone, finds that she is talking, not to the Neal of the present, but the Neal 1998, in the early years of their relationship.  The book then weaves a tapestry, interposing their ongoing relationship development in the past, with its difficulties in the present. This portal to the past is a really wonderful idea, and allows Rowell to keep the story rooted in the familiar, rather than transforming it into outright sci-fi/fantasy.

Along with this really clever plot device, this novel really excels in portraying the challenging dynamics of modern marriage, but flipped on its head.  The dynamic of having the woman as the working mother, with the husband at home is not unique to this book, but it is handled extremely well here.  Georgie is not transformed into some masculine, career-centric workaholic; she is simply a woman of great talent who has, with her husband, elected to be the family breadwinner.  Rowell never questions this dynamic – that the man can raise the kids while the woman works – the conflict instead stems from other roots.

Where this novel starts to unravel for me, however, is in the characters.  I love Georgie.  She is well-developed and a real delight to read, but the others…  I know I am supposed to sympathise with Neal, her husband, and that this is supposed to be a two-sided story, but really I found him passive-aggressive and petty. 

Then there is Seth.  He is Georgie’s partner at work and the object of much of Neal’s jealousy, yet he is terribly underdeveloped to the extent that he appears to be two one-dimensional characters welded together.  He is either, similar to Neal, a passive-aggressive jerk, or this sort of non-entity.  He doesn’t really seem to influence the story; managing to have almost no chemistry with either the narrative or any of the characters.

Having said all of that, I was hooked on this book.  From the moment I began reading it I was totally absorbed by Rowell’s writing and  the skill with which she created the story’s over-arching narrative.  It made me cry and go through minor emotional torment – and yet by the end I still felt underwhelmed.  It is a good read, but it’s a disappointment in many ways, especially when one considers the strength of her previous works, especially Eleanorand Park. 

The central question of the books is: Is love enough?  Can love sustain even when its participants neglect?  Well, love of Rowell was enough to make me buy the book, and appreciation of the writing saw me to the end – but it is not enough to make me give this book my unreserved approval.

7/10

Click here to order Landline via Waterstones

Add Landline to your reading list on Goodreads

Read my review of  Eleanor and Park by the same author

Favourite Quotes

“Neal didn't take Georgie's breath away. Maybe the opposite. But that was okay--that was really good, actually, to be near someone who filled your lungs with air.” 

“The future was going to happen, even if he wasn’t ready for it. Even if he was never ready for it. At least he could make sure he was with the right person. Wasn’t that the point of life? To find someone to share it with? And if you got that part right, how far wrong could you go? If you were standing next to the person you loved more than everything else, wasn’t everything else just scenery?” 

“I love you more than I hate everything else.” 

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Black Box - Cassia Leo

The comfort zone is so-named for a reason. It’s secure and familiar – a cosy place to relax to escape from some of the nasty things going on in the world. The problem is that really good literature should draw us away from this happy place. It should challenge our world view and show us new perspectives that make us feel decidedly uncomfortable. It should be free to take on societal taboos and face them square-on.

Black Box does exactly this. Written by New York Times bestselling author Cassia Leo, it takes on the trauma of a victim of an unspeakable crime, and her entirely rational desire to end her life. Mikki suffered a horrific attack in her teens which left her with scars so deep that they overwhelmed her entire life. Attacked by a group of men, physically and sexually assaulted, and then left for dead, she survived only due to the intervention of another victim of a trauma, this one very different. Rescuing her from her near-fatal fate prevented the young musician Crush from ending his own life.

Their meeting was entirely coincidental, but they keep running into each other, intervening at the crucial moment that prevents them from taking the final fatal step. This final time sees them meet at Logan Airport in Boston as their flight to Los Angeles is cancelled due to bad weather. Mikki, having left notes to her family and settled her affairs was prepared to end her life in the Pacific Ocean but the delay and Crush’s intervention means that she is stuck in Boston for a few days. What follows is a whirlwind romance, but also a deep and sometimes brutal examination of what it means to live with a traumatic event.

The theme of the story is the feeling of lost control. The assault on Mikki did not just leave her emotionally brutalized; it ripped away her means to control her own life. Her loss of power of attorney meant that she had legally lost the right to make her own decisions but she had also lost it in a more primal sense. To exist she has to take meds by the handful and even this does not aid her fully. In order to claw back some feeling of control she resorts to actions such as self-belittlement, self-harm, and attempted suicide.

At the core of this novel is the question: what do you do when the only rational course is to end your life? What is the point of living a life that has been ruined? How do you overcome an event that has come to define your entire existence? What is decidedly unnerving about this novel is that you find yourself siding with Mikki on her desire to kill herself. Cassia Leo does an amazing job of conveying not just Mikki’s fragility and vulnerability but also her strength. For her ending her life is not the coward’s way out at all, it is just something that she must do.

I have not spent much of this review so far talking about the other half of this story. Crush (not his birth name), unlike Mikki has, to an extent at least, been able to deal with the trauma of his past and has determined to save her life in the same way that she, unknowingly, saved his. He comes from a world of wealth but has come to resent the privilege that comes with it, and he recognises in Mikki both a kindred spirit but also the intervention of fate – a supernatural force that keeps bringing them together and binding their destinies. Caring, methodical, and understanding, Crush provides Mikki with the support that she never truly got from her family or carers, and thus ignites from this story of trauma and loss, a love story that is tender, raw and dazzling.

Much like The Fault in our Stars, this is a love story set in a scene where normally one would only expect pain. It takes something on that would and should intimidate a lesser writer, but Cassia Leo rises to the task brilliantly. The eponymous Black Box of the story represents many things, but most of all that place in our souls where we shut in all of our deepest fears and most painful experiences. Yet that box can never be truly locked away; it is always leaking that darkness into our lives and it is only by feeling it and sharing it allows one to move on.

Leo spent much time during writing this book with sufferer of traumas much like Mikki and Crush and this shines though. It is never preaching, nor does it patronise. Well-researched and beautifully written, Black Box leaves you feeling numb from its brutal honesty and its exposure of the vulnerability of the human soul. The author has clearly poured her heart and soul into this book, producing something truly remarkable – a story that will stay with me forever.

9/10

I would like to thank Transworld Publishers for giving me a free copy of this book to review on Net Galley.

Click here to order a copy of Black Box via Waterstones 

Add Black Box to your reading list on Good Reads

Favourite Quotes

“This black box is yours to keep, to stash your troubles away. Just lock it up and call my name and I'll be there always.”

“Fate is death. No one escapes it. But if you stick around long enough, you might find someone to help you cheat fate for a while. And when you can’t cheat anymore, and fate finally catches up to you, maybe it won’t seem so scary with that someone by your side.”

“Fear is crippling. Fear of the future can convince us that there is no way out and nothing is ever going to get better. Fear is blinding; it can make us miss the warning signs flashing right in front of our eyes. It can also make you miss those brilliant flashes of color, when the world isn’t so gray. But, if you think about it, being afraid isn’t such a bad thing."

“Fate is for fairy tales. It’s a romantic notion. Luck is what happens when you’re in the right place at the right time … with the right person.”

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The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt

This year has been the Year of Reading Really Long Books for me.  I’ve ploughed through Les Misérables and The First Man in Rome so far and this has continued with Donna Tartt’s 784 page work The Goldfinch.

The Goldfinch has received almost universal acclaim and has been long awaited – Donna Tartt can rival George R.R. Martin in the field of procrastination.  It was selected by The New York Times as one of its ‘10 Best Books of 2013’ and has been shortlisted for the ‘National Book Critics Circle Award’, the ‘Bailey Women’s Prize for Fiction’, the ‘Pullitzer Prize’ and the ‘Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction’.  In fact pretty much the only thing that it has not won is the ‘Man Booker Prize’ and even this was met with no little controversy.  So, the critics love it, but that is not always an indication of a book that is good to read and indeed I believe this book, while very impressive, to be rather flawed.

The Goldfinch is a the bildungsroman to end all bildungsromans.  It tells the life of Theo Decker, who starts as a rebellious 13 year-old whose mother dies in a bombing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  Theo, who was present at the blast too, encountered a dying man there who encouraged him to take a work of art from the wall, Carel Frabritius’s ‘The Goldfinch’.  The book then follows Theo over the next two decades as his structure-less life takes him from house to house without him ever having a connection anywhere or to anything.  The story takes Theo from New York, to Las Vegas, back to New York, and then to Amsterdam, yet he only has a real connection to one thing, ‘The Goldfinch’.

This being a Tartt book, Theo slipps into substance abuse and introverted existential angst as he struggles to gain control of a life that lost all focus in that art gallery.  She peppers the book too with the usual array of preppy, boisterous parvenus and unsavoury, shadowy elements, all of whom, while enjoyable seem particularly clichéd.  The narrative has a distinctive flow and a peculiar sentimentality to it, as Tartt strives to contrast the material world in which we live in, with the more ethereal one of art and culture.  It is a book of vice, where each character struggles and fails to overcome their more base instincts and traits and none more so than Theo.

This book’s main problem though is its length – put shortly, it’s just far too long.  In my review of The Secret History I stated that the book’s only real weakness was how long it took to get going; The Goldfinch has the opposite problem: it cannot sustain its flow.  The story starts at a roaring pace with the bombing and its aftermath and through the first New York City part of the story it is a thoroughly engaging read, and yet, much like Theo’s life, it gets bogged down in Vegas and the story never really picks up.  Even when the book transitions nearer the end to something of a heist novel, all of the drive seems to have left the narrative and I struggled to get re-engaged.

In summary, The Goldfinch is a work of undoubted quality in terms of theme and scope, but in reading I was always conscious of just how long the thing is and, moreover, I am really unconvinced that it needed to be quite so protracted.  A cursory google of critical reviews suggest that I am perhaps in a minority in this view, but I am no less convinced of this point.

7/10

Favourite Quotes

“Well—I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other"

“A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.” 

“But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.” 

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life” 

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Snowdrops - A.D. Miller

This year has so far been for me a year of reading really long books, so it was really nice when my new book club selected something nice and short for the next meeting, A.D. Miller’s Booker Prize nominated Snowdrops.

Miller is a journalist working at The Economist newspaper and spent many years reporting from Russia.  This experience inspired him to write Snowdrops, a book set in the early years of Putin’s presidency, as the oil tycoons continued to accrue the ‘benefits’ of Russia’s new found capitalist zeal and the people of Russia grew accustomed to rule by the oligarchs.  The book itself is about a British lawyer, an expatriate living in Moscow who falls, against his better judgement, for a con artist called Masha.

The ‘Snowdrops’ alluded to in the title of the book are not the winter flowering plant, but the bodies of people who died in the early Russian winter and whose bodies are quickly covered in snow – only to emerge in the spring.  The message is clear – scratch the surface of modern Russia, and you will only find the morbid below.

Nick, the lawyer, is engaged in the business of drawing up business contracts, a murky world to say the least; indeed he describes it as ‘putting lipstick on a pig’.  He has a fairly high opinion of his ability to navigate the Russian way of living; proud of his ability to spot cons, avoid entrapment and to keep his soul relatively clean.  The problem with him is that he is too clever by half, so sure of his ability to spot a con that he doesn’t take sufficient precaution in case he is mistaken – and it is this that causes him all the problems in the book.

The story has two parallel narratives that never really cross: a business deal with a mysterious and nefarious man known as ‘The Cossack’, and his involvement with the gorgeous and enigmatic  Masha.  The narrative device is a sort of confessional: a letter from Nick to his unnamed fiancée.  The plot is entirely predictable – both the deal and the relationship are destined to end in failure and ruin, a fact never hidden by Nick.  Yet it is the very predictability of the plot that gives it power.  The book reads like a crash in slow motion: we know how it will end, and deep down probably so does Nick, be he and we are powerless to prevent it.

The characters in the book are a little caricatured.  Masha is the stereotypical Russian temptress, familiar to anyone who has ever seen a Bond film.  Nick is the gullible business man.  The Cossack and other officials are also instantly familiar and they all perhaps lack a nuance that one would expect from a Booker shortlisted book.

The book is, however, successful in two key ways.  The first is in the picture it paints of Moscow.  Miller shows a vision of the Russia capital that is both “attractive and appalling”, a fact that he clearly believes that can be extrapolated to describe the country itself.  His descriptions, though occasionally a little flowery, are very effective in drawing you into a world of corruption and murky dealing.

The second is in the narrator himself.  As I said earlier, the device is as a sort of ‘Confessional’ but it is clear that though Nick starts off regretful, it turns out that he has become rather wistful.  He recognises the evils of Russian officialdom, but he misses it: as a prisoner may miss his captor.  Trapped in boring old Blighty, he misses the exciting and dangerous Russian way of life that he escaped.  Yes he got conned, lost his reputation, his money and a portion of his soul, but what a ride!

7/10

Favourite Quotes

“I could tell that one of the Russian proverbs he loved was on the way. 'The only place with free cheese is a mousetrap'”

“That's what I learned when my last Russian winter thawed. The lesson wasn't about Russia. It never is, I don't think, when a relationship ends. It isn't your lover that you learn about. You learn about yourself.”

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The Silkworm - Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)

The second book in a series can often be where a series trips up.  The first book has the excitement of introducing something new, and later books have the complexity built up from those previous works.  Second books often come across as stepping stones; things to get past so as to reach the more exciting bits.  This is, however, entirely not the case with Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling)

If you haven’t read The Cuckoo’s Calling, the first book in this series, then I wouldn’t be put off from reading this review or indeed the book though I would recommend it.  While the events of the previous book are heavily alluded to in The Silkworm, you would not be spoiling the previous book by beginning in media res.

The Silkworm takes place a few months after the events in The Cuckoo’s Calling and business is booming for Cormoran Strike.  His success in cracking the Lula Landry case has found him a raft of rich clients who mainly seem eager to prove that their spouse is banging the secretary/neighbour.  All this is, however, making him feel a little unfulfilled so when the wife of a rather mad author comes in to say that her husband is missing, he jumps at the case.

The missing man is a Owen Quine, an eccentric writer who just before his disappearance had written a novel that basically insulted everyone he knew including his wife, mistress, agent, editor, and former friends.  Any one of them could have a motive, but the police are pretty darn sure it was the wife – Strike disagrees.

Much like The Cuckoo’s Calling, this story is a pretty old-fashioned detective story set in modern London.  Unlike the previous work though, which was set in the flashing lights of glamourous models and stately homes, this book is set in literary circles – around writers, booksellers and publishers.  Now call me biased, but that is my kind of book.

Set around a fast-paced and deeply intricate plot, it continues the story of Batman Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin.  Strike is continuing his policy of attempting to ignore the shambles of his personal life, though at least he is no longer living in his office, but is still being dragged back by his past to aspects that he’d rather leave locked away.  Robin is still feeling held back by the two men in her life: the boss that seemingly does not recognise her potential and a fiancée who cannot recognise the importance that her work life holds for her.  While I was worried that these sub-plots would detract from the main narrative, they actually hold up well, though I am worried that his may wear thin if it continues for several more books!

My main criticism of The Cuckoo’s Calling was that, while it was very enjoyable, it did not have that sprinkling of star dust that transforms a book from being a ‘good read’ to being a ‘great read’.  I feel that this book is a step up.  While it is in many ways a very similar book, it  develops the characters in interesting ways and the plot itself is more fulfilling.  Much like in the 'Harry Potter' books, Rowling dangles clues in front of you, pulling you from one side to the other.  The answer is right in front of you, but you do not see it until the end.  Mystery stories should always end with the reader feeling that the answer was staring them straight in the face – and it does in The Silkworm.

An improvement on her previous foray into the world of crime then, let’s hope her third continues in the same bent.

8/10

Favourite Quotes

“Forever encased in the amber of a writer's prose.”

“writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.”

“Memories like shrapnel, forever embedded, infected by what had come later…words of love and undying devotion, times of sublime happiness, lies upon lies upon lies…his attention kept sliding away from the stories he was reading.”

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