Tag: historical fiction

Book notes: Joyce, Sahlberg, Francis

20th March 2012 / / 4 Comments

Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012)

Harold Fry is whiling away his retirement – pottering about in south Devon, the spark long having gone out of his marriage to Maureen – when he receives a letter from Queenie Hennessy, an old work colleague. Queenie has written from a hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed to tell Harold that she is dying of cancer; moved that she still remembers him after all this time, Harold writes a letter in reply, and goes out to post it – but that feels inadequate to him, and Harold soon finds himself on a mission to walk all the way to Berwick.

Rachel Joyce’s debut is a delight to read: it reminded me of a (less macabre) Dan Rhodes book in its ability to combine whimsy with a genuine emotional punch; Harold’s journey may be eccentric, but his reasons for making it are not – and the colourful characters he meets along the way may have painful stories of their own that they don’t want to share. I particularly like the way that the changing character of Harold’s pilgrimage reflects and reinforces the waxing and waning of his hopes (at his most optimistic, Harold gains a new lease of life, and people want to travel with him; at his most despondent, he is bedraggled and alone). I’ll be interested to see what Joyce writes next.

Asko Sahlberg, The Brothers (2010/2)

Peirene Press’s theme for 2012 is ‘The Small Epic’ – ‘novella length stories of more than 35 chapters’ according to the publisher’s catalogue; but this book (Sahlberg’s ninth, translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah) also fits the bill as a grand-scale story set in a small space. That space is a Finnish farmhouse in 1809, inhabited by brothers Erik and Henrik; their mother; Erik’s wife, Anna; and the brothers’ cousin (who is treated little better than a servant), Mauri. Henrik has been estranged from the rest of his family, and fought on the opposite side to Erik in the recent war between Sweden and Russia. Now, in peacetime, Henrik returns home – and the battle for mastery of the household begins.

There’s a strong sense of character here, especially of Henrik, with his heavy, deliberate steps, and his childhood affinity with a violent horse. The story itself progresses in broad narrative moves, with the small domestic setting only heightening the sense of drama at the plot and character twists. The Brothers feels longer than its 122 pages, in the best possible way.

Paul Michael Francis, The Silver Bridge (2012)

Pavlos is frontman of the band Karma, a rock star with a conscience who is growing disillusioned. He becomes re-energised when he starts to have visions of a beautiful woman, and even more so when he discovers that she is real – the woman is Claire Davis, a Hollywood actress. She has problems of her own, not least her overly controlling mother. Pavlos and Claire might just be the best thing ever to happen to each other – if they could only get it together…

The Silver Bridge is the debut novel by Paul Michael Francis; despite all the differences in setting and subject matter, it shares with The Brothers a larger-than-life quality. I get the sense that Pavlos and Claire might realise how right they are for each other if they’d just stop and think for a bit – but that’s not the kind of story Francis is telling here. It’s outrageous optimism which drives Pavlos to approach Claire in the first place, and the pair fall in and out of love with similar degrees of intensity. Will they get together in the end, or won’t they? It wouldn’t be right for me to say – that’s all part of the novel’s game – but it is rather good fun finding out.

TV Book Club Best Reads 2012: Part 2

24th February 2012 / / 1 Comment

Time for a look at the next four books on this season’s TV Book Club list (my first post on this series is here); these novels are all debuts.

Elizabeth Haynes, Into the Darkest Corner (2011)

In 2003, Catherine Bailey is on a night out in Lancster when she meets the handsome and charming Lee Brightman, and quickly embarks on a relationship with him. Four years later, she is a shadow of her former self: living in London with OCD, her life ruined by Lee’s abuse; her new neighbour, Stuart Richardson, may represent a chance for Catherine to move on – but there’s a threat around the corner.

Elizabeth Haynes portrays the change in Catherine’s character particularly well, right down to a difference in name: the bright, vivacious Catherine becomes the timid Cathy; the contrast between her personality in the two time periods is striking, and great at drawing one into the tale. Perhaps the novel feels a little overlong as a whole, but Haynes shows vividly how Catherine becomes trapped by Lee even as she knows he’s dangerous, and how Lee charms his way into the affections of Catherine’s friends, turning them against her. In this, Into the Darkest Corner is a sharp examination of domestic violence.

Amor Towles, Rules of Civility (2011)

New Year’s Eve, 1937: Katey Kontent is out at a Greenwich Villagejazz bar with her roommate, Eve Ross, when in walks the dashing and wealthy Tinker Grey. They get talking, become friends – and all their lives change over the following year, but don’t necessarily stay in parallel.

I’m ambivalent about this book: there’s some lovely writing and observation (‘from this vantage point [a pier on the Hudson] Manhattanwas simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise – that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving’); but I can’t muster the same enthusiasm for the plot. As the title implies, we see various examples of characters’ doing what it takes to fit in to particular social circles, which is elegantly done; but, as a whole, Rules of Civility doesn’t quite do it for me.

Amor Towles’s website

Katie Ward, Girl Reading (2011)

I read (and really enjoyed) this last year, so I’ll reproduce here what I wrote then:

In Girl Reading, Katie Ward imagines the stories behind a number of portraits of girls and women reading; the portraits range in past time from Simone Martini’s Annunciation (1333) to a photograph on Flickr in 2008, and a concluding chapter set in 2060 provides context for the previous six. Ward has a distinctive writing style that creates a strong atmosphere for each of the time periods, and allows her to weave in details very subtly. I’ll single out her portrayal of Gwen –  a girl in love with an artist in 1916, and who sees a rival for her affections in a visiting woman – as one of my favourite moments, but there are plenty more from which I could choose.

The chapters of Girl Reading are not linked overtly (though some of the portraits do appear in later chapters, and it can be nicely disconcerting to see the gap between what later characters think of the subjects and what we’ve seen of them previously); it’s more that there are contrasts and connections in theme and content. For example, Ward shows the variety of functions which the portraits might fulfil – an expression of a political alliance, say, or a tangible reminder of what has been lost. Similarly, literacy represents different things to different characters; the act of creating each portrait has varying significance; and so on.Girl Reading is an intricate tapestry of a book, and one that leaves me with little notion of what Katie Ward may write next, though I do know that I’ll want to read it.

Jessica Francis Kane, The Report (2010)

The Report revolves around a real-life event from the Blitz: the night when 173 people died in a crush on the way into Bethnal Green tube station (which was being used as an air-raid shelter). Jessica Francis Kane imagines the inquiry into the disaster, undertaken by magistrate Laurence Dunne; and follows the lives of characters involved in the tragedy, such as Ada Barber and her surviving daughter Tilly (Ada’s younger daughter Emma having been killed in the crush). A parallel narrative concerns Dunne’s being interviewed thirty years on, by a documentary-maker with close ties to the Bethnal Green incident.

The Report is very effective at portraying the disaster itself: in the scenes set during the crush, it’s impossible to gain a full picture of what is happening – yet these scenes, and Dunne’s subsequent questioning of those involved, bring home the horror of the event. But Kane also examines issues of truth, and how lasting knowledge of events can be constructed after the fact; Dunne’s attempts to give a particular impression to the people he’s interviewing for the inquiry slide into questions of what should by reported, and how – and there are no simple answers.

TV Book Club 2012 Best Reads: Part 1

10th February 2012 / / 6 Comments

The new series of The TV Book Club is underway, which means there’s another selection of ten ‘Best Reads’. Here’s my look at the first three.

S.J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep (2011)

The TV Book Club list begins with one of the breakout hits of last year, the debut from Steve Watson. It’s the story of Christine Lucas, who has an unusual form of amnesia which causes her to lose her memory every 24 hours. As the novel begins, Christine wakes up and, as ever, must discover that she is older than she thinks, and meet her husband Ben for the first time. Later that day – and unbeknownst to Ben – she is contacted by and goes to see a Dr Nash, who gives Christine a journal she has been keeping, which will allow her to unravel what led to her present situation.

When I started Watson’s book, I was concerned that narrative momentum might be compromised by the protagonist’s having to start from scratch each day. Well, the journal format takes care of that, as Christine can take what she’s already written into account, which smoothes out the flow. But, more than this, Watson uses the structure to create tension: even as Christine is reading her journal and discovering the truth, we’re aware that it won’t be an end to her problems (and I’m not talking about her amnesia). I also appreciate the way that Watson takes a fairly ‘high concept’ idea but grounds the action in a domestic reality. All in all, a fine thriller.

Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers (2011)

From a big seller to a Booker nominee. Patrick deWitt’s second novel is an introspective take on the Western: in 1851, hired killers Eli and Charlie are sent from Oregon City to San Francisco by the Commodore, to do away with one Hermann Kermit Warm, a prospector who has stolen something from him. Eli, our narrator, has been pondering whether he wants to carry on in this business, and the current job will bring matters to a head.

On the very first page of The Sisters Brothers, Eli describes the death of his old horse (and his subsequent visions thereof) in a cool, collected fashion; thus establishing what, for me, is the most effective aspect of the book – the contrast between the innate violence of the brothers’ world and the measured elegance of deWitt’s prose. The latter has a distancing effect, and as a result it comes as quite a jolt when brutal action irrupts into the narrative, particularly when it’s perpetrated by Eli, about whose capacity for violence it is deceptively easy to forget (because one has built up a certain amount of empathy for him). There’s also a strong sense in the novel of a world whose formation is in progress: in the lawless country through which the brothers travel, yes; but also in the mannered dialogue, and the half-sketched-in feel of the setting. It’s as though the world is being remade alongside Eli’s character.

Essie Fox, The Somnambulist (2011)

The East End of London, 1881: when her beloved aunt Cissy, a music-hall singer, dies, it becomes increasingly difficult for Pheobe Turner and her mother Maud to make ends meet. A way forward comes in the form of Nathaniel Samuels, an old acquaintance of Cissy’s, offers Phoebe a job as companion to his wife at the Samuels’ Herefordshire house – but the girl has no idea what secrets are set to be revealed.

I’m ambivalent about The Somnambulist. On the one hand, Phoebe’s narrative voice is great at bringing her character to life and driving the novel forward; and Essie Fox weaves historical detail in skilfully. On the other hand, the secondary characterisation feels a little broad-brush; the short third-person chapters from Samuels’s viewpoint slot in awkwardly; and the plot doesn’t sparkle for me in the same way as the narration.

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic (2011)

8th February 2012 / / 5 Comments

The narrator of Julie Otsuka’s second novel is a chorus: the disembodied ‘we’ of a cohort of Japanese women who travel to the United States at the start of the twentieth century as picture brides; the book follows them from their initial sea voyage through to their being sent away to internment during the Second World War. A quotation from the first chapter illustrates Otsuka’s general approach:

On the boat we carried our husbands’ pictures in tiny oval lockets that hung on long chains from our necks. We carried them in silk purses and old tea tins and red lacquer boxes and in the thick brown envelopes from America in which they had originally been sent. We carried them in the sleeves of our kimonos, which we touched often, just to make sure they were still there.

This is the language of The Buddha in the Attic: individual details and experiences, blended and distilled into a rhythmic composite. That quotation also hints at the hope which their husbands-to-be and journey to America represent to these women – a hope soon tarnished when they discover that the photographs they were given are twenty years old, and that their new husbands are not the well-off professionals which the women were led to believe, but farm-workers and servants. This is the first example in the novel of the American dream not living up to its promise for the women.

Once their new lives in America begin, the women’s experiences are varied, but most find themselves marginalised or ignored. This is where Otsuka’s main technique comes into its own, as the author creates a broad, sweeping portrait of many lives which can at once move out to reveal common themes and move in to focus on individuals.

When the women come to have children, The Buddha in the Attic gains a new layer in the ways that the new generation’s lives reflect and differ from those of their mothers. Where the women once imagined whatAmerica might be like, now their children have notions of the outside world based on hearsay, which may or may not be accurate (“Beyond the farm, they’d heard, wherever you went you were always a stranger and if you got on the wrong bus by mistake you might never find your way home”). As life goes on, some of the children get a taste of the American dream which was denied their mothers – but not necessarily as the women may have wished, because the children tend to reject or forget their Japanese names and traditions.

Life turns again with the advent of Pearl Harbor, as the women now find themselves and their families regarded with suspicion. Hearsay returns again in the form of a ‘list’ of people to be taken away, about which nothing is known for sure (including whether or not it actually exists), but much supposed. Otsuka builds tension effectively in this section, as the details which have so far formed the basis of the women’s experiences give way to questions and rumours.

Otsuka’s first-person-plural narrative voice may speak for all the women at once, but, to an extent, it also speaks for none of them, as we hear no direct individual testimony. There are occasional references to characters by name throughout the novel, but it’s not until towards the end that we get to perceive them as individuals en masse, as it were – but, by then, the Japanese are leaving their communities, and soon all that will remain of them are vague memories, and the odd physical trace like the brass Buddha which one woman leaves behind. The voice of the chorus falls silent, but the music of Otsuka’s writing rings on beyond the final page.

Book notes: Benedictus, Ward, Medvei

18th May 2011 / / 5 Comments

Leo Benedictus, The Afterparty (2011)

Here’s a good example of a book which didn’t sound instinctively like something I would enjoy, but which turned out to be well worth a read. The Afterparty tells the overlapping stories of four people over the course of one night: Hugo Marks, an actor whose birthday celebrations provide the backdrop to events; Mellody, his supermodel wife; Calvin Vance, the young pop star to whom Mellody takes a shine; and Michael Knight, a journalist who’s attending the party reluctantly after being given a colleague’s invitation. The actual text of the novel is framed as the work of one William Mendez, whose emails to a prospective agent, Valerie Morrell, alternate with the chapters. Mendez has plenty of ideas for aspects of his novel’s marketing (all of which have made it to the finished version), but is reluctant to reveal his identity; so Morrell calls on a columnist named Leo Benedictus to stand in for him…

A novel as self-referential as The Afterparty risks getting lost in its own cleverness; but there’s such charm (and a certain audacity) in the way Benedictus lays bare the workings of his book that it won this reader over. It also adds another layer to what seems to me the novel’s main theme: the gap between reality and perception. That theme is reflected in the main text by the subtly different glosses which each viewpoint character places on events (the use of a different font for each viewpoint emphasises that, in a way, we’re reading four different stories). It’s also echoed in the novel’s treatment of modern celebrity culture: Calvin is shown not really to understand the world he’s entered (a world exemplified by Mellody, who has been through it all and bears the scars); Hugo is frustrated at the way celebrity has caused him to be perceived to an extent as ‘public property’; Michael is about to find out what it’s like to be in the limelight, when he gets caught up in a tragedy in which perceptions of reality will be all-important.

Add to this some skilful prose (Benedictus is particularly good at creating striking images of rather mundane phenomena), and you have a fine debut in The Afterparty.

Leo Benedictus’s website; Booktrust interview.

Katie Ward, Girl Reading (2011)

Turning now to another fine debut, though one rather different in subject matter and approach. In Girl Reading, Katie Ward imagines the stories behind a number of portraits of girls and women reading; the portraits range in past time from Simone Martini’s Annunciation (1333) to a photograph on Flickr in 2008, and a concluding chapter set in 2060 provides context for the previous six. Ward has a distinctive writing style that creates a strong atmosphere for each of the time periods, and allows her to weave in details very subtly. I’ll single out her portrayal of Gwen –  a girl in love with an artist in 1916, and who sees a rival for her affections in a visiting woman – as one of my favourite moments, but there are plenty more from which I could choose.

The chapters of Girl Reading are not linked overtly (though some of the portraits do appear in later chapters, and it can be nicely disconcerting to see the gap between what later characters think of the subjects and what we’ve seen of them previously); it’s more that there are contrasts and connections in theme and content. For example, Ward shows the variety of functions which the portraits might fulfil – an expression of a political alliance, say, or a tangible reminder of what has been lost. Similarly, literacy represents different things to different characters; the act of creating each portrait has varying significance; and so on. Girl Reading is an intricate tapestry of a book, and one that leaves me with little notion of what Katie Ward may write next, though I do know that I’ll want to read it.

Katie Ward’s website; East Anglian Daily Times interview.

Cornelius Medvei, Caroline: a Mystery (2011)

A journalist is contacted by an old school friend named Shaw, who wants to tell the story of Caroline. This Caroline is the donkey Shaw’s father first encountered on a family holiday and who soon filled a void in his life that he didn’t know existed. The father became devoted to Caroline: took her home, looked after her, taught her to play chess (she turned out to be rather good at it). It was a wonderful period in his life; but, of course, there was always the danger that it wouldn’t last.

Cornelius Medvei’s second novel has a folktale quality about its telling; the city in which it’s set is never named (neither, for that matter, are most of the characters), and there’s a timelessness to its depiction (it’s probably set in the 1980s or thereabouts, but there are few specific details). Nobody bats an eyelid at the outlandish events that take place, which is just as it should be; the novel depends on our ability to take its absurd premise seriously, and it is imagined so solidly that we do.

But where Shaw’s narration pushes the tale one step out of reality, the journalist’s voice which frames the account brings it back in. There’s not much of that voice, but it is subtly different enough to provide a real jolt when we step from one to the other and begin to doubt what we have read. Caroline the donkey may fruitfully be interpreted as a metaphor for an all-consuming interest, under which light Medvei observantly illuminates his protagonist’s situation.

Then again, Caroline may just be a donkey; as the journalist concedes, ‘in this city, private and public life, the ordinary and the fantastic, are mingled everywhere you look.’ Strange things happen, so why not this? In Caroline, Medvei leaves the question open in a small but finely wrought – and very enjoyable – read.

This review first appeared on Fiction Uncovered.

Cornelius Medvei’s top 10 talking animals in literature (Guardian).

Ariana Franklin, Mistress of the Art of Death (2007)

31st March 2011 / / 2 Comments

Time now for my third and final book in the Great Transworld Crime Caper. I arranged my choices in reverse chronological order of setting, so we’ve gone from the present day to the Second World War, and now we head back to the twelfth century. Mistress of the Art of Death is the first of Ariana Franklin’s (a pseudonym of Diana Norman, who sadly died in January) mysteries featuring Adelia Aguilar, an anatomist from the medical school at Salerno. In 1171, the King of Sicily sends her, along with Simon Menahem of Naples, to investigate the brutal murder of a child in Cambridge. Blame for the killing is being placed on the city’s Jewish population – erroneously, believes Henry II, who has no wish to the revenue they provide placed in jeopardy, and so asked Sicily to send help. As the investigation progresses, the stakes only grow higher, as more bodies are found, and the danger grows closer to Adelia.

Franklin suggests in her afterword that ‘It is almost impossible to write a comprehensible story set in the twelfth century without being anachronistic, at least in part’. I suspect that is probably true, and almost certainly so with a detective story, which relies on the reader’s being able to follow the protagonist’s processes of thought and deduction. It’s telling that Franklin has made Adelia so clearly exceptional within the wider world of the book, both by profession (she risks being accused of witchcraft If her medical knowledge is discovered, so must pretend that her Saracen manservant Mansur is the doctor, and she his assistant) and by her outlook and attitudes. Adelia is a very engaging character, in part because she is such an outsider, and therefore placed in a similar position to the reader with regard to the setting – even more so than usual for a novel’s protagonist, she becomes our eyes (this also allows Franklin relatively unobtrusively to slip in ancillary historical detail). However, Adelia’s distance from her surroundings also means that she lacks empathy at times: when she learns that the parents of the murdered boy (who is now being venerated as a saint) are charging people to visit their cottage, her response is, ‘How shameful’ – but she’s soon made to realise that the family are acting out of desperation, not greed. Adelia Aguilar leaps off the page as a fully-rounded individual.

Indeed, it’s the protagonist who really carries the book for me; the mystery, I think, is less satisfying. The plot advances with a goodly number of twists and turns, but the way the murderer is revealed strikes me as short on impact, as I didn’t gain a sense of it being worked out on the page, as it were. The ending of the novel is interesting at first in the way it uses the conventions of twelfth-century society to create a problem – but the solution to that problem is pretty much a deus ex machina.

Though its plot didn’t quite work for me, Mistress of the Art of Death is still worth reading for the character of Adelia. There are three other books, and I’m interested to see if any have a mystery that’s as well realised as the protagonist.

Links
Transworld website about the book
Mistress of the Art of Death reviewed elsewhere: Novel Readings; A Fantastical Librarian; Alive on the Shelves; She Reads Novels.

Christopher Fowler, Full Dark House (2003)

5th March 2011 / / 4 Comments

My second choice for the Great Transworld Crime Caper, and one that was always going to be on my list. I enjoyed Christ Fowler’s seventh Bryant & May mystery last year, and was interested to find out what the earlier ones were like. Now I’ve gone back to the beginning with Full Dark House and… well, perhaps I’m just being difficult, but now I wonder what it would have been like had I read this one first!

But there is a sense in which reading the first book out of order makes a difference to how one perceives it, because Full Dark House begins with Arthur Bryant apparently dying in an explosion that destroys the offices of the Peculiar Crimes Unit. Except there are more books (set in the present day) featuring Bryant & May and the PCU following on from this, so something more than meets the eye must be going on. Knowing this meant that a certain amount of suspense was inevitably lost to me, or at least turned into something else. This was also, of course, the book that had to introduce the characters of Bryant & May, and establish their partnership – but I already knew them from Bryant & May On the Loose, and felt that I didn’t appreciate all this as much as I might have. Of course, it’s impossible to say; but it does highlight how my opinion of this novel might be affected simply by what I’ve read previously.

The main plot of Full Dark House takes place not in the present day, but at the time of the Blitz, when the rational, nineteen-year-old John May joins the PCU, partnering with Bryant – three years his senior, and of a mindset much more befitting the Golden Age of detective fiction, seeking elaborate and fanciful explanations that draw on obscure knowledge. The two investigate a series of strange murders in a London theatre which is preparing to stage a production of Orpheus in the Underworld. The cast are being picked off one by one; does it have anything to do with the faceless figure rumoured to haunt the building?

One of the things that struck me most about Bryant & May On the Loose last year was the interplay between the Golden-Age and more modern styles of detection (as exemplified by the contrasting approaches of the two protagonists): it wasn’t a case of one triumphing over the other; both were given their chance to shine. It’s the same in Full Dark House: appropriately enough for the time and place (though Bryant fears the time of Holmesian detection has passed, wartime London is presented as somewhere that could still believe in the extraordinary, because the times were extraordinary; and the theatre itself is a kind of luminal space between the outside world and the inner ‘reality’ of the stage), resolving the mystery requires a combination of both approaches. Once again, I’m intrigued by Fowler’s series, and will be reading more.

Links

Full Dark House blogged elsewhere: Fleur Fisher; Ms Bookish; The Book Jotter; Mel’s Random Reviews.

Christopher Fowler’s website

Notable books: February 2011

1st February 2011 / / 1 Comment

To begin the month, my round-up of forthcoming books that have caught my eye:

Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales

Subtitled ‘The Curious Lives of the Elements’, this book promises to range across art and history as well as science in exploring the chemical elements. Sounds interesting, and a great cover too.

Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

I love fiction that brings a tinge of fantastication to the everyday, so this sounds right up my street: a girl discovers that food carries for her a taste of people’s emotions.

Francesca Beauman, Shapely Ankle Preferr’d

I like books that look at history from an unusual angle, and this history of the lonely hearts ad sounds like just such a book.

Carol Birch, Jamrach’s Menagerie

Canongate publish some great books, and this seafaring historical adventure looks promising.

Ellen Bryson, The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno

It’s the setting — Barnum’s American Museum — that intrigues me about this one.

Lucy Caldwell, The Meeting Point

This Bahrain-set novel sounds as though it could have some interesting contrasts.

Jon Courtenay Grimwood, The Fallen Blade

Grimwood turns from science fiction to fantasy, and I’m interested to see what he’ll do with the genre in this tale of vampires in 15th-century Venice.

Sophia McDougall, Romanitas

A reissue (revised, I believe) of the first volume of McDougall’s trilogy in which the Roman Empire has survived to the present day. I missed it the first time around, but am curious to see what this is like.

Matthias Politycki, Next World Novella

I would read this because the synopsis intrigues me (‘shifting realities’ as a man gains a new view of his marriage after the death of his wife), but I’d also read it just because it’s published by the reliably-excellent Peirene Press.

Gordon Reece, Mice

There’s quite a buzz about this tale of suspense centred on a mother and daughter who have retreated to the countryside, and then find their cottage broken into — it sounds to be  worth a look.

Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb

I read a couple of very good books from Sandstone Press last year (Up the Creek Without a Mullet and Love, Revenge & Buttered Scones), so I’ve high hopes for this new title of theirs, a novel about a girl living in a world affected by bio-terrorism.

Nat Segnit, Pub Walks in Underhill Country

A novel written (at least at first) in the form of a walkers’ guide. I’m interested to see how that works.

A squad of debuts: the Waterstone’s 11

28th January 2011 / / 9 Comments

This week, Jackie from Farm Lane Books has blogged about why she loves debut authors, and now her thoughts on the Waterstone’s 11. This is not a football team, but their selection of eleven debut novels, all to be published in the UK during 2011. A sample chapter of each book is on offer available at the Waterstone’s 11 website; Jackie has read all those and posted her reaction.

Well, I also like debut novels, so I thought I’d do the same as Jackie and see how our opinions compare. Many of the selected books were already on my radar, so naturally I am interested to find out what they’re like; and I’m intrigued by the ones that are completely new to me.

So, following the same order as Jackie, here we go:

David Bezmosgis, The Free World

1978: a family of Jewish refugees are travelling from Latvia to a new life in Chicago; this opening section follows them from Vienna to Rome. I liked the prose at the beginning, but found the extract as a whole difficult to grasp — partly, I think, because I’m unfamiliar with the subject matter. I gain the impression of a talented writer and a significant book; but, like Jackie, I’ll be waiting to see what others think before I decide whether to read on.

Anticipation rating: ***½

Sophie Hardach, The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages

A Kurdish refugee enters Germany, and, years later, a German registrar (now working in Paris) who once knew him questions of the legitimacy of a forthcoming wedding. I love the writing in this extract — the opening scene is especially vivid — so this novel is definitely going on my list of books to investigate.

Anticipation rating: ****

Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

Mainstream-published books that could be read as speculative fiction will always pique my interest, and this near-future tale of crime bosses in an Irish city is no exception. Jackie didn’t much care for this extract; like her, I found the dialect quite heavy going, but I am intrigued and suspect I will return to the book.

Anticipation rating: ***½

Amanda Hodgkinson, 22 Britannia Road

A woman travels with her son from Poland to England, where she will be reunited after six long years with her husband, who had been serving in the Polish Corps and now has a house for the family in Ipswich — but the years apart have changed them. I’m ambivalent about this book — I think it’s well written, but at the same time, it doesn’t grab me. I’ll put it down as a ‘maybe’.

Anticipation rating: ***½

Shehan Karunatilaka, Chinaman

A dying sports journalist resolves to find a cricketer whom disappeared years ago — a cricketer he considers great, but who is otherwise largely unknown. Jackie doesn’t like cricket, and couldn’t drum up any enthusiasm for this extract. Fair enough. I don’t like cricket, either, but I thought this was great; the prose is vigorous and quirky, and I want to read more — I have a real sense that I could fall in love with this book.

Anticipation rating: *****

Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English

Narrated by a Ghanaian boy now living on a London estate, this was Jackie’s favourite extract of the eleven. Myself, I think Kelman creates the boy’s voice very well, and I can already see some interesting contrasts being established –yet I don’t have the instinctual feeling that the book is for me. I’ll be seeking out other opinions, I think.

Anticipation rating: ****

Sam Leith, The Coincidence Engine

The most clearly speculative title in the selection, with its “Directorate of the Extremely Improbable” and a hurricane that spontaneously builds an aeroplane from junk, this most certainly goes on my list. It could go either way — depending, I suspect, on how tongue-in-cheek it tries to be — but there’s enough interesting strangeness in this opening extract to make me want to find out.

Anticipation rating: ****½

Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife

In 1941, German bombers ruin a city in the Balkans, and a tiger escapes from the zoo, eventually making his way to the village where the narrator’s grandfather (then a boy) lives. For that boy, it is an occurence as wondrous as if Shere Khan himself had come to life. The synopsis of the book (which points to intriguing developments beyond the scope of this opening extract) alone would persuade me to read on; now I’ve read the sample, the prose does likewise. Put both factors together, and…

Anticipation rating: ****½

Johanna Skibsrud, The Sentimentalists

At the start of this extract, the narrator moves her ailing father to another town, to live with the father of his friend who died when the two were serving in Vietnam. I have less of a sense from reading the sample of what the novel as a whole might be like than I’ve had with any of the previous titles on the list; though I’m broadly in agreement with Jackie — the writing is nicely descriptive, but I’m not really inspired to read further.

Anticipation rating: ***

Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator

Kashmir, 1993: a teenage boy is made to collaborate with the Indian army; in the opening extract, he is sent to collect weapons and ID cards from the fallen bodies. There’s an effective contrast drawn between the boy’s valley before and after the army arrived, and the prose has considerable momentum. I don’t think it’s a book for my must-read list, but I can imagine returning to it in time.

Anticipation rating: ***½

Sarah Winman, When God Was a Rabbit

It’s quite difficult to give a flavour of this extract without going into too much or too little detail; to say it focuses on a girl growing up in the 1970s is too bald a description, but so much happens and is hinted at that it’s hard to summarise. But that doesn’t matter, because the prose is brilliant. Jackie wonders if the novel will be too busy for its own good, and that’s a possibility; but I’m optimistic, and I know I’ll be reading this book on its publication.

Anticipation rating: *****

===

So, out of eleven books, there are four I will definitely be reading (Chinaman, When God Was a Rabbit, The Coincidence Engine, and The Tiger’s Wife); several more I may read at some point; and, though not all the extracts are to my taste (nor would I expect them to be), there’s nothing that makes me go, ‘what were they thinking?’ I think this is a list which genuinely has something for everyone. Good work.

Naomi Mitchison, ‘The Hostages’ (1930)

27th January 2011 / / 1 Comment

The tale of three children held hostage by Romans, this was my first taste of Mitchison’s work, and I’ll be reading more. The plot of this story struck me as overly thin, but I liked the flow of the prose very much; so, though this piece wasn’t really for me, I am keen to see out others by the author.

Rating: ***½

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