Tag Archives: fiction

#BookReview ‘Half of the Human Race’ by Anthony Quinn #WW1 #suffragette

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Anthony Quinn Half of the Human Race by Anthony Quinn is a gem of a novel, one to keep and re-read. The front cover illustration suggests it is another Great War love story, but it is so much more than that. In fact the warfare occupies only a hundred or so pages. Rather, it is a character study of England before the war, of suffragettes and cricketers, of a different time, when the demands put on love were extreme.

A new king is being crowned and the protestations of votes for women are taking a violent turn. Set against this background in 1911, we meet the key characters at a cricket match. Connie Calloway is a former medical student who now works in a bookshop after her father’s suicide left her family poorer than they expected to be. Will Maitland is a young county cricketer rubbing shoulders with the great ‘Tam’, AE Tamburlain, as popular as WG Grace. A flicker of attraction carries the pair throughout this story as both consider questions of loyalty and belief and where love fits into the mix. When the ageing Tam’s place in the M−Shire team is threatened, Will must consider whether to support his friend or risk losing his captaincy of the team. Connie, at once thrilled and intimidated as her friend Lily is imprisoned in Holloway for a suffragette demonstration, considers the strength of her belief in votes for women and how far she is prepared to go. When she meets an old school friend, she also must make a decision. The decisions they take govern the direction of their lives as times change and the country edges towards war. Will their attraction burgeon into romance and love? Connie is hardly Will’s mother’s idea of the girl he should marry. She is outspoken and independent, perhaps too much so for Will? Connie’s personality is juxtaposed with her older sister Olivia who, Connie fears, is trading her independence for a rich husband.

Quinn creates two characters of their time and beyond it, that are totally believable, with a surrounding cast of characters including the fascinating Tam, artist Denton Brigstock, cousin Louis and friend Lily. Quinn, obviously a cricket fan, writes with a light hand about the sport and this should not be off-putting for any readers who do not like cricket. It is a key part of the plot and offers a view of a gentleman’s world where codes of behavior and manners are assumed, where tradition rules; similar values are on show later in the book when Will, now Captain Maitland, is waiting for the next big push. When he confronts his commanding officer to query a battle plan, he is more like Connie than he would ever realize.

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Half of the Human Race is Quinn’s second novel; on finishing it, I wanted to read everything else he has written. I have read Curtain Call, Freya and Our Friends in Berlin, click to read my reviews.

If you like this, try:-
‘My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You’ by Louisa Young
‘Stay Where You Are and Then Leave’ by John Boyne
‘A Long Long Way’ by Sebastian Barry

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#BookReview ‘The Long View’ by Elizabeth Jane Howard #literary #marriage

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Elizabeth Jane HowardThe Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howard is not so much a ‘what happens next’ novel as ‘what has happened in the past to lead to this situation’ story. It is a novel about choices and where they can lead. Howard tells the story, backwards from 1950 to 1926, of the marriage of Antonia and Conrad Fleming. As the story starts, the marriage seems doomed and you cannot help but wonder how these two people ever got married in the first place. In fact, once I finished it I was tempted to read it again from back to front.

The first paragraph is a masterful example of scene setting. It opens with a dinner party to celebrate the engagement of Julian Fleming to June, who has secretly spent the afternoon alone at the cinema. As Antonia considers the complicated marital affairs of her son – and her daughter, Deirdre, who is pregnant by a man who does not love her – I wondered how her own marriage must have shaped her children’s handling of relationships and how hers, in turn, was shaped by her parents. I found Conrad an almost totally unsympathetic character, indeed in the first part he is referred to simply as Mr Fleming. ‘One of his secret pleasures was the loading of social dice against himself. He did not seem for one moment to consider the efforts made by kind or sensitive people to even things up; or if such notions ever occurred to him, he would have observed them with detached amusement, and reloaded more dice.’

This is very much a novel of its time in which middle-class women had limited choices. As a young woman, Antonia lacks the strength to break out. She is timid, feeling she has proved unsatisfactory for both her mother and father. ‘She grew up, therefore, feeling, not precisely a failure so much as an unnecessary appendage.’ Her mother bemoans her lack of interests [Antonia does have interests, simply not those of her mother] and her father her lack of intellect [but without stimulus of career or education]. We see the transition from hopeful, eager young girl experiencing first love, to weary, middle age when the ‘trees ahead so horribly resembled the trees behind, and the undergrowth of their past caught and clung and tore at them as they moved on’.

This is Howard’s second novel. I am most familiar with her later ‘Cazalet Chronicles’ series and there are some key comparisons to be made in the writing style. Sentences in The Long View are longer, paragraphs longer, and the style not as simple and nuanced as the later books. Viewpoint also shifts within paragraphs, a technique she changed for the Cazalets. This is not to say this spoiled my enjoyment of The Long View, it is perhaps an observation for writers rather than readers, but it shows an interesting development in the author’s writing style. And I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of Antonia’s horse rides in Sussex, countryside in which the Cazalet’s house, Home Place, is set.

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Read my reviews of Howard’s ‘Cazalet Chronicles’:- The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off, and All Change.

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#BookReview ‘On a Night Like This’ by @BarbaraFreethy #family #love

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Barbara FreethyOn a Night Like This is the first in The Callaways series by Barbara Freethy about the extended American-Irish Callaway clan in San Francisco. Freethy is a new author for me, a best-selling American author of romantic drama. I would class this as a feel-good holiday romance, so not my usual choice. Freethy is an expert at writing series, which lock the reader into the characters.

The basis of the story is the relationship between Aiden Callaway, smokejumper, and Sara Davidson, lawyer, who grew up next to each other in San Francisco. Aiden is an alpha-male, adventurous, a risk-taker, who has never taken a woman with him to his secret camping ground in the wilds north of Napa Valley. Sara is a workaholic New York lawyer who rarely lets anyone get emotionally close. This is a story of opposites attract. At times I found their connection unconvincing, as it seemed to be purely chemical and physical. Sara had a teenage crush on Aiden which re-emerges when she revisits her widowed father in her childhood home next door to the Callaways. When a fire damages the house and her father is in hospital, Sara and Aiden are thrown together. This is a light romance mixed with a little mystery: three weeks before the two meet, Aiden is involved in a tragic fire where his best friend and fellow smokejumper Kyle died. Aiden’s colleagues blame him for Kyle’s death but Aiden cannot remember what happened and so refuses to defend himself. His loyalty to Kyle is admirable, but misguided. Sara, as the clear-thinking lawyer, encourages him to question the facts of what happened.

The setting and storyline reminded me of Anita Shreve, but without the depth of story or emotional heft, and with too many sculptured abs. The longing of Sara for Aiden became repetitive and needy, they seem such an unlikely pairing. The storyline of Sara’s rift with her father, however, was worth more page space. So, this is a pleasant light romantic read. I enjoyed the interaction of the feisty Callaway family and wanted more of them; particularly fire investigator Emma and the story of the disappearing nun and burnt-down primary school [sadly, this storyline was left unresolved]. Freethy is a hugely popular author but this book felt rather as if she was writing by numbers.

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If you like this, try:-
‘Butterfly Barn’ by Karen Power
‘The Language of Flowers’ by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
‘The Stars are Fire’ by Anita Shreve

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#BookReview ‘Munich’ by Robert Harris @Robert___Harris #spies #WW2

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Robert HarrisRobert Harris is a classy thriller writer at the top of his game. Munich is his re-telling of the September 1938 meetings between British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Both had public, and private, objectives. Chamberlain was a pragmatist; though he sought peace, he was prepared to accept a delay of war to enable our woefully-equipped armed forces to prepare. Hitler wanted all of Europe for Aryans, which meant war. All of this is well-documented. But Harris takes two fictional characters and places them into this real history, splicing their personal stories into the political drama.

Hugh Legat and Paul von Hartmann met at Oxford in the early Thirties. In 1938, Legat is a junior private secretary to Chamberlain. Hartmann holds a similar position in the German government; he is also part of the anti-Hitler movement. They two men have not spoken or seen each other since a holiday in Munich with a girlfriend. We do not know why. Everyone in this story faces a personal decision of conscience: whether to be loyal to country, self, and family, or betray them. The costs are different for each person. For some; death. For others; isolation, loss of job, loss of family, loss of self-respect.

Chamberlain and Hitler meet in Munich with Mussolini and Daladier to settle the fate of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. We are party to a fascinating game of chess as the diplomats and civil servants behind each of the leaders struggle to find a way through the opposition’s refusals and disagreements. The subtle tensions and pettiness within the teams, the one-upmanship, the jealousies, the cliques – which anyone who has worked in management will recognise – remind us that these politicians are ordinary people with an extra-ordinary job to do. If they fail, millions will die. Chamberlain is portrayed as a dedicated, workaholic who is desperate to avoid another war less than twenty years after the end of the Great War.

I read this over a weekend, the last pages flew by as Legat and Hartmann sneak around Munich, hiding secret documents and running from the Gestapo. This is a meticulously-researched literary thriller where the tension comes partly from our own knowledge of the outcome and our understanding that, whatever words the British present, Hitler’s mind is made up. Chamberlain will give his ‘peace in our time’ speech. But to find out what happens to the fictional Hugh and Paul, we must read to the end.

Read my review of An Officer and a Spy, another thriller by Robert Harris based on real events.

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If you like this, try:-
‘The Travelers’ by Chris Pavone
‘Darktown’ by Thomas Mullen
‘The Long Drop’ by Denise Mina

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#BookReview ‘Pigeon Pie’ by Nancy Mitford #satire #historical

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Nancy MitfordPigeon Pie, the fourth novel of Nancy Mitford, was first published in 1940 by Hamish Hamilton. This was a serious error by its publisher given that Mitford wrote this light-hearted satire about wartime spying just before World War Two broke out in 1939. Not surprisingly, it was a commercial miss. Which is a shame. It is a funny, more tightly-plotted and disciplined novel than her first three and is a transition between her pre-war and post-war novels.

At the outbreak of war, Lady Sophia Garfield enrols at her nearest First Aid Post and is put in charge of the office, folding and counting laundry and taking telephone calls. As the book is set during the first few months of war, the Phoney War, not a lot happens for Sophia except endless first aid drills. She teases an acquaintance, Olga – who poses in the press as a mysterious Mata Hari figure – and lunches with inept friends Ned and Fred who work at the Ministry of Information. Then Sophia stumbles on a nest of spies; or counter-spies, or counter-counter spies, she’s not sure which.

Although her characters seem of a type with those of her first three novels – Mitford has a reputation for writing about the upper class, their extravagant and thoughtless lifestyles – in Pigeon Pie they are less cartoonish. Sophia particularly is interesting, drawn as she is into different worlds: her husband Luke’s enthusiasm for a new American religion, the Boston Brotherhood, brings new friends to dinner and a lodger upstairs; her godfather Sir Ivor King, aka The King of Song, disappears; journalist Rudolph Jocelyn enlists; and Sister Wordsworth at the Post is jolly and efficient about bandages and disinfectants and such like. Mitford weaves a plot of spies, kidnapping, bombs, code and general sneaking around, despite Sophia being unable to remember Morse Code and seeing codes in innocent messages.

This had me chuckling aloud.

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Read my reviews of Mitford’s earlier novels Highland Fling, Christmas Pudding and Wigs on the Green.

If you like this, try these:-
‘The Paying Guests’ by Sarah Waters
‘The Heat of the Day’ by Elizabeth Bowen
‘The Slaves of Solitude’ by Patrick Hamilton

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#Bookreview ‘The Marriage Plot’ by Jeffrey Eugenides #literary

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Jeffrey EugenidesThe title of this, the third novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides, refers to the entanglements of three students and the plotting of Victorian romance novels. The Marriage Plot tells of the romantic, sexual, philosophical, religious and literary coming togethers/going aparts of a literature student Madeleine Hanna, scientist Leonard Bankhead and theology student Mitchell Grammaticus at Brown University in 1982 America. It is a tale of youthful assumptions, experimentations, dreams and disappointments. Perhaps it is a tale which will strike a chord with people of the same age as Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell, rather than those who are older.

None of the three main characters are particularly likeable and at times the book gets bogged down in literary theory, philosophy, science and religious theory. Leonard is brilliant but a manic depressive, something which colours the entire book. The portrayal of his illness is convincing and shows the knife edge of pharmaceutical dosage needed to maintain a healthy mental balance. Leonard yo-yo’s back and forth, coping and not coping, at times allowing his manic tendencies to win. Madeleine accuses him of liking being depressed all the time. Mitchell is the idealistic one who goes to India to work for Mother Theresa’s Calcutta hospice and confronts some unpalatable truths. In comparison, Madeleine seems rather spoiled. Both men dote on her however and this is the spine which holds the story together: who will Madeleine finally choose?

Eugenides describes mundane things so beautifully. “Outside, the temperature, which had remained cold through March, had shot up into the fifties. The resulting thaw was alarming in its suddenness, drainpipes and gutters dripping, sidewalks puddling, streets flooded, a constant sound of water rushing downhill.” Simple writing at its best. But at other times the writing feels manic and not just in Leonard’s sections. There is an authorial indulgence with many clever asides from the plot and characters. I soon learned to read these parts slightly out-of-focus, not worrying for example that I didn’t grasp Leonard’s sections on yeast or Mitchell’s constant references to Something Beautiful for God, Malcolm Muggeridge’s book about Mother Theresa. The last third of the book passed much quicker than the first two.

The Marriage Plot is ambitious, as Middlesex was, and rightly so, but is perhaps the inevitable ‘difficult’ book after such a huge success. This will not deter me from reading Eugenides again.
Amazon UK

Read the first paragraph of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.

If you like this, try these:-
‘If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go’ by Judy Chicurel
‘A Sudden Light’ by Garth Stein
‘Barkskins’ by Annie Proulx

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Book review: Gilead

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Marilynne RobinsonGilead by Marilynne Robinson is a read like no other. A slow, contemplative journey through the memories of one man’s life, as he waits to die. In 1956, the Reverend John Ames writes a letter to his young son. It tugs the heartstrings.

Robinson writes with a clear unadorned style drawing heavily on biblical texts but it is not a religious tract, it is the story of a man’s life, his memories, his regrets and loves. The first few lines grabbed me and didn’t let me go. Do not start reading this book if you are feeling impatient. Some passages are easy and quick to read, others deserve more thought. It unwinds slowly like a length of thread, telling us the story of John Ames, his father and grandfather, the legacy of the Ames family which has been inherited by the Reverend’s seven-year old son.

I am not religious and some of the references will have passed me by. In the first half of the novel, I would think ‘oh no not another section about religion’, but as I read deeper into the book I became drawn into the stories of John Ames and his forebears and how their beliefs shaped their lives. I wanted to know what happened to John Ames Boughton, the troublesome son of his best friend and fellow reverend. I wanted to know how the Reverend Ames met his second wife. Some of the questions posed are not answered until the very end.

It is a peaceful novel, set against the backdrop of Fifties Iowa, which draws on local history including the Underground Railroad. Robinson draws a picture of the Gilead community, the people, their kindnesses, their grievances. She paints a clear picture. ‘We were very pious children from pious households in a fairly pious town.’

At times, the writing was so sublime I re-read. For example, ‘Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.’

Gilead, the second novel by Marilynne Robinson, won two prizes in 2005: the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award. I came to it with trepidation, having respected the writing style of her first novel, Housekeeping, but struggled with the pace of the narrative. Read my review of Housekeeping.

If you like this, try:-
‘Barkskins’ by Annie Proulx
‘Did You Ever Have a Family?’ by Bill Clegg
‘The Past’ by Tessa Hadley

‘Gilead’ by Marilynne Robinson [UK: Virago]

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Book review: Panic Room

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Robert Goddard Panic Room by Robert Goddard starts in the voice of someone unnamed, someone who feels safe in a beautiful, calm place, who wants to stay there forever but who knows that is unrealistic. It made me ask so many questions: who is the speaker, where is this safe place and why isn’t it forever?

It’s a while before we learn the identity of the first speaker. We are next introduced to Don Challenor, an ordinary middle-aged bloke, an estate agent who has been sacked, who is given a temporary job by his ex- wife Fran. To prepare for sale a multi-million property, Wortalleth West in Cornwall, for a client of Fran’s. Don jumps in his vintage MG to drive west, not realising how his life will change.

In the house he sets about his job, taking photos and measurements in order to prepare the sales brochure. Except the dimensions of one room don’t make sense. There is a mystery void. A steel door which cannot be opened. Is it a panic room? Why is it there? What’s in it? Is it dangerous? Could someone be inside, watching? Or are they trapped? Why not simply ask the owner of the house? Of course, nothing is that straightforward. And so the search to solve the riddle begins.

This is a cracking thriller which starts slowly and winds up and winds up as all the disparate threads of story begin to fall into place. It is an old-fashioned thriller with a conflicted but strong heroine, a disillusioned male hero who rediscovers his strength and guile, an arch villain who cannot be fathomed because he seems too nice and reasonable, and a couple of thugs who don’t worry about the trail they leave. Add in a Cornish witch, a kidnapping and a disappearing teenager, and you begin to wonder how on earth it will all make sense.

Goddard draws a beautiful picture of the Cornish coastline, it will make you want to go there… just not to Wortalleth West. You don’t have to work hard, just sit back and let this master thriller writer take you on a journey of family lies and disappearance, manipulation and fraud, big finance, global warming and cutting edge science. It will not be what you expected.

Read my reviews of Goddard’s ‘The Wide World Trilogy’: The Ways of the World, The Corners of the Globe, The Ends of the Earth.

If you like this, try:-
‘An Officer and a Spy’ by Robert Harris
‘The Travelers’ by Chris Pavone
‘Purity’ by Jonathan Franzen

‘Panic Room’ by Robert Goddard [UK: Bantam Press]

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Book review: The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

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Stuart Turton The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton is a whodunnit version of Groundhog Day set at a country house party. There is a twist: the Bill Murray character must live each day in a different body, a host, and solve a murder or never escape back to his normal life. I found this to be a tortuous, convoluted and mystifying plot, impossible to review without giving away clues (intentionally or not), but I will have a go.

If you like conventional detective stories which follow the rules of crime fiction, presenting a challenge to be solved, this may not be for you. If you like going on a mystery journey where nothing is as it seems, you will like it. Mysteries work when the reader has something to cling onto, to make them identify with a character, to make them care, to give them someone to root for. This story has so many unknowns I spent most of the story in a state of confusion. Like Coco Chanel dressing for the evening and then removing two elements to ensure she wasn’t over-dressed, I finished this book wishing the author had undertaken a similar cutting exercise. The solution to the murder, and the fate of the protagonist were not the elements I found most fascinating; I enjoyed the challenge faced by Aiden – if that is his true name – when he inhabits the body of a host, a stranger. The obese body but sharp mind of Lord Ravencourt; the over-excited Jonathan Derby who acts without thinking and molests the chambermaids; the beaten-up butler who knows a lot but lays in bed drifting in and out of consciousness.

The list of characters is so long – with too many similar names, Millicent/Madeline, Daniel/Donald – plus others who are simply unnamed background extras, I couldn’t remember which each one was. This is complicated by the fact that the hero – whose name might be Aiden Bishop – doesn’t know who is who either. He doesn’t know who can he trust, who has he already met at Blackheath House, and who he knew before arriving at the party – as he also has amnesia about his real identity and previous life. Two/three other people are also experiencing this mobile bodied state, and Aiden is competing with them to solve the crime. Because only one, he is told by the mysterious fancy dress Plague Doctor, will survive. Oh and there’s a mysterious footman too who may or may not be trying to kill Aiden. Oddly, none of the other time-trapped people appear in Aiden’s body.

By a quarter through I was seriously confused and becoming seriously irritated. Is this a story best read in one sitting, so you are better able to remember all the twists and obfuscations? But the book is not short, 528 pages. Or could it be that there is just too much going on? A closed room mystery, each day repeating itself, a hero with amnesia who must relive each day in a different host body and be influenced by the stranger’s body and personality, a murder that happens every night meaning the victim cannot be rescued, a competition to solve the murder in order to survive, obtuse threats from sinister unidentifiable figures, key characters introduced rather late in the game. There is no doubting the planning skills of the author but at times I did suspect he set out to wilfully confuse rather than tease the reader. I ran through various scenarios: is it a game show, is it a wind-up like Candid Camera, is Aiden the murderer and doesn’t know it, is Aiden the murderer and cleverly duping everyone?

Ambitious, overwhelming, fantastical, mysterious, I can’t help but admire the ambition of the author and the scope of his story. Hidden beneath the machinations are two serious questions: how far will a person go in order to escape an intolerable situation, and is it ever possible to escape your own past? A Marmite book: love it or hate it.

If you like this, try these:-
‘Himself’ by Jess Kidd
‘The Last of Us’ by Rob Ewing
‘Curtain Call’ by Anthony Quinn

‘The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle’ by Stuart Turton [UK: Raven]

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Book review: Whistle in the Dark

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Emma Healey Whistle in the Dark by Emma Healey begins with an ending; a sixteen-year old girl, lost in the Peak District, has been found and is in hospital with her parents. Healey tells the story of the aftermath as Jen, Lana’s mother, tries desperately to unravel the truth of what happened to her daughter. In the face of Lana’s reluctance to speak, Jen’s desperation evolves into obsession and the story circles into myth, obfuscation and misunderstanding. For the reader, there is a lot to unravel.

Told entirely from Jen’s POV, by halfway through I was beginning to question Jen’s state of mind and whether she was an unreliable narrator. There is a lot of smoke and shadows in the telling of this story, interwoven with the crystals of Jen’s friend Grace, the fibs of Lana’s schoolfriend Bethany, the pragmatic questioning and Instagram comments by Jen’s mother Lily, and Jen’s fertile imagination. There were times when it felt a little like being whizzed around in a washing machine. But through it all shines Healey’s ability to draw pictures with words, “The heavy summer foliage that lined the motorway seemed to have taken on its own light, as if the sun had splintered into a thousand pieces and hung, glowing, on the trees. The whites of things, of dresses and china cups and tablecloths, was dazzling.”

I admit there were times in the final third when I just wanted the story to get on with it, to find out where Lana had been for those four missing days. I became as mystified as Jen and could understand her distraction, her inability to judge the truth of what was happening around her as Healey loads on the mysteries. Did Lana return home with an invisible friend? Or a ghost? Jen reads speculation online that something mystical had happened to Lana; she was abducted by aliens, had taken the stairs down to Hell, or stepped into a time circle. This was coupled with my feeling of indulgence on the part of the author, that some short anecdotes were included because they were interesting rather than essential. And then comes a wonderful snippy sentence that brings you back to the heart of everything; for example, when Jen is driving north, “Well, if she cried enough, Jen thought, at least she might not need to wee again for another forty miles.”

An interesting read. A study of the parental difficulties caring for a troubled teenager, where the line stands between caring and invasion of privacy, of how and when to trust a troubled adolescent and when to step in. A veritable minefield. Lana has a history of cutting and an overdose attempt before the disappearance; post-disappearance, Jen alternates between anger and frustration, and treading on eggshells. The online stalking, the shadowing on the walk to school, the listening at the bedroom door, all reinforce the lesson that a snooper often finds something unexpected, something worse, something that should remain private until revealed. A reminder that often the most simple explanation is true.

An interesting read and competent second novel, but not a compelling page-turner like Healey’s wonderful debut Elizabeth is Missing. Read my review here.

If you like this, try:-
‘Reservoir 13’ by Jon McGregor
‘Himself’ by Jess Kidd
‘Doppler’ by Erlend Loe

‘Whistle in the Dark’ by Emma Healey [UK: Viking]

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