|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0062676784
| 9780062676788
| 0062676784
| 3.93
| 90,081
| Aug 24, 2017
| Jun 05, 2018
|
liked it
|
听 Mystery or meta-mystery? Either, but please not this! As for Chapter One, forget the bell and the Mont Blanc pen. Diana Cowper has lunch with Raymo听 Mystery or meta-mystery? Either, but please not this! As for Chapter One, forget the bell and the Mont Blanc pen. Diana Cowper has lunch with Raymond Clunes. And Andrea Kluv谩nek may not have been telling the truth. But be assured that the rest of it, including a clue which would indicate, quite clearly, the identity of the killer, is spot on.The first chapter of Anthony Horowitz's latest mystery novel might have been written by Christie, Rendell, or James. A woman called Diana Cowper, sixtyish, well-off, and mother of an already-famous actor, goes to a London undertaker's office to arrange for a funeral鈥攈er own. Apparently this is not so unusual, and Horowitz takes five pages describing how the funeral director listens sympathetically and notes Diana's wishes. But he then continues: Diana Cowper had planned her funeral and she was going to need it. She was murdered about six hours later that same day. After giving basic details of the crime, the chapter ends. The second chapter features the writer, Horowitz, himself. He is approached by a man called Hawthorne, a rather dislikable ex-policeman who had helped him with police detail on his [real, and very good] television drama Injustice. Although fired from the Met, Hawthorne has been called in as a consultant on the Cowper case. He now proposes that Horowitz follow him around and write a book on the investigation. He suggests the title "Hawthorne Investigates," though this is later changed to "The Word is Murder." In other words, the book we are now reading. The third chapter is teasingly called "Chapter One." Horowitz makes the mistake of showing Hawthorne the draft of his opening chapter, more or less what we have just read, and then has to listen to the detective poking holes in it. The chapter ends with the paragraph at the head of this review. Very nice! Not a mystery novel, but a meta-mystery, a novel about the writing of a mystery novel. Horowitz already did something of this kind about a year ago in Magpie Murders, which begins with an almost book-length Christie pastiche, then starts again at page 1 with a separate book featuring the editor of the book we have just read asking questions about its presumed author. While not especially thrilled by the pseudo-Christie, I loved the "real-life" section, and headed my review "Meta is Better." It seems that Horowitz is set to do the same thing again, only cutting out the middleman. Now it is just he himself as author, playing against the fictional Hawthorne as detective. I settled in for a continuing dialogue between the author's drafts and the detective's corrections. It could have been fascinating. Only that is not what we get. This is the last time we are allowed that dual perspective. From now to the end of the book, Horowitz tags alone with Hawthorne in a series of interviews covering most of Greater London and extending to a seaside town in Kent. He is a Watson to his Holmes or Hastings to his Poirot, but worse鈥攈e is not even allowed to speak. There are potentially interesting moments after each session when the author asks the detective about his methods, but he seldom gets meaningful answers. While Hawthorne remains unlikable from beginning to end, he is pretty good at his job, starting each interview with a different persona then springing suddenly into the attack in ways which the more cautious author would never have dared. And there turn out to be quite a number of possible reasons for killing Diana Cowper, from a fatal car accident she was involved in ten years before to a variety of motives connected with the theater鈥攅ither her own activity as an investor, or the meteoric rise of her egocentric but talented son. Were this a straight detective story, it would actually be a rather good one: four stars nosing even higher. But I can see no advantage whatever to making the real author one of the cast of characters. No advantage, and one huge disadvantage: having to deal with the outsized ego of Horowitz himself. Horowitz does seem to realize the danger, though. Here he is, in Chapter 2, talking about his previous novel鈥攁lso real鈥攁 commissioned Sherlock Holmes sequel called The House of Silk : It struck me from the very start that my job was to be invisible. I tried to hide myself in Doyle's shadow, to imitate his literary tropes and mannerisms, but never, as it were, to intrude. I mention this only because it worries me to be so very prominent in these pages. But this time round I have no choice. I'm writing exactly what happened.Not true; he has every choice. He could have written even a true-crime story removing his presence completely; he could have faded into the background even more than Watson or Hastings. But does he? The first three pages of his chapter are about his triumph with the Doyle sequel, the success of his [superb] television series Foyle's War, and his negotiations with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson about a screenplay for a proposed sequel to Tintin. The man drops more names than Gretel's breadcrumbs! All right, they are generally major names, and there is quite a bit of interest in there for fans of his other work鈥攆or example, that it was the actor Michael Kitchen, not the author, who suggested Foyle's characteristic posture of seldom asking direct questions. But he could equally well have written a memoir. As an ingredient in a mystery, there is a element of self-congratulatory navel-gazing that I find distasteful. And as the story moves deeper into the theater world, with the incestuous artifice and self-regard that it so often involves, the whole thing threatens to become a playground for egotists. It would have been so much better as a simple mystery. Or as true meta-fiction, had Horowitz taken the time to work out the possibilities of his concept. As it is, three stars are generous. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 21, 2018
|
Jul 23, 2018
|
Jul 16, 2018
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 2234085950
| 9782234085954
| 2234085950
| 3.76
| 2,463
| Feb 24, 2018
| Feb 24, 2018
|
really liked it
|
听 An Entertaining Moralist 听听听听You covet gold and scatter ashes.听 An Entertaining Moralist 听听听听You covet gold and scatter ashes.This is the opening page of Philippe Claudel's 2018 novel, The Archipelago of the Dog. It is not yet available in English, so far as I know (the translation above is mine), but given the success of his other novels, I imagine it soon will be. Claudel has always been a moralist, but this is the first time I know of where he has condemned his readers directly from the pulpit. Fortunately, after the first chapter, the moral outrage gives way to a rather entertaining novel that combines elements of policier and parable. It is not my favorite of his books, but it kept me reading. The setting is a small volcanic island in a fictional archipelago somewhere in the Mediterranean, not too far from the African coast and connected by weekly ferry to some unidentified European mainland. The bodies of three black men are found washed up on one of its beaches, presumably migrants drowned on the perilous passage. The Mayor, who is negotiating with a development company to build a spa on the island, wishes to hush the matter up, and swears the other witnesses to secrecy for their common good. Most of these are identified by function only鈥攖he Mayor, the Doctor, the Priest, and the Teacher鈥攁lthough some have nicknames: "Swordfish," "America," and "the Old Lady." The only one to question the Mayor's actions is, not coincidentally, the only one not born on the island, the young Teacher. Although he goes along with the decision to dispose of the bodies in one of the crevices of the volcano, he quietly continues his own investigations. Until one week a stranger arrives on the ferry asking questions; he will become known as the Commissioner. ====== This is the sixth book by Philippe Claudel I have read. Finally, it is helping me to trace a common thread through his astonishingly varied oeuvre (he is also a filmmaker, playwright, and poet). Here are the other five, in chronological order; the links are to my reviews: Grey Souls (2003). The story of a murder investigation in an isolated village in Lorraine (the author's home region) during WW1. An early example of Claudel's fascination with the dynamics of small communities, which also poses the moral question of what the death of one person matters among the slaughter of so many thousands.The fine writing of Parfums is a given; all Claudel's books, and this new one in particular, show his obsession with the power of language to seduce, control, even disgust. There is a chapter near the end in which he describes the fever of the S'tunella, the annual tuna hunt, in terms so visceral that virtually the whole theme of the novel is summed up in this one chapter. He condenses the moral decay of the island into a description of the sun like a pat of rancid butter in a sooty sky, which sea-birds fly in endless circles around the volcano in a noisy "ring of wings, feathers, beaks, and cries." There is no question about his engagement with questions of human rights. Whether it is Asian boat-people or African migrants, his concern has always been with the dispossessed. He has always championed the individual against closed-minded communities that push him to the margins or large institutions that roll right over him. There is a section in this latest novel which, like The Investigation, touches on the faceless power of the corporate machine; I find it the least successful part of the book. Claudel's strength is to depict power dynamics between individuals at the village level. But not quite individuals. Although the characters in the two Lorraine novels had names, I see that even there they were types: the mayor, the butcher, the innkeeper, and so on. The allegorical quality that we see here has in fact been present in all his works. I mentioned that The Archipelago of the Dog has elements of the policier, or detective story. Grey Souls is about a murder investigation, and the title characters in Brodeck has been asked to prepare an investigative report. Claudel is very good at maintaining suspense. But the curious feature of his mysteries is that, ultimately, their solution makes no difference. This story is full of surprise twists, but none of them really change the underlying situation. For example, there is a kind of trial later on in the book, and its verdict seems clear, though unjust. Surely someone will see the injustice and remedy it? Yes indeed, several people do see that this is not the truth鈥攂ut in Claudel's world it is not what is proved in a court of law that counts, so much as the horror of a community so steeped in indifference that individual responsibility no longer much matters. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 15, 2018
|
Jun 18, 2018
|
Jun 07, 2018
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1501126962
| 9781501126963
| 1501126962
| 3.53
| 181,642
| Jun 14, 2016
| Jun 14, 2016
|
really liked it
|
听 When "Aha!" Becomes "Eh?" I wish this were more surreal. A ghost story, for instance. Something surreal. Something from the imagination, no matter听 When "Aha!" Becomes "Eh?" I wish this were more surreal. A ghost story, for instance. Something surreal. Something from the imagination, no matter how vile. That would be much less terrifying. If it were harder to perceive or accept, if there was more room for doubt, I would be less scared. This is too real. It's very real. A dangerous man with bad, irreversible intentions in a big, empty school. It's my own fault. I should never have come here.I quote this passage from late in the novel for two reasons. It shows Iain Reid's voice鈥攐r rather that of his main narrator鈥攁 short-breathed voice that might annoy some readers but kept me reading at a nice clip. And it exactly captures the thoughts that were in my own mind even before I had reached this part in the book. I couldn't make out whether I was in a thriller, a ghost story, or what. What kind of a book is this? That narrator first. She is an unnamed young woman making a car trip with her boyfriend of two months, to meet his parents in a farm in the country. She has already decided to break it off (hence one meaning of the title), but she goes along anyway; indeed, there are times when she seems strongly attracted. The boyfriend, Jake, appears to be a graduate student or postdoc, working in a lab, but we don't see that. What we see through her eyes is a fiercely intelligent young man whose conversation often reduces her to silence. There is something odd here. Odd, too, is the pacing. It takes them ages to reach the farm, and when they get there, they walk for a long time among the broken-down outbuildings in the falling snow before he even takes her inside. By now, there is a definite feeling that this will turn into a horror story. In between the chapters, which are very short at first, come single pages of italicized conversation between two unnamed speakers. They seem to refer to a murder or other violent act and its perpetrator. Their remarks about him vary from Who'd-ever-have-thought-it-? to But-there-were-signs. These are flash-forwards, presumably. Might the man be Jake? The remarks do not quite fit the facts we know, or relate in any obvious way to the young woman. I don't think the tension could have been sustained for much longer, but 210 swift pages are just about right. As you can see from my quote (from page 182) we are clearly headed towards a climax, and the young woman is terrified. And the climax is indeed violent. But it also brings a twist鈥攐ne of those sudden realignments that make you go "Aha!" Only there was no "Aha!" with me, more like an "Eh?". I closed the book with the distinct thought, "I'll have to sleep on that." And sleep I did (in the end, it wasn't that scary), and woke to think about it some more. And thinking it over, in the couple of days before writing this, I have realized that once you accept Reid's surprise premise, you can see how carefully he has laid the groundwork from the beginning. But not enough to elicit that "Aha!" moment. More like "Oh yes, now I see." ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 24, 2018
|
Oct 27, 2018
|
May 16, 2018
|
ebook
| ||||||||||||||
| 0062413864
| 9780062413864
| 0062413864
| 3.85
| 90,140
| Feb 05, 2015
| Dec 01, 2015
|
liked it
|
听 A Debut That Tries Too Hard Three and a half stars. That's my immediate reaction to this debut thriller. By the time I have finished this review, I wi 听 A Debut That Tries Too Hard Three and a half stars. That's my immediate reaction to this debut thriller. By the time I have finished this review, I will know whether to round up or down. On the plus side, the underlying situation is strong. Eight-year-old Benedict Finch vanishes in the woods near Bristol, when his mother allows him to run ahead to a favorite spot. The story is told in two main voices. One is Ben's mother, Rachel Jenner, recently divorced from John Finch, a pediatric surgeon. The other is Jim Clemo, the Detective Inspector assigned to the case. So the book proceeds alternately as a police procedural and a psychological thriller; no harm in that, if the author can maintain the balance. The day-by-day account is bookended by a prologue and epilogue set a year later. The prologue make it clear that the case has been traumatic for all concerned. So we expect something bad, but have no idea what. The result was a mystery that kept me reading. Kudos on that. But Gilly Macmillan cannot help but tip the balance to the psychological side, I think excessively. Rachel loses control during a live television appeal organized by the police, triggering a malicious backlash in social media, accusing her of the crime. Soon she is subject to physical harassment, so we need to add the woman-in-danger trope to the other genres. Some of Jim's sections take the form of case notes by a psychologist he is forced to consult a year after the event. It is a useful narrative tool that certainly heightens the reader's dread, but even at the end I could not see why Jim was suffering so much, nor why his superiors waited an entire year before sending him for therapy. I have to say also that there is an awful lot of panting and flailing in the accounts of Rachel's increasing despair and distrust of even her friends and family. But the interior treatment also allows her quieter epiphanies such as this, when she sees the bedroom her ex-husband's new wife has prepared for Ben. Kudos on these too. I could see that an extraordinary amount of care and attention had gone into the creation of the room. It was painful to me to hear that Katrina had done the work, but not nearly as powerful as the fact that Ben had never once described it to me. "It's beautiful," I said, and I saw suddenly how I'd taken everything Ben told me about his life at his dad's and twisted it into a sordid, unhappy shape.The police procedural and psychological thriller genres differ in one important respect. The former depends on evidence painstakingly unearthed by the police; the latter thrives on revelations given by the author鈥攁nd Macmillan does this to excess. There is not a character who will not be the subject of a flashback at some time or another. These provide new psychological information, but it is often of only of peripheral relevance and introduced with crashing gear-changes rather than evolving naturally. For example, Jim Clemo in the grip of insomnia: When I finally shut my eyes and tried to sleep, my brain had a different plan. It pulled me back to my past, and it did it swiftly, like an ocean current that's merciless and strong. It took me back to my childhood, where it had a memory to replay for me, a videotape of my past that it had dug out of the back of a drawer where I'd shoved it, long ago, hoping to forget.The memory has the purpose of showing that Jim's father, a detective himself, had feet of clay. But it has no bearing on the case, nor does it really explain why Jim is taking this one so hard. Clearly Macmillan is trying to flesh out the anchor character for her proposed series鈥攂ut to my mind, this gratuitous information only weakens him. So far, I was still on the fence. But when Macmillan takes to introducing information in large gobbets on the police side also, rather than through the gradual gathering of facts, I begin to see her inexperience. The effect is to suddenly turn the spotlight on a new suspect鈥攖hough the astute reader will realize that suspects who emerge early will be eliminated almost equally early. I grew tired of the number of apparent new leads that arrive on the detectives' desks in neat packages out of left field. The camel's straw for me was an enormous family secret involving Rachel and her sister that suddenly comes from nowhere, and which the police then dump on them like a truckload of manure. It is too much information at one time, difficult to believe not only in itself, but also that it has been kept a secret. And I cannot accept that an officer as careful and respectful as DI Clemo has shown himself to be would handle this in such a crude and confrontational manner. No: Gilly Macmillan, despite all her strengths, simply wanted to spotlight some new suspects and ratchet up the tension. But I resent being so transparently manipulated. Three stars it is. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 26, 2018
|
May 28, 2018
|
May 16, 2018
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0062389920
| 9780062389923
| 0062389920
| 3.46
| 24,424
| Feb 20, 2018
| Feb 20, 2018
|
really liked it
|
听 Lippman Back on Form. Almost. As so often, my enjoyment of a book is conditioned by those I read before it. Most recently by Laura Lippman, Wilde Lake 听 Lippman Back on Form. Almost. As so often, my enjoyment of a book is conditioned by those I read before it. Most recently by Laura Lippman, Wilde Lake, a slow-moving vaguely-crime novel that never sorted out its intended genre. I almost wrote her off as a result, but now I'm glad I didn't. Then only yesterday, I closed the covers on First Person by Richard Flanagan, a great disappointment from a great author. Why mention it? Because Flanagan's book centers around the relationship between a known criminal and another character who is supposed to be studying him, but may have criminal tendencies himself. But Flanagan deliberately leaves the situation ill-defined, and neither character comes fully to life. Not so with Lippman. Her aims are admittedly simpler, but she builds her mysteries with admirable clarity. Her book begins similarly with a dance between two characters, Adam and Pauline, whose apparently casual encounter in a Delaware bar may not be so casual at all. Lippman's skill is to alternate chapters between these two, and eventually others also, telling us no more than we need to know鈥攏ot even, at first, their names鈥攂uilding our curiosity even as we are getting to know them as people. We may not trust them, one or both may even be dangerous, but we do root for them. And even when she introduces secondary characters who may never be filled out completely, there is enough to capture our interest in them also. One of them was playing a long game. But which one?That is a quote from the book flap, not the text. But it is a perfect come-on and absolutely accurate鈥攁t least for the first half of the book. I drafted most of the above when I was halfway through, and thrilled. Now that I have finished the novel, I confess to a little disappointment. The dangerous dance of mongoose and snake demands an atmosphere of continued mystery. Sooner or later, though, the answer to the book-flap question becomes clear; one character continues to fascinate while the other shrinks. Lippman fans will easily guess which is which; she plays to her strengths, and her strengths are strong indeed. But I felt a distinct loss of momentum, coupled with a surge of sentimentality that is fatal to the hard-boiled noir mood with which this started. Or perhaps it is just that love and honesty make for less spicy reading than sex and secrets? ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 21, 2018
|
May 23, 2018
|
May 16, 2018
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0525954341
| 9780525954347
| 0525954341
| 4.19
| 18,209
| Mar 20, 2018
| Mar 20, 2018
|
really liked it
|
听 Who is the She? Who is the "she" in Elizabeth George's title? There are many possibilities. First, the irrepressible, insubordinate, ill-kempt, Detect 听 Who is the She? Who is the "she" in Elizabeth George's title? There are many possibilities. First, the irrepressible, insubordinate, ill-kempt, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, who is my favorite character in the whole series for her colorful way of saying off-color things, brilliant instincts, and believable background. Barbara has managed to piss off many of her superiors at Scotland Yard, and at the beginning of the book she is sent off to Shropshire on an investigation with Detective Chief Superintendent Isabelle Ardery, her arch-nemesis. The assignment has been designed as an opportunity for her to screw up, and be appropriately punished by exile to the far north. Or the "she" could be Isabelle Ardery herself, whom we have come to dislike in the previous novel, A Banquet of Consequences, for the way she lords it over Barbara's immediate boss, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, whom she outranks only because she now occupies the administrative position that he refused. But very early in this new novel, Ardery reveals herself to have a problem with alcohol, and before long she is behaving worse than ever. I might have said that some of her scenes are bit too melodramatic to be believable, but then alcoholics can indeed behave in quite abnormal ways. One of the many ways in which Isabelle has failed is as a mother. Her divorced husband is about to move with their two sons to New Zealand, a decision she is fighting tooth and nail. But there are at least two other mothers in the book who, by having too little faith in their children, are in serious danger of ruining their lives. Any one of them could be the "she" in the title. It is one of the themes that tie the book together as more than merely another whodunnit. Finally, the "she" could be one of the handful of college-age girls in the town of Ludlow, where most of the action is set. Students at West Mercia College, we see them mostly either binge drinking, having promiscuous sex, or attempting to cope with the consequences of either 鈥� suffering punishments that are largely of their own making. The novel opens with two such girls going to an end-of-term celebration in a local pub, a situation that ends with them having to be carted away by the local Police Community Support Officer, who is all that is left to keep order in Ludlow after deep cutbacks in the regular force. For a long time, the relevance of these first two dozen pages is not clear; the case that brings Scotland Yard to Ludlow is the suicide in custody of a Church of England deacon, an accused pedophile. Isabelle and Barbara go there to report on the soundness of the original investigation, and their inquiry occupies most of the next 200 pages. But they return and, for reasons I shall not disclose,* Barbara is sent out again, this time with her own boss, DI Lynley. There are almost 500 pages still to go. In them, George will spend as much time or more on other characters as she does with the detectives. It is an unusual approach. Rather than discovering information solely through the police investigation, the reader is invited to share the thoughts and lives of a couple of dozen other characters, who may be bystanders, suspects, victims, officers of the law, or sometimes several of these at once. For the last two or three books of hers that I have read, I have felt that Elizabeth George was no longer a mystery writer, but a novelist who uses mystery as a means of prying open many other aspects of everyday life. Hence the importance of recurrent themes such as motherhood, substance abuse, failing marriages, and coming of age, that knit the book together as a true novel, rather than merely serving as clues to a solution. I find the mixture utterly engaging, especially since the American George now has no need to prove she can write a British mystery as well as any Brit, and since what I call the "series story" 鈥� the romantic lives of Lynley, Havers, and others 鈥� is allowed to take a back seat. All the same, I did not like this one quite as much as the last. One reason is that the lives of all these teenagers 鈥� Dena, Missa, Francie, Chelsea, Finn, and Brutus 鈥� is so far from my own now, and often so squalid, that I had a hard time caring about them as much as some of the older characters. Another is that I found it difficult to understand the mission of the Met's first trip to Ludlow. Isabelle insists that it is not to investigate the deacon's death, or the justification for his arrest in the first place, though Barbara keeps blundering into the no-go area; it is quite a relief when, on her trip with Lynley, it becomes more like a normal investigation. And the reason for there even being a second trip at all hangs on a question of chronology that seems to be a matter of sloppy plotting on George's part.* Perhaps I also felt that George was a little perfunctory in tying up some of her many subplots 鈥� not the mysteries, which were admirably solved, but some novel aspects such as the rehabilitation of the various problem characters, which seemed a trifle too optimistic. But this could also be a compliment to her ability to create such characters in the first place, and take them into emotional areas far beyond the range of a more normal genre offering. ====== In her acknowledgements, George remarks that she likes to research a particular part of England in which to set each novel. She used Somerset for her previous book; this time, she moves north, to Ludlow in Shropshire, the bracing hills and smaller villages around, and the cathedral cities of the west country. And she is very good in evoking her setting. I was at school in Shropshire sixty years ago, and revisited the area a decade ago. It took me back to my last trip to that region, when I took the photos of Ludlow below: [image] [image] [image] [image] *See my first comment, which I have posted as a spoiler. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 04, 2018
|
May 10, 2018
|
May 04, 2018
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0747561419
| 9780747561415
| 0747561419
| 3.28
| 164
| 2002
| Jan 01, 2003
|
it was amazing
|
Warmth in the Snow On the face of it, The Big Snow,the title story in this collection of five is a police procedural, but I don鈥檛 think that is its mai Warmth in the Snow On the face of it, The Big Snow,the title story in this collection of five is a police procedural, but I don鈥檛 think that is its main point. At 137 pages it is a novella really, half the length of the whole book, and its mystery is insufficient to justify that proportion on its own. But put together with the other four stories, all of which are set in Northern Ireland during the severe blizzard of 1963, it completes a quietly marvelous collection of character studies, all featuring people who are socially awkward or wrong-footed by the extreme conditions, and treating them with love and understanding. Forget the title; this is a warm book. And an especially meaningful one for me, who grew up in that part of the world, and would have been about the same age as the two youngest protagonists. The opening story, The Light of the World, is the shortest, and hauntingly beautiful. I don鈥檛 want to say too much about it (or any of the stories) as Park is so skillful at controlling information. But it concerns a man leafing through a volume of Ansel Adams photographs while talking to his wife, who is also a photographer. She is lying in bed, and he is standing at the window, watching the falling snow, and everything is connected by beauty, pain, and that pure, pure light. [image] The Wedding Dress is almost as short, and equally mesmerizing. A woman scans the papers for a used bridal dress to buy for her own upcoming wedding, before she too goes out into the snow. White on white, its secret is a terrible one, and oh so sad. At 35 pages, Against the Cold is more substantial. Mr. Peel, the headmaster of a Belfast school, works with one of his teachers, Miss Lewis, to see the pupils safely home before snow closes them down. Conscious of his noblesse oblige, he escorts her to her door. She invites him in for a cup of tea before he starts his own long trek home, but the snow falls harder and harder. Peel is the only one of the five protagonists we do not like immediately. He is authoritarian and patronizing; he fantasizes about one of the other teachers, and looks down on Miss Lewis; he is a prude, who disapproves of her having a reproduction of a couple kissing on her living-room wall (he has probably never heard of Dante Gabriel Rossetti). But they have a long day ahead of them, and things can change.鈥� [image] My favorite story was the second longest at 65 pages, Snow Trails. Peter, its principal character, is the son of the local undertaker, in his first year studying French at university, and longing to get away from the small country town. He is attracted to the young wife of a Belfast businessman, who has recently bought property on the outskirts. She is at least a decade older than him, but that doesn鈥檛 lessen the intensity of his crush. When they meet, he is reading Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier [ The Lost Estate ], and is thrilled that she has read it too. Indeed, the whole story might almost be a retelling of Alain-Fournier's impossible-to-recapture romantic dream, but it is no less effective in its own terms. And it is a similarly young protagonist, not the mystery, that is the focus of The Big Snow. Like the young Morse in Endeavour, probationary detective constable Swift is better educated and smarter than most of the people around him. But he is also green behind the ears and touchingly insecure. He is paired with an old-school sergeant named Gracey, who has no time for niceties but gets results by concentrating on the most likely culprit and squeezing a confession out of him. Only this time, Swift reckons he is wrong; most readers too will probably see the way the wind is blowing well before the halfway mark. But the real interest is in the relationship between the cub and the old grizzly, which takes some surprising turns, and in the character of Swift himself. He identifies strongly with the young murder victim, who is probably the first woman he has seen unclothed, and treats the case as a personal chivalric crusade. Once again, Park gets what it is to be young, sensitive, and bright. So it is a pity that, in developing a type he had captured so perfectly in the shorter story, he moves a little too close to melodrama in the longer one. Were this the whole book, my rating would be no more than four stars. But given the strength of the others, I can certainly go to five. ===== This is the fourth David Park book I have read. I begin to think he has a special affinity for short to medium length fiction. The very fine The Poet's Wives consists of three novellas, focusing on the wives of William Blake, Osip Mandelstam, and a fictional contemporary Irish poet. His The Light of Amsterdam and The Truth Commissioner are full novels, but each consists of several distinct strands that eventually interweave; I was a little lukewarm about the Amsterdam book, but the other is one of the most constructive responses to the Troubles in Northern Ireland that I have read. Long or short, I recommend anything he writes. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Apr 24, 2018
|
Apr 27, 2018
|
Apr 24, 2018
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0297851535
| 9780297851530
| 0297851535
| 4.01
| 1,153,124
| Sep 26, 2006
| Jul 31, 2007
|
it was ok
|
Nausea I have just finished Gillian Flynn鈥檚 debut novel, and feel rather sick. Not the kind of sick that comes from a harrowing mystery finally solved, Nausea I have just finished Gillian Flynn鈥檚 debut novel, and feel rather sick. Not the kind of sick that comes from a harrowing mystery finally solved, leaving you shaken but safely out the other side. No, the result of overlong immersion in a vaguely incestuous, sludgy drama that just made me feel dirtier and dirtier and didn鈥檛 even afford some decent catharsis at the end. Oh, it begins well enough. I was looking for a quick read as a break from the two long novels I was already mired in. The 3-for-2 offer at B&N hooked me, and I was eagerly on my way. Flynn writes good prose, with an eye for the apt but unusual simile, so this started out as a 4-to-5-star read. Camille Preaker, a reporter on a minor Chicagoland paper, is sent back to her home town of Wind Gap, Missouri, to investigate what seems to be the serial murder of two young girls. There is an established pattern for such books: after a bit of pottering around, there will be another murder or two, which will shake up the roster of suspects and put the heroine herself into danger. Only it doesn鈥檛 happen that way at all. The only other murder is more or less an afterthought. Speaking for myself, I hit on two possible suspects well before the halfway point, and the book did nothing to suggest any remotely possible alternatives. Instead, we enter into a nauseating nightmare in which just about everyone we meet鈥攑rimarily women鈥攁re painted in unsympathetic terms. There are Camille鈥檚 old school friends, grown into catty socialites. There are their tween-age daughters, an almost feral group of junior blondes. There is Camille鈥檚 half-sister Amma, thirteen, their leader in the town and a spoiled child at home. And there is Camille鈥檚 wealthy mother, Adora, a woman as cold as the solid ivory floor in her bedroom. And then there is Camille herself, who turns out to have major problems of her own. One of these is the abnormality implied by the title and cover; though it is largely in the past, she still bears the scars. But the one that most got to me is her drinking. I cannot long retain sympathy for a heroine, however bright, who goes through her day downing drink after drink, and repeated descriptions of the resultant puking do not endear me either. It became harder and harder to distinguish Camille from the toxic environment. Was she in danger, and from whom? By the middle of the book, I found I no longer cared. Gillian Flynn does have a twist at the end, but it is a small one, a slight reshuffling of the deck. It does little to clear the air or, as Lady Macbeth said, to wash this filth from off my hands. [PS. It seems almost irrelevant to mention it, but the framing device of the novel is quite implausible. It is hard to believe in Camille Preaker as a functioning reporter, difficult to imagine her editor sending her on a project of so little concern to his readers, and impossible to believe him keeping her there so long when she turns up so little. And then at the end, when she does uncover something of some value, it is simply presented to her on a plate鈥攁 handwritten note somehow preserved in a file she would never have got permission to look at anyway.] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Mar 20, 2018
|
Mar 25, 2018
|
Mar 30, 2018
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| B0DTRVFWR1
| 3.70
| 11,314
| Aug 04, 2003
| unknown
|
liked it
|
听 Feet on the ground鈥� or not? It really was a hell of a blast. The explosion occurred at daybreak on the second Tuesday morning of September, its sho听 Feet on the ground鈥� or not? It really was a hell of a blast. The explosion occurred at daybreak on the second Tuesday morning of September, its shock waves rippling through the beer-stained streets of Mornington Crescent. It detonated car alarms, hurled house bricks across the street, blew a chimney stack forty feet into the sky, ruptured the eardrums of several tramps, denuded over two dozen pigeons, catapulted a surprised ginger tom through the window of a kebab shop and fired several roofing tiles into the forehead of the Pope, who was featured on a poster for condoms opposite the tube station.It's certainly a brilliant opening. A bomb in modern London kills Arthur Bryant, the octogenarian senior partner in the detective team of Bryant and May (yes, like the English matches), bringing to an end their six-decade association in the Peculiar Crimes Unit. And this takes the surviving partner, John May, back to their first case together, a series of grisly murders in London鈥檚 Palace Theatre during the worst year of the Blitz. Unusually for the first book in a long series, author Christopher Fowler sets out to solve the first crime鈥攁nd the last. The 欧宝娱乐 friend who recommended this series praised Fowler for his uncanny knowledge of London then and now, and his ability to take the reader into strange corners and situations. And my friend is absolutely right; Fowler knows the city, and has his feet on its ground; he is at his best when he keeps them there. His descriptions of wartime London ring totally true, and I found myself trusting him, especially in the earlier period. [image] I also had hopes for the setting. The Palace is a real theater, home to many of the big musicals such as Les Mis茅rables, The Sound of Music when I was young, and many famous names before and since. In the novel, they are rehearsing an elaborate and somewhat risqu茅 revival of Offenbach鈥檚 Orpheus in the Underworld. A light opera, certainly, but still opera, and thus in my professional world as an opera director; I should have been in my element. Fowler is excellent at describing the physical building, and he has fun with many of the personalities, such as the domineering director: Helena Parole had a handshake like a pair of mole grips and a smile so false she could have stood for Parliament. 'Thank you so much for taking the time to come down and see us,' she told May, as though she had requested his attendance for an audition. Her vocal cords had been gymnastically regraded to dramatize her speech, so that her every remark emerged as a declaration. May felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle with resentment.However, I came to realize that my professional knowledge made me less, not more, suited as a reader. There was too much that was not quite right. Like so many detective writers, Fowler seems engaged in building up a cast of colorful characters, and treats the inbred nature of the theater world as license to take this even farther, creating types rather than working professionals, regular human beings. And when the story began to hint at elements of the supernatural, in the manner of Phantom of the Opera, or international conspiracies in the manner of Dan Brown, I felt Fowler was losing his best quality, the ability to keep his feet on solid ground. A little over halfway through, I suddenly asked myself, "Do I care to know who has committed these murders, or what happens to all these people?" And the answer was that I didn鈥檛, so I stopped. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Feb 09, 2018
|
Feb 11, 2018
|
Feb 07, 2018
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0062690965
| 9780062690968
| 0062690965
| 4.03
| 4,012
| Feb 06, 2018
| Feb 06, 2018
|
it was amazing
|
听 The Devil in the Mind Men fear that which is alien, that which they cannot control. Hence most are afraid of certain animals, predators, those they听 The Devil in the Mind Men fear that which is alien, that which they cannot control. Hence most are afraid of certain animals, predators, those they cannot tame. In this country that would be snakes, dingos to an extent, but mostly the wild native. It is remarkable really, to see how afraid you all are. They have become like the Devil in the minds of white men.欧宝娱乐 has you choose shelves for books you review. I am making a new one for this, Top Ten 2018 maybe; of course, it is provisional as yet, but I am pretty sure it will still be there in December. This brutal story of settlers, sharecroppers, and frontier justice on the edge of the Outback in 1880s Queensland also clearly goes on my Australia-NZ shelf鈥攊t has the sharp ring of authenticity鈥攂ut in fact it was written by a Brit who only spent six years of his life Down Under. I am also putting it on my Bildungsroman shelf, although its main action takes less than a year, because its main character, Tommy McBride, learns the moral lessons of a lifetime during the few weeks surrounding his 15th birthday. And I was considering starting another one, Good Books I Hated, but that would only apply to the first half, so instead I shall explain. The jacket blurb has it right with phrases like "the brutal realities of life," "seductive cruelty of power," "a story of savagery and race, injustice and honor," and most certainly in the comparison to Cormac McCarthy. If I did indeed have a 鈥淕ood Books I Hated" shelf, all McCarthy鈥檚 books would be on it. And this is recognizably the same world as, say, Blood Meridian, 19th-century frontier country where a thin veneer of legality provides cover for vigilante atavism. It took almost 100 pages, however, for the book to get moving; before that, it was more depressing than violent. Ned McBride farms a subsidiary holding leased from the big landowner of the region, John Sullivan. While Sullivan鈥檚 vast ranch seems to prosper in all conditions, McBride鈥檚 is hit badly by the drought, and those cattle that do not die outright can be sold only for glue. He has a wife and young daughter at home, and is assisted in the fields by two native men and his teenage sons, Billy and Tommy. At 16, Billy is eager to prove himself a man, but it is the observant, questioning Tommy who is the main focus; the heart of the book is his coming-of-age. This element does not really kick in until around page 90, when a sudden act of violence changes the entire course of the novel. Before this, I admit, I was about to write it off. Could the misery get any worse? But the tragedy opens a new dimension in which escalating violence is matched by increasing moral nuance. I was hooked. But to explain more, I have to at least hint at the nature of this pivotal event. It is not a big spoiler, but some readers may prefer not to know. (view spoiler)[The brothers return from a brief excursion to find that the farm has been brutally attacked. Evidence suggests that the culprit is a young native stockman who had been let go. Billy and Tommy call upon Sullivan for help, and now new qualities emerge. The landowner, whom we had thought of as a tyrant, now becomes quite sympathetic, and his wife is an angel of compassion. Sullivan prevails upon Inspector Edmund Noone of the Queensland Native Police to search for the presumed culprit among his tribe of nomadic aboriginals, the Kurrong. The boys had glimpsed Noone once before at the head of his band of black manhunters鈥�"naught but killers and thieves," as he himself says. But once again, we are forced to reevaluate previous impressions. Noone turns out to have a philosophical bent and not a little education. The passage I quoted at the start continues: I think they are unnecessary. Mankind has moved on. I don't suppose any of you have read Darwin, but he makes the case very well. As a race the negro has fallen so far behind the rate of human evolution that for the most part they are unsuited to the civilized world. We have seen it everywhere, the Americas, Africa, the Indies, tribes who left to their own devices have advanced little further than apes. Your native Australian is no different. Darwin saw it for himself, visited these very shores. They are a doomed species, gentlemen. Those who won't adapt or be trained will be gone by the century's end.The moral re-evaluation will continue to the end of the book. People previously thought heartless will display surprising gentleness. In others, the veneer of apparent civility will crack, revealing the latent savagery beneath. It is here that the differences between the brothers will most clearly emerge. Billy, the elder, is prepared to take appearances as reality in his eagerness to join the adult club where shared prejudices are worn as a badge of membership. Tommy, though, continues to question, and cannot help seeing the natives as people too, especially when they take as prisoner a naked young girl of about his own age. But Howarth does not leave it there, as a simple antithesis between good and evil. The pragmatic Noone recognizes the strength behind Tommy's idealism, forming a strange bond between the moral opposites that for me was the growing fascination of the novel. Yet not quite opposites: though Noone is a killer, he is neither dissolute nor unprincipled; and Tommy's innocence cannot last for ever. I have one other shelf to put this on, Mysteries, kinda. We do not know who attacked the McBride farm; the evidence is far from conclusive. At the time, it hardly seems to matter; the outrage is merely the pretext for a travesty of justice that hardly requires evidence. But as the novel reaches its dramatic end (leaving aside the rather anticlimactic epilogue), the question of responsibility becomes very important indeed. (hide spoiler)] I obtained a free copy of the book through the Amazon Vine program. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Feb 02, 2018
|
Feb 06, 2018
|
Feb 02, 2018
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 2707302562
| 9782707302564
| 2707302562
| 3.76
| 1,807
| Feb 1953
| Dec 01, 1976
|
really liked it
|
听 Nightmare Noir [image] The noir mood is familiar to anyone who has read one of the Inspector Maigret novels of Georges Simenon. The bleary-eyed proprie 听 Nightmare Noir [image] The noir mood is familiar to anyone who has read one of the Inspector Maigret novels of Georges Simenon. The bleary-eyed proprietor of a small bar in a French provincial town gets up at dawn to take the chairs from off the tables and wipe their stained marble tops; he is almost sleep-walking. Eventually, the waiter arrives, excitedly carrying the morning paper. There has been a murder in the very next street. Or has there? There seems to be some discrepancy as to the victim's name: Daniel Dupont, a reclusive professor, or Albert Dupont, a shipping merchant? Also some doubt as to whether the was killed or merely wounded. And what has become of the body? Wallas, the stranger who arrived the previous night to rent a room, may have something to do with it, but he has gone out before dawn. We see him wandering through the town in the early hours, heading down endless grey streets from the docks to the city center, but taking for ever to get there. From time to time in the book, he will go into a shop to buy an eraser, but can never find the one he wants. Time and space seem entirely fluid; characters morph from one into another; the only thing tying the story down is an obsessive cataloguing of small detail. [As I read this in French, I will give all quotations both in the originals and my own translations; open whichever version you want.] French: (view spoiler)[L'escalier se compose de vingt et un marches de bois, plus, tout en bas, une marche de pierre blanche, sensiblement plus large que les autres et dont l'extr茅mit茅 libre, arrondie, porte une colonne de cuivre aux ornamentations compliqu茅es, termin茅e en guise de pomme par une t锚te de fou coiff茅e du bonnet 脿 trois clochettes. Plus haut, la rampe massive et vernie est support茅e par des barreaux de bois tourn茅e, l茅g猫rement ventrus 脿 la base. Une bande de moquette grise, avec deux raises grenat sur les bords, recouvre l'escalier et se prolonge, dans le vestibule, jusqu'脿 la porte d'entr茅e. (hide spoiler)]This, of course, is Alain Robbe-Grillet, the screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad, writing in 1953; Les gommes (The Erasers) was his first novel, and the combination of detailed visual description and vagueness in most other respects is a hallmark of the nouveau roman, which he virtually invented. That staircase will come back in the book again and again, in different contexts, often mutually contradictory. The entire novel is a web of simple acts and shape-shifting repetitions. Robbe-Grillet takes the conventions of the policier or French detective novel and turns them on their head. You might think that the genre is a model of logical deduction, a chain of clues leading to the inevitable denouement. But this is where Robbe-Grillet goes his own way. Wallas, who turns out to be a detective, realizes that he may be investigating a murder that has not yet taken place. And where's the mystery? Quite early on, we meet the man who shot Daniel (or was it Albert?) Dupont, we meet his boss, we meet the local chief of police who does not even bother to investigate, but we do not know how all these fit together. The more solutions we find, the more the mystery deepens. The d茅j脿 vu quality begins to extend beyond the novel itself. That drunkard in a raincoat who keeps on turning up to ask meaningless riddles ("What is the animal that is black, that steals, and has six feet?"), where have we seen him before? Perhaps in Oedipus鈥�? French: (view spoiler)[Non. Le bout de canal, il l'a vu lui m锚me, et les maisons qui se refl茅tainent dans son eau tranquille, et le pont tr猫s bas qui en fermait l'entr茅e鈥� et la carcasse abandonn茅e du vieux bateau鈥�. Mais il est possible que cela se soit pass茅 un autre jour, dans un autre endroit鈥攐u bien encore dans un r锚ve. (hide spoiler)][image] My first reaction on reading this, as I said, was to look back to Georges Simenon. But almost immediately after came another one, to look forward to Patrick Modiano. Modiano was still a child, of course, when this was written, but he would surely have grown up reading noir novels as a boy, and so have been interested in Robbe-Grillet's repurposing of them when he began to think of becoming a writer himself. There is no great surprise that both authors should have chosen to write against the same tradition. What struck me is how many of the techniques of the nouveau roman Modiano also inherited. Those obsessive lists, for example: just think of Modiano's catalogs of place names, or people, or books. That wandering through the back streets of a city. That fluid sense of identity. Both authors are existential, questioning the nature of being. But while Modiano's references all point outwards to the real world鈥攕treets you can find on a map, people who actually existed, his own family history鈥擱obbe-Grillet's all turn inwards and lose themselves in the pages of his book. Which, for me, makes Modiano the greater writer. [The photographs (both of Paris, however) are by Ren茅-Jacques: Caf茅 des vents (1947) and Montmartre (1970).] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jan 23, 2018
|
Jan 27, 2018
|
Jan 23, 2018
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1846688205
| 9781846688201
| 1846688205
| 4.24
| 8,421
| 2014
| Jan 02, 2014
|
really liked it
|
So Much He Gets Right Although Adrian McKinty emigrated to the USA after graduating from Oxford, and now lives in Australia, he has never forgotten his So Much He Gets Right Although Adrian McKinty emigrated to the USA after graduating from Oxford, and now lives in Australia, he has never forgotten his Northern Ireland roots. He was born in Belfast (as I was), and grew up in Carrickfergus (the town directly across Belfast Lough from my own home, Bangor), where much of this novel is set. As his protagonist, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy, travels all over the province, McKinty is utterly precise, down to road numbers and small details; you could follow him easily on a map. And when he gets those things right, you are inclined to believe his descriptions of place and atmosphere. Much of this I know myself, from the landscape of flat green fields around Lough Neagh to the twists and cliffs of the Antrim coast road. Like him, I have seen the burnt-out cars and rubble left in Belfast streets after a bombing, so when McKinty takes me places that I would not dare to go, such as the Bogside area of Derry, I trust him absolutely. For this novel, the third apparently in the Sean Duffy series, is set in the time of the Troubles, specifically the early 1980s. This, too, is something that McKinty gets right, for the novel is closely tied to real events, such as the mass escape of prisoners from the Maze, Joe Kennedy's incendiary visit to Belfast, and the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, England. I have noted before how books about Northern Ireland tend so often to skew or simplify the conflict there, coming down clearly on the side of the Catholics or (more rarely) the Protestants. But McKinty manages this beautifully, by making his hero a Catholic policeman in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which was still at that time perceived as a predominantly Protestant force. It is clear that Duffy believes in the Republican cause, but he also knows that it must be achieved by legal means. And although a man of action, ready to get down dirty when he must, Duffy is a university man of broad tastes, as ready to listen to Mahler as Morrissey. This gives him an ironic detachment and a most attractive narrative voice, far more effective than the smartass humor more typical of the genre. The novel consists of two skins wrapped around a central mystery. The outermost one is largely back-story, telling how Duffy was railroaded by his superiors, demoted, and placed on uncomfortable assignments as an ordinary police sergeant. Early in the book, he will be forced to resign altogether, until he is approached by a different agency and recruited to track down Dermot McCann, an IRA bomber and one of the Maze escapees. Duffy grew up with McCann, so he already has a connection with his family鈥攏ot that they are about to reveal his whereabouts. This manhunt is the second layer. The third is surprising: one of his contacts agrees to help him if he will solve the death of her daughter, a case that the police have dismissed as accident but that she believes to be murder. So the middle part of the book is almost a standalone locked-room mystery, having very little to do with the Troubles at all. But it is an intriguing one, and it is a pleasure to watch Sean Duffy as he follows leads and interviews a wide variety of people, male and (memorably) female, inside the law or on the dangerous fringes of it. Rating? The more I write, the closer I come to five stars. But I can't quite get there. In both the solution to the locked-room mystery and in the final confrontation with Dermot McCann (yes, Duffy does find him), McKinty allows his hero to win by means of a sudden narrative leap that seems perfunctory after all the careful spadework that had gone before. It reminds me that this is a genre novel after all, perfect for a long plane trip or (in my case) a day in bed, but not to be examined with the finest lens. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 24, 2017
|
Dec 24, 2017
|
Dec 24, 2017
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0062645226
| 9780062645227
| 0062645226
| 3.95
| 151,307
| Oct 06, 2016
| Jun 06, 2017
|
really liked it
|
听 Meta is Better Often, before reading a book, I look at the number on the last page to see how to pace myself. Only 241? That can鈥檛 be right. The sheer 听 Meta is Better Often, before reading a book, I look at the number on the last page to see how to pace myself. Only 241? That can鈥檛 be right. The sheer heft of the thing feels much closer to 500. It will turn out that these are two books interleaved with one another, each separately paginated. Mystery solved. Anyway, I started. After a brief introduction by the book's editor, we launch into a mystery in the Agatha Christie vein, apparently the ninth in a series featuring private detective Atticus P眉nd, set in an English village in 1955. It is not bad, a clever pastiche of the genre, but without much spark. But after 200 pages or so, the mystery suddenly breaks off, and for the next 200 pages (which start again at 1) we are back with that editor, Susan Ryeland. I won't reveal the reason for this sudden switch of voice, but let's just say that Susan begins to suspect she has a real-life mystery on her hands, that curiously reflects the fictional one. So this is meta-fiction, a novel within a novel about the writing and publishing of novels. [There is also another layer: author Anthony Horowitz makes frequent reference to the television series Midsomer Murders, which he originated, and the real half of the book is set in East Suffolk, the locale of his most recent series Injustice, whose characters also include a book editor.] The concept will seem increasingly clever as more and more links between the two fictions are revealed, but I am not sure that it entirely works. I had my doubts early on, but they were crystallized when, at the very start of the modern section, I read this passage: There was nothing to drink in the house so I opened a bottle of raki that Andreas has brought back from his last trip to Crete, poured myself a glass and threw it back. It tasted like all foreign spirits do after they've passed through Heathrow. Wrong.It's nothing special, perhaps, but still fresh, witty, and true鈥攆resher than anything that had come before. To read this on the first page of Susan Ryeland's section was to make me aware of the comparative staleness of the "Alan Conway" novel that preceded it. Not surprising, since this is a made-up author writing a Christie pastiche. But it is a definite problem for the real author, Horowitz, if he expects his readers to get involved in his fake murder mystery for 200+ pages before he plunges them into a real one. [In all honesty, however, I note that most GR readers do not share my reaction.] Oh, he is skilled enough at it. He begins the book with a funeral in the fictional Somerset village of Saxby-on-Avon, using it as an opportunity to introduce a large number of characters. There is Mary Blakiston, the deceased, a busybody and housekeeper at the big house, owned by Sir Magnus and Lady Pye, who are away on the Riviera. There is Sir Magnus' sister, Clarissa, who never goes anywhere, and Brent, the groundsman at Pye Hall. And in rapid succession, there are Mary Blakiston's son Robert and his fianc茅e Joy Sanderling; Robin and Henrietta Osborne, the vicar and his wife; Emilia Redwing, the village doctor, and her artist husband Arthur; Johnny and Gemma Whitehead, the antique dealers; and Jeremy Weaver, whose role now escapes me. If this list sounds confusing, I mean it to be; it is very much a part of the genre. When there a second death, this time clearly murder, one character remarks to the detective: "The fact is that half the village will have been glad to see him dead and if you're looking for suspects, well, they might as well form a line." Horowitz is primarily a screenwriter; the confusion of characters is not a problem with actors to bring them to life, but they are less clearly distinguished on the page. Fatally, this is also the case with the central figure of the detective. Christie's Hercule Poirot may be a conceited caricature, but he has a distinctive voice and manner; you never forget he is in the room. Conway's Atticus P眉nd is also a foreign 茅尘颈驳谤茅, German rather than Belgian, a Jew who has survived the Holocaust. Though an interesting back-story, it is far too loaded for the convention, and it makes it very difficult to believe that, a mere ten years after the War, he could have become the most famous detective in England. It is even harder to believe that the nine novels in the Atticus P眉nd series could have earned its author millions. Not only is the name hard to pronounce (though there is a reason for that, as Susan will discover), but he has no charisma, no presence, no voice of his own. Time and again, when P眉nd, his assistant, and the obligatory police detective were present together at a scene, I found myself having to look carefully to check who was speaking. This would never have happened with Poirot. Clever though Anthony Horowitz's meta-fictional idea is, his writing only comes alive in the second half. In this case, meta is better! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 19, 2017
|
Dec 21, 2017
|
Dec 19, 2017
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 159308322X
| 9781593083229
| 159308322X
| 3.91
| 96,379
| Jul 1868
| Aug 01, 2005
|
really liked it
|
More Interesting for Plot than People Published in 1868, The Moonstone outsold Great Expectations. Yet Dickens is universally acknowledged the greater More Interesting for Plot than People Published in 1868, The Moonstone outsold Great Expectations. Yet Dickens is universally acknowledged the greater author today, and I鈥檇 assumed that Wilkie Collins was now just a literary footnote, notable as author of the first detective story, but scarcely worth reading for his own sake. The other day, however, I bragged to a friend that I was reading The Moonstone, but instead of congratulations all I got was: 鈥淵ou surely mean re-reading it鈥�? Ouch! [image] The essence of the story is simple enough. A British officer steals a sacred diamond from an Indian idol. Years later, in accordance with his will, it is presented to a young lady, Rachel Verinder, on her eighteenth birthday. And the same night, it mysteriously disappears. Who is responsible? One of the house guests at the birthday party, or the three Brahmans who mysteriously appear, disguised as traveling jugglers? Fortunately, the Indians mainly lurk as a background threat, keeping the main focus on the English characters, both above and below stairs. And when the theft is followed by a suicide, more robberies, and a murder, the mysteries deepen and proliferate. [image] The novel is remarkable for its structure, being told in separate but linked narratives involving eleven different voices. Some of these are only a page or two; the longest, which covers everything from the preparations for the birthday through the failure of the first investigation, is 200 pages. The delight of this method is that it introduces us to a series of unreliable narrators who reveal as much about themselves as the story they are telling. For example, the narrator of that longest part, the old steward in the Verinder household, Gabriel Betteredge. He has already made one false start; here he is reluctantly acknowledging another: I am asked to tell the story of the Diamond, and, instead of that, I have been telling the story of my own self. Curious, and quite beyond me to account for. I wonder whether the gentlemen who make a business and living out of writing books, ever find their own selves getting in the way of their subjects, like me? If they do, I can feel for them. In the meantime, here is another false start, and more waste of good writing-paper. What's to be done now? Nothing that I know of, except for you to keep your temper, and for me to begin it all over again for the third time.But amusing though he is, the amiable fuddy-duddy outstays his welcome. We are glad when the great detective from Scotland Yard, Sergeant Cuff (why only a sergeant?) arrives on the scene and dismisses the local man; even though his voice is filtered through Betteredge, he is still a fascinating character who deserves his place as the first of the great detectives in fiction. [image] The second part of the novel, which picks up the mystery after the interval of a year, is more interesting. This is partly because it moves faster, and partly because it involves many more narrators. The first of these, an impoverished spinster relation of the Verinders called Drusilla Clack, is a small comic masterpiece. Collins mercilessly parodies her evangelism, which makes her delusional about her own motivations and tone-deaf to the needs of others. As in this scene when her aunt, seeking comfort, has just told her that she is seriously ill: Here was a career of usefulness opened before me! 摆鈥 I took my aunt in my arms鈥攎y overflowing tenderness was not to be satisfied, now, with anything less than an embrace. "Oh!" I said to her, fervently, "the indescribable interest with which you inspire me! Oh! the good I mean to do you, dear, before we part!" After another word or two of earnest prefatory warning, I gave her the choice of three precious friends, all plying the work of mercy from morning to night in her own neighbourhood; all equally inexhaustible in exhortation; all affectionately ready to exercise their gifts at a word from me. Alas! the result was far from encouraging. 摆鈥How fair is it to judge The Moonstone by the later standards of the genre to which it gave rise? Not much, probably, yet it is hard not to do so. By those standards, Collins is guilty more than once of coloring outside the lines. He introduces a significant new character three-quarters of the way through. An important plot point is resolved through an implausible experiment involving psychology and drugs. Too many new facts are revealed only the last few dozen pages, without the benefit of real detection. And once more there will be recourse to those hovering Brahmans, although there is quite a poetic symmetry to the way Collins handles them. [image] But the real reason why I give this four stars rather than five is that Collins lacks the essential novelist鈥檚 ability to get us to care about his characters. His skill at sketching the foibles of his narrators does not extend to his protagonists. Rachel Verinder, for example, has two suitors (both her cousins), Franklin Blake and Godfrey Ablewhite. We are clearly expected to rejoice or despair at the progress or setbacks of both these romances. But Rachel, despite others鈥� praise of her, seems petty, spoiled, and willful. And, though for different reasons, neither Franklin nor Godfrey comes across as admirable, or even particularly interesting. Think how quickly Dickens can get you to fall for his heroines and feel for his heroes. If The Moonstone indeed outsold Great Expectations, it can only have been for its unusual plot. In his ability to fill a novel with interesting and lovable people, Dickens had Collins beat. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 20, 2017
|
Oct 31, 2017
|
Oct 22, 2017
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0143110519
| 9780143110514
| 0143110519
| 3.68
| 9,015
| Jan 07, 2016
| Aug 30, 2016
|
it was ok
|
A Truly Horrible Book If you like Hermann Koch, his Summer House With Swimming Pool as well as The Dinner, you might possibly be able to stomach th A Truly Horrible Book If you like Hermann Koch, his Summer House With Swimming Pool as well as The Dinner, you might possibly be able to stomach this way-overlong wallow in the immorality of the super-rich. But be warned, that sure instinct for pacing that fueled Alex Marwood's debut mystery, The Wicked Girls, is almost entirely absent here. It's barely even a mystery. And without the excitement of the chase to keep you going, there's not much point. It begins as a mystery, though, with a number of witness statements relating to the disappearance of Coco Jackson, one of the three-year-old twin daughters of millionaire developer Sean Jackson, who was celebrating his fiftieth birthday with his second wife and three other society couples, two of whom have brought their own kids for the weekend. [I would advise jotting down a cast list at this point, as the interrelationship of the various families and their children is hard to take in, but will become important.] But no time is spent on the inconclusive police investigation of Coco's disappearance. Instead, the action jumps ahead a decade. Sean Jackson has died, and most of the same people reconvene at his latest country mansion for his funeral. Chapters describing this second weekend鈥攁 reunion from hell鈥攁lternate with an almost hour-by-hour reconstruction of the orgy of indulgence ten years earlier. This is almost a 400 page book, and it is not until page 250 that an actual clue turns up to suggest that the secret of Coco's disappearance may lie among the members of the original house party. Of course, we have guessed as much, and been reading with antennae tuned to evil all along. No lack of candidates; with one partial exception, this is just about the most repellent group of people one could possibly imagine. Instead of the thrill of detection, we get the sensation of being sucked into a swamp of adultery, drunkenness, drug use, misogyny, and mindless excess. And when Marwood does reveal what happened to Coco, we still have 100 pages to go. As a mystery, it seems hardly worthwhile reading on; and as a further exercise in deceit and degradation, really who cares? True, she does add a twist or two before the end. But the last of these, a particularly vicious little kink involving the one character who seemed totally unbelievable from the start, was enough to slam my rating from three-point-something right down to two stars. So why not one star or none? Because, although I did not wholly like any of the characters, there was some satisfaction in seeing the woman who had been presented as the bitch of the piece at the beginning gradually emerge in a sympathetic light. And Camilla Jackson, Coco's older half-sister, who becomes the narrator of the modern chapters, is pretty much a mess, but how could she not be? But I was sympathetic to the growing bond between her and Coco's surviving twin, Ruby. And such interest as I had came from seeing her as the "detective," gradually coming closer to the truth. Which made it the final insult, in defiance of all mystery conventions, that she (Ruby) should end the book palmed off with yet another lie, and that the last disgusting revelation should be given to the reader alone. Or perhaps I just miss Poirot addressing the assembled characters, elucidating the mystery, and handing the culprit over to justice? No justice here, and still less light. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 13, 2017
|
Aug 14, 2017
|
Aug 14, 2017
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0571275168
| 9780571275168
| 0571275168
| 3.83
| 4,450
| May 2011
| Jan 01, 2011
|
really liked it
|
Of Detail and Delusion Jane Harris' narrator, Harriet Baxter, is an old woman writing in 1933 about events that took place in Glasgow in 1888, when in Of Detail and Delusion Jane Harris' narrator, Harriet Baxter, is an old woman writing in 1933 about events that took place in Glasgow in 1888, when in her mid-thirties she became friends with the rising painter Ned Gillespie and his family. Harris has the voice down perfectly, the expansive late Victorian style that reports every detail and (apparently) every nuance of feeling. She is an attractive protagonist, with a nice touch of humor and less maiden modesty than one might imagine. But she does go on, at Jamesian length and more; my only problem with this novel is that, at 504 pages, it is about 150 pages too long. It was especially interesting to me for personal reasons, for when Harriet moves to Glasgow to attend the International Exhibition, she finds rooms in a part of the city where I myself lived as a young man; her depth of factual detail is extraordinary, even down to the addition of genuine period street maps. She also uses words that I have not heard in years, such as "outwith" (for "outside of") and those wonderful archaic terms of the Scottish legal system. For, as Harriet makes clear early on, her originally charming story will eventually turn tragic and climax in a criminal trial sensational enough to feature in books published many decades later. We will learn more about both these things in time, but for now we have to wait for them. Harriet had met Ned Gillespie briefly in an exhibition in London. Four months later, by sheer chance, she rescues a lady from choking in a Glasgow street who turns out to be the artist's mother. She is invited round to tea, and soon comes to see more of the family: Ned, his wife Annie (also an artist), his two young daughters, his sister and brother, and of course the mother, Elspeth, a determinedly "raffeened" woman with an active involvement in Christian charity. Harriet herself is helpful, generous, and moderately well-off, so she soon becomes a godsend to this family whose lives are more of a struggle. Before long, one wonders if she is not becoming too ubiquitous as a friend, like a guest who will not depart, though the Gillespies always treat her with respect. But how should WE treat Harriet? Her brief accounts of incidents in her life in 1933, while she is writing this memoir, and especially her troubles with her live-in housekeeper-companion, suggest that she may be emotionally self-deluding. As events unfold up there in Scotland, we will find ourselves in the extraordinary position of not knowing quite what to believe; she is true in detail, but perhaps less so in matters of feeling. The climactic trial scenes, where various versions of truth will contend with one another, are superb. Perhaps they are only possible because of the leisurely way Harriet had drawn us (again apparently) into her mind earlier. As the book has grown in my mind over the past two weeks, I see the author has planted all sorts of seeds that may or may not germinate later鈥攁 fascinating technique that perhaps justifies the book's length after all. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 2013
|
Aug 05, 2013
|
Aug 10, 2017
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| B00J1JVJ5Q
| 3.80
| 4,960
| Jul 01, 2014
| Jul 01, 2014
|
it was amazing
|
听 A Maigret Mystery 鈥� and a literary one 听听听听It was an evening like any other at the Restaurant de la Cloche. Behind the counter, the proprietor, Pasteu听 A Maigret Mystery 鈥� and a literary one 听听听听It was an evening like any other at the Restaurant de la Cloche. Behind the counter, the proprietor, Pasteur, had poured himself a pastis, an indication that no more meals would be served and that any further service would be provided by his wife, Marie, and the waitress Ad猫le. It was nine o'clock.This is the opening of Graeme Macrae Burnet's 2013 debut novel. Skip the title page and start right in with the passage above. Sound familiar? Provincial French bar, the regulars at their respective tables, the taciturn proprietor, evening passing into night. The noir atmosphere could be the start of a Georges Simenon novel, whether a mystery featuring Inspector Maigret, or one of his gritty psychological novels, the so-called romans durs. In fact, it is a mixture of both. Not only does Macrae Burnet clearly intend an hommage to the French writer, but his two principal characters, the bank manager Manfred Baumann and Detective Inspector Georges Gorski, both have Simenon soundtracks running through their heads. This being a mystery novel, there is little more I should say about the plot itself. In fact, it soon turns out that there are three possible crimes: present, past, and future. The present case is the unexplained disappearance of the restaurant waitress, Ad猫le, which Gorski soon begins to treat as a murder. The past one is the murder of a teenage girl twenty years ago, when Gorski was just beginning his career. And the possible future crime involves another youngish woman in a situation that begins to look increasingly perilous. The reader soon realizes that Manfred Baumann might be involved in all three; the mystery is not in the facts, but how the three time-frames intertwine, and especially what is going on in the minds of the two protagonists. Gorski, whose childhood reading of Maigret led him to become a cop, remains haunted by his failure in the earlier case. Baumann, an awkward loner, over-imagines what people think of him, and shapes his answers to Gorski's questions as though he were a character in crime fiction rather than an honest citizen simply telling what he knows. From the midway point on, I found it impossible to put the novel down, not so much that I wanted to know the solution to some mystery, but because I felt tangled in an incipient tragedy that I was powerless to avert. Highly recommended. + + + + + + [image] Graeme Macrae Burnet But there is another mystery here, of a different kind. Look at that title page: The DisappearanceWhat? And more particularly, Why? If you think about it, Raymond Brunet is a pretty obvious pseudonym for Macrae Burnet. But he goes much further. His "Translator's Afterword" is a four-page biography of the supposed author, whose life has much in common with that of Manfred Baumann in the novel. He is supposed to have lived in the town where the novel is set, Saint-Louis, a real community on the Rhine, facing the border with Germany and Switzerland on the opposite bank, and depicted in absolute detail in the novel; you can even follow the characters' movements with a street plan. But there is even more. Macrae Burnet says that "Brunet's" book, after its inauspicious French publication in 1982, achieved the status of a cult classic with the success of the screen version by Claude Chabrol in 1989. And, , you can even find a 90-second trailer for this movie, starring Isabel Adjani and Sam Neill. It is totally convincing, but neither Chabrol's filmography nor those of any of the actors supposedly involved list it. The film simply does not exist! [image] Screen shots from the movie trailer So I ask again, why go to all this trouble? One of the things I most appreciated about his Man-Booker shortlisted second novel, His Bloody Project (2016) was that you could not be quite sure whether it was fact or fiction. Purportedly about a murder by a mid-19th-century Macrae ancestor, the book consists of a personal diary and various legal documents that appear totally authentic; only with difficulty did I conjecture that they were all made up. But this earlier novel is clearly fiction, so why pretend it is not his own? I think for the sake of authenticity. Rather than have readers ask who is this 21st-century Scot to think he can turn his hand to classic French noir, he invents a French author of the period to do the job for him, and backs it up with every grain of authenticity he can muster. It is an astonishing performance, but really only a footnote to the book itself. And that, I am glad to say, is fully good enough to stand on its own. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 08, 2017
|
Aug 10, 2017
|
Aug 07, 2017
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0007413734
| 9780007413720
| 0007413734
| 3.79
| 4,370
| Jun 04, 2017
| Jul 04, 2017
|
liked it
|
听 Implausible construction, but all-too-plausible core Literary fiction this ain't鈥攂ut you don't buy it for that, do you? It is a fast-moving political 听 Implausible construction, but all-too-plausible core Literary fiction this ain't鈥攂ut you don't buy it for that, do you? It is a fast-moving political thriller, incredibly up-to-the-minute; once you have accepted its many, many implausibilities, it delivers, and then some. The subject is not a new one: a plot to assassinate the President of the United States. But not just any President. Although this incumbent is never named, it is all too clearly Donald Trump, in detail after detail. For instance, the same commercial empire, the same surprise election, the same xenophobia, the same misogyny, the same addiction to tweets. Here are two of them: Black caucus attacking me over Forty Acres. Too much white guilt over 'slavery'! Nobody really knows what happened.And when a white suprematist tweets back "Kudos to you for saying it, Mr. President," he responds: Americans want to have this debate. The lying press want to shut it down. Too late!"Sam Bourne" (this is the pen name of Jonathan Freedland, Washington correspondent for the Guardian) clearly has the style down pat. He catches the "post-truth presidency" in every detail. He must have a lightning pen to have captured so much, not just from campaign rhetoric, but from how it has actually turned out in the first months of 2017, and still to have published his novel in Britain by midsummer. I don't know if it will鈥攐r can鈥攂e published here in the US. While it certainly is no recipe book for presidential assassination (although some of the technical stuff is as fascinating as Day of the Jackal ), it is nonetheless a divisive subject that would stir the ire of the Trump base. For this reason, Bourne has to make the assassination about something more than political disagreement or personal dislike. So he opens with a nightmare 3:20 AM scenario in which the President, infuriated by something he has seen on a recorded TV program, storms into the Situation Room and gives the order for a nuclear attack on North Korea (another piece of prescience on Bourne's part), and while he is at it, China as well. The action is averted by some quick-thinking at the Pentagon, but all involved know that this could happen again. And we are only on page 8! I am writing this review at the three-quarter mark, because I fear that once I know how it turns out, it will be impossible to avoid spoilers. But I am fascinated by Bourne's dilemma. Clearly (I think), he cannot publish a book ending in the successful killing of Donald Trump. But equally clearly, his fictional avatar has demonstrated impulsive behavior that could unleash global annihilation unless he is stopped. I don't yet know how Bourne will resolve this. But one of his strategies is to build the story in layers. There are the conscientious officials who believe that assassination is necessary for the good of the country. There is the novel's heroine, a White House trouble-shooter implausibly held over from the previous administration (and an Irish national yet!), who stumbles on the plot and is conscience-torn about whether to stop it. There is a radical faction within the White House, headed by a Steve Bannon lookalike, which seems to have its own agenda. And there are a series of mysterious murders around the world which suggest the presence of a different set of evildoers entirely, acting on motives yet to be revealed. I don't know how it will turn out. But I do know that a book that I had fully expected to pan as opportunistic exploitation has become almost impossible to put down. Despite its many implausibilities, this is because of Bourne's fascinating attention to detail, the uncanny accuracy of his portrayal of the quasi-Trump regime, and his skill in taking an almost impossible assignment and still keeping this reader on the edge of his seat. + + + + + + POSTSCRIPT. Uh-oh, I spoke too soon. By around page 300, I had been prepared to give this four stars. But in the last hundred pages, Bourne changes style completely. Gone is the tense build-up, gone the nail-biting action sequences, gone the meticulous detail of plans and preparation. In their place, talking and more talking, threats and counter-threats. And a lot more politics. However true to its unacknowledged subject, when the depiction of demagoguery becomes too excessive, it loses its effect and becomes almost nauseous. Still, Bourne does find a neat way out of his dilemma, and there is a minor but nice twist at the very end that I found rather fun. So 2.5 stars, upgraded to three. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 23, 2017
|
Jul 24, 2017
|
Jul 06, 2017
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0297847791
| 9780297847793
| 0297847791
| 3.77
| 5,431
| Aug 20, 2003
| Jan 01, 2005
|
it was amazing
|
听 Four Deaths Among So Many [NOTE: I read this in French. This review, from 2010, was posted under the English translation by Hoyt Rogers, under the tit 听 Four Deaths Among So Many [NOTE: I read this in French. This review, from 2010, was posted under the English translation by Hoyt Rogers, under the title By a Slow River, which I compared online. The translator of this version is Adriana Hunter; I have not been able to compare the two, but am told that they are rather different in style: Rogers' American as opposed to Hunter's British English.] This 2003 novel by the author of the recent Brodeck is set in a small town in Lorraine during WW1. Although the line of battle never touches it, it is close enough to the front for the fighting to be visible from a ridge near the town, and the dead and wounded from the trenches are brought to its hospital and morgue. But among so many men killed on both sides, the death that most closely affects the townsfolk is the murder of a 10-year-old girl, Belle de Jour, the pretty daughter of a neighboring innkeeper. What begins as a straightforward police story*, somewhat in the manner of Georges Simenon at his most austere, turns instead into a penetrating examination of the shadowy moral territory in which most of us lead our lives, where nothing is either all black or all white鈥攈ence the original French title: Les 芒mes grises. The original is written in a difficult French, full of colloquialisms and unusual words. I would have thought it almost untranslatable, but from what I can see online, translator Hoyt Rogers makes a brave attempt here. The language and syntax are integral to the heavy and brooding atmosphere that Claudel creates. It is fascinating how he gradually reveals his information, moving backwards and forwards in time over a span of about fifty years, "calling forth shadows," in the words of the nameless narrator. Synopses may tell you (possibly incorrectly) who this person is, but Claudel waits over 100 pages before revealing it, and the facts of his own emotional life do not fully emerge until the very end of the book. We will learn, for instance, that Belle de Jour, although the sole murder victim, is only one among four women whose deaths are important to the story. We find out about the others later, much later, when they have room to resonate as feelings rather than facts, as people who have been loved and whose loss changes those who loved them. Reading a description of this book shortly after finishing the magnificent Brodeck, I feared that Claudel might merely be recycling a few favorite themes. Both books take place in wartime (Brodeck spans WW2 and its aftermath). Both are set in isolated villages in Northern France, whose petty local hierarchies are mercilessly laid bare. Both are first-person accounts by lonely men suffering a personal loss. But they are totally different in effect. Whereas Brodeck turned outward, using the village to cast light on the mentality of the Holocaust, Grey Souls turns its back on the war to probe the innermost recesses of the soul. What it lays bare is much more than solving the murder of Belle de Jour. It poses the question of why this one death, or four, should matter among the slaughter of so many. The answers come only at the end, not as a simple whodunnit (there are at least two plausible solutions), but as a matter of understanding and even sympathy. But with those answers come other questions鈥攎oral questions, and deeply disturbing. Neither black nor white, but grey鈥攁 color that turns out not to be colorless at all, but complex and surprisingly satisfying. + + + + + + * Although this is not really the police procedural story that it appears to be at first, the legal procedures might seem strange to American eyes. I believe that the judge here, Mierck, is not merely the trial judge that he would be in the Anglo-American system, but what the French call a juge d'instruction, who actually takes part in the investigation in capital cases, going out into the field to interview witnesses and suspects. The situation is further complicated here by the fact that, in wartime and so close to the front, Mierck's legal duties are partially superseded by the local military authority, represented here by Colonel Matziev. The role of Destinat as Prosecutor may seem similarly ambiguous鈥攁s indeed is the distinction between policiers and gendarmes among the foot-soldiers of the law. I recommend Googling the French legal system (for instance under "inquisitorial system"), or just going with the flow! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 03, 2010
|
Oct 06, 2010
|
Jul 04, 2017
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0141186798
| 9780141186795
| 0141186798
| 3.82
| 11
| unknown
| Nov 01, 2001
|
really liked it
|
Far From Parochial I must have read some of the Father Brown stories in my youth, but now know of the character mainly through the British television s Far From Parochial I must have read some of the Father Brown stories in my youth, but now know of the character mainly through the British television series starring Mark Williams. Despite the actor's skill in capturing something of the essence of Chesterton's modest yet perceptive priest, the programs annoyed me by setting him in the middle of a vapid situation comedy and, worse, making him the parish priest of an English village (complete with Lady of the Manor), as though there had never been a Reformation, and English society was still Catholic. Coming upon this Penguin anthology, I wanted to see what Chesterton himself did when he began the series in 1910. Reading the originals reveals the adaptation as sheer travesty. In none of the eleven stories collected here do we see Father Brown as a parish priest, even in his own community. He is presented as a reticent figure who crops up in incongruous situations, often without anybody quite knowing why he is there. And it is striking how varied these settings are. Yes, one of them鈥攖he famous "Hammer of God"鈥攊s the parish church of an English village, but the vicar is the brother of the licentious squire, and very much an Anglican. Other settings include a boat train, a walled garden, an exclusive hotel, a Scottish moor, and a haunted castle in Cornwall. I had not realized how much Chesterton owes to Edgar Allan Poe in the Gothic ambience of his stories; his verbal mastery of the style, as in this opening paragraph from "The Honour of Israel Gow," is superb: A stormy evening of olive and silver was closing in, as Father Brown, wrapped in a grey Scotch plaid, came to the end of a grey Scotch valley and beheld the strange castle of Glengyle. It stopped one end of the glen or hollow like a blind alley; and it looked like the end of the world. Rising in steep roofs and spires of seagreen slate in the manner of the old French-Scottish ch芒teaux, it reminded an Englishman of the sinister steeple-hats of witches in fairy tales; and the pine woods that rocked round the green turrets looked, by comparison, as black as numberless flocks of ravens. This note of a dreamy, almost a sleepy devilry, was no mere fancy from the landscape. For there did rest on the place one of those clouds of pride and madness and mysterious sorrow which lie more heavily on the noble houses of Scotland than on any other of the children of men. For Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, and the sense of doom in the Calvinist.What do I like most about Father Brown? His ability to emerge from the shadows with the one modest observation that will reveal the case in a new light. The fact that these observations are based as much on his knowledge of mankind from the confessional as on more physical clues. And his spiritual insight, which sees questions of guilt and innocence in theological rather than legal terms, occasionally more terrible than the written law, but generally with a touching gentleness of understanding. These characteristics make him the opposite of a Sherlock Holmes, who strides in and takes charge. Father Brown is rarely the leading sleuth in a case, but rather the bystander who offers suggestions from the sidelines. As a result, he is seldom the hero of his own stories, and often most of the narration is carried by others. In the first half-dozen stories here, the balance is nonetheless right. But the last few rather disappointed me. For at the same time as Chesterton is moving to ever more fantastic settings鈥攂rigands in the Italian mountains, warring factions in Brazil, convicts in a Chicago prison鈥攈e also tends to sideline his title character more and more. A pity. Perhaps we need a little more of that English parish after all? ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 14, 2017
|
Jun 17, 2017
|
Jun 18, 2017
|
Paperback
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 3.93
|
liked it
|
Jul 23, 2018
|
Jul 16, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 3.76
|
really liked it
|
Jun 18, 2018
|
Jun 07, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 3.53
|
really liked it
|
Oct 27, 2018
|
May 16, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 3.85
|
liked it
|
May 28, 2018
|
May 16, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 3.46
|
really liked it
|
May 23, 2018
|
May 16, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 4.19
|
really liked it
|
May 10, 2018
|
May 04, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 3.28
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 27, 2018
|
Apr 24, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 4.01
|
it was ok
|
Mar 25, 2018
|
Mar 30, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 3.70
|
liked it
|
Feb 11, 2018
|
Feb 07, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 4.03
|
it was amazing
|
Feb 06, 2018
|
Feb 02, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 3.76
|
really liked it
|
Jan 27, 2018
|
Jan 23, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 4.24
|
really liked it
|
Dec 24, 2017
|
Dec 24, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.95
|
really liked it
|
Dec 21, 2017
|
Dec 19, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.91
|
really liked it
|
Oct 31, 2017
|
Oct 22, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.68
|
it was ok
|
Aug 14, 2017
|
Aug 14, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.83
|
really liked it
|
Aug 05, 2013
|
Aug 10, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.80
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 10, 2017
|
Aug 07, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.79
|
liked it
|
Jul 24, 2017
|
Jul 06, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.77
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 06, 2010
|
Jul 04, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.82
|
really liked it
|
Jun 17, 2017
|
Jun 18, 2017
|
Loading...
