Book Reviews

Book #12 Started Early, Took My Dog

March 11, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

The first time I read a Kate Atkinson book, it was because Max, having heard a review of it on the radio, bought me Behind the Scenes at the Museum. It remains one of my all time favourite books. After that came another couple by her, neither of which caught me enough to read them again (although now, I wonder if I was just a bit young, I might try them again) and then she moved on to her Jackson Brodie series.

Jackson is a private detective; he’s a decently good one too, without being a Poirot style, wrap it all up character. Bits of story trail through the books so that you can never be entirely sure that something, or someone, is finished with – unless they are dead. Which does, admittedly, happen a fair bit. Even to Jackson. Set in the UK, mostly in the north, they are the definition of gritty and it is hard to imagine Jackson having a day that is light hearted and in bright sunlight. He’s always up against it – and it is usually raining.

It is impossible not to like Jackson. He’s remained endearingly the same throughout the series, while also changing as his experiences go from the bizarre to the slightly insane and surreal. He’s recognisable from the first book, certainly, and the cast of characters surrounding him fleshes him out enough that I always feel he could potentially just turn up at my house and I’d find myself asking about his daughter and ex-wife.

Kate Atkinson has a great style; it’s neat, funny in a razor at your throat for a joke sort of way and reads as if she is speaking. Phrases drop in and out of it like afterthoughts but they are beautifully placed so that reading her work is pacey but a delight. I’d kill to write like she does, to be quite honest.

Started Early, Took My Dog is certainly more out of the same mould; it’s a good story and perhaps more than ever it has a huge sense of who Jackson Brodie is. He’s at a cross roads in his life, brought to a particular place by circumstances that have left him rootless and bemused and it shows. His detective work is less clinical than previously and you sense that he’s a man with much on his mind who happens to get answers by luck and experience as much as by cunning. The strength of the book is in fact in the characterisation of some of the other people, Tracy and Tilly in particular. You really get to know them even though, in some respects, they are almost incidental to the plot. Tilly in particular is the most extra-ordinary characterisation of an elderly woman plummeting fast into dementia. She’s beautifully drawn despite having just two moments where the plot actually pivots on her at all. Tracy, well, I sense she has more to tell us yet.

There were aspects of this I found less perfect. For the first time, Atkinson seemed determined to place the novel in time, with lots of references to the current financial crisis (I’m sensing she’s angry!) and recent programmes like Life on Mars. It made me wonder how well it will age, in some respects. Some of the cast, a nondescript bunch of thuggish policemen, were hard to grasp and separate – this may have been deliberate, as a device it would certainly work, but their identities were important at various parts and I struggled to keep hold of who was doing what.

A solid 8/10, maybe even close to 9. I’d read it again, I’d happily recommend it, I read it on my Kindle but it could well end p on my bookcase too.

For BabyLostMamas – this is a bad one; there is a mother mourning her baby, a host of lost/gone/missing children and babies, grief and emptiness, abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth and even a little white coffin being carried in loving arms. So err… you know…

Book Review #11 Everyman's Guide to Scientific Living

March 5, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living

I picked this up in the library, based on not an awful lot more than the cover (which I would love to show you but I can’t make Amazon do iframes on this blog… I’m calling for IT support!) and on the basis of it having a “Short listed for the Orange Prize” sticker on the spine. These are two commendable reasons for real books and libraries any way. Since it had the prettiest cover, I read it first out of my pile of ‘real books for this month’ and I think it is probably a good job I did, since it rates pretty high on the BabyLostMothers index 😥

The story in a nutshell is of pre WW2 Australia and of trying to carve out a farmers existence in the bush and the wide open spaces. That is the backdrop to the story; what it is really about is the inadequacies of relationships that are not built on anything real, the inevitability of lack of communication and the truths of people who are obsessive – small people trying to work miracles and how alone and lonely that is.

The main character is female and she tells the story with a reservation and quietness that reminded me of some other book – I’m not sure which. I think it is true this book reminded me of A Town Like Alice but I couldn’t say if it were setting or tone or time period that made that happen. Some of each perhaps. It tells the story of her marriage to a man obsessed with the science of chemicals and of farming by numbers not feel and of what happens to their community when he helps the farmers around him to apply his mantras to their lives.

The whole book is infused with a melancholy that is more infectious than was good for me; there is a hopeless determination about Robert and a quiet, passive, reflective air about his wife, Jean. It is a gentle book but that belies a real brutalness to the subject matter. It more than adequately gives a snapshot of a time and place that takes no prisoners. It is less a story than a chance to take a deep breath and sniff the flavour of a moment and a place in time.

From my point of view it touched more than a few nerves; I live in a house where we are divided into head and heart with little compromise – or at least only a learned compromise – and this story was an illustration to me of where we might have gone without the learning. It is about one person who will reduce everything to numbers and another who will try to accommodate that perhaps beyond the point where speaking might have been sensible. By the time she does speak everything about them is, quite literally, dust. The sense of hopelessness is hard to shake off.

I’d give this a 7/10. I liked it, but it made me sad; I’d recommend it but I wouldn’t go back to it. I ‘would’ go back to the author though and I loved that it really had some innovative touches, not least a series of photographs through the novel that I can well believe were the inspiration for the book.

For the BabyLost – you’d be needing to be strong, I’d say. Lots of babies, birth, stillbirth and dying babies. Not for the faint hearted.

Book #10 Wedlock: How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met His Match

March 3, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

You can sum this story up in one phrase: “What a rotter!”

If you want a 400 page documentary on why you are lucky not to live in Georgian times, then Wedlock: How Georgian Britain’s Worst Husband Met His Match is probably it. You’d have to be having a bad life indeed not to feel you got off lightly compared to Mary Eleanor Bowes.

Wedlock is a factual account of the life of the Countess of Strathmore, ancestor of our ‘Queen Mother’ – the Strathmore surname was Lyon and subsequent generations amalgamated the two names, for reasons which become apparent during the book. A woman of quite extraordinary wealth, and apparently either a slight lack of foresight or a very gullible nature, it tells the story of her two marriages, starting with the moment (between the two) of a dramatic duel in her honour and then exploring both her life up to that point and her life afterwards. Despite not being fiction (which I didn’t realise when I started!) the book is engagingly told and contains enough drama, information and salacious detail to rival most stories. Wedlock is as much about the time as the people and the exploration of the changing role of women, their legal status and the way in which Georgian law and society was operating and altering during the late 1700’s. In fact, this is the great strength of the book for me, as some elements of the narrative left me a little cold at times.

The bulk of Wedlock regards her marriage to Andrew Robinson Stoney and it gives no more away than the title does to say he is something of a cad and a bounder! This book was my library reading groups choice after Washington Square but Stoney leave the villain of that piece standing! He is sadistic, vile, manipulative and abusive who really out villains the very worst of fiction. I’d go as far as to say I might have abandoned the book as being unlikely had it been a story rather than history.

The best of this book was certainly the insight into the times. For me, the least appealing aspect was the endless focusing on his cruelty and violence and I did eventually begin to feel I was reading one of those endless “my mother locked me in a cupboard for 18 years ” books. Just as I was beginning to consider giving up though, the plot move on t the conclusion, which was a relief as I thought the endless catalogue of domestic violence was a little overplayed.

For a Kindle reader, the narrative itself stops at 75% (just in case you start to lose the will to live!) and the remainder is footnotes. This type of book perhaps lends itself less well to a Kindle as flipping to the footnotes is not really an option in the same way you can with a paperback. I enjoy being able to do this with historical books and I didn’t bother to look at the sources etc with Wedlock in the way I would have done had I read it conventionally.

My favourite bit? Discovering that the expression “Stoney broke” is attributed to this unpleasant character’s tendency to be in debt and out of cash.

For the babylost? Mild to moderate; there is significant birthing of babies, in a non graphic way, considerable discussion of abortion the 1700’s way and she is separated from her children for many years. But I coped fine with it.

For me – of course virtually every date quoted was either my birthday, or the 2nd, 13th or 28th April! I don’t think I would read it again, but I would certainly recommend it and it whet my appetite for more fiction from that era in a way that nothing else particularly has.

7/10 an interesting read.

Book #9 The Observations by Jane Harris

February 19, 2011 by Merry 2 Comments

Wow.

My first real riveting read of the year; the first book to make me just want to keep going until it was finished, with as few interruptions as possible. The Observations is the type of book which makes you race to reserve their whole catalogue – I was gutted to discover it is her only novel, but I savoured it all the more for it.

The story is told by Bessy, Irish girl with a murky past and a smutty turn of phrase. She’s young and we join her on the run from a past life, already clearly a young lady who knows how to handle herself. The book is set in the late 1800’s in the north of England, an Irish girl on the run from a shaky upbringing in the slums of Edinburgh/Glasgow or wherever she chooses to say she came from at the time. The complex mixture of race and place neatly avoids stereotyping either of herself or the towns while giving the whole scenario a pleasingly unreal, story world feel. Nothing feels quite real throughout the book, nor does it ever slide into the fantastic either.

Bessy finds herself working as maid for a ‘big house’ that she happens upon, where life is definitely not quite as it seems. her ‘missus’ Arabella Reid, slides quickly from aristocratic and aloof to deeply odd and Bessy finds herself sliding around in the clutches of a woman who is both completely convincingly sane and clearly utterly bonkers. Bessy, young, impressionable and confused from an abusive childhood tries her hardest to be loved and needed but is unable to resist a spiteful prank when her feelings are hurt.

The prank goes wrong and Bessy, like so many damaged children, can only see herself as the soul cause of the results and tries, inevitably, to fix it. She is jealous, loving, sassy and determined, foul mouthed and individual and the story is told cleverly through a first person narrative of her writing up her experiences.

The Observations is nearly 500 pages long; at 250 I was thinking that it was beginning to look as if it had a pleasantly interesting, but not unpredictable end in sight – I was reading it on my Kindle, which gives you less focus on how far through the book you are. When I realised I was only half way through I was slightly stunned; what on earth was left? But then, a quirky take on a ‘maid below stairs, hard luck story’ takes a dramatic and sinister turn. It becomes a thriller, a mystery, potentially a ghost story, a tale of mental health and marriage and dysfunctional lives, a story about village hierarchy and over-reaching ambition blotting out the real truths of relationships and love.

Every time I thought I had a handle on how it was all going to untwist, it took another turn; every time it seemed to be on its way to concluding, another tail end of story would worm its way back to the front. It was, in an unassuming, almost clumsy, far from over-worked cleverness way, quite brilliant.

This book passes the Alison test, it passes the recommending test. It definitely passes the “will I read it or the author again test?” I’d say it is a must read.

9/10 for everyone.

(I’d give it a very mild, you’ll probably be just fine, BabyLostMother warning.)

Book #8 Learning By Heart

February 13, 2011 by Merry 3 Comments

Learning By Heart was another library pick, another one I was pleased to bring home and discover is written by someone, Elizabeth McGregor, who has consistently good reviews on Amazon.

This is the book that referred to glass blowers in Murano, is set half in Italy, has two time lines and is about love affairs and lost children across the years. It has also, just for the record, a family with four sisters and a younger brother, marriages in jeopardy and is in fact threaded with a theme of synchronicity, of people just happening to meet people and be in places at the right moment 😆 Oh, and it has a couple with a young son and infertility to go along with it. Oh yes, and it starts with a mourning parade on Good Friday. You have to laugh.

So, you know 😉

I was surprised by how much I was drawn in to this; although it is essentially a book with 2 female characters at the centre, they are relatively hard to know; the book captures both at a ‘moment’ in their life and both are a little adrift in a mess of life and emotions. The story is told more by the 3 men who love them, two husbands and a lover. The plot unravels more of their lives – infidelity, infertility, loss and grief, love and rejection – than it does of the women. It is quite refreshing in a way (and I recognised something of one of them too, which made it all the more compelling) and certainly a different take on a well established format. It was subtly done and all the people and places felt very real, even if it was just a snapshot of lives.

The book is, essentially, the story of Cora and Zeph, at turning points in their life. It follows Cora through her first move from home, the shocking reality of being a single young woman in London and then the change that a safe and ordinary marriage brings. Half of the book is the journal of a man who loved her and the descriptions of Sicily really made me want to pack up and go immediately. I’ve got a feeling Italy is telling me I need to visit. For Zepf, the book is about finding her courage when her marriage fails and finding out more about her mother and everything that was hidden from view in her life.

I’d give this 8/10. I’m not sure I would need to read it again, or own it, but I’ll certainly read more by the author and I don’t hesitate to recommend. A very enjoyable read.