Category Archives: Susan Hill

Weekly Geeks 16-2010 – Secret Pasts and Peculiar Presents

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As a new member of the team of book bloggers who look after the Weekly Geeks meme this week was my turn to post a discussion topic (and we will not discuss how much I despise using Blogger in comparison to any other platform on the net which is why the format of the post is screwed up). In a selfish sort of way I thought I’d find out what others think of an issue that I have been pondering for a while now. In brief it is the issue of whether or not I can, or even want, to separate an author’s non-writing existence from their fictional works.

It all started because I very much enjoyed the two Susan Hill novels that I’ve read and already had the next book in her Simon Serrailler series on my audio book playlist. Then I discovered, via the author’s opinion column in a UK newspaper, that I don’t particularly like her personality or what you might call her ‘small p’ politics. I found this rant about the charity bookshops Oxfam mean-spirited and inaccurate and the fact that it included yet another misuse of the word bullying was the icing on that particular cake. I haven’t counted (obviously) but I think it is the second most over used word in the published English language these days (after the word tragedy) and because of that any real meaning the word ever had is long gone. Because this one piece made me particularly cranky I went on to read some more of her columns and realised that she is not someone I would want to have a beer with.

I have some pretty odd opinions myself and I manage to rub along quite nicely with friends and family who have wildly wrong  different views to mine so it should be far easier to ignore the opinions of someone I am socially removed from such as an author. Except that I’m a big advocate of putting one’s money where one’s mouth is or, if we’re being pedantic, not putting one’s money in the mouths of people I don’t respect. So if I find out that a company uses practices I don’t agree with I make it a personal goal not to purchase products that company produces if I can possibly avoid it. I won’t pretend I actively seek out such information for all the companies I deal with but if I am making a major purchase or investment I do my best to find out about things like the company’s trade practices and the sorts of investments they make themselves. It therefore feels a bit dishonest not to follow a similar personal rule with respect to my entertainment budget (almost all of which goes to books). It just doesn’t feel right to actively provide income to someone whose opinions I find fairly repugnant. So I am done with the Simon Serailler books which is sad because I enjoyed the first two but it doesn’t hurt to have one’s principles genuinely tested every now and again (and no I’m not angling for a humanitarian award here, there’s plenty of tests I fail and it is only a couple of books after all).

The other part of the question I raised related to how people would feel if they discovered that an author they liked had committed a major crime. Like murder (as in the case of Anne Perry which I thought about after seeing a post about her at Crime Watch). Perhaps perversely I have far less trouble with this one although to be honest I’ve never been truly tested. The closest I’ve come is being a moderate fan of Jeffrey Archer’s and for the record I was completely nonplussed by the fact of his conviction and prison sentence for the crime of perverting the course of justice.

I’m pretty confident that the fact I’d rather one of my favourite authors was a murderer than have social opinions I find abhorrent is pretty screwed up. But there you have it.

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Do check out some of the other thoughtful and thought-provoking answers to this week’s topic (check the Mr Linky below the post). All the posts have been interesting to me but the one that still has me pondering is from KT at Literary Transgressions who has written a terrific responseabout her relationship with author Phillip Pullman both before and after she discovered that Pullman the man isn’t someone she likes very much.

Review: The Pure in Heart by Susan Hill

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In the Cathedral town of Lafferton, England it’s about a year after the events of the first book in this series, The Various Haunts of Men. Several characters are still dealing with the fallout of that book’s rather shocking ending including DCI Simon Serailler who is on a sketching holiday in Venice. He’s called home because his younger sister Martha, who is mentally and physically handicapped, has been taken to hospital with pneumonia and might die. Serailler returns to work earlier than planned to head the investigation into the kidnapping of a young boy, David Angus, from outside of his home.

One of my observations about the first novel was that calling it a Simon Serailler story was bordering on false advertising given his relatively limited appearances. The same cannot be said of The Pure in Heart which is very much Simon’s story. His love of his younger sister and the rest of his family, his frustration at the lack of progress in finding the missing boy, his failure to communicate maturely with his former lover all play out during this novel and paint a far more realistic picture than the rather one-dimensional hero-figure of the first book. Although he turned out to have some very human foibles and some not very agreeable qualities I liked Simon a lot more in this book.

However The Pure in Heart isn’t all about Simon and the kidnapping. There is a detailed exploration of several people, including some who have nothing much to do with the case at all. There is a particularly gripping, if extraordinarily sad, depiction of the effect of David’s disappearance on his family which seemed so realistic I almost felt guilty for being such a voyeur into someone else’s tragedy. Simon’s family feature heavily again and there are other threads including  fascinating one focusing on a man released from prison and struggling to live a ‘straight’ life.

Like Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise I’ve spent some time trying to work out why I enjoy these books because, on the face of it, they’re not ‘my kind of thing’ as they spend so much time focussing on people not relevant to the main story. But when I was mentally comparing The Pure in Heart to other books I’ve read I realised it was similar in intent to Elizabeth George’s Careless in Red but far better executed (and almost exactly half the length!). Whereas Careless in Red had oodles of irrelevant tangents and tried to give a cast of a couple of dozen characters interesting back stories, The Pure in Heart seemed to know just when enough was enough on both counts and drew an absorbing picture of the town and its people without once making me wish for it all to hurry up and be over.

If you want a book that rollicks along at a cracking pace I suggest you look elsewhere. And if you don’t like loose ends you might also want to skip this book. But if a tale that unfolds in intricate, captivating layers and provokes much thought about what you would do in the face of modern moral dilemmas sounds like your kind of thing then read The Pure in Heart. If you happen to enjoy audio books I heartily recommend this version narrated by Steven Pacey who is fast becoming one of my favourite narrators (he was responsible for one of my top ten reads of last year, Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44).

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My rating 4/5

Narrator: Steven Pacey; Publisher: BBC WW [2002]; ISBN: N/A (downloaded from audible); Length: 11hrs 37mins ; Setting: England, present-day

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The Pure in Heart has been reviewed by Maxine at Euro Crime, Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise and Tara at Books and Cooks

Review: The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill

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Title: The Various Haunts of Men (the first Simon Serrailler novel)

Author: Susan Hill

Publisher: Vintage [2005]

ISBN: 978-0-099-46209-5

Length: 549 pages

Setting: The fictional village of Lafferton, Southern England, present-day

Genre: Psychological suspense

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My rating: 4/5

One-liner: An utterly beautiful depiction of a town and its people, one of whom happens to be a killer.

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Freya Graffham has left her job with The Met in London for a quieter life as a Detective Sergeant in the Cathedral town of Lafferton in southern England. As she’s settling into her new job and new life she learns of a woman, Angela Randall, who has been reported missing by her employer. With little to go on but a gut feeling Freya is unable to continue working on the case until a second woman is reported missing. We readers know that something untoward is happening to the women because of a series of communications from the culprit to an un-named person but Freya isn’t privy to these missives and must pursue the investigation with frustratingly little to go on.

I should not have liked this book. It’s a brick of a thing, it really isn’t terribly suspenseful (although the last 100 or so pages are quite gripping) and meeting the purported main character was an entirely unsatisfactory experience. All of these factors should have put the book on my ‘don’t bother’ list. However, its redemption lies in the beauty of its depiction of the fictional town of Lafferton and its inhabitants. Hill paints a detailed and engaging picture of the town with doctors who still make house calls, an uplifting choir and an uneasiness for the new-age ‘healers’ of all sorts who are moving into the area. Layered atop this are a wonderful selection of people including those who will become the victims of the killer. By the time each of them becomes a victim I felt I knew them quite intimately and cared rather deeply about their demise in a way that I often don’t in a standard police procedural in which I’ve only learned about the victim after their death.

Aside from these victims there are a swag of other characters who are wonderfully drawn. I had much the same thoughts as Cathy with regard to the central character of the book in that the high esteem that everyone had for DCI Simon Serrailler didn’t seem terribly warranted based on what we saw of him. However I adored members of his family, primarily his mother and his triplet sister Cat, and look forward to spending more time with them in the future. Freya Graffham, whose annoyance at falling in love with her DCI is wonderfully portrayed, is also great character as is the DS that she co-opts for her missing person investigation. Even the minor players, like Sandy who is the flatmate of one of the missing women, are depicted in so much detail that I felt as if I would recognise them all should I happen to meet them.

Several reviews of this book make mention of the numerous loose ends remaining at the end of The Various Haunts of Men and I agree there are a swag of them. I tend not to mind loose ends as I find them more realistic than having everything wrapped up neatly but I can understand others’ frustration with them. However, I’ve already imagined what’s happened to resolve most of the loose ends and, at least until I read the next book in this series, I’ll just assume I’ve gotten it all right.

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The Various Haunts of Men has been reviewed positively at Mack Captures Crime and Kittling Books and not quite so positively at Shelf Love. Although I disagreed with Jenny’s opinion about the book I thought she made some good points in her review but I just happened to like the things she didn’t.