Whereas last year my foray back into the literary end of the writing pool was very successful, forcing me to reconsider my “I’m done with literary fiction” stance, FLOUNDERING reminded me of all the reasons I gave up on it in the first place.

It starts with a woman picking up the two sons she abandoned a year or so earlier as they walk home from school. Loretta (she won’t be called mum), Jordy (13) and Tom (11) then travel across the country in the half of the novel that is reminiscent of the classic American road trip experience, though with a distinctly Australian flavour. Although the trip has seemed directionless it turns out Loretta’s aim was to reach a run down beach side caravan her parents have probably forgotten they own. In an event that was only surprising in terms of the length of time it took to happen, Loretta disappears again and, largely due to Jordy’s fierce fear of being fostered, the boys try to fend for themselves. There is, of course, an unsavoury neighbour to contend with on top of being young boys alone in the world.

I know it marks me as a literary lightweight but I want something to happen in the books that I read. Preferably several somethings, at least some of which aren’t predictable from page five. FLOUNDERING really doesn’t have much of a plot and what does exist is inevitable from the outset. There were no genuine surprises for me which made the book drag, a pretty astonishing feat given it’s only 202 pages long. This kind of meandering nothingness is what I remember most from slogging through literary fiction in the past and my tolerance for it has, if anything, shrunk as I’ve gotten older. I can appreciate some aspects of the book: the vivid sense of place, some individual moments of beautifully understated heartache and even the authentic nature of the narrator’s voice (though that came with its own problems). But I wanted a story too. More, really, than any of these other things.

FLOUNDERING is told from Tom’s perspective. The innocent, naive sensibility this allows for grew thin especially as it does, by necessity, leave a lot out. I found myself more interested in the book that Ash didn’t write. This is probably wildly unfair of me but I can’t help that I found the child’s point of view very limiting. His world view is, legitimately, narrow and consists of being in a hot car, not having enough food, taking lonely beach walks and going to the toilet. His inner life really isn’t that much more compelling. I would rather, for example, have known what Loretta was thinking as she drove off on a supposedly short errand that left her children alone in a new place and without food or water for a long, hot summer’s day but instead we spent (another) day viewed from the point of view of a kid whose time was largely spent sitting on a step outside his caravan.

Many reviews make particular and generally glowing mention of the fact that this book raises the issue of children at risk. It does, but only in a descriptive sense. That is it says “look, here are some children in danger” and then describes their particular version of danger for 200 pages. It doesn’t offer different perspectives on those dangers nor any insights into how they might be averted. It didn’t even touch on the vexing question of how a 13 year old has learned only bad things about the welfare/foster system in his young life.

After reading the book I listened to an interview with Romy Ash in which she said she wanted to write a book with no bad guys and I’ve been pondering this for a few days. I think it probably explains a lot. Ash has been gentle with everyone, even the people you might expect to dislike and while this is admirable in a “golly let’s all be totally non-judgemental of our fellow human beings” kind of way, ultimately it led to a very passive novel. To me it was just a handful of people doing a few not very interesting things for a while. And then they stopped.

There are however a gazillion glowing reviews of FLOUNDERING to be found so read a few of those before taking my word on anything. And if you do decide to read it make sure you’ve a large supply of drinking water to hand: I defy anyone to read it for long without becoming intensely thirsty.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

FLOUNDERING is the 8th book I’ve read as part of my participation in this year’s Australian Women Writers Challenge, though only the first that sits outside my reading comfort zone of crime fiction.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Publisher Text Publishing [2012]
ISBN 9781921922084
Length 202 pages
Format paperback
Book Series standalone

This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

THE EARTH HUMS IN F FLAT by Mari Strachan was the first reader-submitted book featured on Petrona Remembered, the website a group of us have established in memory of Maxine Clarke which aims to tell the world about great crime fiction. Laura Root’s passionate review of a book I’d never heard of was exactly the kind of thing I hoped the site would attract and so I hunted down a copy of the book in my local library. It is everything Laura promised and then some, an absolute treat of a story about a 12 year old girl in 1950′s Wales whose simplistic take on the disappearance of a local man is compelling.

Antti Tuomainen’s THE HEALER could not, in some ways be more different. It’s set in the near future in Finland and the ravages of climate change have altered the environment and the people. Johanna Lehtinen is a journalist on the trail of the person responsible for a number of brutal killings when she disappears. Her husband Tapani, unable to get the resource-strapped authorities interested in investigating Johanna’s disappearance, takes on the job of finding her. In signs I may be getting soft in my old age I liked this book so very much because, to me anyway, it’s not really a crime story but rather one about a man who loves his wife and isn’t prepared to give up on her. Even though the environment is a grim one THE HEALER is definitely not the kind of dark and depressing novel people think of when they think Scandinavian crime.

Happily most of the rest of my reading for the month was almost as good as this and included (in reading order, with Aussie authors in green)

• John M Green‘s THE TRUSTED – an audacious, fast-paced environmental thriller
• Sean Doolittle’s LAKE COUNTRY – blackly comic noir fiction with a genuine sensitivity for life’s outsiders
• Sue Williams‘ MURDER WITH THE LOT – a zany, cosy kind of mystery set in small-town Australia
• Paul Dorion’s THE POACHER’S SON – exploring a difficult father/son relationship in the woods of Maine – very atmospheric
• Felicity Young‘s ANTIDOTE TO MURDER – a female doctor must clear her name when she is accused of performing an illegal abortion leading to a woman’s death in Edwardian England
• Parker Bilal’s DOGSTAR RISING – a Sudanese refugee works as a PI in Cairo during a time of religious tension and social unrest
• Bateman’s THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSElL – crime satire bordering on the absurd but hugely funny if you like that kind of thing
• Leif G.W. Persson’s ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER LIFE – a perfectly named and surprisingly compelling tale about a crime with origins and a resolution 25 years apart
• Maggie Groff’s GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS – an investigative journalist looks into the case of a man who was reported dead 25 years ago but has been seen recently
• Lyndsay Faye’s THE GODS OF GOTHAM – a highly atmospheric, if somewhat confronting tale that starts with a child’s death in New York in 1845
• Gianrico Carofiglio’s TEMPORARY PERFECTIONS – an Italian lawyer turns PI in an uneven but sometimes insightful novel (review to come).

Because life doesn’t (and shouldn’t) consist of only good things I read another three forgettable books on top of the worst book ever. But let’s say no more about them eh?

Progress towards my book-ish goals

• I’m pleased that 6 of the books I read for the month were by Australian authors (including the worst book ever) but only 2 of them were by women. I’m relying more on the library this year and books don’t always arrive in a statistically neat order but I’m sure things will round themselves out on this front by the end of the year.
• My goal regarding book acquisition  is to buy less but buy local (audio books excluded) and is going quite well. Audiobooks aside I have only bought 1 book in April this year (though I did receive a few freebies in the form of books for the judging panel I am on).

Snippets

I posted another roundup of the crime category for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, where a début novel called FRACTURED by Dawn Barker received two positive reviews..

I had a grizzle about not being able to find a good replacement for Google Reader and other first world problems.

Was April a good reading month for you? Do you sometimes feel like you’re on a ‘reading roll’ like I did during April? Did you have a favourite book or three for the month? 

Happily the story inside is a different kettle of fish all together.

It takes place in New York in 1845 when the city is literally bursting with refugees from the Irish famine and tensions between the foreigners and Americans are high as people scrabble for jobs, homes and food, none of which are in plentiful supply. Everyone, even children, must do whatever it takes to survive. The story’s action centres on Timothy Wilde, a young man with a grim personal history who finds himself an unwilling recruit to the city’s first police force established, against strong resistance from some sectors of the community, by the dominant political players of the day which include Wilde’s older brother Valentine. When he’s not been in the job more than a few weeks Timothy encounters a girl, not yet a teenager, who has escaped from a brothel with a harrowing tale. Timothy and the fledgling police force are drawn into an investigation which threatens to turn the religious resentments which already exist between the Protestant Americans and Catholic Irish foreigners into an all-out war.

I know absolutely nothing about this time or place in history and so have no clue if Faye’s version of New York is even vaguely accurate but she made me believe in it from the outset. She makes superb use of language, including a local rouge’s slang known as flash (for which there is a handy dictionary of terms included), and has an enveloping, three-dimensional way of describing the locations. In fact the sense of place is so vividly depicted that I find it difficult to believe I haven’t travelled in a time machine and seen it all for myself. Not that I’d have wanted to spend a lot of time there if such magical travel were possible as Faye has not offered the kind of ‘genteel picture of a different age’ that some historical fiction offers. The squalor, poverty and harsh grind it takes just to survive this environment are palpable.

I suspect all of that would make for grim reading on its own but the lighter aspect of the novel is provided in the characters. Not that they’re lightweight by any stretch of the imagination but there’s a resilience and spirit in most of them that balances out the darker elements of the environment. Timothy is not at first all together likeable, a bit self-righteous for me, but Faye develops him nicely and allows him to grow and react to to the things he experiences which is a far better (and I imagine more difficult) achievement than having him fully formed before we meet him. His relationship with his brother, who is something of a scoundrel, is tormented but very believable and the resolution of their discord is very well done. I found the relationship with his love interest, Mercy Underhill, less compelling though it didn’t put me off. Mercy is the daughter of a local Protestant reverend is heavily involved in charity work that no one else will touch (such as ministering to the Catholic population) and Timothy has been in love with her since he was a boy. Towards the end of the novel Mercy comes into her own as a character, displaying the deep frustration of a woman who wants to be something other than what society will allow.

The book is not perfect. Faye’s extensive research occasionally spills observably onto the page, though at least this is in the form of unnecessary plot sidetracks which I find easier to cope with than clunky exposition which hardly makes an appearance here, and it does feel a little bit too much like it’s setting up future instalments rather than allowing the novel to stand on its own. But these are minor quibbles in the scheme of things and I was thoroughly swept along by this fast-paced and very atmospheric tale. I even loved the different meanings that the book’s title could be interpreted as having as it progresses. Highly recommended to the historical fiction lovers of strong constitution.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Publisher Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam [2012]
ISBN 9780399158377
Length 414 pages
Format hardcover
Book Series #1 in the Timothy Wilde series?

This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Readerpocolypse

When Google announced last month it would be turning off its RSS Reader at the end of June this year I didn’t worry. I do use the product daily to keep track of the 150-odd blogs I follow (about 3/4 of which are book-ish blogs of one sort or another) but I figured I’d simply switch to another product, even a paid one, and not even notice a bump in my blog consumption practices.

I started trialling the various options being talked about in the techosphere almost straight away and now, a month or so later, I am worried. None of the alternatives have taken my fancy, primarily because none of them have an iOS presence to save themselves (whereas there are a gazillion third party apps which hook into Google Reader and I had found just the one to suit me). I’ve tried Feedly (which is awful as it installs background clunk on the desktop and has an iOS app that is determined to present itself as a magazine rather than my preferred list, refusing to retain my settings each time I close it) and Netvibes (which is better but has to be used via a browser on the iPad and I do prefer a dedicated app on my mobile device) and Newsblur (which I found clunky wherever I used it). I am sick of them all demanding I be more social and /or recommending feeds in which I have zero interest and the entire exercise has made me extremely cranky.

So, apologies if I have not visited or commented at your blog in a while…it’s not a lack of interest but a lack of a good road to get me there. Anyone tried any other Google Reader alternatives they like that work well on both a windows desktop and in the iOS environment?

GRamazon

I reacted to Amazon’s purchase of Goodreads by deleting my Goodreads account which, I thought I would miss quite a lot. Turns out, I don’t miss it at all and quickly realised I hadn’t been getting a lot out of the site anyway. I’ve had a terrific month reading-wise but my best recommendations came from the same great places they always have (like Laura and Barbara and Sarah, thanks ladies), any bookish chatting I’ve had time for has taken place at the Friend Feed Crime and Mystery Fiction room (a truly delightful group) and I did reactivate (and pay for) my Library Thing account to have an alternative place to catalogue my reading (other than this blog and my Collectorz database). Even though they’re not handily all in one place these avenues serve my purposes much better than Goodreads ever has and the fact that none of them are plastered with ads or covert Amazonification makes them that much more valuable to me.

Another first world problem

About 2 and a half years ago I bought an eReader in the hope that I would be able to rid myself of the problem of having too many books (and yes I do know how utterly pretentious that sounds). But with limited storage space, a voracious consumption speed and a need to be increasingly creative in the ways I get rid of my physical books I was serious about wanting to make a total switch within five years.

I know now I’m not going to make it.

While I’m perfectly happy to read in the format I just don’t find myself doing it all that much. In my pointless but determined struggle not to be owned by Amazon I didn’t buy a kindle and so it’s generally more of a pain for me to buy eBooks than it ought to be (thanks Adobe, you’re almost as annoying as Amazon) (you did after all have to be shamed by our Government into reconsidering your years-long practice of charging Australians more than double the price Americans pay for the same products but that’s a whole different story) and they’re often not much (or at all) cheaper than their physical counterparts. While I can, now, understand the pricing (a book’s value is not in its physical form, it’s in its content) I do baulk at paying $20+ to rent something that could disappear in a flash and that I can’t loan or donate or leave on a bus for some weary traveller. It’s not uncommon for mainstream published eBooks to cost that much or more here and I am aiming to do all my book shopping within Australia this year which has really added to the slow down of my eBook consumption.

I really thought I would make the switch to eBooks with ease but, so far anyway, it has proven a pricklier problem than anticipated. Though a recent Big Ideas lecture offered the startling prediction that within 7 years 70% of books published in the UK would be published digitally only. If that does prove even vaguely accurate I suppose I’ll have to work on this one.

What about you? Have you found an alternative to Google Reader that works for you? Do you have a Good Reads account? Have you noticed any changes since they ‘joined the Amazon family’? How about eBooks? Have you made the switch? Not interested? 

At some point in the future climate change has had the devastating environmental impact scientists have warned us about for years and in Helsinki the social order has all but collapsed as those who can afford to flee north, and those remaining fight each other over housing, food, jobs or for no reason at all. Johanna Lehtinen is a journalist who has been contacted by someone calling themselves The Healer who has claimed responsibility for a series of murders of prominent people whose common trait is that they are, in the killer’s eyes, especially responsible for the environmental degradation everyone is living with. Johanna is determined to track down this vicious killer even without the help of the resource-depleted police. Three days before Christmas in this unspecified future year Johanna disappears along with the photographer who was on assignment with her. Her husband,Tapani, is bereft but becomes single-minded in his quest to find his wife, alive and healthy.

If, like me, you’re all ‘serial killered out’ have no fear: this novel is barely about the killer at all. It’s not even really about the attempt to find and stop him. To me it’s a story about a man’s love for his wife and his need to hold on to that one thing while the world he has known collapses. And given that I am the least romantic person on the planet it’s a bit of a surprise then that I liked the book so very, very much.

One of the many things I adored about this book is its length. At under 250 pages it’s almost a short story in comparison to the doorstop-sized tomes being published these days but I’m not just happy to have come across a book that didn’t require weightlifting skills to read it. I truly believe it takes more talent to write with brevity and conciseness, especially when you still manage to produce as a thoroughly satisfying novel as someone who has double the word count at their disposal. And the writing here is incredibly good, each word imbued with heft and meaning, nothing extraneous. I imagine it’s difficult enough to produce a beautifully written book in one language. To turn someone else’s words into beauty in a second language must be infinitely harder and so I am truly humbled by Lola Rogers’ contribution as translator.

The characters are another striking feature of the novel. Tapani is a poet (though he’s the first to admit an unsuccessful one) whose life is given structure and direction by the process of writing. He is therefore in some ways the classic fish out of water when he is forced to dive into the physical world of investigation, though some of his the skills he uses in his work, such as a deep reservoir of patience, serve him well in his new role too. He makes new connections too including an African cab driver who has come to the city because it offers more opportunities than his homeland and a policeman who has lost access to virtually all the usual tools of his job due to the crumbling economy and social structure but has, oddly I suppose, retained his integrity. These two and several other people Tapani meets along the way help build a delicate hope that a future society burdened by the product of our shortcomings will not entirely have lost its humanity.

It’s not all romance and poetry though, there’s a first-class tale of suspense told too as Tapani goes after any lead, however insubstantial or tangential it appears. As he talks to her boss, her best friend and others he learns things he never knew about his wife’s past which helps to narrow down what has happened in her present. At the same time he reflects on their shared history and these flashbacks, short and sparsely written though they may be, are utterly gorgeous in the simple way they depict the couple’s love.

Although it’s a relatively minor theme here I can’t help but be struck by how often the changing nature of the media crops up as a theme in the European fiction I read. Liza Marklund, Thomas Enger and Stieg Larsson have all written stories which rail passionately against the modern trend towards populism over ‘real’ journalism. Tuomainen also addresses this theme such as when Johanna’s boss explains to Tapani the crux of the problem

Then I’ve got reporters like, for instance, Johanna, who want to tell the people the truth. And I’m always asking them, what fucking truth? And they never have a good answer. All they say is that people should know. And I ask, but do they want to know. And more importantly, do they want to pay to know?.

Indeed.

It’s difficult to explain how a book set in a deteriorating world in which it is almost constantly raining and where a serial killer is at large can be uplifting but THE HEALER is somehow life-affirming and beautiful despite its grim demeanour. Perhaps it’s the presence of a poet in the pages (for even unsuccessful poets have, I think, a different kind of soul than the rest of us) but somehow Tuomainen has written a sad but hopeful book that was an absolute treat to read. Highly recommended, and not just to crime fans.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Thanks to Sarah whose review prompted me to track this one down

Translator Lola Rogers
Publisher Harvill Secker [2013]
ISBN 9781846555879
Length 246 pages
Format hardcover
Book Series standalone (?)

This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I don’t want to spoil any of the elements that made this book remarkable for me so all I’ll be sparse with my summary of the plot, which spans a 25 year period. In 1975 a group of radicals take over the German embassy in Stockholm, killing two of their hostages before blowing up the building (either accidentally or purposefully). Readers are treated to a view of the investigation into this incident and its impact on some individual police officers as well as the wider political climate. About 15 years later a man is murdered in his Stockholm apartment and we see this investigation, involving some of the same officers who were present during the German embassy case, in much more detail. A further 10 years later the Swedish version of the secret police, now headed up by one of the officers we’ve met in earlier sections of the book, is asked to look into the background of a prominent politician who is on track to be offered a very senior government post.

This book’s full title is ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER LIFE: THE STORY OF A CRIME and rarely have I come across a book with such a perfectly descriptive name. It describes in a nutshell a theme that is teased out as the layers of the story are revealed and the author explores the idea that people and societies both can be virtually unrecognisable to themselves if viewed at different points on a time scale. I particularly liked the fact that Persson got me thinking about personal and social accountability for the actions of our earlier selves but did not provide any easy answers (which is a hint that this book is not for those of you who like definitive solutions in your fiction). The other reason that the title of the book is so perfect is that it really is the story of a particular crime which has its origins and resolution many years apart but that can only be understood with full knowledge of a range of temporally separated incidents. The way that Persson structures this tale is very clever as it misdirects readers to focus their attention on a specific incident while he builds up a broader picture of a changing society that only becomes fully clear at the novel’s end. From a plotting perspective this is one of the most satisfying novels I’ve read in a very long time.

Other than this element the book breaks…or severely bends… several of my personal ‘rules’ for good reading, which makes my complete enjoyment of it something of a surprise. One of the ways the book doesn’t conform to the kind of thing I normally like to read is that it is rather slow, especially in the longest middle section. But even though I recognised as I was reading that the pace was not really my cup of tea I knew that I wouldn’t mind in this instance because of the sense I had from the outset that my patience would be rewarded. On one level you see a team of investigators – a hodgepodge of characters including a prejudiced, time-wasting buffoon and a young female officer involved in her first murder case – methodically piece together the tiny fragments of evidence left behind by the killer and eliminate dead ends. But on another level there’s a picture being developed of Swedish society, changed from its 1975 self by the collapse of the Soviet Union among other external influences. By the third act of the book – which again features a precisely detailed investigation – the social and political changes have, insidiously, become more pronounced and profound. It was really only here, in this final segment of the book, that I fully appreciated what Persson had been doing all along, though undoubtedly a more perceptive reader would have cottoned on much sooner.

Another feature of the novel that would not normally be to my taste is its remote sensibility. Its tone is almost one of reportage rather than the more standard ‘draw the reader in’ narrative of crime fiction and there are too many characters to really form any emotional connection to them, at least in the early parts of the story. But as a collective I did find them compelling – especially as I watched them change over the years. Anna Holt, whom we first meet as an inexperienced detective facing rampant sexism really comes into her own a decade later when both she and the society she is a part of have changed and she and two other female colleagues really take the lead in this time and place. Lars Johansson has a role in all three sections of the novel but it is not until the end – when he has taken over SePo (the secret police) that we get real insight into what makes him tick and how his participation in earlier events has shaped him. It’s fascinating stuff.

A brief survey of the usual spots shows that reviews of this novel tend to be polarised: readers either love it or hate it with very few indifferent opinions on display. I feel fortunate I fell into the former category but I can see why people would feel differently about the book than I did so consider yourselves warned: I’ve no idea which camp you’ll fall into if you do pick the book up. Following the advice of a good friend I opted not to read this book’s predecessor, apparently the start of a trilogy, and do not feel I was missing anything by not having grappled with the dense 600+ pages so feel safe in recommending it even if you haven’t read the earlier novel. If you like novels that challenge and inform I think you ought to give this one a go and I hope you find it as surprising a good read as I did.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Translator Paul Norlen
Publisher Trans World Publishing [2012]
ISBN 9780307377463
Length 404 pages
Format hardcover
Book Series #2 in The Story of a Crime trilogy

This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL follows on from 2009′s MYSTERY MAN and sees the nameless owner of Belfast mystery bookshop No Alibis (Murder is our Business) once again lukewarm on the trail of some dastardly criminals. Ignoring the case which his ex (?) girlfriend solves in 10 minutes thereby robbing our hero of the fee he was planning to charge a woman who thought she was being spied upon, this book focuses its attention on self-made businessman Billy Randall. He needs the services of a private eye because someone made a video of his giant billboard being defaced (a male appendage is painted on giant Billy’s head) and the video has become such a You Tube sensation that Randall fears his business is starting to suffer as no one can take him seriously. The case takes our hero on a strange and wonderfully madcap journey that involves taxidermy, the Chief Constable and MI5.

The hero of this series is…unlikely to say the least. A cynical, self-absorbed, hypochondriac who would be lucky to leap over a small shrub let alone a tall building he is nevertheless strangely compelling even if not likeable in the traditional sense. And he is, for me anyway, terribly funny. I’m not normally a huge fan of the first-person point of view but it works well for comic novels and ‘no-name’s’ voice is one that particularly appeals to me (though I shan’t think too deeply on what shared traits might draw me to him).  I’m not entirely sure the no-named hero shtick is sustainable (even here it was awkward) for more books but, having noticed there are two more in the series already, I’m willing to make allowances due to being so thoroughly entertained each time I pick up one of these novels.

This is definitely a book I think you should sample before purchasing – you’ll know within a few pages whether or not it’s your kind of humour – and you need to be at least a minor fan of the crime genre to really appreciate some of the jokes and digs at recent publishing trends. If you’re lucky enough to share Bateman’s absurd sense of what’s funny then you’re in for a treat. If you are an audiobook fan I’d highly recommend Stephen Armstrong’s narration – he is now the voice of mystery man for me and I am chuffed to see he’s read more of Bateman’s novels for my personal listening pleasure.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Narrator Stephen Armstrong
Publisher Whole Story Audio Books [2010]
ASIN B003UI7ZH0
Length 8 hours 27 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #1 in the Mystery Man series

This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Jamal Mahjoub has written five literary novels but it was his pseudonymous creations as Parker Bilal that were the subject of the session I caught at a local writers’ festival last month. DOGSTAR RISING is the second book to feature the character of Makana and I wish I’d read the first one as I did have the occasional sense I was missing out on something by not having read the story that introduced Makana. That aside though this is a terrifically atmospheric novel, offering the unique mixture of insights that only someone who was born in England to an English mum and a Sudanese dad and has lived in Sudan, Egypt, the UK, Denmark and (currently) Spain can supply.

The strongest element of the novel by far is the sense of time and place conveyed. Cairo is depicted as a place of poverty, corruption and a kind of vague, direction-less social unrest (it would take another decade for that to coalesce into something stronger). In some ways it is an exotic world very different to my own but it other ways, such as the ease with which ‘the mob’ can be manipulated to turn on minorities, is eerily and sadly familiar. The anti refugee sentiment in particular could be plucked from some of my own country’s present-day newspapers.

Makana lives on the fringes of his community mostly because few people let him forget for long that he is an outsider, though also I think because of the tragedies in his own personal history which have led him to choose a more solitary life than he might otherwise have led. But despite those tragedies and the harsh way he tends to be treated he is one of the good guys, aiming always to get to the truth of a thing even if that proves to be dangerous. He isn’t unrealistically wholesome though.  In this novel he is presented with a very real moral dilemma and we see him  struggle with the difficult decision in a credible way.

Although recognisably a work of crime fiction DOGSTAR RISING does offer a lot more than the standard whodunnit. In fact in some ways the mystery element of the book is the weakest due to some unnecessary complexities that feel a bit contrived. But overall this is a very entertaining and thought provoking novel that I would recommend to those who enjoy exotic locations depicted authentically (though I would read THE GOLDEN SCALES,  the first book in the series, if you can lay your hands on that one first).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing [2013]
ISBN 9781408832837
Length 309 pages
Format eBook (ePub)
Book Series #2 in the Makana series

This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Horace “Horse, as in hung like a…” Mann feels guilty. Before he felt guilty he felt angry so he left his ex-wife, the child that wasn’t really his but for whom he is financially responsible and the country he no longer wants any part of. He ended up in Lima, Peru where his personal life turns into a genuine horror. Hence the guilt.

Horse teaches English to the city’s criminals (so they can more successfully rob the kind of tourists that Horse disdains) and is a minor drug dealer. He has made ‘friends’ with a sociopath called Pitt Watters who is the American ambassador’s son and a CIA killer. When he disappears Pitt’s mother, whom Horse sometimes has sex with, asks Horse to try to find him. Which he proceeds to do. Very, very slowly.

The opening hundred or so pages of THE SECOND BAT GUANO WAR include scenes in which the main character snorts cocaine off a urine-splashed toilet, has trouble finding a place on his body where he hasn’t already burned himself with cigarettes which is his preferred form of self-harm (for the record he chooses an armpit on this occasion), is taken to a bondage club in which a man is whipped until he bleeds for the entertainment of others, has a conversation with his friend’s wife while she removes her vibrator from an orifice and puts it, wet and sticky, on the coffee table between them and has his head plunged into a bucket of shit. The remaining 300 or so pages contain an equal number of similar scenes but I think you get the point.

This is the best evidence I can give of the sensibility of the novel. If all of that sounds like your thing then by all means track down a copy (one of you is welcome to mine if you ask nicely). If it doesn’t sound like your cup of tea then give the book a miss because there is a lot more of the same.

In fact to me it is an endless series of such happenings with little in the way of connecting narrative (though to be fair there is more story in the second half of the novel) (there’s still a lot of violence and bodily fluids but some stuff does happen). Even so, with barely any agency at all Horse lurches around the seediest parts of Peru allowing himself to die. Slowly. Via a series of flashbacks he does tell the reader what terrible event has led to this sorry state of affairs but as the core of this horror is given away by the book’s blurb much of the suspense that might otherwise have been provided here is effectively obliterated. And even in what is objectively a (if not the) defining moment of his miserable life everything happens to Horse or around him.

I’ve no earthly clue who the ideal reader of this book would be. My noir-adoring friend wasn’t intrigued enough by the blurb to take the free copy I tried to press upon him and now, having read it, I cannot think of a single person I know to whom I would suggest it. As a white, Australian, woman who would be considered middle-class with a smattering of exotic travel and one or two of the average human being’s troubles in my background I have absolutely no frame of reference for this novel. Twenty years ago I’d have seen this as some kind of personal flaw on my part. Now I just count my blessings. I am entirely comfortable…indeed grateful…that I don’t ‘get’ this novel.

I am prepared to admit that my lack of connection to anything going on here is not entirely the book’s fault (with me never having been a self-destructive, America-hating, bloke with an enormous penis) it’s not something I’m going to accept much blame for either. I didn’t have anything in common with the people depicted in Sean Doolittle’s LAKE COUNTRY either and I loved it. The differences, for me, are in the presence of a recognisable narrative structure and in the tenderness Doolittle clearly felt for life’s outsiders. Because of that I could, and did, develop my own relationship with the ‘designated loser’ in that novel, even though I couldn’t easily relate his situation (as a rage-fuelled, near-alcoholic, ex-soldier) to anything from my own experience. I’ve no clue what, if any, emotions Porup feels towards the mess of a human being he has created in Horse (or Pitt or Pitt’s mother or Pitt’s father or Horse’s ex or any of the other human detritus that populates this tome). All I know for sure is that he didn’t do anything to make me care whether any of them lived or died, though I’d certainly have been chirpier about it all if their collective fate had taken less than 400 pages to arrive.

One of the things I normally give a bit of thought to at the end of a book is what the author might have been trying to achieve with it and whether or not they managed it. I’m sure I’m often wildly inaccurate but it’s rare that I can’t make a stab at it. Here I’ve no idea. Shock? If so it failed in my case because there was too much awfulness. Each incident of sad debauchery mixed with violence followed so closely on the heels of its predecessor that there’s no time to process any of them at an emotional level. Entertain? I am confident I am (for once) one of the majority of readers who would find the tone and language of this novel too far outside their comfort zone for it to be enjoyable for all but a few. Inform? I suppose the “America is evil” theme is vaguely educational but this message is bludgeoned into proceedings rather than being deftly laid out and in my experience that kind of heavy-handedness rarely attracts new converts. Even many (most?) of those already converted to this way of thinking would, I’d wager, prefer a less crude and violent preacher.

Whatever the intent, for me reading THE SECOND BAT GUANO WAR was a chore. Not the kind of chore that is hard work but ultimately satisfying. Just the kind that is hard work. The level of violence and crudity was too high and mostly gratuitous (i.e. being without apparent reason). The pace was slow, indeed glacial for the first half of the novel, due to the aimless ‘narrative’ and repetition of basic elements (how many scenes of seemingly pleasure-free auto-erotic masturbation are needed to indicate the rockiest of bottoms has been reached?). The imagery ranged from plain awful (with almost everyone being described via some reference to their sexual organs) to outright silly (Pitt’s wife, for example, is introduced with these words “…her eyes blue balls of fire. Another cock-hungry American whore”…”she cocked those blue balls of fire sideways, as if taking aim with a shotgun”). I did not find any of it funny or thought-provoking or engaging or any of the other things that might have made it worth my time. If that makes me boring or bourgeois or close-minded…meh.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Publisher J.M. Porup [2012]
ISBN 9780988006997
Length 410 pages
Format paperback
Book Series standalone

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The opening chapter of THE CARRIER is narrated by Gaby Struthers. She is a 38 year-old business woman who does a lot of travelling for work. On one trip she is prevented from flying out of Dusseldorf airport by bad weather and becomes trapped into looking after one of her fellow passengers, a younger woman called Lauren, whom Gaby thinks of as an ‘unstable tattooed moron’ . Gaby’s sarcastic, superior-sounding internal monologue as she deals with Lauren’s anger at being late and other rants is both funny and cruel but overall did have me thinking I might enjoy the read.

Which is just about the time things fell apart, enjoyment-wise. Lauren has announced that she shouldn’t let a man take the fall for a murder he did not commit but Gaby only finds out many hours later that the man Lauren is talking about is Tim Breary who has confessed to murdering his wife Francine. Though she lives with a different man, Gaby is in love with Tim Breary and vows that she will prove his innocence and thus allow the two of them to live together…finally.

And so begins a tortured tale of thoroughly unlikeable  not terribly believable people, any of whom I would happily have murdered myself if it meant getting to the end of this tome a little bit sooner.

The cast is rounded out by a wealthy married couple called Kerry and Dan who allowed Tim and his wife to move into their mansion two years previously when Francine had a stroke leaving her unable to move or speak and needing 24-hour care. Like Tim they despise Francine for the cruel woman she was pre-stroke, but they adore Tim and want to help him out. Lauren, who we met as the anxious traveller in the book’s opening, was employed as Francine’s carer and she also lives in the mansion along with her husband Jason who is handyman-cum-gardener-cum-thug.

For reasons that are never even remotely clear to me Tim inspires complete worship amongst a mini cult of devotees, i.e. Gaby, Kerry and Dan. As depicted he is an asinine  self-indulgent, bore constantly droning on about his unworthiness. Either he or the author thinks throwing a few lines of poetry into every conversation makes him seem intellectual but honestly it just made him a bit more of a pratt. In short he has all the charisma of wet socks on a winter’s day and I simply did not believe that three adult human beings (even ones with dysfunctional personal histories of their own) would devote themselves to him so fully (Kerry and Dan in particular uproot their own lives completely several times just to be able to serve Tim).

The problem is that this premise underpins the whole story and because I did not buy into it even a little bit the rest of the thing was…well…laughable.

My incredulity only rose a notch or three when the officers of the Spilling police station entered the fray. This completely dysfunctional group of dolts includes Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer who I first met in LITTLE FACE where I thought their fractured relationship completely unworkable. Apparently there have been 6 books in between that book and this one and, unfathomably, the pair are still together. Indeed they’re married now but appear to be as emotionally crippled as they were at the beginning. It’s clear from early events here that a lot more has gone on between these two and amongst their wider group of colleagues and while I don’t know the details of all this sordid nonsense I gather none of it has been pleasant. The upshot of it all is an entire station populated by people who would never actually be employed in a police force but, more to the point, who add absolutely nothing to this story at all aside from word count and tedious sidetracks into infidelity and appalling parenting.

The reason they enter the story at all is because even though Tim has confessed to killing his wife and all the other people involved agree that Tim killed his wife the constabulary diverts its apparently endless resources to investigating the notion that Tim is innocent. There’s a bunch of baffling shenanigans from the boss of the station to ensure that a full investigation takes place and it all seems so far-fetched to me that I have made a mental note that if I ever am accused of a crime I should proclaim my guilt loudly and often as the likeliest way to  make sure the police look for some other bugger to pin it on.

There’s no doubt that Hannah can string a sentence together in a way that is a pleasure to read but that alone doesn’t make a worthwhile reading experience, at least not for me. Her characters are ugly and unrealistic en masse, her plotting tries too hard to be clever and just ends up being tedious and her supposed exploration of human psychology is cruel and borders on the puerile.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Publisher Hodder & Stoughton [2013]
ISBN/ASIN 9780340980736
Length 418 pages
Format paperback
Book Series #8 in the Simon Waterhouse/Spilling Police series

This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.