Restless (William Boyd)

This was a very tolerable read. I know that sounds lukewarm but it's actually quite positive compared to the review I was composing in my head before I had even started William Boyd's Restless. This is because it came out at around the same time as Paul Auster's The Brooklyn Follies. I detested The Brooklyn Follies and because Boyd's novel had the unfortunate luck to come out in the same month they are now intrinsically linked in my mind.*

Nonetheless, I was moved to pick it up the other day from a box of books advertised for 50p in Clapham. I came away feeling most pleased with myself, having grabbed Helen Garner's The Spare Room, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces and something else I have now forgotten the name of. The universe, it seems, was telling me to read Restless.

As I've already said, not a bad read at all. Instead of the cosmopolitan mid-life crisis I was expecting I was pleasantly to find that it was actually a WW2 espionage 'thriller'. I say 'thriller' because the action/adventure part was a bit geriatric. The most exciting thing that happens is a Mexican policeman gets stabbed in the eye with a pencil.

As a relatively anxious person I don't look normally head for the thriller section of a bookshop. If I'm going to be scared I want it to be supernatural so I know there's absolutely no chance whatsoever it could actually happen to me. So I'm not complaining that this didn't have me cowering in terror from the shadows in my loft. I'm just being pedantic and saying that Time Out's comment that it is "heart-stoppingly exciting" would indicate that the reviewer didn't actually read the book.

I particularly liked the way the novel was structured- in ambience as well as tense. The story switches between a young woman who is recruited by the British Secret Service at the beginning of WW2 and her daughter, decades later, whom she enlists to help settle old ghosts. Eva Delectorskaya as an old woman fearing her past demons adds a surreal menace to the text. As the reader I had trouble believing that anyone would actually go after a grandmother who spends all of her time gardening. It is her rising paranoia rather than any actual events which propel the drama along.

Boyd's main problem seems to be his inability to adopt the female mindset and write, realistically, from the point of view of women. Ruth (the daughter) is strong and independent but comes across as cold, which I don't feel is at all deliberate on Boyd's part. Eva as the young, beautiful spy is a mere caricature, sort of like a particularly intelligent Bond girl. Had Boyd managed to inflate these characters into a three-dimensional state the novel could have been quite a bit better. As it stands, it is merely a non-trashy historical fiction novel with some mildly exciting action halfway through.

Rating: 7/10.

* I THINK. I could be wrong and they came out at completely different times. Maybe their covers are the same colour.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson)

So- my Easter crime read.

I normally try to avoid those fad books which everyone in the world is reading, if only so that my experience of the book isn't coloured by all the hype. In this case, I was after a book which would have a gripping, amazing, unputdownable plot, so I delved into one of the books of the moment, Swedish crime *sensation* The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Mikael Blomkvist is a journalist hired to write a family history of the Vanger family, one of the families of industry in Sweden. Whilst he is at it, Henrik Vanger would like Blomkvist to figure out who killed his niece (? I think it was his niece - it is a ridiculously large, extended family, I didn't really keep track of how everyone was related) Harriet forty years previously. We also meet a serial killer with a strange strange bible fetish and a computer hacker with anger management problems.

So far so good...

I don't really know how this measures up in terms of being a good thriller (except..I wasn't really 'thrilled' at any point). Interesting plot? Yes! That extra x-factor that makes you stay up until 4 in the morning reading? No. I trotted off to work this morning with ten pages to go, happy to leave it behind as there wasn't enough book left to sustain two train trips and a lunch break. But what does it say about an 'unputdownable' thriller that ten pages before the end I was able to walk out on it? I know I pretty much stand alone with this point of view, I was assured by colleagues, customers and friends that it would grab me and not let go. Unfortunately it did not do what it said on the label.

Interesting tidbit (maybe... it's quite a well-known tidbit so maybe not...) Stieg Larsson wrote three novels which make up the Millennium trilogy, of which Dragon Tattoo is the first. He delivered all three to his publisher and promptly died of a heart attack without living to see the insane popularity of his books. Most people say 'how sad' on learning this, I am inclined to be suspicious...just like Blomkvist, Larsson was an investigative reporter... maybe he was poking his nose in where it wasn't welcome... and someone felt the need to silence him for good...

7/10

A Spot of Bother (Mark Haddon)

Mark Haddon's second novel (after the remarkably well-received The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time) is a bit of a disappointment. Not because it's different from his first, which it is. But because it is meant to be an overly amusing tale about a seriously dysfunctional family.

Instead, it is mildly amusing and the family seems relatively normal.

It's a real pity. Okay, maybe I wasn't expecting a family unit dysfunctioning as badly as the Flytes, but I was hoping for AT LEAST humour and mishap akin to a Gerald Durrell novel. Haddon is a seriously good writer and I was excited to see what he would bring to the table. Instead, this was too easy a read, with all the depressing parts offset by moments of slapstick that did little to elevate the novel on the humour scale (too predictable) but did much to dilute any serious or meaningful scenes.

The main character George has just discovered what he believes to be a cancerous patch on his hip, not believing his doctor when he is informed it is eczema. Whilst his daughter prepares for a wedding, his wife has an affair and his son struggles with his own relationship, George goes slowly mad. The whole time I was reading this I just kept thinking "Ye gods, give the poor man some Valium." When some kind soul finally does give him Valium I felt overly smug for the rest of the novel, thus paying little attention to how the rest of it panned out.

However, low-brow content aside I could have really enjoyed this, were it not for the way the story and the humour are delivered. Haddon's too good a writer to just deliver chick-lit. He unbalances you as you're reading, making it impossible to just mindlessly enjoy the story. In high school a drama teacher (who shall remain unnamed but who, rest assured, is DEAD to me) told me I acted like a flea on heat (that story is 100% true). That's how Haddon delivers his humour, which hardly makes for a reflective reading experience.

This is all very negative of me and it wasn't a bad read, but A Spot of Bother didn't live up to expectations and at the same time didn't sink far enough below my expectations to warrant an enthusiastic thumbs up.

Rating: 7/10.

Fallen Skies (Philippa Gregory)

Philippa Gregory used to be a sure thing.

Oh, I wouldn't say she writes well.
At all.
I would say she knows EXACTLY how much factual information to insert into her historical fiction; and she is able to gauge to within a paragraph when our attention is beginning to wane so she can slip in a bodice-ripping scene or two. No problem really... that's my kind of thing and it's why I read her. There's nothing better to curl up with on a rainy day than hot chocolate and loved-up Tudors who could, at any minute, lose their heads.

However, lately, Gregory has been stumbling a bit, churning out any old rubbish and hoping mega ruffs and her name on the cover is all that is needed to sell the books. The Other Queen (2008) was absolute junk: Gregory turned one of the most fascinating women in English history (Mary Queen of Scots) into a boring, vacuous Mills and Boon heroine; and the plot read like a Radio 4 dramatisation on a particularly off day.

I thought perhaps Gregory was losing her touch and needed some sort of getaway at a historical fiction writer's spa. The sort of place where authors swan around in velvet, empire-waisted gowns with ridiculous sleeves and talk about codpieces and how Henry VIII is so over right now, their faces plastered in mashed haggis.
Mashed haggis?
Because I can, that's why.

However, having just finished Fallen Skies which came out in 1993 I have come to the realisation that Gregory's success with The Other Boleyn Girl and the others in the Tudor series was perhaps a fluke and now she is regressing back to where she began.

Fallen Skies was, first of all, a complete disappointment between the bedsheets. Our heroine Lily (who is quite, quite annoying) has two lovers: one is her husband Stephen who prefers her to impersonate a starfish during the act so she doesn't display wanton desires; and the other is Charlie, her true love, who had his man bits blown off during the war.
Sigh.
WHY, Philippa, WHY?

Then of course, we have the sinister nanny who we are immediately suspicious of. Several of her previous charges have died in mysterious circumstances. The author appears to forget about this as the nanny is phased out of the story and never returns. Misleading the reader is something I do not look favourably upon so this added to the fact that she led me on in thinking Stephen was gay made me doubly peeved. (I was sure all that time he spent with his mute chauffeur eating grilled cheese sandwiches was fishy. Apparently not.)

Gregory also appears to lose any enthusiasm she may have had for finishing the novel properly. It is a slow, sexually frustrated snail of a book until the last chapter, when it finishes so quickly, with no resolutions or sense, that we can only assume that's when the plot line of The Other Boleyn Girl came to her and she rattled off the end any which way.

Much as I'm doing now...

Rating: 5/10.

Five Quarters of the Orange (Joanne Harris)

Hmmm... I really don't know where to go with this review. In one corner we have evocative writing, memorable characters and a relatively solid plotline. In the other corner we have an elusive pike (yes, the fish), a hatred of clocks never explained or justified, migraine-inducing oranges, a heroine with the face of a toad (by her own admission) and a mother who makes the SS seem the lesser of two evils.

Not that these make the novel bad per se, but it's all a bit much. I put the book down and breathed a sigh of relief that I had finished and could move on. Except I can't move on because that pike keeps popping up in my mind and unsettling me.
Sure, I like being creeped out.
Gollum?
Genius.
Voldemort?
Fabulous.
Vampires?
Obviously.
But a freaking huge, ancient, evil, intelligent pike that can grant wishes and curse people?
NO THANK YOU.
Yadiyadiyada... we still have Harris' trademark magical realism, the interweaving of recipes with the story, that description of children as 'dark and sly' that she seems to favour (I believe blondes have been known to have the occasional immoral moment); but... no. Tolerable, but NO.

N.B. Earhart loves everything Harris has ever written and vehemently disagrees with this review.
Pick a side.

Rating: 6/10.