Welcome to our readers' review page
We hope that the readers' reviews listed will give you some new ideas for good reads. All the books are in stock in Leeds Library and Information Service. If you would like to reserve a copy, contact your local library or request a copy online.
1.
The Gathering by Anne Enright
Veronica is a 39 year-old Irish wife and mother with nine living siblings (her mother also had miscarriages and one child died at the age of three). Growing up, Veronica was closest to her brother Liam, just under a year younger than her, and now he too has died, committing suicide by walking into the sea, his pockets weighted with stones.
There is to be a Wake and the siblings gathered together at their mother’s house include Ernie, a lapsed priest who lives in Peru, Ita, who lives in America, and other assorted brothers and sisters. Veronica thinks back over their lives, particularly Liam’s, teasing at distorted memories which might provide a reason for his death, beyond his drinking and his knock-about way of life. The novel opens as Veronica recreates in her imagination the moment in a Dublin hotel when Ada Merriman, her grandmother, met two men, one of whom was to become her husband. The other had another destiny, and was, perhaps, partly responsible for Liam’s death. Veronica is created vividly on the page through her own words. Her thoughts and the events of her life and the lives of her brothers and sisters are filtered through her remarkably honest and uncompromising personality. There is no attempt to put a gloss on events and her narrative is sometimes uncomfortable for the reader as well as utterly fascinating. Enright writes about love and lust, bravery, cowardice and the hurt that can be carried through a life like an unbearable weight that is impossible to put down. Veronica wants to assign blame, or perhaps to assume shame, but she is not sure that either option can be borne.
The Gathering
won the Booker Prize in 2007 and is a marvellous book. It is moving,
accomplished and full of deep insights into family life.
2.
The Final Solution by Michael Chabon
We are in London, 1944, and a mixed-race C of E Minister and his wife have taken in a child sent by his family on the Kindertransport that shipped Jewish children out of Germany and away from a fate which we now know as the Holocaust. We first meet, mute, traumatised 12-yearold Linus, and Bruno his parrot, an African Grey, as he wanders around the village and comes across a distinguished old gentleman who is, at this stage of his life, chiefly a keeper of bees. Although the name is never mentioned in the story, we soon begin to understand that this old man is, in fact, Sherlock Holmes, who has somehow escaped his creator’s preferred fate of death at the Reichenbach Falls.
Michael Chabon, an American writer, has written, with this short (127pp), haunting and ingenious novella, a perfect addition to the oeuvre that Conan Doyle himself could not fault. But this is Conan Doyle with a heart. The love of a boy for his parrot, and the parrot for the boy, provides a strangely poignant framework for this beautiful little work of art. The double-bluff of the title and the surname of the host family (Panicker(!)) are the only anachronistic notes. But these are not important against the brilliantly authentic tone and the gripping story that unfolds. Absolutely superb, and, I felt, almost (though not quite) equal to John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in the emotional impact it carries within.
3.
Accidents in the Home by Tessa Hadley
The freshness and energy in Tessa Hadley’s writing is what lifts this book from yet another sad tale of adultery. Clare threatens to wreck her marriage for a dalliance with Tom, the new boyfriend of her best friend Helly. It’s a story with echoes in their past, when the popular Helly and the sparky, Goth-dressing Clare, often interchanged their boyfriends. Now Clare is married to Bram, all-round great father and good man and she bakes her own bread and worries ceaselessly about her three children, Jacob (known as Coco), Lily and Rose. There’s a helpful family tree for this is much more than just Clare and Helly’s story. It’s also the story of Graham and his three marriages, which produce a total of six children, of whom Clare is the eldest. It’s a tribute to Hadley’s clarity and skill that one seldom gets them mixed up, for all Graham’s children, and their children, have a part in this neat and shapely saga. This is a slim book (245pp), but character development is stunningly well-handled. With this cutting-edge development in the family relationships novel Hadley’s approach promises to bring the whole genre up to date. Fascinating plot-lines, people who thrum with authenticity, penetrating depth to the writing and, in general, great enjoyment for the reader.
4. Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
Ghostwritten has all the hallmarks of a dry run for David Mitchell’s massive novel Cloud Atlas ; and although his ambition is large he produces less of a sprawl in this earlier novel with the links between his nine disparate characters more obvious. Ghostwritten encompasses settings in Japan, China, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Petersburg, London, Clear Island off the coast of Northern Ireland and finally, a New York disc-jockey’s studio. The links between them are cleverly made and those involved range from a sarangas terrorist on the Tokyo Metro to an ethical female physicist tracked by the FBI to a tiny Atlantic island. The ghosts alluded to in the title are variously a small girl in a Hong Kong high-rise, a sentient being in Outer Mongolia desperate to trace the inception of his transmigratory soul, and, more literally, a young writer in London who is ghosting the biography of a minor intellectual polymath nearing the end of his life. Adventurous, provoking and cleverly constructed, this is an absorbing read from beginning to end. Characterisation is handled with flair – male and female – and some sections of the book are laugh-out-loud funny, while others feature conspiracy theories, the frailties of stock-market excess, art fraud and, in one case, the history of Chinese Communism as it affects a young girl living with her father on a Holy Mountain. The ‘ghost’ theme fragments and fractures at various points, and to some extent exists where a plot might ordinarily have been. But Mitchell’s theme also coheres by virtue of his adventurousness with the element of story, in which he excels in this novel. The ending attempts to tie the stories together, with an apocalyptic climax. Perhaps a more accessible work than Cloud Atlas , this doesn’t have the dauntingly astonishing ambition and vast time-line of that book. However, Ghostwritten does showcase Mitchell’s wonderful, not to say visionary, creative talent.
5.
Natural History by Neil Cross
This is a compulsive read from the beginning, when Patrick walks out of his rambling Devon house on the edge of Exmoor into the Ape and Monkey sanctuary he manages with his wife Jane, and finds Rue, the oldest female chimp, dead in her enclosure – poisoned. Jane is famous; she makes wildlife documentaries for the BBC, which she narrates along with her on-screen partner, Richard. Currently however, she and Patrick are concentrating on making their sanctuary, Monkeyland, a going concern. Jane and Patrick spent the early years of their marriage in Kenya, and it was there that their two children, Charlie and Jo, were born. Now Charlie is a strapping 18 year-old, and Jo, a gangly budding astronomer, is 13. This is the kind of book that you don’t want to finish – the warmth and tenderness of feeling it encompasses is beautifully done; at the same time the plot is a masterpiece of tension and suspense, all the more throat-clenching because it takes place in the context of a close and loving family. Jane has a stalker, who sends vile letters and photographs – an accident of her celebrity perhaps. But when she goes back to Africa to make another documentary, Patrick glimpses something in the woodlands around the sanctuary that leads him into a different kind of danger. Read this book – it cleverly builds to a horrendous climax that will genuinely shock you to your core.
6.
Schooling by Heather McGowan
A difficult book which gives you few clues as to who is speaking or perhaps thinking, and when the point of view changes, who it changes to . Written entirely in stream of consciousness, with, sometimes, stage/screenplay directions (for example: ‘If you’re ready for the blood, the scene of us revising vocabulary in Follyfield 4 dissolves to show a boy-‘), this novel is unlike any I have read before. The storyline concerns the schooling of a 14 year-old American girl, whose mother has just died. She is sent by her Welsh father to his old public boarding school, which has just begun to take in girls. The all-too familiar adolescent experiences ensue – bullying by an older boy, a bit of mild pyromania, a school play, and a passion for her favourite teacher, who happens to be divorced and susceptible – and though little happens between them, an erotic edge is present in their exchanges. Anyone who has experimented with writing forms will recognise the futility of trying to capture the moment in its entirety. Yet McGowan’s novel absolutely sparkles with the referent moment – one just doesn’t know how to place it, since she entirely leaves out the context. Once you get used to this you do get the drift of most references, however, I found myself sometimes looking up, dazed, disorientated and wondering if I shouldn’t be doing something more useful. One of these world-views is wrong. Is it us, who like books with stories in them, as well as experiences populated by characters with whom we can empathise, or is it Heather McGowan who has written a hauntingly poignant yet almost unreadable book about being a child in an adult world?
7.
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
Lee Fiora is a bright kid in her hometown of South Bend, Indiana, but when she gets to the prestigious boarding school, Ault, in Boston, Massachusetts, which she has persuaded her parents to let her attend, all her confidence disappears. It’s not just that most of the kids are rich, but most of them are better students than her, and many of them have confidence oozing from every pore. Lee’s journey through the four years she spends at Ault is a difficult one and it’s curiously absorbing for the reader to follow Lee through the traditions and cultural minefields of this closed society. Along the way Lee falls in love and learns about sex – which has its own stumbling-blocks – and in the end she very publicly transgresses the unspoken rules by which she has learned so painfully to live. This is a fascinating insight into America’s modern education system. It is a little slow in pace, but then four years in one place is a long time. Lee is both happy and unhappy at Ault and the extremes are all part of the experience. I enjoyed this book. It is well-written, thoughtful and evocative.
8.
Continent byJ im Crace
Stories from an unknown continent – but it might as well be Africa, or Borneo, or Brazil, or anywhere hot and humid with wilder reaches, largely unknown to the West. The conceit of this book is that the places in the stories, exist in a new continent and the world it purports to describe is meant to be ‘not ours’. Yet it so clearly is. I am suggesting, therefore, that the novel (which is really seven stories linked by their situation in this nowhere-real land) fails to establish its novelistic credentials. The places it describes are like Brazil,like parts of Africa or Borneo (my emphasis). The puzzlement is chiefly in why there is a need to invent a new continent, when we quickly grasp that these are old stories. They describe tribes discovered, peculiarities of tradition and ritual; they describe a calligraphic art desecrated by greedy politicians; they describe a young man travelling to America and back to his father’s farm in the distant hills, replete with contempt for the old superstitions by which his people live. The stories, in fact, parallel the stories of colonialism, corruption and patronisation with which we, here living in this world, are all too familiar. I am a great admirer of Jim Crace for his refusal to be bound by literary conventions. I loved Quarantine ,Six ,The Gift of Stones ,Being Dead ,The Devil’s Larder , and most of allThe Pesthouse . Continent is beautifully written, since Crace cannot write a bad sentence, but this is an early book and much that came after it is superior in conception and story-telling. Any of the novels listed above have in abundance Crace’s true gift of compelling literary genius, but this one, for me, is marred by the uncertainty of its setting.
9.
Under Cover by Luke Bradbury
This book is riding high on the Bestseller list, on the tail of soft porn kneetremblers such as Belle de Jour andOne Hundred Strokes of the Brush .
Interspersed with the kind of sex tips that state the obvious, this tells the story of hunky Australian Luke, who has come to London to break into the straight male escort market, which he does – to the reader’s lack of surprise. It’s actually rather tame and Luke is the kind of escort who has to remind himself to open doors for his clients and walk on the outside of the pavement – bless. It’s also rather depressing, unfortunately, especially in the sections where Luke kids himself he’s providing a caring service for women who can’t get action elsewhere. Otherwise it is just the usual unrealistic tosh, woefully lacking in genuine eroticism, blandly and sometimes badly written, but harmless fun for readers who like a bit of bedroom fantasy. 10. Never Far From Nowhereby Andrea Levy Olive and Vivien are sisters growing up in the 1970s on a London housing estate in which they are virtually the only mixed-race family. For their mother, race is a non-issue and the younger sister, Vivien, ignores her school friends’ casual racism and passes for white. This isn’t an option for Olive, whose skin is darker. While Vivien, quiet and studious, manages to make it into grammar school, Olive leaves her comprehensive school with no qualifications and marries a white man when she becomes pregnant by him, and it is Olive who experiences the racist attitude of the police at first hand.
Andrea Levy won the Orange Prize for Literature in 2004 with her wonderful book Small Island but Never Far From Nowhere was published before this, in 1996. It is a book which is rooted in real lives and ordinary experiences and doesn’t have the historical sweep and ambition of the prize winning Small Island . But for all that it is a remarkable book for its exploration of the tensions and differences which arise between the two sisters because of the different ways they are treated by their environment and the people who know them. I found its narrative absorbing. It may not be a book about large events, but it has a wonderfully gritty realism in its depiction of two girls growing up in a sometimes hostile world.
11.
The Flood by Maggie Gee
Anti-realism might best describe the writing style used here by Maggie Gee, who has written two other books about the White family who occupy a central place in this book. There is a multitude of characters, ranging from President Bliss to Dirk White, just released from prison where he has served out a term for the murder of a young black man. The waters are rising in Hypericon, which is at war with Loya – a far-flung country that no one seems to care much about, though there are the odd Marxist-inspired protests and there is the One World religious sect which can prove a bit of a nuisance at times.. Then after months of rain, the sun breaks through and a city-wide Gala, to be attended by celebrities and other notables with a slot starring President Bliss himself, is planned to celebrate the cessation of the floods. The rich are invited to the main event in the mansion hall, but the poor only get to see the fireworks. Then TV Astronomer Davey Lucas notices that not only will the planets all align on the night of the Gala, but a strange new comet seems to be heading straight for Earth. If this is Earth, of course, for the book can’t quite seem to make up its mind where it is and in what decade. The tower-block homes of the poor, for instance, seem to be lifted straight from the 1980s, and somewhere that must be Kew Gardens figures large in the story. It is also one of those books where too many characters are introduced then forgotten for long stretches. But that said, there is a mildly amusing edge to the events that unfold and the breezy tone of the writing saves it from portentousness. There is no doubt that Maggie Gee can write very well, but odd flashes of hysterical melodrama sit incongruously beside the effectiveness of the finer creative sections. The book seems to teeter on the edge of satire but never quite hits the mark squarely enough.
12.
Home land by Clare Francis
It is 1946 in the Somerset levels where the marshlands promote the growth of willows (called withies). WWII has just ended and an unending stream of servicemen is returning to the homeland. One of them, Billy Greer, is intending only to stop long enough to ensure his Uncle and Aunt are surviving well enough and perhaps see his long-time sweetheart Annie one more time. He finds his Aunt Flor has had a debilitating stroke, and Annie was married in his absence, though she is now a widow with a small daughter. Billy determines to leave for London where a mate has promised him a job in the motor trade. Along with returning British forces are hundreds of Polish soldiers who have no wish to live under the new Soviet regime. London is in the grip of a housing crisis and rationing has not yet ended. In a Polish camp on the Somerset levels Wladislaw Malinowski agrees to work on the withy holdings and is assigned to that of Billy Greer’s Uncle Stan. The atmosphere and hard conditions of work on the land and the stultifying hostility of the middle classes towards the Polish workers are well-conveyed in this novel. The multi-layered tensions of class – with Billy despising Wladislaw for being the son of wealthy landowners, and local bigwigs despising the Poles for being foreign and the working classes for being – well – working class, are ever-present. There is a murder plot tacked onto the end of this book, but it is really about the experience of non-nationals in England at the end of WWII and the hard lives of Somerset labourers, with a bit about London housing problems slipped into the middle. The only character who really comes to life is the scratchily sensitive and misogynistic Billy who has had it hardest of all. Again and again he lost my sympathies, then regained them, which is one way of keeping the reader engaged.
13.
UV by Serge Joncour
A villa on the Mediterranean belonging to a wealthy family, anxious for the return of their son, who has been in America for far too long, is the setting for this enigmatic, rather creepy thriller in the French-noir mode. The blurb calls it Hitchcockian, but I felt it was more in the line of Patricia Highsmith’s equally mood-rich Ripley novels, although it doesn’t quite have her bite and attack. As the two beautiful daughters of the rich man toast their bodies in the sun a man appears at the gates dressed in white. He introduces himself as Boris, a friend of their brother Philip. He is plausible, he is charming – everyone is taken in, but Boris is not quite who he seems to be. UV is a reference to Ultra Violet light, and this short, edgy little book should come with the obligatory raybans, steeped in sunlight as it is. But night always falls... I enjoyed this evocative, economical thriller which has a sneaky twist in the tale to upset one’s Anglo-Saxon presumptions.
14.
Easy Riders Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind
This is a book for film fans and as a cinema-lover I found it fascinating in its detailed and sometimes shocking revelations about the films that revolutionised Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s. The rise of the Director as a force in the film world rather than just another studio employee is a story of dedicated men (and a few women), who had a vision of film-making as both art and entertainment, though often not at the same time. The book begins with the story of how the film Easy Rider and its success at the box office put a bomb under the backsides of the old studio moguls. As Peter Fonda remarked, “Columbia executives stopped shaking their heads in incomprehension and began nodding their heads in incomprehension.” It is also the story of some great films – and film-makers. The debt to European film-makers is underlined. The new generation of American Directors took their cue from the French and Italians, such as Goddard, Truffaut, Fellini and Antonioni, freeing themselves from studio diktat and hollow genre films as well as the studio star system. Francis Ford Coppola was perhaps the greatest of these new movie brats – making The Godfather I and II, andApocalypse Now . Martin Scorcese madeTaxi Driver andRaging Bull, Steven Speilberg made Jaws andClose Encounters of the Third Kind , and George Lukas made Star Wars and the clones that came after it. Biskind chronicles how it all happened. He documents the fights, the dirty tricks, the money wrangles, the studio disasters and the stars; their egos, their demands, their affairs, their drinking, their drugs – Hollywood – in all its outrageous, untidy, sometimes sleazy and often corrupt phantasmagoria; and when the curtains opened, pure magic.
15.
Hell’s Angels by Hunter S Thompson
Hunter S Thompson depicts the rise of the phenomenon known as Hell’s Angels from the early 1950s, when they were epitomised as lonely, misunderstood rebels in the film The Wild Ones , with a young Marlon Brando playing the lead, to the mid 1960s when their favourite occupation, according to the media, was terrorizing isolated backwoods American townships by getting drunk and running amok amongst the worthy citizens. Though this did happen occasionally, the ‘runs’ of the gangs were usually more apt to involve violence amongst the groups themselves than towards outsiders. The whole ethos of the Hell’s Angels and associated gangs such as the Booze Fighters and Satan’s Slaves, to name just two, was to avoid getting slammed in jail. Since they rarely had jobs, incarceration involved expensive Bond Bails, which could tie up their finances for years. Yet this ran counter to their whole way of life, which was antithetical to society’s norms. A mass of contradictions occurs when trying to figure out what they really stood for. Thompson’s account is a sobering one. The media talked up even minor incidents so that a whole set of assumptions applied to anyone on a trademark Harley Davidson bike. It became ‘known’ that they were given to rapes and gangbangs, but it emerges from the statistics that there have been very few successful convictions for rape in the history of the motorcycle gang’s activities. By the 1960s many Hell’s Angels were married, with families, and wives came on the ‘runs’ too. The female hierarchies are fascinating – wives had the power and the protection, anyone else was fair game. Thompson liked these guys, and although this was written before he got his name for “Gonzo journalism”, his partisanship is obvious right up until the very last section of the book, when he recounts how he was suddenly turned on by a gang of Hell’s Angels in a bar and beaten bloody. Maybe they just got fed up of their pet journalist? Much of the detail of their history is frankly depressing. Individually, too there is not much to distinguish them from the clichés they have embraced. Over the years they have evolved rather better habits – and now there is even a Hell’s Angels Chapter in Windsor, UK. What would our own dear Queen have to say?
I hope you’ve enjoyed this issue, but if you disagree with any reviews, perhaps you’d like to include your views in future issues? New reviews are welcome too - please contact me via email at: eileen.m.shaw@ntlworld.com Meanwhile - keep reading!
Reviewed in this issue:
Anne Enright - The Gathering Andrea Levy - Never Far From Nowhere
Michael Chabon - The Final Solution Maggie Gee - The Flood
Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home Clare Francis - Homeland
David Mitchell - Ghostwritten Serge Joncour - UV
Neil Cross - Natural History Peter Biskind - Easy Riders Raging Bulls
Heather McGowan - Schooling Hunter S Thompson - Hell’s Angels
Curtis Sittenfeld - Prep
Jim Crace - Continent
Luke Bradbury - Under Cover
William Trevor
The Story of Lucy Gault
I read this book for the last meeting of my readers' group (Bookclub at Central library) and I found the story quite sad and depressing. I understand it's set in difficult times but the lack of willingness, lust for life and self power of the characters makes them unlikeable. I didn't vouch for any and although the narrative is quite gripping and makes the book a page turner, the end leaves you disappointed because the much expected change in the characters' lives for a better/new life never happens and they end up even more miserable than at the beginning.
Not to read if you're in low spirits, it will depress you even more.
Lansens, Lori
The Girls
A wonderful book about craniopagus joined twins and their very ordinary but extraordinary lives. How they coped with their lives in small town America. Recommended.
Member of Crossgates readers' group
McEwan, Ian
On Chesil Beach
A wonderful, well written, sensitive book about a couple of innocents before the swinging sixties. Recommended.
Member of Crossgates readers' group