Reading Matters

'The Pages' by Murray Bail

  Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 208 pages; 2009.

It's been 10 years since Murray Bail's last novel, the oh-so wonderful Eucalyptus, which is one of my all-time favourite books. I was anxiously awaiting this new one and had it on pre-order from Amazon for what seemed like forever. When it thudded through the mail box late last week, I devoured it hungrily. Unfortunately, I was slightly disappointed by it.

I'm not sure why. The writing is exquisite, with touches of modernism (Patrick White came to mind on more than one occasion), and the characters are wonderful: well drawn, believable and quirky. The narrative, however, is vague, and there were times when I wondered, where is Bail going with this?

The story is told from two intertwining perspectives. The first is largely from the point of view of Erica, a 45-year-old unmarried philosopher from Sydney, who is sent to a sheep station in the NSW outback to appraise the work of another philosopher, Wesley Anthill, who has died and left all his papers in his writing shed. The second is told from Wesley's point of view, first as a young man, who leaves the farm and moves to Sydney in search of "experience", before wandering through the UK and Europe, and then returning home to toil away on his life's work.

It's made clear from the start that Erica is a fish out of water. She's city born and bred, and the prospect of going over the Blue Mountains into the outback fills her with dread. To alleviate the boredom, she takes along her good friend, Sophie, a psychoanalyst. The dynamic, and the unspoken tension, between this pair certainly enlivens the narrative, particularly when they arrive at the sheep station and find their hosts, Wesley's siblings, Roger and Lindsey, are reclusive country bumpkins not used to talking, much less entertaining two "sophisticated" guests.

There are some funny moments throughout, a kind of laconic humour that brings a smile to the dial, along with some lovely homesick-inducing descriptions of the landscape and interesting turns of phrase, such as this gem:

Also on the table was a bottle of tomato sauce, almost finished, the leftovers clinging to the insides, like the remnants of the British Empire.

And this:

Men in the square were happily playing boule in the face of their fast-approaching deaths.

Much of the book is a kind of treatise to philosophy -- and posits that the Australian climate and landscape do not generate the kinds of conditions necessary to develop philosophical thought.

Hot barren countries -- alive with natural hazards -- discourage the formation of long sentences, and encourage instead the laconic manner. The heat and the distances between objects seems to drain the will to add words to what is already there. What exactly can be added? 'Seeds falling on barren ground' -- where do you think that well-polished saying came from?

And he juxtaposes this with the idea that Sydney may not be a philosopher's city but it is "the most psychological city in the world" where people go into therapy to talk about themselves.

What is going on here? The skies are blue, forever cloudless -- is that it? A great emptiness sending people back to themselves. Now that the city is up and running, no longer a country town, there's been a transference from the landscape and its old hardships to the self?

There are some big ideas here, and I suspect anyone who's studied philosophy (I haven't) will love it. But I was left wondering whether I had missed anything. Was Wesley's philosophy anything more than the average Australian youngster who backpacks through Europe and returns home feeling as if they've discovered themselves and the world?

The Pages is one of those books that asks more questions than it answers, and I suspect it's one of those novels that requires a second reading to fully appreciate. I think this quote by the Independent, on the back of my paperback, sums it up perfectly: "This book is as hard and sparse as that landscape, but no less beautiful for that."

The Pages was shortlisted for this year's Miles Franklin Award but lost out to Tim Winton's Breath.

Today's links

I'm home in bed, suffering from some kind of dreaded lurgy. It's either a bad dose of tonsilitis or the early stages of swine flu. I'm riding out the aches and pains, fever and sore throat by taking paracetamol every four hours and drinking lots of water. Sadly, I don't seem able to muster the energy to read my latest book, Ed O'Loughlin's Not Untrue & Not Unkind, but scooting around the internet for a bit of a look-see is manageable. Here's a few great links I've discovered today:

Jackie at Farm Lane Books Blog has a thoughtful post about contact with authors.

Anne Brooke has a cracking review of Chris Cleave's The Other Hand on the always wonderful Vulpes Libris blog. [Via Lisa, who left a comment on my review of Cleave's book.]

The Times has published a list of the best 60 books of the past 60 years. It's an interesting list with a load of popular titles. I've read 22 of them.

John Self of Asylum has a great review of Magnus Mills' latest offering, The Maintenance of Headway. I've added it to my wishlist, having read most of Mills' previous novels.

The Guardian has published an intriguing piece about Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall going from Booker outsider to favourite in 48 hours. I'm itching to read it: I saw the glowing reviews on  Newsnight Review on Friday, which are mentioned in the piece, and promptly added it to my wishlist. It's also got 20 five-star reviews on Amazon, if that's anything to go by...

The Irish Times looks at whether getting nominated for a literary prize guarantees a longer shelf life for your novel.

The same newspaper also has a great interview with Patrick McCabe, who has just finished a new, yet-to-be-published novel.

'Hot House Flower' by Margot Berwin

Fiction - paperback; Hutchinson; 288 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Having read Susan Orlean's classic non-fiction title, The Orchid Thief, and Eric Hansen's similarly acclaimed Orchid Fever, I had high hopes that this fictionalised account of a woman hunting for rare plants in the tropics of Mexico would be something I'd really enjoy. And while it ticked all the botanical boxes, I'm afraid Hot House Flower was slightly too girlie for me. In fact, the cover image and the cursive font should probably have served as a big warning: this is chick lit and I should read at my peril!

Now, don't get me wrong. I have no objection to chick lit. If it gets people reading and makes people excited about books, then it can only be a good thing. But it's not a genre I enjoy, for a whole host of reasons. And while Hot House Flower may dish up something slightly more exotic than a girl meets boy romance, when you get right down to it, it is essentially a cosy story about a 32-year-old divorcee looking to find a new man.

Bearing that in mind, it is imminently readable, and I consumed it in two sittings, so eager was I to follow Lila Nova's journey from high-flying advertising executive in Manhattan to her reinvention as a flower hunter in the luscious rainforest of the Yucatan peninsula.

The first-person narrative is easy to follow and there's plenty of adventure and thrills and spills to keep you entertained, along with a dash of romance and a bit of magic and witchcraft thrown in for good measure. It's a fun, light-hearted read and definitely won't sap the brain power.

However, the magic realism, highly reminiscent of Sarah Addison Allen's Garden Spells, means you need to suspend belief for much of the story, but especially the latter-third which involves Huichol shamans and herbalists working their supernatural powers. It's fascinating, if slightly too far-fetched for my liking, but if you're looking for some sheer escapism this summer, Hot House Flower will fit the bill perfectly.

'The Secret Scripture' by Sebastian Barry

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 320 pages; 2009.

When I read Sebastian Barry's 2005 Booker shortlisted novel A Long Long Way several summers ago I found it one of the most moving books I'd ever read. There was something about the story of an Irish lad caught between two wars that really resonated with me, and I promptly ordered my father a copy because I knew he'd enjoy the Great War element. Almost three years later I still find myself occasionally thinking about this story, always the sign of a great piece of fiction.

Then, last August, I acquired a copy of Barry's 2008 Booker shortlisted novel The Secret Scripture. It languished on my bedside table unopened and unread for months, and even its triumph at the Costa Book Awards in January, where it won the Costa Book of the Year Award, didn't spur me to pick it up. Then, on my recent trip to Ireland, I discovered a copy of it in the holiday cottage I was renting and felt it was no use putting it off any longer: I had to read it to see how it measured against my very high five-star opinion of A Long Long Way.

The Secret Scripture didn't disappoint. It is a magnificent story about memory and the tricks our minds play on us, and how society has a habit of condemning the innocent to live lives of quiet desperation and unnecessary struggle.

The story is split between two narrators, Roseanne McNulty, possibly the oldest woman in Ireland who has been a patient at Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital since 1957, and Dr William Greene, the senior psychiatrist who is charged with determining which patients can be re-released into the community once the present building is demolished.

Dr Greene, an outsider (in the sense that he's not Catholic) grieving over the death of his wife, spends a lot of time with Roseanne, whom he describes as "my old friend" and the "oldest person in this place".

She has been a fixture, and not only represents the institution, but also, in a curious way, my own history, my own life.

During their sessions in which he assesses Roseanne's suitability for discharge, he finds himself confessing things to her that he would normally keep quiet. Meanwhile, Roseanne gives little of herself away, preferring to make her confessions in a secret diary that she keeps hidden under the floorboards. It is these revealing diary extracts which make up her side of the narrative.

Eventually, over the course of the book, you learn of the joys and horrors of Roseanne's life and how she came to be incarcerated in the asylum. But because she readily admits that everything she recalls "may not be real"  and that she has "taken refuge in other impossible histories, in dreams, in fantasies" you're never quite sure if she is a reliable narrator or not. Towards the end of the novel she confesses that her memories and her imaginings are "lying deeply in the same place" and that the process of excavating them is troublesome.

Dr Greene, who is not privy to Roseanne's written confessional, has his own suspicions about her inconsistent memory, which he puts down to "tangled histories":

Not only can I not get her story from herself, I have versions of her life that I think she would reject.

Eventually, these two diverse narrative threads, which dance around each other, meld together, culminating in a surprise ending, which is devastating in its impact.

Unfortunately -- and this is where I tend to agree with the Costa judges who called it "a flawed novel" -- this tightening of loose ends felt too contrived for my liking, too neat, too packaged. It didn't help that I guessed the ending but had spent the last 50 or so pages convincing myself that I had it wrong, because surely Barry would leave in the ambiguities to allow the reader to come to their own conclusions about what really happened.

Does this matter though? No book is ever perfect and while The Secret Scripture might rely on two major coincidences for its climax to work, it does not detract from the highly emotional story told in such an effortless, beautiful way. And it certainly wouldn't put me off recommending it to anyone looking for something exquisitely written, intelligent and moving.

If you liked this book, you might also like Salley Vickers' The Other Side of You which treads similar territory in terms of narrative, content and style.

'A Woman of My Age' by Nina Bawden

Fiction – paperback; Virago Modern Classics; 160 pages; 1992.

Until very recently I had Nina Bawden pegged as a children's author. Then, while browsing BookMooch a week or so ago, I accidentally discovered she had a rather extensive back catalogue of adult fiction that I simply did not know about. I promptly acquired a rather battered copy of A Woman of My Age (Virago Modern Classic Number 366) and set about reading it.

First published in 1967, this short novel reminded me very much of Doris Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark  in that it tells the story of one woman's emotional journey -- figuratively and physically -- as she struggles to come to terms with growing older and finding her rightful place in the world.

From the outset it is clear that our narrator is not content:

I find this so difficult. When I look in the mirror -- not to see if the grey roots are beginning to show before the next tinting, but in the same way I used to look at myself when I was seventeen, at what, whom and why -- I remain, as I did then, cloudy, fading, sadly out of focus. I do not know myself, only my situation: I am Elizabeth Jourdelay, married to Richard, the mother of his two sons. I am, I am middle-aged. This is an embarrassment that has come upon me suddenly, taking me by surprise so that I don't really believe it. Looking in the mirror I see the wrinkles, but perhaps tomorrow they will be gone and my skin will be smooth again. Though wrinkles are not important. The important thing is that I am in the middle of my life and I feel as I did when I was adolescent, that I do not know where to go from here.

Now, on holiday in Morocco with Richard, Elizabeth longs for the desert because her life was "crowded, cluttered up". But the journey is far from the calm, peaceful one for which she longs. Alongside the heat, there are other English travellers with whom she must contend: the delightfully eccentric and elderly Mr and Mrs Hobbs, and the slightly vain, thrice-married Flora and her much younger lover, Adam.

While Elizabeth enjoys the Hobbs' company, because they remind her of the parents she never had, she finds Flora irritating. Indeed, Flora had gone to Oxford with Richard, and there are suggestions that they pair may have been lovers in the distant past and that their accidental meeting in Fez may have been pre-arranged. These niggling suspicions eat away at Elizabeth, who finds herself analysing her own marriage with a man she barely knew when she married him, aged 20, some 18 years ago.

Her somewhat melancholy recollections of their life together are seamlessly interspersed with what is happening in the present time, as the couple travel from Fez to the barren uplands beyond the Atlas mountains. The reader soon begins to realise that Elizabeth has made far too many compromises in order that the marriage can work, and now, in a foreign country, the cracks in their relationship can no longer be smoothed over. The tension, some of it tragi-comical, builds and builds until it comes to a devastating head...

A Woman of My Age is definitely a product of its times, when women married young and were expected to stay at home and raise a family. But in Elizabeth Jourdelay, Bawden has created a headstrong and independent character who rails against society's "rules" and constraints. Raised by two spinster aunts, one of whom brought her up "to give too much importance to careers and causes and things of the mind", Elizabeth finds marriage and motherhood constricting.

A highly political creature -- "I was very unsure of myself except in matters of political opinion" -- she longs to become a local councillor but Richard thought it a "dirty game and he could not understand how I could endure it" .

Later, when she raises the subject of getting a job, the response from her mother-in-law is crushing:

She said, first, 'Do you really want one, dear? Richard and I thought you had settled so nicely' -- as if I was some sort of jelly -- and then, 'Well, if you really want to, I suppose it would be nice for you to earn some pin money.'

Unfortunately, it does not pan out as planned.

Perhaps it was stupid of me, but I had expected so much, if in a rather a vague way, that the reality was a bitter shock: I was unqualified, I had no degree, I wasn't even trained as a secretary. It soon became clear that nothing which came up to my expectations was open to me. When I realised this, the walls seemed to close in. I became a gloomily devoted mother.

There's something very sad about Elizabeth reconciling her expectations with keeping her family happy, because it's clear that her husband has not had to do the same thing. Of course, we only hear Elizabeth's side of the story, but as the narrative progresses you begin to understand that Richard is not the saintly school teacher husband he purports to be.

And while Bawden deftly captures all the tensions and betrayals and compromises that married people make, she also does a nice line in setting the mood. Her descriptions of Morocco are particularly vivid.

The terrace of the casbah fell away down the hill, dovetailed into one another like the streets and courts of a medieval city, all enclosed in a wall of the same red earth. At one end there was a little tower where cranes were nesting. Beyond the wall was the palm-grove, a chess-board of different coloured grasses, and beyond the oasis, the flat, ochre colour of the desert. The air quivered, not just far in a heat haze, but close by me on the parapet, in a kind of vibrating brightness that hurt my eyes. 

In fact, setting the book in Morocco is a clever touch, because it allows Elizabeth to compare the subjugation of women in North African societies with her own situation. Indeed, when Flora points out that "their men shut them up at home; even if you visit the house, the women don't appear socially. Just to serve the food" the point seemingly goes over Elizabeth's head, but it did not go over mine.

Having read my first Nina Bawden adult novel I'm keen to read the others -- there's certainly plenty to keep me occupied as you can see by this and this. Next on the rank is The Birds in the Trees or maybe I will try Afternoon of a Good Women, two books I mooched even before I'd come to the end of this one. If they are half as good as A Woman of My Age I am sure to be in for a treat.

'The Resurrectionist' by James Bradley

Fiction - eBook; Faber and Faber; 293 pages; 2008. Review copy courtesy of digital advertising agency i-level.

Having recently read Druin Burch's wonderful biography of the world's first famous surgeon, Astley Cooper (1768-1841), I was rather looking forward to a fictionalised account of the men from the same era who robbed graves to supply the medical profession with fresh corpses to study.

Billed as an historical thriller, The Resurrectionist, by Australian author James Bradley, was chosen as one of Richard and Judy's summer reads, so perhaps I should have known that this would not bode well -- I have never had much luck enjoying anything that this duo has chosen for promotion. Still, because I was fascinated by the subject matter, I was prepared to give it a try.

Now this is where I must add a disclaimer: I read this book on a Sony Reader, the first eBook I have ever read, and so for the first 100 or so pages I was still getting to grips with my new gadget and I'm slightly concerned that I may have been distracted and not paid the book the proper attention it deserved. Even so, I struggled to enjoy the storyline, not because it wasn't well written -- the prose style is superb -- but because it lacked narrative drive.

I know I have said this many times in the past, but at the risk of repeating myself I truly do believe that the best books are the ones that pose a question in the reader's mind at the outset, forcing you to read on in order to discover the answer, usually at the end. But in Bradley's Gothic novel I really had no reason to keep reading because I wasn't sure what it was I wanted to find out, in other words, no question had been posed at the start unless, of course, I missed it.

As much as the setting is wonderfully evocative and atmospheric (it would be a very poor writer indeed who could not describe London in the early 19th century as such), and the subject matter intriguing (how could the trade in stolen bodies not be?), I failed to identify with the main character, Gabriel Swift.

Mr Swift is a young assistant to Edwin Poll, the greatest of the city's anatomists, a privileged position that could see him make a name for himself as a surgeon at a later date. Instead, he succumbs to the charms of Poll's nemesis, the vampire-like Lucan, a resurrectionist who rules the trade in stolen bodies. From there it's pretty much a downward spiral into crime and opium-addiction.

Later, the book makes an initially unexplained leap to the antipodes where Swift now resides, which made me wonder if I was reading the same book. Indeed, I did momentarily consider the possibility that the eBook file had corrupted without me knowing, because how else could you explain such a change of direction in a narrative?

Still, I can't say I hated The Resurrectionist. It's got all the right elements for a good read -- fascinating subject, interesting characters, great prose -- but it lacks pace and, most importantly of all for a thriller, suspense, and for that reason I can't give it more than a two-star rating. Others, I am sure, will disagree.

'Krapp's Last Tape and Embers*' by Samuel Beckett

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 39 pages; 2001.

Is it possible to say anything that hasn't already been said about Samuel Beckett's much-produced, much-loved play Krapp's Last Tape? Type the title into Google and you'll get more than 90,000 entries, which isn't bad for such a slim volume.

The play was first performed in October 1958 by Northern Irish actor Patrick Magee at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Since then everyone from Albert Finney to John Hurt have traipsed the boards, playing the sole character of this one-man play. 

In Krapp's Last Tape an elderly world-weary man sits at a desk to make an annual recording on his birthday. He is 69.

In his tape recorder he finds an earlier tape, one that was made when he was 39, and so he listens to it in bursts -- fastforwarding it in places, rewinding it in others -- while he takes notes in the present.

What emerges is that despite the passing of time -- 30 years to be precise -- Krapp does not seem to have lead a very fulfilling or productive life and his best memories are snatches of stolen moments, whether it be walking the dog or making love to a woman, from the past. Indeed the older Krapp describes the younger version as a "stupid bastard" and finds it "hard to believe I was ever as bad as that".

Essentially this is a play about memory, sexuality, the purpose of life, and death. But it's one that can be read over and over to discover new meanings and new insights. Not having seen it performed live, I imagine that it doesn't fully come into its own until the words are given proper voice by a real actor. Thank goodness, then, for YouTube, where I found this rather good version that very much enhances the reading:

* Embers, the second play within this slim volume, was specially written for radio and first performed in 1959. In it a man called Henry walks along the beach thinking about his dead father while other familar voices, including his wife Ada and his young daughter Addie, speak to him from the past.

'Digging Up the Dead: Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon' by Druin Burch

Non-fiction - paperback; Vintage; 276 pages; 2008. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

I have read some interesting and unusual books in my time, but Druin Burch's Digging Up the Dead must be the most interesting and unusual book I have ever read. Indeed, when I was offered it for review, I had initially been drawn to the dark, Gothic nature of the subject, but hadn't quite clocked the fact it was a non-fiction title. So when it popped through my door I was slightly taken aback to discover that it was actually a biography. But what a biography it turned out to be!

Digging Up the Dead looks at the life and times of arguably the world's first famous surgeon, Astley Cooper (1768-1841), whom Burch -- himself a medical doctor -- describes as vain, egotistical, nepotistic and "rather wonderful".

Astley was born into a highly educated family -- his father was an Oxford-educated vicar, his uncle was senior surgeon at Guy's Hospital in London -- but he showed little interest in books or study but specialised in pranks and adventures. When the family moved to Yarmouth he began training under a local apothecary, who also doubled as a surgeon, in the hope that he might learn enough to follow his older brothers into university and perhaps a physicianship, or his uncle to a hospital and career as a surgeon. He did well and moved on to become an apprentice to a surgeon at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.

When he was fourteen-and-a-half he witnessed a problematic, but successful, operation to remove a stone from a man's bladder. This was to have a profound influence on him, because it was not long after that he decided to embark on surgical training in London, much to the delight of his family.

In London, his early career got off to a shaky start. He boarded with one of his uncle's colleagues, Henry Cline, in a "a grand detached residence with stables and outbuildings" at 12 St Mary Axe in the heart of the City of London, and spent much of his newfound freedom running wild instead of knuckling down to his studies. His superiors regarded him as lazy.

Cline, sick to the back teeth of his charge's reckless nature, came home one evening with a human arm and challenged Astley to dissect it then and there.

The skill and industry with which Astley dissected the arm astonished both the apprentice and the teacher. Astley was transformed. The fraudulent military uniform was gone, and in its place was the dress of a surgeon. For the first time in his life he found himself taking an interest in work.

From then on Astley became rather enamoured with dissection, working long hours in St Thomas's hospital, hunching over stinking corpses, learning everything he could about human anatomy. Because the study of anatomy was in its infancy at the time, there was no other way for surgeons to learn their trade and so this is where Druin's book delves into the gruesome nature of body-snatching, that peculiar illegal practice of stealing freshly buried bodies or -- worse still -- murdering people to satisfy the medical profession's need for corpses to study.

Indeed, Astley is often so desperate for fresh corpses he steals neighbourhood pets and dissects them at home while they are still alive, something that turns the stomach today but which, at the time, taught him much that was not known by the surgeons of the day. (Readers with weak stomachs will find much to disgust them in this book, not least the descriptions of vivisection but also the many and varied operations that are performed without anesthesia. But it would not be fair to say they have been included merely for their shock factor; they are necessary for the reader to put Astley's life into context.)

Eventually, of course, Astley becomes a hugely successful surgeon and lecturer, has studies published in The Lancet, wins the Royal Society's highest prize and tends to the Prince Regent and Queen Victoria. All the while, he manages to travel abroad (he gets caught up in the French Revolution), marry, have children and teach surgeon-soon-to-be-turned-poet John Keats (yes, that John Keats).

The picture of Astley that emerges from this rather in-depth but beautifully written biography is an enormously complicated man, arrogant but caring by turns, who loved to take risks but made sure to cover his tracks when it counted most. Living at at time of great political, social and scientific change, he seems to be one of the leading lights in almost every field, not just medicine, and was loathed and loved in equal measure.

Digging Up the Dead is a truly fascinating account of a fascinating man who lived in fascinating times.  Druin Birch has done much to bring him to life by not only capturing the man so vividly but by illuminating the narrative with his own experiences as a medical doctor working more than two centuries after Astley first trod the London cobblestones. It's a slow-burn of a read, one that requires concentration and diligence, but it's well worth the effort, especially if you are fascinated by science, medicine or history.

'Whitethorn Woods' by Maeve Binchy

Fiction - paperback; Orion Books; 450 pages; 2007.

Holed up in bed mid-week with a terrible head cold I didn't feel much like taxing my brain power, and so it was I came to read Maeve Binchy's latest paperback, Whitethorn Woods. I won't be the first to admit that Binchy's novels aren't exactly intellectually stimulating -- they're warm and fluffy and make you feel all gooey inside, perfect fodder for reading on the beach or curled up in bed when you're unwell. But this one, I'm sorry to say, was a disappointing read.

The thing that bugged me most was not the storytelling, which is typically enjoyable, heart-warming Binchy fare, but the complete failure of the publisher to specify anywhere on the cover or blurb that this is actually a collection of interconnected short stories and not a novel. I am not a fan of the short story for no other reason than they  generally leave me feeling dissatisfied, because I want to know more about the characters, their motivations and lives. On that basis I'm a novel-reading kind of gal, and that's probably how it will always be.

Whitethorn Woods comprises 13 short stories, each one divided into two parts so that the same story is told from two different points of view, an interesting "twist" which demonstrates Binchy's exemplary story-telling skills. The characters in each story are all from the same place -- a once sleepy Irish town called Rossmore, which is now booming but is choked by traffic. These stories are connected by three "bridging" chapters -- at the start, middle and end --  which explain how the town's woods and a well dedicated to St Ann are threatened by a new bypass. It's a nifty idea, but I couldn't help but wonder if Binchy had simply chucked together all those unpublished short stories she's written over the years, perhaps the ones languishing in the bottom drawer, and inserted a few common themes -- the woods, the spiritual well, the town's traffic problem -- in order to get the next book out and into the shops. That might sound harsh, but as a reader I have to admit feeling slightly cheated by this book.

Still, if you like short stories, this is a good little collection, provided you don't mind Binchy's rather simplistic, sometimes cloying, view of life in which hard work is always rewarded, love can be found in the most unexpected of places and good things happen to kind people. But personally, as much as I enjoyed reading about the quiet lives told within each story, I struggled to enjoy Whitethorn Woods as a whole.

If you've not read anything by Maeve Binchy before, I suggest this is not the place to start, because if you do it could well be the last Binchy you ever read -- and that would be a sad thing given her extraordinary back catalogue of feel-good fiction.

'Long Way Down' by Ewan McGregor & Charley Boorman

Non-fiction - hardcover; Sphere; 352 pages; 2007.

Three years ago fellow actors and biking buddies Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman set off on a voyage from London to New York the long way round. The resultant 10-part TV series following their 20,000 mile road trip across Europe and Asia proved a huge hit, as did the book that accompanied it. I came to the whole Long Way Round phenomenon quite late, having stumbled upon a repeat screening of the series on Sky TV about 18 months after it had been made. But I was immediately enraptured and thought it was one of the most entertaining travel documentaries I'd ever seen. I promptly went out and bought the DVD and the book.

Fast forward a year and the double-act were back on board their motorbikes, this time traversing the globe from top to bottom -- from John O'Groats at the northernmost tip of Scotland to Cape Agulhas on the southernmost tip of South Africa -- in a new 15,000-mile adventure being billed as the Long Way Down. The popularity of the first series had obviously paid off for them: this time the trip was being documented on a live website and the resultant TV series was being screened on BBC 2 during prime time Sunday night viewing.

I watched the series, although I didn't think it was as good as the first. It didn't seem quite as magical or as fresh as the original. In fact, in places, it just seemed too knowing, too calculated -- and there were far too many participants involved. It wasn't so much as two men and their motorbikes, but two men, their motorbikes, one wife, a dozen various "fixers" and a five-member support crew. Hmmm.

The book doesn't really add to much to the TV series, other than you get a chance to find out a bit more about some of the UNICEF projects they visited and you get a better sense of the African people they met along the way. Like the original book, it fills in some useful gaps that weren't explained or were simply skimmed through on TV.

At times it does read a bit like a stuck record, with both of them complaining over and over about the too-fast schedule and their inability to spend time in all the places they wanted. Coupled with Charley missing his wife and children all the time, and Ewan banging on about how privileged he is to do the trip, it began to wear thin in places.

Nonetheless it's a light, entertaining read, funny in places, moving in others -- a bit like the TV series. But it's lack of intellectual insight or deep thinking about African history means this is really only a book for the fans. If you loved Long Way Down, chances are you'll enjoy this one too, but if you'd rather just watch the TV series you're not going to miss out on anything if you don't bother with the book. And you could perhaps save yourself a lot of time by simply reading the tongue-in-cheek condensed version on The Guardian's Digested Read, which isn't so much a piss take but a crystallised version of the truth.

'Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life)' by Cathie Black

Non-fiction - hardcover; Crown Business; 304 pages; 2007. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Books about management are not normally my cup of tea. But when this one by Cathie Black, president of New York-based Hearst Magazines, was offered to me for review I couldn't resist. In my day job I'm a magazine editor, so I thought it would be interesting to find out about the business from another perspective and to see whether I could learn anything from Black's rise to the top.

Billed as "a memoir masquerading as a guide to career and life", Basic Black isn't a chronological account of Cathie's career. Although she provides plenty of anecdotes about the various roles she's had in the past -- from ad sales on Holiday to president of a fledgling USA Today -- this book is more about dispelling words of wisdom on how to successfully live a "360 Life", one that that balances work and play, rather than an autobiography.

Packed with great practical advice and written in a friendly, accessible and chatty style, Basic Black is an entertaining, effortless read.  But I'm not sure it was pitched at someone of my age and experience, as I found most of the tips too obvious. Doesn't everyone know that being passionate about what you do, going the extra mile and being prepared for all outcomes will serve you well in your career?

That said, I'm sure this book would be perfect for that 20-something female just starting out in the workforce, maybe even an undergraduate preparing for their first job interview. It certainly would have been of interest when I was first starting out, even if it was simply to reinforce my own ideas about how to get ahead in business.

But even if you don't work in the media or couldn't care less about moving up the career ladder, there's plenty of enjoyable anecdotes within the pages of this well-laid out book to keep you reading on. I found a lot of Cathie's stories completely fascinating, but then I'm always interested in the things that people do and say in this game called magazine publishing that I love so much...

'The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary' by Ambrose Bierce

Humour - paperback; Penguin Classics; 336 pages; 2001. Review copy courtesy of publisher.

Remember my post about Blog a Penguin Classic? I was one of the lucky ones who registered with the site and a couple of weeks later received a free book on the condition I'd read and review it within six weeks.

With the six-week deadline fast approaching, I decided it was time I actually cracked open the book and took a proper look at it. The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary, written by 19th century journalist Ambrose Bierce, is not something you would normally sit down and read cover to cover, unless, of course, you have a penchant for reading dictionaries in their entirety. As much as I love using dictionaries -- I couldn't do my day job or the majority of my blog posts without access to one -- I'm not so nerdy about words that I would take something like this to bed with me for a little light reading. That would feel too much like hard work, right?

However, The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary is not your usual run-of-the-mill dictionary. It's a full-scale satire -- and despite being written more than 100 years ago it contains some very funny entries as Bierce makes light work of religion, marriage, politics and society. Here are some of my favourites:

Brandy, n. A cordial composed of one part thunder-and-lightning, one part remorse, two parts bloody murder, one part death-hell-and-the-grave, two parts clarified Satan and four parts holy Moses! Dose, a headfull all the time. Brandy is said, by Emerson, I think, to be the drink of heroes. I certainly should not advise others to tackle it. By the way, it is rather good.

Christmas, n. A day set apart and consecrated to gluttony, drunkenness, maudlin sentiment, gift-taking, public dullness and domestic behaviour.

Dentist, n. A prestidigitator, who puts metal into your mouth and pulls coins out of your pocket.

See what I mean about it still being rather relevant?

But the best bit about this book is the story of how it came about: the introduction by Ernest Jerome Hopkins explains how Bierce's work, largely written between 1881 and 1886 when he was one of the most powerful journalists working in America, came to be published in one volume.

The original idea for a satirical dictionary was born in 1869 when Bierce was working as a columnist for a small financial magazine in San Francisco called the News Letter. He normally filled 'The Town Crier' page with satirical comment and criticism, but during one particularly "dead" week in which topics seemed to have dried up, Bierce penned a piece about the Webster's Unabridged dictionary and how a comic dictionary would be much more fun to read.

Fast forward a few years and Bierce began writing that dictionary and publishing various instalments in whatever newspaper he happened to be editing at the time. It wasn't until he was editor of William Randolph Heart's Examiner that he finally managed to compile all the entries that he could find into a book for publication.

This Penguin Classic version of the dictionary, first published in 1967, brings together a whole host of entries that were lost or forgotten (hence it is subtitled With 851 Newly Discovered Words and Definitions Added to the Previous Thousand-Word Collection).  It will delight anyone who appreciates wit, rather than humour, and revels in word play and doesn't mind the odd bit of poetry (Bierce was also an accomplished poet). In fact, Bierce himself said it would be ideally suited to those "enlightened souls who prefer dry wines to sweet, sense to sentiment" -- and I tend to agree.

While a little long-winded and trying-too-hard-to-be-clever in places, I know this book is going to be one of those titles I will dip into whenever I'm in search of some much-needed cheer. I defy anyone to read it without smirking at least once.

'The Chemistry of Death' by Simon Beckett

 

Fiction - paperback; Bantam; 438 pages; 2007. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

It's been a long time since I've read a straightforward crime thriller that delivers the right ingredients to keep me turning the pages: strong characterisation, a sympathetic narrator, a claustrophobic setting, a smattering of gruesomeness and fear, lots of dark secrets, a good plot and plenty of twists, turns and red herrings to keep me guessing all the way to the end. Simon Beckett's Chemistry of Death certainly ticks all the right boxes.

Set in rural Norfolk, it tells the story of a young widowed GP, Dr David Hunter, who has a secret past: he was once a forensic anthropologist but gave it all away following the death of his wife and young daughter in a car accident. Now living a new life in a small village, Dr Hunter is dragged back to the past when two local children stumble upon the decomposing body of a woman in the woods. The police seek his help to determine the time of death and before he knows it, he is completely embroiled in their investigation. It looks like there is no way out when a second body -- and then a third -- is discovered a short time later...

Beckett is an accomplished writer. The plot moves along at a furious pace, with rarely a dull moment, and each chapter ends with a "hook" that gives the reader a reason to keep turning the pages. He's a master at ratcheting up the tension, so that at times you can feel your pulse racing in tandem with the heart-stoppingly good storyline.

But the best thing about this book is that Beckett makes the subject of forensic anthropology incredibly interesting. He has done his research -- in fact, an article he wrote about the USA's National Forensic Academy for the Telegraph magazine in 2002 is included at the back of this novel -- which adds to the authenticity of the storyline. Is it any wonder he has been compared to Patricia Cornwall, the queen of forensic thrillers?

It's only towards the end of the book that I discovered a few false notes. The climax, in particular, was slightly melodramatic and a little unbelievable -- although the story was so powerful it needed to end with a big narrative "punch". But this is just a minor criticism. As a whole I thoroughly enjoyed The Chemistry of Death and rather suspect that anyone who likes their thrillers to be packed with spine-tingling moments and stomach-churning detail will enjoy it too.

'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas' by John Boyne

 

Fiction - paperback; Definitions; 224 pages; 2007.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is one of those commercially successful cross-over books, originally written for children but now read by adults, that has been lauded by the critics and nominated for countless awards. It even has its own wikipedia entry.

I knew little about the book when I bought it, save that it was about the Holocaust and was written by an Irishman. The blurb on the back gave even less away:

The story of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is very difficult to describe. Usually we give some clues about the book on the cover, but in this case we think that would spoil the reading of the book. We think it is important that you start to read without knowing what it is about. If you do start to read this book, you will go on a journey with a nine-year-old boy called Bruno. (Though this isn't a book for nine-year-olds.) And sooner or later you will arrive with Bruno at a fence. We hope you never have to cross such a fence.

Initially, I thought the book was probably too simple for my tastes and wondered whether it was worth the effort. It didn't take long for the short, sparse sentences and the repetitive nature of some of the phrases to wear thin. But once I got past the half-way mark, I began to feel soothed by the rhythm of the writing.

I also noted that the plot was not as straightforward as I might have thought and that there were little surprises dotted along the way. Of course, the biggest surprise -- nay shock -- is right at the end, although I won't give it away. Let's just say it's a memorable and devastating one, and if you can reach the end without a big lump forming in your throat there may just be something wrong with you.

All in all, this is a simple book about big themes, and quite unlike any other Holocaust novel I have read before. The killer punch delivered in the final pages means I will be thinking about this story in the days, months and years to come...

'Race to Dakar' by Charley Boorman

Non-fiction - hardcover; Little, Brown Book Group; 320 pages; 2006.

As I write, the 2007 Dakar Rally is in full swing. It is the world's most gruelling and challenging off-road endurance race for motorised vehicles. One motorcyclist, South African Elmer Symons, has already died in this year's race and last year's claimed the life of Australian Andy Caldecott.

So when actor Charley Boorman finished the 20,000 mile road trip from London to New York (the long way round via Russia) with his best mate Ewan McGregor in 2004, the Dakar Rally seemed like the next logical challenge. But, as Charley was soon to realise, there's a big difference between riding a route you've organised yourself to racing along one that has been designed to test your off-road navigational skills, your physical capabilities and your mental strength to their absolute limits. It has often been compared to climbing Everest or sailing around the world it is such a difficult feat to achieve.

This book charts Charley's attempt to tackle the Lisbon to Dakar route, via the deserts of Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Mali, Guinea and Senegal, with mixed -- and often heart-breaking -- results. It is accompanied by a seven-part TV series, now on DVD, which looks at Charley's pre-trip preparation and planning through to the actual two-week 10,000km race.

But this is no solo attempt. Charley is clever enough to form a race team comprising two accomplished enduro motorcyclists, the unflappable cool-headed Australian Simon Pavey and determined first-time Dakar Rally racer Englishman Matt Hall. He also has a brilliant race support crew headed by producer Russ Malkin (who also managed the Long Way Round ride).

I loved the book. It's easy to read and highly entertaining and gives you a slightly different perspective to the TV series. It's written in a very chatty style and conveys Charley's fears and doubts quite clearly -- there is little room for ego here!

However, as with Long Way Round, I'm not sure the book would make the grade as a stand alone read without the TV series -- you really need to SEE the terrain and the riding conditions (all that dust, all those dunes and cars barrelling out of nowhere) to fully appreciate the difficulty of the challenge.

All in all, this is a wonderfully inspiring read about pushing the human mind and body to its limits. And you don't have to be a bike nut to appreciate it.

'Christine Falls' by Benjamin Black

 

Fiction - hardcover; Picador; 384 pages; 2006.

It's no secret that the author of this book, Benjamin Black, is actually Booker prize-winning novelist John Banville in disguise. Which partly explains why I rushed out and bought this in hardcover. I'm a longtime Banville fan and was intrigued as to how he would handle the crime genre given he's largely made his name on the back of (high brow) literary fiction.

Christine Falls is certainly an intriguing and arresting read. I might have been holed up in my sick bed at the time, but I think my reaction would have been the same regardless: I just could not bear to put this book down and finished it in one sitting.

Essentially the story, which is set in 1950s Dublin, is about a pathologist, the love-worn Quirke, who discovers a colleague, Griffin, altering a file to cover up the cause of death of a young woman called Christine Falls. Seeking to discover the real cause of the woman's death, Quirke finds himself in the midst of a conspiracy, which involves not only Griffin but the upper echelons of Dublin society and the Catholic Church. Its tentacles stretch across the Atlantic to New England, and goes back several generations. The closer Quirke gets to unravelling this conspiracy, the more dangerous his investigation becomes and before long he's being warned off in no uncertain terms.

Black/Banville adds additional layers to this quite straightforward storyline. He makes Griffin the foster brother of Quirke. This is further complicated by the fact that Quirke and Griffin married a set of sisters and that Quirke, who is widowed, has always carried a torch for the other sister. Quirke is especially close to his niece and is often accused of leading her astray, so there's a lot of family tension to propel the story along.

Throw in a second narrative about a young American couple in New England who adopt a baby from a local Catholic orphanage and you get a well-rounded, multi-layered narrative with enough depth and breadth to keep even the most jaded reader interested.

And, as you would expect from such an experienced and accomplished author, all the various threads of the book are neatly tied together at the end, although I largely guessed the conclusion long before I reached it. Despite this, I found Christine Falls a deeply satisfying read.

This is aided, no doubt, by the Quirke character, who is beautifully realised and all too human. His tragic past adds a certain depth, and I especially liked his strong moral compass.

Setting the story in 1950s Dublin is yet another stroke of genius: it lends Christine Falls the required claustrophobia to make the novel a little darker, a little edgier than having set it in modern times.

But ultimately, I'm not sure this is a typical crime novel. It's certainly no police procedural and it's not exactly a detective story. Perhaps literary 'mystery' might be a truer description.

And for those of you who might have struggled with Banville's style in the past, I can report that he has toned down his usual feats of literary flamboyance: the writing is very immediate and easy to comprehend, so there's no need to keep a dictionary at hand. Good news, no doubt, for those of you who read on public transport!

'A Wild Ride up the Cupboards' by Ann Bauer

 

Fiction - paperback; Scribner; 283 pages; 2006. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

This emotionally charged story is about a young mother’s struggle to keep her marriage alive and her family together when her eldest son, four-year-old Edward, withdraws from the world.

Rachel, heavily pregnant with her third child, is deeply upset about Edward’s inexplicable illness, in which he loses the ability to speak, goes through periods of hyperactivity and suffers from severe insomnia.

Together with her husband, Jack, an itinerant worker whom she met in college, Rachel does everything in her power to find a cure for their young son, even resorting to the highly controversial practice of feeding him marijuana tea. Later they try an unusual physical therapy, which they believe reaps results.

Meanwhile, Rachel, delves into her family history, looking for any genetic clues that might help solve the riddle of Edward’s undiagnosed illness, thought to be a form of autism. But through the years, the stresses of Edward’s problems, has drastic repercussions on the rest of the family.

While Rachel buries herself in her freelance journalism work, Jack, now a policeman, loses himself in the bottom of a bottle. Breaking point is not far behind...

This wise, intelligent debut novel reminds me of the best of Sue Miller's writing with a little bit of Anne Tyler thrown in. It very deftly captures the anguish of a mother's love for her child and her desire to do anything to protect her young son from pain and suffering. It also expertly charts the inner life of a family under financial and emotional strain, and throws open the doors on the inner workings of a marriage that been on the defensive from the word go.

But this is not a perfect novel. The back story about Rachel's late Uncle Mickey, which is told in alternate chapters, did not really work for me. Perhaps because these chapters were so well written I could feel myself becoming so immersed in Mickey's story that the jolt back to Rachel's narrative was sometimes too jarring. In my opinion, I don't think Mickey's life really offered up many clues to Edward's illness, so didn't quite see the point of devoting so many pages to it.

I also felt that towards the end, the overall story was weakened by a slow descent into a social services-type scenario which bordered on melodrama. I felt myself having to suspend belief in places. This ruined what had been -- up until that point -- a very realistic and painful portrayal of a family under siege from within.

Despite these little quibbles, overall this is a beautifully drawn story featuring a strong narrative voice that brims with an undercurrent of slow-burning anger reminiscent of Goldberry Long's Juniper Tree Burning. The characters, while not always likable, are wholly human, complete with flaws and foibles, and for that reason the book rings completely true.

If you like well written family dramas that show ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances, then you will probably find it very difficult -- just as I did -- to put down A Wild Ride Up the Cupboards.

'Windows on the World' by Frédéric Beigbeder

Fiction - paperback; Harper Perennial; 312  pages; 2005. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne.

Windows on the World won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2005, but this book could just have easily won a non-fiction award too. This is because the chapters of this brutally searing book alternate between reality and imagination, so what you get is three stories in one: the factual account of what happened the day that two planes deliberately slammed into New York's World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001; the fictional account of a divorced father trapped in the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of Tower One with his two young sons at the time of the attack; and the author's own personal memoir about the event and its aftermath a year after it happened.

Strangely enough, despite being written by a Frenchman, it is also a homage to America and how the terrorist attack sowed doubt into the American dream for the first time.

I won't pretend that reading this book is not a harrowing experience, because it is. We all know what happened that day and we can all recall where we were and what we were doing. It is indelibly etched on our brains forever.

The beauty of Windows on the World is its attempt to put that event into some kind of context, to try and make sense out of something that is incomprehensible.

But for many people this book will be too painful to read -- Beigbeder makes no apologies for this. "I truly don't know why I wrote this book," he says towards the end."Perhaps because I couldn't see the point of speaking of anything else. What else is there to write? The only interesting subjects are those that are taboo. We must write what is forbidden."

He also goes on to say that he is fully aware that his prose "takes on a power that it would not otherwise have. This novel uses tragedy like a literary crutch".

But what beautiful prose it is. Make no mistake, Beigbeder writes eloquently and sensitively without resorting to exploitation or voyeurism or sadistic pleasure. And he throws in enough black humour to stop the book from wallowing in terminal despair.

There is a frank, candid nature to his writing, which at times, is painful to read, not because it hones in on the terrible events of that day, but because it illuminates the author's own dark soul (for example, his weakness for sex, his hatred of his own narcissistic tendencies, his inability to hold down a proper relationship). At various times the writing reminded me of Chuck Palahniuk (in its ability to capture the surreal horror of it all), Michel Houellebecq's Atomised (in its sometimes dark, detached narrative quality) and Janette Turner Hospital's Due Preparations for the Plague (in its depiction of an apocalyptic terrorist attack).

All in all, Windows on the World is a fascinating book that refuses to be boxed into one particular genre. It disorientates the reader, takes them back in time and poses questions we'd rather not have asked. But despite the morbid subject matter one comes to the last page feeling, not down and depressed, but somewhat hopeful for the future.

'The Sea' by John Banville

Fiction - hardcover; Picador; 200 pages; 2005.

When John Banville won last year's Booker Prize many were surprised. Critics, from the established media and the blogosphere alike, seemed united in their distaste for this novel, deeming it unworthy (and in some cases unreadable) for the UK's most prestigious literary award.

Despite being a longtime admirer of John Banville's work (although it had been about a decade since I'd last read any of his fiction), I was reluctant to try The Sea. I did not want to have my image of his work destroyed. I did not want to discover that the critics were right and I was wrong. And so my hardcover edition sat on the shelf unread for so long that it was eclipsed by the paperback release and I was forced to read it before the paperback reviews put me off it forever.

Now I am wondering why I waited so long, because The Sea is a remarkable novel - in all senses of the word.

It tells the story of Max Morden, a retired art historian, who takes a trip to the seaside village (where he once spent a childhood holiday) to come to terms with the "delicate business of being the survivor" after the death of his beloved wife. The novel, written stream of consciousness style, charts Max's interior monologue, his recollections of the past colliding with the awkwardness of his present day grief.

Banville, a master of narrative, entwines several stories into one seamless, smoothly polished piece of fiction. The reader does not  even notice the joins between Max's divergent memories: his wife (meeting, falling in love, making a life together) and a childhood vacation spent at his current seaside resort, where he was enchanted by the Grace family, and fell in love, first, with the mother Mrs Grace and was then seduced by the daughter, the beguiling and forthright Chloe.

Colliding with his remembrance of things past is his present reality: arguing with his strong-willed daughter who comes to visit; putting up with other house guests, such as Colonel Blunden who "overplays the part of an old soldier", and the stern but friendly landlady Miss Vavasour; and finding things for himself to do, even if it means getting falling-over drunk in the local pub.

Just as the reader begins to wonder whether there is any point to these meandering narratives, Banville does what he does best: he allows these seemingly unrelated stories to join forces. This delivers a shocking blow, so that the reader suddenly realises that Max's grief is two-fold: he is escaping from a recent loss but also coming to terms with a devastating incident from his childhood that has shaped much of his long life.

For me, the joy of reading a Banville book is knowing that you are in the hands of a master craftsman. He writes sentences like jewellers craft necklaces, carefully threading gems to catch your eye and take your breath away. He uses double-barrel adjectives (spit-smeared ball, bat-squeaks of pretend, dull-apple shade of the underside of a leaf) in unexpected ways, re-inventing language so that there's not a cliche in sight. And he writes beautiful, lyrical descriptions that are distinctive and mesmerising without being pretentious, such as this:

A steep-slanted flash of sunlight fell across the beach, turning the sand above the waterline bone-white, and a white seabird, dazzling against the wall of cloud, flew up on sickle wings and turned with a soundless snap and plunged itself, a shutting chevron, into the sea's unruly back.

I will be the first to confess that Banville may not be everyone's cup of tea. But I appreciate his refusal to stick to conventions, to experiment with language and to explore so eloquently and with such clarity what goes on in people's hearts and minds - the "grim gift for seeing people's souls" as Don DeLillo described it.

If you are after something with a straight-forward narrative and a conventional plot, The Sea is not for you, but if you enjoy stylised fiction revolving around deep themes - love, loss, identity and remembrance - and revel in the use of sublime language, then I suspect you will be just as enthralled by this novel as I was.

'A Long Long Way' by Sebastian Barry

Fiction - hardcover; Faber and Faber; 304 pages; 2005.

It is 1915 and the Great War has just begun. Ireland, with the promise of Home Rule in its sights, agrees to send its own to fight for the nation.

Seventeen-year-old Willie Dunne, who desperately wants to please his loyalist father, a much respected member of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, joins the Army because at 5ft 6in he is too short to join the force.

But when he came home and told his father, the big, blank, broad face of the policeman wept in the darkness. And then his three sisters, Maud, Annie and Dolly, lit the candles in the sitting-room and they all felt part of the tremendous enterprise because Willie was going to be in it, and they were proud and excited, though it might last a few weeks at most, because the Germans were known to be only murderous cowards."

Willie's regiment, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, is sent to the muddied rat-strewn trenches of Belgium to fight for King and Country. Amid the mayhem, the bullets and the blood, Willie and his fellow soldiers eke out a harrowing existence, clinging to life by the flimsiest of threads.

During a brief sojourn home on some well-earned leave Willie finds himself caught up in the political events of the 1916 Easter Uprising. Troubled by what he sees, he begins to question whether he - and the rest of his regiment - have become the enemy of the Irish rebels. When he mentions these concerns in a letter home his father disowns him.

What follows is a heartbreaking account of one young man's realisation that there is more to life than pleasing one's father - and one's country.

I had tears coursing down my cheeks as I read sections of this book filled as it is with moments of such desperate sadness. To know that Willie had endured so much - the  terror and violence and madness of the trenches - only to return to a country that had undergone a bloody revolution and no longer felt like his was very emotional. Coupled with a melancholy romance with Gretta, his childhood sweetheart, this book is a true "weepy". But don't let that put you off.

Sebastian Barry's writing, so wonderfully lyrical and poignant (not surprising given that he is also a poet), is a joy to read. It is rich with the Dublin vernacular, not just in the quoted speech of the characters, but in the telling of the story itself. This makes the story come truly alive in ways that a more distant, staid narrative would not have achieved.

I adored A Long, Long Way on so many levels: its eloquent conversational prose; its ability to move a sometimes jaded reader; and its themes - the futility of war, Irish politics and how one young man learns to think for himself.

Very much reminiscent of Erich Maria Remarque's much lauded All Quiet on the Western Front, this book, which was shortlisted for last year's Man Booker Prize, is a devastating read with a clear, bright ring of truth. I highly recommend it if you wish to read some First World War fiction that has a slightly different slant - that of the Irish soldier caught between two wars.

[You can read my initial impressions of this book here and here.]