Reading Matters

'Truth or Fiction' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - hardcover; Headline Review; 160 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Jennifer Johnston does a nice line in slightly kooky characters, and her latest novel, to be published on November 16, is no exception. Desmond Fitzmaurice, one of two main characters in Truth or Fiction, is a doddery old writer who's fallen into obscurity. He lives a rather privileged existence in a house on the Dublin waterfront, where he is waited on hand and foot by his second wife, the dour-faced Anna. For all intents and purposes he seems to be a gentle old soul prone to sentimentality and a hankering for times gone by.

But then London-based journalist, Caroline Wallace, enters his rather mundane world and this version of a polite, well-mannered chap nearing the end of his life, gets turned, ever so slowly, on its head. Caroline, who's been dispatched to interview him on the eve of his 90th birthday, isn't entirely sure what to expect. When she arrives the first thing she does is tell Desmond that:

"My editor asked me to come and interview you. She would like to bring you back to life again. She feels your work is too important to be let fade away, as it has. She would like me to reassess your work and also to do a feature on your lifestyle. How you live, how you have lived, the interlocking of your life and work."

Desmond is not entirely enamoured with the intrusion:

"You wish to take the unimportant garbage of my life and stir it in with the important, with my work. You wish to make me intelligible to the masses. I never wrote for the masses to read."

And yet, there's something about this new-found attention that wins Desmond over. Before long he is introducing Caroline to the important people in his life and confessing a succession of sordid events. But how much of what he tells her is truth, and how much of it is fiction? 

The beauty of this novel, Johnston's 16th, is not so much her typical restrained and unpretentious prose style, nor the fast-moving narrative that largely comprises dialogue, but her very human characters with their flaws and foibles. That Caroline arrives in Dublin reeling from a marriage proposal made by her partner of 10 years adds an extra layer to the story, for how much of her anger is affecting her opinion of Desmond? And why is she so angry in the first place?

Once again Johnston has delivered an entertaining and effortless read, one that can quite comfortably be read in an hour or two. It's a welcome return to form after her slightly disappointing Foolish Mortals; I only wish I hadn't raced through it so quickly, because it could be a long wait for her next one.

'The Lonely Londoners' by Sam Selvon

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 160 pages; 2006.

One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if it is not London at all but some strange place on another planet, Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat-train.

So begins Sam Selvon's bittersweet story about a group of West Indian immigrants living in 1950s London. It's a truly evocative look at a city through the jaded eyes of a black man, Moses Aloetta, a veteran Londoner who somewhat reluctantly welcomes newcomers from his homeland and shows them the ropes. ("I don't know these people at all," he tells one of his friends, "yet they coming to me as if I is some liaison officer, and I catching my arse as it is, how could I help them out?")

But having earned a reputation as a "good fellar to contact, that he would help them get place to stay and work to do", Moses finds himself taking Henry "Sir Galahad" Oliver under his wing. Galahad is irrepressibly upbeat and optimistic; he's also thick-skinned, turning up in the dead of a London winter wearing nothing but "an old grey tropical suit and a pair of watchekong" (crepe-soled shoes). He doesn't even have any luggage with him.

The Lonely Londoners follows the ups and downs of Galahad, and others like him, who arrive in London, thinking the roads are paved with gold, but then find that life is tough, that everything is expensive and that the white population is wary of black faces (or "spades" as they are called throughout this book) despite the "open door" policy of letting citizens from the colonies settle in Britain.

There's no real plot to speak of, because this is essentially a collection of vignettes about various immigrants and the different ways in which they adapt and change to suit their new environment. It's quite dark and depressing in places, as you come to experience each character's slow dawning that London is not the place they thought it would be, that it's a bleak, alien town, far removed from the sunnier climes from which they came.

There's a wonderful scene near the beginning of the novel which captures this sudden sense of alienation perfectly. Galahad is braving the morning rush hour for the first time and when he sees so many people bustling about the tube station "a feeling of fright and loneliness come on him all of a sudden".

The sun shining, but Galahad never see the sun look like how it looking now. No heat from it, it just there in the sky like a force-ripe orange. When he look up the colour of the sky so chocolate it make him more frighten. It have a kind of melancholy aspect about the morning that making him shiver. He have a feeling is about seven o'clock in the evening: when he look at clock on top of a building he see it only half-past ten in the morning.

Anyone who has experienced a London winter for the first time will know this feeling well; the nights stretch into 17-hour extravaganzas and you're lucky if you see any daylight at all if you work in an office. This feels alien enough without having to worry about where you're going to live and work and whether you've got enough money for the bus fare!

Selvon describes this netherworld existence, including the cramped bedsits, visits to the dole queue ("a kind of place where hate and disgust and avarice and malice and sympathy and sorrow and pity all mix up") and the liming (a Caribbean expression for "hanging out"), so beautifully it's easy to get caught up in the lives depicted here. But the best part is seeing how the city eventually works it charms on them, so that, in the end, they find themselves feeling at home, or, as Galahad puts it, "when the sweetness of summer get in him he say he would never leave the old Brit'n as long as he live".

As you will have noticed from the quotations I've used, the book is written in a kind of Jamaican patois, or, as Shusheila Nasta writes in the introduction, "a creolized voice" which lends it a lovely, intimate, Calypso rhythm, and a sense that you really are in the heads of these Caribbean immigrants. 

The Lonely Londoners is part of a trilogy; I'm looking forward to reading the next two as soon as I am able.

'Winterland' by Alan Glynn

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 480 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

I love Irish literary fiction and I'm quite partial to the odd crime novel, so when I first heard that Alan Glynn's Winterland was described as "Dublin noir" I knew I'd probably enjoy it. I was right. This is a cracking story, brilliantly told and incredibly entertaining, and I bet it won't take long before the film rights are sold and we see it on the big, or possibly little, screen some time soon.

The real strength of this story is its wholly contemporary feel. Anyone who knows anything about the Irish economy will love this book, because it so beautifully captures the murky machinations of the property bubble (before it went "pop" earlier this year), planning policy and politics. Throw in a gangland murder, a dash of violence, a smidgen of retribution and you've got all the right ingredients for a dark and thrilling read.

The book opens with a young thug, Noel Rafferty, being gunned down in the beer garden of a local pub. Police figure it's a gangland murder, because the victim is a small-time drug dealer. But later that same night Noel's uncle, also called Noel Rafferty, is killed in a mysterious car accident. Why have two members of the same family, sharing the same name, died on the same night? Coincidence? Or something more sinister?

Enter Gina Rafferty, aunt of the first Noel, sister of the second, who doesn't believe the official explanation that the car accident was exactly that -- an accident.

She begins some detective work of her own, and before long she finds herself thrust into a world of dodgy dealings involving property and politics. She learns that her brother, an engineer, was working on a huge skyscraper, the tallest of its kind in Europe, known as Richmond Plaza. He had a close working relationship with the property's developer, Paddy Norton, a greedy man intent on turning the Dublin skyline into a mini-Manhattan. Norton, in turn, has connections with Larry Bolger, a power-hungry politician with an eye on the country's top job. There's obviously some shadowy goings on between these three men, but proving it takes Gina into dangerous and uncertain territory.

To complicate the story further, enter Mark Griffin, the sole survivor of a car accident that left him an orphan more than 20 years earlier. Is he connected to the Rafferty deaths and, if so, how?

All these characters, including the lone female heroine whom everyone in authority dismisses as an airhead, might sound slightly clichéd but in Glynn's capable hands they become very real people, with foibles and flaws. He really gets into the heads of each individual character and presents their motivations and desires so intricately it's easy to feel empathy for even the most loathsome of the bunch.

The dialogue, smart and snappy (and riddled with Dublinese and obligatory swearing), moves things along at a crisp pace. There's plenty of unexpected twists and turns along the way, but apart from one over-the-top scene towards the end of the book, the whole of Winterland feels authentic and prescient. Highly recommended.

Winterland is published on November 5.

'The Space Between Us' by John MacKenna

Fiction - paperback; New Island Books; 282 pages; 2009.

At what point do you decide to abandon a book? I ask, because I came very close to abandoning this one. I struggled with the first 54 pages, not quite believing the dialogue (too verbose, too artificial) nor the characters (too one-dimensional, too false). But something convinced me to keep reading on, because who knows, maybe it would get better. And, thankfully, it did.

Reviewing this book proves somewhat problematic, however, because the plot has several key revelations which are best discovered by simply reading the book rather than reading this review. (And, whatever you do, don't read the review or "product description" on Amazon, because they're riddled with spoilers. I found this out the hard way, but even though I discovered what was going to happen, The Space Between Us still left me reeling at the end, part in shock, part in awe.)

The basic premise of the novel goes something like this.

A young architect opens the door to two police officers (or guards, as they are known in Ireland) who inform him that his wife, a solicitor, has been killed in a car crash. His reaction is not what one would expect. Instead of being overwhelmed with grief he's overwhelmed by relief -- their marriage had been floundering for a long time but neither party had had the courage to end it. Now, left alone to raise his two-year-old daughter, our unnamed narrator has been given a second chance to start afresh. When a married friend, Kate, confesses she's in love with him, there seems only one road to take...

The book then jumps ahead 17 years and we discover the narrator living in the same house, but alone. His daughter, Jane, is studying classical music at university, but comes home to spend her weekends with him and their dog, the impossibly named Rostropovich. The story then follows our narrator for a year, and in that year, we find him being tested on very many levels.

"You need to stop letting things happen to you and make them happen for you," his neighbour berates him one day.

"You need to be more passionate about life. And I'm not talking about shagging me. I'm talking about you and this way you have of sitting back and letting life wash over you. I've known you for twenty years and you've allowed yourself to just exist, you've lived without passion."

This seems to mirror something Beth, his late wife, once told him when they were on holiday in Amsterdam almost 20 years earlier. She thought a permanent move to the Netherlands would be the impetus needed to kick-start his career to the next level, "the move that gives you the grand design". But he's content designing houses in small-town Ireland and the idea doesn't interest him.

"I think you're afraid of the world," Beth said. I knew by her eyes she was serious. "I think you feel safe being the medium-sized fish in a tiny pond. But what happens if another fish appears in that pond?"

In essence this is a novel about the choices we make in life and the consequences of those choices. It's also very much about unrequited love, death, grief and the relationships between fathers and daughters. And I defy anyone not to read this and be incredibly moved by the gentle prose and the emotional story that unfolds but most of all by the powerhouse ending that turns everything else on its head. This book isn't what I expected, it's far more shocking and disturbing than I could have possibly envisaged, and I rather suspect anyone who decides to give it a try will concur.

Oh, and if anyone does read this book, please come back and let me know: I'm dying to have a proper discussion about it, as it throws up so many interesting topics and issues.

'Let The Great World Spin' by Colum McCann

Fiction - paperback; Bloomsbury; 349 pages; 2009.

Anyone who has seen the Oscar-winning documentary Man on a Wire or read Philippe Petit's To Reach The Clouds will know of Petit's daring high-wire act between between the Twin Towers in New York City on August 7, 1974. It was an act that stunned the world but has taken on extra significance now that the Twin Towers are no longer standing.

Adding to the mythology of Petit's incredibly daring stunt (he walked the wire for 45 minutes, making eight crossings between the towers, and was arrested shortly after) is Colum McCann's equally ambitious novel. I say ambitious because it's fairly staggering in its scope, telling as it does the individual stories of a diverse group of characters living in New York, using Petit's walk as a kind of bridging link between them all. Does he pull it off? In my opinion, not quite.

Long-time readers of this blog will know I have a penchant for Irish writers and stories set in New York, so I rather suspected that Let The Great World Spin would be right up my street, seeing as it ticked both boxes. But there was something about this book that didn't gel with me and I've spent the best part of a week trying to figure it out.

I think the problem is not so much the scope and the huge canvas that McCann uses, nor the diversity of his characters -- an Irish monk, a prostitute and an Upper Eastside housewife among them, all expertly drawn -- but that the book reads very much like a collection of short stories strung together (pun not intended) by Petit's high-wire act. Some of these stories interconnect, others, such as the very brief chapter about Fernando, a 13-year-old subway graffiti artist, do not. And, as ever with books of this type, there is a danger that the reader will like some characters better than others, so that certain chapters become more exciting, or more dull, than others, leading to an inconsistent read.

But I don't want to sound too harsh, because there's no doubt that McCann knows how to write beautifully, painting pictures in just a handful of words, as this example shows:

I watched a long pink boa scarf get caught up in the wheels of a patrol car. It wrapped the wheelbase as if in affection, and bits of tufted pink spun in the air.

Similarly, his ability to get into the skin of so many different characters -- a rich house wife who's grieving over her son killed in Vietnam, a Jewish judge called to deal with Petit's legal case, a black hooker fighting to see her two grandchildren, a reformed drug user guilty of a hit-and-run fatality -- without chiming a wrong note is impressive. And his "bridging" segments about Petit are also a delight to read, particularly the section describing the high-wire itself:

The shouting, the sirens, the dull sounds of the city. He let them become a white hum. He went for his last silence and he found it just stood there, in the precise middle of the wire, one hundred feet from each tower, eyes closed, body still, wire gone. He took the air of the city into his lungs.

Interestingly, when I saw McCann at the Cheltenham Literature Festival last week, he confessed that he wanted the book to contain two very strong fictional characters, mirroring the Twin Towers, but that he accidentally killed one off before he really got started -- and he just couldn't bring him back. Whoops, I hope that wasn't a plot spoiler.

'The Haunting of Hill House' by Shirley Jackson

Paperback - fiction; Penguin Modern Classics; 246 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Reviewing two Shirley Jackson novels in the space of a week might border on overkill, but having very much enjoyed We Have Always Lived in the Castle I was anxious to try The Haunting of Hill House, which was originally published in 1959.

First and foremost, unlike We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is a horror story. Of course, the title itself should give you an inkling of the subject matter, which is essentially a rather creepy tale about a haunted house.

Now this is where I put up my hand and declare that I'm not much into the horror genre. I read so many of these types of books (think Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, James Herbert and Anne Rice) in my teens and early 20s that I eventually became bored with their formulaic style. And since then I can count on one hand the number of horror stories I've read (Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian and Bram Stoker's Dracula).

There's no doubt that The Haunting of Hill House is a creepy, look-under-the-bed-and-check-the-closet type reads. But in Jackson's capable hands it also has a smattering of humour throughout, so it's not overly claustrophobic and is far less spine-chilling than, say Stephen King's The Shining, which this book brought to mind quite a few times. But Jackson ratchets up the suspense by playing with the minds of the characters, so you're never entirely sure whether the terrifying events she depicts happen physically or psychologically.

The book opens with a rather ominous description of the house.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and some of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Into this secluded mansion come four main characters: Dr John Montague, a doctor of philosophy, who thinks himself something of a "ghost hunter" and has rented the house for three months in order to find scientific evidence of the supernatural; Eleanor Vance, a 32-year-old loner, who has spent the past 12 years looking after her (now dead) invalid mother; Theodora, a Girl Scout type with psychic abilities; and Luke Sanderson, a liar, thief and heir to the house.

The house has two dour-faced caretakers, Mr and Mrs Dudley, who live in the closest town, six miles away.

"I don't stay after I set out dinner," Mrs Dudley went on. "Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before dark comes."
"I know," Eleanor said.
[...]
"So there won't be anyone around if you need help."
"I understand."
"We couldn't even hear you, in the night."
"I don't suppose--"
"No one could. No one lives any nearer than the town. No one else will come any nearer than that."
"I know," Eleanor said tiredly.
"In the night," Mrs Dudley said, and smiled outright. "In the dark," she said, and closed the door behind her.

It doesn't take long before creepy things begin to occur inside Hill House, but I'm not going to divulge them here. You'll just have to read the book yourself. But make sure you do it in daylight. And preferably not while you're alone.

'A Far Cry From Kensington' by Muriel Spark

Fiction - hardcover; Virago Modern Classics; 208 pages; 2008.

The late Muriel Spark is one of those writers whose back catalogue is so long and eclectic it's almost impossible to know where to start. I read Aiding and Abetting last year, because I was intrigued by the real life disappearance of Lord Lucan upon which the novel is based. Having seen KevinfromCanada's glowing review of A Far Cry From Kensington last month I decided this novel, first published in 1988, was the next to try.

I treated myself to a lovely Virago Modern Classics edition, featuring an introduction by Ali Smith, and found myself reading the entire book in just two longish sittings. To say I was utterly charmed by it would probably be an understatement. This is a deliciously enjoyable story that is so perfectly constructed it's almost impossible to find fault with it -- on any level. The prose is simple, the characters believable and the plot expertly drawn, so that you're never quite sure where it's going to take you and then feel overwhelmingly satisfied when you arrive at its destination.

The story is narrated by Mrs Hawkins, a war widow, looking back on her life in London some 30 years earlier when, in 1954, she lived in a South Kensington rooming house and worked in publishing. She was only 28 at the time but had a matronly air about her.

There was something about me, Mrs Hawkins, that invited confidences. I was abundantly aware of it, and indeed abundance was the impression I gave. I was massive in size, strong-muscled, huge-bosomed, with wide hips, hefty long legs, a bulging belly and fat backside; I carried an ample weight with my five-foot-six of height, and was healthy with it. It was, of course, partly this physical factor that disposed people to confide in me. I looked comfortable.

Even her boss, Martin York, of the struggling publishing firm Ullswater Press, confides in her, inviting her to his office for a minute ("A minute meant an hour, sometimes more"), where he would stand at his window, or sit in his leather armchair, and regale her with his thoughts. (Despite his confiding tone, he never reveals that he's carrying out fraudulent activities for which he's later arrested and imprisoned for seven years.)

But her forthright manner and her maxim that "no life can be carried on satisfactorily unless people are honest" lands her in hot water. When a purple-prosed would-be writer, Hector Bartlett, starts stalking her in order to get his work published by Ullswater Press, she tells him in no uncertain terms that he is a pisseur de copie, a French phrase for a hack writer who urinates copy. Unfortunately, for Mrs Hawkins, Mr Bartlett is having an affair with a well regarded author, Emma Loy, who has a lot of powerful sway in the book industry. You can guess what happens. Mrs Hawkins not only loses her job, her candid admission (and Mr Bartlett) follows her wherever she goes, and comes back to haunt her in more ways than one...

Meanwhile, back at the rooming house, one of the tenants, Wanda, an immigrant Polish dressmaker, receives a poison pen letter accusing her of "not declaring your income to the Authorities". Wanda almost has a nervous breakdown over this, because she's petrified of being deported back to her homeland. This is where the ever-dependable Mrs Hawkins steps in to do a bit of detective sleuthing to see who might write such a nasty letter. Her efforts come to nothing. It's only when the letter writer phones Wanda to warn her off, that things take a sinister turn for the worse and Mrs Hawkins finds herself being accused of the very crime she's trying to investigate.

So what A Far Cry From Kensington delivers is a two-pronged narrative, one that focuses on the book publishing industry in 1954 and Mrs Hawkins' career as an editor (this makes fascinating reading in itself), and another that focuses on a sinister campaign to frighten a lodger out of her wits, but to what end?

What makes this novel work so wonderfully is, of course, the detail that brings the book trade and post-war London to life. But it's also the sparkling wit (I laughed out loud several times), the delicious characters (Hector Bartlett, for instance, seems as frightful as his prose) and the seamless weaving of two different narratives that are expertly drawn together right at the very end to deliver a really satisfying conclusion.

'Legend of a Suicide' by David Vann

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 240 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

David Vann's Legend of a Suicide is a deceptive book. I started it, thinking it was a novel, and was mid-way through it before I clocked that it was no such thing. This is actually a series of stories, albeit about the same character, Roy Venn, dealing with the suicide of his father, Jim.

The first, Ichthyology, is told through the eyes of a young Roy, who is obsessed with his aquarium and sneaks out of the house in his pajamas whenever he hears his parent's fighting. We learn that his father, a dentist, is a troubled man beset by marital woes. The ending, when it comes, via a .44 Magnum handgun on the deck of a fishing boat, feels like a relief.

The next story, Rhoda, is a black comedy about Jim's second wife, "who had dark, dark hair, pale skin, and a dropped eyelid that, on closer view, made her terribly beautiful". At only 13 pages long, it's enough for the reader to glean that Jim's unable to relate to women very well: within days of their marriage the pair are rowing and Jim's telling Roy, "She wasn't like this before. This isn't the woman I married." We also discover Jim's penchant for guns.

A Legend of Good Men is set after Jim's death and focuses on Jim's first wife (Roy's mother) and the succession of men that she dates. Or, as Roy so aptly puts it:

The men she dated were a lot like the circuses that passed through our town. They'd move in quickly and unpack everything they owned, as if they had come to stay. They'd tempt us with brightly colored objects -- flowers, balloons, remote controlled race cars -- perform tricks with their beards and hands, call us funny names like snip, my little squash plant, ding-dong, and apple pie, and yell their stories at us day and night. Then they'd vanish, and we'd find no sign left, no mention  even, as if we'd simply imagined them.

By now, we've built up a pretty good picture of Jim, his first wife, his second wife and his son, and how his death has altered their lives forever. And then David Vann pulls a brilliant literary trick out of the magic hat and presents us with a two-part novella, Sukkwan Island, that is some of the finest story-telling you're ever likely to come across in modern fiction. I loved this section of the book, which is told in the third-person (as opposed to the first-person in the preceding stories), and read it with a mixture of awe, fascination and fear.

Again, this story looks at Jim's suicide from another angle: what if a bereaved son could extract his revenge on his dad before such a cowardly act is even carried out? I won't spoil the plot, but if you think Stephen King meets Cormac McCarthy's The Road you'll get a fair idea of the horror and bleakness of what unfolds. Mind you, it's quite hilarious in places, if you don't mind laughing at gruesome things. Basically, Jim decides to spend a year living on a remote Alaskan island, taking his now 15-year-old son with him. He is woefully ill-equipped, both physically and mentally, for the task and when winter sets in things begin going a little awry, with devastating consequences...

The fifth and final story, Ketchikan, is told through Roy's eyes as an adult revisiting the town his father once lived in, hoping to confront the mistress that destroyed his parent's first marriage. But instead of putting ghosts to rest, Roy realises that perhaps there were very real reasons for what happened and that he's failed to properly grasp them, let alone understand them. It feels like an emotional low-point, and the reader's left wondering how much of the father's patterns of behaviour will be carried on by the son.

Interestingly, David Vann has dedicated this book to his own father, James Edward Vann, who killed himself when David was a child. In his acknowledgments David thanks his family "because it was an uncomfortable topic I was writing about -- my father's suicide -- and there's exposure in these stories." He adds: "They're fictional but based on a lot that's true."

Legend of a Suicide was published in the US to critical acclaim last year; it will be published in the UK for the first time at the end of this month.

'Quartet' by Jean Rhys

 Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 144 pages; 2000.

It seems ironic or pre-determined (or something), because no sooner than I write a post about bleak books and ask you to submit your suggestions, than I pick up Jean Rhys' debut novel, Quartet. Ms Rhys doesn't necessarily have a monopoly on bleakness, but boy, she does an exquisite line in melancholy and hopelessness.

This book, first published in 1928, brings bohemian Paris in the 1920s to life. It's set in the neighborhood of Montparnasse, where people lived in hotels and passed their time in smoke-filled cafes and ate out every night because they simply didn't have the facilities to cook at home. Women were generally seen and not heard, and relied on men to support them.

Living in this dark, seedy world is Marya, who left England four years earlier to marry a Pole called Stephan. Despite the fact Stephan, an art dealer, "disliked being questioned and, when closely pressed, he lied", she feels safe and "strangely peaceful" when she is with him. But then he is imprisoned, and she's left penniless and alone.

An older sophisticated couple, Mr and Mrs Heidler, come to her rescue, offering her the spare room in their apartment. Although the idea of living with them fills her with "extraordinary dismay", she is left with little choice and moves in. 

It works out well in the beginning, but Marya, a deep thinker, soon finds herself being manipulated and it all goes down hill from there.

I can't say much more than that, because I don't want to ruin the story for those yet to read it. But it's melancholy and rather glum and poor Marya seems unable to get herself out of the hole she's created. She comes across as being rather young and naive, but also slightly weak, as if she feels that because she is trapped there's no use fighting and that it would be simply easier to succumb to other's desires and needs. Even when her husband is finally released from jail, she seems unable to stand up to his devious ways and just lets him get on with it.

This is a beautifully written book, and I love that Rhys doesn't explain everything, so it's up to you, the reader, to fill in the gaps. It's only 145 pages long, but I did have to re-read certain sections because I felt that I'd missed a subtlety that was crucial to the plot. I think there's so much going on here, between characters, even within certain character's heads, that it's the type of book that would benefit from two or more readings and you'd come away from it with a whole new perspective and appreciation of Rhys' talent. (Remember this is her first novel.)

Quartet is incredibly evocative of another time and place, and as I read it I kept thinking it would make a wonderful film. So I was delighted to discover that Merchant Ivory have beaten me to it. It was made into a movie in 1981 and that it can be watched in its entirety on YouTube.

'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' by Shirley Jackson

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 176 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Put the kettle on, grab yourself some snacks and make sure you've got no other plans when you curl up to read this book, because We Have Always Lived in the Castle is one of those delicious, atmospheric reads from which you will not want to be disturbed.

I was caught in the sway of this mesmirising novel, Jackson's last (it was first published in 1962 and she died in 1965), from its opening lines:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

How could you not be intrigued by that?

Sadly, it's difficult to properly review this novel without giving away crucial plot spoilers, so I'll refrain from telling you too much about the story. (A cursory glance at the blurb on this newly published Penguin Modern Classic edition does reveal one of the "secrets" but it doesn't ruin the suspense.) 

Basically, Mary Katherine, also known as Merricat, lives a secluded life with her sister and their bumbling, eccentric Uncle Julian, in Blackwood House, a Gothic-like mansion surrounded by woods on the outskirts of a village. Every Tuesday and Friday Merricat braves the wrath and scorn of the villagers ("The people of the village have always hated us"), who stare and gossip, to buy food and borrow library books. When she enters the grocery store the owner rushes to serve her before anyone else, while other shoppers stop what they're doing...

holding a can or a half-filled bag of cookies or a head of lettuce, not willing to move until I had gone out the door again...

This sense of creepiness builds further when she has coffee in the local coffee shop, because

If anyone else came in and sat down at the counter I would leave my coffee without seeming hurried, and leave.

It's almost like whichever way Merricat turns, there's an insidious, nasty reminder that she, and her family, are not wanted. But what did they do to earn this hate? The answer to this is the nub of the novel, so I'm not going to tell you here.

But essentially, the secretive, hermit-like existence that the Blackwood's lead is disrupted when Charles, a long-lost cousin, makes an unexpected visit and settles in for the duration. Merricat, a wayward, naive and some might say decidedly kooky teenager, feels so threatened by his presence that she goes out of her way to make him feel particularly unwelcome -- with intriguing consequences.

As much as I enjoyed this book and the oppressive, Gothic atmosphere it creates -- think The Village of the Damned meets The Wicker Man -- I did guess the main revelation before the half-way point. But even so, this is a thrilling read, and I can easily see why Shirley Jackson has never been out of print in her native America.

It's not a horror story per se, because it won't have you checking underneath the bed for monsters, but it's a kind of twisted fairytale with a dash of black comedy and a pinch of mystery. Or, as Joyce Carol Oates claims in the Afterword, "We Have Always Lived in the Castle becomes a New England fairy tale of the more wicked variety, in which a 'happy ending' is both ironic and literal, the consequences of unrepentant witchcraft and a terrible sacrifice -- of others".

'Trauma' by Patrick McGrath

Fiction - paperback; Bloomsbury; 224 pages; 2009.

I read Patrick McGrath's Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now last year and enjoyed it so much I made a note to read more of his work. Trauma, his most recent novel, was the ideal follow-up, mainly because it felt remarkably familiar to the final story, Ground Zero, in the previous collection.

Trauma is about a Manhattan-based psychiatrist, Charlie Weir, who is still coming to terms with the break-up of his marriage seven years earlier. Even though he treats patients who have gone through traumatic events, he seems largely unable to confront his own demons.

The opening line makes it clear that Charlie has a guilt complex about his mother:

My mother's first depressive illness occurred when I was seven years old, and I felt it was my fault. I felt I should have prevented it.

Having spent most of his childhood worried about her constant rages, depression and alcoholism, and forever trying to protect her from her suffering, he's self-aware enough to realise that he chose his profession because of his mother.

It is the mothers who propel most of us into psychiatry, usually because we have failed them.

But the psychological effect of his love for her, and her indifference to him, has been further complicated, or worsened, by the absence of his father, Fred Weir, who deserted the family when Charlie was eight years old. A tense, resentful and problematic relationship with an older brother -- Walt, a successful artist -- who never cared much for his mother but was clearly her favourite child, means Charlie's got a few family hang-ups.

All this, by the way, is merely a backdrop to Charlie's real story, which begins with a tentative reunion with his ex-wife, Agnes, and their young daughter, after a seven-year silence. (The reason for their marriage breaking down and Charlie's subsequent solitude is a plot spoiler, so I won't elaborate further.) As the pair begin the long, drawn-out process of mending their relationship, Charlie acquires a new lover, Nora Chiara, and his life, finally, seems to be falling into place.

But, there are complications. He begins sleeping with his ex-wife, who is now married to another man, and then Nora begins freaking him out by behaving in irrational and unexpected ways.

As the tale unfolds it doesn't take long to see that the psychiatrist is becoming just as unstable as his patients.

What I liked most about this book was the fast and furious pace of the story-telling. Even though the narrative jumps all over the place, from past to present and back again, often within a matter of pages, it's easy to follow, and allows the reader to build up a picture of a man quite clearly troubled by past experiences and unable to deal with the consequences of his actions. He's morally dubious throughout, but at what point does the reader even trust his version of events? And who's to say Agnes, Walter or any of his family members are any better?

There's something dark and disturbing about the subject matter, but McGrath has an uncanny ability to really get to the heart of what makes people behave in the often strange and absurd ways that they do. This is the type of novel you race through then wish you'd lingered over the deliciously simple prose that little bit longer. I felt bereft when I came to the end of this book -- read in one sitting, I might add -- and I rather suspect it would make a great choice for a book group, as there's clearly so much to discuss, including psychiatry, family relationships, marriage, sex and jealousy.

'Pretty Monsters' by Kelly Link

Fiction - hardcover; Canongate; 400 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

That I would give this book a five-star review comes as quite a surprise to me, because this is not the type of book to which I would normally be drawn. First, it's a collection of short stories and novellas, and I generally have a preference for full-blown novels. Second, its target market is young adults/teenagers. Third, it's about monsters and ghosts and magic and all kinds of fairytale, fantasy and horror-type subjects. Fourth. Well, need I go on? 

This is, quite frankly, not my usual cup-of-tea. And yet when Pretty Monsters arrived unsolicited from Canongate I couldn't help but be drawn to it. It's an absolutely gorgeous-looking hardcover that has a real Gothic feel, owing to each page being edged in black. It features striking art-work by Australian-based illustrator Shaun Tan throughout (including the cover) and the weight of the book is perfect to hold in the hand, not too heavy and cumbersome as some hardcovers are wont to be.

But what about the content?

There are nine stories here, some of which have been published elsewhere in the past, and each one presents an intoxicating, hugely original world. "These stories will come alive, put on suits and wrestle you to the ground," says Alice Sebold on the back cover blurb. "They want you and you will be theirs." She's completely right. I've never read such a wacky collection of stories that gripped me, held me in their sway and slightly altered my perception of the universe when I came to each stunning conclusion. Where has Kelly Link been hiding all my life? She's bloody brilliant.

She's been described as "an alchemical mixture of Borges, Raymond Chandler and Buffy the Vampire Slayer". But I wouldn't be surprised to discover that she was the lovechild of Stephen King and JK Rowling. To give you an idea of the breadth of her style and imagination, here's a brief rundown of each of the stories in this collection.

The Wrong Grave
A black comedy about a teenage boy whose girlfriend dies and is buried with his collection of self-penned poetry. When he suddenly wants his poetry back he accidentally digs up the wrong grave.

The Wizards of Perfil
A magical story about children who are sold to wizards, whom live in very tall towers and are never seen.

Magic for Beginners
A thrilling tale about a cult-TV show called The Library which a group of teenage school friends become slightly obsessed by. This particular story, probably my favourite in the whole collection, received the Nebula, Locus, and British Science Fiction Association Awards and was a finalist for the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, Hugo, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Award.

The Faery Handbag
An odd fantasy about an eccentric grandmother who owns a magical handbag that hides a village full of fairies. This story won the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Novelette, the 2006 Nebula Award for Best Novelette and the 2005 Locus Award.

The Specialist's Hat
This is a classic ghost story set in a grand house with eight chimneys. Two ten-year-old twins, Claire and Samantha, are introduced to a magic hat by their babysitter. This one won the 1999 World Fantasy Award. You can read the whole story on Kelly Link's official website.

Monster
A creepy story about a school camping trip that attracts an unexpected campfire guest -- a foul-smelling monster.

The Surfer
A science-fiction story about a father and son travelling to Costa Rica to see a surfer who claims to have made contact with aliens. But their trip is waylaid when a flu pandemic hits and they are quarantined in an aircraft hangar.

The Constable of Abal
An almost old-fashioned fairytale about a mother and daughter, who turn out to be transsexual goddesses.

Pretty Monsters
This one involves schoolgirls, werewolves and romance.

These stories are unsettling, dark, disturbing, surreal, wacky, occasionally confusing, often laugh-out-loud funny, but always rewarding, enjoyable and fun. More please.

'I Served the King of England' by Bohumil Hrabal

Fiction - paperback; Vintage Classics; 288 pages; 2009. Translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson.

It's not very often I read a book and feel completely ambivalent about it, but that's how I felt when I finished Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England. I didn't hate it, I didn't love it, but I enjoyed reading it and am glad I tackled it, even if I'm in no hurry to read the rest of Hrabal's back catalogue.

The story, which is set in Czechoslovakia during the late 1930s, is narrated by Ditie, an ambitious busboy at the Golden Prague Hotel, who dreams of becoming a millionaire. He supplements his income by selling frankfurters at a railway station but cheats customers out of their change by waiting until they've boarded the train.

Then I'd fumble about for the change, and the fellow would yell at me to forget the coins and just give him the notes. Very slowly I'd start patting my pockets, and the dispatcher would blow his whistle, and very slowly I'd ease the notes out of my pocket, and the train would start moving, and I'd trot alongside it, and when the train had picked up speed I'd reach out so that the notes would just barely brush the tips of the fellow's fingers, and sometimes he'd be leaning out so far that someone inside would have to hang onto his legs, and one of my customers even beamed himself of a signal post. But then the fingers would be out of reach, and I'd stand there panting, the money still in my outstretched hand, and it was all mine. They almost never came back for their change, and that's how I started having money of my own, a couple of hundred a month, and once I even got handed a thousand-crown note.

With this kind of initiative, it's no surprise that Ditie does, eventually, make his fortune.

He changes jobs several times, moving to more prestigious hotels where he's exposed to more affluent guests and comes under the tutelage of a maître d' who once served the King of England. He has various affairs with different women, including prostitutes along the way. Indeed, he has a penchant for brothels, and spends a lot of his money on prostitutes whose laps he adorns with lavish displays of flowers -- peony petals, daisies, sprigs of fir or mistletoe.

He later gets the chance to serve the Emperor of Ethiopia and is presented with a blue sash and a medal, the highpoint of his career as a waiter, but then almost loses the plot -- and his life -- when he is accused of stealing one of the gold teaspoons used at the event.

It's these farcical moments which makes the novel a delight to read. Much of it is incredibly funny, and even in moments of potential tragedy, it's hard not to laugh. 

But when the Germans invade Prague the narrative takes on a new, sinister dimension, in complete contrast to all that has come before. Ditie falls in love with a German gym teacher and becomes a Nazi sympathizer. It takes awhile to come to grips with this strange turn of events, but it only serves as a taster to a whole series of weird and surreal twists in the narrative ahead, including Ditie's imprisonment for being a millionaire.

I Served the King of England is a strange, witty novel about one man's fantastic journey from rags to riches and back again.

The book was first published in 1971 but has recently been reissued by Vintage Classics in quite a striking purple cover designed by Japanese artist Mio Matsumoto.

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This book was chosen by Claire from Paperback Reader as part of our London-based face-to-face book group. Here's some other posts written about the book by fellow members, which I'll update as they are published:

• Claire's review

• Novel Insight's review

• Simon's review

'The Texicans' by Nina Vida

Fiction - paperback; Soho Press; 304 pages; 2006. Review copy courtesy of the author.

I can't remember the last "Western" novel I read; it's not a genre I find particularly interesting, but I put that down to a childhood filled with F-Troop re-runs on TV!

Nina Vida's The Texicans is set during the mid-19th Century, about 18 or so years before the American Civil War. The story spans 12 years in the life of Joseph Kimmel, a Missouri school teacher, who decides to give up his job in order to tie up his deceased brother's business interests in San Antonio, Texas. Somewhere along the way, he gets distracted and never quite makes it to San Antonio. He spends four years in the newly established Castroville instead, where he marries a German immigrant, Katrin, not because he loves her, but to save her from the local Indian chief.

The couple head for the mountains to make a new life for themselves, acquiring a handful of misfits, including two escaped African slaves and their families, along the way. This is risky business for Joseph, because having negro sympathies could earn him a lynching. However, as a Jew born to Polish immigrants, he knows what it is like to be cast aside and treated as not quite human.

Much of the story revolves around the adventures and dramas as Joseph begins to establish his own town known as Kimmelsburg. It's a tough way of life and there are many battles to be fought with local Indian tribes, including the Comanche and Tonkaways. 

Meanwhile, as Joseph struggles to love the woman he married, he falls for Aurelia Ruiz, the daughter of a Mexican man and his Anglo wife. But Aurelia, who has made a name for herself as a healer (or witch), is already married to one of the runaway slaves and is therefore out of bounds. But this thwarted love affair adds an extra dimension to a story that is already ripe with drama and intrigue.

Sadly, I think the book, while eloquently written, suffers a little from its odd structure. It opens with the story of Aurelia, and explains how she developed her healing talent, was later married off to a cruel white man and eventually lives with a tribe of Comanche indians. It's a rip-roaring narrative that I thoroughly enjoyed, but then, oddly, her story seems to end and we're suddenly thrust into the world of Joseph Kimmel, never to truly return to Aurelia's point of view.

The characters are also perplexing, in the sense that I found it very hard to identify with them. Joseph is a complete enigma: he seems so socially liberal and kind-hearted and generous, but the ways in which he treats his wife, barely acknowledging her and showing no love or fondness, is hard to reconcile. 

Equally, Katrin seems incredibly strong and resilient in all matters except where her husband is concerned, and Aurelia, by far the most interesting person in the whole book, seems to flit around the periphery of the story, never taking centre stage.

But what I liked most about The Texicans is the refreshingly honest presentation of history, free from political correctness. This is a world where settlers -- white and black -- must learn to live with the fear of being scalped by Indians and lynched by the Texas rangers. In some ways it reminded me of Kate Grenville's The Secret River, although Vida tends to paint the pioneers in a rose-coloured light that would make Grenville quake at the knees.

'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street' by Hilary Mantel

Fiction - paperback; Harper Perennial; 298 pages; 2004.

Take a look at Hilary Mantel's back catalogue and I defy you to name another living British author with such a diverse range of subjects and genres under his or her belt. I've only read two of Mantel's books -- the delicious black comedy Beyond Black and her critically acclaimed memoir Giving up the Ghost -- but have been keen to explore more of her work.

Eight Months in Ghazzah Street, originally published in 1988, came much recommended by visitors to this blog. It turned out to be a superb, insidiously creepy read, the kind of story that gets under the skin and has you throwing glances over your shoulder to make sure no one's watching you.

It's set in Saudi Arabia, a highly secretive and repressive society, where the religious police keep a close watch on everything, there are strict laws about what you can wear in public and women are not allowed to drive. Into this restrictive and claustrophobic world come British expats Frances and Andrew Shore. Andrew, an engineer, has a job working for a private construction company in Jeddah. Frances, a cartographer, is forbidden from working, because of her gender, so she must spend her days "keeping house".

Despite the fact that both are used to strange cultures -- they lived in Zambia, where poverty, violence and corruption went hand in hand, for many years -- Frances is immediately uncomfortable in her new surroundings. Instead of living in an expat compound, they've chosen to live among the natives, in an apartment block in a quiet neighbourhood. But everything is walled in and even one of the doorways has been bricked up, creating a cavern-like abode rarely penetrated by daylight.

Not long into their stay Andrew tells her about a psychiatrist's study into the stress on immigrant workers, and you know his words are going to be prophetic:

'When you get here and everything's so strange, you feel isolated and got at - that's Phase One. But then you learn how to manage daily life, and for a while the place begins to seem normal, and you'll even defend the way things are done here, you'll start explaining to newcomers that it's all right really - that's Phase Two. You coast along, and then comes Phase Three, the second wave of paranoia. And this time around it never goes.'

Leaving the house becomes almost impossible. Even a stroll down the street, wearing her "baggiest smock and sandals', is beset with unwanted attention from leering men:

A man in a Mercedes truck slowed to a crawl beside her. 'I give you a lift, madam?' She ignored him. Quickened her step. 'Tell me where you want to go, madam. Just jump right in.' He leaned across, as if to open the near door. Frances turned and stared into his face; her own face bony, white, suffused with a narrow European rage. The man laughed. He waved a hand, dismissively, as if he were knocking off a fly, and drove away.

With not much else to do, Frances befriends the Muslim women living in the building and finds herself unable to come to terms with the religious and cultural differences between them. She finds a similar discord with the expatriate community in which she is expected to socialise.

Before long paranoia takes ahold. Knowing that the apartment above her is empty, Frances begins to hear unexplained noises -- a woman sobbing, footsteps and furniture moving around. When she sees a strange presence in the apartment block's stairwell, she's convinced that something illegal is going on, but no one, including her husband, believes her when she voices her concerns. Perhaps she's going stir crazy after all?

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is a psychological thriller of the finest order. It reads like a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but because Frances is an intelligent worldy-wise woman, you know that her fears aren't fickle. Mantel builds up the tension slowly but surely, revealing Frances' increasing sense of foreboding through diary entries that are interspersed throughout the third-person narrative. It's a highly effective device.

Interestingly, the story does not paint a very flattering portrait of Saudi Arabia, but Mantel, who lived in Jeddah with her husband, a geologist, for four years in the 1980s, makes no bones about this. In the reader's guide that comes with this edition, she writes: "When you come across an alien culture you must not automatically respect it. You must someties pay it the compliment of hating it."

You can read the first chapter of the book here [although you need to be registered with the New York Times website to do so]. But be warned, once you start you'll want to read the whole thing.

'Brooklyn' by Colm Tóibín

Fiction - hardcover; Viking; 256 pages; 2009.

Reviews of Booker long-listed novels on this site are a bit like London buses. You don't get any for ages, then two come along in quick succession.

Following on from yesterday's review of Ed O'Loughlin's Not Untrue & Not Unkind, is Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, another from this year's longlist.

As long time readers of this blog will know, I have a soft spot for Irish fiction, so it was no great surprise that this would be my type of book. But what I did find surprising was just how much I liked it. I devoured it in just two sittings this past weekend.

The book opens in poor, provincial 1950s Ireland -- Enniscorthy, County Wexford to be precise. Eilis Lacey, a part-time shop girl, leaves behind her mother and devoted older sister, Rose, to immigrate to Brooklyn, USA, in search of a better life. She lives in an all-girl boarding house, presided over by the matron-like Mrs Kehoe, and spends her days working in a local department store and her evenings studying for a book-keeping qualification at Brooklyn College. Along the way she makes several friends, meets a boy and finds herself living a relatively contented life, despite the fact that she still misses her family back home.

I'm not sure I can really say anything else without giving away crucial plot spoilers, so I shall keep schutm, suffice to say this is a quietly devastating read, one in which it is completely possible to lose all track of time as you get lost in the world presented here.

Brooklyn is a gentle read, but its gentleness should not be mistaken for shallowness, because this is a story that's profoundly moving and tickles the grey matter in ways you might not quite expect. It might be set in the 1950s but it touches on universal themes that resonate today, and I've yet to read anything that so perfectly captures the profound sense of dislocation you feel when you swap one country for another and then return to your homeland for the first time.

In short, Brooklyn is a superb paean to homesickness and the émigré experience. I think I identified with it so strongly because it shows, in an understated but powerful manner, how all emigrants have to make that god-awful decision about whether to stay or go, a decision that paralysed me for years. When Eilis is confronted with this very kind of choice she is tormented because there is no one right answer: whatever she chooses will have both negative and positive repercussions for herself and her loved ones.

And while I've tried to avoid reading reviews of this book, fearful that it will put me off reading it, I'm conscious Brooklyn has drawn criticism from some quarters over Eilis's passive nature, yet I did not see her that way at all. Sure, her move to Brooklyn is organised by others, namely Father Flood and Rose, but she recognises this as an opportunity for which she should be grateful, even if she finds the prospect of leaving all she knows behind a daunting one. She's proactive enough to get herself educated while in Brooklyn, because she recognises this as another opportunity to better herself in ways which would not be possible "back home". The truly lovely thing about Eilis is that she is a good person, and she thereby attracts good people and many acts of kindness come her way, but her good manners and her unwillingness to rock the boat should not be mistaken for passivity.

Whether Brooklyn makes tomorrow's Booker cut, I cannot say, but it deserves a wide readership regardless: it's a powerful story about culture shock and the life-changing decisions we all must make as we grow up and forge our own paths. I rather suspect it's going to be one of those books that will stay with me a long time...

'Not Untrue & Not Unkind' by Ed O'Loughlin

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 288 pages; 2009.

The 2009 Booker shortlist gets announced this coming Tuesday, so I thought it was about time I reviewed one of the long-listed titles -- Ed O'Loughlin's Not Untrue & Not Unkind. I read it more than a month ago now but haven't been able to muster up enough will power to review it because, to be perfectly honest, I found this an incredibly disappointing book.

I actually bought it long before the long-list was announced, having spied it at Dublin Airport back in mid-April. I was attracted by the story of a foreign correspondent working in Africa and liked the fact that O'Loughlin was a former foreign correspondent himself, so would no doubt know what he was talking about in the novel. Anne Enright's coverline describing it as "the most exciting first novel I have read in many years" sealed the deal.

The story opens with Dublin-based journalist Owen Simmons riffling through the papers of a dead colleague and discovering a photograph that makes him reflect on his time, 10 years earlier, as a foreign correspondent in Africa. He then recounts an endless succession of events -- genocide, war, corruption -- that wouldn't be out of place in Evelyn Waugh's delicious satire about journalism, Scoop but that's about where the similarities end.

Instead of delivering a novel about those fascinating news events O'Laughlin chooses to focus the story on the people covering those events, so what we get is a kind of dry account of the camaraderie between an eclectic mix of foreign correspondents, freelancers and photographers. All of these people face enormous news-gathering challenges and experience some incredibly disturbing situations, but this tends to take a back seat to shifting love affairs and petty rivalries.

This would be perfectly fine if any of those characters were remotely interesting, but I found most of them dull, shallowly drawn and, occasionally, morally dubious.

Sadly, the narrative suffers from a lack of drive, and the only time I felt it getting exciting -- when a reporter, getting worn down by the news cycle, goes off the rails in his bedroom and throws a gorilla doll out the window in a fit of blind fury -- it slides back into its normal plodding pace, with journos lolling around hotel pools or boozing up in hotel bars waiting for the next story to break.

What this all amounts to is a story that lacks emotion, which is difficult to square given the fact it's set during some of the most devastating and violent conflicts in recent times. This is such a shame, because the book had all the right ingredients for a really powerful, hard-hitting and devastating read and what you get is something as dreary as watching grass grow.

Despite this, it's clear that O'Laughlin can write: his prose style is clear and direct, and when he describes the landscape he really comes into his own, as the following passage demonstrates:

The wind chased us to the edge of town and there it halted. It was the strangest thing. Looking back, I could see a brown spire rising over the hills and rooftops, flecked with shreds of paper and plastic, and dust devils played like stray children on the scrub at the edge of town. But ahead of us the hot vacant road shimmered in the sun and there was no wind to trouble the massive indifference of the bush.

But beautiful writing isn't enough when the story you're telling lacks oomph. The only saving grace is the twist at the end, when Owen realises that sometimes your past can come back to haunt you...

'Voice Over' by Celine Curiol

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 288 pages; 2008. Translated from the French by Sam Richard.

Celine Curiol's debut novel, Voice Over, is one of those books that can best be described as "dense" -- it's closely packed with ideas and is written in a complex style. And despite my initial reservations that the narrative was too slow, too meandering, I grew to very much like this story and the slightly kooky, incredibly naive young woman at the heart of it.

It is set in Paris at an unspecified time, although the lack of mobile telephones suggests it could be any time prior to, say, the late 1990s. The unnamed narrator is the "voice over" woman at Gare du Nord train station, which is sort of ironic given that she is struggling to find a voice of her own.

We don't know how old she is, nor anything of her family or educational background, but we learn that she has a crush on a friend, who is already attached to a woman called Ange. As the story develops the crush turns into an obsession and because we are only ever presented with her side of the story we never truly learn how the chap feels about her: does he consider her a hapless friend or someone he would consider leaving his current lover for?

Similarly, while we learn that her work colleagues don't much like her (she hears them talking about her in the staff toilets), we're never quite sure why she attracts so much unwanted attention from men (except, of course, for the one she really wants): is she strikingly beautiful, or does she simply send out the wrong signals? Much of the book documents her endless string of weird and occasionally disturbing encounters -- with men in nightclubs, bars, cafes and parks. Occasionally she finds herself in dangerous situations -- locked in a drug dealer's flat; mistaken for a prostitute by a high-ranking diplomat; running from strangers who want to mug her.

She seems astonishingly passive, unable to say "no" to anyone. This description of her walking through a busy street market seems to sum up her life:

Buying nothing, present in this atmosphere of harangue and transaction, engulfed, borne along by two opposing currents. She allows herself to be pushed along by the movement of the crowd, the sudden eddies, the halts, the momentary gaps. To be there like everyone else, but without a reason, without resisting.

And she's completely disconnected from the real world in the sense that she works in the travel industry, announcing train arrivals and departures, but has no clue about what lies outside of Paris: she's never travelled and doesn't even know what Big Ben is.

How did she get to be like this? Strangely enough there are clues: she refers to a "rite of passage" which, on candid admission to a friend, results in them falling out. Curiol very cleverly scatters these little hints, like breadcrumbs, at semi-regular intervals throughout the narrative, so that there's a reason to keep turning the pages: what was this incident and when did it occur?

In terms of prose style, Voice Over is complex. As James Urquhart writes in this very perceptive review in The Independent "Curiol deliberately blurs speech and thought in dense slabs of intricate prose to engender the same confusion in the reader as in her cripplingly unconfident protagonist". This makes it a disorienting read, but once you get your head around it (I found it helped to read the book in large chunks) it's actually rather mesmirising and hypnotic.

Voice Over was first published in France in 2005. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Independent Foreign Ficton prize.

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This book was chosen by Armen as part of our London-based face-to-face book group. It was an intriguing choice, which generated some great discussion. Here's some other posts written about the book by fellow members, which I'll update as they are published:

• Simon's review
  

• Claire's review

• Novel Insights' review

• Jackie's review

'The Gift' by Pete Hamill

Fiction - hardcover; Little, Brown; 153 pages; 2005.

Coming in at just over 150 pages, Pete Hamill's The Gift is a quick-to-read novella set in Brooklyn, New York in the 1950s. The Americans are mired in a war with Korea, and Pete, the first person narrator, is a teenage sailor on leave for the Christmas holidays. It's a bittersweet return, for as much as he's happy to see his family again, there are two heartaches he must deal with: the father that he feels does not love him and the girlfriend who has replaced him for another.

In typical Hamill style the writing is eloquent and the narrative appealing, but having just read his memoir, A Drinking Life, it's plain to see that this story is actually thinly veiled autobiography. Indeed, The Gift, originally published in 1973, was Hamill's first novel, and he claims to have written it for his father, a man he wanted to impress in order to win his approval and love.

Taking that on board, and noting that all the characters have the same names as Hamill's real life family -- his mother Anne, his father Billy and so on -- it almost feels voyeuristic to read this. It comes across as a kind of love letter to his dad, an Irish immigrant, fond of the drink and handy with his fists, which, at times, threatens to cross the line officially known as schmaltz. The twee cover of a Brooklyn brownstone adorned in Christmas lights doesn't particularly help.

But, in short, this is a lovely heartfelt book that showcases Hamill's ear for dialogue, his flair for nostalgia, and his uncanny ability to chart the innermost workings of the human heart with honesty and candour.

'The Death of Bunny Munro' by Nick Cave

Fiction - hardcover; Canongate; 304 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

If modern fiction has produced a more deluded, creepy, sex-obsessed "hero" than Bunny Munro I've yet to encounter him. If you'll forgive the crudity, Bunny Munro is a wanker -- a literal wanker. He's obsessed with "beating off", as he puts it, and he doesn't particularly care where he does it or how often.

If that's not enough, he sleeps with prostitutes, waitresses, clients, in fact anyone who succumbs to his lecherous ways and sexual magnetism.

And yet Bunny Munro is a married man, and, by his own account, a very happily married man, who loves his wife deeply but fails to truly understand her "medical condition". The book opens with her suicide, which seems to have very little emotional impact on Bunny -- when he discovers her body he notes that "her tits look good". It gets worse. Midway through her funeral, after eying up all the female guests, he's in the toilets masturbating. Later he has unsatisfying sex with the girlfriend of his best friend. 

But while he seems unable to feel any grief over the loss of his wife, as a reader you can't help but feel some sympathy for him. Perhaps the shock has rendered him emotionally crippled? Has her death not yet hit home?

It's when Bunny takes to the road, his nine-year-old son, Bunny Junior, in tow, that you get the true measure of the man. As he peddles cosmetics door to door, making desperate attempts to jump in the pants of countless depressed housewives up and down England's south-east coast, you begin to understand he's losing his grip. He's been a bad husband, a bad father and a truly awful salesman, but his shocking lack of self-awareness means he never truly realises what a terrible, treacherous human being he really is. It is you, the reader, who comes to realise he's unhinged, that his psychopathic tendencies are becoming more and more pronounced, and yet he's been so sympathetically drawn it's difficult to hate him.

Cave achieves this measure of pity by painting a much worse character in the form of the "Horned Devil", a knife-wielding murderer whose trail of death is being reported on the nightly news, and whom Bunny himself finds scary and unbelievable.

And it also helps that Bunny is a father, a terrible wayward father, but a father nonetheless, and that his son, a smart, academically inclined kid, hero-worships him. Bunny might be a creep who preys on vulnerable women, but he's human and even though you know he's going to meet his end at some point -- hence the book's title -- there's hope of redemption.

While The Death of Bunny Munro treads some dark territory, it's incredibly funny in places, which means you end up laughing at the "hero" rather than wincing at his every ridiculously audacious move. And those who are familiar with Cave's long musical career and Australian background will appreciate his in-house joke (although it does wear thin after several repetitions) in which Bunny Munro has a "thing" for Australian songstress Kylie Minogue. (There's an apology to her at the end of the novel.)

Reading this book is a bit like riding a rollercoaster, full of immense ups and downs, with unexpected twists and turns, and a cracking pace that threatens to derail it all. Whether you want to get on the ride depends on your constitution, because the only fluffy thing about this book is the bunny on the cover. Don't say you haven't been warned.