Reading Matters

'The Blue Zone' by Andrew Gross

Fiction - eBook; Harper; 317 pages; 2008.

I never planned on reading Andrew Gross's The Blue Zone but when I found myself stuck on a plane for eight hours and unable to get into my proposed read (which shall remain nameless) I was desperate for some light relief. I flicked through my Sony Reader and came across The Blue Zone, which had been preloaded (along with a handful of Mills & Boon novels -- I know, I know, I know) when I received it, so thought I'd give it a try.

Under normal circumstances I normally avoid these kinds of plot-driven books with thinly drawn characters and cringe-inducing dialogue because I find them a complete waste of time. But it wasn't always this way: I read plenty of best-selling crime thrillers of this ilk in my early 20s before I got bored with their lack of "substance" and moved onto more challenging literature.

Reading The Blue Zone was a not so subtle reminder that my tastes have changed enormously over the past 15 or so years. I hesitate to describe the book as dreadful, because it does have quite an entertaining if totally preposterous plot, but it does come pretty damn close to being one of the worst books I have read this year. I can't say I am surprised. Andrew Gross is the co-author of many of James Patterson's best-selling thrillers, and the one and only time I read any of Patterson's work -- a free chapter taster that came with a daily newspaper a few years ago -- I hated it, so much so I vowed never to read anything by him because I didn't want to waste my time when there were so many other better written novels vying for my attention.

I should have made that same vow for Gross.

But let me tell you a bit about the (overly dramatic and entirely implausible) storyline. The book revolves around a young woman, Kate Raab, whose father, a wealthy Manhattan gold trader, is arrested by the FBI for money laundering. When he agrees to turn witness for the prosecution it means that some nasty Columbian mobsters could put the lives of the picture-perfect Raab family in danger. As a result the family enters the witness protection program and are given new lives and new identities in a new undisclosed location. But Kate, a cancer researcher too caught up in her fledgling career, refuses to co-operate and remains living in New York with her husband. It is only when her best friend and colleague is shot -- a suspected case of mistaken identity -- that Kate begins to understand that she may have made the wrong decision...

Through a series of twists and turns and completely unexpected changes in plot direction, the narrative moves along at an exhaustive pace, and the ending, when it comes, is almost laugh-out-loud funny because it's far from credible.

I'm sure The Blue Zone -- the title refers to the FBI's code for a blown cover -- would make a superb blockbuster movie. Indeed, much of it does read like a screenplay. But as a book it feels too sensational with its overly engineered plot and shallow characters, and for that reason I can't give it more than two stars. This is one for die-hard fans of this genre only -- and even then the most skeptical of you will probably struggle to enjoy it on the basis the story is so farfetched. Mental note: this will be the first -- and last -- Andrew Gross novel I will ever read.

'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.

'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society' by Mary Ann Shaffer

Fiction - hardcover; Bloomsbury; 243 pages; 2008.

It's got a lovely cover, a great sounding name and everyone seems to be raving about it. So what's not to like? Unfortunately, as far as I am concerned, quite a lot.

The book is composed entirely of letters between a successful newspaper columnist, Juliet Ashton, and a vast array of characters including her literary agent, her best friend and members of a literary society on the Channel Island of Guernsey.

It's 1946 and the Guernsey islanders are trying to put their lives back into order after several years of German Occupation. London-based Juliet, who spent the war years writing a column for the Spectator under a non-de-plume, has been commissioned by The Times to write an article -- under her own name -- for its literary supplement about "the practical, moral and philosophical value of reading".

When, by chance, she receives a letter from one of the founding members of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society she asks him whether members of the society would mind being interviewed for the article. A fierce onslaught of letters ensues, each member keen to tell their story, not only about their love of books and reading, but also about what life was like during the war, cut off from the rest of the world.

Obviously, Juliet's interest is piqued, and she abandons her suitor, a debonair American publisher who is keen to marry her, and visits the island to find out more. Here, living among the islanders -- a mish mash of terribly twee characters, it has to be said -- she hopes to find a new subject that she can write about for a new book.

When Juliet receives a letter from her publisher about her lack of writerly inspiration I laughed at the irony: this was a letter that should have been sent to Mary Ann Schaffer, the author of the book.

I've read your chapters several times, and you're right -- they won't do. Strings of anecdotes don't make a book. Juliet, your book needs a centre. I don't mean more interviews. I mean one person's voice to tell what was happening all around her. As written now, the facts, as interesting as they are, seem like randomly scattered shots.

I won't go so far as to describe The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society as dire, but I found it particularly tiresome and incredibly patronising. I don't appreciate having my intelligence insulted on every second page, as if I have never heard of the Second World War and the terrible deprivations and conditions that so many people were forced to endure. I know that children were airlifted to rural Britain, I know that people were sent to concentration camps, I know that German soldiers were brutes, I know that there were food shortages, I know that London was bombed. The author, having discovered all this in a book called Jersey Under the Jack-Boot in 1976, seems intent on ramming this down her reader's throats, as if all of us have been living in a dark cave for the past half-a-century and failed to realise the war happened at all.

Aside from the main character Juliet, who is perky and feisty and strong, I personally didn't care for any of the remaining cast of often poorly drawn, cliched characters, many of whom seemed overtly American as if they were picked up from the rural mid-west and dumped in the English Channel without anyone bothering to change their cultural makeup. (Tellingly, in the acknowledgments at the end of the book, the author's niece thanks the publishers for ridding the Americanisms from her aunt's manuscript otherwise "British characters would be wearing pants, driving wagons and eating candy". If the author can't get the basic language right, what hope is there of ensuring that the subtle nuances of setting, context and character are authentically British?)

There's no narrative drive, propelling the reader to keep turning the pages, unless, of course, you're an incurable romantic who wishes to know which man Juliet ends up falling in love with. But even so, that narrative thread is so over-worked and boringly predictable, it's rendered null and void, at least as far as I was concerned.

Overall, as much as I tried to like this novel, I could not. I particularly hated the "aren't-we-clever-mentioning-classic-authors-and-our-love-of-books" throughout trick, as if this was some kind of short-hand way of winning my literary approval. It wasn't.

This is a poorly written and poorly constructed book. In fact, at the risk of offending so many thousands of people across the world who loved it, I can best describe The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society in two words: deeply mediocre.

'The Iraqi' by J.A. Mulholland

Fiction - paperback; Stamford House Publishing; 399 pages; 2008. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Although I generally prefer modern literary fiction, I pride myself on having fairly eclectic reading tastes and will happily try genres and authors I haven't read before. If a book is set in an exotic location, particularly if it’s a place that hasn’t featured in any other novel I have read before, it will immediately pique my interest.

And I am always very happy to read first-time novelists, often preferring them to more established names.

The Iraqi, by J.A. Mulholland, ticked all these boxes.

Admittedly, I had my doubts about the premise -- an English woman going on "a secret mission into occupied Iraq to save a man she has only met by email" – but felt that the Middle Eastern setting would make up for this.

I was wrong.

Aside from the wooden dialogue and the clunky prose style, the main character, Jo Huxley, is intensely unlikable. She’s a London-based 20-something telecomms worker (whatever that is) who’s not only vain and shallow, she’s incredibly naïve to the point of stupidity. What right minded individual responds to a potential spam email with the subject line “They going to kill me!! Why you not helping?”

But that is what Jo does and, over a very short space of time, develops an online relationship with Kamaal, a Shia Muslim, who is supposedly holed up in a Kurd area of Iraq fearing for his life and desperate for Jo’s help.

How this man has access to email is anyone’s guess, but Jo questions very little about this man’s circumstances. Indeed, she seems to live in a little bubble in which the world revolves around her and her adulterous boyfriend, James, whom is not all he is cracked up to be.

When Jo accidentally picks up one of James bank statements and discovers he is “collecting” vast sums of money – for instance, £412,000 – and confronts him about it, the issue of her invading James’ privacy is not even raised.

The ensuing arguments all seems rather lacklustre and not very realistic to this reviewer’s eyes. Ditto for Jo’s unscheduled “rescue mission” to Iraq, which she arranges on the back of a legitimate work trip to Damascus. It’s a highly dangerous excursion into war-torn territory and there are glimpses of real tension in the narrative, but, for the most part, the writing is superficial. It’s all tell and no show, as this extract reveals:

We must have walked for more than a few hours before we stopped for a drink. We sat on a ledge of the mountain overlooking the most beautiful and magical sight I had ever laid my eyes upon. It completely blew Crib-y-Ddysgl out of the window. The size and shapes of the landscape around us brought me to tears. The mountains held a sense of mystery and magic. It made me question what our life on earth is all about, I was unsure of what part I had to play in the next phase of my life. Right now I had no concrete direction in which to head and that scared me.

Unfortunately this example is characteristic of the entire novel, a novel I so much wanted to like but which I found incredibly tedious and so riddled with holes you could drive a double-decker bus through them. It doesn’t help that this book can’t quite work out if it is a thriller or a romance, and while neither genre should be mutually exclusive The Iraqi turns out to be a poor mix of both.

On the whole this is a very disappointing debut novel, but which couldn't be fixed with a good, healthy rewrite or two. I expect people who read very little or have no critical judgement will love it.

'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.

'School's Out' by Christophe Dufosse

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 400 pages; 2007. Translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside.

I'm not sure what it is with modern French novels, because I never really seem to enjoy them despite the fact that the blurb makes them sound fantastic. The cover of School's Out boasted all kinds of glowing reviews from "cool, sexy and sinister" to "forcibly reminds one of Donna Tart's A Secret History". And the note about the author on the first page said it had been translated into 10 languages and was the winner of the Prix Premier Roman, which is a French prize for first novels (I think?), so how could I go wrong?

The story opens with the death of a young teacher at a secondary school. He has killed himself by leaping out of a classroom window and it is largely thought that his class of unruly 13-year-old students are to blame. But when Pierre Hoffman takes over the class for the rest of the school year he finds the students incredibly well-behaved, quiet and submissive. But he soon learns that there is something slightly abnormal about them, as if they are "existing only as a whole, in a group". Cue spooky music here...

Despite this promising start, the story, in my opinion, runs out of steam.

It didn't help that I found the narrator to be incredibly detached and annoyingly philosophical. The prose style reminded me of Michel Hoeullebecq, but without the sense of humour. Perhaps it lost something in translation? Not that it read oddly, indeed some of the descriptions are pitch-perfect, such as this one:

The light outside was starting to fade. It was a few minutes past noon, and the grey sky of Normandy was already turning a shimmering black. The wind couldn't blow away the rain, a fine, solid rain that hurtled down in sudden pockets like the impetuous whirl of a flock of sparrows. It flew at the service station windows and climbed horizontally up the car park, sweeping the asphalt at an oblique angle. From where we were standing, we could hear a faint whistle from the trees and bushes. Time stopped abruptly as though there had been some sorrt of breakdown in our continuity.

But it went off on so many tangents that the crux of the story -- a class of teenagers that have sinister intentions -- got lost in the mix. Not once did I want to furiously turn the page to find out what happened next. Not once did I feel the slow-burn of menace that I had expected to resonate off the page. The entire narrative lacked oomph or any sense of urgency.

The exciting stuff comes right at the very end -- yes, somewhere about page 312 of a 316-page book -- and even then it's not all that exciting. In fact, it seems somehow unreal and a little bit ludicrous. And I won't even mention the epilogue!

Frankly, a disappointing book and one I wished I'd never bothered reading.

'Rant' by Chuck Palahniuk

 
Fiction - hardcover; Jonathan Cape; 336 pages; 2007. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Chuck Palahniuk is one of my favourite authors. He has a distinctive, often experimental, style that mixes black humour with scathing satire. The result is often a very funny, completely surreal, rollicking good read. But his new novel -- subtitled The Oral History of Buster Casey -- fails to deliver the usual offbeat and inspired narrative I have come to expect.

Rant is essentially a story about a now-dead wayward weirdo -- Buster L "Rant" Casey -- who is responsible for an urban plague of rabies and other "pranks" across America. It is set in a technologically advanced dystopian future in which people are separated into two distinct groups -- daytimers and nighttimers.  The nighttimers, who come out when it is dark, spend a large proportion of their time Party Crashing. This is a sport in which participants deliberately cause car accidents in a rather destructive and surreal version of a demolition derby.

The book is structured as a series of interviews with people who knew Rant before he killed himself. This forms a rather disjointed oral biography in which a vast array of characters reminisce about Rant's short but violent life (he died during a Party Crashing event that was screened live on television), analyse his character flaws and personality, speculate about his motives for committing suicide and debate whether his upbringing was to blame for his bad behaviour.

This mock-documentary treatment is a brave and interesting twist on Palahniuk's usual temporal (told backwards) narrative style, but in my opinion I don't think it truly works. It comes across as too disjointed and too bitty to build up any narrative flow so that it was a very real struggle to turn the pages.

While Palahniuk introduces some interesting and often hilarious concepts -- I love that Party Crashers  recognise each other by dressing their cars with "Just Married" paraphernalia while participants wear bridal gowns -- the novel's flawed structure is a major distraction. This is a shame, because Rant makes some important points about contemporary society, including our obsession with fame, video games and materialism, just to name a few.

If you have not read a Palahniuk novel before, I would not suggest starting with this one, if only because I think it lacks narrative drive. But all the others in his back catalogue -- many of which are reviewed on this site -- are definitely worth pursuing.

'Mergers and Acquisitions' by Dana Vachon

 

Fiction - hardcover; Riverhead Books; 304 pages; 2007. Review copy courtesy of publisher.

When Jay McInerney, he of Bright Lights Big City fame, described this book, about young Manahattanites living it up in their first year on Wall Street, as a "witting and entertaining immorality tale" I jumped at the chance to acquire an advanced readers copy. It sounded like a right old romp that would do for investment banking what The Devil Wears Prada had done for magazine publishing. Alas, it did not live up to expectations.

Mergers and Acquisitions (published on April 5) starts out well. Tommy Quinn, a recent Georgetown graduate who dreams of becoming a medical doctor, lands a plum job with investment banking firm J.S. Spenser (the promotional website is definitely worth a look) instead and, unsurprisingly, finds himself out of his depth: numbers were never his strong point.

He bumbles his way through the first few weeks, making friends with sex-mad ultra-confident Roger Thorne, and lives it up every evening with an eclectic band of young twenty-somethings, including his moneyed but psychologically damaged girlfriend Frances Sloan.

When he's assigned his first major assignment -- an oil deal -- the book really hits its stride. Under the tutelage of a senior colleague, Makkesh Makker, Quinn's luck, despite his inability to know the difference between a US dollar and a Canadian one, looks set to turn in his favour.

But the momentum of this storyline loses its drive, and what could have been a fascinating insight into the world of high finance -- the deals, the stresses, the money and the unrealistically high expectations to deliver results -- turns into a mish-mash of seemingly unrelated storylines about another world on the periphery -- high art, fine dining, glamorous parties, illicit sex, designer brands and shallow people, all tempered by a kind of nasty narcissism.

Meanwhile the narrator, mild-mannered Quinn, never seems outraged by any of the behaviour shown by his colleagues nor acquaintances: he blindly stumbles along, sucked into the vacuous void that swirls around them. In fact, he is so weak and ineffectual that he does nothing to help his girlfriend who is having some obvious mental breakdown and lets her sort out her problems by herself. Charming.

The book's saving grace is the exquisite descriptive passages -- Vachon crafts gorgeous sentences and knows how to describe a scene so that you feel transported into another time and place, an impressive talent for a young first-time novelist. The humour, some of it laugh-out-loud funny, is also a strong point. 

But ultimately Mergers and Acquisitions falls down because it has no cohesive plot or narrative drive to keep the reader turning the pages. Not even its slide into over-the-top farce on the yacht of a Mexican billionaire towards the end could save it. Pity really. There's a potentially brilliant story in here dying to get out -- let's just hope Vachon nails it with his next novel.

'The Atom Station' by Halldór Laxness

 

Fiction - paperback; The Harvill Press; 180 pages; 2004. Translated from the Icelandic by Magnus Magnusson.

The Atom Station was first published in 1948 at a time of great political upheaval in Iceland. The American Military had been resident since 1941 (during World War Two) and was in the process of establishing a permanent military base at Keflavík in the south-west of Iceland. This was considered by many Icelanders to be incredibly controversial, not least because it would make the country a potential nuclear target at a time when the horror of Hiroshima was very much present in people's minds.

This is important background detail for anyone wishing to tackle this novel.

It's also important to realise that Iceland has rich -- and very old -- literary roots. The Icelanders' Sagas from the Middle Ages are constantly name-checked -- and helpfully footnoted -- throughout The Atom Station.

This political and cultural history form the backbone of what is essentially a sharp, often witty and sometimes laborious, satire. The story is told through the eyes of a young peasant girl, Ugla, who moves to Reykjavík to take up the position of a house maid for a politician.

In this ever-busy household Ugla is exposed to a world very much foreign to her rural roots. Here she discovers socialism and falls in with a group that is campaigning for the establishment of a childcare nursery paid for by the state.

She also develops a strong feminist streak, later vowing that she wants to be regarded as a "person" and not a "woman".

"What do you mean, a person?"

"Neither an unpaid bondwoman like the wives of the poor, nor a bought madam like the wives of the rich; much less a paid mistress; nor the prisoner of a child which society has disowned. A person amongst persons. I know it's laughable, contemptible, disgraceful and revolutionary that a woman should not wish to be some sort of slave or harlot; but that's the way I am made."

"Don't you want to get a husband?"

"I don't want to get a slave, neither under one name nor another."

Ironically, headstrong Ugla falls pregnant and returns to her country home. But having experienced a taste of city life, she is soon drawn back and becomes reacquainted with her past employer, whom, she later discovers has "sold" the country to the United States. I'm not sure what this book is trying to say: that the state is more powerful than the individual and hence there's no use fighting it, or that capitalism, in the end, corrupts us all?

I'm sure that more highly attuned political minds than mine would have much to say about The Atom Station. But I found it impossible to like, although I tried to like it very much. I appreciate its worthy aims and its high ambitions and the fact it was borne from an important era in Iceland's recent history, but I struggled with the narrative, which occasionally went off in strange tangents. Perhaps a proper understanding and familiarity with the sagas might have helped me with this.

I loved the character of Ugla, however. She was forthright, strong and had a questioning mind. But even she wasn't enough to make me fall in love with this book in the same way that I fell in love with Iceland when I visited it several years ago...

'Siegfried' by Harry Mulisch

 

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 180 pages; 2004. Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent.

An elderly and celebrated Dutch author, Rudolph Herter, goes on a literary tour to Austria, taking his partner, Maria, with him. During a television interview promoting his latest novel, The Invention of Love, he offhandedly mentions that despite all the books and studies about Hitler humankind is no closer to understanding the Fuhrer and why he did what he did. "All those so-called explanations have simply made him more invisible," says Herter. "Perhaps fiction is the net that he can be caught in."

Later at a book signing, an elderly couple who survived the war, approach Herter with a story of their own to tell. Herter agrees to hear their tale, thinking that he may be able to use it as the basis for his next novel, which he has already decided should be about Hitler.

Over the course of an afternoon in their room at an old people's home, the couple, Ullrich and Julia Falk, break the oath they once swore to Hitler and share their terrible secret with a gob-smacked Herter. Their story is so utterly astonishing that Herter soon realises that even the best fiction writers can never properly compete with the truth...

Sounds fascinating, doesn't it? Unfortunately, if I say any more about the story it will spoil the plot. But let's just say that it didn't turn out to be the dramatic, page-turning tale I had expected.

Sure, it is a strange and beguiling novel, which deals with a lot of big themes. At its most basic level it pits fiction against fact and plays with the idea that truth is stranger than fiction. But it also attempts to explain the role of literature in helping us to comprehend the evils of the world around us. As a consequence the story gets bogged down in philosophy and navel gazing. Which is a shame, because there is a great story here dying to get out.

For me, personally, I would have loved this book to be more traditionally structured: to have a straightforward narrative that tells the Falk's shocking tale from their viewpoint. (In fact, I would have taken Herter out of the story altogether. And yes, I realise this would mean the book would be totally different to the book that Harry Mulisch has created here. I rest my case.)

Instead, what we get is three not-very-seamless stories in one: Herter's, the Falks' and Eva Braun's.

The pacing is not straightforward either, with the climax happening about half-way through, leaving the story that follows slightly weaker for it.

Still, if you like big, weighty themes, don't mind the author philosophising and are fascinated by the love affair between Hitler and Eva Braun you might just find this novel more riveting than I did.

'A Wedding in December' by Anita Shreve

Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 336 pages; 2006.

A group of college friends, many of whom have not seen each other for 27 years, gather for a wedding at an inn in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.

This once tight circle of friends - Rob, an out-of-the-closet pianist; Harrison, a book publisher; Jerry, a burly businessman with a stuck-up wife; Agnes, an umarried history teacher tormented by a long-running love affair and writing a novel; Nora, the widowed owner of the inn; and the wedding couple, Bill and Bridget, who dated at school but then went on to marry other people - spend three days at the inn.

The ceremony, restricted to just this group of seven friends and one or two others, takes on a special significance because Bridget, the mother of a 15-year-old son, has breast cancer and isn't expected to live much beyond two years.

And if this doesn't sound melancholy enough there are other shadows hovering over this group of friends, including the death of Steven, a charamastic classmate, at a drunken highschool party all those years ago, and the tragic events of 9/11 just three months earlier.

Amid this somewhat downbeat atmosphere the party gets snowed in and, fueled by the ensuing claustrophobia, tension and too much alcohol, comes the spilling of sordid secrets from the past...

I had really wanted to love this book, having waited so long for its paperback release, but I have to say I found A Wedding in December disappointing. It felt too contrived, too stilted and too meandering. I am surprised I actually got beyond the first chapter it was so plodding and pedestrian.

I particularly disliked the way in which a dual story - about the Halifax explosion of 1917 in which more than 2,000 people died - was interspersed throughout the main narrative. Shreve is usually a dab hand at dual narratives, but this one felt clunky and overworked. While I understand that it was supposed to mirror the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre I'm sure the profound nature of those events could have been handled differently - for instance, as dinner table discussion between the friends.

That said, the book isn't entirely terrible.

The characters are well drawn and you get a real sense of what they were like at school and what they are like now, 27 years later, having experienced the ups and downs and twists and turns of their own lives.

Shreve also knows how to handle human emotions and is very good at exploring the ebbs and flows of people's lives. If nothing else, A Wedding in December is an interesting look at how our actions and our decisions can have far-reaching repercussions and that it is never too late to seek redemption or find happiness.

Other Anita Shreve books reviewed here include: The Weight of Water, Light on Snow, Eden Close, All He Ever Wanted, Strange Fits of Passion and Sea Glass.

'Jessica' by Bryce Courtenay

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 676 pages; 2000.

This best-selling novel is set in outback Australia during the early 20th Century. Jessica Bergman, the heroine of the book, is a tomboy who helps her father, a Danish immigrant, run the family farm. Meanwhile her elder sister, the beautiful but stuck-up Meg, dreams up plans, with the help of her mother, to wed the local rich boy.

When a brutal murder is carried out at a neighbouring farm, Jessica helps the killer survive a lynch mob hell bent on delivering their own form of justice. This one act of compassion has long-term implications for the rest of Jessica's life - and she is banished from her family, from society and, later, from her child, who is born out of wedlock.

Ultimately this is a relatively sappy and sentimental tale, albeit it an easy to read one. (I was trapped on a long-haul flight with it, and read pretty much the entire 676 pages on the plane.)

While it's supposedly based on a true story, Courtenay offers no explanations, no historical footnotes or afterword to back this up. I'm inclined to think that the murder and Jessica's role in its aftermath may, in fact, be the only true elements and Courtenay has fabricated the rest, which is fine, because it's fiction after all, but as a reader I would have liked to have known what was true and what was not.

That's not my only problem with Jessica. I found much of it sloppily written and in need of some strong editing. It's at least 300 pages too long.

The story meanders all over the place and goes off in unexpected tangents. I would not mind this if those tangents were neatly drawn together at the end, but they are not. Instead, it's like the author made things up as he went along - and no one, not even the editor he so generously thanks in his acknowledgements, bothers to pull him up on this.

The author also has a tendency to hector his readers with his own views (on the treatment of women, on the treatment of aboriginals) instead of letting the reader make up their own mind. I found this patronising and it irritated the hell out of me.

Some of the scenes are overworked and repetitive, much of the dialogue is false (including the colloquialisms, which grated) and the characterisation poor and based on stereotypes (the mother, for instance, is like the Wicked Witch of the West and Jessica may as well have been Cindarella).

All of this is a shame, because there's a brilliant novel in here just dying to get out. A second, possibly third, draft might have ironed out some of these problems.

All in all, Jessica has confirmed what I have thought all along: that this best-selling author is really not for me. Although, judging by his sales figures, I'm probably quite alone in this view. And if you look at the favourable reviews on Amazon.co.uk I suspect I'll be lynched for giving this book just two stars. Oh well.

'A Noble Radiance' by Donna Leon

Fiction - paperback; Arrow; 289  pages; 1999.

This is book number 7 in Donna Leon's crime series featuring Commissario Brunetti, but only the second one that I have read.

In this book Brunetti reopens an investigation into a kidnapping that was never solved. The badly decomposing body of the victim, a young man from a noble Venetian family, has been discovered on farm land in the Italian Dolomites several years after his disappearance.

Brunetti has the difficult task of breaking the news to the victim's family and then sets about trying to work out who murdered him and why.

As a story it is a relatively interesting and fast-paced one. But I had some problems with the book as a whole.

**Please note there are spoilers below**

Perhaps because I have only read the first book in the series and then skipped ahead five books to read this one I have missed some of the subtleties in characterisation that Leon has introduced in each novel as the series has progressed.

For instance, this was my first introduction to Signorina Elletra, the Vice-Questore's secretary, and she seemed too good to be true, saving Brunetti much leg work because of her connections (mainly old boyfriends!) and ability to use a computer. I wanted her to falter somewhere along the line, to come across some kind of "road block" that would test her perseverance and problem solving abilities, but it never happened - it made me wonder who was the real detective here: her or Brunetti?

I also found some of the dialogue pointless, and one thread of the narrative - Brunetti's father-in-law reveals that his daughter is unhappy in her marriage - turned out to be an unnecessary red herring that quite frankly pissed me off. I'm still not sure what Leon hoped to achieve by introducing this additional complication and then resolving it in such an unsatisfactory manner other than to annoy her readers.

There were some aspects of the investigation that seemed a little lacking too. Aside from the fact that a lot of Brunetti's leg work is done by his superior's secretary (see above), when he does venture out to do some investigation of his own, he seems to let his interviewees walk all over him. One man even tries to shoot at him and his colleague and gets not so much as a warning. Perhaps that's the done thing in Italy?

Venice itself was also relegated to a minor role in this book, which is a shame, because it added so much atmosphere to Death at La Fenice. But perhaps this was largely due to the fact that the crime under investigation happened outside of the city - it only fell to Brunetti because the family were Ventian. 

That aside, the book isn't entirely awful. The pacing was good (not too drawn out) and the twist at the end was a nice surprise and packed a powerful punch. But reading this has, in some ways, confirmed why I don't normally read detective serials: they don't really stretch me as a reader and I don't think they stretch the writers much either, because they can sit back and rely on using characters that they've already invented without putting terribly much effort in. Or am I being overly harsh?

Still, I haven't given up on the series. I will read another Leon book, but I think it might help if I stick to the order in which they have been written.

'The Republic of Trees' by Sam Taylor

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 240 pages; 2006.

Four adolescents -- expat Brits who live in France -- run away from their family homes to spend the summer in the forest free from adult control. Here they set up a new society called The Republic of Trees based on the principles in philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract.

At first things are carefree, even joyous. Louis, the intellectual leader devotes his time to drawing a map of the region; Alex, the hunter ensures there's a ready supply of food; Isobel does the cooking; and Michael, the youngest of the quartet, climbs trees and swims in Elbow Pool.

The first half of the book is quite a charming account of Michael's sexual awakening and, told through his eyes, the reader gets to experience his first flush of love (and lust) with the intriguing Isobel.

Later, when a fifth interloper, another ex-pat, this time a Canadian, Joy, enters their world things suddenly go a bit awry. Before long, the pleasant 'camping trip' takes on a worrying and menacing undertone. Sexual jealousy, sibling rivalry and power struggles all come to the fore.

When food supplies start running out the group begins some petty thievery from nearby farm houses and villages, which is indicative of their running-on-empty mindset and their slide into darkness.

Despite the republic becoming more formalised, with proper rules and laws put in place, things begin to spiral out of control.

The tale takes on a nightmarish, and downright nasty, element that does not end until the book's gruesome climax.

I have to admit that I did not like The Republic of Trees very much. That's not to say it isn't well written, because it is. The plot's quite good too. I just did not feel any empathy for any of the characters and had no idea of their ages -- early teens, mid-teens, late teens? -- because none are specified. It's such a minor but oh-so important element.

There were several things that did not ring true either: how could four teenagers run away and not be found and what teenagers are into politics and philosophy to the point of creating their own revolution these days?

Ultimately, while this book has many similarities to William Golding's Lord of the Flies and Toby Litt's Deadkidsongs, two books I've read and enjoyed, The Republic of Trees just didn't do it for me. 

'Oracle Night' by Paul Auster

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 207 pages; 2005.

Up until now I have been a Paul Auster virgin. I have seen him interviewed several times on television, and appreciate that he is an interesting and accomplished and much heralded author. Whenever I hear his name I automatically think of New York, because he seems synonymous with that city.

Recently, when browsing a local bookstore, I picked up Oracle Night and was charmed by the coverline on the front of the book: "If you have never read Auster before . . . this is the place to start". I weighed the pros and cons, and then thought, why not?

Essentially Oracle Night is about a novelist recovering from a near-fatal illness. He lives with his wife in New York, and while she's at work, he spends his days touring the city on foot. One day he buys a notebook from a stationary shop run by a little Chinese man. He brings it home and finds that as soon as he opens it the writer's block that has plagued him for months completely disappears. Suddenly his imagination comes alive and, in doing so, his own life takes on a surreal, larger than life edge that has him questioning the very essence of who he is, where he's come from and where he's going. He begins to scrutinise his relationship with his wife and his friend in ways he had never contemplated before.

Did I like this book? I am still in two minds. It throws normal novel writing conventions out the window. There are stories within stories within stories - and many of them don't come to any satisfactory conclusion. There's no real plot to speak of, although the strong characterisation and the hypnotic writing, holds it together. And, in many cases, it asks more questions than it answers. I am still wondering "what the hell was that all about?"

If anyone who has read this book can enlighten me, then please do. In the meantime, let me say it was a fascinating novel, but I wouldn't rave about it and I have no immediate plans to rush to the bookstore for a feast of more Auster. Although I would never say never.

'The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency' by Alexander McCall Smith

Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 256 pages; 2003.

This book and the others in Mr McCall Smith's charming series seem to be flavour of the month right now.

The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency is certainly an intriguing and quaint book. The central character, Mma Ramotswe, is utterly lovely and especially kind-hearted and the setting of rural Botswana is wonderfully realised.

That's the good bit.

The bad bit, as far as I'm concerned, is the writing (which is far too simplistic for readers like me who enjoy being challenged) and the plot (which doesn't exist).

Each self-contained chapter reads like a series of short stories or anecdotes, which is fine if that's what you like reading, but I found myself becoming bored with this book very quickly. I also struggled to appreciate the stripped back prose which is childlike in its simplicity.

I think this book would appeal to those who don't read very often or to those over-tired readers who want something they can cruise through with their brain disengaged.

A pleasant enough read, but I won't be bothering with the rest of the titles in the series.

'Personality' by Andrew O'Hagan

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 327 pages; 2003.

Maria Tambini, the daughter of Italian immigrants on the tiny Scottish island of Bute, is destined to be a star. She has an amazing voice that captivates anyone who hears it. At the age of 13, she is discovered by a national TV show, and from there, there is no looking back. But the child star, who hungers for fame and glory, also starves herself and before too long, everything is not as it seems . . .

Overall, I found Personality to be a disappointing story. It never really "grabbed" me and I lost interest before I'd even got a 1/4 way through it.

The critics, however, seem to have loved it.

I can understand that they would appreciate O'Hagan's often lush and descriptive language and his ability to capture time and place. His characterisation is also faultless. But the story was let down by O'Hagan trying to be too clever and experimental in places. The chapters jump all over the place, they go backwards and forwards in time, and are told from a diverse range of viewpoints. Nothing seems to hold it together - apart from the story of Maria's climb to the top and her subsequent freefall to the bottom. But even that isn't enough to keep the reader wanting more.

I think the book is weakened by not hearing from Maria; her story is told by players in her life and we never really get to know what is going on in her head.

And the best part of the story, where one fan, Michael, becomes her lover while another becomes her stalker, comes too late in the book (about 2/3 of the way through). A shame really, because I really enjoyed this part of Personality.

All in all, I thought the story was too fragmented and too multi-layered, and, because of that, it lacked coherence, drive and interest - for this fussy reader anyway.

'Holy Fools' by Joanne Harris

Fiction - hardback; Doubleday; 430 pages; 2003.

I was looking forward to Joanne Harris's latest fare so much I went out and bought Holy Fools as a full-price hardcover, something I've never done before. But I figured the enjoyment I'd get from her newest fiction would be well worth the £15 price tag. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

This book was incredibly disappointing. It took me a very long time to read, which is uncharacteristic of my past experiences with Harris's novels — normally I whizz through them at lightening-fast pace, enjoying every moment.

By comparison Holy Fools was, at times, mind-numbingly dull. This may sound harsh, but I did try very much to like this book. On the surface it had everything going for it: an "exotic" setting (a remote abbey on a French island), an interesting historical backdrop (17th century France during a time of great political upheaval) and inspired themes (religious dogma versus witchcraft). But this was merely window dressing; scratch the surface and there was little underneath.

The characterisation resorts to cheap stereotypes and the plot was virtually nonexistent. The tension between the protagonist — Juliette, a one-time circus performer who takes refuge in the abbey with her young child — and Guy LeMerle — her ex-lover now turned charlatan priest— is weak and uninspired. I kept waiting for the story to go somewhere, for the characters to develop and grow, but this did not eventuate.

Harris may have built a reputation as a successful author, one of the first in recent times to get the "literary novel" into the bestseller lists, but Holy Fools is a disappointing edition to her captivating "series" of French books.

'An Air That Kills' by Andrew Taylor

Fiction - paperback; NEL; 266 pages; 1994.

The bones of a baby are discovered in a disused privy as workmen demolish an old inn in a small market town on the England/Wales border in the 1950s. Newly arrived Detective Inspector Thornhill is called in to investigate what appears to be an old Victorian murder case. But all is not what it seems in this fairly pedestrian murder mystery.

The characterisation — a tarty barmaid, a busybody who owns the town's newspaper, a cantankerous elderly resident, among others — is poor and the plot moves along very slowly. It's a bit like a badly written Agatha Christie novel.

And the ending, described on the back cover as "satisfyingly chilling" by The Times, is as predictable as they come. I found this a disappointing read given that I loved Taylor's Roth Trilogy.

'Half in Love' by Justin Cartwright

 

Fiction - paperback; Sceptre; 309 pages; 2002. 

An insightful look at modern-day romance, politics and the cult of celebrity, this novel is essentially the thinking person's love story. But the affair between a Westminster politician and a married English actress is at times a little corny and too contrived.

I found myself not caring about the characters and wishing both of them would just run off together because they were too boring and self-obsessed.

While I appreciate Cartwright's desire to explore the power of the media, political scandal, sexual manners and the stresses of fame, I found his continued philosophising did nothing more than obstruct the plot.