Reading matters

'The Summer Before the Dark' by Doris Lessing

Fiction - paperback; Flamingo; 236 pages; 2002.

Having recently got over my fear of reading Doris Lessing, I decided to try another book by this Nobel Prize-winning author.

The Summer Before the Dark was first published in 1970. At the time it must have been a very contemporary novel, and perhaps a little controversial, because its central theme is the role of women in society. The main character, Kate Brown, is a domestic goddess who spends one summer rediscovering herself and her place in the world after some 20 years of marriage and motherhood.

It might sound like a relatively dull premise for a novel, but in Lessing's hands the book sings with great story-telling, intellectual insight and drama. Kate Brown is no dull housewife: she's a complex woman suffering what can be best described as empty-nest syndrome. Her grown up children are getting on with their lives and her husband is working in America for an extended period, leaving her to her own devices for a summer.

Good at languages -- Italian, French and Portuguese -- she accepts a temporary translator job at a conference in London for an organisation called Global Food. She does so well and enjoys the work so much, her stint is extended and she is promoted. Before she knows it she is one of the main organisers of another conference, this time in Istanbul, and it is here that she embarks on an illicit affair with a younger man and goes on a European road trip with him.

'The Crimson Petal and the White' by Michel Faber

Fiction - paperback; Canongate; 833 pages; 2003.

Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White is, quite simply, an astounding literary accomplishment. Within its 800-plus pages unfolds a story that draws the reader into another time and place so expertly that you feel as if you, too, are treading the streets of Victorian-era London.

Critics have quite rightly compared Faber's epic novel with that other great Victorian writer Charles Dickens, but as Kathryn Hughes pointed out in the Guardian this one is not tempered by the social mores that prevented Dickens from writing freely. Faber's book, a 21st century novel set in the 19th century, is lewd and bawdy, gritty and real, and there's no pretense at keeping things in check lest he offend a delicate reader.

Indeed, one could argue that delicate readers should probably steer clear of this epic tale about a prostitute's rise and fall in Victorian England. His central character, 19-year-old Sugar, is infamous for turning the kinds of tricks other whores refuse to do. And while Faber may not go into great detail regarding those tricks, he certainly does not shy away from letting us into the sordid, carnal world of an 1870s streetwalker. The language can, at times, be very crude -- and if you are offended by the "C-word" you'd be wise to stay away.

But despite the constant debauchery (for want of a better word) that fills the pages, The Crimson Petal and the White never feels pornographic, nor sensationalist. Instead, because Faber has such an eye for detail and is a stickler for historical accuracy, the novel feels like an intoxicating trip into a world that few of us could ever hope -- or want -- to visit.

'The Road Home' by Rose Tremain

  Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 365 pages; 2008.

Rose Tremain is one of those British authors who has been on the periphery of my reading existence for about 10 years. She's been hard at work crafting novels -- 11 at last count -- and the odd short story collection, but I have only ever read Music and Silence, which won best novel in the 1999 Whitbread Awards. In fact, I adored that book so much, it may partially explain why I've shied away from reading anything else by Tremain: I've been scared that nothing else could live up to the beauty of my first experience reading her work.

I have had her 1992 novel Sacred Country in my reading queue for a year or so, but then she won this year's Orange Prize with The Road Home and I wondered whether it was time to give her another shot. A half-price promotion at Waterstone's was the final push I needed, and so, that was how I found myself last weekend opening this book and falling in love with it.

The story is essentially about an immigrant from an unspecified Eastern European country (I imagine it is Poland and wondered why Tremain had refused to just come out and say this), who arrives in London determined to make enough money to support his elderly mother and young daughter back home.

Lev is in his early 40s and still grieving over the death of his wife, 36-year-old Marina, from leukemia, so there's a sense of melancholia about him. But he is also prepared to work hard and knows to get anywhere in life he must put aside his personal troubles and just get on with it.

Naively believing that it is possible to survive in London for £20 a week, he initially struggles to get settled, sleeping rough and making a measly fiver here and there by delivering leaflets for a kebab shop. But his luck turns when he scores a job washing dishes at a restaurant run by a famous chef (the fictional GK Ashe who has a  touch of the Gordon Ramsay's about him).

With a little help from Lydia, a fellow compatriot whom he befriended on the long bus journey to London, he finds himself a room to rent in a house owned by the genial Christy Slane, a recently separated Irish plumber. Together Lev and Christy strike up a wonderful friendship, based partly on shared grief and the fact they both have young daughters of around the same age.

When Lev finds himself falling in love with Sophie, a colleague, it seems as if his new English life is finally complete, but it's really just the beginning of a complex, often bumpy, occasionally funny and constantly challenging journey...

'A Time to Tell' by Maria Savva

  Fiction - paperback; Pen Press Publishers; 308 pages; 2006. Review copy.

I haven't read a rollicking good family-saga-cum-romance for a very long time, so I was pleased to pick up Maria Savva's second novel, A Time to Tell, for a leisurely Saturday afternoon read this past weekend. It turned out to be perfect fare for someone currently suffering from a chest infection, and I ploughed through it in one sitting.

The novel charts the course of Cara Hughes' life over a 50-year period from the early 1950s to the beginning of the 21st century. From her first doomed love affair and a failed suicide attempt, to marriage and motherhood, the book actually opens at the end of Cara's life as a 60-something widowed invalid living with the only relation that will have her -- a granddaughter caught up in an abusive marriage.

Unusually, the story does not follow a reverse chronological order as you would expect from such a starting point, but jumps backwards and forwards in time, a style that reflects Cara's memories as and when they occur to her. Through this disjointed third-person narrative we slowly learn more about Cara's long life: her joys and sorrows, her trials and tribulations, and the very many secrets she has kept hidden from her family, including the fact that the father of her first-born was not the man she married but the one for which, some 50 years later, she still harbours strong affection.

We also get introduced to a vast array of characters -- three children, one of whom has been missing for 16 years, various grandchildren, an estranged sister, and an assortment of in-laws -- so many , in fact, that it is almost impossible to keep track of who's who. Before long, the reader begins to build a picture of a large, complicated and dysfunctional family that is falling apart at the seams.

But Cara only begins to reassess her own familial values and relationships and to regret some of her past actions when she is shunted off to live with an older sister she hasn't spoken to in more than two decades. Here, in the home in which she grew up, Cara is forced to confront some of her most painful memories...

'The Ghost' by Robert Harris

Fiction - paperback; Hutchinson; 310 pages; 2007.

My very short relationship with British author Robert Harris has been a bit of a hit and miss affair: I absolutely loved the compulsively readable Fatherland (1993) but struggled to finish the dull and plodding Enigma (1996), and so I've not been inclined to read his other novels -- Archangel, Pompeii, Imperium -- for fear of wasting my time. But his latest book, The Ghost, has received so much press attention and been lavished with equal amounts of praise that I admit to being intrigued enough to give the man a second shot.

The Ghost was published last September among a flurry of reports that it was based on Harris's one-time friend, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie. This is a claim that Harris denies.

But reading this book it's difficult not to think of the the two main characters --  Adam Lang and his controlling wife Ruth -- as thinly veiled versions of Tony and Cherie. The difference is that in this novel the couple are immersed in an extremely wicked plot that even the conspiracy theorists would have a hard time dreaming up!

'Aiding and Abetting' by Muriel Spark

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 212 pages; 2000. 

Truth is often stranger than fiction, and no more so than in the case of Lord Lucan, an English aristocrat, who has been missing since the night of November 7, 1974. On this night the nanny looking after Lucan's three children was brutally murdered and his wife suffered severe head wounds in the attack. Lucan, who had a gambling problem and had racked up considerable debts, was suspected of the crime. Wanted on charges of murder and attempted murder, he was never brought to court, and despite being declared officially dead in 1999, numerous "sightings" of him still occur around the world.

The late Muriel Spark, one of Britain's most acclaimed and prolific writers, takes this real life story, one that has fascinated generations of Brits, and turns it on its head. She has Lucan still alive, on the run from the law but supported by a closeted network of aristocratic friends. When he presents himself for treatment at the consulting rooms of a Paris-based psychiatrist, Dr Hildegard Wolf is immediately intrigued -- and not just because of Lucan's mysterious past. It turns out she is already treating another man, who also claims to be Lord Lucan. And so she must try to unravel which Lucan -- if any -- is the real seventh Earl, and then she must determine what threat each poses to her new life, far from the one in which she was a fake stigmatic defrauding people of money for her own gain.

What follows is a fun, high-tension, hilarious romp that spans Paris, London and the Highlands of Scotland as Lucan and Dr Wolf both go on the run. Without wishing to give too much of the remaining plot away, I can safely say the ending is a satisfyingly wicked one.

Aiding and Abetting is, quite simply, a delight from start to finish. Its pared down, elegant prose and fast-moving storyline makes it a deliciously quick read. But because it strays into areas of morality and crime there's enough substance to give real food for thought. It might appear to be a rather simple novel but don't let that trick you into thinking it doesn't deal with rather complex issues...

'Silent in the Grave' by Deanna Raybourn

Fiction - paperback; Mira Books; 544 pages; 2008. REVIEW COPY.

Deanna Raybourn's debut novel, Silent in the Grave, kicks off with one of the more memorable opening lines I've ever had the pleasure of reading:

To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband's dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor.

The "I" in question is Lady Julia Grey, who turns out to be the wonderfully feisty late-20-something heroine of this extraordinarily fun novel, which is set in Victorian London. Together with private investigator Nicholas Brisbane, a tall, dark and handsome man, she sets out to discover who murdered her husband, although she is initially sceptical that his death was caused by anything other than natural causes.

The ensuing investigation is hampered from the outset, not the least because Julia is from a rich family where she is expected to play the part of a bereaved widow for at least a year, closeted from the world in her large London townhouse. But also because Nicholas Brisbane isn't exactly the easiest person to work with, riddled as he is by a mysterious illness and an equally mysterious past.

Determined to seek justice before beginning her life afresh, Julia sets about interviewing her servants and searching their rooms for clues. What she discovers isn't pleasant -- and before the story ends she must confront everything from gypsies to prostitutes in a bid to find her husband's killer.

'Gents' by Warwick Collins

Fiction - paperback; Friday Fiction; 172 pages; 2007. REVIEW COPY.

A book set in a public lavatory may not sound terribly salubrious; it may, in fact, sound downright sordid. But Gents is far from the grubby little tale I expected it to be, which is somewhat surprising given that it's a tale about three West Indian janitors working in a central London toilet that is frequented by cottagers.

The story begins with Ezekiel Murphy taking a new job at a subterranean lavatory where the punters must pay to use the facilities. By lunchtime he already realises that some of the customers are using the cubicles for casual sex, a concept which he cannot comprehend. "Why they do it here? Why not somewhere else?" he asks.

His boss, Reynolds, takes a practical view of the situation. "We don't ask why, man. We don't keep their conscience, we only keeping order."

Meanwhile Jason keeps order by putting a big stick under the cubicle door and rattling it about to encourage any "reptiles" to leave.

But while the "reptiles" are harmless in themselves, the attention they attract is not, and before long Reynolds is being ordered by the local council to improve the lavatory's reputation.  However, "cleaning out the swamp", isn't as straightforward as one might think...

'The End of the Affair' by Graham Greene

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 191 pages; 2003.

Is there anyone out there who doesn't know the basic premise of this book, which was first published in 1951 and has remained in print ever since? It must be the late Graham Greene's most famous novel. It's been adapted for the screen twice -- in 1955, starring Deborah Kerr and Van Johnson, and in 1999 starring Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes -- and transformed into an opera in 2004 by the American composer and pianist Jake Heggie.

I've long wanted to read it -- encouraged by several other bloggers, it must be said -- but it took me a few years to get my act together. I don't know why I waited so long. The End of the Affair is a dark but ultimately compelling tale about one man's tortured relationship with a woman he cannot have and the decisions people make that impact on the rest of their lives.

'Saturday' by Ian McEwan

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 282 pages; 2005.

On Saturday February 15, 2003 almost a million people took to the streets of London to protest against the impending war in Iraq. It was the biggest ever demonstration witnessed in the UK.

As someone who took part in the Stop the War march, I was keen to read Ian McEwan's Saturday because it is famously set in London on that very day. But the protest is a mere backdrop to a more deeply personal story, that of a day-in-the-life of a well-established and highly successful neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne, whose comfortable existence is rocked by a string of unforeseen events.

Perowne's normal Saturday -- playing squash with a colleague, watching his son's band rehearsal, shopping for food and then preparing a lavish family meal in preparation for his daughter's arrival home after a stint away -- gets slightly turned on its head when, first, in the early hours of the morning, he stands at his bedroom window and sees a burning aeroplane arc across the sky towards Heathrow Airport, and second, when he is involved in a very minor car accident that turns into a potentially life-threatening situation.