Reading matters

'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 It's a nifty idea, but I couldn't help but wonder if Binchy had simply chucked together all those unpublished short stories she's written over the years, perhaps the ones languishing in the bottom drawer, and inserted a few common themes -- the woods, the spiritual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.

'The Well-Tempered Clavier' by William Coles

Fiction - paperback; Legend Press; 224 pages; 2007. REVIEW COPY.

This soon-to-be-released novel from independent book publisher Legend Press is set in Eton College, the world's most famous public school, during the height of the Falklands War.

It's 1982 and Kim, a 17-year-old boarder, dreams of following in his father's footsteps and becoming a soldier when he leaves school. But when he meets his new piano teacher, the beautiful India five years his senior, he falls instantly in love.

For the next few months the besotted school boy practises Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier -- India's favourite piece of music -- as if his life depends on it. His efforts pay off and the two embark on an illicit but passionate love affair. But Kim, who describes himself as an "emotional iceberg", becomes riddled with jealousy to the point that the relationship can no longer survive...

'Winterwood' by Patrick McCabe

Fiction - hardcover; Bloomsbury; 256  pages; 2006.

Patrick McCabe is an Irish writer who first came to prominence when his novel The Butcher Boy was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize. That particular book told the tale of a young boy who descends into madness following the suicide of his mother. I read it when it first came out in paperback, turning the pages with a weird mix of fear and fascination. It was quite possibly the most disturbing book I had ever read at that stage in my life (I was in my early 20s) and nothing I've read since has even come close to approaching the profound tragicomedy of that amazing novel written in a searing, hurt-filled voice that still haunts me today.

I loved that book so much that when it was finally made into a film I made a point of seeing a screening at the London Film Festival in which McCabe gave a brief talk beforehand. He was a big, bearded man with such a genial nature that I found it surprising that he could have written something so warped and twisted as The Butcher Boy. (The film, I have to say, is nowhere near as harrowing as the book.)

Many years have passed since my initial love affair with McCabe's writing, and even though he's written several novels since, I have not dared read them for fear they would not live up to my high expectations. (Mind you, I did see the film of his novel Breakfast on Pluto at the cinema last year, but only because it starred Gavin Friday, who is one of my musical heroes, and I wanted to know if he could act as well as he can sing. He can.)

What's all this got to do with Winterwood, I hear you ask. Well, I guess it's just a long-winded way of saying that when I picked up his latest offering it was not without trepidation, because I was frightened McCabe might just let me down...

'Where or When' by Anita Shreve

 Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 242 pages; 1993 (this edition 2004).

Charles Callahan, a real estate agent and insurance salesman, is married with three children. One day he chances upon a newspaper advertisement for a new poetry book, which is accompanied by a photograph of the author. Charles is immediately transported back to another time and place, for he once had a summer romance with the author -- Siân Richards -- when the pair were on a Catholic camp as carefree, young 14-year-olds, but lost contact with her afterwards.

With a recession biting and the bank about to foreclose on his Rhode Island house, Charles decides to risk his marriage and stable family life too by getting in touch with Siân, whom he has not seen in 31 years.

He re-establishes contact through an exchange of letters, which soon veer from innocent communication into more dangerous territory. When the pair meet at the site of the original camp of their youth -- now converted into a remote but posh hotel -- they embark on an illicit affair, which has tragic consequences.

'The Widow's Children' by Paula Fox

Fiction - paperback; Flamingo; 240  pages; 2003.

This is one of those rare books that is almost impossible to review without quoting the whole novel from cover to cover. Pretty much every clipped and stripped back sentence in The Widow's Children resonates with meaning and provides startling insights into the ways in which family members interact and play games with one another.

Originally published in 1976 and only recently back in print via Flamingo, The Widow's Children is peppered with eccentric characters, many of them wholly detestable, seething with anger and unspoken hostility.

'A Wild Ride up the Cupboards' by Ann Bauer

Fiction - paperback; Scribner; 283  pages; 2006. REVIEW COPY.

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

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

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

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

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

'Windows on the World' by Frédéric Beigbeder

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

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

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

'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...

'The Weight of Water' by Anita Shreve

Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 248 pages; 2005 [first published in 1997]

Jean, a photojournalist, takes her husband Thomas, a struggling poet, and young daughter Billie on assignment with her to the New Hampshire coast.

They sail on an old boat captained by Thomas's younger brother, Rich, and Rich's new girlfriend, Adaline, towards the unusually named island of Smuttynose. Here, in 1873, two Norwegian immigrants were murdered. A third woman, Maren Hontvedt, escaped.

Jean's assignment is to photograph the bleak, now abandoned island for a magazine feature on the murders, for which a local man was later tried and executed.

Intrigued by the case, Jean goes slightly off brief and decides to do some research of her own. In a local museum she chances upon a sheaf of papers written by Maren Hontvedt that reveal exactly what happened...

'Without Blood' by Alessandro Baricco

Fiction - paperback; Canongate Books; 87  pages; 2005. (Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.)

When this book popped through my letter box earlier this week (a spontaneous purchase from Amazon.co.uk - I know, you shouldn't let me loose on the internet) I was amazed at how anorexic it looked: 87 short pages filled with relatively large type. I read the book cover to cover in less than an hour and now, forced to try and shape my thoughts about it into some semblance of a review, I feel myself itching to read it again.