- The Hobbit by JRR Tolkein. Archetypal adventure story that isn't quite as big or exciting as it was when you were young. ***
- Monsieur by Lawrence Durrell. Deeply strange mess of narrators and characters, who may have all written each other into existance. *
- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Long, mostly good account of the rise of Thomas Cromwell. Complex, and lacks some dramatic vitality. ***
- Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone by JK Rowling. Likeable enough child's fantasy about an orphan wizard. **
- The Mercy Seat by Martin Waites. Rubbish modern noirish thriller set in the North of England. Obvious plot and crap characters. Less than No Star
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Satire of celeb culture and reality TV as teens battle to the death for sport. What's not to like? **
- The Devil's Footprints by John Burnside. Long-even-though-it-is-short novella about a middle aged plonker. No star
- The Agenda by Bob Woodward. Intruiging account of the dealing and politics of Clinton's first few months. *
- About A Boy by Nick Hornby. Smug and twee account a thirty something bloke and a miserable teenager. No star
- The Hillicker Curse by James Ellroy. Brutally frank account of the author's sexual and social dysfunction, though perhaps too much. *
- Falk by Joseph Conrad. Odd novella about romantic-sexual frustration, and cannibalism. Or was it the other way round? *
- The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad by John Stape. Adequate introduction to the writer, but with little consideration of the writing. *
- Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. Second Hunger Games installment repeats the tropes of the first book while advancing the plot arc slightly. *
- Other People's Wars by Nicky Hager. Interminable analysis of New Zealand's support of The War On Terror. Should have been interesting. Isn't. No star
- Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli. Pointless yarn about a kid who runs about a lot, has no family and brings people together. Spinelli has done better. No star
- Bridge to Terabithia by Katharine Paterson. In progress.
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling. In progress.
- Clockers by Richard Price. In progress.
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. In progress.
- The Third Reich by Michael Burleigh. In progress.
- Capital, Vol. 1 by Karl Marx. In (very slow) progress.
Tuesday 10 April 2012
Reading list 2012
Slightly more cutting edge and here-and-now than the 2011 list:
What I read in 2011
For the historical record ...
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence. Remarkable account of the desert war in WW1. Long, doesn't suffer fools, but unique. ****
- The Case of the Missing Books by Ian Samson. Lightweight cutesy mystery, irritatingly whimsical and obviously aimed at starting a franchise. No star
- The Bones of Avalon by Phil Rickman. Elizabethan scientist Dr Dee investigates a murder with mythic and political resonances. Adequate. No star
- Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sprawling, unfocused tale about the gorgeous, flawed, Divers, whose beauty conceals murky secrets. **
- Rommel by Desmond Young. Superb short biography of the field marshal, based on interviews with colleagues and family. ***
- The Hollow Men by Nicky Hager. Interesting study of how the right tried to win power in New Zealand. Of moderate interest to denizens of other lands. **
- Silas Marner by George Eliot. Slight and sentimental yarn about rural types. Not really very distinguished at all. No star
- Out of Sight by Catherine Sampson. Dreary murder mystery that lurches from unlikely to absurd, with an "Eeny, meeny, miney, mo" feel to end. No star
- The Dead Pool by Sue Walker. Very poor murder mystery marred obvious killer, predictable plot twists and some really clunky dialogue. Less Than No Star
- Blood is Dirt by Robert Wilson. African tale of murder and corruption starts brilliantly, but loses its way. Great setting and first chapter. *
- Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper. Part one of famous children's fantasy series. Readable enough, but not great to revisit. No star
- Angel Isle by Peter Dickinson. Massive late work by one of Britain's greats. Magic, adventure and ideas, but it is the characters that sustain it. **
- Rain Dogs and Love Cats by Andrew Holmes. Crime novel that could have been interesting. Well written and observed, marred by whimsy. *
- Out by Natsuo Kirino. Thriller about four women who conceal a murder, and the consequences. Dark and nasty but interesting and involving. **
- 1974 by David Peace. Re-read. Ferocious murder shocker. Doesn't relent on the blood and depravity, but author's purpose isn't clear. *
- The Twentieth Century by Howard Zinn. Class based history. Possibly a bit repetitive in the end. Zinn would argue this is because nothing's changed. *
- Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin. A black actor grows up, confronting racism and his romantic travails. Great pages, dull chapters. No star
- Aneurin Bevan by Michael Foot. Sympathetic, very detailed biography of the perennial Labour outsider. Part one of two. ***
- The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke. Typically well written and interesting account of efforts to build an earth-to-orbit pulley system. *
- City of Screams by John Brindley. Ambitious YA novel that has too much going on. Something about religion, evolution, violence and angels. No star
- Paradise Alley by Kevin Baker. Overblown wannabe epic makes remarkable times - the New York draft riots - tiresome. *
- Final Cut by Paul Thomas. Pacey mystery that loses its way halfway. Killer obvious, plot incoherent. No star
- The Thin Man by Dashiell hammett. Entertaining whodunnit that perhaps has to work a bit too hard to gloss over its doubtful plot. **
- The Man Who Went Up In Smoke by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Adequate policer marred by languid telling and clumsy denounement. We arrive there pages before the admirable Martin beck. *
Maniac Magee, by Jerry Spinelli
A few years ago, I read Loser, by Jerry Spinelli. This was on the recommendation of an interweb friend, who was rapturous in her praise of the book. I concurred. Loser is a beautifully done book. Deft in all the right places, heart felt in the others.
Odd to report that Maniac Magee, which I have just read, also by Mr Spinelli and covering some similar terrain, is much less interesting. Maniac Magee is a young lad who lost his parents in a slightly absurd locomotive accident, rejected his grandparents, and became a homeless waif who drifted (or rather ran) through the streets of his home town, touching many lives and changing things in many ways. Which sounds like a brilliant book. Only my summary is loads better than Spinelli's extended version, even if I do say so myself. because the version that Spinelli gives us is an incoherent stream of stuff happening, and - WHEEEE!! - more stuff happening, and - HEY!! - look out, here's some more stuff happening. There's something about a frog; a knot; lots of luridly sketched characters, one of whom is called Mars Bar; there are some bison - or were they yaks? - or something, anyway; and an old geezer with a lifetime of disappointments weighing him down; a sort of Boo Radley character who terrorises the local children; pizza; and all sorts of stuff.
None of which adds up to very much in the end, and leaves one with a disquieting sensation of not actually having not actually read the book at all, moments after the final page is finished.
Odd to report that Maniac Magee, which I have just read, also by Mr Spinelli and covering some similar terrain, is much less interesting. Maniac Magee is a young lad who lost his parents in a slightly absurd locomotive accident, rejected his grandparents, and became a homeless waif who drifted (or rather ran) through the streets of his home town, touching many lives and changing things in many ways. Which sounds like a brilliant book. Only my summary is loads better than Spinelli's extended version, even if I do say so myself. because the version that Spinelli gives us is an incoherent stream of stuff happening, and - WHEEEE!! - more stuff happening, and - HEY!! - look out, here's some more stuff happening. There's something about a frog; a knot; lots of luridly sketched characters, one of whom is called Mars Bar; there are some bison - or were they yaks? - or something, anyway; and an old geezer with a lifetime of disappointments weighing him down; a sort of Boo Radley character who terrorises the local children; pizza; and all sorts of stuff.
None of which adds up to very much in the end, and leaves one with a disquieting sensation of not actually having not actually read the book at all, moments after the final page is finished.
No star
Friday 10 February 2012
Rain Dogs and Love Cats by Andrew Holmes
You are probably familiar with the phenomenon. You start to read a book, and it is really good. Really, really good. You read perhaps half of it, before exhaustion forces you to stop and rest. The, when you return to the book the next day, it somehow seems to be diminished.
I don't know what might cause this phenomenon, or if it has a fancy, official name. Perhaps it is the result of tiredness, returning to the book when you're still feeling worn out from the exertions of the previous night; perhaps it's because you can have too much of a good thing, and even sugar starts to sicken after a few tablespoonfuls; or perhaps there are writers who specialise in creating riveting first halves of novels, but less skilled at finishing them off. Whatever the cause, Rain Dogs and Love Cats by Andrew Holmes is afflicted. It started well, kept me engrossed until I eventually had to stop and rest; and, when I returned the next day, seemed so much less than it had before.
It's a tale that might have been pirated from Chandler or Hammett. Charlie Watson's brother, Leo, dies in mysterious circumstances. Charlie has a hunch more to it than the police think. Charlie decides to poke about a bit, and discovers his brother had a second life, masquerading as a private detective, and there is, indeed, more to it than the police think. Only, rather than being set in San Fransico in the 20s, it's set in modern, middleclass suburban London, and instead of a shambling PI with a bad liver and a broken heart, our hero is a DJ with a wife and a new baby.
(The Tom Waits reference is deliberate, and relevant, by the way. Read on!)
First the good. Holmes can certainly write. He's got a wry, humour style that is easy to read with out being facile. he's got an eye for observation of people's foibles, the wear and tear of relationships and the intricacies of everyday life, particularly in its intimate, sotto voce miseries and joys. Holmes is probably sick of being compared to Nick Hornby, but - bluntly - he asks for it. Charlie exudes the same geekish, near autistic degree of self-absorption as Rob Fleming in High Fidelity. Charlie doesn't run a record store, but he does work as a DJ and Holmes even uses song lyrics to title the chapters. That's just asking to be tarred with the Hornby-lite brush. Still, Holmes amply demonstrates he can capture the desperation and frustration in every crappy life. And he can draw on the powers of darkness when it suits him, crafting dark and ominous scenes and loading innocuous ink on paper with menace. I don't think any parent could read the opening lines without a shiver of anticipatory horror:
Then, suddenly, Holmes pulls back. Instead of the dark neo-noir nightmare we're promised, we get whimsy. We get, I dread to say, something closer to the cloying cuteness of the Mobile Library mysteries, rather than James Ellroy or David Peace. Holmes seems to recoil from the dark, silky textures he's found and prefers the lighthearted comfort of a pigs ear - in this case, the pig in question being Empress Of Blandings, the redoubtable sow described by PG Wodehouse. Instead of cynicism, bitterness and despair, we get ... silliness. Unnecessary, pointless silliness.
Take the dog. Look, the whole book hinges around Leo's efforts to find a dog. Now, that isn't a codeword for a stash of drugs or a dead body or a missing heiress. It's a dog. And the dog is called Charles Laughton. And - even worse - that isn't even a throwaway gag, it turns out to be fairly important in yoking together the two plot strands that constitute the mystery elements of the story, one of which is quite interesting, and the other, well, is about a dog.
Or there's the pointless absurdity in making the dead brother a *cough* professional Tom Waits impersonator. Now, the reason I picked this book off the shelf was because of the title. I figured any book referencing Rain Dogs in the title, and which features a brother who impersonates the great man, must have been written by a Tom Waits fanatic and would be imbued with the essence of Waits: darkness, hopeless (probably whisky fuelled) romance, bitter regret and the despair of chucking out time. Alas, no. It's entirely frivolous. Leo might as well have been a George Michael impersonator. Or an accountant. The Waits references are simply a schtick, a gizmo, a lure to people like me who are drawn to anything Waitsian.
The book is loaded with such stuff, and it wears thin pretty quick, especially because there are times - when Holmes plays it straight - that you can forgive the silliness, or convince yourself that he knows what he's doing and he'll make it all make sense in the end. So when it doesn't, and you realise that all the frivolous nonsense that glutterred up the story was just frivolous nonsense that glutterred up the story, you feel extra betrayed.
It's almost like Holmes had set out to write a dark urban thriller, albeit one set in the middleclass suburbs. He must have thought it would be interesting to add all these rococo elements, so he could show off his mastery as he wove magic with his unlikely ingredients. Then he chickened out, and was left with a poor farce around a double, or even triple, tragedy. Because people die in this book. Several of them. A young girl is coerced into performing in porn. Years of madness and despair are laid bare for us. There's nastiness in here, but none of it seems to mean anything at all, beyond an opportunity for Holmes to crack a few grating, smug jokes.
Rain Dogs and Love Cats could have been very good. Instead, it was just very disappointing. And its flaws were not flaws of over-arching ambition, pushing too far in the manner of David Peace; they were the flaws of cowardice, of safety seeking and the cheap laugh.
I don't know what might cause this phenomenon, or if it has a fancy, official name. Perhaps it is the result of tiredness, returning to the book when you're still feeling worn out from the exertions of the previous night; perhaps it's because you can have too much of a good thing, and even sugar starts to sicken after a few tablespoonfuls; or perhaps there are writers who specialise in creating riveting first halves of novels, but less skilled at finishing them off. Whatever the cause, Rain Dogs and Love Cats by Andrew Holmes is afflicted. It started well, kept me engrossed until I eventually had to stop and rest; and, when I returned the next day, seemed so much less than it had before.
It's a tale that might have been pirated from Chandler or Hammett. Charlie Watson's brother, Leo, dies in mysterious circumstances. Charlie has a hunch more to it than the police think. Charlie decides to poke about a bit, and discovers his brother had a second life, masquerading as a private detective, and there is, indeed, more to it than the police think. Only, rather than being set in San Fransico in the 20s, it's set in modern, middleclass suburban London, and instead of a shambling PI with a bad liver and a broken heart, our hero is a DJ with a wife and a new baby.
(The Tom Waits reference is deliberate, and relevant, by the way. Read on!)
First the good. Holmes can certainly write. He's got a wry, humour style that is easy to read with out being facile. he's got an eye for observation of people's foibles, the wear and tear of relationships and the intricacies of everyday life, particularly in its intimate, sotto voce miseries and joys. Holmes is probably sick of being compared to Nick Hornby, but - bluntly - he asks for it. Charlie exudes the same geekish, near autistic degree of self-absorption as Rob Fleming in High Fidelity. Charlie doesn't run a record store, but he does work as a DJ and Holmes even uses song lyrics to title the chapters. That's just asking to be tarred with the Hornby-lite brush. Still, Holmes amply demonstrates he can capture the desperation and frustration in every crappy life. And he can draw on the powers of darkness when it suits him, crafting dark and ominous scenes and loading innocuous ink on paper with menace. I don't think any parent could read the opening lines without a shiver of anticipatory horror:
She shouldn't have put the little one in the paddling pool. Not when she was so tired from night after night of 3 a.m. feeds and splintered sleep. Worse than that, she had been drinking.Not long after, he sketches a scene where some scarily feasible young thugs run amok, egging each other on to trash a graveyard. It's the stuff of modern middle class nightmares, and well done. It seems, for a little while, that we're going headfirst down a very dark, nasty tunnel.
Then, suddenly, Holmes pulls back. Instead of the dark neo-noir nightmare we're promised, we get whimsy. We get, I dread to say, something closer to the cloying cuteness of the Mobile Library mysteries, rather than James Ellroy or David Peace. Holmes seems to recoil from the dark, silky textures he's found and prefers the lighthearted comfort of a pigs ear - in this case, the pig in question being Empress Of Blandings, the redoubtable sow described by PG Wodehouse. Instead of cynicism, bitterness and despair, we get ... silliness. Unnecessary, pointless silliness.
Take the dog. Look, the whole book hinges around Leo's efforts to find a dog. Now, that isn't a codeword for a stash of drugs or a dead body or a missing heiress. It's a dog. And the dog is called Charles Laughton. And - even worse - that isn't even a throwaway gag, it turns out to be fairly important in yoking together the two plot strands that constitute the mystery elements of the story, one of which is quite interesting, and the other, well, is about a dog.
Or there's the pointless absurdity in making the dead brother a *cough* professional Tom Waits impersonator. Now, the reason I picked this book off the shelf was because of the title. I figured any book referencing Rain Dogs in the title, and which features a brother who impersonates the great man, must have been written by a Tom Waits fanatic and would be imbued with the essence of Waits: darkness, hopeless (probably whisky fuelled) romance, bitter regret and the despair of chucking out time. Alas, no. It's entirely frivolous. Leo might as well have been a George Michael impersonator. Or an accountant. The Waits references are simply a schtick, a gizmo, a lure to people like me who are drawn to anything Waitsian.
The book is loaded with such stuff, and it wears thin pretty quick, especially because there are times - when Holmes plays it straight - that you can forgive the silliness, or convince yourself that he knows what he's doing and he'll make it all make sense in the end. So when it doesn't, and you realise that all the frivolous nonsense that glutterred up the story was just frivolous nonsense that glutterred up the story, you feel extra betrayed.
It's almost like Holmes had set out to write a dark urban thriller, albeit one set in the middleclass suburbs. He must have thought it would be interesting to add all these rococo elements, so he could show off his mastery as he wove magic with his unlikely ingredients. Then he chickened out, and was left with a poor farce around a double, or even triple, tragedy. Because people die in this book. Several of them. A young girl is coerced into performing in porn. Years of madness and despair are laid bare for us. There's nastiness in here, but none of it seems to mean anything at all, beyond an opportunity for Holmes to crack a few grating, smug jokes.
Rain Dogs and Love Cats could have been very good. Instead, it was just very disappointing. And its flaws were not flaws of over-arching ambition, pushing too far in the manner of David Peace; they were the flaws of cowardice, of safety seeking and the cheap laugh.
No star
Wednesday 8 February 2012
White Riot by Martyn Waites
There are some good things you can say about Martyn Waites's White Riot. First of all, he's taken the title from a song by The Clash, and it's an established literary fact that any book that does so must - at least - have a good title. In fact, as he took the title of another novel from a Nick Cave song (The Mercy Seat), and another from The Pixies (Bone Machine) we can probably go as far as to say that Waites has excellent taste in music generally.
Second, he's got the cojones to take on a searing topical, controversial issue: racial and religious tensions in Britain, suicide bombers and the rise of extremism all feature in White Riot. Even better, he does it from an broadly progressive point of view, rather than opting for mere sensationalism, or pandering to prejudices. And - unlike a lot of progressives - he likes an bit of gore. No simpering middle class handwringing from the sidelines. Within the first few pages, some poor chap has had his luckless head kicked right in, and that's just the start.
But that's about it.
And, unfortunately, each of those virtues is also a weakness; and there's a more fundamental (pun intentional) problem as well. While I think an evening spent drinking with Waites, listening to his record collection and Setting The World To Rights (there's a few hint's he's a whisky man as well, another plus), would be a very pleasant use of time, a couple of days spent reading his book isn't. Unfortunately, he's just not that good a writer.
So, anyway, we're in the North of England. A young Pakistani man is found brutally murdered. Another dies in a botched attempt at a suicide bombing. Skinheads prowl the streets, looking for victims. The neo-fascist National Unity Party and equally dangerous Islamic counterparts square off. meanwhile, former 70s radical Trevor Whitman is receiving nasty phone calls from someone who seems to know a lot about his past. Too much.
Plot specific stuff aside, this is a novel in a serial - the title page bruits it as "A Joe Donovan thriller", a claim that leaves me somewhat cold. Joe who? Sorry, you'll have to try harder. Someone or other - I think it may have been Truffaut - suggested great titles sound familiar even the first time we hear them (which doesn't explain the very blah Jules et Jim). think The Blair Witch Project. Or White Riot. Or The Mercy Seat. The original songs, I mean, not the patchy thrillers dressed up in their finery. There's a frission of recognition even if you've never heard of them before. But "Joe Donovan" doesn't do it for me. Didn't he have some hits in the 70s? Does this explain the music obsession?
Now, I am not a fan of the modern tendency to franchises. I appreciate they have to happen - readers and writers both like to have familiar names and faces, and watch the narrative of the investigator develop over many books. We are now in the MacDonalds and Starbucks era of crime writing, however, and franchises are deliberately constructed from the start, rather than allowed to develop with at least the appearance of organic growth. Let it be remembered that old Phil Marlowe only ever appeared in a handful of novels. Sherlock Holmes cross dressed his way through a few more, and a gazillion short stories, but he didn't drag his personal problems into every one of them. Apart from his crush on Irene Adler, he didn't seem to have any issues to confront. But nowadays the characters and the issues precede the story. Perhaps, the issues preced the characters.
Anyway, this is a serial novel, and it does not wear it lightly. A good deal of time is spent refering back to the previous novel, The Mercy Seat. Joe Donovan has a son, who was abducted, and when we first meet him, he's a mess, a grief racked, obssessed mess, trying to trace his missing child. Fair enough. His fixation has lead him to disband his 'Information agency', Albion, alientating his colleagues, Peta, who bear their own scars from previous novels - Amar, literally, bears scars and is almost crippled at the start of the novel - though he seems to recover quite dramatically as the story progresses, his injuries fading into the background.
This is another thing that irks. The Albion team smack of the CSI / NCIS / House ensembles. What happened to the lone knight errant stalking the mean streets? True, the knight might have been allowed a squire for company, but now-a-days he seems to be accompanied by a whole gaggle of annoyingly 'vivid' characters, whether he stalks the mean streets of some American city, a hospital or Newcastle. Which is a problem in the limited scope of a novel, when the multiferous characters also have such riven backstories and so many personal challenges to confront, beyond the ones placed in their way by the villans of the piece - who barely get a look in for chapters at a time, so busy are Donovan and his entourage slaying their own dragons.
The entourage further complicate matters by being, well, teeth grindingly awful. They seem to have been designed as a (hem) Representative Patchwork Of Modern Britain. So, apart from Joe himelf, whose gruff exterior hides a decent and progressive soul (but who is tormented by the loss of his son and family), there's Peta, who is a tough chick in a man's world (Who is battling alcoholism and has some major family issues to confront); Amar a smart Asian techie (but who is recovering from serious injury and assessing his life. And he's gay, of course.); and Jamal, who is young, funky and black (But has a troubled past of his own). So we've got a white bloke, a white chick, an Asian man and a black kid. It's painfully obvious Waites is striving to cover all his PC, Cool Britainnia bases. But at the same time, to make these characters more than just tokenistic by ladling Troubles over them. Which simply doesn't work. And far, far, far too much of the novel (and this review) is spent watching these characters deal with thier Troubles. it's tiresome, and - ironically - this attempt to make the characters deep simply makes everything shallow. There are too many characters, they are too confronted, we don't really feel much for them. And there's a plot as well? Oh, do I have to invest in that, as well?
The plot? Well, beyond the summary above, it's pretty meat and two veg stuff. Dark Powers are stoking racial tensions to their own ends. The story relies on two massive coincidences (at least) to work. One, a crucial character has to have a chance encounter with a member of the Albion team. In the other a crucial character has to have a chance encounter with a member of the Albion team. You see how this works? Now, that sort of thing might be okay in the opening chapters, to get stuff moving - but the second encounter takes places in the heart of the novel. Worse, What Is Going On is pretty obvious from about the midway point. The only amusement after that is afforded by trying to second guess yourself as the plot trundles forwards, and the bad news is that there isn't actually any stunning surprise revealed in the final chapters - it really is as obvious as all that.
Which might have been quite clever in its own way, but it isn't. There was one possible twist Waites could have included. It seemed obvious to me, after I'd spotted what seemed to be the far-too-obvious possibility that turned out to be what-was-actually-going-on-all-along. But Waites eschews this possibly more interesteding twist - and, even worse, he blandly, directly mentions it, so the luckless reader isn't even left with that shred of possibility to cling to.
All these problems wouldn't matter quite so much if only Waites was a better writer. Hell, Raymond Chandler deployed some shonky plots in his novels - one of them even turned on that most nonsensical of mystery cliches, The Unrecognised Twin. But he could write, so we didn't mind. Oh, and we only had Marlowe to worry about, not a gaggle of characters all competing for our attention and emotional commitment. There's a blah, couldn't-really-be-bothered quality to the prose. The point I first thought Things Might Not Be Going Well was on page 9 - PAGE NINE - when the luckless Sooliman Patel is beaten to death. As the blows rain down, "He thought of his mother, his family. Tried to imagine their lives with out him. Their grief." No you fucking didn't, sport. When you're getting beaten to death with baseball bats studded with nails and razors, you don't lie there thinking beautiful thoughtd. You writhe on the floor, weeping and shitting yourself, gibbering and begging for the pain to stop. Then a couple of pages later, Sooliman's remains are discovered:
The whole book feels like it needed to be scoured by a vindictive editor. Apart from dubious descriptions like the above, there's some truly astonishingly bad figurative language. At one point we're told a tousled Trevor Whitman looks like "Wayne Coyne after a particularly intense Flaming Lips gig." Oh, really? I've never been to a Flaming Lips gig, intense or otherwise. I've no idea what Wayne Coyne looks like. If you're going to make pop culture references, at least make them broad enough for people to reconise (Another time, less absurdly but more blandly, he's a "Walking Gap Ad"). Nonsense like this clutters every page; it is almost like Waites decided to pad his word count by adding idiotic similes into every third paragraph.
And sometimes, the writing is simply incompetent:
So, as I said, I think an evening spent drinking with Waites, listening to his record collection and Setting The World To Rights (there's a few hint's he's a whisky man as well, another plus), would be a very pleasant use of time.
Do you think he'll be asking me round?
Second, he's got the cojones to take on a searing topical, controversial issue: racial and religious tensions in Britain, suicide bombers and the rise of extremism all feature in White Riot. Even better, he does it from an broadly progressive point of view, rather than opting for mere sensationalism, or pandering to prejudices. And - unlike a lot of progressives - he likes an bit of gore. No simpering middle class handwringing from the sidelines. Within the first few pages, some poor chap has had his luckless head kicked right in, and that's just the start.
But that's about it.
And, unfortunately, each of those virtues is also a weakness; and there's a more fundamental (pun intentional) problem as well. While I think an evening spent drinking with Waites, listening to his record collection and Setting The World To Rights (there's a few hint's he's a whisky man as well, another plus), would be a very pleasant use of time, a couple of days spent reading his book isn't. Unfortunately, he's just not that good a writer.
So, anyway, we're in the North of England. A young Pakistani man is found brutally murdered. Another dies in a botched attempt at a suicide bombing. Skinheads prowl the streets, looking for victims. The neo-fascist National Unity Party and equally dangerous Islamic counterparts square off. meanwhile, former 70s radical Trevor Whitman is receiving nasty phone calls from someone who seems to know a lot about his past. Too much.
Plot specific stuff aside, this is a novel in a serial - the title page bruits it as "A Joe Donovan thriller", a claim that leaves me somewhat cold. Joe who? Sorry, you'll have to try harder. Someone or other - I think it may have been Truffaut - suggested great titles sound familiar even the first time we hear them (which doesn't explain the very blah Jules et Jim). think The Blair Witch Project. Or White Riot. Or The Mercy Seat. The original songs, I mean, not the patchy thrillers dressed up in their finery. There's a frission of recognition even if you've never heard of them before. But "Joe Donovan" doesn't do it for me. Didn't he have some hits in the 70s? Does this explain the music obsession?
Now, I am not a fan of the modern tendency to franchises. I appreciate they have to happen - readers and writers both like to have familiar names and faces, and watch the narrative of the investigator develop over many books. We are now in the MacDonalds and Starbucks era of crime writing, however, and franchises are deliberately constructed from the start, rather than allowed to develop with at least the appearance of organic growth. Let it be remembered that old Phil Marlowe only ever appeared in a handful of novels. Sherlock Holmes cross dressed his way through a few more, and a gazillion short stories, but he didn't drag his personal problems into every one of them. Apart from his crush on Irene Adler, he didn't seem to have any issues to confront. But nowadays the characters and the issues precede the story. Perhaps, the issues preced the characters.
Anyway, this is a serial novel, and it does not wear it lightly. A good deal of time is spent refering back to the previous novel, The Mercy Seat. Joe Donovan has a son, who was abducted, and when we first meet him, he's a mess, a grief racked, obssessed mess, trying to trace his missing child. Fair enough. His fixation has lead him to disband his 'Information agency', Albion, alientating his colleagues, Peta, who bear their own scars from previous novels - Amar, literally, bears scars and is almost crippled at the start of the novel - though he seems to recover quite dramatically as the story progresses, his injuries fading into the background.
This is another thing that irks. The Albion team smack of the CSI / NCIS / House ensembles. What happened to the lone knight errant stalking the mean streets? True, the knight might have been allowed a squire for company, but now-a-days he seems to be accompanied by a whole gaggle of annoyingly 'vivid' characters, whether he stalks the mean streets of some American city, a hospital or Newcastle. Which is a problem in the limited scope of a novel, when the multiferous characters also have such riven backstories and so many personal challenges to confront, beyond the ones placed in their way by the villans of the piece - who barely get a look in for chapters at a time, so busy are Donovan and his entourage slaying their own dragons.
The entourage further complicate matters by being, well, teeth grindingly awful. They seem to have been designed as a (hem) Representative Patchwork Of Modern Britain. So, apart from Joe himelf, whose gruff exterior hides a decent and progressive soul (but who is tormented by the loss of his son and family), there's Peta, who is a tough chick in a man's world (Who is battling alcoholism and has some major family issues to confront); Amar a smart Asian techie (but who is recovering from serious injury and assessing his life. And he's gay, of course.); and Jamal, who is young, funky and black (But has a troubled past of his own). So we've got a white bloke, a white chick, an Asian man and a black kid. It's painfully obvious Waites is striving to cover all his PC, Cool Britainnia bases. But at the same time, to make these characters more than just tokenistic by ladling Troubles over them. Which simply doesn't work. And far, far, far too much of the novel (and this review) is spent watching these characters deal with thier Troubles. it's tiresome, and - ironically - this attempt to make the characters deep simply makes everything shallow. There are too many characters, they are too confronted, we don't really feel much for them. And there's a plot as well? Oh, do I have to invest in that, as well?
The plot? Well, beyond the summary above, it's pretty meat and two veg stuff. Dark Powers are stoking racial tensions to their own ends. The story relies on two massive coincidences (at least) to work. One, a crucial character has to have a chance encounter with a member of the Albion team. In the other a crucial character has to have a chance encounter with a member of the Albion team. You see how this works? Now, that sort of thing might be okay in the opening chapters, to get stuff moving - but the second encounter takes places in the heart of the novel. Worse, What Is Going On is pretty obvious from about the midway point. The only amusement after that is afforded by trying to second guess yourself as the plot trundles forwards, and the bad news is that there isn't actually any stunning surprise revealed in the final chapters - it really is as obvious as all that.
Which might have been quite clever in its own way, but it isn't. There was one possible twist Waites could have included. It seemed obvious to me, after I'd spotted what seemed to be the far-too-obvious possibility that turned out to be what-was-actually-going-on-all-along. But Waites eschews this possibly more interesteding twist - and, even worse, he blandly, directly mentions it, so the luckless reader isn't even left with that shred of possibility to cling to.
All these problems wouldn't matter quite so much if only Waites was a better writer. Hell, Raymond Chandler deployed some shonky plots in his novels - one of them even turned on that most nonsensical of mystery cliches, The Unrecognised Twin. But he could write, so we didn't mind. Oh, and we only had Marlowe to worry about, not a gaggle of characters all competing for our attention and emotional commitment. There's a blah, couldn't-really-be-bothered quality to the prose. The point I first thought Things Might Not Be Going Well was on page 9 - PAGE NINE - when the luckless Sooliman Patel is beaten to death. As the blows rain down, "He thought of his mother, his family. Tried to imagine their lives with out him. Their grief." No you fucking didn't, sport. When you're getting beaten to death with baseball bats studded with nails and razors, you don't lie there thinking beautiful thoughtd. You writhe on the floor, weeping and shitting yourself, gibbering and begging for the pain to stop. Then a couple of pages later, Sooliman's remains are discovered:
Marion screamed. And kept on screaming.Over done, much? Hammer Horror called. They want their tripe back.
She was still screaming when the ambulance arrived twenty minutes later.
The whole book feels like it needed to be scoured by a vindictive editor. Apart from dubious descriptions like the above, there's some truly astonishingly bad figurative language. At one point we're told a tousled Trevor Whitman looks like "Wayne Coyne after a particularly intense Flaming Lips gig." Oh, really? I've never been to a Flaming Lips gig, intense or otherwise. I've no idea what Wayne Coyne looks like. If you're going to make pop culture references, at least make them broad enough for people to reconise (Another time, less absurdly but more blandly, he's a "Walking Gap Ad"). Nonsense like this clutters every page; it is almost like Waites decided to pad his word count by adding idiotic similes into every third paragraph.
And sometimes, the writing is simply incompetent:
Fenton, suitably chatised, shrank backwards. Natrass said nothing until he was out of earshot.Wait a minute. How can he shrink back out of earshot, yet remain in the same room? Donovan and Natrass are not whispering surreptitiously to each other. They're talking Fenton is going to be able to hear, unless he leaves the room. Which needs to be stated.
So, as I said, I think an evening spent drinking with Waites, listening to his record collection and Setting The World To Rights (there's a few hint's he's a whisky man as well, another plus), would be a very pleasant use of time.
Do you think he'll be asking me round?
The Devil's Footprints by John Burnside
This book was a great disappointment. Some books can be tedious, banal and incoherent without being disappointing. If you expect a book to be those things - if, say it is written by Wilbur Smith - then you won't be disappointed. You'll get all that in spades.
But I expected a lot of The Devil's Footprints. I was vastly looking forward to it. Everything boded well. A menacing title, a nice cover (black and white, embossed, with the author's name and title in blue - very stylish), an intruiging setting, and an intruiging blurb which suggested a lot about the malignant lingering nature of evil and how the land itself can be imbued with wickedness. And all I get is an interminable account of a middleaged plonker ruminating about stuff. Very, very dull reading and thoroughly inconsequential.
There is a plot, of sorts, or at least a haphazard collection of half plots, but which don't really seem to come together into anything much. An an old folk memory is recalled, about the night the Devil walked through Cold haven; a family tragedy is described; the narrator, an ostentatiously self absorbed nonentity, describes his links to the family hit by tragedy; his relationship from some years before with the suicidal mother who immolates herself and two of her children because she has become convinced her husband is the devil; his earlier, less pleasant role as target of her brother's bullying; and his suspicion that he might be the father of the surviving child of the conflagration. All of which sounds like it might amount to something; none of which does.
There is a plot, of sorts, or at least a haphazard collection of half plots, but which don't really seem to come together into anything much. An an old folk memory is recalled, about the night the Devil walked through Cold haven; a family tragedy is described; the narrator, an ostentatiously self absorbed nonentity, describes his links to the family hit by tragedy; his relationship from some years before with the suicidal mother who immolates herself and two of her children because she has become convinced her husband is the devil; his earlier, less pleasant role as target of her brother's bullying; and his suspicion that he might be the father of the surviving child of the conflagration. All of which sounds like it might amount to something; none of which does.
No star
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