Poem #4 A Thunderstorm In Town by Thomas Hardy

This months poem comes from Thomas Hardy a writer I DETESTED when studying his collected poems at A Level and then fell in love with through his novels 'Far From The Madding Crowd' and 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles'.

Although I didn't enjoy his poetry as a whole, I did like this one :

A Thunderstorm In Town

She wore a 'terra-cotta' dress,
And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,
Within the hansom's dry recess,
Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless
We sat on, snug and warm.

Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,
And the glass that had screened our forms before
Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:
I should have kissed her if the rain
Had lasted a minute more. 

It reminds me of those moments in life we have when we almost chance

something, and fate conspires against us.

Book #47 Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

Moon Over Soho

Another day, another vampire novel. I'm honestly not seeking them out, they're everywhere these days, a little hard to avoid, and in this case, the book is the recently published sequel to the recently reviewed Rivers Of London.

This book picks up where the last left off with bumbling PC and apprentice wizard Peter Grant investigating an unfortunate series of crimes involving 'vagina dentata' in one plot and the unexpected deaths of jazz musicians in the other. Again, I enjoyed its easily engaging style, a little tongue-in-cheek with a likeable, self-deprecating lead.

Unfortunately, I had a problem. I solved the mystery VERY early on in terms of one of the plots. I don't know whether this is a consequence of being somebody who reads a lot, writes and watches a lot of films, making me somebody who understands a lot about how stories work, and patterns writers use or whether it was just genuinely obvious, and would be to anyone, particularly anyone who'd read the first book. Books still do surprise me, particularly recently George R.R Martin's A Storm Of Swords, so perhaps a book that can't or doesn't surprise you is an example of lazy or poor writing.

These books aren't serious crime novels, more romps and light-hearted escapism. Maybe they oughtn't be more challenging in their mysteries, because they aren't that sort of book, the reader is pretty much along for the ride, but it was quite disappointing. Inept as Peter Grant may be, even he should have realised far sooner than he did. The originality shown in Rivers Of London is still present but the concept of the story is let down by the execution. It seems a little ridiculous to accuse a fantasy novel of lacking realism, but a fantasy story should at least be believable within its own framework.

Another thing with both Rivers Of London and Moon Over Soho is that they feel very current, there are references to iPads and Twitter, but this is a dangerous thing to do if you seek to write a book that proves timeless. Popular culture references date books badly, in twenty years will young readers know what these are? I doubt that an 18 year old today reading a older book that might reference such technological wonders as the ZX Spectrum or the Acorn Electron would have the foggiest clue what they were like. (Showing my age!)

One of the books strengths though is the feeling that you get that Aaronovitch, beneath the vampires, the magicians and the strange women with teeth in their vagina loves London and is in part writing a love letter to the city, there's something very endearing about that.

The problem with this book essentially is: although it had vampires, AND a woman with teeth in her vagina, it lacked any real bite whatsoever. The thing is I like Nightingale and Grant, I like the world Aaronovitch has created, and would consider it a foregone conclusion that I will read the third in the series 'Whispers Under Ground', to be published sometime next year. I like the world he's created enough to overlook the flaws. It reminds me slightly of when I was disappointed in Harry Potter and The Chamber Of Secrets but went on to read all the other books in the series anyway, because Rowling "had me" with the first book. Later books proved much better and I'm hoping this will be the case with this series too.

Just please Mr Aaronovitch, give me a genuine mystery I can (pardon the pun) get my teeth into, next time! 6/10

Book #46 In A Strange Room by Damon Galgut

In A Strange Room

In A Strange Room was a runner up alongside C, Room, The Long Song, and Parrot and Olivier in America, for the 2010 Man Booker Prize eventually won by Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question which I reviewed earlier in the challenge.

Although it is a novel it feels strangely unlike one. The protagonist is a South African writer, also named Damon, although this is a work of fiction, the character and the writer share their story. It bears more comparison to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried however than to Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, which is a blessing. Like those two books, this novel also feels more like connected short stories than a traditional novel. Again, as with those books I started it with no idea what it was about. Metafiction, and I believe this counts, seems to be following me.

The story or rather stories, are travel stories, tapping into the new culture of going travelling, taking a gap year or going off to India to find oneself, which has so very nearly become a cliche. In these stories, Galgut exams the experience of the solo traveller, who by necessity almost, becomes involved in the lives of other travellers met along the road, and the potential artificiality or depth of those short-lived intimacies.

Each story has a different title, 'The Follower', 'The Lover' and 'The Guardian' and it seems to me that Galgut examines the different selves you become around different people, either by the role you play in their life or the self you make yourself be to fit in with them. It also makes the clear point that the relationships you create via travelling become unsustainable in the real world, or will break down under the pressures of existing in a foreign land. The moral of the tale is almost travel and friendship don't mix, and also that the friendships you leave behind are damaged by the alterations that take place within you during experiences they haven't shared. There is really something rather bleak about the story, but it is still a good story.

Damon meets Reiner in Greece, unable to define the parameters of their relationship, the two succumb to a damaging power struggle. He meets three Swiss friends in Zimbabwe and travels through Africa with them and is again damaged by his inability to express his feelings and seize the moment. In the final story, Damon takes old friend Anna to India seeking to improve her mental state, when things take a dramatic turn. The stories are by no means underwritten, but they are sparsely told, allowing for a lot of reading between the lines. Damon seems to constantly travel, unable to settle, looking for something, but wherever he goes, there he is, as the saying goes, his location changes but he doesn't, continuing to make attachments that can't or won't last. The stories are much more about his psyche than any of the destinations he visits.

The odd thing about the style was that the narrative voice mostly spoke in the third person but occasionally switched to the first, giving the impression that he is viewing his own actions remotely from afar. This has a very haunting quality, as though Galgut both has and hasn't the power to control events, a passing traveller within his own story, just as he is through all these countries. Rather, it should have been 'odd' but I quite liked it.

I'm not sure it's Booker winner worthy, but I did prefer it to both Room, for which I had misgivings and The Finkler Question whose comic status I question. I can imagine myself recommending this to people as interesting short stories that examine the complexities and frailties of human relationships; or to someone who has perhaps returned from lengthy overseas travel and feels rather disillusioned.

It is short, and I had it read in under 2 hours, but I liked the feel of it and admired the writing 7/10

*I would very much appreciate it if somebody could tell me why this post is so popular it has been viewed almost 700 times as of the end of September 2011*

Book #45 The Passage by Justin Cronin

The Passage

The Passage, is really very much a game of two halves. It attracted me as a book in Waterstones due to the blurb on the back of it, which reads thus:

Amy Harper Bellafonte is six years old and her mother thinks she's the most important person in the whole world. She is.

Anthony Carter doesn't think he could ever be in a worse place than Death Row. He's wrong.

FBI agent Brad Wolgast thinks something beyond imagination is coming. It is.

Intriguing no?

Set in the not-too-distant future, (Jenna Bush is namechecked as Governor of Texas) the US Government organises a biological experiment to create "super-soldiers" and inadvertently cause an Apocalypse, in which Zombie/Vampire hybrid types take over converting humans into one of their own - once the bite has taken hold. Though technically they are Vampires, the human conversion via virus scenario is typical of Zombie stories.

What is slightly odd about this book is that we get a pre-Apocalypse storyline involving Carter, Wolgast and Bellafonte, and then an 80 year time-lapse after which we begin a post-Apocalypse new storyline with some of the last human survivors, with very little in between and a sudden loss of the story of the characters for whom we bought the book because we were intrigued by them.

This, should, technically spoil the book somewhat, and make its next two-thirds a bit annoying, but somehow the new storyline flows on, and you don't mind so much, the loose ends tidying themselves up as you go. It is a shame that there isn't much detail about the actual event in between these two stories though, although perhaps the writer felt that this sort of writing has been overdone.

I found it rather reminiscent of the recent AMC series 'The Walking Dead', the Woody Harrelson/Jesse Eisenberg vehicle 'Zombieland', and the Simon Pegg/Nick Frost vehicle 'Shaun Of the Dead',  zombie apocalypse stories apparently becoming the theme du jour. I was also reminded of the BBC series 'Survivors' which was first shown in the late Seventies and then revamped in 2009/2010 which featured a deadly virus wiping out the human population. There is something extremely ominous about this sort of story, as it encourages you to reflect on the possibility that in the case of such an event, you could become the only person you know left alive. What would you do? This is scary. One of my best friends and I have discussed more than once, what we would do in the event of a Zombie Apocalypse. (Yes, we're weird.)  Basically, you need guns, a car, petrol and access to a supermarket, although these are non-renewable resources which will eventually bottom out. Anyway, where was I?

Even though both Zombie and Vampire stories are overly present lately, this book, although at times  derivative of other media has a quality that means it remains somehow engaging. 
The Passage in terms of the tone of its prose has a clearly Americanised feel, I often find it odd that you can tell an American book by the prose, there's something in the style. It reads similarly to a American crime novel or a thriller and I often find that "tone" a bit of a turn off. Where 'The Passage' as a story, rises above its writing is in the fact that it is seriously creepy, tense and compelling. I kept "finishing for the night" and then going back "for another twenty pages", even though this is not the sort of thing I usually read.

Where the book lets itself down a little is when our survivors come into contact with other survivors and somehow I have found this to be a recurrent flaw of this type of story be it presented as book, film or TV show form. The Passage itself is an interesting title able to mean multiple things, the passage as a journey, the passage of time, and the passage from humanity to otherness.

Although I didn't "get" the decisions behind some of the plot choices near the end of the book, and felt that Cronin lacked the bravery to kill off big characters, I hear this book is a first-parter in a trilogy, in fact, the ending makes a sequel a given, and I will definitely read the follow up.

An unnerving novel. 8/10

Book #44 Night Waking by Sarah Moss

Night Waking 

Night Waking ended up on my Kindle after it was recently listed in The Guardian's "Fiction Uncovered" selection for "overlooked writers deserving greater recognition".

A couple, Anna and Giles spend time in the remote Hebridean ancestral home of Giles' family, doing up a cottage to rent for tourists, whilst Giles watches puffins for his academic research and Anna, an Oxford Fellow, attempts to write a book on the treatment of children in the 18th Century. This may sound blissful but the couple have also brought with them their demanding young children Raph and Moth. When planting trees in the garden with their boys, the couple discover the skeleton of an infant.

The story which focuses on Anna, is a reflection of the problems of modern motherhood as Anna struggles to manage childcare, housework, her book and a good nights sleep. I believe many female readers will identify with the despair of being woken at 3 am for yet another recitation of The Gruffalo. Whilst Moss shows well how the glossy picture of motherhood and its difficult realities do not match up, mothers experiencing a day to day list of menial, repetitive, tasks; the repetition of these tasks occasionally becomes a little Gruffalo-like for the reader. Giles, the husband, is shown in a nearly entirely negative way, of the careless, clueless aristocratic male who is useless unless bribed with sex to look after his own children. Whilst Anna is clearly a woman on the edge, he is lacking in depth of characterisation. His slight repression, disdain of processed food and lack of household contribution, seeming to be the sum total of his personality.   

The second strand of the story which tries to use the past to paint the picture of how the infant came to be in the garden, is interesting, but underdeveloped although it used to good effect in the story's conclusion when the last of its secrets are revealed.

I think too that this is a strikingly middle class book, with strikingly middle class, first world problems. Whether the author seeks to do this in a critical way or whether this is an accidental reflection of her own lifestyle, and she sees no irony, I am unsure. But her characters gripes like lack of internet and mobile coverage, are hard to sympathise with when they are so much more fortunate than most. I think it may appeal to the harassed professional working mother, but perhaps not, if they seek to read for escapism rather than a grim echo of their own toils.

Personally, I felt that the secondary characters, the Fairchild family, whose function really is to serve as interaction for Anna were far more interesting, their problems being more, well, like problems.  The difference being that while Anna worries that her kids aren't eating her homemade bread, Judith Fairchild is worrying that her kid, hopelessly depressed at the state of the world, isn't eating at all whilst Judith, increasingly purposeless, is descending into alcoholism.

I do think that Night Waking has its place, and isn't badly written, though it certainly didn't fly along for me. This is the second book in the challenge to use a Hebridean island as location, and I wondered whether 'Hebridean' may just be becoming an easy byword for remote, windswept, mysterious; so that writers don't really have to work on a sense of place and atmosphere. Neither though, would I say it was a terrible book or a terrible idea. It's alright, but not special. 6/10

Book #43 The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi

The Patience Stone

Atiq Rahimi was awarded the Prix Goncourt, the French equivalent of The Booker in 2008 for his Afghanistan based novella The Patience Stone. The novella joins the ranks of The Bookseller Of Kabul and The Kite Runner of literature telling the stories of a country and its people often shrouded from the West hitherto the outbreak of war in 2001.

This story is the story of a couple who I have only just realised remain nameless throughout the novel as do all other characters...I think perhaps this anonymity seeks to reflect the idea of "Somewhere, A Couple" the depersonalisation seeking to amplify the potential of the universality of experience.

A young mother nurses her husband as he hovers between life and death on a mattress in one of the rooms of their house. The Afghan war rages around their neighbourhood. As the frustration and despair at her situation begins to build, the woman makes a series of personal revelations to her dying husband.

What did I think of it? Well, the point is clear. Rahimi takes the "nameless, voiceless, veiled, Afghani woman" and voices her giving her a chance to vent her frustrations at her unhappiness at her station in life. But, whilst it is true that such women exist within the culture, these women have also become something of a Western, particularly American, media cliche. Whilst it is of the imperative that such voices be heard, this, we must remember is a fictionalised voice.

The book gave me pause for thought too in the sense that it is French, with an English translation by Polly McLean whose translation I think may have harmed some of the books poetic qualities, it is never easy to be certain about translations unless you are capable of reading the book in its native tongue in order to make comparison. The reason it gave me pause for thought by being French is, that the understanding I receive from our media is that Islamophobia is high and on the rise in France, and that tolerance of Islam is fairly low. Did it win the Prix Goncourt partly because it is so critical of Afghan and Islamic lifestyles?

The revelations that the woman makes to her husband involve the use and the breaking of many things truly seen as taboo within Islam, I had to wonder whether this was an act of artistic necessity or a deliberate in-your-face attempt to court controversy and notice. I would imagine that there are many devout Muslims, male and female who would find aspects of this book and therefore possibly the book as a whole deeply, deeply offensive. 

As a reader, I felt that Rahimi succeeded in evoking a suffocating, claustrophobic atmosphere. You can almost smell the rotten stench in the mans sick room. But, sympathy for the womens plight is eroded by her whiny, erratic repetitiveness and behaviour I would classify as not only vindictive but a little  unrealistically absurd.

I didn't really enjoy reading this on any level. Sometimes even though a book is difficult, you gain something in the reading of it and that in itself is pleasurable, but this was no such experience for me. It makes me remember how I similarly did not enjoy the highly praised Kite Runner for its highly graphic depiction of child sexual abuse and found it unpleasant as a reading experience regardless of its worthiness.

I wouldn't say read this book, not unless you are terribly interested in its story or conceit. To be blunt, it's depressing. 4/10

Book #42 Rivers Of London by Ben Aaronovitch

Rivers Of London

Ok, so, I've been on holiday for a week, not got much reading done, was pretty much a pound the streets and go-see holiday rather than a sit on your bum by the pool with a book holiday. I did try but the only book I managed to complete was Aaronovitch's Rivers Of London.

It seems that whenever I make a certain claim, a book will show up to contradict me. In this case, I was bemoaning the fact in my review of The Interpretation of Murder that the crime genre has not seen anything original in a good while despite attempts to give it a new twist. This book likewise attempts the new twist on the genre and yet somehow inexplicably pulls it off.

In Rivers Of London, Aaronovitch takes young London copper Peter Grant, whom, it is hinted at is somewhat inept, and places him at a the scene of a murder guarding it overnight alongside Lesley, a colleague he wishes to be more than just friends with, when he is approached by one Nicholas Wallpenny who claims to have witnessed the crime. During Peter's attempt to take a statement Wallpenny dematerialises revealing himself to be a ghost.

Thus begins a tale of ordinary London policing interlocked with a tale of vampires and wizard police officers, sequestration and ghosts, and a dispute between two powerful water spirits. This book shouldn't work, it really shouldn't, the crime genre, the magic genre, and the vampire genre are such well worn avenues of late that they have become truly pedestrian. With all the elements of recent popular fiction thrown in together this book should have been bad, a bit needy, trying to cover all bases and be liked. In some ways it's a bit annoying that its not, because it makes you wonder how he managed to pull it off.

The main strength of the book is that it's entertaining, the prose is vivid and comical, it has a real caper feel to it, with Peter spending most of his time wondering how the hell he ended up involved in yet another disaster. The main storyline of the crime itself is clever and probably, if I knew much about the history, very well researched. The second storyline the resolution of a dispute between two water spirits each claiming to own the Thames has a very mythological quality, and if it reminded me of anything it was of Neil Gaiman's American Gods (but not enough to consider it plagerist) which from me, is a huge compliment.

All in all, if you are into the new "vampire genre", or "magic genre", fantasy books, like Terry Pratchett say (of whom I have to say I've never been a great fan) or if you don't mind crime that's a bit silly and tongue in cheek, you'll like this. If however, you prefer gritty realism with your crime like Stuart MacBride say, or Peter Robinson, you would probably find this annoying. Personally, I really enjoyed it and will definitely be reading the recently published sequel 'Moon Over Soho' 9/10