Late again - just trying to finish a couple of things off, and co-ordinate two elderly computers which like to specialise in different processes. It's hot, too, which doesn't help me, anyway. And I had a writing crisis (self doubt is my superpower, as someone reminded me last week), and a bit of a blip of things to do in a hurry, too.
So, there are my excuses all ready and laid out - now for the books!
This month's non-fiction is one that has been on my shelf for a while, since I read her charming
Field Notes from a Hidden City and indeed had the pleasure of meeting the author. It's
Corvus, by Esther Woolfson.
Fieldnotes from a Hidden City, her later book, documents her encounters with
wildlife around the west end of Aberdeen – there’s more than you might think,
and she writes about it beautifully. I did rather rudely challenge her assertion that there
were no foxes in Aberdeen and she admitted she had been wrong, though at the
time they were mostly university based and perhaps still are. In a city with deer, dolphins and
seals, on the borderline of the territories of red and grey squirrels, foxes
are a small thing to squabble over. Anyway, this book documents her family’s
birds, focussing chiefly on a rook called Chicken, and it is charming,
intelligent, and in places very funny. There is a great deal about animal behaviour and their behaviour in relation to humans, and in comparison with humans, scholarly, thoughtful, sometimes contemplative, and all a joy to read.
Non-crime fiction next, and for this I chose Darren Hughes, FallenKingdom: Well, the U.K. in crisis, cutting itself off from the rest of the
world – an all too likely scenario in current conditions. But there seems to be
something more to this: how did the country become a police state so quickly? Who
killed the policeman investigating the coach crash? Why does Benton so keenly
want to go home, when home doesn’t seem to want him? And who are the mysterious
hoods, who seem to control everything in England? There are hints of a
modern-day John Wyndham here, and a great atmosphere of bewildered tension,
with occasional flashbacks to the day the country changed which is a tale of
suspense in itself. I have to admit there are some appealing things about the
distorted future – bartering home-grown food, hand knitting, bicycle travel and
home-brew, not to mention repair of electrical equipment rather than throwing
it out. Dystopia isn’t all bad! And though the plot is nicely rounded, there is definitely scope for a follow-up, to which I would look forward.
Now home to crime, and a varied bunch this month.
Ed James, Liars and Thieves: Don’t know why these have all been renamed, but this used to be
Windchill, apparently, which to my mind is a much more distinctive title. Heigh
ho. Scott Cullen being his own worst enemy as usual – I think the appeal of
these books is that Cullen says what we’d like to say, even though we know that
it’s completely the wrong thing to say and that it won’t help him at all. That
and the fact that we hope he’ll learn how not to harm his own career and
happiness so completely effectively!
David Blake, St.Benet’s: As with the first book in this series, I found some of the
investigation a bit disjointed and unlikely, and I’m not quite sure I actually
like the main character. Nevertheless it’s an entertaining read in an
interesting setting, and I’ll probably carry on with the series.
Merryn Allingham, The VeniceAtonement: A historical set in 1950s
Venice, this is skilfully prickly from the start. Why is the narrator so
grateful to, but so uneasy with, her new husband? Why did her new acquaintance,
so respectful of the heroine’s husband but so easily dismissed by him, fall to
her death at La Fenice? What happened with the mysterious Philip? A little
reminiscent of Mary Stewart’s novels (and that’s a compliment), though darker,
this was a lovely book with a promise of more to come.
Ambrose Parry, The Wayof All Flesh: While it’s mildly annoying that the mainstream crime writing
community stands back in awe at one of their number writing a historical crime
novel, this is of course an excellent one (perhaps not ‘astonishing’, as Mark
Billingham apparently said), weaving real people in amongst fictional
characters while never losing the impetus of a well paced plot or a sense of
place and time. I look forward to the next one.
Francis J. Glynn, Veneerof Manners: Good and bad, the bad mostly in the confused formatting of
paragraphs. It could have done with a very thorough edit: there were sections which were
quite amusing if they had not gone on for so long, and other themes which would
have been more effective condensed. Show, don’t tell, as they say. I’m not clear
why the Dundee staff, unable to fly because of the volcanic dust (it’s set in
2010), nevertheless set out to drive all the way to Scrabster for a ferry known
to be in Norway when there was a perfectly good one in Aberdeen that would go
to Kirkwall, never mind the Pentalina from Gill’s Bay that’s actually mentioned
in the book, but perhaps there were good reasons for this strange behaviour. I
was also a bit baffled by other strange police procedure, and I didn’t find the
reaction of the dig team to the police very convincing – all right, maybe the
leader of the dig would have played the prima donna but I’m sure some of the
students would have been fans of crime fiction and known what to do. Likewise some
other characters act very oddly – several police officers are completely
pigheaded - and I didn’t feel that a crime godfather would be obvious to the
main character and not to everyone else on Orkney where almost everyone knows
almost everyone else. Some of the description is very good, and some of the conversations
are painfully pedestrian. The characters all seem to exist independently and don't really react with each other. I liked the scholarly Georgian Orcadian farmer whose
letters the main character is transcribing, but I’m not sure his defence of the
North was really carried through in the main plot and again the contents could
have been wound up a bit for a sharper read.
Alex Gray
Still Dark: I’m a bit ambivalent about this. The plot is gripping, and the
pacing is excellent, yet somehow the actual writing is pedestrian and often
repetitious – a character will appear and be described, and fit in nicely with
what’s going on, then about a page later they are introduced as though they are
a new person and described again in a different way (not impossibly different,
just that it’s not simply a cut and paste that’s been accidentally left in).
There were quite a few typos, too. I quite liked the characters though they
pushed being a bit too perfect sometimes. I wouldn't mind reading more.
Malcolm Hollingdrake,
Only the Dead: This started with a great deal of detail and some wandering
commas, but it didn’t take long to catch my attention. Still, it was quite hard
to read – some timelines seemed confused and hard to follow. It could do with a
bit of editing – there’s repetition and ‘internment’ does not mean the same
thing as ‘interment’, and one doesn’t ‘reign in’ things, one ‘reins’ them in
(horses, yes?). Nor, despite the efforts
of Olympics commentators, does one ‘medal’, particularly when one means
‘interfere’. I liked the main character, the policeman, who was a bit different
and it was interesting to see inside his head, having known a friend with the
same condition. In the end quite an interesting plot, or two plots.
Cecilia Peartree,
Unrelated Incidents: Thank heavens for my sanity, another Pitkirtly mystery.
Whimsical humour from a town full of perfectly reasonable eccentrics. I love
this series, which takes me to a harmless murder zone where I can laugh out loud
and still, often, feel a keen sense of suspense.
Right, and what am I doing? Faffing, principally: allotment-tending, looking forward to a few days in Orkney thinking about Vikings, working for actual money, bracing myself for the new university term at the university bookshop, trying to tidy up for some visitors coming. Knitting, making felt. Do you see writing on that list? You do not. I think it might be imminent, though, if I can fit it round everything else!
