1 Chronicles

For some reason, the Bible at this point jumps back a few generations and boringly repeats stories we have already covered in the Samuel and Kings books. Add in reams of genealogies and you get pretty turgid stuff.

King Rat – China Mieville

I quite enjoyed Perdido Street Station, so I was optimistic that I would enjoy this earlier novel from the same author given its London setting. There is lots of fun stuff about rat people in Bazalgette’s sewers and the city’s dark underbelly, which gets us through the first 100 pages or so on tale-spinning verve alone.

Unfortunately Mieville’s cliched and over-egged prose is far too weak to cope with some of the issues he enters into midway, such as mental illness or the emotional after-effects of rape. Even worse, the “overground” elements of the story are tied into the short-lived and unlamented Drum and Bass scene (solemnly capitalised throughout) and the “Big up dem Junglist Massive” rhetoric is initially risible and eventually irritating. It was a relief to finish it.

The Third Man & The Fallen Idol – Graham Greene

Greene wrote the prose story of The Third Man as a working document for the benefit of Carol Reed, who directed the brilliant movie. Of course it is superbly done, though it is impossible not to picture Joe Cotten, Orson Welles et al despite the many differences between this version and the resulting film. Much of the fun for me was in noting the differences between the two iterations, which are discussed briefly in Greene’s interesting introduction.

My edition also included the less accomplished The Fallen Idol, also filmed by Reed.

The Restraint of Beasts – Magnus Mills

Something of a deadpan comic classic, this strange and dark novel made me laugh out loud several times whilst being simultaneously appalled at the events being described. I’ve never read anything quite like it, and the use of pace and repetition is masterly.

A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson

Allow me to discuss Bryson's account of walking the Appalachian Trail as if it were, itself, a trek.

We started off brightly, making good progress through an appealing landscape. About halfway through, however, we appeared to lose our path and progress became sporadic, and the experience trailed off somewhat towards the end. We have used this guide several times before, and he was generally as engaging, knowledgable and interesting as we have found previously.

The Lieutenant - Kate Grenville

It is impossible to read The Lieutenant without thinking of Grenville's earlier, brilliant retelling of the European settlement of Sydney, The Secret River. They share a concern with early relationships with the Cadigal people and the tragic inevitability of the slaughter of the local population. This iteration is a lightly fictionalised version of the story of English astronomer William Dawes, who sounds like a real hero.

Read The Secret River first, but this is a praiseworthy younger sister to that masterpiece.

Mary - Vladimir Nabokov

Despite being his first novel, Mary contains some typically brilliant Nabokovian moments but overall I felt unsatisfied. I've read too many of his early, inferior stuff lately, time to get back to the phase of his career when he was churning out the masterpieces.

Stone's Fall - Iain Pears

My admiration for Pears' earlier novel An Instance Of The Fingerpost is boundless. It took the structure of the Alexandria Quartet - 4 unreliable narrators recount the same events from differing perspectives - wedded to a historical thriller plot to provide the kind of book that one buys as a gift for friends for years afterwards.

Stone's Fall attempts a similar trick, with added chronological trickery. On this occasion the inspirations seem cinematic; plot and structure recall a 1909 version of Citizen Kane, with obvious nods to Don't Look Now and Chinatown along the way. Crucially, the three narrators here are much less diffentiated than those of Fingerpost, which robs the text of important richness. There are also lingusitic anachronisms ("certifiably insane" in the nineteenth century?) and rather too many cliches to contend with, even for a genre piece.

Having said all that, I did wolf it down pretty speedily. The sense of place in the earlier, London based chapters is well done and the plot twists and turns satisfyingly. The final revelations are surprising, if somewhat unlikely.

You've probably gathered that I'm ambivalent about this book. A fine page-turner, but Pears can do better.

According to Queeney - Beryl Bainbridge

There's not too many novels that can feature a Joshua Reynolds portrait of two major characters on the cover, but this account of Samuel Johnson's last years has that privilege. The milieu is beautifully evoked and the unstructured, episodic plotting suits the subject nicely. Don't read it for the story, read it for the strong characters and fascinating details.

All The Conspirators - Christopher Isherwood

I love Isherwood’s Berlin stories, but this first novel is best regarded as juvenilia. It’s a slightly odd experience, actually, a novelist notable for his clarity aping Virginia Woolf’s opaque stylistic tics.

Wake Up - Tim Pears

I can see what Pears was trying to do here, linking ideas about genetic modification in agriculture with hereditary ideas within the family, but I’m not quite sure it works. The episode involving group food poisoning at a church is memorable but seems oddly out of place.

Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut

You don’t read Vonnegut for elegant, structured plots, but Timequake is even more ramshackle than most. Nevertheless there is some glorious stuff here, including a blinding gag with the punchline “Ting a ling you sonofabitch” and the timeless zinger “If your brains were TNT, there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off”.

Pointless, in the best possible way.

The Steep Approach to Garbadale - Iain Banks

I was a devotee of Banks a few years back but this rehash of his splendid earlier work The Crow Road was, a couple of vivid set pieces aside, a disappointment. The family saga suffers from irrelevant travelogues, shoehorned in and simplistic political commentary, and an underwhelming twist. The excitement and freshness of The Wasp Factory seems like an awfully long time ago.

Framley Parsonage - Anthony Trollope

The fourth of the Barchester Chronicles is well up to scratch, a typically Trollopian tale of star-cross’d lovers, flawed heroes and gently pointed social satire. We know that the ending will be broadly happy so the pleasure is in the getting there. I was particularly pleased that the slyly entertaining Miss Dunstable reappears in this book, and even gets a surprise happy ending of her own.

Humphrey Clinker - Tobias Smollett

This is an entertainingly relaxed account of a journey around Britain taken by a good-natured Gentleman and his eccentric family. The plot is negligible but the characterisation is excellent, and the humour is reminiscent of the formally similar Don Quixote.