The End of the Affair - Graham Greene

Greene treats us with a heady cocktail of love, hate, jealousy and God - and very enjoyable and moving it is too. I've seen the movie so the revelation that acts as the central plot fulcrum was known to me but that didn't bother me, so good is the writing and the ideas here.

The Lacuna – Barbara Kingsolver

The first half of the novel deals with a young man growing up in Mexico in the 1930s in the household of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Trotsky. You can probably guess how that pans out.

The second half of the novel deals with the USA in the 1950s and the oppressive hypocrisy of McCarthyism. You can probably guess the links here, and the implicit connection with the religious right of today.

Kingsolver’s storytelling skill means that, despite such predictability, the reader is gripped throughout thanks to fine writing, a well-constructed plot and vivid characters. I was particularly taken with Violet Brown, our hero’s redoubtable stenographer who begins very much in the background but becomes more prominent as the tale develops.

Matthew

I think if I could supply only one book to an alien in order to explain Christianity, this would be it. It contains a reasonable overview of Jesus’s life, a chunk of expositional theology and many of the most-quoted Son-of-Godisms including the crucial (and beautiful) Sermon on the Mount.

The interesting thing about having heard all of these stories at school and then revisiting them as an adult is how insurrectionary a figure Jesus is.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. (10:34)
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. (10:37)
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. (19:24)

Nobody tell the authorities! No wonder that old Marxist Pasolini used this Gospel as the source for his extraordinary masterpiece.

Mr Standfast - John Buchan

Possibly the most preposterous Hannay story yet, jollied along by a particularly daft love story and a greater level of stiff-upper-lippery than ever. The numerous references to Pilgrim's Progress are quite effective, and this is perhaps the last novel to treat WW1 as, essentially, a Boy's Own lark. Conscientious Objectors are given a surprisingly sympathetic hearing.

This is typical of the kind of thing the reader is letting himself in for:

"My stomach rose at the thought of it, and I had pretty well decided to wire to Bullivant and cry off. There are some things that no one has a right to ask of any white man."

Party Going - Henry Green

Did they really close train stations when it was foggy back in the day? I can only assume so, as this is the premise of this comedy of manners, focusing on a group of toffs attempting to go to a country house party but finding themselves stuck in the railway hotel overnight.

I continue to struggle with the characters in Green, but the writing is difficult yet interesting.

Raffles – E.W. Hornung

Raffles is the original gentleman jewel thief, with a devilish offbreak to boot. These are entertaining and amusing tales but they lack the cunning plots devised by Hornung’s brother-in-law, Arthur Conan Doyle.

Living – Henry Green

Here Green uses a strange affectation whereby he drops the use of the article, presumably to reflect the Brummagem dialect, so you get “They had taken bus” and so forth. Interesting.

There are some lovely descriptive passages of factory life, but I am finding it hard to connect with Green’s characters thanks to the distancing effect of his style.

News of a Kidnapping – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This is Marquez’s equivalent of Capote’s In Cold Blood – a sumptuous novelist reins in the adjectives to look at a real and important criminal case. Here the issue is the kidnapping of politically valuable hostages by the Escobar narcotics cartel in 1990s Colombia. I was more involved in the day-to-day situations in which the victims, mainly middle-aged women, found themselves than the big picture political narrative with which it intercuts.

Loving – Henry Green

I’d somehow got the impression that Green was a straightforward social writer in the Orwell tradition, but this is actually a modernist piece. As a result the reader needs to concentrate to keep tabs on the sprawling dramatis personae, but the pay-off is a solid story with plenty to say about class and loyalty.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or the murder at Road Hill House - Kate Summerscale

I don’t generally read the True Crime genre, but this is an unusual case. The 1860 murder of a 3 year old boy in a locked country house inspired the entire canon of crime fiction, with its finite number of suspects, the dashing London detective and the gradual unravelling of family secrets. Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens et al were watching closely.

The detective is the Mr Whicher of the title, and he sounds like an amazing bloke. The history of detectives in this period is fascinating, and the conclusion of the case is tantalisingly only semi-resolved.

Case Histories – Kate Atkinson

It’s well written, this, but once again my enjoyment of the story bumps up against an impatience with the conventions of the crime genre. Inevitably the investigator is from a broken marriage, of course a bunch of plot strands get pulled conveniently together at the end and of course the obvious solutions to the mystery are not the real ones.

Enjoyable enough, but.

The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy

You wouldn’t want to live in Hardy’s Wessex. In the first chapter of this corker, a drunken farmer sells his wife and daughter to a sailor. In remorse, he gives up the booze and becomes a respectable citizen, but obviously his past comes back to haunt him.

The fast-paced plot is absurd, frankly, driven by a succession of outrageous coincidences and more convenient eavesdropping than a Shakespeare comedy, but the overall fatalistic vision is irresistable.

Incidentally, there is one conversation about lower class, rustic language in which two of the examples given are dumbledore and hagrid. Hmm.

Contains the word elsewhither.

Libra – Don DeLillo

DeLillo is a very fine sentence writer but I found this overlong conspiracy theory about the assassination of JFK a little hard to stomach. In fairness, the purpose is less to propound a particular version of events than to explore the canker in the soul of America.

Oroonoko – Aphra Behn

A 1688 novel about an African slave written by a woman is always going to have some interest, and the various internal stresses and contradictions are evident to the modern reader. The story cracks along and, whilst we expect a tragic ending, the brutality of it comes as a shock.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog – Muriel Barbery

There is much to find irritating here; the cutesy title, the cod philosophising, the odd view of French society as anti-intellectual. It’s a blatant pitch for the Short History of Tractors In Ukrainian/book club market and hence unavoidably middle-brow in a bad way, but there are a few pleasurable moments along the way.

There’s a lovely bit about Ozu movies and open doors which made me smile.

Summer Crossing – Truman Capote

This is one of those cases where the manuscript is discovered after death and published, possibly, against the author’s wishes. In general I am pro-publication in such cases (what’s the harm?), though this is clearly not in the same class as Breakfast At Tiffany’s which it superficially resembles.

An across-the-tracks romance set in NYC, the writing is conspicuously more comfortable in the privileged Upper East Side than it is in down-at-heel Brooklyn, and the overall feel is something like a juvenile F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Can You Forgive Her? - Anthony Trollope

Having completed the bucolic Barsetshire Chronicles I now move on to the political Palliser series. The central plot strand involves a young woman vacillating between two lovers, one wild and charismatic and the other staid but responsible. It drags on somewhat, but there is a boring comfortableness about it and the subplot involving the Palliser family is engaging, which bodes well for the upcoming books.

Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates

Holy moly, this is a brutal and brilliant novel, the last book I read in 2010 and also the best. A stark look at the gradual disintegration of an ostensibly happy couple’s dreams, the author inflicts psychological torture on the characters in an utterly believable way. Despite the characters’ obvious shortcomings we never lose our sympathy for them, which makes the the unravelling of their complacent but typical lives all the more painful.

The Conversations at Curlow Creek - David Malouf

Somewhat over-written but not without merit. I enjoyed the “real time” conversation between the two central characters (a condemned bushranger and his executioner) more than the flashbacks to life in rural Ireland.