Category: Book Reviews

Ninepins by Rosy Thornton

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

I finished read Rosy Thornton’s book Ninepins a few days ago.  It’s a remarkable book about mothers and daughters, about growing up and relationships. It’s quite difficult to describe – it’s not exactly a thriller, although there is a mystery element to it and the tension  and suspense gradually build throughout the book. And it’s not exactly a romance, although there is a love story in there too. It’s about people, but there is a satisfying plot and beautiful descriptions of the locations – I learnt a lot about the Cambridgeshire Fens.

It rings true to life, with all the anguish and angst of bringing up children as Laura, a divorced single mum struggles to cope as her daughter Beth turns twelve. They live in an old tollhouse, called Ninepins – there used to be a bridge across the lode and the toll was 9d (nine pence), which over time morphed into ‘Ninepins’. To help out with her finances she rents out the self-contained pumphouse, converted from a fen drainage station, to students. Her new lodger is Willow, a 17-year-old student, with a troubled past. She has been in a care home and still needs Vince, her social worker for support. Laura is not sure what influence Willow will have on Beth, who is having difficulties making friends at her new school. When Beth gets into trouble at school, Laura becomes even more anxious and she doesn’t seem able to do right for doing wrong. Then there is Willow’s mother whose appearance on the scene brings about devastation.

This is a darker book than Rosy’s other books that I’ve read and it captures perfectly the precarious relationships between parents and children as they begin to grow up and feel independent. Just how much leeway should Laura give Beth, how much should she intervene in her life, how much should she monitor what Beth is doing are questions that Laura is trying to resolve. Willow’s and Vince’s appearance in their lives bring changes that Laura had just not considered.She knows a little about Willow’s background and what she does know bothers her immensely. It’s the relationships in this book that are the focal point as Laura, Beth and Willow come to terms with their situations. A gripping story that held my interest throughout.

  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Sandstone Press Ltd (16 April 2012)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1905207859
  • ISBN-13: 978-1905207855
  • Source: Author review copy
  • My Rating: 4.5/5

The Hanging Valley by Peter Robinson: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

There are 20 books in Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series (listed at Fantastic Fiction). I’ve read a few of them, completely out of order, but it doesn’t seem to matter too much as each one stands alone, although I suspect I’d get a better idea of Banks’s personal life if I had read them in order!

The Hanging Valley is the fourth one in the series.

Synopsis (from the back cover):

A faceless corpse is discovered in a tranquil, hidden valley below the village of Swainshead. And when Chief Inspector Alan Banks arrives, he finds that no-one is willing to talk. Banks’s frustration only grows when the identity of the body is revealed. For it seems that his latest case may be connected with an unsolved murder in the same area five years ago. Among the silent suspects are the Collier brothers, the wealthiest and most powerful family in Swainsdale. When they start use their influence to slow down the investigation, Inspector Alan Banks finds himself in a race against time…

My view:

As well as the Collier brothers, there are other suspects, including John Fletcher, a taciturn farmer, Sam Greenock and his wife Katy who own the local Bed and Breakfast guest house. There’s something not quite right about Katy, she’s obviously troubled and hiding something, and she is dominated by Sam. As I read on I thought the killer was first one character, then another and never really worked out who it was until quite near the end. I enjoyed the puzzle.

Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks had been transferred to Eastvale from London two years earlier and is still getting to know the area. He’d moved from London because of the sheer pressure of the job and the growing confrontation between the police and citizens in the capital had got him down. Crime in Eastvale had been slack until this murder happened. And it’s complicated, the locals close ranks and Banks has to work hard to get information, first of all to discover who the victim was and why he had been killed. The trail leads him abroad to Toronto before Banks discovers the truth.

The Hanging Valley is rich in description, both of the Yorkshire Dales and of Toronto. (Peter Robinson was born in Yorkshire and now lives in Toronto.) The hanging valley sounds a beautiful spot, a small, secluded wooded valley with unusual foliage:

… the ash , alders and sycamores … seemed tinged with russet, orange and earth brown. It seemed … like a valley out of Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’.

… the valley clearly had a magical quality. It was more luxuriant than the surrounding area, its ferns and shrubs more lush and abundant, as if, Neil thought, God had blessed it with a special grace. (page 5)

All of which makes the discovery of the corpse so shocking, with its flesh literally crawling. So, I enjoyed this book on two levels – the mystery and the writing itself. I did think, though, that it could have been shorter and more concise, and some of the characters were rather indistinguishable which is why I rated it 3/5.

  • Paperback: 324 pages
  • Publisher: Pan; New edition (8 Nov 2002)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0330491644
  • ISBN-13: 978-0330491648
  • Source: I bought it

The Village by Marghanita Laski: A Book Review

Published on by Margaret

Persephone edition endpapers

The Village was first published in 1952 and chronicles life in an English village immediately after the end of the Second World War. It begins with two women meeting to go on duty at the Red Cross post as they had done throughout the war. They are from different ends of the village, Wendy Trevor from up the hill where  the gentry live and Edith Wilson from Station Road where the working-class live.  Both knew that the breaking down of social barriers had just been one of those things that happened during a war. Mrs Wilson acknowledged that she would miss the camaraderie:

‘There’s a lot of us will miss it’, Edith said. ‘We’ve all of us felt at times, you know, how nice it was, like you and me being able to be together and friendly, just as if we were the same sort, if you know what I mean.’ (page19)

But the war had changed much and the social barriers were rising, but when Wendy’s daughter, Margaret, falls in love with Edith’s son, Roy, the Trevors are horrified and refuse to give their permission for the couple to marry. Margaret does not have the same attitude as her parents:

‘The trouble with you, Miss Margaret, is that you’ve got no sense of class.’ (page 113)

I thought at first that this book was not as good as Laski’s Little Boy Lost, which I loved, but as I read on I realised the simple direct style of writing contained depth and complexity and  by the end I was convinced I was living in the village, amongst these people at the end of the war. It’s not as heart-rending as Little Boy Lost, but it is absorbing reading.

The Village is not only a love story, it’s a novel exploring the issues of class and social mobility, family relationships, parental control and the position of women. Although the Trevors and the Wilsons are the main characters, it’s a novel about the whole community,with a list of all the characters at the beginning of the book, including their station in life.

Included in the mix are the Wetheralls, Ralph and his American wife, Martha. They provide an interesting perspective on the complex British class system, comparing it with the American attitudes to different groups of people. Ralph, a business man, explains to Martha because they’re in ‘trade’, the Trevors who are gentry but hard up, still look down on them – and class is still most important. Martha wants to help Margaret and can’t understand that class doesn’t go by money, until Ralph points out that it was the same in America – ‘Plenty of your old Boston families are nearly as poor as the Trevors, but they still look down their noses at everyone else.’ (page 166)

He goes even further comparing the position of the working-classes in Britain to that of negroes in the United States, not the southern states but in the ‘enlightened North‘:

‘Many’s the time I’ve sat in your mother’s apartment in New York and heard you all talking in a broadminded way about treating the negro properly, but I’ve never come in and found a black man dropped in casually for cocktails, and I wouldn’t expect it, any more that I’d expect to find the Trevors  accepting Roy Wilson as a son-in-law.

…

Honestly now, you wouldn’t have married a negro, would you? You’d do your best to stop your daughter from marrying a negro. Well, you take my word for it, the Trevors will feel just the same way about Margaret marrying Roy Wilson, if there’s any question of it, which I very much doubt.’ (pages 231-2)

It ‘s certainly a book I’d like to re-read.

  • Paperback: 312 pages
  • Publisher: Persephone Books Ltd; First Edition edition (22 Sep 2004)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1903155428
  • ISBN-13: 978-1903155424
  • Source: I borrowed the book from a friend, and now want my own copy!
  • My Rating: 5/5

I wrote about the beginning of The Village here.

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte, published in 1847, is a deeply moral novel about a young woman, a governess and her experiences working for two families in Victorian England. Agnes is the younger daughter of an impoverished clergyman. Her parents had married against her mother’s family’s wishes and when their fortune was wrecked Agnes determines to help out by working as a governess.

The first family she works for are the Bloomfields. Mrs Bloomfield tells Agnes her children are clever and very apt to learn. In fact they are terrible children, utterly spoilt and cruel. I found their brutality shocking, the more so since Anne was writing from her own experiences. One of the most vivid scenes is where Agnes kills a brood of nestlings to prevent Tom Bloomfield from torturing them.

Agnes is treated like a servant, rather than as a governess. She has no authority over the children and is not allowed to discipline them much as she would like to. Her attempts to improve their wild behaviour by quoting Bible texts and moral instruction have no effect on the children’s behaviour. As Agnes’s mother has told her that people do not like to be told of their children’s faults she kept silent about them and despite her best efforts she failed to make any impression on them:

But either the children were so incorrigible, the parents so unreasonable, or myself so mistaken in my views, or so unable to carry them out, that my best intentions and most strenuous efforts seemed productive of no better result than sport to the children, dissatisfaction to their parents, and torment to myself.

Her second post with the Murrays is little better – her charges are two teenage girls, who are just as spoilt as the younger children, wilful and determined to have their own way and two younger boys who are rough and unruly. Fortunately the boys are soon packed off to school and she only has to cope with sisters.

Both families are portrayed as wealthy, snobbish and totally lacking in any regard for Agnes. The only glimmer of hope comes through her friendship with Edward Weston, but even then Rosalie, the older daughter, is determined to make him fall in love with her. But surely Edward will not be deceived by Rosalie’s scheming ways? Agnes is gentle and self-effacing, never making her feelings known and it seems as though she is destined for a miserable life. Although she loves Edward she is totally unable to give any indication of her feelings towards him. Things seem to get even worse after her father’s death and she has to leave the Murrays – and Edward. However, Snap the dog plays his part in bringing some joy into Agnes’s life.

Agnes Grey vividly portrays the class distinctions of Victorian society, the position of women in that society from both the working and the middle classes through the first-person narrative. Above all it gives a very clear picture of the life of a governess, with all its loneliness, frustrations, insecurities and depressions. The characters, for the most part are well drawn, (the minor characters are one-dimensional) and I liked Agnes’s unspoken thoughts, eg. when told to go to the schoolroom immediately because the young ladies were waiting for her  she thinks, ‘Climax of horror! actually waiting for their governess.!!!’

Reading Agnes Grey has made me keen to re-read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, for one thing to compare the two governesses. It’s been years since I read Jane Eyre, and my memory is that it is a much more dramatic novel (certainly it is much longer).

  • Format: Kindle Edition
  • File Size: 449 KB
  • Print Length: 155 pages
  • Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0812967135
  • Publisher: Modern Library (18 Dec 2007)
  • Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
  • Source: My own copy
  • My Rating: 3/5

The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

I’m taking part in the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge. I couldn’t wait until I’d got them all in the order she wrote them so I’ve been reading them as I come across them. Some of her earlier books have been hard to find, but on a recent trip to Barter Books in Alnwick I was able to fill in some of my gaps.

I’ve read 34 of her books before finding her third book,The Murder on the Links, originally published in 1923. This is the second book featuring Hercule Poirot.  There have been many editions published since then and my copy is a paperback, published in 1960 by Pan Books.

Agatha Christie had the idea for the book after reading newspaper reports of a murder in France, in which masked men had broken into a house, killed the owner and left his wife bound and gagged. From these facts she then invented her plot, setting the book in the fictional French town of Merlinville ( midway between Boulogne and Calais), at the Villa Genevieve, next to a golf course and overlooking the sea. The owner of the villa, Mr Renauld, a South American millionaire had written to Poirot asking for his help as he feared his life was in danger.

When Poirot and Hastings arrive they are too late to help him as the night before their arrival he was found dead, lying face down in an open grave, stabbed in the back. As they are in France, Inspector Japp does not appear, instead there is a young French detective, M. Giraud, who thinks very little of Poirot’s methods and disagrees with his findings. This is very much a mystery puzzle book, with many clues and several red herrings.

In her Autobiography, Agatha Christie describes how she was writing

… in the Sherlock Holmes tradition – eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrange-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp – and I now added a ‘human foxhound’, Inspector Giraud, of the French police. Giraud despises Poirot as being old and passé. (page 290)

And it was then that she realised that she had made a mistake in starting with Poirot so old. She would have preferred to have abandoned him after her first three or four books and begun again with someone much younger, but she was stuck with him.

It is rather a melodramatic tale, but still enjoyable as Poirot unravels the mystery. An interesting subplot involves a love interest for Hastings, when he mets a young lady calling herself Cinderella. There is a hint at the end of the book that he will marry her and move to South America. Agatha Christie was stuck with Poirot, but she felt she could get rid of Hastings – she was getting rather tired of him. She didn’t write him out completely and he does reappear in later novels, visiting Poirot from his home in Argentina. I like Hastings, who in this book shares rooms with Poirot and is a ‘sort of private secretary to an MP.’

Her Autobiogaphy also reveals that Agatha Christie was not pleased with the jacket cover her publishers had designed as she felt it didn’t reflect the plot. In fact she was ‘really furious and it was agreed that in future she should see the jacket first and approve of it.’

She thought The Murder on the Links was ‘a moderately good example of its kind‘ and I liked it. My rating: 3/5.

The Parasites by Daphne du Maurier: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Daphne Du Maurier has been one of my favourite authors ever since I read Rebecca as a young teenager. I’ve read quite a lot of her books, some more than once, but this is the first time I’ve read The Parasites.

This is different from the other books by Du Maurier that I’ve read. There’s no real mystery, no dramatic suspense, no need to hold your breath and wonder what comes next. In some ways it’s a family drama and in others it’s a psychological study. The characters, for the most part, are not likeable – they’re selfish and self-centred, the ‘dreadful Delaneys‘. They’re from the theatrical, artistic world and they mix with the rich and the upper classes. They are siblings, with famous parents – Pappy, a singer who is a  larger-than life character and Mama who is a dancer. Between them they have three children – Maria, who is Pappy’s daughter; Niall, who is Mama’s son; and Celia who is their daughter.

At the beginning of this book Charles, Maria’s husband accuses her and her stepbrother, Niall and half-sister Celia of being parasites:

… that’s what you are, the three of you. Parasites. The whole bunch. You always have been and you always will be. Nothing can change you. You are doubly, triply parasitic; first, because you’ve traded ever since childhood on that seed of talent you had the luck to inherit from your fantastic forbears; secondly, because you’ve none of you done a stroke of ordinary honest work in your lives, but batten upon us, the fool public who allow you to exist; and thirdly, because you prey upon each other, the three of you, living in a world of fantasy which you have created for yourselves and which bears no relation to anything in heaven or on earth. (page 5)

The narration alternates between the past and the present and between the first person narrator and third person description, which I found rather odd at first. The narrator could be any one of the three – Maria, Niall or Celia – or is it Daphne Du Maurier herself? I read Margaret Forster’s biography of Daphne a while ago and checked what she had to say about The Parasites. I wasn’t surprised to find out that this book is semi-autobiographical. Daphne had written to a friend in 1957 explaining that these characters were her ‘three inner selves’ and Margaret Forster considers that Pappy was modelled on Gerald, Daphne’s father.

It’s the relationships between the three siblings that forms the core of The Parasites. After Charles’s outburst the three of them discuss what he meant and go back through their lives. There are poignant moments as they remember the joys and difficulties of growing up and that strange realisation that you’re no longer a child:

Grown-up people … How suddenly would it happen, the final plunge into their world? Did it really come overnight, as Pappy said, between sleeping and waking? A day would come, a day like any other day, and looking over your shoulder you would see the shadow of the child that was, receding; and there would be no going back, no possibility of recapturing the shadow. You had to go on; you had to step forward into the future, however much you dreaded the thought, however much you were afraid. (page 61)

Like all of Du Maurier’s books I could visualise the scenes, almost as though I was really there. I may not have liked the characters but they are convincing –  I wouldn’t want to have to spend much time with any of them. But it’s not all intense. There is also humour to balance the drama, such as the hilarious scene where the Delaneys visit the Wyndham family soon after Maria has married Charles.

Even though this does not rank with my favourites of Daphne’s books I did enjoy it and it spurred me on to read My Cousin Rachel, which I’ve been meaning to read for years, and Justine Picardie’s novel, Daphne – more about both books another time.

  • Paperback: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Virago Press Ltd; New edition edition (5 May 2005)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1844080722
  • ISBN-13: 978-1844080724
  • Source: I bought it
  • My Rating: 3.5/5