Category: Book Reviews

Faulks on Fiction by Sebastian Faulks

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

I didn’t watch the TV series Faulks on Fiction but was interested enough to buy the book. It seemed a good idea to trace the history of the novel through a selection of fictional characters. To a certain extent Sebastian Faulks has done that, but the book is really about the characters and only touches on the development of the novel. Faulks, he reveals in the Acknowledgements, would prefer his book to be called Novel People, which I think would be better.

And if you haven’t read the books and don’t want to know the plot don’t read this book, because Faulks gives these in detail. There are 28 characters, categorised into Heroes, Lovers, Snobs and Villains. It is a very personal book as Faulks himself features in his descriptions, telling of when he first read a book and what he thought on reading it and his impressions on re-reading. I liked that. He also discusses the way literary criticism has changed in that over the last twenty years the author’s life and its bearing on the works has become an issue:

The bad news was that it opened the door to speculation and gossip. By assuming that all works of art are an expression of the authors’ personality, the biographical critics reduced the act of creation to a sideshow. It has now reached such a pass that the only topic some literary journalists seem able to approach with confidence is the question of whom or what people and events in novels are ‘based on’. (page 2)

Accordingly, Faulks focuses on the plot and the characters rather than on the authors, although oddly enough he does indulge in some ‘based on’ descriptions, eg in his chapter on Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair where he discusses whether or not the character of Sarah was ‘based on’ a real life lover of Greene’s.

Faulks is rather disparaging about monthly book groups where the topic is not the novel but a discussion about the author’s life and how it is reflected in the book, together with how this is borne out by the ‘readers’ own experience of such matters’. (page 6) His book aims to show how novelists ‘create – from nothing, or from imagination’. It’s hard to imagine that novels are so divorced from life!

However, despite this and despite not agreeing with all of his interpretations – it would be strange if we all agreed about everything – I enjoyed reading this book. I’d read the majority of the books he discusses and enjoyed being reminded of them – books such as Pride and Prejudice, although Faulks fails to see the attraction of Mr Darcy, who he places in the section on Lovers, describing him as a  ‘rude and gloomy man‘, a ‘manipulative, hypocritical, self-centred depressive‘ and considers that Elizabeth is his ‘lifelong Prozac‘.  I really must re-read Pride and Prejudice, because my memory of Darcy and Elizabeth is very different from Faulks’s picture of them.

Other books he discusses include Robinson Crusoe, Vanity Fair, Wuthering Heights, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Clarissa and Great Expectations, to name but a few.

I haven’t read Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and as I  want to read it without Faulks’s opinion in my mind I haven’t read the chapter on Count Fosco in the section on Villains.

As for the other books I haven’t read, which he describes, I think I don’t need or want to read them, such as Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, Money by Martin Amis,or The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollingsworth. I also don’t want to read Faulks’s new James Bond book, Devil May Care, which he plugs in the section on Snobs. But maybe I’m being too dismissive, because as I didn’t agree with all his views on the books I have read, so maybe I should read the books for myself.

  • Paperback: 384 pages
  • Publisher: BBC Books (1 Sep 2011)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1846079608
  • ISBN-13: 978-1846079603
  • Source: I bought the book
  • My Rating: 3/5

The Crocodile Bird by Ruth Rendell: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

I posted the opening sentences of The Crocodile Birdlast Friday. It really grabbed my attention and got me wondering what had caused Liza’s world fall apart. The cause is revealed when Eve, Liza’s mother tells her she has to leave home because Eve is liable to be booked for murder in the morning. Liza is nearly seventeen but has been brought up with practically no knowledge of the world outside the little gatehouse to Shrove House, where she has lived in seclusion, never having been on a bus or train or having any contact with other children. As Liza explained, Eve had wanted to protect her:

The world had treated her so badly, it was so awful out there, that I wasn’t to be allowed to go through any of that. I was to be sheltered from the world, hence no school and no visits to town, no meeting other people, other people kept down to a minimum, a totally protected childhood and youth. (page 116)

Liza, however, has a secret lover, Sean and when she leaves home she to goes to live with him in his caravan. She tells him the story of her life in a series of tales each night, just like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, culminating in how her mother is now on trial for murder. It seems, moreover, that she has killed more than once. Eve’s passion and obsession is for Shrove House, owned by Jonathan Tobias. Eve and Jonathan had grown up together and she had once thought they would marry and Shrove House would be hers. She would do anything to stay there.

This really a psychological study, rather than a straightforward crime fiction novel. It’s written in a simple style matching Liza’s childlike naivety.  To some extent, I thought that reduced the tension, although as Liza’s eyes were opened and she realised the meaning of events she had witnessed as a child, the tension mounted. It seemed that she might be following in her mother’s murderous footsteps!

The Crocodile Bird is an easy book to read and one that I enjoyed. The title intrigued me for most of the book, as I wondered where the bird comes into the story. The explanation is as Liza explains to Sean that just as the crocodile bird is able to feed safely from the mouth of a crocodile, so whatever Eve did to others (and she did some terrible things) Liza, like the bird, was always safe with her.

  • Paperback: 368 pages
  • Publisher: Arrow; New edition edition (29 Sep 1994)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0099303787
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099303787
  • Source: I bought the book
  • My Rating: 3.5/5

Much in Evidence by Henry Cecil

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

I’ve been reading quite a few long books recently and fancied something shorter, and more amusing. I also noticed that I’ve not been reading much crime fiction lately, so I looked at my bookshelves and took down Much in Evidence by Henry Cecil (published in the US as The Long Arm). My copy is a secondhand book, with this great cover.

I haven’t read any of Cecil’s other books, but after reading this one I certainly will look out for more. there is a list of his books on Fantastic Fiction. It’s no surprise to me to find out that Henry Cecil, real name Henry Cecil Leon (1902 -1976), was a judge and I loved the way he pokes fun at the law and the legal system in this book. The dialogue is masterful, and the characters are hilarious, from the drunken solicitor, Mr Tewkesbury, to the barrow boy, Mr Brown. The plot is farcical, which I found fascinating and highly entertaining.

To summarise the plot very briefly – Mr Richmond, bald and lame was attacked in his home and robbed of £100,000. The insurance company reluctantly paid up, but then they discover that a series of bald, lame men had been making dubious claims on insurance companies and he is charged with fraud.

Coincidences abound in this book, until you just don’t know what to believe. Is there just once coincidence too many … ? It was with relief that I read the last chapter, where my suspicions were confirmed.

My rating: 4/5

Details of a new copy of Much in Evidence (from Amazon UK):

  • Paperback: 212 pages
  • Publisher: House of Stratus; New edition edition (16 Oct 2000)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1842320572
  • ISBN-13: 978-1842320570

Westwood by Stella Gibbons: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

I found Westwood by Stella Gibbons a slightly disappointing book. I liked it, but didn’t love it, as I’d hoped I would. I do enjoy descriptive writing, and there are some beautiful descriptive passages, but there were far too many, even for me, which eventually made me wish Gibbons would just get a move on. Lynne Truss in the introduction wrote that she loves it deeply and it made her laugh and weep. I found it amusing in places and also touching. It’s a slow meander through the characters, their lives and their houses.

Margaret Steggles, a plain young woman finds a ration book on Hampstead Heath which provides her with an introduction into the lives of Gerard Challis and his family, his beautiful wife, Seraphina, his self-absorbed daughter Hebe and her spoilt children and Zita the family’s maid. Margaret idolises Gerard, who is a playwright. He in turn falls under the spell of her best friend, Hilda. The contrast between Margaret and Hilda is marked. Margaret is serious, somewhat of a snob, ‘not the type to attract men’, and impressed by the artistic circle surrounding the Challis family. Hilda, a beautiful young woman who attracts many male admirers has no trace of romance in her nature and Margaret realises that Hilda ‘would not or could not be serious’. Margaret becomes obsessed with Gerard’s house, Westwood and longs to be there whenever she can. Feeling that she has outgrown Hilda, she cultivates a friendship with Zita.

This is not a wartime novel, although it is set in London just after the Blitz and there are some wonderful descriptions of the city and its unexpected green and unspoilt places amidst the ruins of bombed houses. Although the war is not really in focus, the atmosphere of the times infuses the novel. The nature of war itself is discussed by Grantey, the family’s old nurse in her conversation with Hebe:

… it’s all part of God’s plan for doing away with war for good and all.

…

All those dreadful explosions and atrocities and secret weapons they keep on talking about, … and not knowing when you go to bed at night if you’ll be alive when you wake up in the  morning – that’s all part of God’s plan. He’s letting it get worse and worse, so’s it’ll destroy itself, like; it’ll get so bad not even wicked people’ll want it , and then it’ll stop. (page 277)

Really???

It’s a novel about relationships, about friendship, about hope and longing and above all about disappointment and ‘coming to terms with life’.

*Slight spoiler alert follows*

*I wouldn’t have known without Lynne Truss’s introduction to the book that Gerard was based on the writer Charles Morgan, who had annoyed Stella Gibbons, and Gerard’s characters in his dreadful plays are parodies of Morgan’s female characters. Morgan had claimed that a sense of humour was lacking in writers.The pompous Gerard is the butt of the humour in the novel  – in particular the scene where his grandchildren find him in a compromising situation in Kew Gardens – that did make me smile.*

  • Paperback: 464 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage Classics (4 Aug 2011)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 009952872X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099528722
  • Source: I bought it
  • My Rating 3/5

Stella Gibbons’s more famous novel is Cold Comfort Farm. I used to think I’d read it, now I’m not so sure. I like Westwood just enough to make me curious to look out for it. If you’ve read it, or Westwood, what are your views?

White Nights by Ann Cleeves: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

White Nights (Shetland Island, #2)

White Nights by Ann Cleeves is the second in her Shetland Quartet, featuring Detective Jimmy Perez. The first book is Raven Black, which I read and wrote about last year. I enjoyed this one just as much as the first and, although I think it stands well on its own, I think it best to read them in order as some of the characters appear in both and you can follow the development of their relationships.

White Nights is set mainly in Biddista, a fictional village of a few houses, a shop, an art gallery and restaurant called the Herring House, and an old Manse. Kenny Thomson finds a man’s body hanging in the hut where the boat owners of the village of Biddista keep their lines and pots. Perez recognises the dead man – he’s the mystery man who had caused a scene the previous evening at the opening of Bella Sinclair’s and Fran Hunter’s art exhibition. At first it looks as though the man, his face covered by a clown’s mask, has committed suicide, but he’d been dead before he was strung up and the murder team from Inverness, headed up by Roy Taylor, are called in. It takes quite some time before they can identify the dead man and even longer before the motive for killing him is revealed. And that is only after more deaths have occurred.

This is a most satisfying book for me. It’s not only full of believable characters, each one an individual in their own right, it also has a nicely complicated plot and a great sense of location. As well as the mystery of who killed the man in the clown mask and why, there is also the disappearance 15 years earlier of Kenny’s older brother Lawrence. It was thought that he left the island after Bella had broken his heart. Kenny hadn’t heard from him since and at first thought the dead man could be him.

It’s the place, itself, that for me conveyed the most powerful aspects of the book. The ‘white nights’ are the summer nights when the sun never really goes down. They call it the ‘summer dim’, the dusk lasts all night, and in contrast to the bleak, black winters, fills people with ‘a kind of frenzy‘. The landscape and the climate certainly play a great part in people’s lives.Taylor feels very much an outsider, almost too impatient to cope with what he thinks is Perez’s hesitant approach, until it occurred to him that

here in this bizarre, bleak, treeless community, Perez’s strange methods might actually get results. (page 263)

I could see the landscape and the sea, and I could hear the birds, the kittiwakes on the cliffs, the puffins and skuas. The Shetland Islands are part of theBritish Isles, but are so far north of the mainland that they are on about the same latitude as the southern point of Greenland.

However, I did think that the ending came rather suddenly after the careful build up to the mystery. The tension just gradually faded away as it became obvious who the culprit was. But I still think it’s a very good book, that held my interest, one that made me want to get back to it each time I had to put it down.

  • Paperback: 340 pages
  • Publisher: Pan (5 Jun 2009)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0330448250
  • ISBN-13: 978-0330448253
  • Source: Library Book
  • My Rating: 4/5

Gillespie and I by Jane Harris: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Gillespie and I by Jane Harris is a cleverly told story, narrated by Harriet Baxter, alternating between events in 1888-90 (in Glasgow) and those in 1933 (in London). In 1888 Harriet moved to Glasgow where she got to know the painter, Ned Gillespie and his family. At first I liked Harriet but as I read on I became increasingly doubtful about her character, even though she comes across as an honest, reliable person. But, as she relates what her life is like in 1933 my impression of her began to change.

All is well at first but than a tragedy occurs which forms the major part of the book. It’s signalled in advance, when Harriet refers to the ‘horrible events’ that lay in the future. To say any more would be too much of a spoiler.

The setting of the book in Glasgow of the late 19th century is well described, helped by plans in the front of the book. The characters are also convincing, even some of the minor ones and her portrayal of Ned’s disturbed daughter, Sybil is quite chilling. This is a very detailed book, both about the place, artists and, through the account of a trial, the Scottish legal system of that period. It’s a book that lingered in my mind after I finished reading and if it wasn’t so long I’d like to re-read it in the light of what I now know.

  • Hardcover: 528 pages
  • Publisher: Faber and Faber (5 May 2011)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0571275168
  • ISBN-13: 978-0571275168
  • Source:an uncorrected proof from the publishers (via LibraryThing Early Reviewers)
  • My rating 3.5/5

I haven’t read Jane Harris first book, The Observations, although I’ve owned it for a while. It’s probably time I read that one too.