Category: Book Reviews

Crime Fiction Alphabet – A is for …

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

… Agatha Christie

For the first of this year’s Crime Fiction Alphabet hosted by Kerrie I’ve chosen a double A – Agatha Christie – An Autobiography.

I finished reading it at the end of December. I can’t remember exactly when I began reading it. I think it was the end of May because in a Sunday Salon post then I wrote that I was thinking about starting it. I read short sections of it most days since I started it and felt quite sad when I came to the end. It was like having a daily chat with Agatha.

 

It took her fifteen years to write it. She stopped in 1965 when she was 75 because she thought that it was the ‘right moment to stop’. It seems right that a book that took her so long to write should take me a long time to read. As well as being a record of her life as she remembered it and wanted to relate it, it’s also full of  her thoughts on life and writing. I’ve written about her Autobiography in a few posts as I was reading it:

It struck me as I was reading her Autobiography that  it’s not very easy to work out the dates of many of the events she described. It follows on chronologically but is so interspersed with her thoughts and reflections that I forgot the date, or she hadn’t mentioned it. She wrote about her childhood, teenage years, friends and family, and her marriage to Archibald Christie; but although she wrote about their divorce she didn’t write about her disappearance in 1926. She wrote about her travels around the world, the two world wars, her interest and involvement with archaeology and her marriage to Max Mallowan.

Towards the end of the book she wrote that she had decided not to tidy up her Autobiography too much:

Nothing is more wearying than going over things you have written and trying to arrange them in proper sequence or turn them the other way around. I am perhaps talking to myself – a thing one is apt to do when one is a writer. (page 455)

What she remembered most were things that were most vivid and it was places that remained most clearly in her memory. She never had a good memory for people, apart from her own dear friends:

A sudden thrill of pleasure comes into my mind – a tree, a hill, a white house tucked away somewhere by a canal, the shape of a hill. Sometimes I have to think for a moment to remember where and when. Then the picture comes clearly, and I know. (page 416)

She wrote quite a lot about her writing methods, writing criticism, hearing your own voice, economy in wording, writing detective stories, adapting plays and writing them herself, the right length for a detective story (50,000 words), writing two novels at once, writing books set in historical periods and the joy of creation. The one book that satisfied her completely is not one of her detective books but one she wrote under the name of Mary Westmacott – Absent in Spring – and she wrote it in three days flat (pages 516 -7).

She ended the book with these words:

A child says ‘Thank God for my good dinner’.

What can I say at seventy-five? ‘Thank God for my good life, and for all the love that has been given to me.’ (page 551)

Louisa May Alcott: Little Women

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I had forgotten that Little Women is such a moral tale. In fact, I doubt that when I first read it years ago I ever thought of it as a moral tale at all, but the emphasis on the characters of the four sisters  with their individual flaws and efforts to overcome them was the dominant theme that struck me whilst I was reading the book this time.

I loved Little Women when I first read it and re-read it several times. It remains in my memory as one of my favourite childhood books. But reading again now it seems dated (although I did like reading what the girls wore – gloves were essential wear for a party!) and rather pious. I’m also reading Eden’s Outcasts: the story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, so I flipped forward in that book to see what John Matteson had to say about Little Women and Louisa May’s thoughts on writing her book. She wrote Little Women after Thomas Niles, a partner in the publishing firm of Roberts Brothers had asked her to write a book for girls. She wasn’t too keen but agreed to do so even though she said that:

I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters. (Quoted in Eden’s Outcasts page 332.)

She consulted her mother and sisters and with their consent wrote the book based around the Alcott girls’ lives.

Little Women is about the four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, and their mother – ‘Marmee’. Their father is absent for most of the book, working as a chaplain in the army,during the American Civil War.  The first part of the book is a series of scenes of the March family life illustrating each sister’s burden of character flaws, and their attempts to overcome them. Meg is vain and materialistic, Jo has a temper and flies into great rages, Beth is painfully timid and shy and Amy is selfish. This section of the book is loosely based on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, as some of the chapter headings indicate – for example, Playing Pilgrims, Amy’s Valley of Humiliation, Jo Meets Apollyon and Meg Goes to Vanity Fair.

The second part of the book centres on Jo (based on Louisa herself), her writing and her reluctance to grow up. Again this hadn’t struck me when I read as a child (I can’t remember how old I was); I’d thought of her as a tomboy character. She says to Meg, who at 17 is a year older and falling in love:

Don’t try to make me grow up before my time, Meg: it’s hard enough to have you change all of a sudden; let me be a little girl as long as I can. (page 162 of my copy of Little Women)

Laurie, who lives next door with his grandfather becomes a friend to all the girls, but especially to Jo. The family go through a number of dramas, both small and large, culminating in Beth catching scarlet fever after visiting the poor Hummel family, whilst Marmee is in Washington staying with Mr March who was very ill in hospital. Mr March is mostly absent from the book, and even when he does come home there is very little mention of him; he is a man of few words. He discovers that his ‘little women’ have changed for the better whilst he has been away, despite it being a rough road for his little pilgrims to travel:

“But you have got on very bravely; and I think the burdens are in a fair way to tumble off very soon,” said Mr March, looking with fatherly satisfaction at the four young faces gathered him. (page 232)

Little Women ends with Meg’s engagement to John Brooks, Laurie’s tutor. The story continues in Good Wives,which I have as a separate book, but it was originally published as volume 2 of Little Women. These two books were followed by Little Men, the story of Jo and her husband Professor Bhaer at Plumfield school, and Jo’s Boys, continuing the lives of the family and the boys ten years later.

Even though it is a sentimental tale, which it wasn’t in my memory, I did enjoy the experience of re-reading Little Women – some of the magic was still there. And I think I’ll re-read the other books soon as well.

Frozen Moment by Camilla Ceder

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It was a pleasure to read Frozen Moment, Camilla Ceder’s début novel, a police procedural set in Sweden. It is centred on the characters as much as on the plot. Camilla Ceder has studied social science and psychotherapy and as well as writing works in counselling and social work and this comes out quite strongly in this book.

Publishers’ blurb:

One cold morning, in the wind-lashed Swedish countryside, a man’s body is found in an isolated garage.  The victim has been shot in the head and run over repeatedly by a car. Inspector Christian Tell, a world-weary detective with a chequered past, is called to the scene. But there are few clues to go by, and no one seems to be telling the truth.

Then, a second brutal murder. The method is the same, but this victim has no apparent connection with the first. Tell’s team is baffled.

Seja, a reporter and witness, thinks a long-unsolved mystery may hold the key to the killings. Tell is drawn to Seja, but her presences at the crime scene doesn’t add up, and a relationship could jeopardise everything. For the inquiry to succeed, the community must yield the dark secrets of the past…

My view:

I liked this book straight away from the opening scenes describing how Ake Melkersson woke up and got ready for his last day at work and the shock he had on finding the dead man:

He’s only half a man, thought Ake Melkersson, a hysterical, terrified giggle rising in his chest. He’s flat, half of him smeared over the gravel. He thought back to the cartoons of his childhood, in which characters were always getting run over by steamrollers, ending up as flat as pancakes. There was never any blood in the cartoons, but there was blood here, collected in a hollow in the gravel around the man’s head, like a gory halo. (page 5)

After that it seemed to stall for a while and I was beginning to wonder if the plot would ever get going. A few chapters further on and I was relieved to find that it did. At times I felt the descriptions of the characters, their thoughts and motives were too detailed and I wanted the action to speed up, but by the end of the book I was converted to Ceder’s style.  There is a strong sense of place – the atmosphere of a bleak, and cold Scandinavian winter is well drawn.

I hope Ceder writes more books about Inspector Tell and his team, even if he is yet another detective who likes to work on his own, who is lonely and introspective, who can’t sleep well, smokes and likes a whisky or two …

Teaser Tuesday

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event hosted by MizB where you share ‘teasers’. I’ve adapted it a bit to include more information about the book and longer teasers.

Yesterday I finished reading Where Three Roads Meet by Salley Vickers. I borrowed it from the library simply because I’ve enjoyed other books by Salley Vickers –  in particular Miss Garnet’s Angel and Mr Golightly’s Holiday.

Where Three Roads Meet is different, but just as good. It’s one of the Canongate Myths series, modern versions of myths told by a number of different authors. I’ve read others in the series – A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong, Weight by Jeanette Winterson (the myth of Atlas and Heracles) and The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood (the myth of Penelope and Odysseus).

It’s the Oedipus myth as told to Sigmund Freud during his last years when he was suffering from cancer of the mouth. Under the influence of morphine he is visited by Tiresias, a blind prophet of Thebes who tells him his version of the Oedipus story. In between telling the story, Freud and Tiresias discuss language and the origins of words. The point where the three roads meet is the place Oedipus and his father had their tragic meeting, setting in motion the sequence of events that led to his downfall and to the fulfilment of the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother.

In Tiresias’s version Freud’s interpretation wasn’t quite right:

Because, if I may say so, here in all the world was the one person you could safely say didn’t have the complex you dreamed up for him. He was Oedipus, plain Oedipus. But not simple. What was complex about him was not that he wanted to sleep with his mother (as she herself said, that impulse is not so uncommon) nor even that he killed a man who had once threatened his life. Tit for tat, some might say. What was so remarkable was that his own safekeeping was usurped by the need to know what he needed not to know. (page 169)

This is a book with multiple layers, not a simple book. Although it’s easy enough to read it straight through, it is complex, with many ideas about life and death, and truth and ambiguity to ponder. Even if you know the story of Oedipus it seems fresh and new in this version. I found the details of the operations Freud had, their effect upon him and the terrible pain he suffered was quite shocking. All in all, a satisfying, entertaining and challenging book.

Missing Link by Joyce Holms: Book Review

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

A few weeks ago I quoted a short extract from Missing Link by Joyce Holms in a Tuesday Teaser post. This book is the 9th in the Fizz and Buchanan series, but it does stand well on its own and I had no difficulty in sorting out the relationship between the two main characters – Fizz Fitzpatrick and Tam Buchanan.

Fizz and Buchanan are an interesting pair. Fizz  is a lawyer, working for Buchanan and Stewart and Tam has recently left the law firm to work as an advocate.  Mrs Sullivan asks Fizz for help to prove that she is the person who killed Amanda Montrose, despite the fact that Terence Lamb has been convicted of the murder. Fizz immediately thinks that Tam is the person to investigate, even though she doubts Mrs Sullivan’s story:

Daft as the whole story line appeared on the surface, there was something about the old lady’s matter-of-fact delivery that precluded too confident a rebuttal. She was delusional of course, there could not be the slightest doubt about that. Sane, mature and reasonably intelligent people, such as Mrs Sullivan obviously was, simply did not bash someone with a hammer. Not hard enough to kill them. … So Mrs Sullivan was probably fantasising about that at least, if not the whole damn incident. All the same she had Fizz well hooked and willing to hear the rest of her crazy story, if only for the pleasure of relating it to Buchanan at a later date. (page 23)

It had me well hooked too.

I liked the relationship between Fizz and Tam, colleagues, like brother and sister, but may be more than that? And Fizz certainly lives up to her name, a real live wire. The characters are well-drawn, even the lesser ones like Justin, the decorator who can cook delicious meals. Just how reliable is Mrs Sullivan? She seems physically incapable of  killing anyone with a hammer and then dragging  the body and pushing it over a sheer drop into a ravine below. But why when she appears to be gentle, motherly and sincere would she want to confess to a murder she hadn’t committed?

This is a well- paced novel, full of twists and turns and plenty of tension. The plot is well thought out and had me guessing nearly all the way to the end, in fact the whole answer took me by surprise. This is a book I thoroughly enjoyed from beginning to end.

Two Moons by Jennifer Johnston: A Very Short Book Review

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

There’s a touch of magic about Two Moons by Jennifer Johnston and I think it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Set in Dublin it’s the story of three women. Mimi and her daughter Grace live in a house overlooking Dublin Bay. Grace, an actress, is absorbed in rehearsals for Hamlet in which she is playing Gertrude, and Mimi, her elderly mother is similarly absorbed in talking to an angel, Bonifacio, who is invisible to everyone except Mimi. Their lives are disrupted by the arrival of Grace’s daughter, Polly who arrives to stay for a few days bringing with her, Paul, her new boyfriend.

Two Moons is a warm and intimate novel, portraying the problems of falling in love at all ages and the difficulties of  growing old and coming to terms with the disappointments of the past with great sensitivity. I especially liked Jennifer Johnston’s style – delicate and light yet at the same time there is a great depth of meaning. The characters are all real and their emotions are so beautifully expressed.

I read it as slowly as possible to savour the experience and I shall certainly re-read it. But I wish I could read it again as though it were for the first time.