Category: Book Reviews

When the Lights Went Out by Andy Beckett: Book Review

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

I saw When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies by Andy Beckett on LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Programme and the publishers’ description made me think maybe it would be interesting:

Over five years in the making, this book is not an academic history but something for the general reader, written with the vividness of a novel or the best works of American New Journalism. No such treatment of the seventies has been previously attempted. Hopefully the book will bring the decade back to life in its all its drama and complexity.

And it did bring that decade back to life. It’s a very detailed book, using original material such as diaries, letters, personal memoirs as well as books written about the period. I particularly liked the personal, face-to-face interviews with some of the key figures such as Ted Heath,  and his assessments of politicians such as this one of Margaret Thatcher in 1975 when she was a contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party:

 She was a fast learner, a holder of fierce convictions and a highly distinctive speaker and political presence. (page 261)

Margaret Thatcher was, essentially not easy to be around: ‘Thatcher was always tiresome,’ remembers the political journalist Michael White who spent a lot of time with her in the seventies. ‘There was no romance, no self-analysis, no self-consciously epic qaulity like you would have got with Churchill. (page 262)

When Beckett describes the strikes of the decade, and there were so many, the changes in the balance of power, the three-day week and the Winter of Discontent, I was back there living it all over again. My only criticism is a personal one – when he writes about the economic and financial situations with all the statistics he quotes I was a bit bored and have to admit that I skim read those sections. It was the personalities, the personal touches and the cultural and social scenes that I liked – for example during his interview with Denis Healey, who was Harold Wilson’s Chancellor of the Exchequer in the seventies Healey talked about Wilson’s lack of ambition:

‘In his second term he told many people that he planned only to stay a few months. He told me in the lavatory at No. 10 just before a Cabinet meeting.’ Healey giggled, characteristically delighting in the black comedy. Then, equally characteristically, he looked out of the window of his Sussex study and kicked Wilson’s reputation in the shins. ‘I thought, “About bloody time!” He was a terrible prime minister, actually.’ (page 162)

 Andy Beckett is a journalist and this book is very readable. As well as the personalities I also liked his descriptions of places, comparing how they are today with how they were in the seventies and his comparisons of the crises that faced Britain then with those facing us today:

At the least, a very seventies dread has seeped back into how people in Britain and other rich countries see the world. Economic crises, floods, food shortages, terrorism, the destruction of the environment: these spectres, so looming in the seventies did not go away during the eighties and nineties; yet they faded – they were often quite easy to forget about. Now that they have returned to haunt newspaper front pages almost daily, it is possible to wonder how many of Britain’s seventies problems were ever really solved. (page 522)

Peril at End House by Agatha Christie: Book Review

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

peril-at-end-house

Peril at End House by Agatha Christie was first published in 1932.  For once I wasn’t totally bemused and I was doing well, following the clues, or so I thought because I did solve some of the puzzles before Poirot revealed the culprit. But I hadn’t got the final solution!

Poirot is on holiday in Cornwall and boasting of his modesty to Captain Hastings, who is the narrator of this story. In his own words he is happy to be in retirement:

To sit in the sun – what could be more charming? To step from your pinnacle at the zenith of your fame – what could be a grander gesture? They say of me: “That is Hercule Poirot! – The great – the unique! – There was never any one like him, there never will be!” Eh bien – I am satisfied. I ask no more. I am modest.

But when he meets Nick Buckley who tells of her “accidental brushes with death” he just cannot resist investigating who is her would-be killer. Nick treats it all as a joke but Poirot is convinced that she is in grave danger. Indeed it seems as though he is right, especially when her cousin Maggie, wearing Nick’s shawl is shot.

But why would someone want to kill Nick? She lives at End House, badly in need of repair and “mortgaged up to the hilt”. Could it be Ellen, the housekeeper, or one of her friends – the languid, affected and mysterious Frederica known as Freddie, or her cousin Charles, who will inherit the house if she dies. Or maybe it’s the Australian couple renting the lodge house from Nick, who knew her father when he was in Australia. And what is the significance of the secret panel in the house – if it really exists?

There are plenty of twist and turns as usual with an Agatha Christie plot and not everyone is who they seem to be – identity plays a large role in this complicated mystery. I enjoyed it very much, not least because of Captain Hasting’s comments on Poirot’s outrageous vanity, such as this one:

His fame and reputation meant nothing to her – she was of the generation that knows only the great names of the immediate moment. … He was to her only a rather comic elderly foreigner with an amusingly melodramatic mind.

And this attitude baffled Poirot. To begin with, his vanity suffered. It was his constant dictum that all the world knew Hercule Poirot. Here was someone who did not. Very good for him, I could not but feel – but not precisely helpful to the object in view!

agatha_christie_rcHave a look at the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge Carnival for more posts on her books.

Beachcombing by Maggie Dana: Book Review

Published on by Margaret

beachcombingRecently, Maggie Dana kindly sent me a copy of her book  Beachcombing which  is to be published this week, on June 5.  It’s the story of Jill who is fifty-two, divorced and living alone in a beach cottage in Connecticut. On a visit to her friend, Sophie in England where they grew up, she meets Colin, a boyfriend from their teenage years. From the moment she fell down the stairs  and fainted at his feet I could see what was coming.

Of course, Jill falls in love with Colin, who thirty-five years later is not the boy she thought he was.  She thinks he’s going to marry her and come to live with her leaving his partner, Shelby, and the prosperous little hotel they run in the Cotswolds. And then, everything  goes wrong! She has to work her way through heartbreak, work and financial problems, and innumerable car problems. At times she had fallen out with both of her best friends. The only problem free relationships she has are those with her two grown up sons.

Jill has a phobia about middle aged men leaving their wives for younger women and that colours her relationships so much so that she cannot see what is so obvious to everyone else. Despite having friends she is lonely and mistakes lust for love. I began to despair that she would ever come to her senses.  I got to the point where I wondered what could possibly go wrong next and even at the end when things seem about to get better I wasn’t convinced they would.

The things I liked about Beachcombing were the way the characters are delineated (Jill is actually an amalgamation of a few women I’ve known) and the descriptions of the locations:

I race across my patio and head for the path between the dunes that separate my backyard from the beach. The tide’s coming in. I jump a line of seaweed and shells and plunge into the waves. The cold takes my breath away. Ducking under I swim a few strokes, then tread water and watch windsurfers bounce like butterflies across the metallic blue chop. In the distance, a freighter ploughs its way toward New York, and just beyond the lighthouse a small fishing boat chugs into the harbour.

I’ve lived on the beach for sixteen years and this view still gives me goosebumps. It validates my life. It keeps me from knuckling under when cranky clients, clogged sinks, and leaky roofs gang up on me at the same time.

But I’d have liked it more if it wasn’t written in the first person present tense.  It’s a personal thing – I’m never too keen on that. Instead of adding to the drama I found that the continual crises Jill encountered actually lessened their impact; once one had passed it had gone, in a series of “nows”. I had the same problem reading The Time Traveler’s Wife.

The back cover describes Beachcombing as

… a coming-of-middle-age story about girl friends when you’re no longer a girl, and growing up when you’re already grown up, and the price you’re willing to pay for the love of your life.

I think that is a good summary. I wondered what the title – Beachcombing – implies. It occurred to me that the sea casts up a lot of rubbish on the beach and maybe that symbolises the rubbish that came into Jill’s life. It can also leave treasures. Jill’s problem was that she had difficulty in distinguishing  the rubbish from the treasures.

Doctored Evidence by Donna Leon: Book Review

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

doctored-evidenceDoctored Evidence is the first book by Donna Leon that I’ve read. Maybe I should have started with the first Commissario Brunetti book, Death at La Fenice, because I felt as though I’d walked into a room where everyone else knew each other and I didn’t.

It started off well with the murder of the most unlikeable character Maria Battestini. At first Flori, her Romanian maid is suspected of her murder but it is clear from Signora Gismondi’s evidence that the maid could not have had time to kill the old woman. What follows is the investigation of the murder by Commisario Brunetti aided by Signorina Elettra and Inspector Vianello.

It was going well and then I began to get a bit bored as it became bogged with lots of possiblities for who killed Battestini. At the end when the murderer was revealed I only had a vague impression of the character and had to go back to read various scenes again. For me the minor characters were all a bit vague, with the exception of Signora Gismondi who came across very clearly. I would have liked more about her.

I liked Brunetti; he seems to be a maverick character. I think a Commissario is in charge of a police station or division or something similar, but at one point I wondered if his boss was Signora Elettra, only to discover that she works for Brunetti’s boss Vice-Questore Patta. Maybe this would all be clearer to me if I began with the first Brunetti book.

I liked the scenes with Brunetti’s family, his conversations with his wife and the descriptions of their meals. At one point when he tells his wife he won’t be home for a meal she replies “Wonderful”, because she can read while she eats. I also liked the way their discussion about the Seven Deadly Sins influences how he tries to work out the motive behind the murder and that he picks the wrong sin. The scenes with Lieutenant Scarpa, a most unlikeable character, where his antagonism towards Brunetti and the way Brunetti eventually deals with him are among the most vivid in the book.

In a way I was a bit disappointed with Doctored Evidence but overall I liked it enough to look for another book by Donna Leon.

This is the 17th library book I’ve read this year contributing to the Support Your Local Library Reading Challenge 2009.

A Lost Lady by Willa Cather: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

a-lost-ladyI was very impressed with A Lost Lady by Willa Cather and now I want to read more of her books. I read it through in one sitting, which is most unusual for me, but having started it I just had to finish it. Not that there’s any mystery to solve, but just because I was enjoying the story, the writing and the scenes it conjured up in my mind.

A Lost Lady is about Mrs Forrester, a beautiful woman married to an older man, an elderly railroad pioneer living in a house on a hill at Sweet Water in the Nebraska plains along the Burlington railroad. She’s a well-loved, beautiful “lady-like” woman and the house, well known for Mrs Forrester’s hospitality and welcome, is in an idyllic setting. The story is told mainly through the eyes of Judge Pommeroy’s nephew, Niel Herbert, aged 12 at the beginning of the book.

There is an episode near the beginning of the book that completely shocked me, involving boys and a woodpecker. Even the boys watching who were not especially sensitive were “indignant and uncomfortable, not knowing what to do.”  This episode signals the end of an idyllic life style. Captain Forrester looks back with nostalgia at his early days in the West, a time when

One day was like another, and all were glorious: good hunting, plenty of antelope and buffalo, boundless sunny sky, boundless plains of waving grass, long fresh water lagoons yellow with lagoon flowers, where the bison in their periodic migrations stopped to drink and bathe and wallow. “An ideal life for a young man,” the Captain pronounced. (page 48)

His working life was ended by a railroad accident, and it’s now a time when life is changing. He is aging and helpless, and with the failure of the bank in Denver his dreams have ended. Mrs Forrester who adapts to change also symbolises the end of a past age. Niel has idolised her but as she begins to drink and takes a lover he is shattered, disllusioned:

In that instant between stooping to the window-sill and rising, he had lost one of the most beautiful things in his life. Before the dew dried, the morning had been wrecked for him; and all subsequent mornings, he told himself bitterly. This day saw the end of that admiration and loyalty that had been like a bloom on his esixtence. He could never recapture it. It was gone, like the morning freshness of the flowers. (pages 83-4)

Mrs Forrester is indeed “lost”, no longer the woman she was, not only “lost” to Niel, but “lost” to the values of the times. Other themes explored in A Lost Lady are the rise of materialism, a longing for the past seen as a golden age, the spoiling of the countryside in the name of progress and the changing role of women in society. There is also an emphasis on the need to adapt and to accept the possiblity of loss. I can see some similarities to Madame Bovary, in Mrs Forrester’s adultery (the book has been called “the Madame Bovary of the American frontier”), but there aren’t many similarities between the two woman other than that. Madame Bovary reads romantic fiction, is dissatified with her husband and commits suicide, whereas Mrs Forrester carries on with her life, is practical and does not give in to despair.

A Lost Lady is a complex novel, written in 1922 and published in 1923, and although it deals with the passing of the old order it still seems relevant today. Perhaps every age is the end of one period and the start of another.

The Spare Room by Helen Garner: A Short Book Review

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

It was with a sigh of relief that I read the last page of The Spare Room by Helen Garner. I’d read about this book and when it was offered on LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Programme I ticked the box, never thinking I would “snag” it, but I did. I was hesitant about reading it, because it sounded a tough subject – for three weeks Helen’s friend Nicola who is suffering from cancer, stays with her whilst she undergoes alternative therapy. Nicola refuses to accept that she is dying and Helen struggles to cope with the situation.

It’s not a book that I would say I enjoyed. It is a difficult book to read, not because of the style of writing, which is fluent, but because of the agonising descriptions of Nicola’s condition and the anguish and anger that hits Helen. But I’m glad I read it; it was nowhere nearly as bad as I imagined it would be and I will look out for more books by Helen Garner.