Category: Book Reviews

White Noise by Don DeLillo

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

bookawardsdraft2smallWhite Noise, which won the National Book Award in 1985 for Fiction, fits into the Book Awards Reading Challenge II. It’s about Jack Gladney’s family following a year in their lives from his point of view. It’s in three parts – not a lot happens in part one “Waves and Radiation”, which mainly introduces the characters, Jack the head of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill, his wife Babette, the different children from their various marriages and Murray his colleague.  TV programmes seem to be on constantly in the background and Jack and Babette are obsessed by the fear of death, both wanting to die first, as though they have a choice. There is more action in part two,  “The Airborne Toxic Event” when Jack and his family evacuate their house following a chemical spill, plunging Jack into pondering the nature of death. Part three focuses yet again on death, the fear of death and the afterlife, mixed up with Jack’s search for “Mr Gray”, the man who supplied Babette with Dylar, the drug that supposedly removes the fear of death.

white-noise-1I alternated in reading between thinking I didn’t want to finish this book and wanting to finish it. After tedious passages when my mind wandered on to what what we were going to have for dinner, and other more interesting topics, it grabbed my attention and I found myself reading to the end, but it’s too long and too rambling for my liking.

I didn’t make many notes whilst reading but those I did jot down related to the seemingly trivial nature of much of the family’s preoccupations, their trips to the supermarket, their reaction to various crises, the insecurity and precarious nature of life, the search for cures, and above all the fear of death.

Jack discusses these subjects with everyone – his wife and children, Murray and Winnie, the eccentric research neurochemist at the College. Winnie thinks

…  it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need? Doesn’t it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of  a final line, a border or a limit.

I thought the third part of the book changed the tone again, with Jack’s descent into a kind of madness as he plans to kill “Mr Gray”. For me this was almost a dreamlike, or rather a nightmarish, scene and seemed too contrived. Jack’s evasion of reality and truth runs throughout the book and his conversation with the nun in the final section about belief and the afterlife highlights this – the nuns’ “dedication is a pretense”, because “someone must appear to believe” or the “world would collapse”.

All in all, I was not too engaged with White Noise, although it does contain some interesting ideas and I’m not sure I would read any other books by DeLillo. Maybe postmodern books are just not my cup of tea.

The Hidden by Tobias Hill

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

lter_small_transparent The Hidden came to me from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Programme. Tobias Hill is a new author to me, but he’s written three other novels, a collection of short stories, a book for children and three collections of poetry.the-hidden

The Hidden is a book about obsession, and secrets, sombre in tone and full of ominous signs of things not being right, of not being what they seem. I enjoyed it, although at times I got a bit lost in the dialogue trying to follow who was speaking and had to backtrack and with the third person narrative I was unsure sometimes who the ‘he’ was. That said, it was a gripping tale of what happens to Ben Mercer.  Ben, emotionally vulnerable after his divorce, leaves Oxford for Greece where he joined a group of archaeologists on a dig in Sparta. The group is made up of five people, including a fellow academic from Oxford, and two beautiful young women. Dazzled by their charisma he is desperate to be accepted as part of their group, to be included, to take part in the strange games they play. But it wasn’t just a game.

It’s also about the history of Sparta. Interspersed in the narrative are Ben’s “Notes Towards a Thesis” and it was in these notes that I found clues about the nature of the group. In ancient Sparta the Crypteia meant “The Secret Matter” or “The Hidden” – young men who were “an instrument of subterfuge and terror”. 

I liked the contrasts in this book, the vivid descriptions of places. Here is an example where Ben is remembering Oxford:

The fog going out through the streets to the rivers, the Thames and the Cherwell, the Evenlode and the Ock. The city always secretive and all the more so at that hour, as it slept, its acres full of unseen courts and cloisters, its lodgings and stairs full of lives, waiting, pending morning.

And again describing Athens:

He recognised the lay of the land, the hills and saddle that ran between them. He knew the history of the ruins on each, the palaces and shrines and graves built one atop the other, like corals, the living on the dead. But the green of the slopes in the sunlight, and the flash of spring flowers; and beyond the ziggurat-steps of the Menelaion, the clear air across the valley, and the city below, and the mountains beyond the city, white capped, momentous … it was spectacular.

A novel about secrets, hidden things that maybe Ben should have left alone. The characters are all difficult to like, maybe because I couldn’t get a clear picture of some of them in my mind. Ben is really rather pathetic and needy and because of that he is easily manipulated. I read the chilling events at the end of this book with increasing unease and a feeling of desolation. It was both gripping and horrific.

Not Every Book’s a Winner

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

death-of-a-gossipI’ve read a lot of good books recently so I shouldn’t really be surprised to read one that’s not so good but I was a little disappointed with the last book I’ve read – Death of a Gossip by M C Beaton. I hadn’t read anything before by M C Beaton but I kept seeing her books on display at my local library. The New York Times Book Review quote  on the back cover made this book sound ok: “An enchanting series … M C Beaton has a foolproof plot for the village mystery”, so I thought I’d try it.

This is the first in her Hamish Macbeth Murder Mystery series and sadly it’s going to be the only one I’ll read. Despite the interesting quotes at the start of each chapter it’s a bit lightweight. The story is told mainly from one character’s perspective and that is the rather silly 19 year old secretary, Alice, who along with seven other people has enrolled in a fishing class at John and Heather Cartwright’s Lochdubh School of Casting: Salmon and Trout Fishing, staying at Lochdubh Hotel a remote village in the Scottish Highlands. The other “students” include a rich American couple, a “galloping major”, a twelve year old boy and a society widow, Lady Jane Winter. Hamish is the local bobby, apparently slow-witted and oafish, ambling aimlessly round the village.

Lady Jane is a most unpleasant woman who appears to know secrets that all the others would prefer to remain secret. So it is no surprise to find out that she is a gossip columnist and when, as the book title indicates, her strangled body is fished out of the river there is no shortage of suspects. Despite help from detectives from Strathbane CID it is Hamish who solves the case.

There was too much about the techniques of fishing for my my liking. I thought the characters were really just stereotypes, the descriptions of what everyone was wearing became quite tedious and the plot was rather simple. But it is a very quick read when you don’t want anything too challenging.

There is a quote on the inside of the front cover from Anne Robinson and I wondered if this  really was from the icy, sarcastic  presenter of the Weakest Link. It seemed too fulsome:

Sharp, witty, hugely intelligent, unfailingly entertaining, delightfully intolerant and oh so magnificantly non-pc.

Maybe the words “delightfully intolerant” and “magnificantly non-pc” are from the Anne Robinson who upset me by wanting to put the Welsh into Room 101! She’s not been my favourite ever since then, even though I used to like her Saturday morning radio show in the early 1990s.

Still a Favourite

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

Rebecca001

Rebecca begins with a dream:

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

That first line has never failed to delight me and that dream sets the tone for the book. I’ve read it many times and each time I fall under its spell. Identity is a recurrent theme, just who was Rebecca, what was she really like and what lead to her death. I still want to know the narrator’s name and her awe of Rebecca still exasperates me. Daphne du Maurier described the book to her publisher as:

a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower … Pyschological and rather macabre.

Dreaming is another theme. The new Mrs de Winter is in awe of Rebecca, Maxim’s first wife, and has nightmares about her. She daydreams, imagining what Rebecca was like, how beautiful she was, how much Maxim and everyone else must have loved her and how capable and talented she was. She pictures what she thinks life was like for the family in the past and imagines what will happen in the future. She builds up false pictures in her mind and lacks the courage to demand the truth.

Then of course there is the house, Manderley:

A thing of grace and beauty, exquisite and faultless, lovelier even than I had ever dreamed, built in its hollow of smooth grassland and mossy lawns, the terraces sloping to the gardens, and the gardens to the sea. (page 73)

There is a nightmarish quality to the house, approached down with a dark and twisting drive, that turns and twists like

“a serpent … very silent, very still … like an enchanted ribbon through the dark and silent woods.

Then coming out of the dark woods the drive is edged on either side by

a wall of colour, blood-red, reaching far above our heads. We were among the rhododendrons. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddeness of their discovery. The woods had not prepared me for them. they startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic, unlike any rhododendron plant I had seen before. (pages 71 and 72)

The “slaughterous red”  symbolises blood and death. The rhododendrons intrude into the house, not only are they growing outside the morning room “blood-red and luscious”, making the room glow with their colour, but they are also filling the room – on the mantlepiece, on the writing desk and floating in a bowl on a table. There are more shocks lying in wait for the new Mrs de Winter, a shy and socially awkward young woman, married to a man twice her age, haunted by Rebecca and as she struggles to fit in with the social class, her confidence is continually undermined by her own insecurity and the hostile and resentful presence of the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, whose eyes were “dark and sombre” in her “white skull’s face”, “malevolent” and “full of hatred”.

A novel where secrets are only just  supressed, like a ticking bomb waiting to explode revealing the devastating truth.

Fire in the Blood

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

I bought Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky ages ago, full of enthusiasm to read it at once. I read a few pages and then for some unknown reason left it lying around unread. A few weeks ago I borrowed Fire in the Blood from my local library and once I started to read it I just had to finish it. Now I’ll have to read Suite Francaise as soon as possible.

Irène Némirovsky was born in Russia in 1903 and fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a best selling novelist. She moved from Paris just before the German occupation in 1940 and went to live in the small village of Issy-l’Eveque (in German occupied territory). She was arrested in 1942 and deported to Auschwitz where she died in August 1942.

Fire in the Blood is set in a small village based on Issy-l’Eveque between the two world wars. The narrator is Silvio looking back on his life and gradually secrets that have long been hidden rise to the surface, disrupting the lives of the small community. The people are insular, concerned only with their own lives, distrusting their neighbours. All Silvio wants now is a quiet life, but he cannot avoid being drawn into helping Colette, his cousin Helene’ s daughter, when her husband Jean is found drowned in the mill stream.

Although only a short book (153 pages) it is an intense story of life and death, love and burning passion. It’s about families and their relationships – husbands and wives, young women married to old men,  lovers, mothers, daughters and stepdaughters. Silvio in his old age feels rejected by life and lonely. In his youth he had travelled the world, seeking his fortune, propelled by the fire in his blood.  Now his passions are extinguished and he no longer knows who he is. He remembers :

When you’re twenty love is like a fever, it makes you almost delirious. When it’s over you can hardly remember how it happened … Fire in the blood, how quickly it burns itself out. Faced with this blaze of dreams and desires, I felt so old, so cold, so wise. (page 45)

The flesh is easy to satisfy. It’s the heart that is insatiable, the heart that needs to love, to despair, to burn with any kind of fire … That was what we wanted. To burn, to be consumed, to devour our days just as fire devours the forest. (page 152)

The characters are drawn with simplicity and detachment, but this is deceptive as there are layers upon layers and there is a brooding, silent and haunting atmosphere, almost menacing as the truth emerges. Added to this is the writing itself full of rich descriptive passages of the land and the people. It is indeed a gem of a book.

The End of Summer by Rosamunde Pilcher

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

end of summerI don’t often listen to audiobooks but a car journey up to Scotland seemed the ideal time to do so – reading in the car just makes me feel queasy. Rosamunde Pilcher’s The End of Summer read by Geraldine James was entertaining enough to fill in three hours of the journey. It’s easy listening, and though the ending was predictable I did enjoy it.

After years living in America, Jane Marsh is summoned back to Scotland by her grandmother to stay at her beloved Elvie, the remote and beautiful family estate. There she is reunited with her dashing and handsome cousin Sinclair, whom she had idolised as a child. She had dreamed of marrying Sinclair but meeting him again she finds he is not as she remembered and she wonders whether he can be trusted. In contrast to Sinclair is David Stewart, the dependable and efficient family lawyer.

This is a gentle story, although there is one dramatic episode towards the end of the book. The most enjoyable parts for me were the descriptions of Elvie, the loch and the surrounding landscape and Geraldine James’s reading of the story.