Category: Fiction

I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

I read I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill for the 1970 Club hosted by Simon and Karen.

Description from Amazon UK for the Mass Market paperback edition published in 2014:

‘Some people are coming here today, now you will have a companion.’

But young Edmund Hooper doesn’t want anyone else in Warings, the rambling Victorian house he shares with his widowed father. Nevertheless Charles Kingshaw and his mother are soon installed and Edmund sets about persecuting his fearful new playmate.

From the dusty back rooms of Warings through the gloomy labyrinth of Hang Wood to the very top of Leydell Castle, Edmund pursues Charles, the balance of power slipping back and forth between bully and victim. With their parents oblivious, the situation speeds towards a crisis…

Darkly claustrophobic and morally ambiguous, Susan Hill weaves a classic tale of cruelty, power, and the dangerous games we play as children.

It is a depressing, tragic, heart-rending story about 11 year-old Charles Kingshaw’s misery and torture when he and his mother Helena, went to live at Warings, the home of Joseph Hooper and his bully of a son, Edmund, also aged 11. It’s well written, with well defined characters and I could easily visualise the setting, but I can’t say I enjoyed it. There is that awful sense of foreboding all the way through.

I really disliked Edmund who took great delight in terrorising Charles. As for the parents I was shocked at their behaviour and attitudes. Mrs Kingshaw is oblivious to what is going on between the boys and how much Charles fears Edmund. Charles is a sensitive boy, but smart and resourceful. He decides to run away, but Edmund follows him into Hang Wood and they lose their way. Charles can cope, but Edmund falls to pieces, cries like a baby, and injures himself falling into a stream. However, after the adults rescue them and they return to Warings Charles succumbs again to Edmund’s bullying, dominated by his cruelty. Things come to a climax when they all visit a ruined castle, where Charles is really the ‘King of the Castle’ and Edmund falls off a high wall. There is no way that all will end well. It reminded me of that sense of impending tragedy in The Lord of the Flies. It’s disturbing, dark and violent. The ending was inevitable and totally tragic.

I’ve had this book for a long time and can’t remember when or where I bought it, nor why I haven’t read it before now. My copy is a secondhand hardback published by Longman in 1970. The Introduction clarifies that Susan Hill wrote the book for adults. It’s a chilling novel that explores the extremes of childhood cruelty.

The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Ruth Rendell, Lady Rendell of Babergh, also known as Barbara Vine, who died aged 85 in 2015, was a literary phenomenon. From 1964, when Inspector Reginald Wexford first appeared in From Doon With Death, she wrote more than sixty novels, including police procedurals, standalone and psychological mysteries plus numerous books of short stories. Many of them were adapted for television or made into feature films.

The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell, is one of my TBRs, a book that’s been sitting on my bookshelves since 2016. It’s one of her later novels, a stand-alone book, first published in 2014, a year before her death.

Description from Amazon UK

Beneath the green meadows of Loughton, Essex, a dark network of tunnels has been dug. A group of children discover them. They play there. It becomes their place.

Seventy years on, the world has changed. Developers have altered the rural landscape. Friends from a half-remembered world have married, died, grown sick, moved – or disappeared.

Work on a new house called Warlock uncovers a long buried grisly secret: the bones of two severed hands are discovered in a box, and an investigation into a long-buried crime of passion begins.

The friends, who played together as children, begin to question their past. And a weary detective, more concerned with current crimes, must investigate a case of murder.

The book begins just before the second world war when Woody killed his wife and her lover when he discovered they were having an affair. He then cut off their hands, a right hand and a left that they had held together, and put them in a biscuit tin, which he buried in a tunnel, where the local children played.

Time moves on to 1944. Ruth Rendell describes a garden where the neighbourhood children play:

The garden was not beautiful. It had no flowering trees, no roses, no perfumed herbs. Tunnels they called it at first. The word ‘qanat’, an impossible word, was found by Daphne Jones and adopted by the rest of them. It meant, apparently, a subterranean passage for carrying water, in some oriental language. They liked it because it started with a q without a u. Their schoolteachers had taught them that no word could ever start with q unless followed by u, so Daphne’s idea appealed to them and the tunnels became qanats. (pages 13 – 14)

Time moves on again and we meet up with the children as adults in their seventies, when the skeletal hands have been discovered. The qanats were actually the foundations of a house called Warlock in Loughton, twelve miles north of London and most of the children, are now still living in the area. When they read the newspaper report about the discovery of the hands they get together and reminisce about their childhood and playing in the tunnels, wondering whose hands had been buried.

This is when the book expands into a study of ageing as well as murder mystery:

As you get older, you forget names: those you studied with, lived next door to, the people who came to your wedding, your doctor, your accountant and those who cleaned your house. Of these people’s names you forget perhaps half, perhaps three quarters. Then whose names do you never forget, because they are incised on the rock of your memory? Your lovers (unless you have been promiscuous and there are too many) and the children you went to your first school with. You remember their names unless senility steps in to scrape them off the rock face. (page 17)

It’s quite a long book, nearly 350 pages in a small font in my copy and Ruth Rendell takes time to describe these old friends’ lives and reveals their relationships, their loves and losses and those of their own children and grandchildren as well as their regrets, and bereavements. I felt I really got to know them as real people. Long buried secrets rise to the surface, and old passions are reignited.

From the beginning we know the identity of the murderer, Woody and that of his wife Anita, but not that of the man, whose hand had held Anita’s. At times I thought I’d worked out who it was but when his identity was revealed it wasn’t who I thought it was – it was more complicated than I’d realised. And who is ‘the girl next door‘? I did work that out correctly. It is in some places a bleak novel, and all the characters’ lives have changed by the end of the book. It’s a book that really gripped me and drew me on to find out more. And I really enjoyed how it shows the changes that have taken place in society from the 1930s onward.

I’ve read several of Ruth Rendell’s standalone books and I think this is one of her best. I’ve also read some of her Inspector Wexford books and those she wrote under the name of Barbara Vine.

Top 5:non-human characters

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. For details of all of the latest prompts for October to December, see Meeghan’s post here.

It’s time to talk about books with non-human characters — animals or supernatural creatures… maybe even a park bench. Who are your favourite non-human characters?

This is a selection of some of the books with non-human characters that I’ve read and enjoyed. I’ve read all these books, so the links in the titles take you to my reviews.

The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide. The main character in this book is a stray cat, Chibi, who made herself at home with a couple in their thirties who lived in a small rented house in a quiet part of Tokyo. At first the cat was cautious and just peeked inside their little house but eventually Chibi spent a lot of time with the couple coming and going as she pleased.

The Toymakers by Robert Dinsdale –  a wonderful book about Papa Jack’s Emporium in London, a toyshop extraordinaire. The toys it sells aren’t ordinary toys – they seem alive, from patchwork dogs, to flying pegasi, Russian dolls that climb out of one another, runnerless rocking horses, whales that devour ships, fire-breathing dragons and many others to the toy soldiers that wage war on each other.

The Good People by Hannah Kent is set in 1825/6, a long gone world of people living in an isolated community, a place where superstition and a belief in fairies held sway. People talk of others being ‘fairy-swept’ or ‘away with the fairies’, and kept with the music and lights, dancing under the fairy hill.This is not a fairy story, but one in which their existence is terrifyingly real to the people of the valley. The villagers believe that the fairies live in Piper’s Grave, ‘the lurking fairy fort’, at the end of the valley, a place where few people went, a neglected and wild place. People see lights there, glowing near a crooked whitethorn tree that stood in a circle of stone. Nóra is completely unable to cope with Micheál, her four-year old grandson. There is talk that he is ‘fairy-struck’.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley, described as ‘steampunk’, this is a mixture of historical fact and fantasy set in Victorian times, both in London and Japan. The main characters are Thaniel Stapleton, who works in the telegraphy department of the Home Office in London, Keita Mori, watchmaker extraordinaire and an inventor of amazing clockwork creations and Grace Carrow, an Oxford physicist who sneaks into an Oxford library dressed as a man, desperate to prove the existence of the luminiferous ether. I loved Katsu, the clockwork octopus, which was made by Mori.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum. I enjoyed this entertaining story, pure escapism, which I would have loved as a child, following Dorothy’s adventures in the Land of Oz after the cyclone whisked her house high in the air out of Kansas and set it down on top of the Wicked Witch of the East, thus killing her. Dorothy and her little dog, Toto, are very anxious to get back home to Kansas and they set out on the yellow brick road leading to the Emerald City to ask the Wizard of Oz to help them. On the way she meets the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion, who go with her as they want the Wizard to give them brains, a heart and courage respectively.

Their journey is interrupted in various places and by a variety of creatures, some very dangerous indeed; as in most fairy tales, there is a fair amount of violence in the book, as Dorothy and her friends combat the Wicked Witch of the East.

The 1970 Club

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

It’s time for the 1970 Club, the bi-annual event where Simon and Karen ask readers across the internet to join together to build up a picture of a particular year in books. Any book published in 1970 counts – in whatever format, language, place.

I’ve previously read and reviewed read three books published in 1970:

Passenger to Frankfurt by Agatha Christie – not representative of Agatha Christie’s books and not one I’d recommend to anyone who hasn’t read any of her books. Although there is a degree of pessimism and cynicism running through it there is also a strain of humour, a sense that you shouldn’t take it all too seriously and I did enjoy it.

Sir Stafford Nye, a diplomat is on his way back to London, sitting in an airport lounge in Frankfurt. He was thinking that “life and journeys by air were really excessively boring” when he met a dark haired woman whose life was in danger and his own life changed for ever. The woman wanted his passport to get her safely to London, disguised by his dark purply-blue cloak with its scarlet lining and hood.  He agreed. So far, so good. From then on Sir Stafford is dragged along, somewhat unwillingly at first into a world of espionage, and world-wide organisations dedicated to anarchy and violence.

A Clubbable Woman by Reginald Hill, his first published book and the first book featuring Dalziel and Pascoe. My first encounters with Dalziel and Pascoe (played by Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan respectively) were the TV adaptations that began in 1996 and I was pleased to find out that Warren Clarke’s portrayal of him was a good match for Reginald Hill’s description.

Connon, known as Connie, was set to play rugby for England before an ankle injury ended his career. He is no longer Wetherton Rugby Football Club’s star player but he still plays occasionally. After a match in which he returns home dazed and confused after a blow on the head he finds his wife, Mary watching television, leaving him to get his own meal. Feeling sick he goes upstairs, then passes out. Later he realises that she is still downstairs, apparently still watching the television – then he discovers that she is dead, with a hole in the middle of her forehead. Dalziel, who is a member of the rugby club, and Pascoe investigate the murder. 

Wycliffe and How to Kill a Cat by W J Burley is the second book in the Wycliffe series. It’s set in Cornwall in the late 1960s, specifically at the time of the astronauts’ first moon landing in July 1969. Superintendent Wycliffe, despite being on holiday, can’t help getting involved when a young woman is found murdered in her seedy hotel bedroom. She’d been strangled and her face had been savagely smashed in. A thousand pounds was still in a drawer, hidden beneath her clothes, so the motive wasn’t theft. I like Wycliffe, a quiet man who works on instinct and I’ve read a few more of the books in the series.

I have two other books published in 1970 to read in my TBRs:

I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill, which I am currently reading and The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch.

The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell: Book Beginnings & The Friday 56

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

I’m featuring The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell, one of my TBRs, a book that’s been sitting on my bookshelves since 2016. It’s one of her later novels, a stand-alone book.

Chapter One:

He was a handsome man. A handsome boy, his mother called him, because she started praising his looks when he was five.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. You grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Unlike other users of Baldwin’s Hill, who were afraid of pregnancy or, in the case of the girls, of not being virgins when they were married, he and Daphne went ‘all the way’, as the phrase had it. She didn’t get pregnant, though he had done nothing to prevent it.

Description from Amazon UK

Beneath the green meadows of Loughton, Essex, a dark network of tunnels has been dug. A group of children discover them. They play there. It becomes their place.

Seventy years on, the world has changed. Developers have altered the rural landscape. Friends from a half-remembered world have married, died, grown sick, moved – or disappeared.

Work on a new house called Warlock uncovers a long buried grisly secret: the bones of two severed hands are discovered in a box, and an investigation into a long-buried crime of passion begins.

The friends, who played together as children, begin to question their past. And a weary detective, more concerned with current crimes, must investigate a case of murder.

Six Degrees of Separation from  Long Island by Colm Tóibín to Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter

Published on by Margaret17 Comments

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month starts  with ColmTóibín’s Long Island, the sequel to Brooklyn. I haven’t read this book, so this is the description on Amazon UK:

A man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island and in that moment everything changes. Eilis and Tony have built a secure, happy life here since leaving Brooklyn – perhaps a little stifled by the in-laws so close, but twenty years married and with two children looking towards a good future.

And yet this stranger will reveal something that will make Eilis question the life she has created. For the first time in years she suddenly feels very far from home and the revelation will see her turn towards Ireland once again. Back to her mother. Back to the town and the people she had chosen to leave behind. Did she make the wrong choice marrying Tony all those years ago? Is it too late now to take a different path?

My first link is from the word ‘Island‘ in 100 Days on Holy Island by Peter Mortimer. The island is also known as Lindisfarne. This sense of being an outsider pervades the book. He always felt an ‘outsider’, not accepted by the locals. He wasn’t there as a tourist, nor had he gone to settle there, but he went with the intention of seeing how he coped with living there  for one hundred days and writing about it.

My second link is The Rising Tide by Ann Cleeves, the 10th Vera Stanhope mystery novel. It’s set on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne a tidal island just off the coast of Northumberland, only accessible across a causeway when the tide is out. DCI Vera Stanhope and her team investigate the death of Rick Kelsall who was discovered hanged from the rafters of his small bedroom on Holy Island. He is one of a group of friends who have met for a reunion each year on the island for the past fifty years

My third link is another book with the word ‘tide‘ in the title – A Dark and Twisted Tide by Sharon Bolton. This is such a terrifying novel, particularly if like me, you have a fear of drowning. Police Constable Lacey Flint thinks she’s safe. Living on the river, she’s never been happier. Until she finds a body floating on the surface, as she wild-swims in the Thames.

My fourth link is The Marlow Club Murder by Robert Thorogood a ‘cosy’ murder mystery. Seventy-seven year old Judith Potts is happy with her life, living in an Arts and Crafts mansion on the River Thames, although there are hints that there is something in her past she wants to forget. It’s the height of summer, in the grip of a heatwave, and Judith decides to take all her clothes off and go for swim in the Thames. She was enjoying herself when she hears a shout from her neighbour’s house on the opposite riverbank, followed by a gunshot. Later, when she goes to investigate, she finds him, dead in the river, with a bullet hole in the centre of his forehead. Judith is a crossword compiler, who writes cryptic clues.

So My fifth link is Puzzled: Secrets and Clues from a Life in Words by David Astle, a real life cryptic crossword compiler, a Melbourne-based writer of non-fiction, fiction and drama. He co-hosts Letters and Numbers (the Australian version of Countdown) as the dictionary expert, and his crosswords appear in Australian papers The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Beginning with a Master Puzzle, he leads us through each of the clues, chapter by chapter, revealing the secrets of anagrams, double meanings, manipulations, spoonerisms and hybrid clues. More than a how-to manual and more than a memoir, Puzzled is a book for word junkies everywhere.

My final link is Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter the second book in the Inspector Morse books. Inspector Morse is perplexed when a letter of reassurance arrives from young Valerie Taylor, missing for more than two years and presumed dead, in a case that takes a bizarre turn when a mysterious body turns up. This book, like all of Dexter’s books, is a most complicated mystery, one of the ‘puzzle’ types. Dexter, himself, constructed crossword puzzles and made Morse a crossword aficionado. Morse is puzzled by this case, his brain seething in ceaseless turmoil, until he realised that if he shuffled the suspects and possibilities like the letters in an anagram the answer would come to him.

The books in my chain are a mix of crime fiction novels, and non fiction (Puzzled and 100 Days on Holy island). What is in your chain, I wonder?

Next month (November 2, 2024), we’ll start with Sally Rooney’s latest release, Intermezzo.