Category: Fiction

A Change in Altitude

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

I wasn’t sure when I was reading A Change in Altitude which time period it is set in and discovered from Anita Shreve’s website that it is set in the late 1970s, which surprised me because I’d thought it was possibly the 1950s. This is the story of Margaret and Patrick, a young American couple who have recently arrived in Kenya. At the start of the novel they have just arrived. They are living in a small house in the grounds of their new friends, Diana and Arthur because the plumbing has failed in their own house. Diana is a native white Kenyan and Arthur is British.

Seen through Margaret’s eyes, Kenya is a place of appalling poverty, discrimination and heat. She and Patrick  feel obliged to the other couple and agree to go on a climbing expedition up Mount Kenya, despite their inexperience. I felt very much for Margaret as she struggled to keep up with the others as they ascended the mountain. They were led by guides, roped together, crossing scree and then a glacier, when the inevitable accident happened and Margaret is overcome by feelings of guilt.

From that point on I began to lose interest in this book. I don’t know whether it’s my taste in reading that has changed but this book, fell short of Anita Shreve’s earlier books, which I enjoyed so much. Maybe I should re-read one and see if it’s me or her writing that has changed. Despite the drama of the accident there was no sense of suspense or tension. I liked the account of the change in attitude that was stirring in Kenya as the inequalities in living conditions and culture are highlighted, but as for the change in altitude I just didn’t understand the symbolism. At times the writing is disjointed and the characterisation unconvincing. It’s basically a story about marriage and love and how events and their aftermath affect our lives. All in all, although it promised to be good, it was rather disappointing.

Teaser Tuesday – The Rain Before It Falls

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading.

For today’s teaser I’ve chose this from The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe. I recently borrowed this book from the library and have only read  the opening page just to see if it appealed. It does. It begins with Gill and Stephen, her husband outside raking leaves and shovelling them onto a bonfire when the telephone rang. Gill ran inside to answer it and then went back into the garden:

Stephen turned as he heard her approach. He saw bad news in her eyes, and his thoughts flew, at once, to their daughters: to the imagined dangers of central London, to bombs, to once-routine tube and bus journeys suddenly turned into wagers with life and death. (page 1)

Now, I just have to read more …

My Read-a-Thon Experience

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

At the last minute on Saturday I decided to take part in the 24 Hour Read-a-Thon. This was the first time I’d done this. Previously I’d thought there was no way I could read for 24 hours, but this time I realised that I didn’t have to – I could read for just as long as I liked! Which is what I did.

So I read all of Saturday afternoon, with just a short break for making dinner. Then, because I’m a creature of habit and I enjoy watching TV on Saturday evenings, I stopped reading long enough to watch Strictly Come Dancing and the X Factor, both entertaining programmes. Later on I fell asleep reading and started again about 6am. It was easier to read on Sunday morning than usual because we’ve been having internet connection problems and couldn’t get access until the afternoon. All in all I must have read for about 13 hours or so out of the 24.

I liked the experience of concentrated reading, spending most of the time on reading Exit Music by Ian Rankin. Usually I read in chunks rather than for hours and hours on end and it really helped to get into the plot. Often when I’ve been reading for a while I get a feeling that I should be doing something other than sitting reading but during those 24 hours it was as though I had nothing to do except read.

I finished Exit Music during Sunday morning and started Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman. That was quite strange, because that is pure fantasy; it was surreal moving from the world of crime with Rebus to that of magic with the strange, witchy Owens sisters and their family. I read about half of Practical Magic before the end of the Read-a-Thon. More about both books to follow.

I’m not sure I’ll take part again, but I enjoyed it this time.

Library Loot

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Library Loot:

From top to bottom they are:

  • A Detective at Death’s Door by H R F Keating. I haven’t read anything by H R F Keating, so I’m not sure what to expect. There’s a long list of his books at the front of the book and a brief summary of his work. He was the crime reporter for The Times for 15 years and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association and the Society of Authors as well as President of the Detection Club. With such credentials I’m hoping to like this book, the fifth Detective Superintendent Harriet Martens novel. Martin Edwards’ page has much more information about Keating.
  • The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl. I’ve recently read Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood and am keen to read more of Dicken’s books and books about Dickens (both fiction and non-fiction). So, even though I wasn’t too keen on Pearl’s novel about Edgar Allan Poe, I thought it was worth borrowing this book to try it. From the back cover this novel seems to be about Dickens’ final instalment of his last manuscript that disappeared after his death in 1870.
  • The Turning of the Tide by Reginald Hill. This was originally published under the pseudonym Patrick Ruell in 1971 called The Castle of the Demon. It looks as though it’s a sinister thriller when Emily discovers a body lying in the water at a sleepy coastal town. I like Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe books and am hoping his earlier book won’t disappoint.
  • Frozen Moment by Camilla Ceder. ‘Move over Wallander‘ it says on the front cover. Camilla Ceder is a Swedish writer who also works in counselling and social work. This is her first novel; a murder mystery featuring Inspector Christian Tell, a world-weary detective with a chequered past. I picked this book off the new book stand attracted by its cover.
  • The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe. I’ve never read anything by Coe but I keep seeing his name on various blogs, so my eyes were drawn to this book in the library. The book’s blurb attracted me, describing the book as ‘intensely lyrical in its evocations of rural Shropshire and post-war London, and extremely moving in its portrayal of the nature of love and happiness.’ It looks like my sort of book.

Monday Musing

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

This week’s musing is:

What’s your favorite ‘cozy’ book €” and, by that, I’m meaning ‘curl-up-on-a-cold-day comfort read‘? Or, if you don’t have a particular book, what genre do you most feel like reading when the weather starts to turn colder?

For me it’s a ‘curl-up-on-a-rainy-day’ rather than a cold day. As a child on rainy days I used to love sitting inside watching the raindrops running down the window, curled up in front of an open fire with a book to read. Usually it was an Enid Blyton book – Mallory Towers for example, or one of the Heidi books, or What Katy Did. Over the years I read these many times.

These days, on rainy days I like to read a book such as One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes, a nostalgic look at England just after the Second World War. Anything that transports me to another world is good. It may be a book I’ve read and enjoyed before such as Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes, which would whisk me off to sunny Italy. It’s nothing like the film they made of it – the book is much better. Or it could be historical fiction such as this one I’ve been looking forward to reading for ages, Helen of Troy by Margaret George.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Edwin Drood 001It’s been a few weeks now since I finished reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, his last and unfinished book. I was surprised that it took so long before the mystery actually began to emerge and that it’s more the story of Edwin Drood’s uncle, John Jasper, than it is of Drood himself.   I was also surprised that much of it is written in the present tense, a style that I’m not too keen on. I haven’t read a Dickens novel for a few years and found the difference in style between this and modern mystery novels interesting. The build up to the mystery is so much more leisurely and descriptive than in modern novels, and I had to tone down my impatience for something mysterious to happen. Once I’d passed these hurdles I enjoyed the book immensely, even though I knew that the mystery is left open.

It begins dramatically with a scene in an opium den where Jasper lies under the influence of several pipes of opium, trembling and almost incoherent from the visions that came to him. According to the introduction to the book, Dickens took great care to make the scenes in the opium den authentic and had visited one in the east end of London, under police guidance. The mystery only becomes apparent when Drood has disappeared and cannot be found.

He had been engaged to Rosa Bud from their childhood days and both had realised that they didn’t want to get married. Before that Neville Landless and Edwin had come to blows over Rosa, but made up their differences just before Edwin disappears, but Jasper spreads suspicion that Neville may have killed him.

The novel abounds with wonderful characters – Canon Crisparkle, Neville’s mentor; Durdles a stonemason and his assistant, Deputy, whose tasks include making sure the drunken Durdles gets home safely, by the unlikely means of throwing rocks at him; and my favourite character, Mr Grewgious, a lawyer and Rosa’s guardian. Over and above these characters is the setting of Cloisterham (Rochester), with its Cathedral and sinister and dark background, ideal for secrecy and crime:

… a certain awful hush pervades the ancient pile, the cloisters, and the churchyard, after dark, which not many people care to encounter.

The inhabitants of Cloisterham feel

the innate shrinking of dust with the breath of life in it, from dust out of which the breath of life has passed. (page 105)

The mystery remains unsolved. What did happen to Edwin Drood? Was he killed and if so was it by John Jasper, his uncle, obsessed with his passion for Rosa? Who is Datchery, a stranger who arrives in Cloisterham six months after Edwin’s disappearance and what is his part in the story? And what is ‘Er Royal Highness the Princess Puffer’, the opium den woman’s connection with Jasper? I suppose it’s up to each reader to decide, although there is an account given by Forster, Dickens’s friend, in which he wrote that Dickens had intended it to be a story of the murder of a nephew by his uncle, but we’ll never know if that was so.

Also reviewed by A Library of My Own.