Category: Fiction

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro is a quintet of stories exploring the themes of love, music and the passing of time. All have narrators who are musicians. As I wrote in an earlier post I’m not a great fan of short stories but these are better than most as they do flesh out the characters in more detail, although some of them just seem to stop rather than ending, leaving me wanting more. There’s nothing dramatic here, rather they are gentle stories with a touch of nostalgia and a sense of loss for what has gone or what could have been.

The first story is The Crooner set in Venice. A young Hungarian musician playing in a cafe meets his mother’s favourite singer, the ageing Tony Gardner. Tony enlists the musician’s help in seranading his wife, Lindy from a gondola.  He reminisces, looking back with nostalgia over the 27 years he and Lindy have been married. They rehearse the songs he’s going to sing to her, all the while going round in circles passing the same palazzo several times. By the end of the story I was left feeling sad – things were not what they initally seemed.

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Come Rain or Shine. Ray goes to stay with his friends Emily and Charlie. Their marriage is obviously going through a bad patch and when he is left alone in their flat bored with reading Mansfield Park and browsing their CD collection he can’t stop himself from reading Emily’s diary. What follows is farcical as in his attempts to hide the fact he read the diary he ends up wrecking the room and pretends that it was the neighbour’s dog.

The Malvern Hills, is another sad story about a young musician who’s struggling to make his way in the rock world. He retreats to the Malvern Hills to compose love songs. There he meets an older couple, Swiss folk singers Sonja and Tilo, whose lives are on the point of change.

Noctune, the title story again features Lindy some years later. She and a saxophonist are neighbours, convalescing in a luxury hotel after they’ve both had plastic surgery. A sad bittersweet story as they listen to CDs and then go on a nocturnal walk around the hotel in the early hours of the morning. But their lives have not lived up to their dreams and a plastic surgeon can’t fix that.

The last story Cellists completes the cycle – back in the same cafe in a piazza in Venice seven years later. Tibor, one of the cellists, meets and falls under the spell of Eloise, an American who is apparently a distinguished musician. Their encounter changes his life for the worse.

These stories are full of longing and regret, something which I think Ishiguro does well.

Teaser Tuesday – All the Colours of Darkness

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

teaser-tuesdayTeaser Tuesday is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

I haven’t finished reading All the Colours of Darkness by Peter Robinson but I thought I’d quote a few sentences from it as a “teaser”. Robinson is a “new to me author”, but by no means a new author. He’s written many books and received numerous awards, all listed on his website.

All the Colours of Darkness is the eighteenth book in his Inspector Banks series. Banks and DI Annie Cabbot are investigating the deaths of Mark Hardcastle, found hanging from an oak tree in Hindswell Woods, and his partner Laurence Silbert found battered to death in his house in the Heights, the ‘posh’ part of Eastvale (a fictional Yorkshire town).

It looks like a textbook case of murder-suicide, a crime of passion. But somehow I have my doubts as this is set out in the first few chapters. This seems to be confirmed in the chapter I’m currently reading when Banks is interviewing Laurence’s mother Edwina, now in her eighties, the owner of the enormously successful Viva boutique chain in the 60s:

‘Edwina’, Banks said in exasperation. You’re keeping something from me. I can tell. You were doing it last night and now you’re doing it again. What on earth is it? What are you holding back?’

Edwina paused and sighed.’Oh, very well. It is naughty of me, isn’t it? I suppose you’d find out sooner or later, anyway.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and looked Banks in the eye. ‘He was a spy, Mr Banks. My son, Laurence Silbert. He was a spook.’ (pages133-4)

There are theatrical references as Mark was a set and costume designer for a production of Othello at the Eastvale Theatre and the epigraphs at the beginning of the book are from Shakepeare’s Othello and Puccini’s Tosca. So it’s promising to be a mix of different elements – jealousy, murder, revenge, envy and ambition.

Crime Fiction Alphabet:Death of a Chief by Douglas Watt

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Letter DThis week’s letter in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet is D:

Douglas Watt is a historian, poet and novelist. Death of a Chief is his first novel.

From the back cover:

The year is 1686. Sir Lachlan MacLean, chief of a proud but poverty-stricken Highland clan, has met with a macabre death in his Edinburgh lodgings. With a history of bad debts, family quarrels, and some very shady associates, Sir Lachlan had many enemies. But while motives are not hard to find, evidence is another thing entirely. It falls to lawyer John MacKenzie and his scribe Davie Scougall to investigate the mystery surrounding the death of the chief, but among the endless possibilities, can Reason prevail in a time of witchcraft, superstition and religious turmoil?

Death of a Chief is set in pre-Enlightenment Scotland – a long time before police detectives existed.

I seem to be reading a lot of crime fiction set in Edinburgh recently with Ian Rankin’s Rebus series, but Death of a Chief is set in a different period and at times, it seemed, a different place!  One location that puzzled me was the Nor’ Loch below Castle Rock, where a second body is found – that of James Jossie, the apothecary – I just couldn’t picture a loch actually within the city. I found the answer in Wikipedia  – this area is now occupied by Princes Street Gardens, between the Royal Mile and Princes Street. How different it was before it was drained in 1759, with its muddy shoreline, and its dark dank water in the shade of the black mass of the Castle Rock!

Although I know very little about 17th century Scotland it seemed to me that this book brought that time and place to life well.The differences between the Highlanders and Scots Lowlanders are highlighted. Scougall a devout Presbyterian Lowlander has been brought up believing the Highlands to be a barbaric place ‘roamed by bands of murderers and in the grip of Popery’. The difficulties of  language also confront Scougall – he can’t speak Gaelic. As MacKenzie and Scougall travel into the Highlands to attend Sir Lachlan’s funeral and search for Campbell of Glenbeg, a notorious drunkard and gambler and a suspect for the murders, it seems that Scougall’s fears are justified when they are attacked by a group of “caterans”, men without a clan who were hired to kill them.

Although the locations are well described and MacKenzie (based on a real historical figure) and Scougall are well drawn some of the other characters are a bit sketchy and I had a little difficulty identifying them as I read. I had to backtrack to remind myself who they were. But I liked Watt’s style of writing. I enjoyed the book’s historical background and  the way he portrayed the political and religious conflict. The tension is well paced and the mystery is intriguing. I just had to keep turning the pages to find who was the culprit and I didn’t work it out until just before the denoument.

The Girl on the Landing by Paul Torday

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I read about The Girl on the Landing in newbooks magazine, along with the first chapter. It caught my attention, although I wondered if I wanted to read about mental illness. I needn’t have worried, as I was soon involved in the story – there was something very sinister going on.

Michael and Elizabeth Gascoigne are the narrators of the story and the question that puzzled me was, just how reliable are their accounts. It soon becomes obvious that it is Michael who is the problem. It begins when Michael and Elizabeth visit a friend’s country house and he spots a painting of a landing with a woman clad in a green dress in the background – except that there is no woman in the painting. Despite his outward calm and reliability he is mentally ill – hearing voices and seeing people who aren’t there – or are they? I began to wonder if they were real after all. Such was the effect this book had on me.  When he stops taking the drug their marriage takes on a new character, taking Elizabeth quite by surprise, initially liking it, but soon scaring her.

The location is split between Michael’s luxury London flat and his large country estate in Scotland. In London he is the part-time membership secretary of Grouchers, an exclusive gentlemen’s club. Here he is faced with a difficult situation when Mr Patel, a Ugandan Asian applies for membership, raising questions about the nature of Britishness and Englishness, identity and personality – all quite disturbing for Michael and the other members. Michael describes Grouchers as

… a fantasy world, where perfectly normal middle-aged, middle-class men were transformed for a few hours by a collective mania into behaving and speaking as if they were inhabiting some last outpost of the British Empire in the 1950s.

In contrast to life in London, is the Gascoignes’ life in Scotland, in the dank and gloomy house Michael inherited from his parents – Beinn Caorunn. Elizabeth hates the place and rarely goes there, but Michael loves it; it is the place where he feels “connected to the world again”. But  Michael has secrets and as the novel progresses the nature of these secrets are gradually revealed, building a sense of mystery and foreboding. Just who is the woman in the green dress, the Lamia and what did happen to Michael’s parents? As Michael says:

None of us knows who we really are.

The tension builds and I just had to finish the book, but I thought the ending was an anti-climax as Elizabeth takes over the narrative and we are left dangling. Just what did happen … ? But I couldn’t really imagine how else it could end and it was a very enjoyable book.

Musing Monday – My Wishlist

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Musing Mondays (BIG) Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post from Just One More Page is about books on your wishlist€¦

Last week we talked about keeping a wishlist. Why not pull out that list and show us some of the books you’ve been eyeing off?

I have a wishlist on Amazon, just adding books every now and then. Actually I forget to look at it unless it’s my birthday or Christmas is getting near. I looked at it today for this post and found most of the books are non-fiction – possibly because I read more fiction and non-fiction tends to get overlooked. I’ve copied the descriptions from Amazon.

Some of them have been on the list for years. The oldest entry is dated November 2005! But I do remember adding it after reading some of Iris Murdoch’s novels and thinking Sovereignty of Good would be interesting. I still do.

Iris Murdoch once observed: ‘philosophy is often a matter of finding occasions on which to say the obvious’. What was obvious to Murdoch, and to all those who read her work, is that Good transcends everything – even God. Throughout her distinguished and prolific writing career, she explored questions of good and bad, myth and morality. The framework for Murdoch’s questions – and her own conclusions – can be found in the Sovereignty of Good .

How To Be Free by Tom Hodgkinson. I haven’t read anything by this author and can’t remember where I saw this book but who wouldn’t want to be free?

Read “How To Be Free” and learn how to throw off the shackles of anxiety, bureaucracy, debt, governments, housework, moaning, pain, poverty, ugliness, war and waste, and much else besides.

More recent additions to my wishlist are these:

In Our Time by Lord Melvyn Bragg. I used to listen to this radio series regularly but haven’t managed it recently – this could help fill in the gaps.

Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time series regularly enlightens and entertains substantial audiences on BBC Radio 4. For this book he has selected episodes which reflect the diversity of the radio programmes, and take us on an amazing tour through the history of ideas, from philosophy, physics and history to religion, literature and biology.

Agatha Christie’s Autobiography. I’ve been reading quite a few of Agatha Christie’s books so I thought I’d like to read more about the author herself.
The life of Agatha Christie as told by herself. It covers her childhood, her first marriage, the birth of her daughter Rosalind, her second marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan, and an account of her legendary career as a novelist and playwright.

Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks
A fascinating exploration of the contents of Agatha Christie’s 73 recently discovered notebooks, including illustrations, deleted extracts, and two unpublished Poirot stories.


The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam. I read Old Fifth a while ago and loved it so I thought this should be good.

Written from the perspective of Filth’s wife, “Betty”, this is a story which will make the reader weep for the missed opportunities, while laughing aloud for the joy and the wit. Filth (Failed In London Try Hong Kong) is a successful lawyer when he marries Elisabeth in Hong Kong soon after the War. Reserved, immaculate and courteous, Filth finds it hard to demonstrate his emotions. But Elisabeth is different – a free spirit.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle earlier this year and loved it. So now I want to read this one.

Hill House stood abandoned six miles off the road. Four people came to learn its secrets. But Hill House stood holding darkness within. Whoever walked there, walked alone.

The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

I expected  The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk to be much better than it is. It begins well, and every now and then I thought this is really good, but at times it seems to get lost in itself. It’s about the life of a family – the Bradshaws, mainly concentrating on Thomas and his wife Tonie – over the course of a year. Not a lot happens on the surface but underneath everyone’s life is in turmoil and change.

Thomas is the middle brother. Howard is his older brother, married to Claudia; Leo, is his younger brother married to Susie. We also meet his parents and Tonie’s parents. The book is a series of episodes in their lives, both individually and collectively. It’s a mixture of straight forward narrative about their daily lives, interspersed with interesting reflections on such themes as what is real/unreal/artificial, what is the value and nature of success, what is art, the duality of character, the question of work/home balance, women going out to work versus staying at home, progress, the impossibility of perfection, the nature of love, the importance of wanting what you have and of avoiding not wanting what you have and so on and so forth.

 Thomas, the house-husband, is learning to play the piano whilst he is at home looking after Alexa, their eight-year old daughter, and much of the description of him has a musical theme – he is a “symphony” crashing about. Tonie, getting on with her career, seems a very negative character, usually dressed all in black and uncertain of what she wants from life. The crisis comes when Alexa falls ill and Thomas has to cope on his own. Howard and Claudia are muddling along with their three children and Skittle, their little dog and their crisis comes as they are preparing to go away on holiday – I found this chapter one of the most “real” in the book, describing the “ordeal” of it all.

My overall impression of it is that although it’s intense, it’s also emotionally detached; the characters are well drawn for the most part, but just as I was getting involved with them, the narrative moved away.

(The Bradshaw Variations – an Uncorrected Proof copy supplied by LibraryThing Early Reviewer Programme)