Category: What’s In a Name

Crime Fiction Alphabet – O is for One Good Turn

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

letter OWe have reached the letter O in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet and my book this week is:

One Good Turn (Jackson Brodie #2)

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

This is the second of her Jackson Brodie series. I read Case Histories, the first one, a few years ago and the third one, When Will There be Good News? just over 2 years ago, both of which I thought were excellent. So I had great expectations that this would be equally as good. Maybe it’s me, but I don’t think it is. It is good and I enjoyed it but I thought it was over complicated, especially at the beginning with so many different seemingly unrelated characters being introduced. It’s only near the end that you find out the connections and interactions between them all. And the ending did take me by surprise – a neat twist.

My problem with this book that I’d just get interested in one strand of the story and want to find out what happened next, when the action shifted to another set of characters. There is also too much detail, background information and flashbacks holding up the action for me to say it’s an excellent book.

But it is still a book that I had to finish; I had to find out what happened and work out the puzzle, because it is a puzzle. Like the Russian dolls within dolls (which also feature in this book), there is a thread connecting it all together. Set over four days an awful lot happens changing the characters lives for ever.

It’s summer in Edinburgh at Festival time when people queuing for a lunchtime show witness a road rage incident after Paul Bradley brakes suddenly to avoid hitting a pedestrian. The driver of the Honda behind him attacks his car with a baseball bat and then attacks Paul himself.  The one good turn comes from Martin Canning, the author of the Nina Riley mysteries, who stops the attack by throwing his laptop bag at the Honda driver hitting him on the shoulder.

One of the people in the queue is Jackson Brodie, who doesn’t want to get involved but who nevertheless gives Martin his mobile number and noted the Honda’s registration number. Amongst other witnesses are Gloria, the wife of an unscrupulous property developer, and her friend Pam. I got to like Gloria, a very sympathetically drawn character. Numerous other characters are involved – Jackson’s actress girlfriend, a failing comedian, exploited Eastern European workers for a housecleaning/escort agency called Favours, and Sergeant Louise Monroe and her teenage son, Archie, amongst others.

It’s complicated and full of coincidences, a very cleverly plotted book and as Jackson says:

A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.

One Good Turn is also my entry in Beth’s What’s In a Name Challenge – a book with a number in the title.

  • Paperback: 544 pages
  • Publisher: Black Swan; Reprint edition (22 July 2010)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0552772445
  • ISBN-13: 978-0552772440

What’s In a Name 4

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Challenge completed!

The What’s In a Name Challenge, hosted by Beth Fish Reads is running for the fourth time. I took part in the first two, but missed out last year. I’m tempted to join in again in 2011. I just need to read one book from each category and I’ve gone through my To-Be-Read books to find these titles:

1. A book with a number in the title – One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
2. A book with jewelry or a gem in the title – The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
3. A book with a size in the title – Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
4. A book with travel or movement in the title – Exit Lines by Reginald Hill
5. A book with evil in the title – Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie
6. A book with a life stage in the title – Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden

After the Fine Weather by Michael Gilbert

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

After the fine weather3

The title of this spy mystery book sets the scene; after the fine weather comes the snow. Set in Lienz in the Austrian Tyrol the onset of bad weather coincides with an alarming sequence of events. Bald Kommt der Schnee:

In Lienz we call this Bellermanswoch. The Bellerman is the old man who goes round after the feast is over, cleaning up the tables and snuffing the candles. … But when the Bellerman has finished his work, when he has extinguished the last candle, the snow will come.

Laura Hart travels to Lienz to stay with her brother who is the British Vice-Consul there. On the train there she meets an American who warns her of the growing political tension in the area, with a group of Nazis, blowing up pylons and railways causing trouble between the Germans, Austrians and Italians.

When she witnesses a political murder and insists that the Italian arrested for the shooting is innocent she becomes involved in a dangerous game. Helped by the American and a Secret Service agent she attempts to leave the Tyrol.  I did find the politics quite confusing in this book, knowing next to nothing about it and the episode at the end involving what I took to be a variation of the Abominable Snowman was far-fetched. However, the book as a whole is fast-paced with lots of action and would probably make a good film – if it hasn’t done so already.

This book completes my reading in the What’s In a Name Challenge in the “Weather” category.

James Herriot’s Cat Stories

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

In August I read a beautiful little book- it was a birthday present – James Herriot’s Cat Stories. It was a great relief to read this book after some of the books (about war and disasters) I’d been reading lately and this book with its lovely illustrations by Lesley Holmes cheered me up immensely. That’s not to say it has no drama or desperate situations of the feline type that tugged at my heart strings. (An aside the heart does have strings – I saw them on Alice Roberts’ programme Don’t Die Young.)

I must have watched all of the programmes in the TV series All Creatures Great and Small about “James Herriot’s” vet practice in Yorkshire.  There are many James Herriot books and I’ve read a few of them in the past. This book contains ten short stories, all about cats. In the Introduction James writes that cats were one of the main reasons he chose a career as a vet. They have always played a large part in his life and and now he has retired they are still there “lightening” his days. When he studied to become a vet he was astounded that he couldn’t find anything about cats in his text book Sisson’s Anatomy of Domestic Animals. Yet when he began his practice there were cats everywhere and every farm had its cats. Things have moved on since then and now “Large, prestigious books are written about them by eminent veterinarians, and indeed, some vets specialise in the species to the exclusion of all others.”

Cats have always played a large part in my life too (see here and here). 

James Herriot’s Cat Stories is not large; in fact it’s very small (158 pages) but the ten stories clearly demonstrate his love of cats. Inevitably there are some spoilers in my summaries:

  • There is Alfred the Sweet-shop Cat, “a massive, benevolent tabby”, belonging to Geoff the sweet-shop owner. When he starts to lose weight and becomes gaunt and listless, Geoff too begins to wilt and become bowed and shrunken.
  • Oscar the Socialite Cat who loves people often goes missing as he visits his human friends. Everyone loves him.
  • Boris by way of contrast lives in household full of cats taken in mainly as strays by Mrs Bond. Boris is a “malevolent bully” who regularly beats up his colleagues, so that James was always having to stitch up ears and dress gnawed limbs.
  • Three stories are about Olly and Ginger were two little strays who came to live, not with the Herriots but who sat on the wall outside the kitchen window, too wild to actually venture into the house. When they become desperately ill will they let James treat them?
  • Emily, a dainty little cat, has adopted Mr Ireson, “a gentleman of the road”. When Emily becomes pregnant, seemingly full of kittens she needs a caesarean operation.
  • Moses – Found Among the Rushes. He was rescued by James, looked after by a farmer’s wife and adopted by a large sow. 
  • Frisk the Cat with Many Lives (don’t they all). Why does Frisk, old Dick Fawcett’s faithful companion keep falling unconscious?
  • Buster the Christmas Day Kitten – the little orphan born on Christmas Day who grows up playing with dogs and behaves like a feline retriever.

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

I’ve had my copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel for a long time. I can’t remember how long and there is no date in the book – all I know is that it cost 3s 6d and I must have been about 11, 12 or 13 when I first read it. Once I started to read it this time I realised that I remembered very little of the plot, apart from the fact that it’s about the French Revolution and a band of Englishmen, led by the mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel,  rescuing French aristos from the guillotine. No-one knows his identity, the French hate him and are desperate to catch him whilst he is the toast of the British aristocracy – the Prince of Wales describes him to Chauvelin, the agent of the French government, as “the bravest gentlemen in all the world, and we all feel a little proud, Monsieur, when we remember he is an Englishman.”

And I hadn’t forgotten this little verse that that “six foot odd of georgousness as represented by Sir Percy Blakeney, Bart” had composed whilst tying his cravat:

We seek him here,
We seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven?
Is he in hell?
That demmed elusive Pimpernel.

Everyone knows that Sir Percy is hopelessly stupid, but he is incredibly rich and as a leader of fashion he is the talk of the town and “his inanities were quoted, his foolish laugh copied by the gilded youth at the Almanack’s or the Mall.” His French wife, Marguerite is by contrast, a clever, witty woman, but she is trapped by Chauvelin into betraying the identity of the Pimpernel. Chauvelin had acquired a letter written by her brother revealing that he was working with the Scarlet Pimpernel – either she finds out who the Pimpernel is or her brother will go to the guillotine.

I wish I could remember whether I guessed the identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel when I first read the book, but I do remember that I loved the romance and the action of this tale based loosely on the French Revolution. I was still spellbound by the romance and drama of it all. I’ve discovered that it start out as a play, starring Fred Terry (the brother of Dame Ellen Terry and great-uncle of Sir John Gielgud) as the Scarlet Pimpernel. There have been many films of the book and the role of the Scarlet Pimpernel has been played by many actors on stage and screen including Leslie Howard, Anthony Andrews, and Richard E Grant. Amazingly I have never seen any of them, so my mental vision of the characters is drawn straight from the book, which is what I prefer.

 I re-read this book as part of the Heart of a Child Challenge. It also qualifies for the What’s In a Name Challenge as a book with a plant in the title, because the Scarlet Pimpernel is not only the nickname of the hero but it is also the symbol with which he signs his messages.

 

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2007, Harper Perennial 433 pages. Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2007.

This book is based on the Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967 – 70 and I’m old enough to remember hearing about it at the time. Then I had little idea what it was all about – now I understand a bit more. Nigeria became a Republic in October 1960 and Half of a Yellow Sun begins in the early 1960s in Nsukka in the south eastern area where Ugwu becomes Odenigbo’s houseboy. The story centres on these two characters and Olanna, Odenigbo’s partner, her twin sister Kainene and her partner Richard. Odenigbo is a professor at the University and his house is the meeting place for academics who debate the political situation as it leads up to violence and the secession of Biafra as an independent state. The title of the book comes from the symbol on the Biafran flag, which was half of a yellow sun.

The novel moves forwards and backwards in time between the late and early1960s as the civil war proceeds. Focussing on the struggle between the north and the south, the Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa people, it brings home the horrors brought about by war, the ethnic, religious and racial divisions and the suffering that results. Ugwu at the start of the book is an ignorant young teenager from a poor village eager to learn but still steeped in the superstitions of his family – the old ways. By the end of the novel he has become a valued member of the family and is writing a history of his country. Richard, the white man in love with Kainene but not fully accepted into her world, is eager to be considered Biafran, but is still on the outside. He is in Nigeria studying African art – the Igbo-Ukwu roped pot – and is recruited into writing articles about the war for the outside world, but the story of the war is Ugwu’s to tell and not Richard’s. Olanna’s family is wealthy and even though they are Igbo, they cannot understand her relationship with Odenigbo who is committed to the Igbo cause and would prefer her to marry Madu, a major in the Biafran army. Once the war starts they are all drawn into the conflict, the situation spirals out of their control and they each react in differing ways.

The book explores the conflicts between nationalities, different cultures, different backgrounds and upbringing, between what is traditional and tribal and what is new. Although the violence and deprivations of the war are horrifying and form the dominant element in the story this is not just a war novel. It is also a novel about love and relationships, between parents and children as well as between men and women; about how people learn to adapt and cope with life.

I found the characters to be real, so much so that I could imagine I was there in the thick of things. I sympathised with Richard in his efforts to be accepted and suffered with Olanna when she was confronted with the horror of war and grieved over the plight of the refugees. It reminded me of Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, which I read about 10 years or so ago and Adichie writes of his novels in an article at the end of her book:

Achebe’s war fiction then, humane and pragmatic as it is, becomes a paean to the possibilities that Biafra held. The stories have an emotional power that accumulates in an unobtrusive way and stuns the reader at the end; there are sentences in them that will always move me to tears.

She writes of her own work:

If fiction is indeed the soul of history, then I was equally committed to the fiction and the history, equally true to the spirit of the time as well as to my artistic vision of it.

How well she has succeeded. Half of a Yellow Sun is an emotional book without being sentimental, factual without being boring, and I was completely absorbed in it to the end.