Scott Pilgrim, Inspector Montalbano, The Jewel in the Crown
Couple of reviews. I also read Making Money, but it turns out I'm too distressed by the Alzheimer's thing to write a review, and anyway it's exactly like you expect, which is fine.
Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together (Bryan Lee O'Malley): Well, I am pleased to report this is just as entertaining as the previous three. The book suffers to some extent from middle-of-the-series syndrome: it's a bunch of unconnected episodes and not a huge amount gets accomplished, but the individual episodes are all very good -- sort of an Empire Strikes Back deal structurally*. Plus the series format means that even if nothing else gets done the book moves us one step closer to the big climax. So overall, thumbs up.
*Come to think of it, the ending is like Empire Strikes Back in another respect too.
The Shape of Water, The Terra-Cotta Dog, The Snack Thief (Andrea Camilleri):
You can plot mystery novels on a two-axis graph, where one axis is "how good a mystery is it?" and the other is "how focused is the book on solving the mystery?" Agatha Christie novels tend to score high on both: the mysteries are solid as puzzles and the characters are thin. The modern mysteries about a pastry chef and her crime-solving cat tend to score low on both: the mystery is basically a slapdash collection of clues and an excuse to drive the plot, which focuses mostly on the protagonist's personal life and relationship with her mom. While I definitely prefer good mysteries (to, you know, bad mysteries), the other axis I am ok with either way.
Given that scale, the Inspector Montalbano series falls in the middle*, tending slightly to the pastry-chef corner. The mysteries aren't terrible but don't feel "tight", and a lot of time is spent on the guy's girlfriend, his housekeeper, the meals he's eating, and so on. But in fact one of the major reasons I'm reading this book is because it's set in Sicily, so all the extraneous detail is great (especially since the mysteries themselves aren't spectacular). That said, it's hard to pick out exactly what non-culinary elements of the books are prototypically Italian. The bit where a cardinal calls to put political pressure on the police detective probably counts, and the easy acceptance of corruption (there's a bit where there's a mole in the department tipping off the criminals, and in an American book this would end with the mole being exposed as the detective's best friend -- but no, it's just the way things are that there are guys in the department tipping off the mafia and nothing more is said). I'm not sure about the guy living in a different city than his long-term girlfriend -- I can't tell if nobody thinks this is weird or if they do but are too polite to say anything.
Anyway, as mysteries they're perfectly fine and as advertisements to come to Sicily and eat they are better than fine. There are a bunch more in the series which I will probably get to at some point.
*The high quality mystery/not primary focus corner is occupied by Dorothy Sayers' stuff, where several books spend as much time on the characters' personal lives as the investigation; and in the lousy-mystery/sole focus of the book corner is, of course, The Da Vinci Code.
The Jewel in the Crown (Paul Scott): I gather this is the first of a four-book series about the British in India in the 1940s. I'm not exactly sure what the other books are about, because this one seems pretty mammoth and comprehensive on its own -- it's in some sense a study of every possible combination of Britain and India and how the human representatives of them all feel about each other. So you have the British army guy sent in to keep order, the upper-class British civil servant, the British lower-class guy come over to make something of himself as a police officer, the Indian guy who was raised in England, the Indian guy who idolized British culture and hence brought his son to England to be raised, the Indian guy who's a judge in the British-established legal system, the Indian guy who's a self-made millionaire and thinks he therefore doesn't need to worry about the British, the Indian guy who's a teacher in a missionary school, the Indian guy who wants the British out but wants to do it peacefully, the Indian guy who's a young radical and wants the British out any way he can, the Indian guy who's a thug and is looking for an excuse to riot. And those are just the guys -- then you have the upper-class British ladies who are married to various civil servants and soldiers, the British lady come to do missionary work, the crazy British lady who lives in the slums, the orphaned British daughter come to live with relatives, the rich dowager Indian lady, the poor Indian woman who -- ok, you get the picture. And this somewhat overwhelming cast of characters all interact and snub or condescend to or fall in love with or envy or hate or attack or sabotage or insult or bribe or arrest or what-all to all the other ones.
Things are not made easier to grasp by the writing, which is 90% fine and 10% sentences like this:Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south.
With all this scope, then, it's nice that the author keeps focus on a single incident, a rape on the evening of a rebellion. It's true we see months and years back and forward from that point, getting back-history on all the characters so we'll know why they do what they do, but the fact that it keeps coming back to the single incident helps me remember what's going on. And overall the author carries it all off pretty well. As one of the characters comments it's not really possible to explain all of a historical incident -- you could spend your whole life recording details and not get them all -- but the book still succeeds in giving what seems like the right feel for the times and the people, and if it's not comprehensive it is honest about its gaps*.
*The one place I'd say this isn't quite true is the treatment of female characters. With historical settings it's hard to work out sometimes how much sexism is inherent in the setting and how much in the particular story. In this case it feels like the author made a real effort to include female focal characters, but their actual effect on the narrative is very little, except for the very end of the book -- and there the character has an effect by her concerted inaction.
Up next: Watchtower, Singularity Sky, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.
Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together (Bryan Lee O'Malley): Well, I am pleased to report this is just as entertaining as the previous three. The book suffers to some extent from middle-of-the-series syndrome: it's a bunch of unconnected episodes and not a huge amount gets accomplished, but the individual episodes are all very good -- sort of an Empire Strikes Back deal structurally*. Plus the series format means that even if nothing else gets done the book moves us one step closer to the big climax. So overall, thumbs up.
*Come to think of it, the ending is like Empire Strikes Back in another respect too.
The Shape of Water, The Terra-Cotta Dog, The Snack Thief (Andrea Camilleri):
You can plot mystery novels on a two-axis graph, where one axis is "how good a mystery is it?" and the other is "how focused is the book on solving the mystery?" Agatha Christie novels tend to score high on both: the mysteries are solid as puzzles and the characters are thin. The modern mysteries about a pastry chef and her crime-solving cat tend to score low on both: the mystery is basically a slapdash collection of clues and an excuse to drive the plot, which focuses mostly on the protagonist's personal life and relationship with her mom. While I definitely prefer good mysteries (to, you know, bad mysteries), the other axis I am ok with either way.
Given that scale, the Inspector Montalbano series falls in the middle*, tending slightly to the pastry-chef corner. The mysteries aren't terrible but don't feel "tight", and a lot of time is spent on the guy's girlfriend, his housekeeper, the meals he's eating, and so on. But in fact one of the major reasons I'm reading this book is because it's set in Sicily, so all the extraneous detail is great (especially since the mysteries themselves aren't spectacular). That said, it's hard to pick out exactly what non-culinary elements of the books are prototypically Italian. The bit where a cardinal calls to put political pressure on the police detective probably counts, and the easy acceptance of corruption (there's a bit where there's a mole in the department tipping off the criminals, and in an American book this would end with the mole being exposed as the detective's best friend -- but no, it's just the way things are that there are guys in the department tipping off the mafia and nothing more is said). I'm not sure about the guy living in a different city than his long-term girlfriend -- I can't tell if nobody thinks this is weird or if they do but are too polite to say anything.
Anyway, as mysteries they're perfectly fine and as advertisements to come to Sicily and eat they are better than fine. There are a bunch more in the series which I will probably get to at some point.
*The high quality mystery/not primary focus corner is occupied by Dorothy Sayers' stuff, where several books spend as much time on the characters' personal lives as the investigation; and in the lousy-mystery/sole focus of the book corner is, of course, The Da Vinci Code.
The Jewel in the Crown (Paul Scott): I gather this is the first of a four-book series about the British in India in the 1940s. I'm not exactly sure what the other books are about, because this one seems pretty mammoth and comprehensive on its own -- it's in some sense a study of every possible combination of Britain and India and how the human representatives of them all feel about each other. So you have the British army guy sent in to keep order, the upper-class British civil servant, the British lower-class guy come over to make something of himself as a police officer, the Indian guy who was raised in England, the Indian guy who idolized British culture and hence brought his son to England to be raised, the Indian guy who's a judge in the British-established legal system, the Indian guy who's a self-made millionaire and thinks he therefore doesn't need to worry about the British, the Indian guy who's a teacher in a missionary school, the Indian guy who wants the British out but wants to do it peacefully, the Indian guy who's a young radical and wants the British out any way he can, the Indian guy who's a thug and is looking for an excuse to riot. And those are just the guys -- then you have the upper-class British ladies who are married to various civil servants and soldiers, the British lady come to do missionary work, the crazy British lady who lives in the slums, the orphaned British daughter come to live with relatives, the rich dowager Indian lady, the poor Indian woman who -- ok, you get the picture. And this somewhat overwhelming cast of characters all interact and snub or condescend to or fall in love with or envy or hate or attack or sabotage or insult or bribe or arrest or what-all to all the other ones.
Things are not made easier to grasp by the writing, which is 90% fine and 10% sentences like this:Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south.
With all this scope, then, it's nice that the author keeps focus on a single incident, a rape on the evening of a rebellion. It's true we see months and years back and forward from that point, getting back-history on all the characters so we'll know why they do what they do, but the fact that it keeps coming back to the single incident helps me remember what's going on. And overall the author carries it all off pretty well. As one of the characters comments it's not really possible to explain all of a historical incident -- you could spend your whole life recording details and not get them all -- but the book still succeeds in giving what seems like the right feel for the times and the people, and if it's not comprehensive it is honest about its gaps*.
*The one place I'd say this isn't quite true is the treatment of female characters. With historical settings it's hard to work out sometimes how much sexism is inherent in the setting and how much in the particular story. In this case it feels like the author made a real effort to include female focal characters, but their actual effect on the narrative is very little, except for the very end of the book -- and there the character has an effect by her concerted inaction.
Up next: Watchtower, Singularity Sky, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.