March book reviews
The Cutting Room - Louise Welsh (fiction, crime) (**)
I loved Louise Welsh’s historical novella, Tamburlaine Must Die, but I found this thriller set in the seedy world of Glaswegian antiques dealerships distinctly un-thrilling.
Right from the start, I wanted to get out my red pen and start correcting The Cutting Room. It’s not the typos that bother me - although they’re there - it’s the way that the novel’s mystery (about ‘snuff’ pornography) fails to mesh with its milieu and cast of characters. Welsh seems far more interested in writing about her hard-drinking, grizzled protagonist, Rilke, and his motley assortment of friends and colleagues, than she does in developing the mystery.
When I try to describe the novel, the word I keep coming up with is: clumsy.
There’s a strong whiff of pretension attached to Cutting, with epigraphs adorning almost every chapter (you don’t get a gold star for invoking every poem you’ve ever read, Welsh), and truly awful naming choices. ‘Rilke’ is simply an absurd name for a scummy detective character, but worse is the sub-Dickensian villain, named ‘McKindless’. We get it: he’s unkind.
Welsh tries to draw parallels between Rilke and sadistic pornographer McKindless, positing (I think) that we are all capable of sado-sexual impulses. But, like almost everything about this novel, it’s clumsy. There’s no smooth story arc to Cutting; it’s filled instead with scenes that demonstrate something - here we meet the friendly policeman character; here we learn that Rilke likes rough sex; here we learn that Rilke believes in honour among thieves. It’s paint-by-numbers storytelling and the novel drags as a result.
There’s potential in Cutting - I like the idea of a gay protagonist in a staunchly-heterosexual genre; I feel there’s a lot to be said about the link between sex and death - but it all remains sadly unrealised.
Wintergirls - Laurie Halse Anderson (fiction, teen) (***)
Laurie Halse Anderson tackles the subject of anorexia with brutal honesty and a surprising amount of lyricism. Using language which is poetic without being pretentious, Wintergirls evokes the dreamlike, fragmentary feeling of a life of wilful starvation.
As someone who knows a little about anorexia (not through personal experience, just as a perpetual researcher), I was impressed at how realistic and well-researched the book is. Anderson weaves little-known facts about anorexia (you know you grow fur if you have anorexia, right? YOU GROW FUR) into her narrative, never reaching for movie-of-the-week clichés.
I want to give this book a solid four stars because it’s so beautifully written and leave it at that. Alas, I cannot, because - beautifully written it may be - there’s no there there.
There’s simply no storyline to make Wintergirls compelling. It’s all description and emotion and absolutely no plot. This may be realistic - how many anoretic girls have time to audition for the school play or become a concert pianist or solve a murder mystery? - but, as the reader weaves slowly through protagonist Lia’s rituals and neuroses, the novel becomes dull and repetitive.
The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron - Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind (non-fiction, business) (***)
The Smartest Guys In the Room is a well-written, well-researched attempt to unravel the financial shenanigans that led to Enron’s bankruptcy. It’s a compelling (and sometimes soapy) indictment of the worst side of business, and it queasily foreshadows the financial crisis of 2008.
I can’t say enough about how well McLean and Elkind present the material in this book, but the fact remains that (a) it’s really, really long, and (b) it’s about finance. I learned a lot about securitization (etc.) as a result of this book, but nonetheless, there were times when I just couldn’t stay engaged with all the accountancy blah blah blah stuff.
I started this book at Christmas and I’m just now finishing it in March. Yeah, it was a long slog.
Worth reading, but one that I’m glad to finally boot off my nightstand.
Made in Britain: Inspirational Role Models from British Black & Minority Ethnic Communities - Steven D'Souza and Patrick Clarke (non-fiction) (**)
The concept behind this book - providing black and minority ethnic (BME) young people with role models who aren’t rappers or footballers - is genuinely inspirational. This makes the book’s failings even more disappointing. While I’m sure young people could extract some useful material from Made In Britain, it falls a long way short of being truly compelling reading.
Steven D'Souza and Patrick Clarke profile a dozen prominent BME figures - among them: CEOs, activists, an architect, a comedienne - but they fail to extract very much interesting material from them. They simply don’t take control of the interviews; when their subjects offer up bland business-speak aphorisms, they don’t probe any deeper. One subject hijacks the interview completely and it becomes a shameless advertisement for his brand of beer!
What’s more, Made In Britain chooses to reprint the interviews as transcripts. One would never pick up a newspaper or magazine and find a transcript of an interview; good journalists shape their interviews, giving background detail and including their impressions of their subject. I’m not going to accuse D'Souza and Clarke of being bad journalists - they’re not journalists at all! Both successful men, they’ve found their niche elsewhere. And yet they’ve chosen to write a book of journalism. Go figure.
The book has also been laid out in a very strange way - with double line breaks between the paragraphs. To be frank, it looks self-published.
Nice idea; disappointing book.
Close and Deadly: Chilling Murders in the Heart of Edinburgh - Alanna Knight (non-fiction, true crime) (*)
Ahh, an ‘impulse borrow’ from the library and one that did not live up to even low expectations.
A collection of true crime accounts, Close and Deadly seems strangely disjointed. Ostensibly, the 20 or so ill-deeds described in the book are tied together by the fact that they all took place in Edinburgh. However, there’s no real sense of place inherent in the narrative. Alanna Knight makes scant effort to really evoke the streets, the people and the peculiarities of Edinburgh. There’s certainly nothing else to link together the stories: the cases span more than 100 years; they are variously driven by passion, money, madness.
It’s no exaggeration to say that you could google ‘murder’, read the first 20 newspaper articles you find and you’d have an experience fairly similar to reading Close and Deadly.
It’s true that some of the accounts provide diverting, bitesize mysteries. However, many more are bizarrely overlong - not because they’re complex cases, but because Knight includes superfluous detail. I suspect Knight wrote precisely according to how much research material was available on each case: if there was a lot of material, she wrote a long story; if there wasn’t much material, she wrote a short story. Need I point out that a good researcher should filter and summarize material?
Its research flaws aside, I’m afraid I can’t even say that Close and Deadly is well-written. I felt like this book needed a good copyeditor. Tell me, does this sentence bother you as much as it bothers me?
After a marriage of ten years, they were anxious to have a child and had a baby daughter, Veronica Jane, born in January 1968.
*twitch*
Here, I’ll fix it for you, Alanna Knight:
After a marriage of ten years, they were anxious to have a child. Veronica Jane, their baby daughter, was born in January 1968.
I loved Louise Welsh’s historical novella, Tamburlaine Must Die, but I found this thriller set in the seedy world of Glaswegian antiques dealerships distinctly un-thrilling.
Right from the start, I wanted to get out my red pen and start correcting The Cutting Room. It’s not the typos that bother me - although they’re there - it’s the way that the novel’s mystery (about ‘snuff’ pornography) fails to mesh with its milieu and cast of characters. Welsh seems far more interested in writing about her hard-drinking, grizzled protagonist, Rilke, and his motley assortment of friends and colleagues, than she does in developing the mystery.
When I try to describe the novel, the word I keep coming up with is: clumsy.
There’s a strong whiff of pretension attached to Cutting, with epigraphs adorning almost every chapter (you don’t get a gold star for invoking every poem you’ve ever read, Welsh), and truly awful naming choices. ‘Rilke’ is simply an absurd name for a scummy detective character, but worse is the sub-Dickensian villain, named ‘McKindless’. We get it: he’s unkind.
Welsh tries to draw parallels between Rilke and sadistic pornographer McKindless, positing (I think) that we are all capable of sado-sexual impulses. But, like almost everything about this novel, it’s clumsy. There’s no smooth story arc to Cutting; it’s filled instead with scenes that demonstrate something - here we meet the friendly policeman character; here we learn that Rilke likes rough sex; here we learn that Rilke believes in honour among thieves. It’s paint-by-numbers storytelling and the novel drags as a result.
There’s potential in Cutting - I like the idea of a gay protagonist in a staunchly-heterosexual genre; I feel there’s a lot to be said about the link between sex and death - but it all remains sadly unrealised.
Wintergirls - Laurie Halse Anderson (fiction, teen) (***)
Laurie Halse Anderson tackles the subject of anorexia with brutal honesty and a surprising amount of lyricism. Using language which is poetic without being pretentious, Wintergirls evokes the dreamlike, fragmentary feeling of a life of wilful starvation.
As someone who knows a little about anorexia (not through personal experience, just as a perpetual researcher), I was impressed at how realistic and well-researched the book is. Anderson weaves little-known facts about anorexia (you know you grow fur if you have anorexia, right? YOU GROW FUR) into her narrative, never reaching for movie-of-the-week clichés.
I want to give this book a solid four stars because it’s so beautifully written and leave it at that. Alas, I cannot, because - beautifully written it may be - there’s no there there.
There’s simply no storyline to make Wintergirls compelling. It’s all description and emotion and absolutely no plot. This may be realistic - how many anoretic girls have time to audition for the school play or become a concert pianist or solve a murder mystery? - but, as the reader weaves slowly through protagonist Lia’s rituals and neuroses, the novel becomes dull and repetitive.
The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron - Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind (non-fiction, business) (***)
The Smartest Guys In the Room is a well-written, well-researched attempt to unravel the financial shenanigans that led to Enron’s bankruptcy. It’s a compelling (and sometimes soapy) indictment of the worst side of business, and it queasily foreshadows the financial crisis of 2008.
I can’t say enough about how well McLean and Elkind present the material in this book, but the fact remains that (a) it’s really, really long, and (b) it’s about finance. I learned a lot about securitization (etc.) as a result of this book, but nonetheless, there were times when I just couldn’t stay engaged with all the accountancy blah blah blah stuff.
I started this book at Christmas and I’m just now finishing it in March. Yeah, it was a long slog.
Worth reading, but one that I’m glad to finally boot off my nightstand.
Made in Britain: Inspirational Role Models from British Black & Minority Ethnic Communities - Steven D'Souza and Patrick Clarke (non-fiction) (**)
The concept behind this book - providing black and minority ethnic (BME) young people with role models who aren’t rappers or footballers - is genuinely inspirational. This makes the book’s failings even more disappointing. While I’m sure young people could extract some useful material from Made In Britain, it falls a long way short of being truly compelling reading.
Steven D'Souza and Patrick Clarke profile a dozen prominent BME figures - among them: CEOs, activists, an architect, a comedienne - but they fail to extract very much interesting material from them. They simply don’t take control of the interviews; when their subjects offer up bland business-speak aphorisms, they don’t probe any deeper. One subject hijacks the interview completely and it becomes a shameless advertisement for his brand of beer!
What’s more, Made In Britain chooses to reprint the interviews as transcripts. One would never pick up a newspaper or magazine and find a transcript of an interview; good journalists shape their interviews, giving background detail and including their impressions of their subject. I’m not going to accuse D'Souza and Clarke of being bad journalists - they’re not journalists at all! Both successful men, they’ve found their niche elsewhere. And yet they’ve chosen to write a book of journalism. Go figure.
The book has also been laid out in a very strange way - with double line breaks between the paragraphs. To be frank, it looks self-published.
Nice idea; disappointing book.
Close and Deadly: Chilling Murders in the Heart of Edinburgh - Alanna Knight (non-fiction, true crime) (*)
Ahh, an ‘impulse borrow’ from the library and one that did not live up to even low expectations.
A collection of true crime accounts, Close and Deadly seems strangely disjointed. Ostensibly, the 20 or so ill-deeds described in the book are tied together by the fact that they all took place in Edinburgh. However, there’s no real sense of place inherent in the narrative. Alanna Knight makes scant effort to really evoke the streets, the people and the peculiarities of Edinburgh. There’s certainly nothing else to link together the stories: the cases span more than 100 years; they are variously driven by passion, money, madness.
It’s no exaggeration to say that you could google ‘murder’, read the first 20 newspaper articles you find and you’d have an experience fairly similar to reading Close and Deadly.
It’s true that some of the accounts provide diverting, bitesize mysteries. However, many more are bizarrely overlong - not because they’re complex cases, but because Knight includes superfluous detail. I suspect Knight wrote precisely according to how much research material was available on each case: if there was a lot of material, she wrote a long story; if there wasn’t much material, she wrote a short story. Need I point out that a good researcher should filter and summarize material?
Its research flaws aside, I’m afraid I can’t even say that Close and Deadly is well-written. I felt like this book needed a good copyeditor. Tell me, does this sentence bother you as much as it bothers me?
After a marriage of ten years, they were anxious to have a child and had a baby daughter, Veronica Jane, born in January 1968.
*twitch*
Here, I’ll fix it for you, Alanna Knight:
After a marriage of ten years, they were anxious to have a child. Veronica Jane, their baby daughter, was born in January 1968.