Fifty book challenge 2012: Books 51-60
Previously seen on this challenge ...
51. The Town in Bloom, Dodie Smith - Dodie Smith is now known almost solely for The Hundred and One Dalmatians and I Capture the Castle, but she was a prolific novelist and playwright in her time. A few of her novels have just been reissued by Constable, this being one.
In the 1920s, three aspiring young actresses living in the same theatrical women’s club become close friends. Later they meet another young woman who becomes star-struck by them, moves into the club, splashes her seemingly inexhaustible funds on them, then disappears as suddenly as she came. Forty years later, glamorous Lilian, large, indolent Molly, and the narrator, tiny, indomitable Mouse, are still having regular reunions, always hoping that Zelle, too, will show up. But she never does - until Mouse spots a familiar profile outside their restaurant, and gives chase, stirring up a vivid mass of memories of the months they were together: Mouse’s determination to find work in the theatre and her reckless pursuit of her heartthrob boss, Lilian’s limited theatrical success and the ploys she utilises to land herself the husband she wants, Molly’s own True Love story and, of course, the real story behind Zelle’s appearance and disappearance.
Very readable, even though few of the characters are particularly likeable, and none of them, except perhaps Molly, has any morals to speak of. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating snapshot of period London theatre life, based largely on Smith’s own professional experience.
52. The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, Catherynne M Valente - ‘Catherynne’? Seriously? Oh, well, never mind.
I do believe that we have here a whole new genre: art house fantasy. Never mind the story, see how clever we are!
No, I didn’t like it very much, what makes you say that?
In a universe apparently inspired by an old Fry’s Turkish Delight advert, a young orphan girl afflicted by a dark birthmark around her eyes haunts the gardens of the Palace (it doesn’t say what Palace), feared and shunned by all, until one day a young boy dares to speak to her. She tells him that her birthmark is, in fact, a long, magical tale, one that she is reading (it also doesn’t say how she learned to read) slowly, in a backwards mirror, one eye at a time. The boys asks her to tell him her stories, and so she begins.
The conceit here is that the stories in question, as in The Thousand and One Nights on which this is so clearly based, unfold from character to character: we begin, and occasionally return to, the orphan and the boy; she begins to tell him the Prince’s story; the Prince meets a Witch, and we move on to her story; then the Witch’s grandmother gets in on the action … and so on. It’s an entertaining enough novelty to begin with, but very soon gets tedious. Aside from all else, the stories themselves are thin and insubstantial, and being broken up in this way does nothing to improve them.
The book itself is beautifully produced, in a large format, on heavy quality paper, a glossy cover, illustrations - rather bad ones, but I expect the artist was proud of them - and rough-cut page edges. (Actually, I’m not sure what the term is for the page edges; I think they’re cut to different widths according to alternate chapters, but I really can’t be bothered to check.) Lots of style; very little substance. Still, if you pretend you’re clever and arty enough, there’s every possibility that you’ll manage to fool a few people at least into agreeing with you.
To Oxfam with this one.
53. The Last Kashmiri Rose, Barbara Cleverly - I do hope Barbara Cleverly has a sister called Beverly. I wish my name were ‘Cleverly’, and I lived up to it. But, as ever, I digress.
This is the first in a series of mysteries set in 1920s Raj India and featuring Joe Sandilands, a Scotland Yard detective on what he had hoped would be temporary secondment. Sandilands is sent to a military station to investigate the death of an officer’s wife in what initially seems to be a suicide. He soon discovers that this is the fifth officer’s wife to die in suspicious circumstances, and has to unravel a mystery that has its roots before the Great War.
An efficient enough mystery, if a little far-fetched, and the Raj background is convincing enough, at least to a non-expert. Sandilands himself is not as likeable as perhaps the author meant him to be, largely due to his liaison with yet another officer’s wife, but altogether I found this interesting enough at least to give the next one in the series a go.
54. The Mobile Library: The Case of the Missing Books, Ian Sansom - first in a series featuring fish-out-of-water librarian Israel Armstrong, a North London, Jewish vegetarian who accepts a placement in Northern Ireland as the only library work he can get. When he gets there, he’s dismayed to find that the library is closed: what he’ll actually be running is the mobile library, based in a rusting, decrepit old van, currently garaged in a chicken shed. Worse yet: the books are missing. It’s up to whiny, ineffectual Israel, with the help of the pugilistic Ted, the van’s driver, to find the books, get the van on the road, and bring literature back to the people of County Antrim.
Lively and entertaining, if a bit fixated on poo. Israel is irritating, but not wholly without his good points, and the local population isn’t quite entirely made up of stereotypes. Almost, but not quite. Worth seeing how the second book goes.
55. The Mathematics of Love, Emma Darwin - a well-crafted novel that switches between England and post-Napoleonic Europe of 1819, and the heatwave summer of 1979, the two segments sharing the location of Kersey Hall, Stephen Fairhurst’s Regency home and a temporary refuge for modern-day teenaged Anna, along with themes of loss, abandonment, and violence. Fairhurst is trying to rebuild his life after a war which has left him crippled, but finds little in English country society to keep him there; his travels into Europe bring him deeper understanding of himself and, eventually, lead him to confront a vital piece of his past. Anna has been dumped on an uncle she barely knows while her mother tries to sort out yet another new life for them, only to find herself defending her uncle’s unacknowledged child from their crazed, bitter, violent grandmother. She finds respite and consolation with the exotic European photo-journalists who rent the old stables next door, but this ends in grief when she finds herself falling in love with the much-older Theo. And then there are the old letters she’s given to read - letters from the long-dead Stephen Fairhurst.
A good book; just, somehow, not mammothly endearing. The acknowledgement page at the end tells us that it was written for the author’s MPhil in Writing at the University of Glamorgan, and this may account for the slightly impersonal feel.
56. The Gargoyle, Andrew Davidson - the narrator of the book (it possibly doesn’t bode well that I read the whole thing without ever realising he never gives us his name), a handsome but amoral porn actor and producer, is driving down a mountain, off his head on booze and coke, when he goes over the edge, the car crashes in flames, and he’s hideously burnt and mutilated. Luckily for him, he’s rich enough - see above re ‘porn star’ - to be able to afford exemplary medical treatment; at a hospital, furthermore, which appears to have been staffed by Central Casting: he has a grimly dedicated woman surgeon working on him, a badly-dressed and nerdy psychiatrist, a smiling and irrepressible Japanese physical therapist, and three nurses: Serious Nurse, Perky Nurse, and Enigmatic Nurse.
Into his hospital room one day comes a stranger, Marianne Engel - and, where the narrator is nameless, Marianne Engel is always referred to by both her names - a sometime psychiatric patient, and an artist who specialises in carving grotesques, more commonly known as gargoyles. She tells the narrator that she carries multiples hearts in her chest, and passes them into her gargoyles as she releases them from the stone. She also tells him that he and she have met before: that they were lovers sometime in the 14th century; he was a mercenary, and she was a nun who left the cloister for him. He died, and she had been waiting ever since for him to return and their story to complete itself.
All of which makes for a perfectly adequate novel, if you don’t expect too much. Its research shows something shocking - the author might as well just have printed up a couple of articles on burn treatments and a few more on 14th century Germany from the internet and had done with it - and the characters, as I may have hinted previously, are straight out of stock. The narrator does have something of a sense of humour, though, which redeems both him and the book to some extent.
It also suffers from Annoying Artiness; the page edges are tinted black, and portions of the text are also blocked out in black. All this actually means is that the pages stick to one another. Which is just irritating.
57. It Ends With Revelations, Dodie Smith - Miles Quentin, a distinguished actor, is starring in the out-of-town opening of a play of which no-one has very high hopes. While Miles rehearses, his wife Jill, who acts as his personal assistant, makes the acquaintance of Geoffrey Thornton, the local MP, and his two excessively precocious daughters. Both families become very fond of one another, but before long Geoffrey is making it obvious that he has more than a friendly interest in Jill - an interest which, in spite of herself, she has to admit she reciprocates.
The elephant in the room is that Miles is gay, and his marriage to Jill has never been consummated. Even so, they’ve been perfectly happy for ten years. Does Jill really want to take the risk of destroying their happiness?
Written and set in 1967, this is very much a period piece - in some ways, in fact, it seems much more dated than far older novels on a similar theme. Everyone concerned is very careful not to give offence when discussing homosexuality - as it is always referred to; the word ‘gay’ hadn’t come into common parlance at that time - but, even so, some of the things they come out with rather make one shudder. Even the devoted Jill is perfectly capable of suspecting Miles of paedophilia; Miles’s agent candidly admits that he doesn’t understand his queer clients; and Geoffrey quite clearly considers Jill fair game because her husband isn’t - there are not enough quotation marks in the world - a “proper man”.
These problems notwithstanding, the writing has Dodie Smith’s trademark sparkle, and her insider’s knowledge of the theatre is, as ever, fascinating.
58. The Telling, Jo Baker - yet another tale of two timelines; it’s an excessively popular plot device these days. Sometimes it works pretty well. Others - here, for example - not so much.
The two strands concern Rachel, a modern housewife, suffering from depression following her mother’s death but settling in to pack up her parents’ almost-unused country retreat for sale; and Lizzie, a maidservant from the mid-19th century, whose life is disrupted when her father takes in a lodger who proves to be that most dangerous thing, a Chartist. Full points to the author for getting Chartism into a romantic novel, but she doesn’t manage to make it very interesting, and the modern-day story is even less so. Nor is there anything very substantial to tie the two strands together. True confession: I read about half this book a couple of years ago, then put it down and didn’t pick it up again until the other day, when I decided to finish the thing just out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Another one for Oxfam, I fear.
59. How To Be a Woman, Caitlin Moran - modern feminist Moran takes on modern feminism with wit, grace, vast amounts of booze, and a whole lot of sweariness, interweaving the earlier chapters with memories of her own overweight, friendless, impoverished childhood. (I am now incapable of imagining Daddy Moran as anything but the dad in Shameless, and in the wholly improbable event that I should ever meet him, I shall have to apologise.)
Most of what Moran has to say is really just simple commonsense, and I was nodding along with her quite happily for a good two-thirds of the book. Then she got started on the joys of Motherhood, and I lost interest. And then after that there was a nasty little outburst of ageism, which nearly lost me altogether. However, nobody’s perfect, and by the time Moran is 58 (which, she says, she reckons is ‘old’) she will probably have reconsidered her position.
For the most part: funny, convincing, clever, and very easy to read - perfect for hospital waiting rooms and long bus journeys. That may not be what the author wanted to hear, but it’s what she’s getting from me.
60. Naked Heat, “Richard Castle” - beyond meta, this one: Castle is, of course, a TV show about a crime fiction writer, Richard Castle, played by the lovely Nathan Fillion, who, for various flimsy and unconvincing reasons, is permitted to ride alone with New York detective Kate Beckett in order to research his writing. Beckett inspires a character, also a New York detective, named Nikki Heat; and this is, purportedly, one of the books inspired by the collaboration.
My head, just for one, is hurting rather badly about now.
Anyway, all that notwithstanding, this is a perfectly decent police procedural mystery, with a good plot and enough twists to keep the reader entertained. It’s a step or two up from an episode of Castle - necessarily having to be a little more complex just for reasons of length, if nothing else. It’s even fairly well-written, although the author (we will assume not Castle, and not Nathan Fillion either) has a bit of a problem with descriptives, and Nikki Heat is ‘Heat’, ‘Nikki’, ‘Detective Heat’, ‘Detective Nikki Heat’ and ‘the detective’, if not all on one page then certainly all in quite short order.
The supporting characters from Castle are mainly present, and only very thinly disguised, including Castle’s mother. We’ve lost his daughter, but gained an additional female detective. Castle himself is represented by journalist Jameson Rook - ohhhh, Rook, I see what they did there - whose excuse for tagging along after Nikki Heat is even less convincing than Castle’s. Castle the character, that is. Not Castle the writer. Who doesn’t exist.
Ummmm …
Incidentally, if any of these characters did exist (which, we have established: no), I can’t think that Kate Beckett would be very pleased with Castle at his giving Nikki Heat a murdered mother, since that’s something she’s tried to keep private throughout the show. But then, Castle often needs a smack. If he weren’t the lovely Nathan Fillion, he would undoubtedly get a lot more than he does.
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51. The Town in Bloom, Dodie Smith - Dodie Smith is now known almost solely for The Hundred and One Dalmatians and I Capture the Castle, but she was a prolific novelist and playwright in her time. A few of her novels have just been reissued by Constable, this being one.
In the 1920s, three aspiring young actresses living in the same theatrical women’s club become close friends. Later they meet another young woman who becomes star-struck by them, moves into the club, splashes her seemingly inexhaustible funds on them, then disappears as suddenly as she came. Forty years later, glamorous Lilian, large, indolent Molly, and the narrator, tiny, indomitable Mouse, are still having regular reunions, always hoping that Zelle, too, will show up. But she never does - until Mouse spots a familiar profile outside their restaurant, and gives chase, stirring up a vivid mass of memories of the months they were together: Mouse’s determination to find work in the theatre and her reckless pursuit of her heartthrob boss, Lilian’s limited theatrical success and the ploys she utilises to land herself the husband she wants, Molly’s own True Love story and, of course, the real story behind Zelle’s appearance and disappearance.
Very readable, even though few of the characters are particularly likeable, and none of them, except perhaps Molly, has any morals to speak of. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating snapshot of period London theatre life, based largely on Smith’s own professional experience.
52. The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, Catherynne M Valente - ‘Catherynne’? Seriously? Oh, well, never mind.
I do believe that we have here a whole new genre: art house fantasy. Never mind the story, see how clever we are!
No, I didn’t like it very much, what makes you say that?
In a universe apparently inspired by an old Fry’s Turkish Delight advert, a young orphan girl afflicted by a dark birthmark around her eyes haunts the gardens of the Palace (it doesn’t say what Palace), feared and shunned by all, until one day a young boy dares to speak to her. She tells him that her birthmark is, in fact, a long, magical tale, one that she is reading (it also doesn’t say how she learned to read) slowly, in a backwards mirror, one eye at a time. The boys asks her to tell him her stories, and so she begins.
The conceit here is that the stories in question, as in The Thousand and One Nights on which this is so clearly based, unfold from character to character: we begin, and occasionally return to, the orphan and the boy; she begins to tell him the Prince’s story; the Prince meets a Witch, and we move on to her story; then the Witch’s grandmother gets in on the action … and so on. It’s an entertaining enough novelty to begin with, but very soon gets tedious. Aside from all else, the stories themselves are thin and insubstantial, and being broken up in this way does nothing to improve them.
The book itself is beautifully produced, in a large format, on heavy quality paper, a glossy cover, illustrations - rather bad ones, but I expect the artist was proud of them - and rough-cut page edges. (Actually, I’m not sure what the term is for the page edges; I think they’re cut to different widths according to alternate chapters, but I really can’t be bothered to check.) Lots of style; very little substance. Still, if you pretend you’re clever and arty enough, there’s every possibility that you’ll manage to fool a few people at least into agreeing with you.
To Oxfam with this one.
53. The Last Kashmiri Rose, Barbara Cleverly - I do hope Barbara Cleverly has a sister called Beverly. I wish my name were ‘Cleverly’, and I lived up to it. But, as ever, I digress.
This is the first in a series of mysteries set in 1920s Raj India and featuring Joe Sandilands, a Scotland Yard detective on what he had hoped would be temporary secondment. Sandilands is sent to a military station to investigate the death of an officer’s wife in what initially seems to be a suicide. He soon discovers that this is the fifth officer’s wife to die in suspicious circumstances, and has to unravel a mystery that has its roots before the Great War.
An efficient enough mystery, if a little far-fetched, and the Raj background is convincing enough, at least to a non-expert. Sandilands himself is not as likeable as perhaps the author meant him to be, largely due to his liaison with yet another officer’s wife, but altogether I found this interesting enough at least to give the next one in the series a go.
54. The Mobile Library: The Case of the Missing Books, Ian Sansom - first in a series featuring fish-out-of-water librarian Israel Armstrong, a North London, Jewish vegetarian who accepts a placement in Northern Ireland as the only library work he can get. When he gets there, he’s dismayed to find that the library is closed: what he’ll actually be running is the mobile library, based in a rusting, decrepit old van, currently garaged in a chicken shed. Worse yet: the books are missing. It’s up to whiny, ineffectual Israel, with the help of the pugilistic Ted, the van’s driver, to find the books, get the van on the road, and bring literature back to the people of County Antrim.
Lively and entertaining, if a bit fixated on poo. Israel is irritating, but not wholly without his good points, and the local population isn’t quite entirely made up of stereotypes. Almost, but not quite. Worth seeing how the second book goes.
55. The Mathematics of Love, Emma Darwin - a well-crafted novel that switches between England and post-Napoleonic Europe of 1819, and the heatwave summer of 1979, the two segments sharing the location of Kersey Hall, Stephen Fairhurst’s Regency home and a temporary refuge for modern-day teenaged Anna, along with themes of loss, abandonment, and violence. Fairhurst is trying to rebuild his life after a war which has left him crippled, but finds little in English country society to keep him there; his travels into Europe bring him deeper understanding of himself and, eventually, lead him to confront a vital piece of his past. Anna has been dumped on an uncle she barely knows while her mother tries to sort out yet another new life for them, only to find herself defending her uncle’s unacknowledged child from their crazed, bitter, violent grandmother. She finds respite and consolation with the exotic European photo-journalists who rent the old stables next door, but this ends in grief when she finds herself falling in love with the much-older Theo. And then there are the old letters she’s given to read - letters from the long-dead Stephen Fairhurst.
A good book; just, somehow, not mammothly endearing. The acknowledgement page at the end tells us that it was written for the author’s MPhil in Writing at the University of Glamorgan, and this may account for the slightly impersonal feel.
56. The Gargoyle, Andrew Davidson - the narrator of the book (it possibly doesn’t bode well that I read the whole thing without ever realising he never gives us his name), a handsome but amoral porn actor and producer, is driving down a mountain, off his head on booze and coke, when he goes over the edge, the car crashes in flames, and he’s hideously burnt and mutilated. Luckily for him, he’s rich enough - see above re ‘porn star’ - to be able to afford exemplary medical treatment; at a hospital, furthermore, which appears to have been staffed by Central Casting: he has a grimly dedicated woman surgeon working on him, a badly-dressed and nerdy psychiatrist, a smiling and irrepressible Japanese physical therapist, and three nurses: Serious Nurse, Perky Nurse, and Enigmatic Nurse.
Into his hospital room one day comes a stranger, Marianne Engel - and, where the narrator is nameless, Marianne Engel is always referred to by both her names - a sometime psychiatric patient, and an artist who specialises in carving grotesques, more commonly known as gargoyles. She tells the narrator that she carries multiples hearts in her chest, and passes them into her gargoyles as she releases them from the stone. She also tells him that he and she have met before: that they were lovers sometime in the 14th century; he was a mercenary, and she was a nun who left the cloister for him. He died, and she had been waiting ever since for him to return and their story to complete itself.
All of which makes for a perfectly adequate novel, if you don’t expect too much. Its research shows something shocking - the author might as well just have printed up a couple of articles on burn treatments and a few more on 14th century Germany from the internet and had done with it - and the characters, as I may have hinted previously, are straight out of stock. The narrator does have something of a sense of humour, though, which redeems both him and the book to some extent.
It also suffers from Annoying Artiness; the page edges are tinted black, and portions of the text are also blocked out in black. All this actually means is that the pages stick to one another. Which is just irritating.
57. It Ends With Revelations, Dodie Smith - Miles Quentin, a distinguished actor, is starring in the out-of-town opening of a play of which no-one has very high hopes. While Miles rehearses, his wife Jill, who acts as his personal assistant, makes the acquaintance of Geoffrey Thornton, the local MP, and his two excessively precocious daughters. Both families become very fond of one another, but before long Geoffrey is making it obvious that he has more than a friendly interest in Jill - an interest which, in spite of herself, she has to admit she reciprocates.
The elephant in the room is that Miles is gay, and his marriage to Jill has never been consummated. Even so, they’ve been perfectly happy for ten years. Does Jill really want to take the risk of destroying their happiness?
Written and set in 1967, this is very much a period piece - in some ways, in fact, it seems much more dated than far older novels on a similar theme. Everyone concerned is very careful not to give offence when discussing homosexuality - as it is always referred to; the word ‘gay’ hadn’t come into common parlance at that time - but, even so, some of the things they come out with rather make one shudder. Even the devoted Jill is perfectly capable of suspecting Miles of paedophilia; Miles’s agent candidly admits that he doesn’t understand his queer clients; and Geoffrey quite clearly considers Jill fair game because her husband isn’t - there are not enough quotation marks in the world - a “proper man”.
These problems notwithstanding, the writing has Dodie Smith’s trademark sparkle, and her insider’s knowledge of the theatre is, as ever, fascinating.
58. The Telling, Jo Baker - yet another tale of two timelines; it’s an excessively popular plot device these days. Sometimes it works pretty well. Others - here, for example - not so much.
The two strands concern Rachel, a modern housewife, suffering from depression following her mother’s death but settling in to pack up her parents’ almost-unused country retreat for sale; and Lizzie, a maidservant from the mid-19th century, whose life is disrupted when her father takes in a lodger who proves to be that most dangerous thing, a Chartist. Full points to the author for getting Chartism into a romantic novel, but she doesn’t manage to make it very interesting, and the modern-day story is even less so. Nor is there anything very substantial to tie the two strands together. True confession: I read about half this book a couple of years ago, then put it down and didn’t pick it up again until the other day, when I decided to finish the thing just out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Another one for Oxfam, I fear.
59. How To Be a Woman, Caitlin Moran - modern feminist Moran takes on modern feminism with wit, grace, vast amounts of booze, and a whole lot of sweariness, interweaving the earlier chapters with memories of her own overweight, friendless, impoverished childhood. (I am now incapable of imagining Daddy Moran as anything but the dad in Shameless, and in the wholly improbable event that I should ever meet him, I shall have to apologise.)
Most of what Moran has to say is really just simple commonsense, and I was nodding along with her quite happily for a good two-thirds of the book. Then she got started on the joys of Motherhood, and I lost interest. And then after that there was a nasty little outburst of ageism, which nearly lost me altogether. However, nobody’s perfect, and by the time Moran is 58 (which, she says, she reckons is ‘old’) she will probably have reconsidered her position.
For the most part: funny, convincing, clever, and very easy to read - perfect for hospital waiting rooms and long bus journeys. That may not be what the author wanted to hear, but it’s what she’s getting from me.
60. Naked Heat, “Richard Castle” - beyond meta, this one: Castle is, of course, a TV show about a crime fiction writer, Richard Castle, played by the lovely Nathan Fillion, who, for various flimsy and unconvincing reasons, is permitted to ride alone with New York detective Kate Beckett in order to research his writing. Beckett inspires a character, also a New York detective, named Nikki Heat; and this is, purportedly, one of the books inspired by the collaboration.
My head, just for one, is hurting rather badly about now.
Anyway, all that notwithstanding, this is a perfectly decent police procedural mystery, with a good plot and enough twists to keep the reader entertained. It’s a step or two up from an episode of Castle - necessarily having to be a little more complex just for reasons of length, if nothing else. It’s even fairly well-written, although the author (we will assume not Castle, and not Nathan Fillion either) has a bit of a problem with descriptives, and Nikki Heat is ‘Heat’, ‘Nikki’, ‘Detective Heat’, ‘Detective Nikki Heat’ and ‘the detective’, if not all on one page then certainly all in quite short order.
The supporting characters from Castle are mainly present, and only very thinly disguised, including Castle’s mother. We’ve lost his daughter, but gained an additional female detective. Castle himself is represented by journalist Jameson Rook - ohhhh, Rook, I see what they did there - whose excuse for tagging along after Nikki Heat is even less convincing than Castle’s. Castle the character, that is. Not Castle the writer. Who doesn’t exist.
Ummmm …
Incidentally, if any of these characters did exist (which, we have established: no), I can’t think that Kate Beckett would be very pleased with Castle at his giving Nikki Heat a murdered mother, since that’s something she’s tried to keep private throughout the show. But then, Castle often needs a smack. If he weren’t the lovely Nathan Fillion, he would undoubtedly get a lot more than he does.
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