Imagine Beatrix Potter meets Agatha Christie and you have Shady Hollow. A bunch of animals live together in a small town where differences in size and diet don’t seem to be a problem as they mix together in coffee bars and restaurants. Fortunately, they all seem to have taken up vegetarianism so they don’t eat each other, but when a toad is found stabbed in the lake near his house it’s obvious that someone in Shady Hollow is prepared to kill for reasons other than getting their next meal. And when the beaver who owns the local sawmill is also murdered, it seems there may be a serial killer on the loose.
Will ace reporter Vera Vixen be able to track down the murderer? Or will she be the next victim?
I got a copy of this book through NetGalley and I did enjoy it. It’s the lightest of light reads and maybe what we all need nowadays, but it’s difficult to review. I’ve really said all there is to say about it. It’s nicely written in plain prose, but it’s hardly going to offer a wealth of characterisation: everyone is defined by their species characteristics (real or imagined). So the racoon is a bandit, the fox is cunning and the local police force are bears: strong and patient if sometimes a little plodding.
If you like this sort of thing, you’ll like it and if you don’t, you won’t. Shady Hollow is the first in a series. It worked well for me but three (so far) might be a bit much: one dip into a childhood world of talking animals is fun, but three suggests problems adapting to adult life. It’s nice to see odd books like this get support from their publishers but there are definitely worthier tomes out there being ignored.
Anthem is, to put it mildly, rather a strange book. It is, perhaps, the book that 2022 deserves: quirky; darkly cynical; very funny in places but desperately sad in others; simultaneously deeply pessimistic but finally (perhaps unrealistically) optimistic.
The book is set in an America of the very near future with several incidental characters who are named real people and key figures who are given fictional names but who are clearly identifiable. It must have given the lawyers pause.
Hawley likes to take down the fourth wall from time to time and talk directly to his readers. Thus we know that he does not intend to take sides. There are two parties in the USA: the party of Truth and the Party of Lies and they are, he says, interchangeable.
… Right now, the Party of Truth is in power. Before that the Party of Truth was in power. (Except it was the other party.) You can see how this is going to go. For short, let’s call one side Truthers and the other side Liars. Which is which depends on you.
Let’s not kid ourselves though. Hawley is a fully paid up member of the Liberal Elite and this book was never going to view Trump (referred to throughout as the god king) in a positive light. In fact, one of the funniest passages of the book is a random, rambling Trumpian monologue which catches his tone exactly and which, sadly, is too long to include here. It includes the line:
“But the omelet comes and the sausage – can I just tell you – the size of my pinkie, okay. Or smaller, ‘cause I got pretty big hands.”
It’s fair to say that this is not a book to appeal to mid-Western Republicans.
But, I hear you cry (because this demolishing the fourth wall is catching), what is the book ABOUT?
Good question, but arguably irrelevant. Is the Lord of the Rings about a couple of midgets trying to throw a ring into a volcano, or is it an epic metaphor about good and evil and the struggle for civilisation? Is Anthem a story about mass suicide amongst the youth of the world (although, frankly, this is so US-centric that “the world” is purely background colour) or is it an extended riff on the failure of modern politics, our refusal to deal properly with climate change and the general unpleasantness of human beings to each other? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.)
My personal politics hover somewhere between the Party of Truth and the Party of Lies, which means that I quite often read the Guardian but find that its painful insistence on being continually shocked by the basic unfairness of the world can irritate. Anthem is like reading the Guardian steadily for 427 pages. Fortunately, Hawley is a seriously good writer and his prose carries you along, even when you are losing patience with his remorselessly metrosexual, comfortable, all-American view of life and its woes. After all, the starting point of the book is that we are supposed to feel sympathetic and concerned about all the dear little children of privilege who are killing themselves because – well, we never discover exactly why. Teenage angst gone mad, mainly. It was difficult to care that much before the teenagers of Ukraine found themselves taking up weapons in a doomed attempt to save their homeland but, now that the news is full of young people with real troubles, I find myself struggling to tune up the world’s tiniest violin.
Hawley built his reputation in screen-writing and this is reflected in the style of his novel. While it does take itself seriously as a novel of ideas, it is happy too lurch off into action-packed sequences which show a Hollywood-inspired lack of attention to plot detail. People meet when the plot needs them to meet; escape deadly traps with implausible ease; and, when required, return from apparent death. When all the author’s attempts to get people to the right place at the right time fail, he resorts to having them guided directly by god, who speaks to them via a teen savant who calls himself the Prophet.
There is a figure called the Wizard (not a real wizard and bearing remarkable similarities to Jeffrey Epstein) and another called the Witch (probably a real witch). (You may notice that several characters seem unduly attracted to Capital Letters.)
The Witch appears, with no backstory and little attempt at narrative coherence and tortures a major character over an extended period. She is then apparently killed (more than once) but remorselessly continues, evil incarnate, to pursue our young hero until she doesn’t any more. She vanishes from the storyline as inexplicably as she arrived in it.
The messages from god, the improbable coincidences, characters like the Witch – all these are things that we have grown used to in a screenplay. The sort of thing where you wake after a fun night at the cinema (or on Netflix – this is 2022) and say, “But how did he know that she would be at the nightclub?” Only pedantic people allow this to spoil their pleasure in a good action movie, but one of the things that distinguishes books from film is that the plot of books should try to avoid this sort of thing while Anthem positively embraces it. I’m not going to give examples because even I am not quite that pedantic and, in any case, it would involve massive spoilers, but once you start looking you will see a lot of them.
So is this a terrible book? No, definitely not. It positively bowls along and the prose is a pleasure to read. And it does make some sharp and worthwhile points about the world we live in. But it is not the Great American Novel that some reviewers (and maybe even the author) think it is. It may well be the Great American Novel That Defines 2022, but that’s a bit like being the most cheerful Russian novel about the Gulag: there’s not that much competition and even the best of the field (take a bow The First Circle) is still pretty depressing.
Writing a review of Anthem and trying to say intelligent things about it, all the irritating quirks of the book become much more noticeable, but (though I was vaguely uneasy about some of it) while I was reading I was turning pages at speed and generally enjoying the experience. It’s a long book, but it was a relatively quick read. If you are not a mid-Western Republican and you can get through the Guardian without balling it up and throwing it at the wall, then you will probably find more to enjoy than to hate. Read it and form your own opinion.
Every year I say that I am cutting back on book reviews and in 2021 I have managed to make a start in that direction. There were only 18 book reviews on my block last year (including one that just snuck into the beginning of 2022). A lot of people reported that, contrary to expectations, they read less during lockdown than they would usually and I think I have been no exception to this. Still, 16 book reviews is more than one a month, so it may be helpful to do my annual summary that provides convenient links for anyone who might be interested in reading my take on any of the year’s choices. (Click on titles to go to my original review.)
Historical
In 2021 only nine of my reviews were historical novels. These ranged from two very different approaches to the 17th century right up to World War II, which is particularly popular with historical fiction writers at present. Here they are in roughly chronological order.
Elizabethan spies. Mary Queen of Scots. Gripping stuff in stunningly well-written novel by someone who certainly knew their Elizabethan history. Brilliant characters, (largely) convincing plot, loads of lovely period detail. A model of how to do it.
The second story here set against a Civil War background. Two strong female characters, a suitably chilling villain and a story that positively romps along, helped by fluid prose that’s a pleasure to read. A lot of fun.
Definitely one of the best books I read last year, Deborah Swift’s story of a surprisingly sympathetic mass-poisoner in 17th century Naples blends fact and fiction in the seamless way she has made her own.
Humphrey’s hero is fighting in the American War of Independence, but the book is very like the Burke series in its mix of espionage and carefully observed accounts of some key battles. If you like James Burke, you’ll love this.
Now we are fully into James Burke territory with a plot to kill Napoleon in 1801. I enjoyed seeing how another author covered territory not that different to the latest Burke adventure. (Burke and the Pimpernel Affair is set in 1809.) It’s an exciting story with a convincing historical background.
It’s 1864 and the hero of Vanner’s Dawlish Chronicles is a young midshipman when he finds himself caught up in a plot to provide unofficial military aid to the Danes who are at war with the Austrians and Prussians over the Schleswig-Holstein question. As ever, Vanner is fascinated by the technological advances of his chosen period and the effect that these are having on the conduct of war. He is unsparing with the details of the early days of modern warfare. It’s not an easy read, though Vanner writes well. It’s the subject matter, not the prose, that wears you down. There is an awful lot in this book and most of it depressing. It’s true, though, that war really is hell and books that are honest about this are a valuable antidote to a lot of the romanticised versions of war that you read in so many novels. It’s a must-read for fans of naval history in the early years of steam.
Up to the First World War now and another of Alan Bardos’ excellently researched books. This is the sequel to The Assassins. We’re back with his anti-hero, Johnny Swift, with a brilliant summary of why the Allies were attempting a landing at Gallipoli and why it was doomed.
Moving on to World War II we have Deborah Swift’s book about the ‘Shetland Bus’ ferrying resistance fighters between German-occupied Norway and the Shetland Islands. It’s a little-known part of the war and will appeal to people who enjoy war stories.
How come I’ve a tenth title here when I said that only nine of my reviews were historical novels? The answer is that Lucky Jackis not a novel but “a sort of a memoir”. It’s an account of the life of a West London cobbler, put together from family records and Jack’s own writings by his grand-daughter, Sue Bavey. Jack was born in 1894 and died in 2000 and he fives an ‘Everyman’ perspective on the whole of the 20th century. This is a wonderful book, which I recommend wholeheartedly.
I don’t often write negative reviews: life’s too short. But I’ve enjoyed books by Ragnar Jonasson before and the publisher sent me a copy of this to review, so I felt I had to. Long story short: don’t read it. (Definitely not the book and probably not the review either.)
Jane Austen for the 21st century. Highlights include the middle class house party from hell (probably my favourite bit of the book and a reminder that thanks to covid we’ve all been excused some ghastly evenings) and the detailed descriptions of décor. Each of the main characters lives in a very different kind of house. All of them are dripping with money but all are in a diverse style. Just reading about their furnishings immediately places the characters. “Oh yes,” says my beloved of one of them, “That’s the house I’d live in if I had the money.” She’s right of course: it belongs to the most sympathetic character in the book.
Traditional cosy crime story, enlivened by having one character who is a ghost (but who doesn’t help solve the murder, thank goodness). Undemanding well-written fun.
A friend who had read my urban fantasy, Something Wicked, said that it reminded him of Rivers of London so I had a look at it on Amazon and it’s rather wonderful. And, yes, there are definite similarities to Something Wicked. Perhaps Aaronovitch’s familiarity with the supernatural (the story does suggest quite a lot of research) means that he read Something Wicked and then moved back through time to write Rivers of London.
Like Something Wicked the story starts with the discovery of a body that has been the victim of an unusual murder. In this case it has been decapitated. There follows a lot of detail of police procedure but the appearance, fairly early on, of a ghost as a witness to the crime suggests that things are going to get very weird very quickly. While my detective finds himself working alongside Chief Inspector Pole, a vampire from the mysterious Section S, our hero here, Chief Inspector Nightingale, is a wizard working for Economic and Specialist Crime. Pole and Nightingale share a preference for working alone from their homes and both seem to take an unhealthy interest in mortuaries, but while Pole’s brief sticks to the vampiric, Nightingale covers all the ghosties and ghoulies London has to offer. It makes for a complex plot but it makes sense as you read along. It’s helped by a wonderful sense of place, with lots of details of London geography that pin it firmly to reality. Above all it is funny – often laugh-out-loud funny. It’s a wonderful mix of horror and humour and glorious British eccentricity at its best. I do recommend it.
I was given a copy of this book from NetGalley. It appealed because I have been reading a few stories set around the British Civil War lately and another book in this period looked fun. The blurb mentioned a supernatural element, but I thought that might be interesting too.
I struggled with the opening. The story starts in 1703 but we are plunged straight into an account of events in 1628 which are obviously in some way supposed to relate to the rest of the book. It’s an account of a shipwreck and there are suggestions of something unnatural about it, but then we moved to the second chapter set in 1643 where a young man is returning home after a battle. Although we are soon to meet allegations of witchcraft, there is nothing as dramatic or spectacularly supernatural as the shipwreck.
We get to the shipwreck later – much, much later – but its insertion at the beginning just confused me. It seems part of a trend – presumably in response to suggestions that modern audiences have short attention spans and must have their interest piqued immediately – to putting a dramatic start to books, whether or not the story actually starts dramatically. It’s annoying. It’s particularly unfortunate as once we get to the young man returning home we find ourselves in a nicely observed account of the times. When he is faced with allegations that a servant girl is a witch, he is sceptical. In fact, much of the interest (and tension) of this part of the story comes from his trying to decide if the girl is guilty or if there is a natural explanation for the events surrounding her – a tension that is, if anything, rather undermined by the opening chapter.
The writer explores attitudes to witchcraft and how people respond to the idea that a woman might be a witch. We also see how the process can be abused by those who see possibilities for personal advantage from a witch’s fate.
Our hero is young and naïve but has to grow up fast as he navigates these difficult waters. He is helped by John Milton. It’s interesting to bring such a well-known historical figure into the story, but I felt he was rather wasted. It could have been an unknown John Smith and nothing much would have changed.
There are twists and turns to keep your interest and the whole thing is really well written. I found myself caught up in the story right to the end, but quite what happened at the end and what it all meant in the wider scheme of things was less than totally clear. Overall, I’d say that this is an entertaining read but it never lives quite up to its promise. If you’re interested in supernatural tales and life in the 17th century, it’s definitely worth a look.
With Burke and the Pimpernel Affair coming out on Friday, my blog is a bit occupied with the adventures of my Napoleonic spy at the moment. That should mean waiting a few weeks for my review of Lucky Jack. I don’t want to hang about, though, as Lucky Jack is a wonderful book and deserves all the support it can get. So I am yet again reviving my Tuesday book review slot so as to get the word out. I hope you enjoy it and that it encourages you to give the book a go.
Lucky Jack
This is a “sort of a memoir”. It sits between memoir (all in the first person, much in Jack’s own words) and a biography (put together by Jack’s granddaughter, Sue Bavey).
Jack was born in 1894 and died in 2000 age 106.
Jack was, in many ways, an ordinary man, so his experiences give a fascinating picture of the changes in life between the end of the 19th century and the very beginning of the 21st.
He describes incidents throughout his life in the same way, whether it was skating on the frozen Thames as a child or living the horror of the World War I trenches.
Jack was born the year before my father (yes, my father was very old and I am no longer young) and he was brought up not that far from where I live now, so I’m constantly catching glimpses of a world I heard described by my own dad or places that I know. Reading about the early 20th century like this is a strange experience. The familiarity of much of it suggests that life has not changed that much and then you come to a detail like his baby sister being buried in the same grave as a stranger “for a small cost” and you are reminded how much was different.
The 100th anniversary of the end of World War I three years back means that we know much more about the horrors of the trenches now than we did until recently but, even so, Jack’s account brought me closer to many of the realities of life in the trenches than anything else I’ve read.
Jack’s military service was not just in France. He also served in Dublin during the Easter Rising. He does not write much about this, but it is telling that he considered his posting back to Ypres was “a relief”. Our history books are too quiet on our relations with Ireland and this tantalisingly brief glimpse of the reality of British military occupation there is revealing.
Jack was captured by the Germans in March 1918 and gives a harrowing account of his life as a prisoner of war. For some reason (perhaps because we think that the old nationalist divisions should be left to heal) we hear little about the way in which the Germans treated their prisoners. I was quite shocked.
After the war, Jack returned to England and married. There are lots of glimpses of life with his new wife. These do not contribute much to our understanding of the period, but it is these vignettes of domestic life that make Jack a three dimensional human being. He takes on the role of Everyman, guiding us through the Depression and World War II.
The years after the Second World War are not covered in so much detail. He leaves London and, soon after, his wife dies. The rest of his life recounts the move from living with his son and daughter-in-law to lodging with an elderly friend, moving into sheltered accommodation and then counting down to death with a series of grand birthday parties: his hundredth, his 104th, his 105th, and finally one quieter party to mark his 106th birthday. He died three weeks later.
I read this because Sue Bavey asked me to and I was quite nervous of taking it on. Memoirs have become quite popular lately, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to read the life story of a West London cobbler. In fact, it was fascinating. Nowadays we say that children should learn about history from the experience of ordinary people, but what is usually presented as “ordinary people” is an anodyne composite of the man or woman in the street. These sanitised figures give no real understanding of the lives of “ordinary people” while Jack’s life, I felt, gave genuine insights into what the world was like throughout the 20th century: a period of astonishing change. As my father used to point out, he had grown up over a stables, when horses were the main form of transportation but he lived to fly abroad for his holidays and eventually to watch men travel to the moon. Jack shared these experiences. Like all children, I never paid proper attention to my father’s accounts of his life. Jack has given me another chance to understand it and I am grateful.
Last week I posted here to say that books make excellent Christmas presents. I’m not about to start recommending a list of books for Christmas, but by pure coincidence I have a couple of reviews that I need to post, so I’m going to put these up here and if the books appeal, I suggest you buy them.
The Poison Keeper: Deborah Swift
It’s difficult to write a review of a book that you feel is simply practically perfect in every way, especially when the plot contains so many twists, turns and surprises that there is hardly anything you can say that won’t include a spoiler. So here is a very short review of Deborah Swift’s The Poison Keeper. It’s set in 17th century Italy – mostly in Naples – and it follows the adventures of a young woman who is forced by circumstances to take up her mother’s trade as an apothecary. She starts reasonably enough providing remedies for minor ailments, moves on to abortifacients and, almost before she knows it, she’s providing poison for murder on a scale that makes the authorities wonder why it is that so many rich men are suddenly dying and leaving their wealth to their wives.
As I said, it’s difficult to explain why a book like this is so extraordinarily good. Perhaps it’s the convincing period detail, perhaps it’s the wonderful characterisation, perhaps it’s the moral quandaries that the characters face. Is the poisoner, in the end, any worse than a mercenary soldier? If men can use their strength and power to humiliate and subjugate women, is it legitimate for women to use a bit of pharmacology to even things up?
The story is told with Swift’s usual verve and skill and is one of those books that had me putting off things that really ought to have been done just so that I could get on to the end of the story.
We’re coming to that season when everybody has to choose their books of the year. The Poison Keeper has definitely made my shortlist.
The Paris Apartment: Lucy Foley
The Paris Apartment is being compared to books by Agatha Christie, but this is grossly misleading. Agatha Christie wrote carefully constructed detective mysteries in which the clues were made available to the reader and much of the satisfaction the books gave came from working out whodunnit. The Paris Apartment is more of a thriller. Four people share a luxurious apartment building with a conciergerie who lives in a little shed in the courtyard. Ben has been invited by an old friend to take the only empty apartment for a peppercorn rent. (We never discover why the apartment is empty, which is a minor, but real, irritation for any Agatha Christie style detective fans who want all the loose ends neatly tied off.)
Ben’s sister has invited herself to come and stay with him, but when she arrives he is missing. She sets out to solve the mystery of his having vanished.
The story is told in the first person by each of the people living in the flat (including, for a while, the apparently deceased Ben). The place obviously harbours an evil secret. We are even told that the basement used to be used by the Gestapo for torturing prisoners, which adds an appropriately macabre undertone to the story. As the story goes on, layer after layer of mystery is revealed. I’m not going to say anything else about the plot as there are many twists and turns before the denouement. I didn’t see most of them coming, but somehow they did not seem that surprising after they had happened. Possibly it’s because the whole thing is written like a jigsaw puzzle and the pieces do definitely fit neatly together, but credibility and characterisation are sacrificed to making the mechanics of the plot work.
Did I care about the people or their ultimate fate? Absolutely not. But was I curious enough keep reading? Yes. So this is a book which will pass away a wintry afternoon over the Christmas holidays and I’m sure it will make a more than acceptable gift for mystery thriller fans. Just don’t give it to anybody who really likes Agatha Christie.
Please note that I got a pre-publication copy. If you do want to give it as a Christmas present, it will have to be Christmas 2022, as it isn’t being published until March.
And don’t forget my books
Some people seem to lose count. (I do myself.) There are five books about my Napoleonic-era spy, James Burke. A sixth, Burke and the Pimpernel Affair will be published early in 2022. If you want to read more about the series, click on this link: https://tomwilliamsauthor.co.uk/james-burke-his-majestys-confidential-agent/
I’ve also written two contemporary urban fantasies (Dark Magic and Something Wicked), which are a complete change from historical fiction. They are fun to write and fun to read. If you want to enter a world of Black Magic and vampires and (with the publication of the next one in early 2022) werewolves, do take a look.
