by TCW | Aug 20, 2019 | Book review
Every so often I “buy” a free book on Amazon which is being promoted in the hope of getting some reviews. If I read a book like this and I like it, I feel that I really should review it. That’s only fair, isn’t it? I hope you do the same.
Anyway, the latest random book picked up like this was Tannis Laidlaw’s ‘Half-truths and Whole Lies’. Here’s the review.
———————————————————–
Sophie Rowan has left an American university to lead a research project at a prestigious medical school in London. There she discovers, to her amazement, that her professor takes credit for the work done by other researchers on her team.
This is an enjoyable tour of an aspect of academic life that anyone who has worked in a university (I’ve dabbled and my wife has worked as an academic) will recognise. The evil professor in this case is more blatant than most, simply plagiarising her students’ theses and publishing them under her own name, but I am surprised that Laidlaw’s protagonist is shocked to learn that professors don’t always properly credit work done by others in their departments. (I hasten to add that the academics I’ve worked for have been generous with credit, but this is far from a universal experience.)
Sophie Rowan’s journey from dewy-eyed innocence to an understanding of just how Machiavellian university politics can be makes for an excellent read. At the same time as she is learning the realities of academic life, she is also exploring her new home in London. As a Londoner, I enjoyed seeing my city as experienced by a foreign visitor. Sophie Rowan’s London is well observed and it is clear that the author, too, has seen London as an outsider. The confusion that Sophie feels when offered “nibbles” is just one example of the fun that Laidlaw has with this.
This is quite a layered book. Sophie has rather a busy back-story and she has to sort out family issues and her love life as well as deal with university politics. There’s so much going on it’s easy to get very involved with the character and I did enjoy the story. As it goes on, and the evil professor is revealed as a sexual predator as well as a plagiarist, things get a bit melodramatic, culminating in a stand-off between somebody who can be legitimately described as psychotic and somebody who shows many of the attributes of a psychopath. A butcher’s knife features. It’s a slightly rushed and over-the-top ending which I found a bit unsatisfying, but those who want to see good triumph and evil carted away in handcuffs should enjoy it.
by TCW | Jul 23, 2019 | Book review
I’ve never reviewed two books by the same author in successive weeks before, but I’m happy to make an exception now.
My review of Frank Prem’s ‘Small Town Kid’ came out last week. Frank was pleased to see that I liked it, so he sent me a copy of his next, ‘Devil in the Wind’. It’s another book of free verse, this time inspired by the 2009 bushfires in Australia.
I generally take my time with poetry books, but I opened this one to make sure that my Kindle copy had downloaded properly and I was immediately gripped. I read it over the next couple of days, hardly an achievement because poetry books don’t have that many words in them, but not the way I would usually approach poems at all.
I found the work immensely moving. Frank does, admittedly, have spectacularly moving source material, but I vaguely remember reading about it in newspapers time and the naked facts don’t have the same gut wrenching impact as these verses.
As I said last week attitudes to poetry are inevitably subjective, and perhaps you won’t feel the same way about them as I did. If you go onto Amazon, though, ‘Look inside’ will let you read all but the last page of his ‘Prologue’ which grabbed me by the throat and pretty well forced me to read on. All I can suggest is that you do just that. If you like it, please buy the book. It’s wonderful.
by TCW | Jul 16, 2019 | Book review
When Frank Prem offered me a copy of his “free verse memoir” through a writers’ Facebook group I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted it. But then I reckoned the idea was so outrageous that I might as well read it anyway and I’m ever so glad that I did.
I wouldn’t exactly think of it as a free verse memoir. It’s definitely free verse – the absence of all punctuation and capitalisation gives it a very 1960s feel that I’m not sure improves it – but it’s not exactly a memoir. Rather it’s a chronological series of poems describing the author’s life growing up in small-town Australia. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book of poems and felt enthusiastic about all of them. There is a strong subjective element to poetry and what pleases one person won’t please another, but there are some real gems here. He captures a lot of the ambivalence of a young child’s feelings about life. He captures, too, a vanished way of living. There are poems about the dubious charms of the outhouse and the odiferous work of the night-soil men and then, later, a poem about the blasting of a sewerage line heralding a new world:
of filtration
and treatment plant
and of sculpted porcelain
It is, the title of the poem assures us, “the dawn of civilisation”.
There is a strong sense of place and time – not only the period, but slow cycle of the seasons and the events that mark their passing in this small town. Here’s the church fete:
once a year
it happens once a year
the noise shatters the afternoon
as an old ute with two loudspeakers attached above the roof of the cabin
does circuits of the town
and can be heard in a garbled blur
from three streets off
and not much better up close
but it doesn’t matter what they’re saying
because we already know
And bonfire night:
a couple of tuppenny bangers
and a short detour
to blow up the deputy headmaster’s mailbox
is an annual event
and he’s long practised
at straightening its swollen metal sites
on the morning after
As Frank grows older (there’s a nice poem called ‘growing pains’) girls feature more often, from the gentle innocence of ‘sweet maureen’
I rode my bike for sweet maureen
from beechworth to yackandandah
…
I was drawn
down the road
descending like a bullet
from the barrel of my rifle
drawn to ride
to sweet maureen
to the rather less innocent Judy.
judy runs the supermarket now
but I remember her as fifteen years
of laughing dark-brown eyes
that once upon a time
closed to kiss me
on a new year’s eve
in a crowded street
that vanished
for the whole
of one
single
moment
As the book goes on, the sad reality of the lives of some of these women is cruelly exposed, like the popular girl at school who
… stopped coming
to classes
then moved away
before the baby arrived
Eventually, though, there is love:
hey I think we’ll get by
won’t our folks
be surprised
they think that we’re lost
but I don’t suppose
we’re so bad
and a child.
I watch over
my tiny wonder
Despite the pessimism that slips in through many of the poems
we were formed
as small-town kids
was there ever a chance
this is, in the end, a life affirming collection of poems. I’m glad I took the chance to read it.
Small Town Kid is available on Amazon in paperback or as an e-book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07L63WS2D
You can hear Frank reading some of his poetry on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvfW2WowqY1euO-Cj76LDKg
Frank’s second book, Devil in the Wind (poems inspired by the bush fires of 2009) is also available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07Q9YLD8V
by TCW | Jul 9, 2019 | Book review
A Plague on Mr Pepys is the second of Deborah Swift’s stories based on the lives of women mentioned in Samuel Pepys diaries. (I reviewed the first in the series HERE.) While Pepys featured heavily in the first book, here he is a more peripheral figure and the story centres on Bess Bagwell, the mistress most often mentioned by Pepys in his diaries. Not a lot is known about her (even her given name comes from Swift’s imagination), which gives Swift free rein to tell a story set amongst the working folk of London. Bess has risen from the whorehouses of Ratcliff to marry a skilled carpenter and be mistress of her own home in Deptford. But life in 17th century London is always precarious and when her husband falls foul of the Guild system and can’t get work in the shipyards, they move rapidly into debt.
This is not a cheerful story. Bess Bagwell’s descent from happily married housewife to debt-ridden homelessness is painfully detailed. Survival in the 17th century depended a lot on family, but families can turn against you if you think you are better than they are and both Bess and her husband have flown too high to rely on the family support that might have saved them.
Bess moves from housewife to working in a glove factory, to taking on piecework and, finally, to unemployment. Somewhere along the way she finds herself trying to save the family finances by trading sexual favours for patronage from Mr Pepys. It seems she hasn’t quite escaped the whorehouse after all.
If things seem bad, there’s still the plague to come. With characters seeming to die on every page, Bess begins to accept that she may well not survive. Worse, it’s not entirely clear that she wants to.
Is there any chance of a happy ending? Well, all things are possible, which is pretty well all that kept me going. It’s a harrowing look at the reality of 17th century life, benefiting from Swift’s considerable expertise in the period. (Sadly this expertise does not extend to naval conflict – an area that I know from experience is all too easy to slip up on. Fortunately most of the story stays firmly on land.) It’s far from an easy read, but with so many novels that romanticise the 17th century, this is a useful antidote – and, if you can stick it – a book that looks long and hard at love, marriage, and family loyalty.
Swift’s writing is fluid and kept me going through difficult subject matter. Even so, this is not an easy book, but one which definitely repays the effort you put into it. Despite the misery, I am happy to recommend it.
by TCW | Apr 16, 2019 | Book review
At the end of last year I reviewed ‘Dear Laura’ by Jean Stubbs. It was presented as a detective story, but I said in my review that I felt that it was more of a psychological thriller, so when the publisher (Sapere) offered me a sequel featuring the same detective I was intrigued as to what sort of a book I would be reading.
‘The Painted Face’ is, again, more an exploration of the mind of one of the protagonists than it is a conventional detective story.
Carradine is an artist: a man gifted with great technical skill, but unable to express himself as he would wish. In both his painting and his personal life he is unable to give vent to any real feelings. His emotions are trapped as the child he was when the step-sister he adored was killed in a train crash and his stepmother (Gabrielle), for whom his feelings were practically oedipal, subsequently died of grief.
He decides that the only way he can move on is to understand the mystery of his sister’s death. The circumstances had never been properly explained. Why was the child, whose mother was devoted to her, travelling apparently alone on a train from France to Switzerland? Why was the mother’s maid summarily dismissed soon after?
Inspector Lintott (from the previous story) has retired, but Carradine hires him to dig up the past. They travel together to Paris, where Gabrielle’s family had lived and where she spent much of her time with them. It was from there that Odette, the sister, had set off on her fatal journey.
The dedication of the book mentions Paris and the city is clearly a character in the book. It’s 1902 and Paris is at the height of its fin-de-siècle splendour (as Carradine would see it) or degeneracy (as Lintott definitely suspects, at least initially). The book is a celebration of the honest enjoyment of good food, good company, and good sex which Stubbs ascribes to the Paris of the period. She does the food and the company rather well and the sex, where discreetly touched upon, is nicely sketched too, but there is a gaping hole where Paris ought to be. There are no smells (though the sewers then were presumably even more odiferous than they often are now); there is little sense of the noise of a busy city full of cobbled avenues. We do not gaze through the windows of the shops of the Champs-Élysées and, although there are often descriptions of individuals encountered on the streets, we get no sense of the hustle and bustle, the colours or the swirl of movement.
In ‘Dear Laura’ Stubbs showed herself mistress of the domestic. Almost all the story takes place in one house and the mild claustrophobia of the setting adds to its strength. The best bits of ‘The Painted Face’ are also those which take place in quite intimate settings: the painter’s studio; a mistress’s boudoir; even the attic of Carradine’s home. The attempts to paint on a broader canvas – a journey across a peculiarly anonymous France; the walks around Paris – these simply distract from a story that is really about Carradine and his attempts to come to terms with his demons.
In the end Lintott solves the mystery and Carradine does find closure. It’s not really a detective story at all – most of the mystery is solved when he reads Gabrielle’s diaries which Carradine, despite going to the trouble of hiring a detective, has never thought to read himself. And the story is finished neatly by a series of improbable coincidences which would have embarrassed Dickens – surely the father of improbable literary coincidences. The final twist, too, is rather pat and predictable, but it does provide a satisfying ending.
This is a well-written story with some nice characterisation. Not only the tormented artist and the apparently stolidly conventional detective are well-drawn but so are the minor characters: the garrulous old lady who provides a vital clue tucked away in her apparently unending reminiscences; the restaurant owner who helps Lintott negotiate his way through a menu he cannot read; the servant with an active fantasy life who, in the real world, is constantly falling pregnant.
There is much to enjoy, but, taken as a whole, I felt it didn’t quite work. That may be just me: in any case, the time spent reading was not wasted and you may well enjoy it more than I did.
