Capital - stuff happening

Capital by John Lanchester (Faber and Faber: 2013) Pepys Road is home to a mix of London life, from the high moneyed to the high principled. Some have roots in the street stretching back generations, some are riding a current wave of good fortune. And others simply visit to give out parking tickets. Lanchester tells us all of their stories.

“Life is just a bunch of stuff happening, one thing after the other.” Someone said that once (or something similar anyway). I’m no good at quotes, so let’s assume it was one of the usuals (Churchill, or Wylde, or Lennon, or some such). Whoever said it, there’s sense to it.

Storytelling usually relies on recognisable arcs and climaxes. There’s a great book on my shelf I got one Christmas on the seven basic plots which you can spot in the majority of stories. Most of the time, one version or another of these is told. And most of the time, it’s a departure from real life.

Real lives don’t have arcs. Resolutions. Beginnings, middles and ends. We can impose those structures on memories, but usually it’s just stuff happening, one thing after the other.

“Quit being a jerk, GBR. Just tell me about the book” right? 

OK, the link I’m trying to make here is that Capital is nigh on 600 pages of stuff happening. Lights shone on a bunch of characters’ lives, all of which started before the first page and all of which carry on after the last page.  

Sure, there are little swirls of arcs, but no grand thread. People’s fortunes rise and fall, they love and die, succeed and fail – all that jazz, but the overwhelming impression you get as you’re working through this isn’t of “ohmygodohmygodohmygod, I wonder what happens next.” It’s gentler than that. More real for it, but less dramatic.  

Great book are (often) about escapism. About extraordinary things or extraordinary people (or both if you can get away with it). Not Capital. Everything that happens in Capital is stuff that happens every day. Well, maybe not everything, but a lot.  

Even the mystery of an anonymous “we want what you have” campaign fizzles out in rather unspectacular fashion.  

I’m still not sure if this is criticism or praise. Lanchester is clearly trying to lay down in words a representation of life in London (a fact screamed loudly by the title of the book). Probably more accurate to say “lives”. He jumps between a bunch of very different people with very different experiences of the capital. Each is so expertly drawn that they seem very real. Almost ordinary. In so doing, he presents a more complete picture than other novels in the current (though not entirely original) craze for using London as a muse (see Zadie Smith’s NW, or Francesca Segal’s The Innocents).  

And that’s cool. I mean it; that’s cool. A hundred polaroids of London from a dozen perspectives. Variety. Reality.  

But it’s not grabbing. Not profound. Not heart racing or heart breaking or heart warming. There’s little high emotion here. Not much high anything really. Just stuff happening, one thing after the other.  

There are one or two currents that may have been deeper than I appreciated. Maybe this is a book that gives up more every time you read it. But when you turn the last page, you’re not sent running back to the first to find out. 

5 GBR 

I’ll be disagreed with for that, I’m sure. This is a best seller. There’s a lot positive about Capital. But on the GBR scale, which prizes pure enjoyment over all else, it falls in the middle ground. 

Next week, I’m off to Scilly (hurrah!) Hope to get through something and post about it before I leave, but if not, adios until next time.

Back to Blood - thawing a cool kid

Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe (Jonathan Cape: 2012) Tom Wolfe continues to try and live up to The Bonfire of the Vanities. The 81 year-old turns his journalistic spotlight on a flawed Miami, a city transformed by recent immigrants and struggling to cope with the problems the demographic shift has brought. It’s a world he explores through (amongst others) an ostracized Cuban cop, a Russian billionaire oligarch, a preppy Yale educated journalist, a professor trying to gentrify his Haitian background, and a larger than life black police chief.

Welcome back! It's 2013! And as we all trudge through January, the most depressing of all the months, let's try to get back to some sense of normality.

Sunday morning.

A new GBR post.

I approached this one a little nervously. It had that cool-kid aura. The kind that of kid who just has it. Doesn’t need to shout about it. This is a 700 page epic. Written by Tom Wolfe. It promised to lift the grimy lid on Miami, and explore racial tensions through an assortment of characters and plot lines.

It just felt way cooler than me. On a different strata.

So I tip-toed up to it. Worried it’d all fly over my head. That it’d be too complex, the writing too poetic, the social themes too distant.

I needn’t have worried. The cool kid soon melted, let me into his world, and swiftly got me thinking like him. No doubt there’s a lot going on in this book, but it’s kept in pretty good order by Wolfe, nothing getting too messy, too confusing. The social themes are attacked head on, with little sub-text (that I could spot, anyway). There’s not much interpretation needed by the reader; Wolfe lays it all out there on the page.

And his writing style? That’s what provided the handful of stand-out moments of the book for me. Wolfe has a sense for the senses. By which I mean he uses everything he can to put across sounds, smells, physical feelings - human experience. He creates rhythms. He gets creative with punctuation. He shifts font. Uses subscript. All the tricks in the book and one or two new ones to create passages that get as close to the real thing as he can. He drops it in bursts, flashes of poetry which remind you he’s speaking about real stinky people and real hot places.

And then, as with any aloof cool kid, the more I got to know this book, the more mystery it lost. Which was a shame. As the book wore on (and, at 700+ pages, it had a lot of wearing to do), it felt as if the plot simplified too much. The characters, so lively and real at the outset, slowly became simply devices to move the story on. Actors on a stage.

I guess I was expecting something bigger. I was expecting something flawless. And it wasn’t. There was too little majesty. Too little awe. There were flabby bits, sections which became over explained, and even a couple of unbelievable character developments towards the end.

Which is pretty harsh, I know. After all, there’s no denying the quality of this book. The story is genuinely gripping. Wolfe’s Miami is a compelling world. His small behavioural observations and grand social arguments make it all relevant (albeit ultimately too close to ordinary). And his language, his poetry, his journalism - it all makes it incredibly readable.

So what am I saying? I guess it’s that old problem of expectation again. If this book was written by an unknown, if it looked a little less ambitious, if it flew under the radar a little more, I’m sure it would have packed a bigger punch. I’m sure I’d have found it easier to focus on its good points than feel essentially disappointed at the end.

5 GBR

We kick of 2013 with a victim of expectation. Totally worth reading though, and you’ll probably enjoy it more than I did now I’ve lowered your expectations.

Next week, I’m not sure. I started Zadie Smith’s new one, but it’ll be a race to finish it by next Sunday. On the other hand, I do have a Kindle Paperwhite now, so I can read ANYWHERE!

Look out, world.

The Milkman in the Night - I was not grabbed. I was barely pawed.

The Milkman in the Night by Andrey Kurkov (Harvill Secker: 2011 - first published in Ukraine in 2009) A series of interweaving stories based in modern Ukraine, involving a resurrected cat, an anti-wimp drug, an underground cult, unexplained sleepwalking, an embalmed husband, and lots of milk (though not necessarily in that order).

That sounds a lark, eh? All those bizarre plot ingredients. Ripe for a bit of Andrey Kurkov fun, I’ll bet.

That’s exactly what I assumed. I’m a Kurkov fan. I enjoyed Death of a Penguin. It was short and almost perfect. So this seemed worth looking forward to.

I probably should have left it there. But I had to go and spoil it. I had to wade into another Kurkov which, from the outset, warned me it was going to be different. It was longer than any other Kurkov I've picked up, which was a red flag to start with.

It's not entirely different, I guess. There are still many of the hallmarks I loved the first time around. The Milkman in the Night has a similar sense of humour as Kurkov’s previous writing. His feel for the absurd is still there, and he continues to make you feel something approaching warmth for his simply presented, innocently motivated characters. They’re almost two dimensional at times, but it gives them a strange sort of appeal. Not quite pity, but something in the same family.

So he played around with the same ingredients, and he did so through a handful of cleverly interlinked stories. 

But no! I have to stop myself there. I’m in danger of persuading myself this wasn’t that bad after all. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great either. There were sections where I got bored, which is pretty much the one sin I find tough to forgive in a book.

With the possible exception of Irina, I struggled to care what happened to each of the characters. Trying to sustain the sort of farcical story lines Kurkov is so expert at weaving through a long novel like this is an incredibly tough ask, and not one I think The Milkman in the Night answers very successfully.

I just didn’t enjoy this. I can sit down and I can tell you all the reasons why this should be good. I could tell you the bits I did enjoy. I could laud his humour and the serious points that lie underneath it. I could probably sell this book to you if I put enough heart into it. But none of it escapes the fact that at no point was I tempted to stay on the train for an extra stop to read a bit more.

It provides a complete counterpoint to JK Rowling’s latest mega-book in a lot of ways. With The Milkman in the Night, I should enjoy it but didn't. With Rowling, I’d struggle to tell you exactly why I enjoyed The Casual Vacancy. I shouldn’t have. But I did. Rowling’s story telling prowess compelled me, and I looked forward to picking it up every chance I got.

That didn’t happen with this. I was amused. At a couple of points, I was touched. But for a 474 page book, there needs to be a whole lot more than that. It needs to make you care. Compel you to read on. It needs to grab you in a way that sustains you through each turn of the page.

I was not grabbed. I was barely pawed.

5 GBR

Good bits, but not enough of them.

Next week, a complete surprise (mainly because I have no idea what it’ll be yet. I have six books all staring at me waiting to be read - I may have to flip several coins).

The Sisters Brothers - cheating

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt (Granta Books: 2011) A story of two notorious brothers at the time of the Gold Rush. The Sisters Brothers are guns for hire. Eli, the more sensitive of the two, begins to question the life they lead as their latest job throws up a host of moral dilemmas.

This whole GBR adventure has been fuelled, at least a little, by a wish to try new things. Be forced into new genres.

I’ve cheated every now and then. For graphic novels, I started with a literary one in Persepolis. For an intro to love stories, I sidestepped Mills and Boon and went for a more gothic option in The Gargoyle. But for the most part, I’ve picked a range of genres and tried to go straight at them. YA fiction, philosophy, science, Russian classics…you get the idea.

This time, though, I’ve cheated again.

It’s set in the Wild West. But I’m not sure you could describe this as a Western. Elmore Leonard this is not. I doubt John Wayne would have considered starring in the film adaptation.

I’m perhaps not qualified to discount this entirely as un-Western, having not read any of the classic variety, but there are a few things I’m pretty sure I can assume. The classic Western is action packed, one dimensional, and has a clear sense of good guys and bad guys.

The Sisters Brothers, on the other hand, has long periods of thoughtful narrative broken up with flashes of action. It’s nuanced in the themes it explores. And it’s intelligent in its portrayal of good and evil (with the possible exception of the figure of The Commodore).

For all these reasons, there’s much to like. I enjoyed Eli’s ethical struggle with himself and with his brother. I enjoyed the way deWitt sketched the brothers’ relationship. I enjoyed the character of Warm, an enigmatic figure for the first half and a driving voice of the second half.

It felt as if much was being held back though. Perhaps it’s a result of the tone deWitt was striving for. It’s understated. It’s successful in achieving the kind of tone you’d expect from a strong, silent cowboy with hidden depths.

All of which is to say it was boring in places. We all love that brooding character, but spend an entire book in his company and you can quickly become frustrated, aching for the fireworks to come or the story to giddy up.

There were scenes of high action. Explosions. Riotous parties. Even a duel. But they were over quickly, and they failed to ignite the imagination. You were never brought right into them as the reader. I felt constantly at an arm’s distance from what was happening on the page.

So a mixed bag in all. An original book. And one written with discipline and ingenuity. But lacking the sucker punch to make me love it. Like it, yes. Love it, no.

5 GBR

A couple of middle-of-the-road scores in a row. Lets’ see if we can shake the dust off next week. Planning on going for a historical novel that seems to be the commuters' favourite at the moment. And I know you love it when I go on about historical novels.

The House of Silk - hammed up Holmes

The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz (Orion Books: 2011) A Conan Doyle Estate sanctioned Sherlock Holmes novel. Watson tells the tale of one of Holmes’ most shocking adventures, where he pursues the truth behind mysterious House of Silk. It’s a chase that takes him to the brink of the noose, and leads to some of the most distasteful secrets of the rich and powerful.

I’m not sure how I feel about all this. Taking huge literary characters and reviving them through modern authors. I can see the plus. Why say goodbye forever to James Bond, to Sherlock Holmes, to Miss Marple. Sure, they are the products of their creators, but once they’re gone, surely the characters can live on? Surely they’re bigger than one mind? In the right hands, with the right skill, surely they can outlive the writers that first brought them to life?

There’s the obvious minus too. These classics are just that – classics. Picking them up again and dusting them off with second hand talents, well, it runs the risk of damaging them, right? Of taking a little of the glow off and cheapening them.

I don’t know which side of the argument I fall on. I’m indecisive like that. But I love a bit of Sherlock Holmes. So I couldn’t resist having a shot at this book.

Horowitz is certainly qualified. He created Midsomer Murders. He’s done a bunch of other stuff too, but that’s enough for me. And this isn’t the first big character he’s picked up. He’s penned a few TV episodes of Poirot, taking a bit of modern artistic licence en route.

So this guy knows what he’s doing. And it shows. The tone of the book, and a heap of the basic ingredients, could easily have come from the pen of Conan Doyle. He inhabits Dr Watson almost perfectly, strikes the right sentiment in every situation. It’s a true recreation, with Watson’s actions and thoughts and feelings ringing true throughout. And it’s not just Watson; Holmes is Holmes too. Enigmatic. Deep of feeling. High of ego.

So what of the plot? Well, it’s dramatic. It twists and turns and takes in an array of settings. It has a few familiar ingredients – injustice, mysterious evil, red herrings, intriguing sub-plots. It’s all there. But for me, it never really clicked.

Which is an absolutely terrible criticism. One of those “can’t put my finger on it” criticisms. Not constructive. Suspiciously baseless. But true, nonetheless.

The plot was full of heart racing ultimatum. Tantalising hints towards Armageddon-proportion disaster. But it didn’t work as effectively as when Conan Doyle did it. It was almost too busy. It got old after a while. Tiring. I grew impatient with cliff hanger after cliff hanger, mystery after mystery. The more so as much of the mystery could be seen through. The broad brush strokes of the truth could be guessed.

Just felt like Horowitz was over-reaching. The story steered for anti-climax from page one.

And that is how this book steered into a predictable brick wall. Horowitz succeeded in recreating the Conan Doyle voice. He succeeded in bringing the characters back to life faithfully. But he failed in his plotting. It didn’t feel genuine. It felt cheaper.

It might be my fault. If I read the exact same book believing it to be written by Conan Doyle, maybe I’d be more charitable. I was aware that Howoritz’s name was on the spine, and so maybe I looked too closely, was too quick to judge turn of phrase as cliché and twist of plot as contrivance.

My fault or not, doesn’t change the fact that I got bored at times with this. Which is sad, because this is Holmes.

5 GBR

Might have to pick up an original soon to reconnect with the real Holmes.

Next week, a bit of Waugh. I know you love that guy as much as I do, so I’m sure you’re excited.

Ex Machina - cabbage

Ex Machina – the first hundred days (DC Comics: 2005). The first instalment of a series charting the trials and tribulations of Mitchell Hundred. He’s a man with the ability to control machines with his mind, but after realising the mysterious super hero route might not work for him, he decides to run for Mayor of New York instead.

With some things, I’m like the kid that says they don’t like cabbage before trying it. We are all a bit like that, right? You kind of have to be. If I watched every TV show I saw an advert for, went to the cinema for every new film, bought every new album that came out, I’d go crazy. So you filter. You pick off a few genres you know you’ve enjoyed in the past and, for the most part, you stick by them.

I’ve never really touched a graphic novel before. The one graphic novel I did try wasn’t your classic super hero type. I’d assumed I wouldn’t really like those sort. But a lot of people have told me I’m wrong. That there’s more to graphic novels than I think.

So I tried one. I sucked it up and decided to taste the cabbage before screwing my face up and saying I don’t like it. I am a grown up after all (most of the time).

I had assumed the pictures would get on my nerves. Kind of like watching a subtitled movie. Constantly switching back between the two mediums, between the words and the images – I thought that’d be frustrating. But it wasn’t. I got used to it pretty quickly. More than that, I enjoyed it. It was done well, the words and the illustrations were matched smoothly and complimented each other.

It was the pace of this that took a little longer to get used to. It dived right in from the first page, which was exciting, but meant there wasn’t any room for build up. It skipped a lot of the getting-to-know-you phase. The bits that did try to give a bit of back-story seemed clumsy and rushed.

But that’s super hero stories I guess. High tension and dramatic emotion from the get go. It’s not about real people, it’s about big characters with dark motivations. It’s glossy and it’s big-screen. Ex Machina is all those things, which is fun, it’s just a shame that there wasn’t room for a bit of balance too – a breather every now and then to make the action more meaningful.

The story itself was OK. Not much more than that though if I’m honest. I’m no connoisseur of graphic novels (*cue gasps of disbelief*), but even I spotted quite a lot of recycled elements. The misunderstood hero. The accusations of vigilantism. The childhood traumas. The unreasonably evil bosses. The mystery villains. It all felt like it’d been done before.

It even tried to inject a little bit of political debate, but that went the same way as the character development. It was done in a bit of a superficial way. It felt shoe horned in, with no room to grow or gather any deeper meaning.

I’m probably missing the point. I’m imposing the same sort of criteria on this as I would on a normal book. Ex Machina achieves a lot. It’s exciting. It’s fast paced. It’s explosive and imaginative in parts. But it never really surprised me. I’d hoped that it would. I’d hoped that it would have the sort of intrigue and complexity and real tension that I always assumed graphic novels couldn’t achieve. But it didn’t.

It tasted pretty much as I expected it too. Like cabbage.

5 GBR

Maybe I just need to read more of these to get into the swing of them. Develop a taste for them. Which is probably worth doing – I know enough people that love graphic novels to believe that there must be something there that I’m missing.

Next week, back to normal books. The un-illustrated sort. A bit of Gaiman maybe. He’s a guy that does the graphic sort and the normal sort.

Or maybe I’ll have finally finished the monster of a book I’m still working my way through.

Makers - too much tech, too little else

Makers by Cory Doctorow (Harper Collins: 2009). The story of two tech/engineering entrepreneurs who love to make stuff, and are at the centre of a new business boom that sees big money invest in communal tech start ups – a phenomena dubbed “New Work”. The whole thing is documented by an online journalist, who follows our two entrepreneurs as they test the boundaries of their community driven innovations.

Hands up, I totally flaked out last week. Was home for the weekend and didn’t get back till Sunday afternoon. I could have posted a review on Sunday evening, but I didn’t. Lazy, that’s all. Sorry.

I’ve also made a fatal error. I’ve got right into a book that’s a bit big. A lot big actually. And it’s taking me a while to get through. I blame Katy Atkins, who recommended it a few weeks ago. I bought it and now I can’t put it down. I’m really enjoying it. But it’s going to take a few weeks to finish.

So I thought it’d be worth going back and telling you about something else on my bookshelf that I read a while ago. It’s the one I was reading about this time last year I think, so there’s at least some relevance there.

Cory Doctorow (I didn’t know this when I picked the book up to begin with) is something of a celebrity in the online world. He was named as one of the world’s top 25 internet influencers (whatever that means). I’m not going to pretend I fully understand most of what he writes, blogs, lectures and debates about, but suffice to say he’s well down with the 2.0 world.

And Makers is positively soaking in all that stuff. It brings up some properly interesting possibilities, even for a technology caveman like me. What’s all the more compelling is that none of this is 25^th century sort of stuff. It’s all got a very real world context, and the technology is of the in-the-not-too-distant-future sort. From what I understand, there are people ferreting away as we speak to make this technology a reality. Hell, for all I know, this stuff is possible right now.

But it’s not just technology that Doctorow explores in Makers, he stretches his theme to explore the business patterns and societal changes that the technology is tied up with. He does a good job of interlinking all of the above without ever presenting one as leading the others. Technology, society, business – it’s all moving and changing from page to page.

It all knitted together well. The plot progression made sense. Doctorow’s soaring imagination was there, but reigned in just enough to keep it true. All good points.

But me, I found it all a bit too glossy. The people in the book never really came to life for me. At all. There was so much emphasis on the innovation that the human side was ignored a little I think. No doubt, the characters all had interesting arcs, they all had important parts to play in the plot and they all seemed to represent something, but I felt like you could write the entire essence of each one down on an index card.

I don’t know how good writers take a fictional person and make them reach-out-and-touch real by using nothing more than words on a page, but they do. We’ve all read great examples of it. We all know it’s possible. I don’t know how it happens, but when it does I recognise it. And it didn’t happen here.

I just didn’t care about these guys.

Not every book needs every ingredient though, I guess. Makers has plenty of them. It was interesting. It was imaginative. It was ambitious. It opened my eyes to a few new possibilities. It was original.

But it drowned it the concepts that dominated it. It lacked emotion. And it lacked a bit of humanity.

5 GBR

I don’t regret picking it up. It kept me interested. But I won’t be picking it up again.

Next week all depends on whether I finish my current big book (thanks a bunch, Atkins...) So it’ll either be that one (a debut masterpiece from a Scottish writer) or it’ll be something else from the shelf.

I bet you can’t wait.

Persepolis - graphic

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (Vintage: 2008). A graphic novel following the story of the author’s life. She grew up in Iran and lived through the headlines. Persepolis gives an insight into the lives of a political family, and how the story of Iran shaped the outlook of one of its daughters.

I was watching Fresh Meat last week. At one stage, they took the mickey out of “geeks that read Iranian graphic novels and get around to talk about it” (or something like that, anyway).

This was about three days after I finished an Iranian graphic novel. And had decided to blog about it.

It was a struggle not to feel pretty small at that point.

To be fair to Persepolis, it’s also a “major motion picture”, which earns it a few more cool points, right? No?

Well, no matter, I read it and now I’m blogging about it, and if that means I get judged by the Fresh Meat crowd, well I guess I’m just going to have to live with that. So there.

This was my first graphic novel. Which, after a bit of thought, I’ve realised really is too wide a label to be a genre. I mean, it’s like saying this is my first movie, or this is my first cartoon. It’s a format, but the differences between each example can be huge. Persepolis, Watchmen, Sin City – they’re all graphic novels, but I’m willing to bet cold hard cash that they’re all very very different.

So I’ll not pause too much on the graphic novel factor. It was new to me, but I got used to it pretty quickly. I guess the big difference is that there are more tools on hand to create a distinct feel. Satrapi didn’t have to rely solely on the words on the page to develop the atmosphere of the book, she had the style of the drawings, the way they were arranged on the page, the expressions on people’s faces – all came together to signpost both the plot and the emotion of the book very effectively.

Perhaps most impressive about Persepolis was its consistency. The writing style, the pictures, the layout – they all chimed together, they all looked and felt and sounded the same. This is a book with a very strong personality, and it works well to tell a powerful story.

But there was a fairly major downside to Persepolis for me. The style is very simplistic, which means that it comes off as childish in places. Which is brilliant  and apt in the early and middle parts, where the world is being presented through the eyes of a child. But the kid grows up as the story moves on, and the style stays the same. When there’s high drama early on, the child’s voice and perspective makes it all the more heartbreaking. But when there’s similar drama later on, and we’re still experiencing it with the same style of narration, it comes across as flippant.

And a little annoying.

I don’t want to get too down on it. I enjoyed reading it, and it’s probably a little unfair to applaud the style of the book and then criticise it for staying true to that style from start to finish. I just felt that the story moved but the characters didn’t. The grown up Marji at the end of the book still feels like the child Marji from the start.

Maybe that was intentional. Maybe she’s trying to show that we’re the same people our whole lives, no matter what age we are. Maybe that’s a good point to make. But in making it, I think she’s sacrificed depth and development and richness.

5 GBR

Plenty good about Persepolis, but plenty bad too. Classic middle value score.

Next week, think I’m going to turn a little Doctorow. I’m sure the Fresh Meat lot would approve. Not that I care.

The Confession - predicatble, but who cares.

The Confession by John Grisham (2010: Century). An innocent man is days away from facing the death penalty. The man who committed the crime is, himself, facing death from a tumour.  Can his last minute confession stop the wheels of the well oiled Texas death penalty machine? And how will the public drama affect the small Texan town that has been divided by the crime for almost a decade?

Come on now. Tell me you didn’t just read that synopsis and say in your head “classic Grisham”. I know you did. Some of you even said it out loud. The guy has got to the stage where you can recognise his plot from a mile away. Does that make him predictable or a master of his genre? I guess it makes him a millionaire, so who cares.

Say what you want about Grisham, after you’ve chewed your way through a few non-fiction books (one of which being particularly difficult to digest philosophy), few things bring you back to life quicker than a good old fashioned Grisham legal drama.

This is not a classic. For me, Grisham reached his peak with A Time to Kill. Since then, he’s basically been writing the same paperback for a legion of summer holidayers every year. There’ve been flashes of originality where he’s left his comfort zone with success. There was one about an American football player in Italy, one which went through a real life case, one which was a collection of short stories. But the majority of his twenty-odd novels are well spun legal dramas based in the familiar environs of America’s southern states.

So where does this one rank? Well, it has all the right ingredients. Heartbreaking legal injustice, check. A central figure who can hold our hands as the plot unfolds, check. The backdrop of a divided and prejudiced community, check. An obsessive, crusading lawyer, check. About 100 opportunities to explain why Grisham doesn’t like the death penalty, check. Roll up roll up, it’s all here.

Knowing the Grisham formula doesn’t make it any less enjoyable though. Well, not much less enjoyable anyway. I was hooked again within a few dozen pages. The story is masterfully woven, incredibly tight. There wasn’t a single sentence out of place, not one instant where I felt I needed to do any work. I turned every one of the 450-odd pages eagerly. Yes, my eyes rolled every now and then, and I usually had a pretty good idea of how the next bits of the plot were going to unfold. I’d met a lot of the characters before, just with different names and in different Grisham novels. But the story skipped along, and I enjoyed the ride for the most part.

That isn’t to say The Confession didn’t tackle some big-ish issues. It did. The death penalty. Racism in the USA. The possibility of rehabilitating sex offenders. The stifling bureaucracy of the Church. They’re all there, just dealt with in a fairly one-sided, simplified, Grisham sort of a way.

After what the last few books demanded from me, this one demanded very little. It was like a post-season exhibition match after a long gruelling season. Still the same game you’ve been playing for years, but more relaxed, a bit more fun.

This was a nice, quick read. Compelling in places, but predictable for the most part. Not groundbreaking, but making up for it with spoonfulls of tight Grisham plotting.

5 GBR

Give me six months, I’ll have forgotten all about this book. But it was fun while it lasted.

Next week, one I’ve been meaning to read for a while. A Million Little Pieces. Now, how do I tag that one – fiction or non-fiction?

The Seven Days of Peter Crumb - uncomfortable reading

The Seven Days of Peter Crumb by Jonny Glynn (Portobello Books Ltd: 2007). The ramblings of a crazy man as he lives out his plan for the last seven days of his life. We’re given an insight into his motivations and delusions as he commits American Psycho-esque atrocities throughout London, with a stop-over in Leeds for good measure.

After last week’s young adult adventure, I reverted to form a little this week.

This is, most definitely, a book for the grown up. And not just because of its graphic violent passages. It’s a book that kept me awake, kept me working as I was reading it. If Jonny Glynn was trying to make his readers feel uncomfortable, then congratulations, mission accomplished.

Sounds quite negative, that, doesn’t it – making his readers feel uncomfortable. I can’t quite figure out if I meant it that way. For sure, there are plus points about a book like this that keeps you on your toes. It makes you feel like you’re really eating something substantial, like by reading the book you’re playing your role in an exercise that has a bit of meat to it. Nothing skips you by. There’s no making shopping lists in your head whilst you’re reading this, no sir.

The bad points about uncomfy books? Well, without wanting to state the obvious, they’re uncomfortable. No two ways about it, this book takes a bit of effort. Every time I picked it up, I was challenged. It took me a few minutes to get into it every time. No sliding into the sofa and switching off with this one. Nowhere was that more evident than right at the start. Do not start this book unless you have half an hour or so to spend on it – it takes a while to figure out what’s going on, for the penny to drop and Glynn’s style to emerge from the confusion it creates.

So, was all the effort worth it?

I finished this book a couple of days ago, and I still can’t figure out the answer to that one. There’s no doubt Glynn’s created a wonderful character in Peter Crumb, and he reveals him to us slowly and expertly. Crumb’s voice is striking, and it grows as his seven days go by. It’s a fantastic example of putting down in the pages of a book a man that is both extraordinary and believable. He’s fundamentally flawed, and commits some horrific crimes, but he’s also a sympathetic character. I read American Psycho a few years back. I was similarly disturbed by the antics described in that book as this. But this time around, I felt I understood the action a little more. It’s horrific from the victim’s perspective, but it also seems horrific from Crumb’s point of view. It’s a contradiction that is only achieved because of the genuine link that’s created between reader and protagonist – between him and me.

By the end of the book, I found myself largely on his side, which was a feeling immediately followed by disgust when I remembered what he’d done.

Sounds like I’m talking myself into a high GBR score here, so time for a few qualifiers.

Crumb is excellent. The other characters in the story (peripheral as they are) are not. Pretty much all the supporting cast seem watery, without much effort put into making them as believable as Crumb. Every now and then, they even manage to act quite outside the very vague parameters that are set for their behaviour. For me, that spoiled things fairly regularly.

The ending is weak. This blog isn’t here to tell you what happens in books (go read them yourself), so I won’t say anymore than that. Suffice to say, the ending is pretty flat.

And some of the stylistic quirks felt over the top. Some didn’t - some worked well and added to the many ways in which this book worked to keep your mind alive. But too many times, Glynn overdid the stylistics, showed off a bit too much with his formatting. He didn’t need to. Blank pages, new font styles and sizes, strange layouts – they all have their place and can all add to a book. But for me, he did it too often, and made it look like he’d just figures out how to use his word processor.

So where does that leave me?

In the plus column – a great premise, a wonderful protagonist, a strong voice, clever pacing, and a challenging style.

In the minus column – a weak cast of supporting characters, a flat ending, over stylised writing, and a challenging style.

5 GBR

Am I glad I read it? Yup. Will I look at it on my bookshelf with fond memories? Nope. (Well, partly because I borrowed this copy and will have to give it back, but you know what I mean).

The Small Hand - a bit too small?

The Small Hand by Susan Hill (Profile Books 2010). A ghost story from one of the genre’s most prolific. An antiquarian book seller feels the hand of a child holding his whilst lost in an overgrown country garden. The hand comes back to him over the coming weeks as he struggles to understand who it belongs to and what it wants.

I’d never really read a ghost story before (unless you count The Shining, which I’m not sure qualifies as a pure ghost story). This one promised to be a good place to start. A new book from a recognised leader in the field of ghost stories. I admit, I was also suckered by the look of the book as well. It’s a small hardback with an old looking sleeve. I would, indeed, look cool reading this on the train every day.

All good signs then.

But it didn’t live up to them.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was a bad book. It had quite an interesting premise. It was all written in the first person, which is fairly rare nowadays and so gave it a bit of a different feel. It built up nicely to a big ending. And it took you to one or two interesting settings.

But it was a bit...blegh. I never really felt any connection with the main character, and his conversion from sceptic to believer was a bit...well...unbelievable. It’s a ghost story, so I expected to be on the edge of my train seat most of the time. I even contrived to make sure I finished the book alone in my flat with just a lamp on to see if that would help. But it didn’t. I never really felt any tension, I didn’t care a huge amount about the main character, and the times when he was in danger I just felt he was being a bit silly. Hill never really got me believing that he was in real danger, or that the small hand was anything other than a minor inconvenience.

Maybe it’s my fault. I couldn’t be more of a sceptic when it comes to ghosts (if they were real, surely one of them would have been on BBC Breakfast by now). Maybe I just wasn’t in the right state of mind to let the book in.

Having said that, The Shining scared me. That relied on the supernatural, but I genuinely feared for the characters in it, and was constantly willing them to escape. So it is possible. I’m not cold hearted and it is possible to scare me. The Small Hand just didn’t.



The Shining - Better



For all its faults though, it’s readable enough. Susan Hill has written a lot, and she knows her stuff. I never felt I was struggling to get to the end of the book, and (although I was never truly engaged with it) I wouldn’t go as far as to say I was bored. Just slightly disinterested.

And it’s short, so it won’t take up too much of your time.

Redeeming factors that drags its GBR score up to...

5 GBR

I’ll review The Shining one day. No prizes for guessing whether it’ll outscore The Small Hand or not.

Moneyball - like a girl only I think is pretty...

Moneyball, by Michael Lewis (Norton: 2003) A non-fiction book following the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics (a major league baseball team) for a year

A book . About baseball. Combining two things in my life that I spend perhaps too much time on, and so probably an apt choice as the first GBR review.

First off, let’s get one thing straight. I loved this book. Really, I did. But, in the spirit of GBR, I have to think about whether or not you will love it. And that’s a bit less clear.

I never really held much weight with the “jack of all trades, master of none” principle. There are enough hours in the day and days in a life to spend on any number of trades. And there are a lot that, let’s face it, aren’t that difficult to master. And so when this book purported to be a good baseball book, a good business book, and a good read all in one, I had no problem believing that it could be all three. Having read it, I’m not sure it mastered all its promised spheres though.

Let’s (quickly) take them one by one.

A good business book? Lewis does well to take some of the ways in which the Athletics are managed and make transferrable business principles out of them. But I have a central problem with business books, a problem that Moneyball failed to solve. Most of them have one very good principle, and then put 100,000 words behind that principle to make a book out of it. Few people would, after all, buy a “business booklet”, so the point needs to be stretched if it’s to be monetised. And Moneyball certainly stretched the business lesson it was preaching. Its one (albeit very good) lesson can be summed up thus: find an undervalued asset, buy it, exploit it, and then once its success (achieved under your watchful eye) renders it overpriced, sell it. There. I just did it in 23 words. Moneyball did it in 304 pages.

A good read? Well, Moneyball has more success here. It’s a non-fiction book, and most non-fiction books struggle to live up to the kind of compelling narrative that novelists have the luxury of. But Michael Lewis has done a good job of filling Moneyball with enough little twirls of storyline to keep you interested and entertained. It even has something of an arc, almost resembling a plot, that is often difficult to find in a non-fiction book. But that’s where it falls down. When I consider what Moneyball is competing against for your time, it stumbles. When I imagine your choice between another episode of Law & Order, or a fast paced novel designed purely to entertain, or Moneyball, I find it hard to recommend the book. A well written non-fiction book, certainly, but outside of that context, it struggles to measure up.

How about a good baseball book? Abso-bloody-lutely. Not a single doubt about that. This is a fantastic (perhaps even the best) baseball book. Full of insights into the game and the business of baseball. Full of characters that any baseball fan will love. Full of stats lovingly explained. Full of...well...just full of baseball.

So would I recommend it to you as something worthy of your time? If you’re a baseball fan, then 100% yes. But I suspect the majority of you are not baseball fans. And so, however much I loved this book, it fails to score highly on the GBR scale, (which, after all, takes into account only whether or not this is a book that you should make time in your life for).

I loved it, but nevertheless, it scores a mediocre...

5 GBR (out of 10, that is...)

Wow, that felt bad, like I’ve just told a pretty girl she’s ugly. I’m off to have a cold shower.