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 Casual Vacancy - my two-cents

The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling (Little Brown: 2012). Pagford Parish Council is locked in bitter in-fighting as it tries to jettison the less desirable parts of the village. An unexpected death opens a seat which could make the difference. The ensuing debate provides a backdrop for profound and often tragic changes to the lives of a handful of protagonists.

Time to bend the knees and jump on a bandwagon. Everyone else has done it, so why not GBR? Why not read The Casual Vacancy? Why not tell you what I think about it?

Because you’ve probably had your fill of people telling you what they think about it, that’s why. It’s probably the biggest book event of the year, and the biggest since the last Harry Potter came out. Love or hate her, Rowling is doing something right.

So I’ll keep it short. If you don’t want to, you don’t need to read beyond the next paragraph. For what it’s worth, here’s the GBR take.

This is a good book.

For those of you still with us, I might as well give you a bit more detail.

I was ready to plough through 500-odd pages of mediocrity. That’s what most of the early reviews set me up for. Something above average, that would have probably been published with or without Rowling’s clout, but not something that’s going to go down in literary history on it’s own merit. The reality, though, was a notch or three above that.

Its strength is (quelle surprise) the plotting. Strip all the blockbuster sales, all the hero worshipping, and all the circus away from Rowling, and you’re still left with an unnaturally good story-teller. Her characters are so tightly drawn, their motivations so subtly soaked into the narrative, the flow of the story so naturally constructed, that you can’t help but get sucked in. Any dubiousness I had when I opened the first page was gone by the time I got to the fiftieth.

I was immersed, willingly or not, in the world Rowling created. I wasn’t constantly looking for the next twist, or skipping ahead to the dialogue - I found myself feeling the plot unfold quite patiently, simply content to be a spectator on a detailed but easily consumed little universe.

There was a slight jarring I felt throughout the book though. It came in the cartoonish nature of some of the main characters. Large swathes of The Casual Vacancy are so supremely authentic that it is a bit of a jolt when the larger than life Howard breezes through his chocolate box delicatessen, or when gossipy Maureen turns up to a party in a shorter than short skirt.

It could be on purpose. It could be these caricatures are inserted to make the darker parts of the novel stand out in greater relief. It could be Rowling is trying to make a point about the real life that lurks underneath the faces we put on for the rest of the world. In fact I’m sure that’s it, I'm sure it's all a device. But nevertheless, I still found it a little inconsistent. This switching from gritty realism to CBBC soap opera didn’t quite work for me.

That is nit picking though. How can I be anything other than positive about a book that absorbed me so much. I honestly looked forward to picking this book up and flicking through a few pages. I was genuinely sad to turn the last page and say goodbye to Pagford. I believed in the world Rowling created, and was absorbed by the goings on in it. So what if every now and then I felt awkward at the use of a few trite stereotypes.

9 GBR

Anything less than 9 GBR, and I’d suspect myself of marking her down just for being famous. Anything more and I’d have to slap myself in the face for being a push over.

We're on a run of good scores at the moment. Next week, I go back to the Booker Prize shortlist to try another one of them out. Populist? Moi? Non!