Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts

Thursday 11 November 2021

Truth or fiction?

The Book of Evidence In John Banville's The Book of Evidence, Freddie Montgomery sits in prison, awaiting his trial and sentencing for the murder of Josie Bell. The unfortunate maid came across her killer as he was stealing a painting, and one thing led to another. In Freddie's account he imagines he's standing in court, talking to the judge. "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Don’t make me laugh".

Freddie identifies the turning points that have led him to his current situation. But if we think we can begin to understand his actions by these meaningful moments, Freddie quickly puts us right. He says, "They have significance, apparently. They may even have value of some sort. But they do not mean anything. There now, I have declared my faith.".

We can't believe anything that Freddie says. Which parts of his life are fake and which real? He tells us he might try to use what he has written as his testimony. "But no," he says, "I have asked Inspector Haslet to put it into my file, with the other, official fictions." On finishing The Book of Evidence I can only conclude that Banville has written a metafiction, an account of a murder narrated by a fictional murderer who never stops telling us stories. Deep!

A generous and wise aunt

Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen How brilliant it would be to have an aunt like Fay Weldon in her epistolary novel, Letters To Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen. She not only dispenses advice to her niece Alice on literary criticism and the art of writing, but she's also generous with her money; £500 for a word processor, and the offer to pay for a course of study at UCLA.

The first of sixteen letters explains that Alice is "doing a college course in English Literature, and ... obliged to read Jane Austen" Alice finds Austen boring, petty and irrelevant and sees no purpose in reading her books, but Weldon attempts to persuade her niece otherwise.

Can you trust your memory?

Burnt Sugar Sometimes you'll be watching a movie or TV series that portrays the ideal family, one where problems are discussed and resolved, where mothers dispense hugs and wisdom to daughters in equal measure, and you think to yourself, "what a crock of sh*t". This is what I imagine Antara, the protagonist of Avni Doshi's Burnt Sugar would think. Age 36, she's resentful of the way she has been raised, despises her mother who has recently developed Alzheimer's, but can't cut the ties.

You're better off without him, love!

A Cat, a Man, and Two Women According to the Wikipedia page Cats and the Internet, "images and videos of domestic cats make up some of the most viewed content on the web". It goes further: "viewing online cat media is related to positive emotions, and ... it even may work as a form of digital therapy or stress relief".

Can the same be said for feline-centric literature?

A grim and fiercely joyless old lady

Great Granny Webster These days it's impossible to read a book without the gloomy cloud of Covid looming above me. Unfortunately Caroline Blackwood's Great Granny Webster filled me with a despondency and ennui that might not have been so bad if I'd read it before 2020.

The eponymous matriarch is a "grim and fiercely joyless old lady". Her 14-year-old great-granddaughter is sent to live with her for two months in the hope that the girl will benefit from the sea air in Hove, where Mrs Webster lives. As the teenager is leaving she discovers that her father, who died when she was nine, regularly enjoyed visiting the old woman.

Wednesday 10 November 2021

A modern day Beowulf

The Mere Wife Maria Dahvana Headley's The Mere Wife opens with a female soldier, Dana Mills, "facedown in a truck bed, getting ready to be dead." It's a powerful beginning which draws the reader in, written in the present tense with short, punchy sentences. It hints at an optimistic future too, as Dana's only comfort is the memory of "a line I read in a library book. All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well."

Tuesday 9 November 2021

I thought LA was a sunny place

The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1) There are not far off 6000 reviews of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep on Goodreads. Can there be anything more for me to add to the pile?

I'll try to keep it brief. Private detective Philip Marlowe is hired by millionaire General Sternwood to find out who's blackmailing him. The wealthy old man has two strong-willed and wayward daughters, "Vivian is spoiled, exacting, smart and quite ruthless. Carmen is a child who likes to pull wings off flies. Neither of them has any more moral sense than a cat". They both have links to crooks and gangsters, and the book follows Marlowe's investigation of this seedy underworld in Los Angeles.

Thursday 4 November 2021

Inhumement, entombment, inurnment or immurement?

The Loved One Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One is a short novel which often appears in best-of lists of humorous literature. It's an Anglo American tragedy according to the subtitle, about an American girl called Aimée who can't decide which of two suitors she should marry: British expat poet Dennis Barlow, or her respected American work colleague Mr Joyboy.

Waugh wrote the book during an all expenses paid visit to Hollywood, where MGM was hoping to obtain the film rights for Brideshead Revisited.

Monday 1 November 2021

Heavy themes, light touch

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World "Her name was Leila. Tequila Leila, as she was known to her friends and her clients." Elif Shafak's 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is the story of Leila and the five friends who loved her.

The story is in two parts: part one The Mind, part two The Body. In The Mind, we discover the events in Leila's life that led to her leaving home and becoming a sex worker in Istanbul. It's narrated in flashback during the brief time between her heart stopping beating and her brain ceasing to function; the 10 minutes 38 seconds of the title. I don't want to give too much away. Suffice it to say that Leila and her mother, being female, have little control over their lives. There's a particularly disturbing scene that takes place when Leila is six, but in spite of the dark subject matter it's not a bleak tale because Leila is a fighter.

Friday 15 October 2021

You've obviously forgotten what it's like

Black Swan Green In Black Swan Green David Mitchell has brilliantly recreated the struggles of a teenage boy who's trying to make sense of the world. It's narrated by the thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor in thirteen chapters, each representing a month in his life from January 1982 to January 1983.

Jason has plenty of problems and several secrets.

Thursday 14 October 2021

Like visiting friends you've not seen for ages

Nightrise (A Philip Dryden Mystery) What a pleasure to revisit Ely and the Fens of eastern England in Jim Kelly's crime mystery novel Nightrise. It's a couple of years since I read my last Philip Dryden book, The Skeleton Man, and this one is set five years after the fictional journalist's previous outing.

It was a bit like visiting friends you've not seen for ages and who have hardly changed.

A good read for a dark and stormy night

The Small Hand Driving back from visiting a wealthy client in the south of England, Adam Snow takes a wrong turn and finds himself at the gate of a deserted house with an overgrown garden that used to be open to the public. As he stands in the silent dusk he "felt a small hand creep into my right one". So begins Susan Hill's ghost story, The Small Hand.

Don't believe the hype

Where the Crawdads Sing Here's one thing I liked about Delia Owens's Where the Crawdads Sing. It's a vivid description of the onset of a storm: "The wind hit first, rattling windows and hurling waves over the wharf." The use of the word hurling is very evocative. Unfortunately, that's about the only positive thing I have to say.

Thursday 29 April 2021

Michael Collins - Mission Accomplished

Michael Collins (S69-31742, restoration)

I woke up to the sad news that Michael Collins had died. Five years ago the Apollo 11 astronaut inspired the first story I wrote that I was pleased with. I don't remember watching the Apollo 11 mission on TV, but there's plenty of information online which I used as research: Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience, and Glamour: Would you go to Mars? Meet the four women astronauts who can't wait to go, and most importantly, the EP-72 Log of Apollo 11. Here's my story. Hope you enjoy it.




Mission Accomplished

“What are you doing there?”

Static crackled through the radio receiver.

Saturday 3 April 2021

The everyday as exceptional

The Complete Talking Heads I studied Shakespeare's Twelfth Night at school and even forty years on I can recall, probably inaccurately, some of the wonderful language. The teacher had to explain what it was that would have made Queen Elizabeth 1 and her court laugh, although as a teenager it was enough to know that one of the characters is called Sir Toby Belch. The thing was tho', the play was rather dry and stolid on the page, and it was only when a group of us went to the theatre to see it performed that it came alive.

And so, I was wary of expecting too much from Alan Bennett's "The Complete Talking Heads",

Monday 23 November 2020

A Marxist and a monarchist

The Untouchable The British royal family is an anachronism. Don't you find it odd in the 21st century that one family's wealth, prestige and standing is based on its claim to be descended from a French bastard who invaded England nearly 1000 years ago? Geneticists tell us that pretty much everyone with English ancestry is related to William the Conqueror, including Danny Dyer, who's traced his roots back to King Edward III. So why should Queen Elizabeth and her extended family be the exception and hang on to all the loot?

Thursday 22 October 2020

A daft story with a philosophical theme

Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang Imagine the scenario; climate change and ecological destruction has reached the point where a great catastrophe is about to unfold unless world leaders agree to "Turn off the factories, ground the airplanes, stop the mining, junk the cars." What would you do? If you're a member of the Sumners family in Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, you decide to build your own hospital and research centre, and start cloning yourselves to save the human race.

Friday 16 October 2020

A Dark-Adapted Eye. What's the truth?

A Dark-Adapted Eye I used to love the telly series Columbo. Peter Falk as the shuffling detective in his rumpled mac knew who'd committed the crime right from the beginning. He just had to work out how to catch 'em. In Barbara Vine's book A Dark-Adapted Eye we know there's been a murder, we know the murderer was Vera Hillyard, and we know she was hung for her crime.

Over thirty-five years Vera's family has tried to forget about the incident, and in their own ways have distanced themselves from it. The long dormant memories are reawakened when a true-crime writer contacts Faith Severn, the murderer's niece.

Friday 25 September 2020

A Long Petal of the Sea? Not my cup of tea.

A Long Petal of the Sea Our book club choice for August was Isabel Allende's A Long Petal of the Sea, published in 2019. Len and Yvonne are fans of the Chilean writer and were keen to read it.

She's a new author for me. Allende's Wikipedia page was encouraging, mentioning magical realism and saying her novels are often based on historical events and real-life individuals. As for A Long Petal of the Sea, it ticked quite a few of my boxes. The opening part is set during the Spanish Civil War, a conflict I know little about, during a period of time that I find fascinating - the 1930s, economic depression, competing ideologies of Marxism and Fascism, the run-up to World War II. With a couple of weeks to spare before book club I read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and then sat down to immerse myself in Allende's tome.

Thursday 6 August 2020

Romantic fiction or psychological manipulation?

Mission to Monte Carlo I just read my first, and last, Barbara Cartland book, Mission to Monte Carlo. It's a piece of romantic fluff set at the turn of the 20th century and so absurd that I had to imagine it was a parody of itself in order to get to the end. But while I sniggered through its seven chapters, the "happy" ending left me uneasy and fearful for the future of its heroine. I know it's only fiction, but hear me out.