The Girl on the Train is the first of the summer reading recommendations from the estimable Paola Buonadonna, the one she described as a "fun read". I had already noticed the book in the shops - how not to? - but neither had I quite realised its hit-of-the-summer status, nor do I think I would have actually bought it without Paola's testimony. So thanks, Paola.
Of course, The Girl on the Train is the thriller of the moment, doubtless being read on a thousand commuter journeys every day. Deservedly so. Hawkins has served up a clever, perfectly paced mystery-thriller which pleases above all for the strength of its central character, the deeply unreliable Rachel Watson.
Rachel is the "girl on the train" (the rather inaccurate use of "girl", one suspects, being chosen precisely to invite comparison with another wildly successful unreliable narrator story, Gone Girl, a not entirely inappropriate comparison), who rumbles into London from the suburbs every day. Her trip, thanks to a reliably unreliable section of London commuter rail network gives her the opportunity to gaze wistfully at the trackside houses en route, notably one, inhabited by a young couple she dubs Jess and Jason, for whom she imagines an idyllic existence of domestic bliss. Soon we discover that this vision contrasts markedly with her own life. She is a recent divorcee, from the wonderful, but not ever-patient, Tom, with whom she once lived in a house also visible from the train just a few doors down from Jess and Jason. Tom is still in this house, now with a new wife, Anna (who "stole" Tom) and their brand new baby, Evie. We are soon given grounds to understand Tom, Rachel is erratic and alcoholic, given to extreme outrageous behaviour, often in the direction of pathetically harassing Tom and Anna. Moreover, even her daily commute is a sham, she having lost her job months before, the pretence maintained for the sake of appearances towards her (almost) ever-patient landlady/flatmate Cathy, to somehow appease the world in general and, almost certainly, simply to have the opportunity fleetingly to observe the lives of Jess and Jason, Tom and Anna.
The story picks up, as the cover blurb will tell you, when Rachel sees something from the train which wrecks her view of Jess and Jason's domestic idyll, and which could have an important bearing on a police investigation into the subsequent disappearance of Jess (in reality called Megan, her husband being Scott).
So back to real books after the audiobook interlude, and indeed back to a book started a week or two before the two audiobooks did their thing. Back also to a writer who has featured a couple of times recently on this blog, the author of Pure (currently one of my most frequent recommendations) and Ingenious Pain, Andrew Miller. These two books, set at opposite ends of the eighteenth century impressed me hugely and have stuck with me, leaving a strong sense of the weird, the unexplained and the unaccountable, perhaps in nature, perhaps in human nature. The sheer admiration they provoked led me to the 'M' shelf in Nottingham Waterstones in search of more by Miller.
Unlike the two historical novels, The Optimists is a contemporary tale, set somewhere in the mid-1990's. It tells the story of Clem Glass, a photo-journalist recently returned from a place we rapidly understand to be Congo, where he recorded the aftermath of an atrocity, a massacre of unarmed civilians, in a remote church. Details of the event, and Clem's experience of it, emerge in dribs and drabs over the course of the novel, but it is clear from the outset that the vision of hell and human depravity has completely derailed Clem, leaving him listless, without compass, disengaged. Ironically, what restores at least some purpose to his life is the acute mental breakdown suffered by his sister, Clare, a danger to her which outstrips even Clem's danger to himself and which prompts him to act.
The bulk of the novel recounts the halting progress made by Clare, as Clem, together with family and friends, edge her back from her personal abyss over a summer spent in an old family property in the West Country of their childhood. Her recovery (of sorts) is matched, it seems, by Clem's re-engagement with the world, and his implicit acknowledgement that the pure evil he witnessed in the Congo does not define all of humankind, all of the time.
The story takes a sudden turn (actually sudden turns are not unusual in this novel) when new reaches Clem that the man he believes to be the perpetrator of the church massacre, has been arrested in Brussels under an international warrant, and though subsequently released, is at large in that city. Whence a section of the book set in Brussels' Matongé district and environs in which Clem seeks to confront the man who sits at the heart of his nightmares. How this pans out, and what Clem experiences in Brussels prove that nothing is quite as simple as it might be.
This was the second of the audiobooks consumed on my solo road trip to Italy, this being made possible by the fact that a 14 hour drive became an 18 hour one thanks to a large diversion in Switzerland to avoid a two hour queue at the St. Gothard tunnel, more queues at the Italian border and the inevitable stop-and-start in the tratto appenninico of the A1 motorway. None of which bothered me too much, as this was a gripping tale which wiled away the hours quite nicely.
This book is an unashamed thriller, in thriller mode, with leading characters referred to tersely by their surnames. I can't claim the intellectual respectability for an audiobook I invoked for Station Eleven, because this was an abridged version of the original novel (though still a meaty six hours of listening), but it is a high-grade thriller nonetheless, as you would expect from the excellent Harris. Nor is it ideas-free. Indeed, it is one of those speculative books which looks at the world and wonders what would happen if things were taken to their (or at least a) logical conclusion. (Dave Eggers' The Circle) was another in this mode.
The story centres on Dr Alexander Hoffman, a brilliant scientist, who has taken his knowledge, honed at CERN, from which he was somewhat mysteriously fired, and used it to build a fortune as a hedge fund manager. His hedge fund, Hoffman Associates, uses a sophisticated algorithm, developed by Hoffman himself and managed by a team of PHD level "quants" (analysts) he has recruited himself and all of whom, we are told, are somewhere on the autistic scale. The fund has been extremely successful and has handsomely rewarded a motley crew of super-rich investors over years of bear markets. As the book opens, Hoffman is going live with an updated version of his algorithm, dubbed VIXAL-4, and is pitching to his investors for additional funds.
This is the first of three catch-up reviews, the result of finishing three books in the space of three days. How come?
It's down to a long, solo car trip, of the kind not undertaken for several years, and the rediscovered joys of audiobooks. You may consider that to be cheating, but I make no apology for Station Eleven, which was a full ten and a half hour unabridged listen. I even think a case can be made for getting more out of a book this way: you do actually experience every word - no skipping or skimming - and are generally in the hands of a professional who places emphases correctly, paces and pauses appropriately and helps brings different voices to life. It is, in short, a great and rewarding way to "read" a book, just so long as you have the time and focus to do it, such as, for example, on a long solo car trip.
But enough of the medium, what of the book itself? I sought out the book when I remembered that I wanted to read it, but had forgotten to include it in my selection of "real" books for the holidays. I had heard it spoken of highly here and there, most notably by David Plotz, he of the Slate Political Gabfest (and whom I once met), who raved about the book on a recent podcast.
Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic story, set in a world twenty years after a flu pandemic has wiped out most of humanity - though in fact probably about half of its volume is spent in pre-collapse flashbacks. If your heart sinks when I reveal the basic premise of the book, I sympathise. I am not one for disaster movies and post-apocalyptic fiction - all that scarifying revelling in doom and disaster is not generally for me. That said, there has been an exception, The Road, which I wrote about in 2011, a book so superbly written that its utter bleakness became a virtue.
Sometimes you read a book which has to be followed by something a bit lighter. Ardennes 1944 was superb, but it was also such a book, gruelling in content and demanding in detail. So when it came to picking the next thing from my "to read" shelf, my eye alighted on something I had really bought for the holidays, Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch.
People who have followed this blog for a while will be aware of one of my weaknesses, namely an attachment to a series of books featuring streetwise London copper, Peter Grant, who is distinguished from his colleagues not so much by his good nature and fine line in banter, but by the fact that he possesses magical powers and is apprenticed to the head of the Met's "weird stuff" squad, the urbane and wizardly DCI Nightingale. This is the fifth in the series, with the previous four all reviewed on this blog: Rivers of London, Moon Over Soho, Whispers Underground and Broken Homes.
There's an extra little story behind this book, which was purchased at the new Hatchards in St. Pancras station, which replaced my much lamented Foyles bookshop there. I spotted a pile of hardback editions of Foxglove Summer, "signed by the author". Well, the signature tipped me over the edge, as this isn't really the kind of book you normally buy in hardback, and a few moments later I was at the till. "They're good, aren't they?" said the lady at the till, adding: " He's a nice guy, I used to work with him." Whence an account of Ben Aaronovitch's less affluent years working as bookshop hand in a small London store, and generally of what an agreeable chap he is. Judging by his writing, this is, in fact, rather easy to believe.
