I hesitate slightly over this one. This was consumed as another audiobook, on the car on the way back from holidays (there were two - see next review) and was an abridged version, three CDs clocking up a mere three hours. For a 330-page book, that does not seem a lot, and, having subsequently read some reviews (a thoughtful one here), it is clear that quite a lot ended up on the cutting room floor. In my defence, this was my (successful) bid to persuade my audiobook-rookie travelling (and life) companion of the merits of the medium, so I thought it wise to start with something short.
The abridgement did not mean that I did not enjoy this novel, simply that I may have missed some important elements and my comments may suffer consequently. It also means that I will keep this brief.
Behind the Scenes at the Museum is Kate Atkinson's first full-length novel. I bought it, (i) following the advice of my literary guru-of-the-moment that "anything by Kate Atkinson" would do the business, (ii) because they actually had it in the rapidly vanishing "spoken word" section of Nottingham Waterstones and (iii) because I had, albeit rather vaguely, heard of it.
This is such an English book. It is English in its understatement, English in its evocation of rainy holidays-from-hell in unexotic locations, English in its wryly humorous response to disaster, English in its 1950s and 1960s provincial smallness and greyness, English in its attitudes and accents, English in its oblique allusiveness, where talk constantly skirts around the important things. It is also a supremely accomplished book, one which takes us with a counterintuitively light and jokey touch through a family saga of repeated, almost inevitable-seeming death and disaster, both historical and contemporary, as well as small-town infidelities and dysfunctional family dynamics, all the while sucking us down, on a trajectory rich with hints and half-hidden clues, in an accelerating spiral like water emptying out of some great pit, towards the central, hidden truth with reveals so much about why the characters we have come to know are as they are. This big reveal, the nature, though not the details, of which we have gradually discerned, is anything but funny, and breaks dramatically with the so-English well-never-mind tone that gives the novel so much of its humour and character.
Peter Ackroyd's recent work has tended to be in the realm of non-fiction: biography (including, famously, of London), history, and, generally, London-themes generally, for example, the excellent London Under. However, Ackroyd originally made his name as a novelist, bursting on the scene with his extraordinary Hawksmoor, which, as I have related before, had me spending my lunch breaks back in 1987 scouring East London for Hawksmoor churches, just to see if I could detect the sheer weirdness communicated so powerfully in Ackroyd's novel. In any case, since then, Ackroyd has been more or less a fixture on my must-buy list (with, obscurely, the exception of the biographies of people, an omission I should probably rectify).
Over the years, through both his fiction and non-fiction, Ackroyd has become the undisputed, though unofficial writer-laureate of London. His vision of the city is of an almost living thing (hence a "biography"), with innumerable layers of history and experience piled on top of each other, with the London-past frequently breaking through into London-present. In his novels, this has proved a powerful source of mystery and strangeness, with the city seemingly living according to a separate notion of time, while in his non-fiction, there is a constant emphasis on how London's past impinges on and conditions its present in a multitude of unexpected ways.
I hadn't heard of Three Brothers before I spotted in in the bookshop, but was of course intrigued. It marked a return to the novel for Ackroyd, and a uncharacteristically recent timeframe, opening in the postwar years and unfolding in the rather grimy, dodgy London of the sixties and seventies (not so swinging in this book). The story is one of three brothers, born in the gritty, partially blitzed streets of Camden Town just after the War, coincidentally on the very same day, 8 May, in successive years. Their life is not an easy one; their mother abandons the family early on, while the father, a would-be writer, can do little better than pick up low-skilled jobs, first as a nightwatchman, subsequently as a long-distance lorry driver. The boys are left pretty much to their own devices, and to find their own ways in the city. The three have opposing characters: the oldest, Harry, is a go-getter, ambitious and hustling, willing to compromise to make his way in Fleet Street where he rises to edit a national newspaper; the second, Daniel, is the academic, who makes it to grammar school, whence Cambridge, and becomes a member of the newly-empowered chattering classes; the youngest, Sam, is the sensitive soul, unable to hold down a proper job, but somehow more in touch with other people and the city in which he lives.
Murakami is becoming a global brand. There are outward signs of this even as you pick up the book in a store. First, he no longer has any need of a first name, at least not for the purposes of the cover. Second, the edges of the pages of my paperback edition were coloured black, as if a child had taken a marker pen and run it over the sides of the pages, held tightly together. The effect is both rather gimmicky and surprisingly strange (also slightly off-beam, as black is very much a colour in this book). Add to these physical characteristics of my edition the Murakami-mania which attended the publication of this book in Japan - midnight queues outside bookshops, a million sold in the first week - and you start to get the vibe: we are in literary superstar territory here.
The question for the Murakami reader is whether the contents of these books is also somehow becoming branded. Certainly here we are in very familiar Murakami territory, the quest of a lonely, somewhat alienated protagonist struggling to (re)capture meaning and connections in life, while haunted by some traumatic personal event which desperately needs, yet seems to defy, explanation. There is undoubtedly a sense of having been here before, and though I devoured this book as eagerly as I have previous Murakami novels (helpfully, he is as keen on plot as on metaphysics), the sense of déjà vu was distinctly there, to the extent that I started to anticipate certain outcomes - though it was refreshing to find that I was generally wrong.
This is a long-outstanding recommendation pending on my reading list, dating back at least a couple of years, initially on the part of that connoisseur of (a) historical novels and (b) the French Revolution, Julian Priestley, and recently renewed in conversation with another personal literary lighthouse, Paola Buonadonna. But experience warned me that a novel by Hilary Mantel is not a matter undertaken lightly, and The Place of Greater Safety had to wait for propitious summer circumstances before I felt ready to take it on.
It's not only a matter of sheer length, though the 872 pages of my paperback-brick edition, covered with print that has me reaching for my brand-new reading spectacles in anything less than perfect light, are daunting enough. The real challenge, familiar to readers of the Wolf Hall (to be) trilogy, is Mantel's quirky prose style. Pronouns are slippery: who is the "I", the "she", the "we" in action? Perspectives shift without warning: suddenly the omniscient narrator becomes a first-person inner voice. Place and time jump unpredictably between, or even during, scenes. Standard paragraphs give way to stage-style dialogue, or note-form non-sentences. As ever with Mantel, it pays to be on your toes - this is not stuff to read in bed of an evening as you drop off to sleep. Frankly, it is all a bit of an effort; I will confess to numerous occasions when I would become aware halfway down a page that I didn't actually know which characters were participating in a scene and need to backtrack to find names and establish identities.
What does all this achieve? Well, arguably, this is more how people think and experience the world - glimpses, snatches of conversation, fragments of thought. Cumulatively, it works extremely well in an evocative, allusive manner, building up an intimate portrait of Mantel's characters. It is also the way she has always written, it seems. I was aware that this novel was a relatively early work - it was first published fully 23 years ago, in 1992, and recently republished on the back of her recent successes - and had wondered if her style might be more straightforward than it was in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. But no, not at all. This multi perspective, shifting technique is at the core of Mantel's method.
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).
