When God Was a Rabbit, by Sarah Winman

4 Stars, 2 paws, bedtime reading for lounging in winter… which it nearly is, again. Sigh.

It’s been a while, both since I read this book and since I have blogged a proper book review. I’m determined to write reviews faster/shorter, and so clear my slightly epic backlog of books I’ve read in almost the past year. I think I read this one around about last Christmas.

Anyway, I liked it, it was a little bit like a Grimm’s fairytale for adults, where bad things happen (really bad things like abuse, illness and death), but the goodies stick together and things are kind of ok in the end. Make no mistake, the language and material are grown up, but the storytelling, especially the first part, which looks back on events during the narrator’s childhood and adolescence, has, at times, a dreamy quality, albeit tempered by an adult understanding of past events. It’s not a happy book, but well-written, and it’s not a happy story, but leaves you with a bit of hope.

 

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, by Jonas Jonasson

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, by Jonas Jonasson (image from goodreads.com)

4-5 Stars, 2 paws, chapters slightly long but still fine as a bedtime read, perfect for travel.

Do you have elderly relatives who are not beyond a little fib? I think grandfathers are most likely to fall into that category, but my late great-grandmother could hold her own as well when it came to tall tales and colourful embellishments of the mundane. The sad twist in the tale, at least in my family, is that it becomes difficult to decide where the fun ended and the dementia began, but I’m pretty sure that the stories were told long before the forgetting and confusion set in.

This book sounds a bit like those stories. It begins, and ends, with Allan Karlsson doing a bunk from the Old Folk’s home on his 100th birthday. The rest of the novel fills in both Allan’s lifestory and what happens next, and weaves an intriguing net taking in several key historical figures of the 20th century (Nixon, Mao, Stalin, to mention a few), as well as bombs, cases of murder/manslaughter, an escaped elephant and a motley crew of interesting people. I don’t want to give anything away by going into detail! It does so with a light and satirical touch and manages to stay entertaining by never taking itself too seriously, regardless of the darkness that lies underneath many of the events Allan somehow got himself muddled up in.

If you are willing to suspend your disbelief, secure in your 20th century history, and willing to come along for the ride, this is an enjoyable way to while away a few hours. It is also a reminder of many rich and long lives, even those that can no longer tell their own stories.

The Woman Who Went To Bed For A Year by Sue Townsend

Ratings: 2 stars, no paws, bedtime reading

Hmmmm. I have always enjoyed the dark and slightly desperate side of Adrian Mole, even in the later incarnations of his diaries and when there was a growing New Labour critical edge in them. And TWWWTBFAY seemed to do quite well in the bestseller charts and thus made for a satisfying supermarket bargain. I even kind of enjoyed reading it, but mostly because I was looking for the POINT, the crucial moment where it all becomes clear. And there was a flashback to a lost pregnancy and unresolved grief which might have been said point, but for me that was too little, too late.

It just seemed a rather self-indulgent thing of Eva, TWWWTBFAY, to take to her bed after her horrible teenage twins leave home to start at university. Her husband is a rather useless and hopeless human being, who also has carried on an affairs for years, her mother and mother-in-law are your average amount of self-obsessed, the twins are somewhere on the autistic spectrum, and she just doesn’t want to/can’t deal with it in any more. So she abdicates all responsibility and retires to her en-suite bedroom. Her builder/white van man basically supports her through a lot of this, even though he has more reason to take to his bed than she does, perhaps being able to sympathise. So do many of the people who come to see her, as she develops into a bit of a cult figure. It’s probably meant to be a satire of the cult of minor celebrity, as well as a damning indictment of the dysfunctionality of families, but to run with this interpretation you have to warm to the main characters, and I didn’t, with the exception of a lukewarm appreciation for Alexander, who seemed nice enough. Everybody else could have done with a serious talking to, administered at frequent and regular intervals.

But when the author biography and interview at the end of the book are more interesting than the book itself, I think we can safely conclude that I just didn’t particularly take to this book. Ah well. Moving swiftly onwards…

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman (image from Amazon.co.uk)

3-4 stars, -3 paws, fine as bedtime or travel reading

I bought this on a weekend away to Dublin, and because I can never resist small, independent bookshops. Let’s face it, after looking around for more than 2 minutes, you pretty much have to buy things to support them, and we walked away with 3 books (not a wise move if you still have most of a day of sightseeing ahead of you). The bookshop is called “The Gutter Bookshop” and is near the Cathedral end of Temple Bar on Cow’s Lane. Having spent significant amounts of time in there, mostly reading the bookseller reviews of specially picked novels on a dedicated shelf, I can personally confirm that the guy behind the till was fantastic, giving advice and offering to order in books for various customers. Well worth a visit, and we did in fact go back on our last day there, although I can’t remember whether we bought more.

I had seen The Imperfectionists before, likely when it first came out in the UK, and toyed with the idea of buying it, but then picked up something else instead. So when I saw it again, with a glowing review, in Dublin, I thought I should give it a go. I was, and technically still am, reading “Eating the Sun” by Oliver Morton on this trip, which is an extremely well-written and enjoyable popular science book about photosynthesis. It is just too long and when I reached a page somewhere in the early two hundreds (which is only about halfway through), I decided that I needed a hiatus. So I’ve been catching up on my newspaper and magazine backlog since sometime in November, and this was one of the novels I picked up for “light” relief.

The book is divided into chapters of manageable size, each concerned with the story of one main character. Short sections on the newspaper, with which all of them are connected, appear between these and help to tie everything together. As suggested in the review blurb in the front, each chapter could pretty much work as a free-standing short story, and as you might expect for this format, there is usually a twist in it somewhere, and often it appears to be a cruel twist of fate here. This is extremely well-crafted and I could not help but admire the plotting and connections made between the different stories, as well as detecting traces of a very dark sense of humour. You find out about the whole history and eventual demise of the paper, and you get to see snapshots of defining moments in the lives of key characters as well. I also appreciated that in this novel people had jobs, and that these jobs play a considerable role in their lives, although most of the stories are filling in about what happens away from work.

However, the novel seemed heartless to me and the author inflicts several casual cruelties on his creations like an absolute monarch or dictator, which are clearly just there to shock and upset, without fully getting explored and developed. I’m willing to concede that maybe I’m just upset that (***spoiler alert***) both the young girl and the dog die, inflicting maximum damage on those who loved them. It’s why this novel gets a negative paw rating and while, although it has stayed with me since finishing it, I ultimately didn’t like it.

Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett

Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett (image from Amazon.co.uk)

3 stars, 2 paws, bedtime reading

Having read Sir T’s latest offering (out in paperback, that is) not so long ago, I decided to fill in some of the back-catalogue when I next saw them cheap (Amazon eventually came to the rescue). Not having grown up in the UK, I only started reading the Discworld novels around about Hogfather, so I go through spells of catching up on earlier novels from time to time. This may well be the start of the next bout, but with my backlog of other books, it will be slow and steady.

Moving Pictures imagines the arrival of films on Discworld and is mostly set in Holy Wood (geddit?), but with subplots taking place in Ankh-Morpork, so we get to see some of the wizards of the Unseen University (UU), early members of the City Watch and quite a lot of Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler. The novel is a crazy tangle of ideas and satirical versions of the movie industry and its fans, relating it all to an ancient rift into another world and a golden statue that looks like everybody’s uncle Oswald. There are talking dogs (Gaspode and Laddie), heroes and damsels in distress as well as elephants, trolls and the Patrician, so you get a good chance of seeing some of the stalwart characters in this volume.

If that sounds like there is too much going on, there is, and some of the loose ends remain untied at the end, which is a shame. I guess it was written and published when the franchise was starting to be well-established and the introduction of the silver screen is conceptually great, but it seems overly busy and the characters are underwritten at times. So the craftsmanship in the later novels is better developed, but, with the general outline of this alternate world much more familiar to most readers, the stories are less “out there”. And all the better for it, I think. So I intend to persevere with both the back-catalogue and the later versions, enjoying it all as part of the ride.

Maine by Courtney Sullivan

Maine by Courtney Sullivan (image from amazon.co.uk)

4 Stars, no paws, bedtime reading.

I’m still lagging behind with writing up reviews, but this might actually be a good thing for the present book as I read it quite quickly, some of it while I was away from home for work. It seemed somehow fitting to read another family novel directly after The Weird Sisters, but with hindsight I might have inserted something completely different, like a popular science book or an adventure novel, to avoid comparing them the whole time.

At first sight, they have a few things in common, both good and bad. On the plus side, there are several female protagonists who belong to the same family and we get the story from different perspectives, they are both set in small-town USA and they are well-plotted and written. And on the minus side, the male characters are cardboard cutouts and underdeveloped, with no direct voice, which I guess makes the target market for this book, whether you want to call it chick lit, family fiction or a novel about women’s lives, abundantly clear. It might be easier and more believable for female writers to steer well clear of the opposite sex, but I can’t help but feel disappointed whenever it happens, as women clearly do not live in isolation. Anyway, I suggest you don’t read these two novels back-to-back and appreciate the skilled plotting of the present one (and the unique voice of Weird Sisters) instead.

Back to Maine… Alice, the matriarch of the Kelleher family owns a desirable waterside plot in Maine containing the family’s old beach house and a newer luxury holiday home her son had built there, ostensibly for her and her late husband. While it sounds like the Kelleher’s weren’t always wealthy, and indeed both Alice and her daughter-in-law Ann Marie are from the “wrong side of the tracks”, they are certainly doing fine, at least financially, in the present. The novel charts the events of one summer holiday, but also flashes back to many past events to explain the context of present events and emotions. Four different characters contribute, Alice, Ann-Marie, Kathleen (Alice’s eldest daughter) and Maggie (Alice’s granddaughter and Kathleen’s daughter), and each chapter focusses on one of them – I mention this technical detail because the plot strands are expertly linked together in this (small) family epic.

The remarkable thing is that all four women are flawed characters, angry, drinking too much, irrational and sometimes very mean to each other. Their behaviour makes sense when you follow their own story and internal monologue, but then you learn about the effect and sometimes hurt this inflicts on others and find yourself agreeing with those, only to be fed another important morsel about somebody else in the next chapter, which upsets the picture yet again. And thus their fairly low-key quarrels, present-day problems and disappointments draw you in. You begin to appreciate the complex net each family creates for itself, both by saying too much and explaining too little, even as the children become adults themselves and could comprehend things they were once too young for.

It’s not a happy book, not much happens and little is resolved by the end, but that seems a much better reflection of a large and messy family than a neat ending could provide. I’m still grumpy that Daniel, Alice’s husband, could only contribute through the memories others have of him, as he sounded lovely and insightful, characteristics difficult to find in some of his family. Nevertheless, several of the reviewers on the back mention that they didn’t want this book to end, and I have to agree with them – I kind of miss them all, perhaps because they are so, well, human.

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

4 stars, no paws, bedtime reading.

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown (image from Amazon.co.uk)

Chicklit novels about dysfunctional families are not exactly rare and it takes a little extra effort to come up with something out of the ordinary in this area. Eleanor Brown certainly has a go at doing exactly that – the novel employs a first person plural (we) narrator in some sections and is littered with quotes from and references to the works of Shakespeare. This is mixed with sections from the point of view of one of the three sisters, Rosalind (Rose), Bianca (Bean) and Cordelia (Cordy), who together are the Weird Sisters of the title. The Shakespeare links are explained by the profession of their father, a Shakespeare scholar, who likes to quote from the Bard’s work in ALL situations. And so we learn that the original word used, “wyrd”, means fate and that the fate of these three sisters is intertwined.

Now technically grown up, they are brought back together when their mother is diagnosed with cancer, but as readers we know from the beginning that there is more to Bean’s and Cordy’s return to Barnwell, a small US university town, and that Rose, who has returned a long time ago after her studies, is not just making a sacrifice to look after their ageing parents. All three have become damaged and disillusioned by their experiences, although these are scrapes and bruises, not deep wounds. As the story unfolds, things change, amends are made, the relationships between the sisters and with their parents evolve, and everybody gets better, including their mother.

I liked the ambition of the author in allowing the chorus of sisters to interject and analyse the situation, providing us with both the sisters’ individual points of view and their collective family history. I also liked the portrayal of the challenges faced by the young academics, Rose and her fiancee Jonathan, and of the bond between the sisters. Like most siblings, they are connected through their childhood, even if they happen to not like each other in a(ny) given situation.

There are sections where the Shakespeare references feel like too much of a gimmick, and others which are almost patronising in their effort to educate us readers. The male characters, as is often the case, are two-dimensional and appear as and when needed to support the protagonists. It seems to me that most female authors struggle with inventing/describing men as three-dimensional human beings, relegating them instead to supporting actors. In the present case, the father remains enigmatic with his quotes and inability to engage with the world, and only some of the mother-daughter conversations help to make him seem at least loving.

Nevertheless, this is a warm-hearted story with a happy ending and some interesting craftsmanship in terms of the writing, so it (just) earned 4 stars.

Paddle by Jasper Winn

3-4 stars, no paws, ok for bedtime and travel. Warning – might make you buy a kayak and paddle off around Ireland!

I have been reading books, but fallen behind on blogging about them. I actually read this one in late August, when the weather was still pleasant and taking a kayak around Ireland seemed like a nice plan. What’s more, I bought it for my husband a little before then, and not just did he read it very quickly, he then signed us up as members of the British Canoe Union and started to organise a trial session so we would buy a second kayak (I have owned one since my student days) or possibly a double canadian canoe. The snag with this is that the trial day is going to be on Saturday and autumn has just started, with a large low pressure area settling in over the UK which is bringing lots of rain and wind for the next few days. Maybe it will have worn itself out by the weekend, but the drop in temperature is difficult to ignore at the moment. In fairness, the author himself encountered a fair bit of weather on his trip and carried on regardless, so we should probably just toughen up and hope for an end-of-season bargain. I mean, who else is going to be out on a rainy Saturday morning in late September, right?

The book, subtitled “A long way around Ireland”, describes how Jasper Winn, a relative novice to sea kayaking, decided to search for his disappearing youth and his national identity while paddling around Ireland. Still recovering from a brush with serious illness and in what would turn out to be a summer of poor weather, he set off on his own, with what little equipment he could fit into his kayak, paddling during the day and camping or staying in hostels at night. The early chapters describes his adventures both on the water, while he develops his sea legs and gains experience, and off it – the weather is so poor that there is a lot of drinking in local pubs and getting to know the regulars. He appears to be a reasonably good musician and singer, so can always join in with others. As his confidence grows, he spends more time on the water, musing about his relationship with the sea, but also with the land he is circumnavigating. While he spent a lot of his youth (and education in the school of life) in Ireland, where his possibly eccentric parents settled near a castle ruin after leaving England, he has also travelled to other countries and currently seems to struggle with deciding where home is and what it might mean to him when he finds it.

While there are hints of a midlife crisis, this is mostly a positive book about the sea, the coast and the people who live there. Jasper Winn’s story is honest, and he owns up to sometimes making the wrong, or at least a very risky, decision when setting off by kayak on stormy days. A little bit like Bill Bryson-on-sea, he brings us snapshots of the locals and the environment he encounters, but also allows us to gain in insight into his own world views and personal history. This is not a book about travel, really, or about sea kayaking, but more an opportunity to hear Jasper Winn’s tale of when he paddled around Ireland in a rainy old summer. You can almost imagine hearing about it down the pub. And while my ambition is well and truly stretched with hoping to paddle around the Kingsbridge estuary in South Devon sometime soon, it is a fine tale indeed.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

3 stars, no paws, bedtime reading.

Have you ever imagined what it would be like to see Marilyn Monroe at 85 or James Dean in his sixties? While they died too young, their tragic deaths are part of their legends, and in some ways it is the same with Douglas Adams who died in 2001. Imagine for a moment, though, what might have come after Hitchhiker’s Guide and his various film and TV projects – would he have managed to top it (the later parts of the HHG series are less exciting, after all), or would his career have fizzled out, to be replaced by campaigning for rescuing endangered animals and preserving ecosystems, as he started in “Last Chance to See” with his mate Mark Carwardine? He might have contributed to the new Dr Who series, written more books (his Wikipedia entry suggests that this would only have happened under duress…) and seen the Hitchhiker’s movie (perhaps disapproved of it), as well as the recent BBC  serialisation of Dirk Gently.

After seeing the Dirk Gently pilot with Stephen Mangan, Darren Boyd and Helen Baxendale, I was sufficiently intrigued to order the book, but then didn’t get around to reading it until now. Rather surprisingly, we got another three-part series since, but it seems likely that there will not be any more of this enjoyable and weird adaptation on TV. Having seen the TV series first, the book is a bit of a surprise because it develops the idea of time and space travel much more strongly than we saw on TV, and I’m sure that upset fans of Douglas Adams and the book, but this level of complexity would not have worked in the dramatisation, not even on BBC Four. The other noticeable difference is that the book is mostly focussed on MacDuff, not Dirk Gently who is the protagonist on TV, although this may change in the second book of the series.

As is often the case, I would recommend treating the book as a separate entity from the TV series, recognising how the different media took different things from the story told, which remains clever and inventive in both versions. In the book, there is a clever condemnation of blind religious belief, a ghost story, a mysterious murder, a few snapshots of Cambridge college life, a flawed love story, and a reluctant buddy story, sprinkled with a bit of quantum mechanics and some wry observations on human relationships. If you can bear SciFi/Fantasy, this is good fun, and it’s sad to think that there won’t be any more from such a talented and inventive (I’m trying to avoid saying crazy) author.

Snuff by Terry Pratchett

4 stars, no paws, bedtime reading.

We have been worried about Sir Terry. He revealed a while ago that he had been diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease (P0sterior Cortical Atrophy), and since then he has appeared on our television screens several times to explore the devastating effects of Alzheimer’s and the touchy issue of assisted suicide when his future becomes unbearable. While he has asserted that he will keep writing for as long as he can, I have caught myself watching out for changes in his novels that tell us that it’s time to say Goodbye to one of the UK’s most unusual and prolific authors.

Snuff by Terry Pratchett (image from http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/21/snuff-terry-pratchett-review)

The good news is that the time hasn’t come – Snuff is inventive, well-written and further develops the Sam Vimes/City Watch arc of stories by taking the Commander out of the City and sending him on “holiday” to his wife’s privileged country seat. The story then becomes an almost traditional cop story, involving lots of sleuthing and dangerous investigations. It also further develops the integration of the whole cast of Discworld species, including Vampires, Werewolves, Dwarfs, Trolls and now Goblins into society, with all the prejudices and resistance these developments can entail. There is a welcome outing for Vimes’s servant Willikins, who can fashion a weapon out of anything, and the challenges of family life are explored by contrasting Sam Jr.’s needs and demands with Sam Sr.’s adventures and past events which haunt him, tied together by his wife Sybil’s gentle and understanding nagging and the social demands on his time arising from her status.

I know these novels are considered part of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre, but in many ways they are a distorted and at times satirical version of our own world, sharply observed and, often poignantly, capturing the foibles and prejudices of people anywhere, even on a world held up by elephants and travelling through space on a giant turtle.  If you haven’t read a Discworld novel before, I would not start with this one, because, while being broadly self-contained, it refers back to earlier books and understanding the references makes this much more enjoyable, but if you have, all is still well and hopefully it will continue a while longer.