An early thriller novel full of decent chaps and rotten blighters. Whilst reading this I found myself trying to decide on the best semi-archaic synonym for ‘thrilling’, like ‘swashbuckler’, ‘humdinger’ or ‘snortripper’ (I may have invented that one).
The protagonist, Richard Hannay, bored with life in London, is framed for murder. Now a man on the run and not so bored, he proves to be a resourceful fellow, getting to try on lots of new disguises at a relentless pace. With a turn of pace, competence and luck which at times verge on the improbable, he MacGyver’s his way up and down the country, even getting to blow himself up and out of a jail cell at one point.
Hannay is also a fantastic judge of character and doesn’t mind letting you know. The predominance of rural folk and city bigwigs does result in a fair few flat characters, but the Scottish Highlands, however, are wonderfully described (‘Behind me was the road climbing though a long cleft in the hills, which was the upper glen of some notable river. In front was a fat space of maybe a mile. All pitted with bog-holes and rough with tussocks, and then beyond it the road fell steeply down another glen to a plain whose blue dimness melted into the distance.’) Circling back to the decent chaps and rotten blighters, the latter – what with this being set pre-WW1 and published in 1915 – are of course ruthless Germans, conspiring to bring about war (not to forget an unsolicited rant about Jews).
A fun read, the ten chapters set a rapid – although somewhat uniform – pace.
Worth reading? Yes.
Worth re-reading? No, just as there’s not much in the way of subtext. However, the descriptions of the Highlands are great.
Read: November 2023–April 2025 (stuck in the bookshelf traffic jam for a while)
Edition read: Scratch Books, 2022, 173 pages
Contemporary short-story anthology
I read this alongside John Grisham’s The Firm whilst on holiday (St Ives, thanks for asking – yes, the surf was up). Let’s say these were contrasting reads.
This contemporary short-story anthology is made up of seven stories, each with an author interview at the end. I read the first collection* (also consisting of seven stories) in February 2023 and found a lot to pick apart in the interviews, which enhanced a second readthrough.
Whilst I didn’t enjoy this collection as much as the first, I was reminded of how interesting the form of the short story can be. Often, the form is, what is this story? What is it that’s actually happening? Some of these stories are quite hard to parse and further analyse, with a lot between the lines, such as in Bad Dreams, when the mother blames her husband for a nocturnal disarray – actually created by her child – in a kind of misunderstood epiphany.
However, by and large these stories avoid the mistake of having more between the lines than what is actually in them (a now-ceased subscription to Granta impressed upon me that something needs to happen in your stories, not just the idea of something). They are often slice-of-life accounts (All Will Be Well), and/or bring disparate elements brought together (Path Lights and Maintenance).
The interviews with the authors show as much; they are all very learned and sophisticated, combining clever and interesting concepts with carefully considered, sophisticated themes. So why didn’t I enjoy this collection as much as I did the first? A story can be clever, but something still needs to grab you – this was present in the closer, To All Their Dues, but sometimes I was left scratching my head (and not in the sense of being intrigued).
Worth reading? Yes.
Worth re-reading? Yes, although the first volume was better.
* I particularly enjoyed Theophrastus and the Dancing Plague by Jessie Greengrass.
The demobbed Hazel Motes returns to the Deep South to set up his own church, ‘The Church Without Christ’ circa late 1940s, relocating to the big (fictional) city of Taulkinham from his now-abandoned rural hometown after finding that his family has all died or moved away.
Set on becoming a preacher until conscripted at 18, Mote set himself on becoming an atheist – or anti-religion – preacher, seemingly out of a sense of nihilism. However, it’s not the ordeal of war, and his resulting injury, cause this crisis of faith; he’s just told that he doesn’t have a soul by a fellow GI.
There is a certain class of purportedly ‘classic’ novels that I am not struck by, and the common factor behind my lack of comprehension seems to be, why are these people doing these things?
This was my first problem with Wise Blood; the protagonist is told that he doesn’t have a soul and he switches from knowing ‘by the time he was twelve years old that he was going to be a preacher’ to wanting to ‘be converted to nothing instead of to evil’.
It was this inscrutable nihilism which reminded me of The Outsider. I generally go in for Southern Gothics (William Gay, Harry Crews and Cormac McCarthy are favourites of mine), but I was underwhelmed in a way that reminded me of Albert Camus’s The Outsider, where the weight of expectations brought too much baggage. That’s not to say Wise Blood didn’t have both good and great scenes (in particular, the ending), just that there were elements and sections which didn’t land, such as when Enoch Emery, whose role as a character seems to be a metonym for the (religious) masses, finishes his part in the story out in the woods dressed up as an ape. Given that it is he who is of the ‘wise blood’, following it to make his decisions, is this just a critique of idolatry?
It’s certainly misanthropic, with few characters coming out of this looking good; the blind preacher Asa Hawkes turns out to be a fraud and as soon as Motes sets up his religion, the conman Hoover Shoats duplicates it in order to make money. Emery certainly introduces an element of the grotesque – dressing as an ape, stealing a preserved corpse – as well as comedy (such as his mispronunciation of ‘museum’).
Another element that I couldn’t work out was Asa Hawkes’s daughter, Sabbath Lily; I think she is supposed to be predatory, but Motes never seems particularly victimised by her. What was interesting was how it ended with Motes’ landlady trying to find meaning in his – now blind – eyes, at the moment of his death, searching hard and finding nothing – or maybe just whatever she wants to find. Overall, however, if this is a parable on organised religion, I’m not sure what the lesson is.
Worth reading? Yes, but I didn’t like it as much as I wanted to.
Worth re-reading? No – with the caveat that it is hard to fully understand on a first read. A short and quick read at 160 pages, I think a second read would bring more out of it.
DJ Tony and Producer Lou take a road trip across Ireland running a call-in competition for the Mazda 2 they are driving. In an inversion of the Troubles, London is under a swathe of terrorist attacks and Irish expats are returning home; the Mazda is to be given to whichever recently returned emigrant wins the competition.
All Along the Echo takes an experimental form, with pages of radio static and graffiti, and there is a plenitude of voices, both over the radio and in person as it moves between perspectives. Despite the thought-provoking premise of the transposition of The Troubles, it all feels a bit low stakes: DJ Tony’s marriage is struggling (but it seems OK in the end?); Lou feels guilty about a time she cheated on her girlfriend (but this doesn’t come to anything?) and is worried about her missing cat (who her girlfriend eventually finds in – improbably – a sewer); there is teenage angst from a vulnerably housed graffiti artist (which feels a bit more real, but just ends when she makes some friends?); and there is a completely disconnected murder scene (everyone else is a recurring character – why not the ones in this?)
I was sold on the blurb’s declaration that ‘All Along the Echo asks us whether our lives ever add up to more than the stories we tell ourselves’. I was left unconvinced of this; whilst it is skilfully written, for the most part the character arcs were flat and ultimately it all felt a bit scattered, leaving me unsure of what it was building towards.
Reading this review back, it feels a bit severe – the characters come across as real and the dialogue is convincing, and I was interested in seeing how the themes of a road trip, returning home and telling stories came together. It’s just that the story doesn’t add up to what it seems like it could have been. Whilst on a meta level that seems like it could be very clever – the narrative standing in for our lives – the execution has to match the ideas. Given the interesting form, I am interested in seeing what else Denton has written.
Worth reading? No.
Worth re-reading? No, but I am interested in Denton’s other books to see if the execution matches the ideas.
A bracing take on motherhood from the perspective of the mother of a mass shooter.
The prose is intense and clever. I had to read this in short bursts, not just because at points it was uncomfortable (Shriver has created a chilling nemesis in Kevin), but because she writes so articulately and incisively that therein lays a tension between reading about Kevin’s next atrocity (he is adept with cruelty and violence) and soaking up the details of his mother’s life and perspective (a good problem to have as a reader – I can imagine creative-writing courses loving this).
The novel takes an epistolary form, the protagonist Eva Katchadourian writing to her estranged husband after what she refers to as ‘Thursday’ to finally express many an uncomfortable truth. That she refers to the mass murder perpetrated by her son as ‘Thursday’ suggests she is more OK with some of these uncomfortable truths than others; enter the unreliable narrator.
This narrator is clearly highly intelligent and slightly superior, with the narrative perspective completely hers – neither her husband nor Kevin get a word in directly. The epistolary form is an astute choice of form, allowing for this subjectivity, a credible intimacy and a plot twist. A more predictable choice would have been letters to the titular inmate. Here, instead, it is how a husband and wife are left to communicate after a ruinous event.
Kevin is an intriguing villain and the defining question of the book shapes up to be, why did he do it – what was wrong with him? And, as secondary questions, what if the only thing that someone likes is hurting others, and (don’t forgot that bit about the unreliable narrator?) what if, whatever you do, the child you raise is not a nice person?
Although his character is written as being perennially pitted against his mother, the answers to these questions are ultimately left to our interpretation. This lack of a clear ‘why’ makes Kevin’s villainy that more compelling.
I enjoyed Mandel’s previous titles The Lola Quartet and Station Eleven and their themes of escape, isolation and reinvention, as well as the subtlety of her writing. What at first appears to be a series of vignettes develops into a single story. Initially, it is not apparent how – and why – these stories are connected, but the success of Sea of Tranquility, and what makes it stand out, lies in that it takes an element of sci-fi – a genre new to Mandel’s writing, albeit in lo-fi form here – and uses it to focus on the human desires and failings of her range of characters. Mandel’s characters routinely paint themselves into corners, and in Sea of Tranquility the sci-fi aspect brings a literal element to the past revisiting the present. These characters – who here, can travel through time and change planets – still yearn, are still uneasy, live normal lives, oft to the point of numbness, all stressed by Mandel’s understated writing style.
The plotline of The Offing is slightly more pedestrian than Myer’s more typical ‘Northern Gothic’ novels; working-class boy (Robert) from post-WW2 English mining town meets eccentric upper-class woman (Dulcie), who has retreated from society due to long-lost love, where they experience mild culture clash and she exposes him to the better things in life.
Told in the first person, the story takes an analeptic form, which somewhat explains the rich vocabulary, but for a narrator introduced as painfully ancient, he has a remarkable memory for details. Read this deliberately rich vocabulary with patience and the five senses get a workout; the colours, smells, feelings, sights and sounds of nature all feature regularly and prominently and there are some great turns of phrase (‘The ashen sea roared in the distance like a football stadium witnessing an extra-time injustice’). However, the plentitude of what I came to feel were overly frequent and verbose descriptions of nature did get monotonous.
There are two main sections – Robert by himself, which if anything is slightly more interesting, capturing the landscape(s) of northern England as he walks across it, and then when he encounters Dulcie. There is a subplot about poetry, which seems slightly meta – is Myers talking about how Northern working-class people aren’t supposed to like poetry, but if you take them out the pits, they do?
If there had been something else happen, it could have had a more compelling sense of drive; unfortunately, besides the over-the-top descriptions, the stakes just feel a bit low.
Worth reading? No, even though I came into this wanting to like it – Myers has written some brilliant books.
Worth re-reading? No. Myer’s other books – The Gallows Pole and These Darkening Days – however, are well worth a read.
I saw a National Theatre production of this in November 2023 and did my best to follow the plot, but at a certain point it just took an absolute left turn to comprehension and I had no idea what was going on. Let’s see if I can do any better with the book.
It starts with a funeral, which leads the (unnamed) narrator to revisit his childhood home, and the pond, or the ‘ocean’, at the end of the lane. In turn, he remembers a childhood memory – the story at hand – for the first time. As such, it is told in the form of analepsis. Here, death is a gateway.
Much like Gaiman’s Neverwhere, the story takes place in a universe that could be ours, until it very much doesn’t, with the introduction of a different – perhaps parallel – universe. I spent a while considering whether this was surrealism or fantasy; despite the title, I think it’s the latter. The element of surrealism that is a lack of understanding of the rules of the universe, and the suspension of the normal rules – those of reality – evolves into fantasy as the sense of normalcy completely gives way to another, strange and unfamiliar, world.
It is written from a child’s perspective, quickly deploying the trope of a child dealing with gaps in their knowledge and understanding, particularly of adult themes, with the early suicide of the opal miner. The narrator, who often articulates his feelings of a lack of agency, is convincingly passive as a child. I wondered what the significance of the opal miner was for a bit: he is gone almost as soon as he appears. Ultimately, besides this character providing a dark example of something beyond the child narrator’s understanding, as well as driving the plot forward, I read it as a note on the letdowns of adulthood. As this suggests, although it could be read by older children or young adults, it works on two levels, and in many ways this is quite a dark book; besides looking at loss (such as when Lettie is hurt protecting the narrator and has to ‘rest’ for what turns out to be a lifetime) it draws upon what adults say/look like versus what they actually do/how they act, the protagonist’s father’s affair with Ursula being an example.
As this early development suggests, the plot whips along (I read this over a long weekend), although the logic behind ‘why is this happening?’ is not always apparent and re-reading a couple of pages proved necessary (this made me feel better for not having been able to follow the play). Gaiman is inventive, creating his own tropes, such as the suicide of the miner summoning the spirit/Ursula to distribute money. Although he has written a compelling fantasy, this book could be read on a purely symbolic level for memory and loss of childhood, the ocean being something to return to and submerge in but never cross.
In Down Under, Men at Work sing their way through a couple of culture clashes. These all turn out to be relatively benign; cars break down on hippie trails, people make Vegemite* sandwiches, beer flows and people chunder. There is an attempted drug deal, but the proud Australian tells the Bombayite that he comes from the land of plenty, and that Aussie rules is the best sport, so clear off mate.** In Shōgun, the learning curve is a bit steeper; the (Protestant) Elizabethan protagonist gets shipwrecked in ‘the Japans’, the only people who can translate to and from Japanese are pesky Catholic missionaries, people are either beheaded or expected to commit ritual suicide (‘seppuku’) for slight infractions, eating raw fish is a yes and daily baths are expected.
The Erasmus, a trading ship of Elizabethan-era Dutchmen and an Englishman (John Blackthorne, the navigator and our protagonist), arrives at a key moment in the history of feudal Japan; the Taiko (Japan’s main man) has died, leaving an infant son and five lord regents to rule for him as a council until he comes of age. These five regents all want to kill each other off, but manners dictate that no one can even openly show that they are mildly offended by obvious stingers, so they resort to a lot of scheming instead. Talking of scheming, the Portuguese Jesuits are already there, facilitating their monopoly of trade between Japan and China, as well as working on The Treaty of Tordesillas. They are not pleased about a bunch (in fact, the very first bunch) of Protestants appearing.
As such, Shōgun covers the build-up to war and the requisite manoeuvring, moving between the perspective of various characters, including Blackthorne, to do its world building. Although based on a true story, from a post-colonial perspective, that a story about feudal Japan had to involve an Englishman seems a bit questionable, although Clavell’s approach does make for an interesting premise. (This is also not to mention that feudal Japan did a fair bit of colonising of its own.) Upon first consideration, it just seems improbable that Blackthorne is the protagonist (and also gets the main lady.) However, he is very much used as an oft-unwitting chesspiece in a game of political chess; it ends with an soliloquy from Toranaga (who, indisputably, grows into being the Shōgun of this story), rather than from Blackthorne, wherein it is revealed that the latter’s plans of sailing off into the sunset back home to England may not quite work out. Emphasising this point, the rest of the crew of The Erasmus quickly become minor characters; their main purpose is to show the tension between what Blackthorne was and what he becomes. Fortunately, Clavell doesn’t try to place Blackthorne on a typical hero’s path and make him become a great warrior who comes to surpass his (many) enemies in combat; instead, Blackthorne quickly comes to understand that he is no match for any samurai.
Shōgun packs a lot of plot into its 1000+ pages, and my initial assumption that there was going to be a swordfight on every page was incorrect – it actually ends before the major warfaring begins, being very much about the preceding manoeuvering. The flipside to this is that what with the politics, plotting, spying and power struggles, the plot can be hard to keep up with and the sections focused on social propriety make for slower reading.
When it comes to show versus tell, it leans towards tell, wherein a lot of historical information about Japan, and the personal stories of characters, are set up, generally via free direct discourse. It is a nice touch that Toranaga disappears at times, not just from the events of the book but also from the narrative, with Clavell resisting the urge to jump into his perspective and instead let the reader get a taste of the other characters’ confusion.
Worth reading? Yes – it’s a long read, but stick with it.
Worth re-reading? Yes, and given the complexity of the plot, would be a fruitful read with the added comprehension that a second read invariably brings. However, to compare apples to orangutans, the 2024 TV series is better than the book, so if you don’t have time, do that.
Death is part of our air and sea and earth. You should know, Anjin-san, in this Land of Tears, death is our heritage.
Edition read: Dead Ink Books, April – May 2025, 446 pages
Fiction – folk horror. Won a Nero Award for Best Fiction.
*Spoilers*
Three young women live in personal stases of varying degrees in a village in northern England where the dead meander and a six-year summer shows no sign of abating. This is the first interesting point (besides the dead roaming about and everyone seemingly just kind of…meh about it): a folk horror set in a warm, sunny, endless summer, inviting at least just a little bit of comparison to that most famous piece of work in the folk-horror oeuvre, The Wicker Man (we’ll come back to that later).
The title refers to the unnaturally ever-abundant vegetation created by the endless summer that these three female protagonists – Heather, Rachel and Antonia – inhabit. In this world, Leslie has a different take upon zombies; they are generally harmless until underestimated, at which point they close in, gang up and kill people with hard objects. No eating reported.
The descriptions of this eternal summer are rich without being saccharine (‘Very occasionally it was a dry heat, a soily heat smelling of bug carcasses and stones, but usually the air sweated as much as the people’), and rural scenes abound, with the action sticking to the countryside and villages.* In this garden, there are no old(er) people and no authority figures, although there does exist the accepted aphorism, ‘Don’t go to Almanby’. No one seems to know why; just going there is taboo. Plotwise, Heather is trying to find her boyfriend, Steven, who disappeared to – of course – Almanby around six months earlier, although a difficulty in keeping track of time is a recurring theme, getting pushed to extremes later on in the book, with one particularly atemporal slippage of reality.
Rachel needs to deliver a package – the contents of which she keeps a secret from Antonia and Heather – again, to Almanby! This is the start of the story proper. Roadtrip!
I started off quickly, then slowed down, finding the irreverence of Rachel and Heather a bit grating, then got back into it as the narrative drive picked up. Rachel clearly has something to hide, but we aren’t just let in on what. She receives mysterious, nonsensical transmissions via a portable radio. The unknowns, including an ever-elusive ice cream van, build up the mystery, driving the story via intrigue, and although the unanswered questions ultimately add to the feeling of a bad dream, these don’t all resolve as clearly as possible. For example, it’s implied that Antonia is a murderer, which doesn’t go anywhere, nor does it really seem to inform her character. Her love interest in (but seemingly never with) Heather also just fizzles away at the end, without any requisite epiphany.
Although it moves between the perspectives of each of the three main characters, it can sometimes be hard to remember the ‘whys’ in this novel; why did David hold them up? He is also being manipulated by Steven? What’s the deal with Rachel – is she addicted to something? At one point I wondered if Almanby was an analogy for addiction (‘it was the best feeling she’d ever experienced, and she never wanted it to stop, even as she knew it soon would’), but this isn’t developed and her motivation remains unclear.
Jumping back to that use of ‘folk horror’ and The Wicker Man – when they arrive in Almanby is when it really becomes clear that the normal rules of this universe have fallen aside and that something is off, although Leslie does a good job of maintaining the build-up and making it hard to place what. As suggested, a lot remains unexplained, which at times really adds to hazy feel, such as the farm building which turns into a looping maze, but this doesn’t deliver on all fronts. Is Heather struck by lightning towards the end? Is Steven trying to destroy Almanby? The theme of sacrifice also comes up, but not as a heavy-handed copy and paste of The Wicker Man. So, although the composition falls apart towards the end, the ending is still delivered with considerable interest, and does leave a satisfying chill.
Worth reading? Yes.
Worth re-reading? Yes, although the strength of the writing carries the plot a bit.
*These were pleasingly effective compared to another recent read, Benjamin Myer’s The Offing.
The Page Count 