Best of the Year: Sheer Entertainment

I have read quite a lot of escapist fiction this year – escapist in my case means crime fiction that keeps you turning page after page, or a book that immerses you in a particular time and place. A sense of humour also helps – I do like black, absurdist comedy; it must be my ‘living under a dictatorship’ heritage.

The problem with escapist literature is that you have to choose it well: some things sound far better in theory than in practice, or the blurb is misleading, and even the same author is no guarantee of success. See below which ones did not work for me and which I recommend in their stead.

1. Instead of Sarah Pearse: The Sanatorium – try Allie Reynolds: Shiver

I am a sucker for books featuring winter in the mountains, especially when the setting is France or Switzerland, where the skiing terrain is familiar to me. Although The Sanatorium is atmospheric, the whole story feels implausible and the characters are stilted. I enjoyed Shiver, the tale of snowboarding rivalry, far more and read it in a single sitting. And you don’t need to be a snowboarding fanatic to cope with the terminology.

2. Instead of Catherine Cooper: The Chateau – try Stella Benson: The Swiss Summer

I read a previous book by Catherine Cooper, The Chalet, last year and thought this might be equally fun, especially since it was about an expat couple trying to renovate a dilapidated chateau in France (you all know how obsessed I am with chateaux). However, the plot was so preposterous and the people so awful (and flatly awful at that), that I struggled to finish this. I appreciated Benson’s far more nuanced approach to different types of expats and the relationship between then and the locals in her admittedly not thrillerish at all but enchanting Swiss Summer.

3. Instead of Valerie Perrin: Fresh Water for Flowers – try Margaret Kennedy: The Feast

The French author’s story of loss, grief and unspoken love touched many hearts, I know, so you will be cross with me for admitting that to me it felt kitsch, like wading through treacle. I much preferred the allegorical tale by Margaret Kennedy, which was full of witty social observations, as well as some really entertaining characters.

4. Instead of John Leake: The Vienna Woods Killer – try Catherine Ryan Howard: The Nothing Man

It’s perhaps a little unfair to compare a true crime account with a work of fiction that only purports to include true crime elements, but I really wanted to like the book about the Vienna Woods Killer, because it features one of those hard-to-believe cases about a serial killer who was a darling of the Viennese literary society. It is meticulously researched, but oddly lacking in any Viennese atmosphere (or proper interpretation of Austrian society) unfortunately. The Nothing Man did a much better job at bringing to the fore the trauma suffered by the victims as well as the narcisstic personality of the serial killer.

5. Instead of Tahmima Anam: The Startup Wife – try Nickolas Butler: Godspeed

A novel about a female co-founder of a tech start-up being manipulated and tricked out of her rightful place and a novel about a bunch of construction workers being bullied into delivering on an impossible deadline might not seem to have much in common at first glance, but they both skewer the American dream and its materialistic ambitions. I wanted to like the Start-Up Wife more, but it felt both predictable and lower in stakes, as well as more clunky writing, compared to the downward spiral story of the three male friends building a house – perhaps because a house feels like the solid kind of legacy that we all can understand (and it feels even more of a waste when it fails).

Further recommended reads:

All of these are perfect escapist reads, for whatever mood you might be in:

• If you’re going on a train journey soon, then Kōtarō Isaka’s Bullet Train is a very entertaining, quite un-Japanese type of thriller, with echoes of Fargo.
• If you miss theme parks (or adventure parks, rather), then Antti Tuomainen’s The Rabbit Factor, with its unique, darkly humorous take on the Finnish mafia, is perfect.
• If you like the Brontës or historical crime fiction more generally, then the series by Bella Ellis, starting with The Vanished Bride, featuring the siblings as detectives will warm the cockles of your heart (and also bring a little chill).
• If you enjoy historical crime fiction set outside England, then Maryla Szymiczkowa: Karolina or the Torn Curtain set in late 19th century Krakow was both educational and entertaining.
• If you enjoy satire about writers and literary festivals, and think the publishing world needs a good hard look at itself, then Dan Rhodes’ Sour Grapes will deliver in spades, although at times the farce is a little too puerile.
• If you like stories about friendships going off the rails and how one bad choice in your youth can have serious consequences years later, but without the artificial construction of dual timelines and ‘that day that I will not divulge to you until the very end of this thriller’, then I really recommend Sharon Bolton’s The Pact.

The Feast by Margaret Kennedy

No Russian, no snow, but a book I read in November and didn’t quite get around to reviewing yet. Set in post-war Britain with restrictions and rationing still very much in place, this book is a study of individual characters and group dynamics, a morality tale that is more fun than preachy. It is also about a period of massive societal changes: there is a conflict between urban and rural lifestyles, the class system seems to be breaking (of course, we know it proved to be more resistant to change than one might have expected), and poverty is often just a misstep away.

I thought I was being very clever in noticing that some of the characters represented the Seven Deadly Sins, but it turns out that this is precisely what the author intended and every other reader was fully aware of it. There is a little bit of a tension to find out if any of the deadly sinners were ‘punished’, i.e. perished in the landslide which buried the hotel, as we are told in the prologue. We go back in time to a week before the tragedy and discover the eccentric and disparate guests who have all converged upon this Cornish seaside hotel.

Owing to financial constraints (and the firm belief that their younger sons need a private school education), the Siddals have transformed their large home into a boarding house. Although not a talented cook, Mrs Siddal is preparing all the meals, while her husband (SLOTH) lies around not doing very much other than making awkward, profound or witty observations about the world and generally annoying the guests. He did remind me somewhat of Mr Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. Their oldest son, Gerry, although a qualified doctor, does most of the dogsbody work around the place, as does the pretty maid Nancibel, because the housekeeper Miss Ellis doesn’t like hard work and would rather be sticking her nose into other people’s business and gossiping about them. Miss Ellis (ENVY) likes nothing better than seeing other people suffer:

This Socialist Government does not look after poor people like they promised but they have brought rich people down, which is one comfort.

One such rich family is Sir Henry and Lady Gifford, with their four children (three of them adopted). The wife and children spent most of the war safe and well-fed in the United States, and Lady Gifford does not understand why a mere inconvenience like rationing should spoil her diet, even if the others are left without food (GLUTTONY). She believes herself to be an invalid and therefore requiring extra care, but her husband feels that all of the sacrifices of his fellow countrymen can’t have been in vain. He does not want to move to the Channel Islands to escape income tax, he feels a sense of responsibility to improve society.

Widowed Mrs Cove has three daughters who seem like spectres in comparison to the bouncy Giffords, but the two sets of children befriend each other. The other guests cannot help noticing just how tight-fisted Mrs Cove is, taking her children’s sweet rations to sell on the black market, and possibly trying to swindle them out of an inheritance (AVARICE).

Also among the guests are Mr and Mrs Paley, who cannot bear to talk to each other after the death of their daughter. Mrs Paley does start unbending as she becomes involved in the plight of the children and young people around her, but her husband is so bound up in his grief, that he won’t let anybody help him (PRIDE). The Canon Wraxton (WRATH) is a late addition to the party, annoying everyone with his loud, bullying ways, and the disparaging way in which he treats his cowed daughter as an object.

Finally, we have the writer Anna Lechene (LUST), what one might nowadays call a ‘cougar’, always with an aspiring, attractive young writer at her beck and call, whom she promises to help get published some day. In this case, it is the somewhat feckless yet naively hopeful Bruce, who is her ‘secretary-chauffeur’, but then falls for Nancibel and resolves to become a better man. Anna also endangers one of the Gifford children, Hebe, by taking her to a rather louche party and getting her drunk.

It’s the Cove children who conceive of the idea to have a midnight feast on the coast. They are generous of spirit and want to share nice things with others, although they have next to nothing. So kind-hearted Nancibel convinces Mrs Paley and some of the others to pool together their rations and create a bit of a feast. Everyone is invited, but we can’t help but feel some satisfaction, like in the old-fashioned morality tales, that those who refuse to contribute or participate end up under the rubble.

With so many characters to portray, and some of them representing archetypes, you might be excused for thinking that they would feel a bit a pawn-like or flat in the author’s hands. Not at all! They are all richly layered and we gain insights into their psychology through a judicious amount of head-hopping from chapter to chapter, letters, conversations and observations about each other. All done with a lot of wit and charm – a complete delight!

Incoming Books and Their Sources (4)

I didn’t think I acquired lots of books this month, but surprise, surprise, it’s still quite a chunky pile!

Zoe seems quite smitten with my latest pile of books in the TBR trolley. Some of the others mentioned are in e-book format.

Yorkshire-inspired reading

Bella Ellis: The Vanished Bride and The Diabolical Bones. Bella Ellis is the pen name for Rowan Coleman – a series of murdery mysteries featuring the Bronte sisters – I had never heard of this series before, but it was a must after visiting the Parsonage. – discovered in the charming Wave of Nostalgia shop on Haworth Main Street, with its theme of ‘strong women’. The third volume has just come out: Rowan Coleman was at the shop recently to sign the book, but I thought I should start at the beginning. I’ve already devoured the first one and could of course imagine every room in the house and the surrounding landscape.

E.C.R. Lorac: These Names Make Clues – a present from the lovely Janet Emson, when we met at Sculpture Park, already done and dusted, short review to follow.

Margaret Kennedy: The Feast This one was actually inspired by a review from Jacqui, but it fits in well with an idea I had for a crime novel featuring disparate guests arriving for various reasons at a Buddhist retreat centre in Yorkshire (which might bear some coincidental similarities to the Christian retreat centre I stayed at).

Inspired by other readers

Shirley Hazzard: The Evening of the Holiday American author Lily King said in a recent article on LitHub that ‘one of the greatest loves of my life has been the short novel The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard. I have kept a copy of it on the desk where I write for more than twenty-five years. I reach for it when I am stuck, scared, or bored, when I am at loose ends or bound up tight. I raise it like a sacred text, let it fall open where it will.’ It doesn’t take much to persuade me to pick up a Shirley Hazzard book, since I identify strongly with her wandering lifestyle and cross-cultural observations, but this ringing endorsement activated my trigger-happy finger instantly (I found a second-hand copy of it).

Abir Mukherjee: A Necessary Evil I read the first in this wonderful series set in Raj-era India for the Virtual Crime Book Club and then found another (out of order) at the library). Then other books came along and jostled for priority, but a recent review of Mukherjee’s latest by Mary Picken made me want to go back to it and attempt a bit of a chronological order (which is more important in historical fiction than in other crime series), so I borrowed this second one in the series from the library. Short review to follow soon, but highly recommended.

Annamarie Jagose: In Translation You can blame Lisa Hill from ANZ Lit Lovers blog once again for this hard-to-find book. A translator of Japanese literature, a love triangle and a potential fraud: could this book be any more me than that?? It is out of print (dates from 1994), but I managed to find it second-hand.

Inspired by Twitter

Alberto Prunetti: Down and Out in England and Italy An obvious reference to Orwell’s account of precarious work in Paris and London, I became aware of this book thanks to tweets by Tanya Shadrick and the Working Class Festival. The gig economy is so prevalent nowadays, so a very timely read.

Cristina A. Bejan: Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania. I’ve been following Cristina for a while on Twitter, she is a poet and an academic of Romanian origin, now living in the US. When I saw that her research into the interwar period in Romania (which some see as the ‘golden age of intellectuals and literature’) had been published, I instantly asked her to send me a copy, which she kindly signed for me. It features the world of Mihail Sebastian and his ‘friends’ – need I say more?

Joanna Cannon: A Tidy Ending. The Trouble with Goats and Sheep was possibly one of the first books I downloaded from Netgalley back in 2015/16, but I didn’t get to read it until this year (and quite enjoyed it). I also like following the exploits of Joanna and her lovely, goofy German Shepherd Lewis on Twitter, so when I heard she has a new book out and read the blurb, I wanted to read it. I hope it’s not going to be mediocre psychological thriller territory – there have been far too many of those in recent years, they’ve all blended into mush in my mind.

Polly Atkin: Recovering Dorothy I met Polly on a poetry writing retreat in Wales a few years ago and have been following her work ever since. She has been very busy despite lockdown and other issues, and she has recently published not only a new collection of poetry but also a book examining Dorothy Wordsworth’s legacy (despite struggling with poor health and looking after her brother).

Inspired by literary festivals

Natasha Brown and Claudia Rankine discussing their work with Alex Clark.

Claudia Rankine: Just Us

Natasha Brown: Assembly

Although I felt pretty run-down and ill over the weekend (thank you, older son, for coming all the way from Durham to give me and your brother your tonsillitis and other flu bugs), I attended some of the sessions of the Cambridge Literary Festival (Winter Edition) – luckily, they are all recorded and available to watch until the 28th of November, so I still have time to catch up. I was particularly struck by the mutual admiration and thoughtfulness of the session featuring Natasha Brown and Claudia Rankine, so I ordered their books at once (I have several other Rankine books, but not her latest, and have heard excellent things about Brown’s debut novel).

Fatima Manji: Hidden Heritage

I expected to like the panel above, but what is lovely with these all-access festivals is that you stumble across unexpected delights, such as Fatima Manji describing how she researched the origin of various objects in British museums or forgotten papers in archives, to show the long history of Britain’s fascination with the ‘Orient’. I found out that Queen Victoria spoke and wrote Urdu, that Elizabeth I was corresponding with the women in the Ottoman Sultan’s harem in Topkapi Palace, that coffee houses were bemoaned as dens of iniquity by the ale-houses (for being Turkish temptresses) and so much more.

Publisher initiatives

Olga Tokarczuk: The Books of Jacob, transl. Jennifer Croft I’ve wanted this book ever since I heard the author and translator mention it at the Hay Festival in 2018, just after they won the Man Booker International Prize for Flights. In the meantime, many of the bloggers I love have been looking forward to it, and I hope we will exchange views on it even if we don’t do a readalong. I couldn’t quite afford the limited edition of it though, but the Fitzcarraldo newsletter mentioned that they had copies signed by the author at Foyles, so… it was a no-brainer.

Josep Maria Esquirol: The Intimate Resistance, transl, Douglas Suttle Thank you, Fum d’Estampa Press, for keeping me on their mailing list, although I still haven’t reviewed any of the three books they have sent me. I am very interested in this one, however, because it is a work of philosophy, which has now become an area of vivacious debate between my older son and me. He will no doubt have a very long reading list over the holidays, but maybe he will read this one too, and we can compare notes.

Willem Frederick Hermans: The Darkroom of Damocles, Beyond Sleep and An Untouched House, transl. David Colmer. I receive the Pushkin Press newsletter; when they mentioned that they are publishing a new book by Hermans, and would therefore be reducing prices on his three previous books in virtual format, I thought it was too good an opportunity to miss to read work by one of the most respected Dutch writers of the 20th century. Maybe I should have stuck to just one, to see if I liked his style, but as you can see, I don’t do things by halves!

Serendipity

Christine Mangan: Palace of the Drowned. Such serendipity, aka random pick, typically occurs in a library. While picking up my reservations, I saw this recently-published novel by Christine Mangan on display. Although I hadn’t read her previous one, Tangerine, I had hear good things about it, and the blurb for this one: ageing novelist, Venice setting in the 1960s, an over-eager young admirer… yes, it might sound a bit like Death in Venice or The Talented Mr Ripley, but it’s just the sort of thing I cannot resist.

What do all these different sources prove (other than that I am very easily led astray when it comes to books?)

1. Publisher newsletters or special offers still work a treat
2. Recommendations from other readers and bloggers are my default option
3. If I know and like people on Twitter, I will follow their work with interest
4. I nearly always buy books by friends
5. Festivals sell books
6. I love reading books set in a specific location, especially if I know it personally or want to visit that location
7. Libraries are the best!