Harriet Devine's Blog

When Will There Be Good News?

Anyone who has visited here recently will know that I have really enjoyed the first two books in this series, Case Histories and One Good Turn. So I was delighted to get hold of this most recent one, which I bought as a special airport edition (aka trade paperback, if you are in the US) a couple of weeks ago. I finished it last night, and yes, I started it almost two weeks ago. Now, I am a fast reader, and usually if I am loving a book -- and my goodness did I love this one -- I race through it in a day or two at most.But you know what? I loved it so much that I couldn't bear the thought of finishing it, so I forced myself to take it really really slowly.

Set several years after the last one, this novel finds the wonderful ex-soldier, ex-cop, ex-private detective Jackson Brodie seemingly happily settled into a new life, with a new wife, plenty of money, and no need to go on working. But Jackson has his own demons, which never leave him, and a relatively new one is the existence of Nathan, the young son of  his ex-lover Julia, who lives in Yorkshire with Julia and her photographer husband, who, she claims, is Nathan's father. But Jackson is convinced that Nathan is his son, and the novel begins as he makes a surreptitious journey to the village where Nathan is at school, and manages (by a typically Jacksonish and rather clumsy maneuver) to remove a few strands of the child's hair for DNA testing. An interesting potential plot-line, you may think -- but you will wait a long time to see what the outcome of this is. For something completely different is in store for Jackson. Getting lost on the moors, problems with the car, taking the wrong train -- fate seems to have pushed him along an increasingly darkening path until a train crash in Edinburgh almost ends his life for good. Meanwhile his friend, Detective Inspector Louise Monroe, has also married, not very happily, to a man who is, essentially, far too good and kind, and who brings out her worst, angriest, most rebellious side. Events bring these two together and it is clear that a powerful bond still exists between them. 

As with both the earlier books in this series, there are several complexly interwoven lines of plot. One concerns a young woman doctor Joanna Hunter. Successful, married, with an adored new baby, living in a delightful house and apparently happy with her life, Joanna has an appalling secret in her family history -- as a small child, she witnessed the horrific and motiveless murders of her mother, sister and baby brother by a young psychopath, and only managed by chance to escape with her own life. Now, after serving thirty years in prison, the man is due to be released. How will Joanna be affected? Hard to say, as she speaks to no-one about these things, not even to young Reggie (Regina), the sixteen-year-old girl who helps with baby-sitting while studying for her A-levels. Highly intelligent, well read, sweet and funny, Reggie has been forced to leave the posh school where she was a scholarship pupil after the sudden death of her mother, and is struggling to study the classics on her own, coached by a dotty ex-teacher who has taken up a peculiar brand of religion. If that were not enough, Reggie's life is dogged by her criminal brother Billy, who appears unexpectedly from time to time with various unpleasant and scary threats. Reggie is a wonderful character, the only one who really has a clear view of what is really going on -- Atkinson has described her as the moral centre of the book. Fate -- yes, fate again -- brings all these people into contact with each other, with often surprising results -- you will have to read the novel to see what these are. 

For me, I think this was the best of the three novels in this remarkable trilogy. It is certainly the darkest, though often very funny, and the most allusive, I think, in a literary sense. Many things are left unresolved at the end of the novel and I really do hope that Kate Atkinson is not going to be so cruel as to finish the series with this book. You can hear an interview with her, in which she talks about the novel and about her writing technique and her future plans here.

Endless Night

I know there are a number of fellow lovers of vintage crime fiction out there, but I suspect quite a few of them think Dame Agatha is not quite up to scratch -- good at plotting, not so great at characterisation and dialogue, maybe? If you are one of those, and have not read this novel, give it a go! I am certain you will be be pleasantly surprised. This is a very different kind of book from the Marples and Poirots we are all so familiar with. The story is told in the first person, by a young man, Michael Rogers. Charming, attractive, but lacking any real direction in life, he has been drifting from job to job in a pretty unfocussed way. All that changes when he visits a small country village and falls in love with a run-down country estate known as Gypsy's Acre and develops a passionate desire to build a house there. On the same day he meets a young American girl,  Ellie Guteman, who he marries secretly after a whirlwind romance. Ellie proves to be stupendously rich, and together they are able to buy the estate and employ an astonishingly talented young architect to build their dream house, despite being quite disturbed by the warnings of an elderly gypsy woman that the place brings nothing but bad luck to its inhabitants. At first all seems to go well for them, but events take a darker turn -- more than that I can't say, but believe me, the twist at the end was quite a shock to me.
There are many things I would like to say about this book but unfortunately I can't say any of them without giving too much away. So you will have to take it from me that the narrative and the plot and the characterisation are all done with immense skill. It's one of those books that you want to start again from the beginning as soon as you have finished it, to see exactly how wrongly you interpreted certain events and to admire the writer's skill in so brilliantly misdirecting you. Great stuff.

Poem: The Voice

    I have a couple of books waiting to be blogged about but no time to do them justice. So meanwhile here is a poem I like -- as I'm sure you know, this is one of the ones Hardy wrote after the death of his first wife Emma. The marriage had deteriorated badly and he was in love with someone else, who he married after Emma's death, but when he had lost her he started to remember the happiness of the beginning of their relationship and wrote several of these sad and lovely poems, of which this is probably my favorite.

   Thomas Hardy : The Voice

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling. 

					Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)	1912

Beyond Black

This book, which I started before my hols and finished while I was away, proved to be a tremendous read. Published in 2005, it is the story of Alison, overweight, troubled by the traumas left from her appalling upbringing, and gifted with genuine psychic powers. Travelling the psychic-fair circuits, doing gigs in seedy halls and run down theatres, offering phone consultations, she does her best to bring comfort to the bereaved, which often entails suppressing her uncomfortable insights. Financially she is relatively successful, and early in the novel finds herself with an assistant, the acerbic, sceptical Colette, who puts her business affairs in order, arranges the purchase of a house, and nags Alison ceaselessly about her weight and her eating habits.Living in the midst of conventional suburbia, where the neighbours believe Alison to be an employee of the weather centre (Colette has told them so, but not told Alison, who is constantly bemused when they grumble to her about the innaccuracy of the forecasts), Alison does her best to conform to the rules laid down by her increasingly irritable assistant while simultaneously struggling with her low-life spirit guide Morris who does his best to make her life difficult. As the novel proceeds, more or more is revealed -- both to the reader and to Alison, who had blocked out her worst memories -- about Alison's truly horrendous childhood, her prostitute mother, and the appalling criminals who populated her early years.
What really impressed me about this book was not only its ability to be achingly funny and desperately tragic, sometimes simultaneously, but also the skill with which Mantel convinces you utterly to buy into Alison's psychic abilities, which are treated with the utmost seriousness -- or rather, with such a throwaway ease that there is no question of doubting them. There is the most wonderful cast of supporting characters, including the bizarre clutch of psychics, with varying degrees of genuineness, who make up the little band of fellow workers on the touring circuit, the sad homeless boy who takes up residence in Alison's garden shed, and not least Morris's dreadful dead cronies, who visit from time to time and torment Alison with uncomfortable reminders of her mostly forgotten childhood. A book which will stay with you long after you have read it.

Norm and Anne Tyler

You might remember that just before I went away I had a lovely lunch with Norm and Adele Geras. I only just discovered that Norm blogged about our lunch, and also about reading Anne Tyler, whose books we discussed over lunch. Reading his list, I realised how many of her great novels I still have to read.
Here is Norm's list, with my comments (if no comment, I haven't read it):

Top spot

A Patchwork Planet (I completely agree)

Bubbling unders

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (I haven't read, but hear it is wonderful)
The Accidental Tourist (Yes, a great book)
The Amateur Marriage  (Yes, a great book)

Excellent

If Morning Ever Comes
The Tin Can Tree
Celestial Navigation
Breathing Lessons

Very good

A Slipping Down Life
The Clockwinder
Back When We Were Grownups

Still to read

Searching For Caleb
Earthly Possessions
Morgan's Passing
Saint Maybe
Ladder Of Years (Loved this -- I'd certainly put it under Excellent)
Digging to America (A bit disappointing for me -- it would have to be just Very good)

So -- how many have you read? And where you you put them?

The Confessions of Max Tivoli

It wasn't so long ago that I was enthusing about Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage. I liked it so much that I sent off at once for this, his first novel. Once it arrived, though, I felt a bit hesitant to throw myself into it.  The story of a man who ages backwards?  How strange it sounded. But, like the best magic realism, which category I think this must fall into, once you accept the premise, the whole story becomes completely believable and extremely moving. Yes, Max is born with a "rare condition" -- his physical age is the exact reverse of his mental/real-time age. That is, he is born looking like a man of seventy, and as time passes the years gradually fall away. He knows, therefore, the exact year of his death -- 1941 -- which his parents have engraved on a locket so that he will never forget it, though by this time, of course, he will be physically a tiny, helpless baby. This fact must, of course, remain a terrible secret, something which Max's parents impress on him from an early age -- "Be what they think you are" is the Rule his mother imposes on him. How hard this is may be easily imagined. As a child, Max has no friends, until one day a chance meeting in a park brings him into contact with Hughie, a boy of his own age, who sees beyond the strange old man's body to the boy's mind behind it, and becomes Max's lifelong friend, one of the few people who know his secret. But it is when Max reaches adolescence that things become really difficult and painful. Aged 17, with the appearance of a man in his fifties, he falls in love with beautiful Alice Levy, who of course sees him as nothing but an aged neighbour. Worse, Alice's widowed mother develops a passion for him and he is drawn into an intensely sexual affair, all the time longing to be with the daughter rather than the mother. Things go badly wrong, and Alice disappears from his life, only to reappear again when Max has reached thirty-five -- the only time in his life when his real age and his body's age actually coincide. This time he succeeds in winning Alice, and they marry, though at once Max comes under strain, as he is unable to tell his secret to Alice and has to conceal from her the fact that he is getting younger all the time. The marriage eventually ends -- badly -- but Max is reunited with Alice towards the very end of his life, in circumstances both bizarre and painful though also bringing him much joy of a rather equivocal kind.

Set in the San Francisco of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the novel takes a tremendous historical sweep through the period, encompassing among other events the San Francisco earthquake and the First World War, and beautifully detailed in its depiction of the clothes, the houses, the neighbourhoods, the whorehouses. All that is great -- but what is really great is how beautifully this novel is written, how deeply it delves into the human mind, how much it has to say about love and about friendship. I believe Andrew Sean Greer is a really important writer and I'm excited to see what he does next.