Category: Humour

Murder and morality: The Forged Coupon, An Untouched House & Smoking Kills

3/7/2018

Three translations came my way recently, each of which considers crime in a moral context. The two novellas are the work of now deceased European authors while the short novel comes from a contemporary writer. While one is a comedy and the others deadly (pun intended) serious, they collectively address the causes and consequences of the ultimate crime. In one, it begins as an accident and becomes an addiction; in another, it’s endemic in the destructive forces released through war; in the third, it’s the end result in a chain of selfish actions. While one ends in pessimism and another brings hope and redemption, in a third, the narrator gets what he wants in an unexpected way. I’m not saying which is which, but listing my reviews in the order I read them. I wonder which you would prefer.

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Balancing the light and dark #amreading

31/5/2018

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A couple of years ago I blogged about the reasons I’d give up on a novel. Near the top of my list of eleven reasons, I wrote:

4. While I believe there’s room for a touch of humour in almost any topic, I don’t like comedic takes on tragic situations unless, like The First Bad Man, it’s really dark and over the top. Apparent denial of desperation and devastation can really freak me out.

3. Yet, much as I’m drawn to the dark side, I don’t want my reading to be totally bleak. There are ways of writing about trauma that allow for a sliver of light.

While these two points still hold for me as a reader, I’m not sure I can identify exactly where the balance lies for me between dark and light, either in relation to what I want from a novel or in how to find it.

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Genealogy: The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland & The One Who Wrote Destiny

5/4/2018

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When we find ourselves unmoored, we might be extra motivated to seek to consolidate our roots. That’s the slim connection between these two novels in which a woman confronting terrible loss decides to research her family tree. Both involve a story of migration: Jane Ashland’s ancestors moved from Norway to the USA; Neha’s in The One Who Wrote Destiny came from Kenya (and before that India) to the UK. For another novel about tracing the members of an extended family, see Kintu.

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Sequalling the classics: Dr Jekyll & Miss Blaine's Prefect

12/3/2018

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I’m not always drawn to sequels, but Dr Jekyll and Miss Blaine both caught my eye because they promised to be fun. The first needs no introduction; the second is a time travelling crime novel about a woman who loathes The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for giving her alma mater, the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, a bad name. Both feature mysterious deaths and, as an added bonus, the second namechecks Mr Hyde.

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Two novels about contemporary inequalities

26/12/2017

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Some moral questions to end the year and see us into the next! Is it okay for some to go hungry while others feast? Is it okay that the accident of where we are born, and to whom, determines our life chances? Does it matter that, with modernity and the march of capitalism, the gap between the haves and have nots is widening? Neither this tragicomedy set in Edinburgh nor this scattershot novel set in India have the answers, but they can entertain us while making us reflect on the issues.

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The Visitors by Catherine Burns #blogtour #giveaway

15/10/2017

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Middle-aged siblings, Marion and John Zetland, rattle around the crumbling Georgian townhouse that has been their home since childhood. Timid and childlike, Marion has never had a job, and her more educated brother hasn’t worked since being dismissed from his teaching post at a boarding school twenty years before. She spends her time with her large collection of cuddly toys, dozing in front of the TV and heating the tinned food on which they subsist. John occupies himself with making model aeroplanes and attending to the visitors in the cellar, an unpleasant part of life which Marion does her best to ignore. Who is she to judge whether it’s right or not? John has always known better than her and, as the reader discovers as the story unfolds, her parents, teachers and schoolmates were never any help in teaching her how to be a person.

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Two “novel” perspectives on tourism: Here Comes the Sun and The South in Winter

20/6/2017

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Each of these novels provides a behind-the-scenes perspective on tourism, the first raging at the inequalities, the second poking gentle humour at those who mediate between traveller and native. Having anticipated some of the themes in a recent 99-word story composed before I read either, both, while very different from each other, are definitely my kind of book.

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Ireland’s Subterfuge and Fury

10/5/2017

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Allow me to introduce you to two novels looking back on Ireland’s recent history through the eyes of a man whose life has been limited by secrets, subterfuge and hypocrisy.

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The absurdities of cheese and cake

7/5/2017

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Frans Laarmans, a lowly clerk at an Antwerp shipyard in the 1930s is offered, by a wealthy friend of his brother’s, the opportunity to establish himself as a cheese merchant, dealing in full fat Edam from Amsterdam. Despite his distaste for even the word cheese, and his lack of business acumen, he jumps at the challenge. Immediately, the worthies at his patron’s weekly salon treat him more respectfully although his wife, to whom he is somewhat condescending, queries terms of the densely written contract. But soon Frans is busy choosing a name for his company, installing a telephone, buying headed stationery and sourcing a suitable desk – anything, it seems, to avoid getting to grips with the mechanics of selling cheese.

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The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times by Xan Brooks

18/4/2017

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Officially speaking, these men do not exist. You could say that whatever goes on never actually happened. Whenever relations your youngster has with my chaps do not really exist. But if that’s the case then your conscience is clear.

Five years on from the end of the First World War and the flu pandemic that slaughtered many more, fourteen-year-old Londoner, Lucy Marsh, is taken on a summer Sunday afternoon, along with three other teenagers, deep into Epping Forest for a rendezvous with the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and Toto. There, something momentous happens, in a way that, in tune with uncensored fairytale traditions, is both matter-of-fact and magical, beautiful and horrific.

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A necessary nip of narcissism?

26/3/2017

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It had been a great night at the Polari salon in Nottingham, and the audience was waiting for the final performer to take the stage, when a woman bounded from the back of the room. Scowl framed by the hood of her black anorak, and ignoring the compere’s insistence that she wasn’t on the programme, Barbara Brownskirt barked out a series of poems from her numerous unpublished collections about, among other things, her unrequited love for Judi Dench. She was scary. She was hilarious. She was – and still is – the unsuccessful lesbian Poet-in-Residence at the 197 bus stop, Penge, and the brilliant creation of writer and performer Karen McLeod.

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Two novels about approaching the end

24/2/2017

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I’ve enjoyed these two novels about how we manage the end of life, the first through old age and the second through assisted dying. Mortality gets us all sooner or later; what better way to face it than with a novelist holding our hands?

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Satire for our times?

9/2/2017

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Is satire redundant when the World’s Most Powerful Narcissist tweets his outrage at the slightest scratch on his orange-tinged carapace, while She Who Should Be Humbled files for divorce from Europe in the full knowledge that this will leave her dependants economically and morally depleted, and literally humbles the Bejewelled Great-Grandmother by committing her to take her New Suitor for a spin in her horse-drawn carriage? Publication proceeding at a slower pace than populist politics, these two novels – the first set in a dystopian near-future and the second in 2013 – were conceived prior to the dystopia that was 2016 but can still evoke a shudder in these early days of 2017.

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What’s marriage, anyway? Wait For Me, Jack blog tour

20/1/2017

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Blinded by the sun as they walked slowly back to the car, they leaned towards each other. They felt wrong together, mismatched, a mistake taken too far. But from a short distance they looked like many couples did to outsiders – exclusive, close. From a greater distance, they looked like a single person.

Jack and Milly’s marriage is like the weather, with sun either too fierce or blocked by clouds. They inhabit a climate with myriad variations of hot and cold, seeming different from the inside than from outside, from morning or evening, when filtered through a prism of the promise of happiness or resignation to “for better or worse”.

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The Birdcage by Clive Aslet

22/10/2016

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Lieutenant Winnington-Smith is a promising artist and hopeless soldier who gets injured on his second day. Captain Southall is the commander of the Royal Flying Corps, Kite Balloon Section, who takes ‘Winner’ up in the sky to sketch the view. Elsie Fox is the fearless young working-class woman who drives an ambulance for the British Women’s Hospital and developed a soft spot for Winner on the boat out there. Isabel Hinchcliff is an upper-class nurse at the hospital, brought up with a heavily starched upper lip. Welcome to Salonika in the middle of the First World War, a multicultural playground and hotbed of spies in neutral Greece where those with the means can make believe carnage doesn’t lurk just over the horizon.

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The Vanishing Futurist by Charlotte Hobson

27/8/2016

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Mankind … was only a half-designed product that had taken shape by accident rather than through conscious choices. In many ways we were not so different from the millions who seek self-improvement today … hopeful that with self-awareness human beings are capable of living together in harmony.

In May 1914, “much against the advice of my parents” twenty-something Gerty Freely leaves her home in Cornwall to take up a post as governess to the younger children of Kobelev family in Moscow. She’s quickly beguiled by the lively, liberal and chaotic household comprising the family, their servants and former employees, and various hangers on, including fledging quantum physicist, Nikita Slavkin. When war breaks out in Europe, Gerty is happy to remain with her friends rather than return home.

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(The Taming of the) Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

21/8/2016

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I was once at a performance by the Royal Shakespeare Company which was aborted after the interval because the safety curtain had got stuck. My disappointment at missing the final acts was mitigated by the fact that the play being performed was The Taming of the Shrew: one of his more challenging plays for anyone with even the most watered-down feminist inclinations. So I was intrigued to discover that, as part of Hogarth Press’s Initiative to mark the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death, prolific novelist Anne Tyler, author of A Spool of Blue Thread, had been commissioned to come up with a twenty-first century rewrite.

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Death and the Seaside by Alison Moore

13/8/2016

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In her early twenties, after a gap year that turned into three, all spent under her parents’ roof, her mother had insisted that she go away to university, if she could still find one that would take her. And so she had gone to university, although it was not, as her father had pointed out, a proper university; it was not a good university. She majored in English, because it had always been her best subject and because she had managed to get a B at A level. It was also her native language.

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3 routes to a baby: New novels by Rebecca Ann Smith, Helen MacKinven & Pamela Erens

29/7/2016

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In between celebrating my book’s first birthday – and finding the clichéd book-as-baby metaphor more apt than ever – I’ve had the pleasure of reading three novels about the begetting of real human babies: a debut scientific thriller from England; a second gritty comedy from Scotland; a third novel in the literary genre from the USA. As if the authors have responded to a writing prompt to bring a novel angle to “having” a baby, there should be something for everyone in this selection. If you’d like to recommend any others, you can do so via the comments.

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Workington and Barrow: Small towns, great fiction?

15/5/2016

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What does the working-class child aspire to? In my case, I couldn’t dream of joining a middle-class profession I’d never heard of. Nor, even though I was addicted to writing from the start, did I believe that someone like me could become an author. Books never seemed to be based in the places with which I was familiar: they were set in boarding schools rather than comprehensives; in country houses rather than a small semi-detached; in cities rather than small industrial towns. So how could I resist a novel set in my birthplace, the small northern town from which my odd accent derives? As if that weren’t enough, I’m offered a novel set where my parents grew up, a similar down-at-heel out-of-the-way place where I had my first restaurant meal. Sixty miles separates these two towns, as well as some breath-taking countryside, as depicted in The Wolf Border, one of my favourite reads from last year. But Workington and Barrow don’t have the beauty of the Lake District. Thanks to Vintage Books and Legend Press, I had the chance to discover whether they could nevertheless shine on the page. I’d be interested in your thoughts on using real places as fictional settings.

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<<Previous

Murder and morality: The Forged Coupon, An Untouched House & Smoking Kills

Balancing the light and dark #amreading

Genealogy: The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland & The One Who Wrote Destiny

Sequalling the classics: Dr Jekyll & Miss Blaine's Prefect

Two novels about contemporary inequalities

The Visitors by Catherine Burns #blogtour #giveaway

Two “novel” perspectives on tourism: Here Comes the Sun and The South in Winter

Ireland’s Subterfuge and Fury

The absurdities of cheese and cake

The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times by Xan Brooks

A necessary nip of narcissism?

Two novels about approaching the end

Satire for our times?

What’s marriage, anyway? Wait For Me, Jack blog tour

The Birdcage by Clive Aslet

The Vanishing Futurist by Charlotte Hobson

(The Taming of the) Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

Death and the Seaside by Alison Moore

3 routes to a baby: New novels by Rebecca Ann Smith, Helen MacKinven & Pamela Erens

Workington and Barrow: Small towns, great fiction?

2018 Reading Challenge

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