Eyejaybee tries for 100 again

I am looking forward to taking the challenge again for 2016. last year I was quite fortunate in that my commuting arrangements gave me for time for reading than I had previously been accustomed to, so I was able to reach 100 with a bit of time to spare. I am not sure whether I will be quite so lucky again for 2016.

I suppose it might be a slightly retrograde step, but I thought I might offer up my summary of 2015.

My favourite 'new to me' fiction books of 2015 were:
1. Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
2. Last Night in Montreal by Emily St John Mandel
3. Sweet Caress by William Boyd
4. Even Dogs in the Wild by Ian Rankin
5. The Corrupted by G F Newman
6. A Lovely Way to Burn by Louise Welsh
7. The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins
8. Gorsky by Vera Goldsworthy
9. Paradise City by Elizabeth Day
10. Notting Hell by Rachel Johnson

My favourite non-fiction books of 2015:

1. Education, Education, Education by Andrew Adonis
2. 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear by James Shapiro
3. Meadowland by John Lewis-Stempel
4. The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson
5. My History by Antonia Fraser
6. Tolkien: Writer of the Century by Tom Shippey
7. The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski

My favourite re-reads during 2015:

1. Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (I was so impressed by this book that I re-read it within just a few months of my first encounter.)
2. John Macnab by John Buchan
3. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
4. The Deaths by Mark Lawson
5. The Return of John Macnab by Andrew Greig
6. The Human Factor by Graham Greene
7. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
8. A Good Man in Africa by William Boyd
9. Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood
10. And then There Were None by Agatha Christie

The books that I enjoyed least during 2015:

1. Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson
2. The Last Word by Hanif Kureishi
3. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
4. NYPD Red by James Patterson
5. The Girl Who Wasn’t There by Ferdinand von Schirach

Welcome back! I'm looking forward to following your reading again this year.

>1 Eyejaybee: Congrats on making it last year! :) I wish you the best in 2016, and Happy New Year!

Off the mark, though this was a book that I actually started last year.

1. Cop to Corpse by Peter Lovesey.

A return to mid-season form for Peter Lovesey following last year's weak offering "Stagestruck".

The novel opens with uniformed constable Harry Tasker being shot dead as he completes his city centre beat in the early hours of Sunday morning. There have already been two brutal, unprovoked murders of uniformed police officers in the area, so passions are riding high. Lovesey's no-nonsense detective, Superintendent Peter Diamond, who heads the local Manvers Street nick (the station at which PC Tasker was based) takes over the investigation, only to find himself fighting a turf war over jurisdiction with Chief Superintendent Jack Gull from the Regional Serial Crimes Unit.

Meanwhile the reader is allowed to read a blog posted by Ishtar, adopted pseudonym of a local woman who, along with her two best friends, uncover the apparently sinister behaviour of a man masquerading as a Mr John Smith who seems to be up to something involving regular clandestine flights to Amsterdam.

Lovesey weaves a tight and compelling plot and, as usual, takes the opportunity to impart much of his extensive local knowledge. Diamond is as brash as ever, though such is the extent of Gull's gung-ho approach that Diamond appears almost a paragon of sensitivity. He succeeds in maintaining high tension throughout the story, without having to resort to grotesque violence.

Looking forward to seeing your reading again!

2. Look CLoser by Racherl Amphlett.

The plot of Rachel Amphlett's political thriller fairly races along. Indeed, the reader is pitched straight into the action from the opening lines when Will Fletcher is delivered by taxi to the Accident and Emergency ward of St George's hospital. Amy, the journalist with whom Will lives has been rushed there, after having been shot while conducting an interview with Ian Rossiter, Leader of the Opposition.

Amy is in a coma and requires extensive surgery. Will is sent home to await further news, but on arrival at his flat he finds that it has been ransacked. And then he starts to receive mysterious and threatening phone calls … Someone is after information that Will doesn't even know he owns, and it quickly becomes clear that they mean business.

The general trend for political thrillers in recent years has been to favour verisimilitude over excitement. This novel veers the other way, and the story focuses on the chase rather than an inexorably constructed political scenario. It is no less successful for all that, though, and proves very entertaining. Perhaps closer to Dick Francis than John le Carre, but certainly enjoyable.

3. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

It is difficult to view a book as famous as Frankenstein other than through the prism of its cinematic legacy. The images conjured simply by mention of that name are almost inescapable. That is a shame because it is a marvellous book that has been poorly served by most of the screen adaptations it has spawned.

Not least among the many amazing aspects of the book is the fact that Mary Shelley was just eighteen when she started to write it. Her prose has an assurance and cadence of a master rather than a mere neophyte.

Frankenstein appeared very early on in the history of the novel as a prominent literary form, and it displays many traits that were common in the early nineteenth century. The first few chapters take the form of letters from Robert Walton, an English traveller who is not without his own psychological baggage, to his sister. These detail his attempts to hire a crew in the wilds of Northern Russia with a view to sailing in search of the North Pole. Having penetrated far into the pack ice of the Arctic Circle Walton encounters a wild, dishevelled man who has an amazing tale to tell. This is, of course, Victor Frankenstein. The tale is indeed disturbing but engrossing.

On screen, one of the key scenes is that in which Frankenstein's creation finally comes to life (usually with the help of a stereotypically contorted servant by the name of Igor), after lengthy scenes in which Frankenstein trawled through graveyards looking for suitable parts. In the book, this scene is condensed into a handful of paragraphs, without any lurid descriptions or prurient indulgence. Construction of the creature has been an academic quest, an exercise in scientific endeavour, conducted in a private laboratory rather than the gothic attics that so frequently occur in films. Even the moment at which the creature comes to life is described with delicious understatement. 'It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.'

Frankenstein's joy in his success is short lived, turning immediately to despair and self-loathing, fleeing from the sight of his awful creation. The remainder of the book is a beautifully woven tale of despair and tragedy, that remains remarkably fresh and accessible.

4. Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje.

I found this book a bit of a struggle. Set in Storyville, the red light district of New Orleans at the start of the twentieth century, it promised a lot but failed to deliver.

The novella tells the story of Buddy Bolden, accomplished cornet player by night, though by day he supported himself working in a barbershop. Recognised as a gifted musician, Bolden has plenty of demons to deal with and is subsiding into alcoholism alongside a gambling addiction. Hitherto devoted to Nora, his wife, he suddenly also finds himself madly in love with Robin, wife of his fellow musician Jaileen Brewitt. The emotional intensity of his situation grows too much for Bolden and he disappears, leaving his friends and family to try to pick up the pieces and discover where he has gone.

I have enjoyed some of Ondaatje's other books, and particularly 'The Cat's Table' though I also remember finding 'The English Patient (both the book and the film) unnecessary drawn out, even to the extent of thinking "Please just die!". Reading this book was not, however, an enjoyable experience. The story was disjointed and the characters extremely remote: I don't need to feel great affection for characters in order to enjoy a book, but I do normally need to feel some interest in their fates. I couldn't summon the strength of spirit to feel anythi9ng at all for any of the figures in this book, and was merely conscious of a ggreat sense of relief when I finally finished it.

5. Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz.

Sherlock Holmes is one of the most enduring of fictional characters. Thousands of visitors flock each year to see his London address (even though 221b Baker Street has now been subsumed into the headquarters of a major high street bank), and more films have been made about him than any other single character. Many writers have tried to reincarnate the masterful detective and recreate the Conan Doyle's style, some more capably than others, but none have caught the Holmes zeitgeist as deftly as Anthony Horowitz.

Horowitz is, of course, an accomplished writer of long standing having written novels, screenplays (he created both the Foyle's War and Midsomer Murders television series) and his books for children including the highly successful Alex Rider sequence. His most recent previous novel, The House of Silk, was commissioned by the Conan Doyle Estate, the first time that it had endorsed another writer to add to the Holmes canon. That book was a great success, receiving critical acclaim and securing high sales.

Moriarty puts a slightly different twist on things, and is set in the immediate aftermath of the fight at the Reichenbach Falls. The story is narrated by Frederick Chase, an American investigator from Pinkerton's Agency (which would eventually evolve into the FBI) who has travelled to the small Swiss town of Meiringen, near to the famous Reichenbach Falls. There he is met by Inspector Athelney Jones (one of the Scotland Yard inspectors with whom Holmes had collaborated in some of his earlier adventures) where they attempt to identify a body that has been pulled from the river. On the basis of their inspection they agree that this is probably the corpse of Moriarty.

Chase goes on to explain that Pinkerton's Agency has been investigating the rise of Clarence Devereux, an American gangster who has become the kingpin of a huge criminal network extending all throughout the States. Pinkerton's believe that he had been in negotiations with Moriarty with a view to establishing a transatlantic criminal empire. Chase and Jones agree to work together to try to discover how far those plans had progressed, and return to London.

Horowitz mimics Conan Doyle's style very closely - I haven't read anything else that comes so close to the tone, pace and style of the original Sherlock Holmes stories. He even has the same ability to conjure London locations.

Athelney Jones had been disturbed by his pervious encounters with Holmes, and had sworn to learn from the great detective's methodology. He has certainly come a long way, and demonstrates his own 'cold reading' skills to Chase at every opportunity. He has also developed some of Holmes's disdain for the lack of insight of several of the Scotland Yard detectives. There is one particularly poignant scene in which Chase and Jones meet Lestrade and a couple of the other detectives whom Holmes had, inadvertently, humiliated in the past, and they all trade memories of the great man. There are also several resonances to some of the original stories such as 'The Red-Headed League' and 'The Hound of the Baskervilles'.

This is an enthralling novel in its own right, and a worthy homage to the Sherlock Holmes collection.

I must admit that I liked ( and enjoyed it) the book until the ending! I thought that it was a "easy way out"-what do you think

It certainly took me by surprise, and it left a few loose ends (though that is not necessarily a bad thing).

Have you read Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story? That put another intriguing twist on the events leading up to, and including, the confrontation at the Reichenbach Falls.

No, I will put the book on my wish list!

6. Number 11 by Jonathan Coe

After a very promising start, this proved to be one of those annoying books that completely sold me the dummy. I think it would be fair so say that the first ninety per cent was very enjoyable, but when I embarked upon the last thirty pages or so, my estimation of it plummeted. I can't remember a similar such onset of late but intense disappointment since I read Audrey Niffenegger's 'Her Fearful Symmetry'.

The good parts were very good, comprising a state of the nation novel (even including a character whose work nickname is 'Nate of the Station), embracing some hilarious episodes mingled with tragic back stories and chilling observations about the fragmentation of society. There are strong resonances with Coe's earlier novel 'What A carve Up' which many see as his masterpiece. Unfortunately this book did not live up to the promise of its forerunner (though, to be honest, I found the conclusion of that earlier book disappointing too, and felt that it detracted from an otherwise excellent novel).

7. Shire Hell by Rachel Johnson.

In her previous book Rachel Johnson offered a very entertaining account of life in one of the communal garden squares of Notting Hill, where conspicuous expenditure had become virtually a competitive sport, and keeping up with the neighbours dominated every thought. The novel focused on Mimi Fleming and Clare Sturgis, next door neighbours and close friends, ad their different experiences of life in the square.

In 'Shire Hell' Mimi and her family have moved to West Dorset, and are struggling to adapt to a very different , and only slightly less competitive lifestyle. We are given alternating narratives from Mimi and her new friend, Rose, who had also moved down to Dorset a few years earlier. Rose is married to Pierre, an indolent and slovenly husband, who purports to be an artist but hasn't sold any work for years. Perpetually peeved that she has to d support the family almost single-handed, Rose diverts herself with a series of flings with an assortment of different men, and has cultivated a reputation in the village as a 'fallen woman'.

The alternating narrative format works well. Mimi's and Rose's different perspectives lend a verisimilitude to the episodes they recount, and Johnson's sharp observation is at work throughout. While there is very little action, Johnson details a series of social set pieces, including a formal evening dinner, a fortieth birthday lunch, a village fete and a visit to a local eco-village inhabited by environmentalists, before the novel ends with a wedding that cuts across the classes. Each of these events is described with meticulous detail, and is marked by a startling revelation - some very humorous, others quite tragic.

While this lacked the originality of 'Notting Hell' it was entertaining, strewn with pen pictures that were as delicious as they were vicious.

8. The Zig-Zag Girl by Elly Griffiths.

Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens is not a conventional policeman. During the Second world War he had been in the army, and then transferred into the Secret Service where he had formed part of a group known as 'The Magic Men', whose role had been to explore different means of fooling the Germans. Now, in the early 1950s, he is in CID based at Brighton. It is in that capacity that he attends the scene of a gruesome murder in which a young woman has been cut into three sections. Her hed and legs are found in two separate black chests. Beguilingly, only the upper and lowest parts are there. The midriff is delivered to the police station a couple of days later, addressed specifically to Stephens, though quoting his former military rank rather than his police title.

Meanwhile, another former member of 'The Magic Men' is also in Brighton. This is Maximillian Massingham, known professionally as Max Mephisto, one of the leading stage conjurers of the day, and he is top of the bill in one of Brighton's theatres. Recognising the black chests as similar to those used by conjurers, Stephens makes use of this coincidence to seek Max's advice about the murder. They renew their friendship and start investigating the crime together.

This may all sound like fairly ordinary fare for crime investigations, but Elly Griffiths delivers her story with style, and holds the tension admirably. The period descriptions of post-war yet still austerity-bound Brighton give a suitably grim backdrop to the story, and the vignettes of music hall life are entertaining. I see that there are furthr novels in this series, and I shall certainly look forward to them.

9. Jeeves in the Offing by P. G. Wodehouse.

Another foray into the wonderful world of Wodehouse!

This is not, perhaps, the finest of the Jeeves and Wooster novels, but that still leaves plenty of scope for it to be very good. Many of the old favourites are present, including Aunt Dahlia and Roderick Glossop, and we finally get to meet Aubrey Upjohn, former headmaster of Bertie's preparatory school. Connoisseurs of the Wodehouse oeuvre will be pleased to know that the story even features a cow creamer, and Augustus the cat makes a couple of appearances.

The characters are as wonderfully crazy and unreal as ever and the plot has all the customary convolutions, though (as always) Wodehouse resolves all the numerous threads of the story line.

In this outing the story revolves around the complicated course of true love for Roberta "Bobbie" Wickham (one of the seemingly endless stream of gorgeous women to whom Bertie Wooster had at one time been engaged) and Reginald "Kipper" Herring (lifelong friend of Bertie and one of his fellow inmates all those years ago at Aubrey Upjohn's school).

Beautifully written, and faultlessly plotted, this book was as enjoyable now as when I first read it more than thrity five years ago.

>17 Eyejaybee:. Just reading the review makes me smile. I do enjoy Jeeves & Wooster. Maybe a read in order project is in the offing. hmmm.

>18 Helenliz: That sounds like an excellent idea!

There are several of them that I have read and re-read numerous times (Right Ho, Jeeves and The Code of the Woosters are perhaps my particular favourites), and they never fail to cheer me up.

10. Trigger Mortis by Anthony Horowitz.

Over the last few years, the estate of Ian Fleming has commissioned various contemporary writers, including such luminaries as William Boyd and Sebastian Faulks, to produce new novels featuring James Bond. To be honest, I thought that Sebastian Faulks's offering, 'The Devil May Care', was rather disappointing, though perhaps that is merely a reflection that he copied Fleming's style too closely. The original Bond books have not aged well, and the oeuvre was in need of some remedial treatment. William Boyd's contribution, 'Solo', was a far better attempt, capturing more of the feel of Fleming's originals, though served up with Boyd's customary elegance of phrase.

Anthony Horowitz is the most recent novelist commissioned to add to the Bond canon, and it seems like an inspired choice. Fresh from similar duty on behalf of the Conan Doyle estate, for whom he has written two new stories to extend the Sherlock Holmes collection ('The House of Silk' and 'Moriarty'), he has produced an excellent James Bond story, easily as entertaining as any of Fleming's own novels.

This story is set in 1957, shortly after the conclusion of the events recounted in 'Goldfinger', and Bond has just returned to London, accompanied by sometime renegade Pussy Galore, who is currently living in his Mayfair flat. Summoned to headquarters to be briefed by M, Bond learns that SMERSH, the sinister Soviet espionage agency, is targeting a leading British racing driver with a view to promoting the achievements of their own new car design. Bond is asked to undertake an intensive training regime, and then to participate at a forthcoming race at the Nurburgring, where he is to protect the British driver, even if it means deliberately crashing into Dimitrov, the Soviet driver.

While engaged in this scheme, he encounters the mysterious Jeopardy Lane, who purports to be a journalist covering Grand Prix racing. Bond also espies the head of SMERSH on a rare jaunt outside the Soviet Union, and notices that he is in close conference with a Korean-American business tycoon. His curiosity pricked, Bond goes off at a tangent that catapults him into the midst of a far-reaching and particularly sinister plot. Unlike the grotesqueries to which we have become accustomed from the Bond films, this is not about a tycoon seeking personal world domination, but it does push the Cold war to the outer limits, at a time when the super-powers were engaged in a bitter race to conquer space.

This may all sound rather too far-fetched, but Horowitz has the knack of persuading the reader to suspend disbelief entirely (far more so than Fleming ever managed, in my opinion). I found myself sucked into the book immediately and was gripped by it throughout.

11. A Buzz In The Meadow by Dave Goulson.*

Dave Goulson's previous book, 'A Sting In The Tale' was a marvellous introduction to the life of the bumble bee, and proved to be an immensely informative, yet also highly entertaining book. Undaunted by the potential difficulty of following such a great book, Goulson has produced a successor that is equally engaging, addressing a wider range of issues, though still focusing on the insect world.

A few years ago Goulson bought a run down farm in France, with thirty odd acres of meadowland. Leaving this meadow to its own devices, Goulson has been able to observe how local wildlife, ranging across all levels of the food chain, has reclaimed the land. The various new creatures that he discovers prompt detailed apostrophes on different aspects of the insect world, with amusing recollections from his time as a student.

One of the many charms of this book is the insight into his research methods, and his conmstant willingness to innovate. There is a serious message in the book, and his concerns about the implications for world harvests of the overuse of neonicotinoids, and the threat that they pose to natural pollinators are clear. He doesn't allow this message to become oppressive, though. He makes his point, and illustrates it with examples from around the world, and then moves on.

His love of the study of natural science, and his sheer joy at observing the miracles of insect life, shine through the book, and are aptly underlined by his self-deprecating humour. He has that happy knack of being able to convey complex ideas in a clear, and indeed humorous, way.

12. Hand of God by Philip Kerr.

Scott Manson, acting manager of Premier League football club, London City, is back, following his appearance in Kerr's previous novel, 'January Window', in which he investigated the murder of his predecessor in that role.

In this return fixture, Manson's team find themselves playing in Greece against Olympiacos, battling to qualify for the riches offered by the European Champions' League. Kerr is probably best known for his series of novels featuring German private eye Bernie Gunther, set before, during and after the Second World War. Those books have received considerable critical acclaim, not least because of Kerr's attention to detail. Those close observational skills are present here, too, despite the vastly different context.

London City's visit to Athens is not a happy one. Even before they fly out to Greece, the team is brought down a peg or two following defeat in its first fixture in the Premiership by newly promoted Leicester City. If the book were just being published now, there would be nothing odd about that, as Leicester currently sit on top of the Premier League, though such an eventuality would have seemed utterly implausible a year ago when the book came out. {Sorry about that, but as a Leicester fan, who is still waiting for the bubble to burst, I couldn't resist emphasising that aspect!}

Right from arrival in Athens the team finds itself plagued with misfortune. There are tensions, both racial and religious. Within the team, and the players are met with waves of resentment from the fanatical Olympiacos fans. Kerr is sensitive to prevailing context here, and on the plane Manson lectures his players about the likely response of the austerity-ridden Greeks to any of the conspicuous expenditure so often associated with Premier League footballers. All that fades into relative insignificance, however, when London City's star striker suffers what appears to be a heart attack in the opening minutes of the game. This sparks a series of events that result in the whole team being detained in Athens, unable to return to London before various investigations can be completed, though these are hampered by the plethora of strikes and industrial action being taken by different elements of the Greek authorities.

Kerr has clearly done his research (I understand that he is an avid Arsenal fan), and he offers lots of observations about the game, both in England and in Greece. He also uses the opportunity to launch a few barbs at FIFA and UEFA, the worldwide and European administrative bodies, whose ludicrous attempts to whitewash the endemic corruption certainly merit any ridicule that might be launched at them.

This was faced paced and gripping, though I found it lacked the engagement of 'January Window' - part of the appeal of that book had been the fact that it was the first decent thriller set in the world of football that I had read. Now some of the novelty has gone.

13. The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes.

Julian Barnes has had an illustrious writing career. His early novels such as 'Metroland'' gave notice of a talent beyond the normal, and his Booker-nominated 'Flaubert's Parrot' showed the scope of his imagination and his capacity to blend beguiling fiction with a strong factual basis. His talent has not been restricted simply to fiction, and he has enjoyed considerable success, both in Britain and in France, as an essayist, In 2011 he won the Booker Prize with 'The Sense of An Ending'. I was, therefore, looking forward to reading this novel but, as soon often seems to happen with books that I have been eagerly awaiting, in the event I found it slightly disappointing.

The Noise of Time' focuses on some of the key events in the life of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and in particular his tempestuous relationship with the Soviet regime. As the book opens, he is waiting in his apartment building in 1936, expecting to be arrested and taken to face interrogation at 'The Big House'. This is following an unexpectedly acrimonious response to the premiere of one of his works, not least because of a slightly farcical performance which was itself caused by the orchestra's unease at the presence of Stalin and many other senior members of the regime.

Expecting that he will never return home, Shostakovich tries to prepare for the imminent grilling, and reflects on the unexpected course his life had followed up to that time. For various reasons, not all of which are made clear to him, or indeed to us, that grilling never happens. This does not, however, mean that he is free of future concern, and while his position within Soviet society is gradually rehabilitated, he recognises that it will only be a matter of time before he inadvertently transgresses the invisible demarcation lines again.

The novel showcases Barnes's lovely prose, though I did find the staccato delivery of mini-chapters, seldom in chronological order, detracted from, rather than added to, the cohesion of the story. The vignettes of Prokofiev and Stravinsky were very entertaining, and the overall impact of the book was informative, but somehow, and unusually for Julian Barnes, especially given the potentially fascinating subject matter, the story never quite ignited.

14. Black and Blue by Ian Rankin.

At the time of its release Ian Rankin declared that this was the finest Scottish crime novel yet published. This might seem rather a brash statement for someone normally so self-deprecating as Rankin, though perhaps he was right. Of course, it depends upon what one considers as a Scottish crime novel. There had certainly previously been some fine crime novels and stories by Scots writers (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Val McDermid are just two that leap immediately to mind), though perhaps fewer actually set in Scotland.

Rankin has subsequently written Scottish crime novels that are even better than 'Black and Blue', though it certainly marked him moving up to a new level. There had already been a few novels in the Rebus series, and some of them had been very strong performances, but this one showed a greater assurance and depth.

Rebus had always been aware of the Edinburgh's dark history, but in 'Black and Blue' the undercurrents are drawn from further afield. As the novel opens, there is a major investigation across all Scotland's police forces (this was written long before the rationalisation of the different police services into one body, Police Scotland) into a series of killings of young women by an unknown assailant dubbed 'Johnny Bible' by the tabloid press. This is a reference to the real spate of unsolved killings of young women in Glasgow in the late 1960s by a murderer who became known as 'Bible John'. One of Johnny Bible's victims had been killed in Glasgow, the second in Edinburgh, and the latest in Aberdeen

Rebus remembered the Bible John killings which coincided with the end of his school days and his joining the army, and felt that somehow they had soured his memories of the late Sixties. As the new investigation into the apparent copycat killings widens, he has been doing his own research, scouring newspapers from the time, and concocting his own theories. This is principally a consequence of his own obsession with unsolved crimes. It is, however, also a means of distraction from growing public outrage about the death of a prisoner who had committed suicide. The prisoner had always maintained that he was innocent of the crime for which he had been convicted and that he had been framed by the police. Rebus had been involved in that investigation, very early in his career in CID, and he is now being plagued by television journalists who are preparing a documentary about the dead prisoner's claims.

Rebus is, however, drawn into an investigation of his own when the body of a man on leave from his job on a North Sea oil rig is found in a run down Edinburgh estate. Certain characteristics of the death lead Rebus to a hitman, formerly employed by one of Glasgow's leading gangland figures. Other associations lead Rebus to Aberdeen, where he finds himself in the fringes of the investigation of the latest Johnny Bible killing.

There are several interlaced themes throughout the novel, and Rankin manages them dextrously. Weaving real crimes into a novel can be dangerous, particularly when friends and relatives of the victims might still be alive, but Rankin handles it with great sensitivity. Rebus is at his best here, with his own demons and frailties tested as never before. This novel marked Rankin hitting mid-season form, and pitched him right into the front rank of British crime writing, where he has stayed ever since.

15. The Night Manager by John le Carre.

When the Berlin Wall came down, and the Cold War ended, many people speculated what the future would hold in store for writers of spy fiction. John le Carre had established himself at the forefront of that genre, and critics waited with considerable interest to see how he would react to the changed times, and the virtual removal of his literary context.

'The Night Manager' was his first novel to be published in the post Cold War era, and it demonstrated that he wasn't particularly worried about adapting to a new agenda. The book bears all the hallmarks of his previous works: that extraordinary prose style that no-one has ever managed to emulate but which seems to flow so naturally and effortlessly for him, the air of despair encompassing his leading characters and a close attention to detail that always lends his novels such a depth of verisimilitude.

The protagonist, the night manager himself, is Jonathan Pine, a former soldier with more than customary amounts of career and family baggage, who has ended up working at a luxurious hotel in Zurich where he presides over the night shift. His attention is caught when Richard Roper, an immensely wealthy international tycoon, descends upon the hotel with his considerable retinue at short notice in the middle of a protracted blizzard. Pine has encountered Roper before and has a grudge to resolve. As the novel unfolds as Pine embarks on an espionage mission to expose Roper's dubious operations, going under deep cover, with professional assistance.

While not quite up to le Carre at his best, such as in 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy', this remains a very effective novel, cleverly plotted and delicately layered.

I love le Carre novels. Are you planning on watching the miniseries?

Yes. In fact, it was as a consequence of seeing a trailer for it on television that I decided to re-read it. It had certainly stood the test of time.

I am always a it nervous about television adaptations of novels that I like - I have been disappointed by so many in the past.

Hugh Laurie is pretty great though. Hopefully the adaption will not be disappointing.

16. Thank You, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse.

This was the first full length novel featuring Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, whose adventures had already secured widespread popularity through several short stories, and it shows Wodehouse on fine form.

As the novel opens, Bertie is obsessed with a banjolele that he has recently purchased, and which he is playing at every opportunity. As might be expected, this has not been well received by those forced to listen, and his neighbours in the apartment block they share have not been reticent in expressing their displeasure. Following an ultimatum from the building's manger either to cease playing the instrument, or find alternative accommodation, Bertie, as a self-professed man of iron will, decides to move on. However, when he recounts this decision to Jeeves, adding that he will, instead, take a small cottage in the country, Jeeves drops his own bombshell, announcing that he would not be able to cope with the impact of Bertie's playing of the banjolele in the confines of a small cottage, and that he must, therefore, tender his resignation. After that, things become really complicated!

As always with Wodehouse, this is beautifully written, flawlessly plotted and deliciously removed from any semblance of reality. It might not quite match up to the absolute classics in the Jeeves and Wooster series, such as 'Right Ho, Jeeves', 'The Code of ther Woosters' and 'Joy in the Morning', but it comes very close!

17. Paper Money by Ken Follett.

Although he has been immensely successful, I always have struggled with Ken Follett. I do remember having enjoyed 'The Key to Rebecca', though that was thirty-five years ago while I was still at school. Since then the few of his novels that I have tried to read I found utterly impenetrable. Indeed, I would not ordinarily have even considered reading this if I had not found it on offer at an absurdly low price while I was in an uncharacteristically amenable mood on holiday. Being short of books on my trip, this reprint of one of his earliest novels (originally published under his pseudonym Zachary Stone) was a faute de mieux option at Inverness Station.

It was, in fact, better than I had expected. The plot is sound, cleverly linking three complex threads, though the characters struggle even to seem two dimensional. In the rather pompous foreword, Follett remarks that he has always had a tendency to 'underwrite' his books, and that this trait was especially evident in this book. I would question that judgement. While the characterisation is certainly stilted, I felt that the story was hampered by an over-ponderous narration, with no cliché knowingly avoided.

To be fair, it probably offered decent value in return for the measly two pounds that I paid for it, but it hasn't made me want to attempt any of his later books, even if they are more polished and better crafted.

18. Call For the Dead by John le Carre.

This was le Carré's first published novel and also marks the debut of George Smiley. Even in this book, published in 1961, Smiley is already world weary, and tarnished, bowed down by the pressures of the world of spies and counter-espionage manoeuvres, at a time before both the public unmasking of Kim Philby as the 'Third Man' and the raising of the Berlin Wall.

Many of the traits that would become so evident in the later works, and in particular the three novels forming the 'Quest for Karla' trilogy (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy'', 'The Honourable Schoolboy' and 'Smiley's People'), are already visible: the close attention to detail, the air of unrelenting melancholia and the sense that Smiley is largely at the mercy of the whim of others (including his errant wife Ann). Also present is the irremediable shabbiness of the spy's art. Hitherto, perhaps with the exception of Graham Greene's books, spy novels (with Ian Fleming's Bond stories leading the pack) had fizzed with excitement, played out in glamorous locations, with the protagonists weighed down ultra hi-tech gadgets. This book changed the nature of the spy novel, and henceforth serious authors of spy fiction would site their stories in le Carré's world.

The novel opens with Smiley being summoned to see 'The Advisor',(the head of the Counter Intelligence Service) where he learns that Samuel Fennan, a senior civil servant at the Foreign and Commonwealth office, has killed himself as a consequence of allegations of treachery levelled against him. Devastating enough in itself, this drastic outcome looms even more significantly because Smiley had interviewed Fennan the previous day about those allegations, and had informally advised him that he was in the clear and that no further action would be taken. Smiley is dispatched down to Fennan's home in Surrey to interview his widow, and to try, as subtly as possible, to establish exactly what had happened.

I first read this book more than thirty years ago, by which time le Carré was already established as a master of the art. I remember enjoying it that first time, and re-reading it now it still retained its tension, and early traces of le Carré's unique prose style are already evident.

19. Jeremy Hutchinson's Case Histories by Thomas Grant.*

What a gem of a book!

Jeremy Hutchinson will turn 101 next month and has enjoyed a particularly rich and eventful life. He qualified for the Bar in 1939 though his legal career was put on hold while he served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. Returning from service he stood as the Labour Parliamentary Candidate for the Westminster constituency in 1946 (and actually canvassed No. 10 Downing Street where, having been advised that Winston Churchill was away, he delivered his electoral pitch to the domestic and official staff). He was also married to theatrical legend, Dame Peggy Ashcroft.

Having failed to secure the seat he set about establishing himself as one of the most capable barristers of his generation. He would go on to participate in several of the most significant court cases of the latter half of the twentieth century, representing clients as diverse as Soviet spies George Blake and John Vassall, Christine Keeler, Penguin Books (in the celebrated case attending the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover), The Daily Telegraph and celebrity cannabis smuggler Howard Marks.

Thomas Grant weaves the accounts of the trials together deftly, and the contextual précis he offers for each case combine to give an entertaining and enlightening social history of Britain during the 1960s through to the early 1980s. Jeremy, later Lord, Hutchinson shines through as a beacon of integrity, as happy upsetting the establishment under the Labour Governments of Wilson and Callaghan as when he was challenging iniquities emanating from Margaret Thatcher's administration.

The cases are grouped together thematically, rather than in chronological order, presenting an insight into the changing social mores. Grant is himself an accomplished barrister, and his recapitulation of the cases is clear, crisp and engaging, immediately accessible and appreciated even by a legal ignoramus such as myself.

20. The Rose of Tibet by Lionel Davidson.

One of the symptoms of madness is the repeated performance of the same action with an expectation of a different outcome. I am, therefore, slightly worried about my own sanity. A few months ago, having been sold the dummy by fervent encomia from a number of writers whose works I have enjoyed, I succumbed to the grievous error of buying Lionel Davidson's Kolymsky Heights, which proved to be one of the most fatuous and irritating novels I had read in a long time.

I had promised myself that I would not make that mistake again, so, when I saw Davidson's The Rose of Tibet being lauded by Anthony Horowitz I should have known better. I had, however, just read two books by Horowitz that I had greatly enjoyed, so I foolishly succumbed and decided that the Kolymsky Heights debacle might have been an unrepresentative blot on Davidson's literary escutcheon.

Sadly not. I estimate that I have read about five thousand books so far, and I am struggling to recall one that was more irritating, fatuous and worthless than this one. I can't definitively say that I haven't read a worse book, but if I have, then some protective streak in my consciousness has erased it from my memory.

The Jeremy Hutchinson books sounds interesting. And I must re-read Frankenstein.

21. Bleak House by Charles Dickens.

This is a massive novel in every sense. In the Penguin Classics edition it weighs in at 980 pages of small print, and that excludes the extensive notes, preface and introduction. Carrying that around in my greatcoat pocket I have found myself tending to walk in circles. It is, however, surprisingly readable, and contains many themes that seem entirely contemporary to us.

The themes, layering and interlacing of plots and the cast of characters are also offered on a grand scale, and the overall impact in mesmerising, yet surprisingly readable and engaging. It is difficult in a short review even to attempt to summarise the plots. Suffice it to say that they are all expertly managed and resolved.

Looming over the whole novel is the long-running civil law case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce, which has been progressing at glacial pace through Chancery. ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce’ has now become a byword for legal obfuscation (or ‘wiglomeration’ to use Dickens’s own term). Even in the novel itself, the case, originating decades earlier from disputes over the distribution of a complex estate under instructions contained in conflicting wills, the case had already become infamous, and those connected with it were imbued with a certain dusty glamour.

There are some marvellous set pieces that show Dickens at his characteristic best. The opening paragraphs contain with a glorious description of an impenetrable fog surrounding (and emanating from) the Inns of Court that presages the confusion and opacity that the claimants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and indeed any other cases that come before Chancery, will encounter.
It is, however, not just a splenetic satire on the iniquities and perfidies of the legal system. Social injustice is held to account throughout the novel, with some heart-rending scenes depicting the life of some of London’s poorest inhabitants, many of whom live in stark juxtaposition with some of the wealthiest members of society. There is plenty of humour too, with Dickens’s portrayal of Mrs Jellyby, an undoubtedly well-meaning woman whose obsession with bringing relief to the poorer tribes of Africa leaves her utterly blinded to the neglect faced by her own children, and the desperately ambitious Mr Guppy for whom what he lacks in self-awareness is more than compensated by good, old fashioned solipsistic vanity. There is also a murder mystery following the death by shooting of Mr Tulkinghorn, a sinister senior lawyer who has fingers in a multitude of pies, and whose passing is mourned by few beyond Sir Leicester Dedlock, one of his wealthiest clients.

The main story is, however, concerned with the progress through life of Esther Summerson, who narrates much of the book. Esther is, as Jane Austen might have said, ‘the natural daughter of somebody’, and finds herself taken under the aegis of John Jarndyce to act as companion for his cousin, Ada Clare. Ada, along with her cousin Richard Carstone, is one of the wards of court around whom the interests in Jarndyce and Jarndyce circle. Unacquainted before the novel opens, they are both assigned by the court to the protection of John Jarndyce, who lives in Bleak House, and, almost predictably, fall in love with each other. John Jarndyce, who will emerge as possibly the most benevolent and generous character in English literature, counsels them to try and embrace life without considering what might eventually come their way as their respective legacy from the ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce’ case. Ada is happy to follow that advice though Richard, like a prospector who has fleetingly spied a sparkle in his pan, cannot escape from dreaming of how he might enjoy his legacy, and allows his mind to be twisted by greed and hope. Esther, meanwhile, has her own story, that is no less beguiling and engrossing for the reader.

Great review. Bleak House is absolutely my favorite Dickens novel.

Yes, great review, Ian. I read and hugely enjoyed this late last year.

22. Crack Down by Val McDermid.

Kate Brannigan is back, and this time it's personal!

This was the third outing for Kate Brannigan who works as a private detective, and is junior partner in the firm of Mortensen and Brannigan, specialising in investigating 'white collar crime' in the Greater Manchester area in the 1990s. The novel opens with Kate and her boyfriend Richard posing as a married couple seeking to buy a smart new sports car in a bid to uncover an internal scam being run by the network of dealerships. Everything seems to be going smoothly, and they collect the car a couple of days later. That is where things start to go wrong.

Although they are supposed to return the car, Richard, a rock journalist, decides to drive it to a concert he has to report on. Almost predictably, the car is stolen outside the venue. However, a couple of nights later, attending another gig in a different part of Manchester, Richard spots the car parked up, and, still having the keys with him, he decides to repossess it. He is stopped by traffic police a few minutes later, and as they find a package containing two kilos of crack in the boot, he is arrested and the police want to throw away the key. Brannigan is left to try to discover the truth.

Like the other Kate Brannigan books, this is a gripping and cleverly constructed story. Kate Brannigan is a very engaging, empathetic and plausible character and narrates with a wry humour. The action is fast-paced, with Kate mixing with a variety of characters from the seamier side of life. Val McDermid's later novels became known for their goriness, with victims suffering acts of macabre violence. Those books, including the series featuring Carol Jordan and Tony Hill proved very successful, and the violence never seemed gratuitous. The Kate Brannigan novels, however, don't go down that route. There are certainly some extremely unwholesome characters, but their crimes remain relatively conventional. A very entertaining and well-weriiten story.

23. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante.

Before I read it I wasn’t sure what I would make of this book. There has been so much attention in the media to the Neapolitan Series, of which this is the first volume, not least because no-one seems to know who the author is. I did also wonder whether it might be a book that would be of greater interest to women readers than men.

I was, however, captivated right from the start. The novel is, essentially, a fictional memoir of a childhood and adolescence spent in a poor suburb of Naples during the 1950s. Elena Greco’s father works as a porter in City Hall, while her mother, like all the married women in the area, is a beleaguered housewife. Elena is initially rather frightened of Raffaella (known as ‘Lila’), the slightly older daughter of her neighbours, but conquers her fear and they become close friends. Lila is very bright and capable, but even more headstrong, and does not react favourably to discipline.

As the girls make their way through primary school it becomes evident that the two of them are considerably brighter than their peers. It also becomes apparent that Lila is an accomplished autodidact, having basically taught herself to read, and then taught herself Italian (as opposed to the local dialect which everyone in the neighbourhood speaks). Lila’s abilities inspire Elena who applies herself equally avidly, and they both come to excel in their classes.

Both girls come from poor families, and there is opposition in both homes when the girls’ teacher suggests that they should be encouraged to stay on at school beyond eleven, when many of their peers ceased formal education. Elena’s family resists but is persuaded by the teacher’s assurance that her talent is beyond the ordinary. Lila, however, is less fortunate and her family do not accede to the teacher’s pleading. Their paths, consequently, start to diverge, though their friendship remains strong.

The book is a marvellous depiction of the pains and pangs of growing up, but also, more seriously, the nature of friendship. Lila and Elena take different paths through adolescence, yet their friendship remains intact, despite being tried to the limit.

The story is enchanting in its own right, but rendered even more marvellous by the elegant simplicity of the language. I would be interested to know to what extent that reflects the original Italian or the skills of the translator.

24. Widows and Orphans by Michael Arditti.

Michael Arditti's tale of the tribulations faced by Duncan Neville, editor and proprietor of the Francombe and Salter Mercury blends humour with wry observation. Francombe is an old fashioned seaside resort that has fallen on hard times, unable to compete with the temptations of budget flights to warmer climes. Even the town's pier, once an icon of the resort's prosperity, has fallen into disrepair, and the novel opens with an account from the Mercury of an arson attack that he left the pier's future in even greater doubt.

Duncan Neville wants to preserve, or even restore the pier, as an icon of the town's former prosperity, and in addition to his other responsibilities he is Chair of the Pier Preservation Trust. There are dissenting voices, and plans are already afoot for a complete redevelopment of the pier, complete with luxury apartments, a casino and an 'adult' theme park. This battle over the pier's future forms the backdrop against which the other themes of the novel unfold.

Duncan is far from perfect, and has is flaws, but is an essentially sympathetic character. He is, however, about the only one. Several teenagers feature in the novel, including Jamie, Duncan's son, but all of them are utterly ghastly. Most of the other characters have their dreadful moments, too, and Duncan sometimes finds himself embattled and encircled.

The numerous subplots give great scope for humour, though, and there are some hilarious moments. As an observation of small town life and political shenanigans, the book is very successful.

25. Tiny Stations by Dixe Wills.

I am generally reluctant to write a very negative review of a book, conscious that someone has expended a lot of effort writing it while all I have had to do is sit back and read it. In ‘Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant’ the fifth volume of Anthony Powell’s marvellous ‘Dance to the Music of Time’, Maclintick, the lugubrious music critic refers, somewhat dramatically, to the ‘proper respect of the poor interpretive hack for the true creative artist’.

Sadly, that restraint only extends so far, and faced with this book I find little option but to take the gloves off and decry it utterly. The saddest aspect is that it might have so good. Dixe Wills had become aware of the phenomenon of request-only railway stations, of which 150 still exist across the British railway network. Trains will only stop at these stations (or ‘halts’) if a passenger on board has requested it, or if someone on the platform flags the train down, like hailing a bus or taxi. There is a potentially fascinating story behind each of these stations, and Wills set out to explore a lot of them. Being a bit of an anorak, that seemed fairly tempting to me.

Unfortunately, this is a particularly poorly written book. Wills attempts to strike a humorous tone, but this falls woefully flat. His puerile comments seldom ascend above the severely irritating, and generally succumb to a sickening tweeness that robbed the content of any potential to hold my attention.

This very soon joined the list of books that I have deliberately left on my bus or train. I am just relieved that for once I hadn’t written my name on the flyleaf, so there is no risk of a well-intention Samaritan returning it to me.

>41 Eyejaybee: Thankyou. I'd looked at that as a possible present for my train-mad husband. I agree with you, the surmise sounds great. If the execution is that poor, it's a good thing it stayed on the bookshop shelf.

26. Clean Break by Val McDermid.

The fourth instalment in Val McDermid’s series featuring Kate Brannigan maintains the high standards of its predecessors. Kate, the engagingly self-reliant private investigator based in Manchester, is summoned to the stately home of a client for whom her firm had installed a state of the art security system. Embarrassingly, the home has been burgled and the prize possession, a Monet, has been stolen. Kate’s investigations reveal that there have been several similar burglaries around the country, and in each one just a single item, invariably the most valuable, has been taken. CCTV footage from one of the raids shows the burglars breaking in, heading straight for the one item, removing it and then escaping, all within a minute of breaching the property.

Meanwhile, Kate finds herself taken on by a new client. The perpetually bed tempered Graham Kerr believes that his company, which produces domestic cleaning fluids, is being blackmailed through targeted product tampering, which has already apparently left one customer dead from cyanide poisoning. Surly to bed, and surly to rise, Kerr seems to blame Kate for everything that has happened, overlooking the fact that she was only retained after the customer’s death.

Over the series McDermid has amassed an impressive supporting cast for Kate. In addition to her lover, music journalist Richard Barclay, there are an assortment of local senior police officer (some helpful, others less so), a daunting defence solicitor, and her best friend Alex, an investigative journalist (probably based upon McDermid’s own past working on the Northern crime desk at The Guardian). All of them become involved to a greater or lesser degree as Kate’s investigations lead her halfway across Europe.

McDermid’s great skill is to make her plots, and her characters’ actions and reactions, entirely plausible. Kate is not a superhero, and is as fallible at times as everyone else, occasionally coming to rue her own impetuosity. The two wholly separate plots are seamlessly interlaced throughout the book, and the story zips along with great pace.

27. The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante.

I am not sure what happened here. Having greatly enjoyed Elena Ferrante’s first Neapolitan novel, ‘My Brilliant Friend’, I eagerly embarked on the second, which picks up exactly where the first book left off. I had been making great progress, as enthralled with it as I had been with its predecessor, when I made the mistake of leaving it on my desk at work. Too tired, or perhaps just too plain lazy to go back for it (though in my defence I had been in the office for more than eleven hours), I started reading something else on the Kindle app on my phone on the journey home, expecting to pick it up the next day and resume my enjoyment on Elena and Lila’s travails in Naples in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Somehow, though, it never quite happened. Picking up the book the next day the magic had evaporated, and I found myself struggling to recapture the sense of thrill. In fact, I found it difficult even to care, and the latter part of the book became a challenge rather than a joy. Right now, I doubt if I can find the strength of spirit to press on with the next two volumes. On the other hand, I recognise that virtually everyone else I know who has read these books has raved about them, which had been my own response to the first volume, so I may leave it a few weeks and try again.

28. Orient by Christopher Bollen.

The Orient of the title is a small fishing village on Long Island, with a community split between those who live there all year, and others who own second homes there as retreats from New York. Paul Benchley straddles both groups, having grown up in Orient but subsequently moved to New Yok where, now middle aged, he runs a thriving architectural practice. The start of the novel sees him driving back to Orient accompanied by Mills Chevron, a young man whom he has befriended and taken under his wing. Mills Chevron at nineteen years of age has had a troubled life, passing between various foster families before fending for himself on the streets of New York, getting by through a mix of drug dealing and occasional prostitution.

Life in Orient is pleasant, though not idyllic. Across the Sound from its fishing harbour lies Plum Island, historic site of the Federal Government’s chemical research facility. Security is, naturally, intense, and few of Orient’s residents have ever set foot on Plum Island, though speculation abounds about the experiments that are conducted there, and there are widespread rumours about strange creatures that have been glimpsed running around the research facility. There is, then, a heady mix of ingredients, and it is not long before things start to go awry. A man is found drowned in the harbour and hunters find the body of a strange animal, unlike anything they have ever seen before. Meanwhile, Mills starts to find the close knit community in Orient claustrophobic.

Bollen develops the atmosphere effectively, changing the narrative perspective with each chapter, building up a credible community of shared aspirations but differing experiences of daily life. One of the critics’ plaudits on the cover suggested that the book was a cross between Donna Tartt and The Great Gatsby, and I can see what they meant. Bollen writes well, too, though he is perhaps too aware of that. There are several passages that are principally designed to demonstrate how clever Bollen is, rather than to advance the story or enhance our understanding of the characters. As a consequence, in addition to being occasionally too self-consciously literary (I think he just tries too hard!), the novel ends up being longer than it needed to be. It is still a very good book, and a rewarding read, but if it had been one hundred pages shorter it might have been fifteen per cent better.

29. The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux.

This is one of the classic ‘locked room’ mystery stories, that has prompted scores of imitations over the years, including John Dickson Carr’s homage, ‘The Hollow Man’. The basic premise is very simple: Mademoiselle Sangerson had retired to bed in The Yellow Room, which she locked behind her. Shortly afterwards she was heard screaming, having been grievously attacked. Her father, Professor Sangerson, and his servant come running to assist and find the room still locked from the inside. When they eventually gain access to the room they find the wounded woman, but no sign of her assailant. The strange circumstances of the attack excite the more sensational end of the press and the story becomes a talking point all around France.

Frederick Larsan, most famous detective from the Surêté is appointed to investigate the case. In the meantime, however, ingenious journalist, Rouletabille, decides to launch his own investigation, accompanied by his friend Sainclair (who narrates the novel). Sainclair is suitably astonished and impressed throughout, in similar vein to Watson as companion to Sherlock Holmes. Sadly, the relationship between the super sleuth and sidekick is not developed with the same humorous scope that attends the Sherlock Holmes stories. The plot may be just as ingenious as anything that Conan Doyle came up with, (and I was certainly fooled, even though all the necessary clues are there), but it never quite gripped me much as I had thought it might.

It is well written and (presumably) well translated – the version I read was definitely very readable, and had none of the drawbacks that often attend books from that period (it was published, I believe, in 1906).

30. Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke.

I have always been a huge fan of Arthur C Clarke’s novels, and this, which was his first major commercial and critical success, was apparently his own favourite. Published in 1954, as the Cold War was gathering in intensity, the novel starts with the Americans and Russians in the midst of a space race (prefiguring the bitter competition that would flourish during the latter half of that decade and then throughout the 1960s). This is, however, rendered redundant by the arrival of a fleet of huge spaceships marking the arrival of an alien race, immensely more powerful and technologically accomplished than mankind.

The aliens, known informally as The Overlords, assume power over the Earth almost immediately, with the human population realising that resistance would be pointless. They are benign, and under their suzerainty the world embarks upon an extended period of peace, accompanied by a surge of technological advancement and economic growth. The world’s woes are largely vanquished and the population can concentrate on a life led by leisure. Not everyone is happy – some feel that their cosseted existence is robbing mankind of its initiative and ability to progress.

Clarke’s description of the Utopian lifestyle afforded the world under the benevolent guidance of The Overlords is beguiling and demonstrates his awesome prescience. In a throwaway remark he predicts the introduction of a readily accessible, reliable oral contraceptive and something remarkably similar to DNA fingerprinting, decades before either would become a reality.

Clarke is a great science fiction writer because, in addition to being an accomplished scientist, he had that happy knack, so rare among other performers in the genre, of being a genuinely good writer. He understands the intricacies of plotting and development of plausible, sympathetic characters. In Childhood’s End plausible characters abound, ranging from gushing socialite Rupert Boyce, independent and dangerously inquisitive astrophysicist Jan Rodricks, and the domesticated Gregsons, George and Jean and their two children. Clarke’s compelling verisimilitude over the everyday makes the fantastic seem utterly credible. More than sixty years since its publication, and nearly forty since I first read it, the book remains just as gripping, enjoyable and rewarding.

Definitely putting Childhood's End on my list as my next read by Clarke (thus far I've only read his novelization of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I loved).

>48 mabith:. While Childhood's End may have been Clarke's own favourite, I thought that many of his later books, and in particular Rendezvous with Rama, Imperial Earth and The Fountains of Paradise were even better.

Gotcha! I have an unfortunately long list of sci-fi I need to get to.

31. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.

The post apocalyptical dystopia is not a literary seam that I had prospected very often until recently, so I had been unaware of the gems it had to offer. In recent months I have been especially enthralled by Emily St John Mandel’s ‘Station Eleven’ and ‘Louise Welch’s ‘A Lovely Way to Burn’, each of which brought a new twist to the genre. Both of those books start in the present with a particularly virulent form of flu breaking out and spreading around the world in days, obliterating the population and leaving the survivors struggling to salvage any dregs of civilisation in the hope of maybe forming a future.

Margaret Atwood’s ‘Oryx and Crake’ deservedly stands alongside both those books, but strikes a different pose. Set in an unspecified but presumably not too distant, hi-tech future, we see the fractured world through the eyes of Jimmy, now known as ‘Snowman, who is living wild, not sure whether he is the last real man still alive. He passes his days taking care to avoid the scorching midday sun and moving warily to avoid attracting the attention of a number of wild beats, including wolvogs and pigoons, creatures created in the laboratories of the high tech genetic engineering firms that had proliferated throughout the last years before the catastrophe.

We soon learn, however, that Jimmy is not entirely alone. There is a village-dwelling community of simple folk who look upon him as a sort of magus, and offer him food (particularly fish) in return for his messianic intercession with the godlike ‘Oryx and Crake’. We also gather random insights into Jimmy’s past as he remembers various episodes from his childhood and adolescence. We gradually learn about Jimmy’s fractured family, with his mother increasingly disillusioned and mentally dislocated while his father became increasingly absorbed in his work to create designer livestock. These memories also offer an insight into the nature of the world before the catastrophe, with the privileged elite living in heavily guarded corporation-owned compounds away from the wild ‘pleeblands’ where order was already crumbling. It was at school in this sheltered world that Jimmy first met Crake, a brilliant student whose family had just moved to the same compound.

Atwood captures the cynicism, disillusionment and sense of disenfranchisement of the adolescent boys brilliantly, as they dabble with increasingly inappropriate computer games and sample the horrific porn and other, worse experiences that the internet has to offer. Soon snuff violence and degrading images of women are insufficient to whet their appetites, and they are drawn to ‘Extinctathon’ a bizarre game that combines some of the worst ‘shoot ‘em up’ violence with extreme biotechnology. Meanwhile, the corporations for which their families work continue to push the boundaries with ever more amazing experimentation to create new species to solve the burgeoning world food shortages. What could possibly go wrong?

Alternating between Jimmy’s present, when it evidently has gone wrong, and scenes from his early life, Atwood builds up a fascinating, spellbinding and often frightening story, liberally sprinkled with literally allusions and wry observations on twenty-first century life.

32. At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier.

I am a huge fan of Tracy Chevalier, and have always loved her seemingly effortless ability to combine enthralling stories while instructing her readers in some hitherto unexplored avenue of knowledge. Her previous books have addressed the burgeoning tapestry industry in medieval Belgium The Lady and the Unicorn, Vermeer’s experiments with a camera obscura in seventeenth century Delft The Girl With a Pearl Earring and quilting in nineteenth century America The Last Runaway. Throughout all of her novels she has also demonstrated that she is a fine writer, capable of ensnaring the reader with a few pages, or even just a couple of paragraphs.

I was, therefore, intrigued to know what her latest book would have to offer, and I wasn’t disappointed. We are once more in nineteenth century America, in the Black Swamp area on northern Ohio, at the south-western extreme of Lake Erie. The Goodenough family have struck out west from their native Connecticut, and have staked a claim to a patch of
marsh-ridden land with a view to growing apples. James, the head of the family, is an obsessive cultivator of apples, driven by what has become a family tradition. He has even brought with him the carefully tended boughs of an English apple tree (a golden pippin), carried all the way from Herefordshire by his ancestors, with a view to gratfing them to native tress and rearing them in Ohio.

Life is hard in the Goodenough household. James and his wife Sadie have had nine children, but four have died, carried off by the relentless swamp fever. Having to face life with very little input from outside the family homestead has taken its toll, and James and Sadie spend most of their time at daggers drawn. They even differ over their preferences for apples: James like sweet apples such as the Golden Pippin while Sadie prefers ‘spitters’ the sour apples from which cider, not to mention the even stronger applejack, is made. Sadie is altogether too fond of applejack, which in turn has disastrous consequences for her relations with James. Chevalier cranks up the tension masterfully, with James and Sadie using their surviving children as pawns in their ceaseless matrimonial conflict.

The Goodenoughs do have one fairly regular visitor, an itinerant apple salesman called John Chapman, better known in American folklore as Johnny Appleseed who was instrumental in spreading apple growing across the continent. Chapman would today be styled as a hippy, living in the wilds, always travelling barefoot and eschewing any animal products. His inclusion gives Chevalier a vehicle for the discussion of various aspects of apple rearing, though this is never obtrusive: she never lectures her readers, but instead imparts her extensive knowledge almost by osmosis.

The Goodenoughs lurch on, from one family crisis to another. The action then moves on some fifteen or so years, and follows Robert Goodenough, James’s and Sadie’s son. He has ventured further west and finds himself in California during the 1850s goldrush. Still his father’s son, he remains enchanted with trees and is astounded when he first encounters the majestic redwood and sequoia. These are trees on a completely different scale, and Robert is spellbound.

As always, Tracy Chevalier has created some simple but entirely believable characters, and conjured up the sheer hardness and brutality of pioneering life, mixed with a sense of wonder at the sheer scale of the natural world. She tackles so many different facets of life: commercial rivalry, the plight of women in the goldrush, the glories of untrammelled nature, and family loyalty. A great success.

33. Finders Keepers by Stephen King.

I first encountered Stephen King’s books back in 1980 when I was given a copy of The Stand for my seventeenth birthday. I thought that was excellent and eagerly read his previous novels, and awaited any new releases. I felt that he had a great gift for realistic dialogue and a knack of capturing a lot of the minutiae of life. I have never been a huge fan of horror books but I felt with King, at least in the earlier works, that even when the supernatural aspects strained my credibility too far, the strength of the writing and the plausibility of his characters and settings were strong enough to hold my support.

That did, however, gradually change, and by the time Mr Mercedes was published it had been decades rather than simply years since I had last read one of his books. I was persuaded to try Mr Mercedes, reassured that it was a straight novel rather than an excursion into horror or fantasy, and I was immediately hooked. King still writes great dialogue, and he knows how to make his characters come alive on the page. Retired detective, Bill Hodges, The central protagonist of Mr Mercedes.

Finders Keepers is a sequel to Mr Mercedes, set a couple of years later. The first section of the book is, however, set between the late 1970s and the present day, following the story of Morris Bellamy, a would-be litterateur who went off the rails. His literary hero was John Rothstein who in the 1950 and 1960s had written some highly regarded novels including a trilogy featuring Jimmy Gold, known as ‘The Runner’, which captured the cynicism and challenges besetting those following the American Dream. But suddenly, without explanation, Rothstein stopped writing, or, rather, he stopped publishing, becoming a recluse like J D Salinger, eschewing interviews and refusing to discuss his past or future work. As the novel opens, Bellamy and two accomplices break into Rothstein’s house in the middle of the night and encounter the novelist. That meeting will have serious repercussions thirty five years later.

The book is very carefully plotted. There are some intriguing coincidences, and powerful resonances from Mr Mercedes, but nothing that compromise the plot’s plausibility. The story is compelling and while it involves frequent flashbacks to various stages in Bellamy’s life, these never become intrusive. This puts King right at the forefront of contemporary American crime writers, a genre that he could well have dominated for the last few decades if he had opted for that genre rather than horror.

34. The Roman Hat Mystery by Ellery Queen.

As a teenager I used to love the Ellery Queen television series (though I imagine they were already rather dated even then), and I remember reading a few of the books at that time. I hadn’t thought of him (Them? ‘Ellery Queen was actually a partnership of two writers) for ages until a colleague chanced to mention him in the office the other day.

In an idle moment I tracked this book (the first of the series) down on Amazon and decided to give it a go. The book hasn’t aged particularly well, though that is perhaps fair enough, given that it was published in the 1930s, with markedly different social mores and conventions. The basic premise is straightforward enough. Monte Field, a defence attorney with dubious gangland connections, is found dead, apparently poisoned, at a Broadway show. Inspector Queen is summoned to investigate. His son Ellery also turns up and, over the next few days, employs his beloved logical deduction to identify the killer.

The plot is certainly sound, and the clues are certainly all there. The relationship between Ellery and his father, Inspector Richard Queen, is very well constructed, with mutual affection and regard occasionally obscured by utter exasperation. (Well, that certainly struck a chord with memories of my own family!)

I enjoyed the experiment of revisiting Ellery Queen’s mysteries, and I would be interested to see an episode from the television series, too, but I don’t think I will be venturing any further down memory lane as far as the books are concerned.

35. Pleasantville by Attica Locke.

Attica Locke’s novel opens on 5 November 1996, when Americans were in the process of returning President Clinton to serve his second term at the White House. The Presidential contest is not, however, the only election holding the attention of the people of Pleasantville, which is a real area in Houston, Texas. The locals there are being canvassed by rival candidates for a mayoral election which has split the local community. There are a lot of burning issues around Pleasantville. Jay Porter, the novel’s principal protagonist, has fought a number of class actions for the community over pollution caused by a number of large businesses, and has established himself as a thorn in the side

Alicia Nowell is a young woman about to graduate from high school and has been helping the ‘get out the vote’ push for one of the candidates, delivering leaflets and fliers throughout the neighbourhood. With less than an hour to go before the polls close she decides to head for home, but as she waits on a street corner someone is watching her. She never makes it home, and her badly beaten corpse is found five days later, provoking a massive murder investigation. Shortly after her body is discovered the police arrest a prominent member of one of the electoral teams, and the case becomes a political football, drawing massive attention from the media. Reluctantly Porter bows to unwarranted personal pressure and agrees to represent the accused man.

This book is a fascinating blend of political intrigue, courtroom confrontation and whodunit, with a fair sprinkling of the history of the civil rights movement thrown in. Locke crosses genres with ease, and manages the story with great dexterity. Jay Porter is a good man, and an empathetic character, grappling with
self-doubt, money worries and the pressures of raising his children as a single parent, still wracked with grief over the death of his wife a year ago.

36. Erewhon by Samuel Butler.

Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, first published in 1872, is a natural descendant of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia even down to the title making clear that the land in question doesn’t exist (‘Erewhon’ being an anagram of ‘nowhere’) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

Related in the first person, Butler’s protagonist Higgs seeks his fortune in one of Britain’s then numerous far flung dependencies, where after a few years learning his trade as a shepherd he decides to strike out on his own, venturing into the previously unexplored hinterland. Butler himself lived and worked for several years in New Zealand, and the narrative gives many hints that this was the model for the unspecified territory of the book. After some hair raising adventures he manages to penetrate into previously unknown lands, though he is initially dismayed to find them populated by a foreign race of inordinately beautiful people.

The alien race is as amazed at the prospect of this bold stranger suddenly appearing among them as he is to find the land inhabited. Over the next few months he came to know the people and was introduced to the higher echelons of its society. He learns that the land is called Erewhon. Initially engaged by the society that the Erewhonians have developed, he gradually becomes disillusioned at what he sees as a moral inversion within their prevailing social mores.

Butler handles the opening chapters of the book, from Higgs’s decision to find his fortune overseas to his discovery of the Erewhonians, very capably. The novel seems to be an engaging adventure story, and the struggles that the hero faces as he strives to make his way further inland are genuinely exciting. Similarly, the initial chapters recounting his meeting with the Erewhonians, and the amusing mutual confusions that arise between them, work well.

Unfortunately, though, he fell into the frequent trap of labouring the point to the extent of alienating his reader. The Erewhonians have a completely different outlook on life, viewing sickness as a crime with an inclination to punish the sufferer rather than offering them sympathy and support. Though an amusing idea, and a clever mechanism to allow Butler to expound his own views, this soon became simply irritating, like a Monty Python sketch that has gone on far too long.

To the modern reader, Butler’s use of anagrams or even plain reversals of names becomes rather tedious. One of the first women whom Higgs comes to know is called Yram (i.e. ‘Mary’ backwards), while one of the principal characters among the Erewhonians is a businessman call Nosnibor Senoj – which is ‘Robinson Jones’ backwards.

The story is far from being without merit, though, and it is perhaps unfair to subject it to the scrutiny afforded by jaded twenty-first century cynicism. A principal tenet of the Erewhonians is their intense dislike of machinery (Higgs’s wrist watch causes them considerable dismay). While we might initially think of them as similar to the Amish community, this trait also prefigures the Butlerian Jihad against computers that lay behind Frank Herbert’s Dune sequence.

I was glad that I had read it, though I don’t think it will leave me sufficiently enthused to read any of his other works any time soon.

37. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant by Anthony Powell.

I find it very difficult to explain the charm of Anthony Powell's autobiographical roman fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time, though the attraction is undeniable. As with the previous volumes, very little actually happens, and we continue to next to nothing about Nick Jenkins, the narrator and clear avatar for Powell himself.

This particular instalment immerses us in the chaotic classical music community of pre-war London, and introduces the troubled genius of composer Hugh Moreland (apparently closely based upon English composer Constant Lambert, whose son Kit, incidentally, would later discover The Who in the early 1960s). Moreland will emerge as one of Jenkins's closest friends, though the initial impression of him is less positive. In addition to Moreland we also meet Moreland's wife Matilda, an aspiring actress and former mistress of business magnate Sir Magnus Donners (who has at various times been a patron of Moreland himself), the querulous critic Maclintick and his shrewish wife Audrey.

We are also treated to the return of some old friends, with cameo appearances by Mark Members and J G Quiggin (still locked in their rivalry, each vying for literary supremacy over the other) and a very humorous tour de force from Charles Stringham, now a mere shadow of his former resplendent self. The egregious Widmerpool is back, too, though in this volume he is more peripheral than in the preceding books, and his presence is restricted to a chance encounter in a hospital where he is being treated for "a slight nuisance with boils" followed by a luncheon engagement in which he treats Jenkins to an unintentionally humorous account of his recent encounter with the Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson, shortly before his all-too-brief succession as Edward VIII, and Mrs Simpson.

I have recently been reading a lot of P G Wodehouse whose marvellously entertaining novels similarly evoke a now distant world in which all the principal characters live in a small sector of London bounded by Oxford Street to the north and The Mall to the south. Wodehouse's humour is direct - pure farce delivered in beautiful prose. Powell's humour is more subtle, and inextricably interlaced with a surging melancholy, but no less powerful or engaging.

38. The Gaudy by J. I. M. Stewart.

This novel is simply marvellous. Written with effortless grace, it is a beautiful paean to Oxford and the academic life, though it does not refrain from sending up the pomposity and internecine plotting of the dons. The Gaudy is the first of a series of five novels which, to my mind, represent the finest roman fleuve in an academic setting.

The novel opens with Oxford alumnus Duncan Pattullo returning to his old college, probably either in the late 1960s or possibly the early 1970s, for the first time in more than twenty years since he graduated. He is there to attend a Gaudy (a celebratory dinner for old members). Right from the start he is overwhelmed with nostalgia, put up in his old rooms and almost immediately bumping into his old tutor. The nostalgia is slightly discomforting, though he soon encounters Tony Mumford, perhaps his closest friend from student days. Oddly, however, they have never met during the intervening twenty years.

Mumford has been very successful since graduating. Having made a fortune in the City he embarked upon a career in politics which has taken him into the House of Lords. On the day of the Gaudy there is a government reshuffle, and the evening news includes an announcement of his elevation to the Cabinet. Mumford does, however, have an ulterior motive in coming back to the college as it transpires that his son, Ivo (possessed of an unrivalled lack of grace) is struggling to pass the end of year exams, and his future in the college hangs delicately in the balance.

Pattullo also encounters Gavin Moggridge, an unremarkable student who had inadvertently embarked on a career of dazzling adventure entirely unexpected of, or even by, him, and Cyril Bedworth, a formerly dim undergraduate, who two decades before had had viewed Pattullo and Mumford with untrammelled admiration. Throughout the formal dinner Pattullo's attention wavers between the present day and his undergraduate days (and even his earlier schooldays in Edinburgh), and his perceptions are constantly re-defined.

The portraits of Albert Talbert, the aging tutor whose grasp on the world around is as lacking in acuity as his name is lacking in euphony, and Edward Pococke, the extraordinarily urbane Provost of the College, are finely drawn yet never succumb to cliché. Plot, the careworn scout on Pattullo's old staircase, and Nick Junkin, the engaging though slightly mentally dislocated undergraduate who now occupies Pattullo's old rooms, are so credible that I feel I know them.

Stewart was a noted academic himself, producing several detailed analyses of early twentieth century literature, and, under the pseudonym Michael Innes, was one of the most dextrous exponents of the ‘cosy’, gentleman detective genre. Yet the sequence that this novel opens was surely the crowning glory of his fruitful career.

39. Misery by Stephen King.

After reading The Stand while I was still in school I became a huge fan of Stephen King, and read most of his subsequent books up to Thinner (published under his pseudonym of Richard Bachman). I am not really sure why I stopped reading him then. Perhaps I become less enamoured of fiction involving the supernatural in general. I had also been a keen reader of science fiction up until my early twenties, though that was another genre I largely left behind.

In the last couple of years I have rediscovered Stephen King through his excellent books Mr Mercedes and Finders Keepers, both of which feature Bill Hodges and his posse, and are straight crime novels. The latter of those featured an over enthusiastic literary fan, and the reviews offered a lot of comparisons to King’s Misery, published almost thirty years earlier.

Misery is a great book, utterly gripping from the outset, and while the villain of the work is a larger than life character, everything is grounded in the real world. No intrusions from the supernatural, though the horror is still there in the shape of a twisted character driven by obsession and psychosis. The plot is fairly simple but completely captivating.

Best-selling novelist Paul Sheldon has just completed his latest novel and celebrates by drinking rather too much champagne and then, ignoring warnings of an impending snowstorm, attempting to drive through the Rockies. The storm takes hold and he skids off the road. Fortunately, he does not hit anyone else, but, less fortunately, he is badly injured in the crash and passes out in the wreckage of his car. The next thing he knows he is in bed with horrific injuries to his legs. His rescuer is former nurse Annie Wilkes who, it turns out, is a huge fan of Sheldon’s books, particularly those featuring his character Misery Chastain, an adventuress in Victorian England. The series of novels featuring Misery has been immensely successful, far outselling Sheldon’s other books. He had, however, come to hate the character, seeing her as a millstone preventing him from the proper exercise of his literary skill, and in the most recent volume he had succeeded in killing her off. As it happens, Annie Wilkes has only just started reading that latest book.

Sheldon is unsure why Annie Wilkes has not taken him to hospital, and gradually comes to realise that she has only the most tenuous hold on sanity. This becomes apparent as her disgust at the fate that Sheldon directed towards Misery Chastian, which provokes a dreadful rage which she takes out on Sheldon, withholding the painkillers that she had, thitherto, been dispensing to him. Annie’s fragile grasp on reason becomes increasingly evident, and Sheldon is pitched into a dreadful ordeal as he tries to placate her while wondering how (or even if) he can escape.

The book treats a lot of serious issues: mental health, obsession, the art of writing and addiction. Sheldon offers all sorts of insights, presumably channelling King himself, into how he develops a plot, fleshes out characters and constructs a book. He also shows great self-awareness as to his own qualities, and the frustration that his ‘potboilers’ featuring Misery consistently outsell his other, more serious’ works.

The book was published in 1987 around the time, as I understand, that King’s family stage a major intervention to address his own addictions (alcohol, various prescription medicines and other illegal drugs). Sheldon proves an interesting vehicle for analysis of these problems – he had already been a drinker and smoker, and owing to the circumstances of his imprisonment by Annie Wiles he can feel himself becoming addicted to the powerful painkiller that she feeds him.

The novel is a great success. King maintains the tension throughout, and there is a frightening plausibility about the whole story. I just feel rather sad that I didn’t read it nearly thirty years ago when it first came out.

40. Blue Genes by Val McDermid.

This is the fifth novel featuring Kate Branigan, the Manchester based private investigator, and probably the best one so far (which is saying something as the previous books had all been very strong). As usual, Kate finds herself investigating several cases simultaneously, carefully balancing her time and skills, and somehow managing to keep a grasp on all of them.

The principal storyline, however, which gives the book its name, revolves around the apparently mindless murder of a doctor engaged in extensive research into subfertility and IVF. She was murdered in her own home, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary the police are treating it as a case of an attempted burglary that went wrong. Among her patients at the time of the murder were Alex and Chris, Kate’s best friends, who had been referred to her for help with a baby. It is only after the murder, however, that they realise that she had been working under a pseudonym. As there are a lot of sensitivities about their treatment, Alex retains Kate to investigate further, and also to ensure that their records are safe.

As usual, McDermid develops the plot quickly, but plausibly, quickly enfolding the reader in the story. Branigan is an immensely plausible protagonist – capable, occasionally stubborn, and overwhelmingly logical, she knows her limitations, but is not afraid to push herself absolutely to them. In this outing there are additional domestic and work-related challenges that she has to address, and she takes them on adroitly

41. The Hammer of God by Arthur C Clarke.

This is one of Clarke's later novels, and less well known than some of his classic stories from his vintage period during the late 1970s and through the 1980s. It does, however, ranks with the best of his books. All his customary traits are on display: plausible and empathetic characters, a well-constructed plot and a scientific context that is technically viable yet also readily accessible to even the most scientifically ignorant (among whose ranks I immediately declare myself).

The novel is set in the late twenty-second century at a time when Earth has established colonies on Mars and beyond. Quite by chance, amateur astronomer Dr Angus Miller discovers a new asteroid moving through the far reaches of the solar system. Closer inspection shows that its trajectory will put it on a collision course with Earth. Given its immense size it soon becomes evident that the impact will be as catastrophic as that which caused the demise of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.

In recognition of its lethal potential the asteroid is name Kali, after the fierce, retributive Hindu goddess. Earth is not defenceless, though, and plans are brought into play to try to deflect Kali from its current course. Robert Singh, captain of the spaceship Goliath stationed at the Lagrange Point towards Jupiter's orbit, is ordered to go to Kali, and attach a fission motor and huge supplies of fuel, with a view to nudging Kali off its current course. A deviation of even a few centimetres should be sufficient at that distance to push Kali far enough away from its lethal course and save the home planet.

This all sounds far too simple and straightforward, and there has to be a catch. Back on Earth religious fundamentalism rears its head, in the guise of Chrislam, a hybrid faith that had established a strong hold over millions of followers during the twenty-first century. Chrislamists see the threat posed by Kali as a divine sign - if it impacts with Earth and wreaks havoc, killing billions of people, then that will be the will of God, and his followers will join him in Heaven and enjoy his everlasting redemption. If, on the other hand, it passes safely by, then God will have intervened and shown his divine mercy.

Clarke gives us an engaging story embellished with touches of satire, comedy and emotion. All in all a heady mix, and Clarke shows how powerful and worthy science fiction can be, when crafted by a master.

Thanks for The Hammer of God review, it is straight onto the TBR pile, also agree with your review of Misery, a very scary story and best 'horror' novel I've read !

42. Whisky from Small Glasses by Denzil Meyrick.

I was rather disappointed by this novel. I was initially delighted to stumble across a new series of crime novels set in south west Scotland, and, happening to be in Dumfries and Galloway, I started it with a certain relish. The opening scene struck a compelling note, with the local police attempting to move a corpse that had washed up on the beach to prevent the incoming tide from compromising the locus, only to see the body fall apart in their hands.

It was, however, all downhill from there, with no Scottish noir crime cliché left unsampled. The detectives were as foul-mouthed, dysfunctional and emotionally challenged as could be predicted. The plot was well thought out, but failed to rescue the book from the relentless surge of Scottish stereotypes that flooded through it.

43. Down Among the Dead Men by Peter Lovesey.

Peter Lovesey’s series of novels featuring the irascible Superintendent Peter Diamond is marvellous, and I have always wondered why it hasn’t received greater public acknowledgement. With the glorious setting of Bath and Diamond’s often comical idiosyncrasies, the books also seem tailor made for television adaptation.

As it happens, the action in this latest volume moves away from Bath to the almost equally photogenic city of Chichester where Peter Diamond accompanies his Assistant Chief Constable, Georgina Dalrymple, to conduct a disciplinary review of an officer whose has been suspended following allegations of misconduct relating to a murder investigation seven years previously . Readers of earlier books in the series will be aware that ACC Dalrymple and Peter Diamond have markedly different approaches to police work: he is an old fashioned ‘thief taker’, while she is more concerned with meeting targets, public relations and political accountability.

Lovesey is a master at constructing plausible yet engaging plots, and he delivers again here. Diamond and Dalrymple meet predictable resistance from the suspended officer’s colleagues, but also find themselves being drawn into a current investigation into the disappearance of several underworld figures. They also become involved, to Diamond’s delight but Dalrymple’s extreme displeasure, in the investigation into the disappearance of a local schoolgirl.

Lovesey succeeds in blending a police procedural novel with a ‘vintage’ crime novel, harvesting the best aspects of both genre without compromising his plot or characters. This was very entertaining, as are all of Lovesey’s books.

44. Deep South by Paul Theroux*.

Although he has also had considerable success as a writer of fiction, Paul Theroux is probably best known as the pre-eminent travel writer of his generation. His first travel book (and to my mind probably still his finest), 'The Great Railway Bazaar', was published more than forty years ago and chronicled his journey from London to Vladivostok and back, travelling by train. Since then he has made a career of writing about his journeys, generally peppered with his now infamous vitriolic barbs about the countries he has visited. He has travelled throughout the Americas, southern Africa and India by train, sailed through Micronesia, walked around the British coast and hitched his way around the Mediterranean, spitting venom much of the way.

His latest travelogue sees him back home in his native America, driving through the southern states. In fact, he made four separate journeys, one in each season of the year, detailing the towns he visited and many of the people he met. He meandered by car throughout the southern states, appalled by the intense poverty he observed, though also inspired by the positivity and hope that encountered, often in surroundings of the greatest deprivation. He visits churches, organisations working towards urban regeneration and a surprising number of gun shows, which he described with great brio. Fifty years on from the Civil Rights movement, it is, sadly, clear that bigotry and hatred are far from gone. Theroux meets Klansmen whose opinions are predictably archaic and objectionable. More sadly, he finds similar views among all too many ‘ordinary’ citizens that he comes across at random.

Even at his most bitter, Theroux always writes with great clarity, and in this book his customary bile seems to have been diluted. His observation is acute, he applies his extensive powers of description deftly: although the book includes a selection of photographs, Theroux’s account is so clear it renders them almost superfluous.

Theroux offers interludes between each season’s journey in the form of brief essays. One offers a detailed account of the taboo racial epithet and how ownership of the word has changed. Another gives an intriguing writer’s view of William Faulkner and his literary legacy – Theroux finds echoes of Faulkner’s world (not always welcome) throughout his journey.

Informative and very entertaining.

45. Maestra by L. S. Hilton.

I suspect that the publishers might be hoping that this novel picks up where the 'Fifty Shades' series left off, though I think it is rather better than that. It is certainly the most sexually graphic novel I have read for a long time, but it also stands as a well plotted thriller in its own right, with enticing settings ranging from the higher end of the London art world to jet set locations throughout Europe.

Judith Rashleigh, the narrator, is resourceful and flexible, and not scared to live dangerously, and after a chance encounter with an old school friend she takes on a temporary role as high class club hostess to help eke out the meagre salary she earns as a researcher in one of London’s prominent auction houses. Perhaps not surprisingly, this brings her into contact with wealthy men who operate in the shadows, but whose largesse enables Judith to start to enjoy a greater quality of life than she had previously dreamed was possible. In the meantime, she suspects that things might not be quite as they seem in the auction house. It is, of course, only a matter of time before things go disastrously awry, and Judith finds herself facing calamitous consequences, and has to draw deeply upon her resourcefulness.

The book works very well – I was hooked almost immediately, and the various crenulations of the plot kept me guessing (generally wrongly) which way the story would turn next. There were some negative aspects, however. Try as ai might, I just couldn’t warm to Judith Rashleigh as a character, and I did struggle with the relentless litany of fashion brand names (though that might well simply be a reflection of my untrammelled ignorance of that world). Overall, though, I think it was worthy of the considerable hype that has attended its publication.

Did you ever go back to the Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels? I have just started the fourth one, and although on a page-by-page basis they don't seem as amazing as their reputation, I still can't seem to stop reading them!

>67 Cinnamon_Heart: I haven't yet, though I certainly shall. I am glad you have enjoyed them.

46. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.

I suspect that my expectations of this classic science fiction novel might have been unduly stretched by recollections of listening to Jeff Wayne’s musical version from the late 1970s. Reading it now I found that the narrative from Wayne’s version seemed more imposing and eloquent than Wells’s rather pedestrian prose. That may just be a trick of the mind, though - I suppose that anything read out loud by Richard Burton would always have greater impact than words on a page.

The story is a compelling one – towards the end of the nineteenth century a number of cylinders are launched from Mars and land at various sites through Surrey and the Home Counties of England. A crowd gathers to witness this spectacle and, after a considerable delay while the capsules to cool down from their perilous journey through Earth’s atmosphere, the Martians gradually appear. It is immediately apparent that this is not friendly foray with a view to establishing peaceful and mutually beneficial trade. The Martians have a death ray and deploy it liberally, causing the survivors to flee, and start a mass exodus from London.

His prose may seem rather dry nowadays, but Wells knew how to tell a story. His characters seem very real and plausible, and he successfully blends the outlandish (i.e. an alien invasion) with the mundane aspects of life, adding verisimilitude to the story.

I think War of the Worlds still stands up well today, in a way that many of his lesser known works, a number of which I have read, do not. Jeff Wayne's version is great also (and both the 1950s and the 2005 film version are also very good).

47. Different Class by Joanne Harris.

I have always loved stories set in schools, and this is one of the finest in the genre. Joanne Harris first introduced us to St Oswald’s, a minor public school located in the fictional Yorkshire town of Malbry, ten years ago in Gentlemen and Players. That was a rattling good yarn, teeming with themes of revenge and bitterness played out against a backdrop of an ancient school that a new management team is striving to modernise.

Different Class picks up where Gentlemen and Players left off, at the start of the following school year. As with the earlier book, the story is told in alternating narratives, one delivered by Roy Straitley, curmudgeonly Classics teacher now with one hundred terms of teaching at the school under his belt, while the other comes from one of his former pupils, recounting events from the early 1980s.

After the events of the previous book a new ‘Crisis Team’ has been installed in the school to help the newly-appointed headmaster, John Harrington, himself an old boy of the school whom Straitley vaguely remembers. Harrington’s time as a pupil had coincided with a difficult spell for the school (indeed, the school seems to have lurched from one challenging period to another), and his return as headmaster seems set to herald a period of relentless modernisation. This frightens Straitley who is a great advocate of traditional methods.

It has been clear from all of her previous novels that Joanne Harris is masterful at telling a story, and the two entwined narratives in this book complement each other beautifully. She also has a conjuror’s gift for misdirection. She suckered me completely in Gentlemen and Players, and even though I was expecting something of the sort she did so again here.

This is clearly a book I will be reading, and enjoying, again before very long.

48. Zero K by Don DeLillo.

I am not sure that I have ever been able to say that I exactly enjoyed one of Don DeLillo’s novels: there is always a persuasive bleakness that stays with the reader long after the final page is read and the book has been replaced on the shelf. While Zero K is as mirthless as any of its predecessors, it is also just as thought-provoking, even haunting, as its fellows.

Jeffrey Lockhart has drifted through life in New York, largely estranged from his immensely wealthy father, Ross, who had walked out on his family many years earlier. As the novels opens, Jeffrey is on his way to meet Ross at a remote scientific compound in central Asia – probably Kyrgyzstan, a locale of ‘harsh geography, beyond the limits of believability or law”. The compound houses an organisation called ‘The Convergence’ which has developed a high tech alternative to conventional death. Using advanced cryonic technology, bodies can be frozen until such time as medical science can offer a cure. Ross Lockhart is one of the principal investors (termed ‘benefactors’) in The Convergence.

Artis, Ross’s wife and Jeffrey’s stepmother, though several years younger than her husband, has been ailing, beset with a combination of terminal conditions, and has resolved to submit to the service that The Convergence can offer. Ross has accompanied her as she prepares for her despatch into an unknown (and unknowable) future, and has invited Jeffrey to join them. (Artis had been responsible for the gradual rapprochement between Ross and Jeffrey). It is essential that the final preparations for Artis’s admission into The Convergence synchronise entirely with her biorhythms, so Ross and Jeffrey have a while to wait. Life in The Convergence compound is bleak. The food on offer is nourishing but entirely devoid of flavour to recognisable substance. The walls are predominantly white and the accommodation most closely resembles monastic cells. Around the compound there are various huge television screens which continually display soundless footage of a range of different natural disasters or scenes of warfare, revolution, carnage and mayhem, reminiscent of the passage in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, ‘I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies and sea-fights; peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms …’

DeLillo’s prose is austere and direct, with no hint of flummery, yet his characters come to life on the page. Throughout the book, Jeffrey is obsessed with language and definitions. He has to assign a name to everyone he meets, and then assign a back story or pedigree to explain how they got there. Back in New York, after Artis has completed her entry into The Convergence, Jeffrey resumes his curiously listless and unfulfilled life, and finds himself viewing everything from a new, slightly dislocated perspective. Having learned of, and then witnessed, The Convergence, he finds himself struggling to assimilate, dependent upon his extreme precision of language to remain his grasp on the world around him.

Still, I have been rambling and feel I haven’t done justice to this marvellous book. Nathaniel Rich published a more helpful review in The New York Review of Books

Thanks for the Zero K review, must get to it soon.

49. Even the Dead by Benjamin Black.

This is definitely an above average crime novel, though as Benjamin Black is a pseudonym used by leading Irish contemporary novelist, and Booker Prize winner, John Bainville, that is no surprise. The Benjamin Black novels are set in Dublin in the 1950s and feature querulous, borderline alcoholic, pathologist Dr Quirke and Detective Inspector Hackett.

Bainville’s literary credentials shine through, however, and the characters are marvellously drawn. Quirke is a generally lugubrious character, battling with demons arising from his past and compounded by his weakness for liquor, and his melancholy pervades the whole book. As the novel opens he is on leave of absence, recovering from a serious assault (incurred during the previous book in the series) and attempting to dry out, leaving his deputy to run the pathology laboratory. He, however, when faced with the autopsy of a young civil servant found in a burnt out car that apparently crashed in Phoenix Park, calls on his boss for a second opinion.

Energised by this summons to help, Quirke agrees with his assistant’s judgement that there was more to the victim’s injuries than could be explained by a road accident. A police investigation ensues, and uncovers dark secrets at the heart of Dublin society. Bainville/Black conjures a compelling air of menace, intensified by Dr Quirke’s own predicaments.

Despite the gloom (and there is absolutely no hint of levity at any point), the novel races along. Bainville/Black understands how to construct a plot and delivers a sound one here.

I am a Banville fan yet haven't read any Black, must remedy this, thanks for the review Eyejaybee !

>75 bryanoz: He is certainly a marvellous writer, and has crossed over into the crime genre with great ease.

50. The Good Liar by Nicholas Searle.

Nicholas Searle’s debut novel is simultaneously unsettling and gripping. Roy is an elderly gentleman with firm ideas about how things should be done. Betty is younger but widowed, and already retired from her academic job. They meet through an online dating agency and seem to get on well. So well, in fact, that within a very short time Roy has moved into Betty’s house, to the slight consternation of her family.

Roy divulges very little of his earlier life to Betty, though it gradually emerges that he has a past … in fact, several pasts. Alternating chapters in the book take us steadily further back in his life, revealing a history of dodgy deals and a career of opportunism and seized chances.

Searle develops the tension adeptly, toying with the reader’s sympathy so that it switches to and fro between Betty and Roy. In addition to the carefully constructed plot, the book also offers a sensitive (yet also humorous) portrayal of ageing, and a rogue’s reluctant acknowledgement of the gradual curtailing of his powers.

>75 bryanoz: Links to my LibraryThing reviews are automatically posted to my Twitter feed, and I have just been notified that 'Benjamin Black' (@BenBlackAuthor) retweeted my review of Even The Dead.

Sold ! Which one to read first ?

They are all very good though as there is a fairly involved back story it might be best to take the series in order and start with Christine Falls.

The Good Liar sounds like it was an interesting read. I'll have to put it on my list, or at least make one of my parents read it (I'm starting to feel overwhelmed by my to-read lists).

51. 1971 - Never a Dull Moment: Rock's Best Year by David Hepworth*.

The basic premise of David Hepworth’s book is that 1971 was rock music’s finest year, yielding a harvest of albums that, in addition to their immediate appeal, had the most far-reaching impact on the genre. I was just eight years old in 1971 so while I am familiar now with most of the acts, albums and individual songs that Hepworth cites, I can’t recall their impact at the time.

He certainly puts forward a compelling argument, backed up by his extensive knowledge of the field from his twin careers as rock journalist and publisher, and I was certainly amazed to see just how many classic albums did come out in that year. I might have been inclined to put forward my own claim in this vein for 1975 (the year of ‘Physical Graffiti’, ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy’) but that is neither here nor there.

He works his way through the year, one month per chapter, and pays close attention to the political, social and cultural context. The pre-dominant theme looming over the rock world as the year began was the legal action set in motion on 31 December 1970 by Paul McCartney formally and finally to dissolve The Beatles.

The termination of The Beatles momentarily left a void, but there were plenty of acts eager to try to fill it. Slade, as yet unestablished, criss-crossed the country playing more than one hundred and fifty gigs at what now seems an unedifying selection of unfashionable and small venues, before recording their first album and starting their string of hits that would elevate them to the front rank of chart success. David Bowie released two albums in 1971 (‘The Man Who Sold the World’ and ‘Hunky Dory’) and managed his first successful trip to America. Mick Jagger’s wedding to Bianca may have plumbed new depths of tawdry celebrity spectacle, but the Rolling Stones, ensconced in the French chateau leased by Keith Richard as his tax exile bolthole, went on to record Sticky Fingers which was to relaunch their career and establish them as a major album-oriented act.

Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin showed that heavy rock was still in vogue, both releasing masterful albums (‘Masters of Reality’ and ‘IV’ respectively), though it was also the heyday of the singer songwriter, with James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and Carole King all recording albums (‘Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon’, ‘Blue’ and ‘Tapestry’ respectively) in the same studio complex at the same time. Having been one of the most successful singles bands in the 1960s, The Who release ‘Who’s Next’ which Hepworth suggests might be the album of a bumper year.

Hepworth doesn’t, however, merely list who released which album or score success with which new single. He develops cohesive themes that resound throughout the book, and draws valid and illuminating comparisons with current music trends. It is notable how many artists and bands enjoying considerable success in 1971 are still at the top of their game in 2016. All in all, very enjoyable and informative.

I agree with 1975 Eyejaybee, throw in Born to Run and Sabotage, although Venus and Mars did have an overall lowering effect !

52. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens.

This was Dickens’s last completed novel, originally published in serial form in twenty episodes during 1864 and 1865. Though not as long as Bleak House, it contains more complexities of plot and is peopled by a vast cast of characters: perhaps rather too many for even a novelist of Dickens’s calibre to choreograph capably.

The opening scene shows Dickens at his best, with Gaffer Hexham, a waterman from Rotherhithe, out in his small boat on the Thames with his beautiful daughter Lizzie, retrieving a corpse form the water. We soon learn that this is not as unusual an occurrence as might be supposed, and that Hexham is known as a finder of corpses. Papers on this particular corpse suggest that it is John Harmon, heir to the estate of his father, ‘the Golden Dustman’, who had made a fortune out of marshalling and removing the capital’s rubbish. John Harmon had been estranged from his father who had, as a consequence, attached some unconventional conditions to his will, including the unexplained requirement that, to inherit his legacy John Harmon would have to marry Miss Bella Wilfer, daughter of a nearby clerk. In the apparent absence of John Harmon, the whole estate reverts to Mr and Mrs Boffin, former servants of the Golden Dustman

Interleaved with the developing story of the corpse in the river is an account of the Veneerings, a wealthy family with a complacent circle of acquaintances. Dickens uses the Veneering sand their circle to lampoon social mores among the caste of newly prosperous businessmen and their families, and also to compare the comfort and ostentation of their existence with the poverty rife around the city. They indulge in prurient discussion about the disposition of the estate of the Golden Dustman, and enjoy a good laugh at the prospect of the Boffins struggling to adjust to their new found wealth. In fact, the Boffins seem surprisingly unaffected by their good fortune, and are principally concerned at how they might help Miss Wilfer, and what other good works they might undertake.

Dickens always tries to provide hefty doses of light relief (most notably to my mind in the person of Jerry Cruncher in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’). In ‘Our Mutual Friend, the comedy derives from Silas Wegg, a one-legged purveyor of fancy goods, whom Mr Boffin, recognising his own lack of education, commissions to read Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ to him. Wegg is a great opportunist, and drives a hard bargain, eager as he is to earn sufficient money to buy back his missing leg which has been preserved by Mr Venus, a prolific taxidermist.

The plot is far too complex for me to attempt a synopsis here. There are, however, some of Dickens’s more common themes such as the gulf between the rich and poor, social pretension, the redeeming power of education and also rebirth and reinvention. I feel that Dickens let the gravity of his themes overwhelm him to the extent that he lost control of the plot. There are more unresolved threads than is usual for Dickens, and a lack of coherence within some of his principal characters. I enjoyed the book over all but felt that this was Dickens slightly overreaching himself.

I found this one a bit of a struggle overall; it had some good characters and a few good scenes, but isn't one of my favourite Dickens novels (better than Little Dorrit though!).

53. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood.

I seem to have read a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction recently, in which an all too fragile edifice of civilisation breaks down leaving a threatening and increasingly feral dystopian society. Emily St John Mandel’s ‘Station Eleven’ and Louise Welsh’s ‘A Lovely Way to Burn’ were among the finest examples, along with Margaret Atwood’s ‘Oryx and Crace’.

‘The Year of the Flood’ is not so much a sequel to ‘Oryx and Crace’ as a companion volume. The earlier book looked back from an unspecified near future in the aftermath of the devastation of society (though it soon became clear through the protagonist’s recollections that society had actually been fragmenting for a long time) through the eyes of Snowman who had lived on the fringes of the privileged establishment. Snowman’s best friend had been a prominent researcher for a sinister Corporation that had been experimenting with new genomes and microbes whose unregulated escape had prompted the final devastation.

In ‘The Year of the Flood’ the story of the ‘waterless Flood’ is recounted from the perspective of a sect, God’s Gardeners, who had set themselves aside from the general run of society and established a network of self-sufficient vegan communes around California. The bulk of the novel takes the form of alternating narratives from Toby, one of the senior women within the sect, and Ren, a younger, former member of the sect who had been removed from it by her opportunistic and self-serving mother.

Both Toby and Ren have survived the devastation wrought by the plague (details of which are only hinted at), though neither of them know how many other survivors there are. Toby feels under siege in the spa complex in which she had ended up working, to evade detection by the security forces following a series of violent acts perpetrated by various militant vegetarian groups. Meanwhile Ren is locked in a secure room within a high tech brothel where she had been an exotic trapeze artist. Each section of the book starts with a sermon preached by the sect’s leader, Adam One, followed by one of the hymns that the sect would chant, before leading into the interlaced narratives of Ren and Toby.

This may all sound rather self-righteous and off-putting, but Atwood tells her story with her characteristic verve. Blending offbeat humour with acute observation and a plethora of cryptic literary and religious allusions. Her depiction of God’s Gardeners is masterful, drawing on a range of Old Testament themes (particularly the stories from ‘Genesis’ of the Creation), mixed with some suitably hippyesque embroidery, yet remaining almost alarmingly plausible. After all, I suppose that quasi-religious sects in California are not that difficult to believe!

The story unwinds at a gripping pace, and resonates powerfully with ‘Oryx and Crace’, with the two novels between them delivering a very powerful impact.

54. Fresh Hell by Rachel Johnson.

This is the third (and probably final) instalment of Rachel Johnson’s saga about life in Notting Hill, and brings the story to a successful conclusion. The Flemings have returned to Lonsdale Gardens, where they were living in the first volume (Notting Hell), though now they are in a formerly council-owned property abutting the gardens rather than the town house they owned in the first volume.

As with the previous volumes, the story takes the form of alternating narratives from Mimi Fleming and Clare Sturgis, but, as a new departure, there are also occasional contributions from Ralph, Mimi’s husband, and a few blog posts from Mirabel, Mimi’s eldest daughter. As with the two previous books, this format works well, allowing the story to move forward at a brisk pace, and allowing for humorous comparison of differing perspectives. Johnson offers very sharp observation of the absurdities of life in what I tend to think of as London’s ‘Other Hill’ where conspicuous and unnecessary expenditure is obligatory.

There are several plots unwinding concurrently. In the background lies the outrage of local residents about plans to extend a neighbouring house by adding three basement levels. While there are genuine concerns about the possible impact on other properties arising from subsidence, exacerbated by traffic disruption, the foremost emotions among the wealthier neighbours are envy and annoyance that they hadn’t thought of this wheeze first themselves. Against the backdrop of the campaign to challenge this development, Johnson weaves in a complicated thread of relationships extending all around the square. The effect is successful, and strong enough to sustain the characters through their third outing (though perhaps three volumes might be sufficient).

55. Star Struck by Val McDermid.

This is the sixth (and so far the final) novel featuring Val McDermid’s appealing private investigator Kate Brannigan. In the run up to Christmas Kate has been retained to protect Gloria Kendal, one of the leading stars in ‘Northerners’, a hugely popular long-running soap opera set in the Manchester area (I wonder what that could be modelled upon!), who has been plagued with threatening poison pen letters.

Meanwhile her friend and self-defence trainer, Dennis, finds himself under arrest after a the body is found in a shop-squat he has been running. Convinced of Dennis’s innocence, despite his long track record of organised crime across the Manchester gangland, Kate undertakes to investigate to try to clear him. And it has started snowing heavily!

As always with Val McDermid, the plot is perfectly plausible and well-constructed, and the characters are utterly believable. She uses the plot to satirise the world of soap operas, and draws on her own experiences as a journalist to expose the traffic in leaked plotlines and cast members’ secrets. Brannigan is a great character: independent and tough, yet also capable of great emotional insight. Without the gory serial murders that characterise McDermid’s later works, this is a traditional detective story – well planned and well written.

56. Young Pattullo by J. I. M. Stewart.

This is, quite simply, my favourite novel EVER.

It is, as it happens, the second volumes in a sequence of five (A Staircase in Surrey) that chronicles Duncan Pattullo's experiences at, and relationship with, a fictional Oxford college. In the first instalment, The Gaudy, which is set in the late 1960s or very early 1970s, Pattullo, now a successful playwright, returns to Oxford for the first time in more than twenty years to attend a celebratory old boys' dinner at the college. During this visit he meets some of his contemporaries and, after inadvertently becoming embroiled in resolving an unsavoury episode involving the son of his closest friend from student days, he finds himself being offered the opportunity to take up a Fellowship in Modern European Drama.

For this second instalment Stewart takes us back to Pattullo's first year as an undergraduate. in 1945 or 1946. Raised in Edinburgh and educated at what is clearly meant to be Fettes, young Duncan Pattullo had never initially entertained the dream of going to Oxford. However, fate, in the form of his unorthodox father intervened with dramatic consequences. Lachlan Pattullo is an accomplished artist, generally specialising in landscapes, though not above accepting commissions for portraits. One recent such commission had required him to paint Professor McKechnie, a dreary though capable academic at Edinburgh University. McKechnie is a sombre and quiet man except upon the subject of his son Ranald, a schoolmate of Duncan's. Fed up of hearing the ceaseless eulogies about Ranald and his imminent departure on a scholarship to Oxford, Lachlan arranges for Duncan to have a shot at the John Ruskin Scholarship, which he successfully bags. Stewart gives us a lovely cameo in which young Pattullo first encounters the gathering of rather upper class English alumni of the more accomplished public schools, but without resorting to crass stereotyping - all of the boys seem immensely plausible.

Duncan is beset with all of the regular dilemmas and challenges of growing up, though it is clear that he immediately falls in love with everything about Oxford. He soon becomes friendly with the fellow residents on the staircase in Surrey quadrangle where his rooms are located, notably Tony Mumford (who would later evolve in Lord Marchpayne, Cabinet member), Gavin Moggridge and Cyril Bedworth. There are scenes of high comedy mixed with others of great sensitivity.

Stewart's masterful cameos are not just restricted to Pattullo's fellow students. Edward Pococke, Provost of the College, is a picture of urbanity and tends towards courteous litotes, while Duncan's two personal tutors, the permanently distracted Albert Talbert and the mage-like J B Timbermill, are particulrly finely drawn. The latter, who teaches Duncan the wonders of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English literature (my own chosen area of specialisation as an undergraduate) is clearly modelled on J R R Tolkien.

Alongside the beautiful depiction of Oxford in the 1940s Stewart also gives an insight into Duncan's far from conventional homelife which includes a slightly mad uncle, the self-styled laird of Glencorry whose Highland retreat Duncan visits at length.

I have often wondered why this novel means so much to me, and I have never quite put my finger on it. Still, I have read it many times already, and I look forward to reading it many time more!

57. The Leeds Fiasco by Angus Ross.

I first read this book about thirty-five years ago, when I had just moved to Leeds as a student. Back then I enjoyed it as a fairly fast-moving adventure romp reminiscent of Desmond Bagley or Alistair Maclean. This time I was less impressed.

The book is narrated by Mark Farrow, a member of an unspecified intelligence agency, who has been called upon to investigate the leak of technological secrets from a licensed manufacturer based in Leeds. As with Bagley’s and Maclean’s, Ross’s book is wholly plot driven – there is no attempt to develop any of the characters. Indeed, no cliché is knowingly overlooked, and in addition to some ‘professional’ northerner’s disdain for Londoners there is a smattering of homophobia, and a gun slinging American security man.

It wasn’t all bad, though. Ross’s description of Leeds rings true to my memories of the city, and there is a marvellous description of Bryan’s fish and chip shop on Weetwood Lane (rather feebly disguised as ‘Bryant’s’ of ‘Wheetwood Lane’).

Still, time moves inexorably on and while this book may well have been in tune with its own time of the late 1970s, it hasn’t aged very well.

58. The Age of Reinvention by Karine Tuil.

This is a fine example of a clever idea for a novel that fell foul of a deliberately impenetrable prose style that made it take on the proportions of a painful ordeal rather than a n intriguing challenge (which had been my early assessment). I am not sure whether the relentless opacity of the prose is a consequence of a hesitant translation (the novel was written in French) or inadequacies in the original.

The basic premise is certainly alluring enough. Sam Tahar was the son of Tunisian immigrants living in an impoverished suburb of Paris. By dint of hard work, opportunism and the partial theft of a friend’s identity, or at least the crucial elements of his past, has forged a new life for himself as a successful New York lawyer. The friend who had been destined for similar success in still living in Paris, mired in poverty, and more or less living from hand to mouth. Almost predictably their paths are brought back together, with devastating results.

As with so many novels these days, this book would have benefited from being at least one hundred pages shorter. The descriptions are effective – the contrast between Sam Tahar’s current life and the trials of his upbringing are deftly managed – but the plot seemed too laboured

59. Black Water by Louise Doughty.

This was possibly my biggest literary disappointment so far this year. I have loved all of Louise Doughty’s previous novels (and not just because I knew her at university), and had been eagerly awaiting this one, especially as her last one, ‘Apple Tree Yard’, had been so good (certainly in the top three or four books that I read that year).

Things seem to have gone slightly awry, however, as I found this book to be very heavy going. One of the characteristics of Doughty’s previous books has been her knack of immediately grabbing the reader’s attention and engulfing them entirely in the story. That talent seemed wholly absent here, and I had to make a huge effort to keep pushing through this book. Because it is by her, I will make a point of trying it again in a few weeks (I am, after all a great believer in the idea that one has to be in the right mood for certain books), and hope that I experience a wholly different response then.

60. The Vinyl Detective by Andrew Cartmel.

This is one of those frustrating books that might so easily have been brilliant, but sadly fell short in the execution, As is so often the case, I think that the biggest problem arose simply from it being rather too long. The first couple of hundred pages or so were very entertaining, with a clever, engaging and humorous plot peopled with some appealing characters, coming together to yield a quirky and original novel.

The first person narrator collects vinyl records, specialising in classic jazz though prepared to dabble in discs from any genre if they are suitably rare. He holds on to many of the records he finds, unable to bring himself to part with some of the more esoteric of his finds. He does, however, also deal very successful with clients around the world, many of whom specifically commission him to find particular treasures. He is connected by a new client of this sort who wants him to track down a particularly rare pressing of a limited edition jazz album from the early 1950s. His curiosity is pricked and he takes on the commission, not entirely uninfluenced by the fact that his client is dazzlingly beautiful.

The plot develops soundly, with the narrator and client poring through jumble sales, charity shops and record fairs, striving to track down the elusive record. It soon becomes apparent that someone else appears to be on the trail of the missing record too, and strange accidents begin to befall some of the narrator’s associates from the vinyl hunting community.

Cartmel makes some astute and humorous observations about the nature of obsessive collecting in general, and vinyl fanatics in particular, and the first half of the book certainly races along. Sadly, around the halfway mark I found that the story started to lose its way, and what had been appealingly quirky started to seem simply irksome and irritating. A great idea, but I fear the author was slightly lacking in the narrative skill to pull it off.

61. Stasi Child by David Young.

As the guardian knight from the closing scenes of ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ might have said, ‘I chose poorly’ with this book. I had found myself in Sheffield with neither a book not sufficient charge on my Kindle to sustain me on the journey home, and this was the only vaguely appealing book I could see in the station newsagent.

It didn’t even hold my attention as far as Chesterfield: weak plot and utterly implausible characters. The basic story revolves around the investigation into the death of a young girl whose body was found near the Berlin Wall, on the East German side, with a clear implication that she had been escaping from rather than into the West. The investigation is hampered by conflicts between the Stasi and the Vopos, different arms of law enforcement. There was, however, no cliché knowingly overlooked, and my journey down to London seemed to take an inordinately long time without anything worthwhile to read

#93 - many Doctor Who fans would say this also typified his Doctor Who TV scripts - good idea and quirkiness, but a lack of solid plotting.

62. Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel.

It isn't often that I re-read a book within a few months, but I was so astounded by this masterpiece that I have now read it for the third time in the space of not much more than a year, and it just gets better with each new reading.

I can scarcely remember my first encounter with the post-apocalyptic road story genre. Perhaps it was the BBC television series 'Survivors' which initially enthralled before merely irritating viewers during the late 1970s. Cormac McCarthy restored some class to the genre with 'The Road', but it has been to Emily St John Mandel to bring it to its apotheosis with the awesome 'Station Eleven'.

The basic scenario is simple, but chilling. As the novel opens, fêted actor Arthur Leander is performing in the title role of 'King Lear' in the Elgin Theatre, Toronto, when he suddenly collapses and, despite the sustained efforts of Jeevan, who yearns to become a paramedic, dies on stage. Arthur is not the only person dying unexpectedly in Toronto that evening. Earlier in the day a plane had landed from Eastern Europe, packed with passengers unaware that they were carrying Georgian Flu. As snow starts to fall, the emergency rooms at the city's hospitals are rapidly filling up with patients in the deeper throes of desperate illness, and the epidemic has already taken hold. The spread and impact of the disease is unstoppable, and within a few days hundreds of millions of people around the world are dead, and the fragile foundations of the infrastructure of cohesive civilisation are crumbling.

The action then moves on twenty years and focuses on Kirsten Raymonde who is part of a band of survivors who move around the Great Lakes area of North America. There is no society left. All that remains are scattered gatherings of survivors. There is no electricity, and what fuel that remains has gone stale and cannot be used. There is certainly no imposed authority - each settlement has established its own discrete laws and is focused solely on its own survival. Some of these communities are worse than others, but there are some common factors throughout: outsiders are unwelcome and viewed with suspicion.

Of course, much of the above description must sound like fairly customary post-apocalyptic fodder. Emily Mandel’s stroke of genius, that sets this book so far above others in the genre, resides in her decision to make Kirsten's band of survivors so different. The group calls itself ‘The Travelling Symphony' and comprises a selection of musicians and actors who have taken to performing some of the more popular works of classical music and performing Shakespeare's plays. Their motto, taken from an episode of 'Star Trek: Voyager' is 'Because survival is insufficient'. We subsequently learn that Kirsten had been one of a group of young girls who had actually been in the production of 'King Lear' featuring Arthur Leander.

In fact, in many ways Arthur Leander is the hub around which the whole novel revolves. Although he dies within the first few pages, Mandel fills in much of his life as remembered by other key characters. The story flashes back at various stages to illuminate the earlier life of some of the characters, and Mandel interlaces the story with terrific dexterity. Her language is amazing, too. She manages to combine a ferocious clarity with moments of startling beauty. The title of the novel is a reference to a comic series featured in two books that are among Kirsten's most prized possessions from before the demise. There is a complex and moving back story involving these comics which lend a spellbinding further dimension to the novel.

When I previously reviewed this novel last year I bemoaned the fact that it was unlikely that I would read anything else quite so good throughout the rest of the year. I was fortunate enough to read some excellent books throughout the rest of last year, and so far through 2016, but I still feel that nothing has really topped this … with the possible exception of Emily St John Mandel’s own ‘Last Night in Montreal’, and I sense an imminent re-reading of that, too!

You're obviously really taken with this novel, Ian. I read it in April 2015 and enjoyed it certainly, and gave it 4 stars out of 5, but maybe I will read it again - I practically never re-read a novel so relatively soon after first doing so.

63. Dispatches by Michael Herr.*

I was saddened to read the obituaries of Michael Herr who died just a few days ago at the age of seventy-six. For a lot of people, particularly men, of around my age his book Dispatches captured the essence of the Vietnam War, a campaign with which I have always had a bit of an obsession.

I turned twelve years old in 1975, just as the Americans withdrew from South Vietnam and, shortly afterwards, the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia. For the previous few months I had been captivated by the seemingly interminable reports each night on the television news showing firefights, helicopter sorties and general mayhem as the war drew gradually towards it close. Of course, I had very little idea what it was all about but to a young boy it simply all looked very exciting.

The Vietnam War was perhaps the first multimedia engagement, with footage broadcast nightly to the rest of the world, courtesy of a huge corps of reporters (from both the traditional press and the burgeoning television companies who were eager to fill their news programmes with footage from the front). Michael Herr spent several years as part of that press corps, travelling all over the country in military helicopters and planes, writing articles for Esquire, Time and Life magazines.

The book is very difficult to describe – Herr effortlessly conveys the horrors of engagement, the terror and the brutality, yet also the camaraderie and sensitivity that the troops displayed, all set against the backdrop of the draft and the Civil Rights movement back home. His style is vibrant – Herr was, after all, one of the earliest and most adept exponents of what was then the emerging literary form of ‘New Journalism’. Fact written as seamlessly and engagingly as fiction.

Herr’s prose is meticulous, often veering towards the poetic, paradoxically often hitting its most purple patches when tackling the most awful subject matter. He also captures the zeitgeist of the times. Rest and recreation spells in Saigon were played out to an amazing sound track of 1960s rock, fuelled by handfuls of hallucinogens and downers. There is a wistfulness there, too (‘Of course, coming back home was a down. What could you do for a finish’), and a feeling that the rest of his life would always be coloured by his experiences in Vietnam. (‘I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.’) He doesn’t glamourise war, but there is an inescapable sense that participation made combatants different from the rest of us.

64. It's a Tough Game, Son by David Icke.
David Icke has had several careers. He started out as a professional footballer, playing in goal for Coventry City and then Hereford United before having to retire from the game while still in his twenties, having fallen prey to pernicious arthritis. He then became a sports reporter before progressing to local television presenter, appearing regularly as the sports anchor on BBC television’s ‘Midlands Today’ programme. That catapulted him into nationwide recognition, and he soon became a regular presenter of BBC’s flagship sports programme ‘Grandstand’ and host of its coverage of any number of one-off sporting events.

That career came to an early end in the late 1980s when after he became one of the leading national spokesmen for the then emergent Green Party, falling foul of the Corporation’s need to avoid any appearance of political affiliation. In 1990, however, he reinvented himself as a Messianic figure, calling himself a ‘Son of the Godhead’ (the Godhead being, in this context, the Infinite Mind) and dressing only in turquoise clothes, which he saw as a conduit for positive energy. He then made a series of bizarre prophecies, including the end of the world in 1997. At first the prevailing view was that he seemed to be going through a very public nervous breakdown. He did, however, prove to have a further career as a new age guru, in which role he has delivered popular lectures (often lasting more than ten hours) at venues all around the world. He has also become a raving conspiracist, compiling ever more intricate and implausible explanations for what most people might consider natural phenomena.

This book deals with his first incarnation as aspiring, though ultimately disappointed, footballer. It was written almost as a warning or manual for young boys who also thought that a career in football might be their salvation and route to wealth and fame. I was surprised to read that Icke had left school early, with few qualifications, as my principal recollections of him were as a very articulate presenter, whose remarks had the added value of someone who had undergone rigorous sporting application of their own.

He writes as clearly as he used to speak on television. There is no purple prose; just a clear explanation of his experiences in the game and the pitfalls he encountered. He doesn’t glamourise the game (he played in an era far before the influx of huge sums of money – when his arthritis forced him from the game he had just £36 in the bank), but his love of the game shines through.

He also offers some vivid pen portraits of prominent players of the day, including Peter Shilton (to some extent his idol as an East Midlands goalkeeper) and Steve Perryman. His description of the first time he saw the legendary George Best is also engaging and touching.

This is not a book that I would ever have dreamt of reading in the ordinary course of events, but was passed it by my boss who had uncovered it at the back of a cupboard when clearing out his mother’s house. That was serendipitous as it proved a very enjoyable and nostalgic read, though I do not feel even vaguely tempted to venture into his more new age works.

Footballer to sports commentator to Green party spokesman to new age guru is certainly an interesting life trajectory!

>100 mabith: There is a certain irony that when he declared himself as a supporter (in fact one of the leading figures) of the Green Party, the reactionary press in Britain, such as the Daily Mail and Daily Express, felt that he lend a certain tone and gravitas to the Green movement that had thitherto been lacking. When his public persona imploded there was a certain degree of schadenfreude as it confirmed their deep-rooted anti-green prejudices.

It seems so unbelievably unfortunate for the Greens.

65. A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming.

The principal protagonist is Thomas Kell, a recently ‘retired’ officer in MI6 who is currently awaiting subpoena as a witness in a prosecution arising from alleged incidents of ‘extraordinary rendition’. Out of the blue he receives a call from a former colleague asking for help tracing the woman who has been chosen by the powers that be as the next head of MI6, who appears to have disappeared while on a holiday visit to the south of France.

Having nothing better to do, Kell agrees to help, flying down to Nice to try to pick up her trail. Cumming gives a fascinating insight into low level spycraft, all of which will certainly lead me to change my own habits when staying in a hotel!

The novel has constant twists and turns, but never loses its basic plausibility. It did, however, keep taking me by surprise, and I found it an immensely enjoyable read. There is a more serious element to the novel though, with Kell’s departure from the Service allowing for detailed consideration of the various sides of the argument around extraordinary rendition.

Cumming isn’t John le Carre – he may have the detailed knowledge of the field but he doesn’t have le Carre’s masterful prose (but then who else has?)

66. The Third Man by Graham Greene.
Carol Reed’s film of The Third Man, starring Orson Welles as Harry Lime and famous for its haunting theme music played on a zither, is widely (perhaps universally) acknowledged one of the great cinematic classics. This is the book of the film – unusually, the film came first, Graham Greene expanding his screenplay to produce this novella.

Set in post-war Vienna, a city governed jointly by the victorious Allies from the Second World War. The life of the boulevardier is long gone, replaced by ultra-austerity and grim rationing. Each of the four powers controls a different section of the city and movement between the different zones, and particularly in and out of the Soviet area, is limited. Green captures the endemic melancholia marvellously: that was, after all, so often his trademark. Many of his novels are set against a context of pervasive misery and pessimism. Indeed, critics came to refer to the hinterland of gloom as ‘Greeneland’ and late 1940s Vienna fits the bill closely.

The novella is recounted by Calloway, a Scotland Yard police officer who had been sent to Vienna with the gazetted military rank of colonel. He is, however, investigating black market infractions. Rollo Martins, who struggles to make a living as the writer of hammy Westerns, is invited out to Vienna by his old school friend Harry Lime, who lures him with the offer of a job writing promotional material for a charity bringing comfort to some of the hordes of displaced persons who have been drawn to the city. Upon his arrival in Vienna, however, Martins learns that Lime had died a few days ago, and is about to be buried that very afternoon. Feeling a displaced person himself, martins speaks to some of Harry Lime’s circle of friends and acquaintances, each of whom offers a slightly different version of Harry’s death. Confused and upset, Martins’s discomfiture increases when he suddenly sees Lime, large as life, walking down the street.

The story unwinds dexterously and Martins is pulled further into the mystery as he tries to reconstruct Lime’s life in Vienna, and to explain his apparent death and subsequent reappearance. Issues of conscience and obscured morality were Greene’s speciality, fuelled by his own doubts and religious ambivalence, allowing him to capture Martin’s quandary perfectly.

I think that this is one of those rare instances where the film is better than the book, though the book is still exceptionally strong, and it certainly demonstrates Greene on top form.

*Edited to correct a careless slip in the last sentence

#66 - Ian, I think you meant to say this is one of the rare instances where the film is better than the book (and I would agree, the direction and music are key parts of it success).

Yes, John - spot on.

67. The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller.

What an irritating book!

This is a fine example of a very good idea that suffered from woeful execution. Andy Miller catalogues his reading for a year, recounting how he came to acquire each book and the impact it made upon him as he read. On the face of it, this should have made for a fascinating account, of particular interest to other bibliophiles. Sadly he squandered this golden opportunity for a fine book by trying (but failing lamentably) to be funny. Unfortunately he is just not a good enough writer to pull this off, and the books just ends up being deliberately quirky.

I laughed until I stopped.

68 The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees by Rob Penn.

This is a gem of a book. Rob Penn has had a lifelong love of trees and wooden artefacts. In 2014 he selected a mature ash tree in a forest and, with the aid of local experts, cut it down with a view to seeing how many useful items he could make, or have made for him, from the wood it yielded. The list of items is astounding. The book is, however, so much more than a simple catalogue of artefacts.

Penn encounters some amazing artisans, all of whom share a deep love for working with wood, and take an immense pride in working to historic methods. Ash is one of our most prevalent trees, and archaeological evidence from around the world suggests that its wood has been used by humans for at least five thousand years. Among its many attractive qualities are its simple abundance, augmented by the fact that it grows very quickly, usually with a very even grain structure. When properly seasoned it also loses more of its natural moisture content that most similar woods, making it lighter than them.

Penn travels the country to visit the specialist workers who make the various items for him. He offers a loving description of their workmanship, and the care and attention that they bring to their respective crafts. He also goes in to the history of the various items he commissions, which allows him to go off at tangents, for example explaining the history of the Irish game of hurling or chronicling the development of the toboggan. One chapter (The Crack of the Bat) sees him visiting America where he has a baseball bat made for him. This is a cue for a potted history of the baseball bat. I can imagine my friends rolling their eyes and smirking as they read that, feeling that a history of the baseball bat was just what they needed to make their lives complete, though I can assure them that this little adjunct was riveting, just as all his other sidebars are.

Penn writes with great clarity but tremendous enthusiasm, and I was left feeling very envious of the various objects he amassed from his single felled tree.

In The Year of Reading Dangerously was there any explanation of why the reading was labeled dangerous?

>109 mabith: The danger arose from the risk of becoming obsessed with the books, to the exclusion of other tasks. (I guess we all know about that on this site.)

I suppose I think of that as a positive side effect of reading! Though my version of obsession tends to be limited to frequent re-reads and giving other people copies of the book.

69. The Allegations by Mark Lawson.

Although he is principally known as a journalist and broadcaster, Mark Lawson is also a very accomplished novelist, and this latest book will serve to boost that reputation further. Until a couple of years ago Lawson was the lead presenter on BBC Radio 4’s daily arts review programme, Front Row, in which he demonstrated his eclectic knowledge across a variety of genres, and showed that one did not have to subside into flaccid sycophancy when interviewing artists. He was, however, moved from that show with relatively little notice, with rumours attributing his removal to allegations of bullying. That clearly rankled, though I suppose everything in life is potentially valuable copy for a novelist, and his experiences have clearly informed this marvellous novel.

There are two closely intertwined plots. In the principal storyline, Ned Marriott, a celebrated television historian, known for his controversial takes on familiar historical events, finds himself arrested on the day following his sixtieth birthday, accused of an unusual variation of a historical instance of sexual assault stretching back nearly forty years to the sweltering summer of 1976, when Ned was still a postgraduate student. Ned’s world starts to unravel as the police pursue their investigations, confiscating all his family’s computers, tablets and mobile telephones. Never a complete stranger to hypochondria anyway, Ned’s health suffers and he finds himself on a heady cocktail of anti-depressants and blood pressure medications. Lawson’s portrayal of a bewildered and frightened man having to inform his family (grown up twin daughters from a first marriage, a nine-year-old son from his current relationship and his ageing mother and stepfather) of the charges laid against him is adroit. Ned’s life seems fixed permanently on hold while the police continue to delve into his past. It takes a while before Ned’s name comes into the public domain, but once it does, it creates a huge stir across social media. He also finds himself in the hitherto unfamiliar position of no longer being wanted as a television pundit.

Meanwhile Tom Pimm, Ned’s closest friend, and fellow academic in the history faculty of the University of Middle England (with twin campus sites in Coventry and Buckinghamshire), finds himself the subject of an investigation into allegations of bullying. Tom is certainly a pedant, given to feelings of intellectual superiority over some of the less gifted among his academic colleagues, but he is aghast at the thought that he might be a bully. He is soon finding himself a victim, however, as anonymous accusations are stacked against him. Both find themselves on suspension while their respective investigations drag on. Lawson uses the investigation into Tom Pimm to lampoon hollow management jargon and over-eager political correctness, but the Kafkaesque procedure (Lawson offers an instructive course in the literature of false or groundless accusation throughout the work as both Ned and Tom find themselves increasingly obsessed with literary paradigms of their own circumstances) is chilling. Internal disciplinary procedures are necessary but can bring their own terrors if not handled sensitively. Meanwhile the shadow of Operation Yew Tree looms oppressively over the whole story.

The linked plots are delicately balanced, and complement each other. While the description of the scenario may sound sombre, the novel is extremely funny: gallows humour from both Ned and Tom, and crushing satire about the over commercialisation of universities, where students are now referred to as customers, and where a lecturer is criticised for pitching his lectures at too clever a level.

All in all a great success – if anything, I found it even better than Lawson’s last novel, The Deaths, which was one of my favourite books from the year it was published.

70. Thirst by Benjamin Warner.

I have been reading a lot of dystopian novels recently, some of them a lot better than the rest. Sadly this was not one of the better examples. I bought it at the newly refurbished flagship branch of Foyle’s on Charing Cross Road where they were offering it at half price. I realise now that they were probably ashamed to have it in the store.

The basic premise is that following a sudden infrastructure failure, an American city finds itself cut off, without power or running water, and, predictably, civilisation turns out to be more fragile than previously imagined. Within days, the hitherto neighbourly society crumbles and it becomes everyone for themselves.

All rather tired as plot material goes. I did initially think that there might be a new twist here, but I suspect that Warner lacked the literary wherewithal to bring it off.

71. End of Watch by Stephen King.

I had high hopes for this novel but found myself disappointed. It is the third volume in a series that also features Mr Mercedes and Finders Keepers, which related the killings by Brady Hartsfield and their aftermath. I enjoyed both of the previous volumes, which succeeded as high calibre crime stories, grounded in reality and free from any dependence upon the supernatural phenomena which have been so characteristic of much of King’s work.

Don’t get me wrong. I have enjoyed a lot of King’s horror stories in the past, and think he is a master of the genre. I have, however, lost my taste for such diversions now, and was sorry to see them obtruding into this novel.

This story opens with retired police detective Bill Hodges being called by his former work partner to attend the scene of an apparent murder/suicide. One of the survivors of Hartsfield’s murderous attack on the queue of people awaiting the opening of a job fair had been left paralysed, and had subsequently been tended by her mother. Both women are now dead, with the clear inference that the mother had given her daughter a lethal cocktail of medication before then killing herself. There are, however, a couple of trivial loose ends which prick Hodges’s curiosity.

Hartsfield remains in a secure wing of the local hospital where, considered incapable of contributing towards his own defence, he has been undergoing medical treatment, though he remains severely handicapped, both physically and mentally. Rumours abound, however, that strange things happen in his room. When Hartsfield is agitated, drawers appear to open and close, and objects on the table fall to the ground, all without any perceptible contact from Hartsfield himself.

I, personally, found my credibility too sorely tried by all of this, which detracted from what had otherwise been an entertaining and gripping series of stories. There is much to be positive about, though. As usual, King’s characters, and their dialogue, are completely plausible, and his ability to build suspense remains as sharp as ever.

72. Maddaddam by Margaret Atwood.

Somehow this third, and concluding volume, of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian chronicle didn’t quite work for me, though I am struggling to identify why.

The story picks up immediately after the end of the previous book, The Year of the Flood, with Toby and Ren rescuing Amanda from the ‘Painball’ escapees, and encountering the dishevelled and disoriented Jimmy (‘The Snowman’ from Oryx and Crace, and a former boyfriend of Ren from their school days). They return to a temporary base and set about trying to re-establish civilisation.

Margaret Atwood is a master of many genres, and this series has reaffirmed (not that it was ever in question!) dexterity with science fiction. Her vision of the future is appalling, but terrifyingly plausible. Civilisation is fragile and all too susceptible to the unexpected. Her attention to detail is extraordinary, and the book is peppered with clever literary, religious and sociological allusions (and they are just the ones I spotted, which probably represents an embarrassingly small proportion of the total)

Reading what I have just written I am struggling to understand why I don’t feel more enthusiastic about this book, but it just didn’t strike the spark in me that I had expected. Don’t worry, though, Margaret; I’m pretty sure it’s not you but me.

73. The Gifts of Reading by Robert Macfarlane.

Robert Macfarlane is well known for his love of walking, climbing and camping in the wilds, and has enthralled his fans with his previous books including The Old Ways and Mountains of the Mind. This latest work is an essay about the great pleasure that derives either from giving or receiving books. Of course, that sounds rather like a statement of the obvious, but Macfarlane develops his point with great clarity, citing exchanges of books with an old (now dead) friend with whom he worked and travelled in China.

He also recounts his love of Patrick leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, which he had himself received as a gift years ago. Leigh Fermor’s book relates his adventures walking from London to Constantinople in 1933, an adventure that inspired some of Macfarlane’s own expeditions. He now takes great pleasure in giving away copies of that book among others.

This may just be a short essay but it encompasses important themes about the value of literature and friendship and the catharsis of giving, all written with Macfarlane’s customary clarity and simplicity.

74. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot by David Shafer.

This was one of those odd cases where I think the novel was very clever, with an intricate, well thought out plot, but I just couldn’t make myself like it.

There are three separate plot lines revolving around a young Persian-American woman working for an NGO in Burma, a young man who has just lost his job working for a childcare setting in Portland, Oregon, and an author of a self-help manual who is working the promotional chat show circuit. There is no apparent connection between them … except that they might be subject to scrutiny by a secret ‘shadow government’. From there it trundles on as a conspiracy thriller.

I think my difficulties with this book arose from the narrative tone – the plot was potentially strong, but it just didn’t hang together as a book. I wonder whether the author was too concerned with how it might be filmed.

75. A Memorial Service by J. I. M. Stewart.

I found re-reading this novel particularly moving. This is the third volume in Stewart's masterful sequence A Staircase in Surrey and it opens with Duncan Pattullo embarking on a new career as a Fellow of his old Oxford College. I had the great good fortune to enjoy a brief tenure as a (decidedly junior) Fellow of an Oxford College during the early/mid 1980s, perhaps ten or fifteen years after this novel is set, and despite that slight time lag I felt that I could recognise almost everything that Pattullo encounters. Certainly the relationships between the different tenants of the staircase struck all too poignant a chord with me.

After all, Stewart himself was an accomplished academic, publishing a series of highly regarded works on late nineteenth/early twentieth century English literature (with particular emphasis on Conrad), so he knew what he was talking about.

The plot revolves around an academic wrangle over a manuscript donated to the College by Lord Blunderville, one of its more celebrated alumni who had eventually risen to be Prime Minister at some unspecified spell between the World Wars. In the preceding volume, Young Pattullo, set during Duncan's time as an undergraduate, we happened to be present when Christopher Cressey, an aloof history don, made away with the book in question, seemingly with the former Prime Minister's blessing. More than twenty years on Cressey still has the manuscript, and the College is now striving to recover it using whatever means are available to it. Duncan is bemused, wondering why so much consternation should arise from the fate of this small book.

Meanwhile the loutish Ivo Mumford, son of Duncan's closest friend from his own student days, is struggling to retain his place in the College having completely fluffed his exams while revelling in the rowdy exploits of the Uffington Club, an exclusive clique of wealthy rowdies (presumably modelled on an early incarnation of David Cameron's Bullingdon Club). Duncan invites the wretched Ivo to launch with a view to trying to encourage him to greater application to his books. These advances are roundly snubbed, though Ivo does tell Duncan that he has been working with a friend to develop a new University magazine by the name of Priapus. Duncan is understandably concerned!

However, the plot, though engaging, is almost superfluous to the glory of the book. Stewart captures the eternal contradictions that bedevil almost every aspect of life in academic Oxford. The College basks in its centuries-long history and proudly defends its traditions, yet is also alive to the changing demands of its undergraduates in times of changing social mores. Personal animosities flourish between the Fellows, yet they are capable of immense sensitivity to the plight of their undergraduates.

Though far shorter than Anthony Powell's beautiful A Dance to the Music of Time, there are great similarities, not least in the use of hilarious scenes underpinned with waves of melancholy. Indeed, one of the leading characters, Cyril Bedworth, has made a career on critical appraisal of Anthony Powell's novels.

Eternally enchanting - I could happily re-read this series every year.

76. The Travelers by Chris Pavone.

Chris Pavone’s previous two novels, ‘The Ex-Pats’ and ‘The Accident’, were both notable for their elaborately sinuous, almost internecine, plots, and he has adopted that approach to his latest book.

Will Rhodes is a journalist, writing for ‘Traveller’ magazine, a long-established journal with a reputation for high quality writing about high end tourist experiences. The organisation publishing the magazine also runs a network of travel bureaux around the world, or at least ran (the impact of the internet has not been kind travel agencies). While out on an assignment in France which involves attending a very exclusive wine tasting event at an impressive chateau, Will meets Elle Hardwick, a beautiful Australian who works in a similar vein. Some months later they meet by chance again at a similarly exclusive event in Argentina. But is Elle, or, indeed, Will, exactly what she claims to be.

The novel flits around the world, an involves an extensive cast of characters, all of whom feel the repercussions of Will’s encounter with Elle. As already mentioned, the plot takes numerous twists and handbrake turns, and I was certainly left guessing wildly adrift at what the next development might be. Very entertaining, though perhaps not quite up to the exceptional standard of ‘The Accident’ which had me fooled completely, and was one of the best thrillers I read last year. ‘The Travellers’ is, however, still very well executed.

77. Another One Goes Tonight by Peter Lovesey.

I am surprised that Peter Lovesey’s books featuring Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond haven’t been adapted for television. After all, Bath, where they are set, is surely as photogenic as Morse’s Oxford, and the pragmatic yet frequently querulous Diamond seems to have the requisite personal idiosyncrasies to guarantee a loyal television audience. Most importantly, the stories themselves are always well constructed and engaging.

This is the sixteenth volume in the series, and once again shows Diamond at odds with Georgina, his Assistant Chief Constable, who has assigned him to a Professional Standards role, investigating an as yet unexplained traffic accident involving a police car in the early hours of the morning. One of the police officers in the car is killed outright, while the other is seriously wounded. Diamond attends the scene of the crash while the traffic officers are still conducting their scrupulous checks, and himself find another victim of the crash, an elderly man who appears to have been knocked an electric tricycle. Diamond is then catapulted into a beguiling investigation to establish what the elderly man (retired engineer and train enthusiast, Ivor Pellegrini) might have been up to, out and about so early in the morning.

Lovesey’s skill lies in his ability to construct quirky plots that still retain the reader’s credibility. Diamond is often irritating, even infuriating, and has a penchant for leaping to convictions and then attempting to make the facts fit his theory, only to have them completely dashed, leaving him to start again. He is, however, an essentially sympathetic figure, and his heart is clearly in the right place. Like all good leaders, he has also had the sense to equip himself with a strong team that can complement his own shortcomings.

Lovesey doesn’t do grim reality, favouring plausibility while picking out a clever path avoiding both the glorification of violence and the cosy, even twee, hinterland inhabited by the likes of Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. As with all the previous volumes in the series, the plot is tightly constructed, and the clues are all there. He did, however, manage completely to fool me (again), and the denouement came as much of a surprise to me as it did to Diamond’s colleagues.

78. The Travelling Companion by Ian Rankin.

Fans of Ian Rankin will be aware of his own fascination with the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, echoes of which are found throughout his crime novels featuring Detective Inspector John Rebus. This short story gives further vent to that preoccupation, revolving around the experiences of Ronald Hastie, a student of English from Edinburgh who takes up the offer of a vacation job working in an antiquarian bookshop in Paris.

While there Hastie meets another bookseller who shows him a manuscript which appears to be an early version of Stevenson’s classic, ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. Meanwhile the hitherto clean living, almost demure, Hastie finds himself undergoing a range of new experiences, some of them with drastic consequences.

I was actually a little disappointed with this story – it wasn’t bad but somehow I expected something a little more polished from Rankin. This seemed more like a brief outline of a potential novel rather than a finished story.

79. Breaking Cover by Stella Remington.

Few people have a stronger claim to know the ins and outs of counter terrorism and counter espionage work than Dame Stella Rimington, former Director General of MI5, and she has applied that insight in eight previous novels featuring her engaging heroine Liz Carlyle. She understands the international context and the political intriguing between the different intelligence agencies at home and the constant jockeying for preferential position between the allies.

This latest novel opens just after the appointment of a new ‘C” (head of MI6) who is keen to improve the public image of the organisation at a time when people are protesting against its perceived powers to snoop on just about anyone. As part of this process he decides to appoint a new Director of Communications to oversee the agency’s relationship with the media. This move is not welcomed by some of the more traditional senior staff, and they are upset further when the appointment is given to Jasminder Kapoor, a prominent human rights lawyer who has frequently striven to hold the service to account over perceived infractions of citizen’s rights to privacy. Ms Kapoor is herself criticised by many of her erstwhile adherents, who fear that she may have ‘sold out’ to the establishment. Against this background of organisational upheaval, Liz Carlyle and her colleagues receive information from a source in Tallinn about a Russian operation against Britain, seeking to infiltrate MI6. Investigations begin.

The operational scenes appear very plausible (as far as I can tell), and Liz Carlyle and her deputy, Peggy Kingsolving, are as engaging and credible as ever. The plot does, however, seem rather weak, revolving as it does on one character’s immense naiveté that stretched my credibility just that little bit too far.

80. A Colder War by Charles Cumming.

Thomas Kell, who first appeared in Charles Cumming’s earlier novel A Foreign Country, returns, this time charged with investigating the sudden death of Paul Wallinger whose plane had crashed during a flight over one of the Greek islands. Wallinger in no ordinary citizen. He was MI5’s chief representative in counter espionage operations in Turkey, and also the occasional lover of Amelia Levine, Head of MI5, and known officially as ‘C’. Kell’s own past is clouded, and he had been on suspension from MI5 following his alleged indirect involvement in an incident of extraordinary rendition some years. His career had been rehabilitated following the events of A Foreign Country, though he has not yet been exonerated, and the official enquiry into the rendition claims continues.

Kell had known Wallinger well, and was shocked to learn of his death. He is even more astounded to learn from ‘C’ that there seems to be a leak and that intelligence operations out of Turkey might have been compromised. Kell is commissioned to investigate, which means reviewing whether Wallinger himself had been a traitor. Being Kell, it is not long before he has managed to embroil himself in additional complications, including starting a relationship with Wallinger’s daughter.

The plot is well constructed, and Cumming gives intriguing insight in intelligence tradecraft. I did, however, occasionally feel that the relationships between Kell and his fellow characters, especially the women (and Rachel Wallinger in particular) were portrayed rather clumsily. Still, over all it was a gripping story that held my attention throughout. Not up to le Carre’s almost peerless standard, but rather more satisfying that Stella Rimington’s most recent offering.

No doubt named after Vernon Kell, the first and longest-serving head of MI5.

81. Idlewild by Mark Lawson.

It has been said that everyone of a certain age remembers where they were when they heard about the assassination of President Kennedy. (I don’t, but then I was only seven months old.) Like the World Trade Centre attacks on 9/11, Kennedy’s murder has become one of the great landmark moments in history: the slaying of an iconic President that spawned thousands of different conspiracy theories, and possibly marked the passing of an age of American innocence. Many of those conspiracy theories also feature the equally iconic actress Marilyn Monroe who was believed to have had a long running affair with the President, and whose suicide in 1962, when at the peak of her fame, rocked the world.

Mark Lawson’s novel conjures an alternative history in which both of them survived. Marilyn Monroe recovers from her drug overdose and goes on to resume her career, though perhaps with some ill-chosen film ventures, while President Kennedy’s life is saved following almost miraculous medical treatment at Parkland Memorial Hospital, and he recovers to resume his Presidency and secure re-election the following year on a wave of sympathy. In November 1993, as the thirtieth year of the attempted assassination nears, the former President prepares for a thanksgiving ceremony in Boston to celebrate his escape.

The speculative nature of the novel is deftly handled, Lawson has obviously done huge amounts of research, not just into the events in Dallas in November 1963 but also into the political careers of his successors. Lyndon B Johnson suffers more than most in this alternative history, having to watch Kennedy secure a landslide re-election, and then seeing Nixon elected in 1968. On the other hand, the opprobrium generally heaped on him over America’s engagement in Vietnam is now directed at Kennedy himself, who loses the effect of canonisation bestowed by the assassination ion the real world.

Lawson crams his story with passing allusions to political events throughout the thirty years following the Dallas shooting – I spotted a lot but am convinced I missed just as many. I particularly liked Michael Dukakis’s appearance as an enthusiastic beat policeman in Boston, with no hint of his real world exploits as Presidential candidate.

The novel is not only very clever but also exceptionally funny. In Lawson’s 1993 America is governed by President Sanders, an independent multi-millionaire from Seattle whose late emergence as a candidate took the 1992 election campaign by storm. Sanders is a marvellous creation, full of homespun half-baked philosophy and bizarre personal beliefs – his aides are constantly alert to try to prevent the President from pressing the metaphorical self-destruct button.

There are so many different strands to this novel: satirical observations about the nature of elections in a media-led political world, the rapacious desire of the press to turn up salacious stories, the nature of celebrity, and the toll exacted by high office. What moist surprised me was that this was Lawson’s first novel – it is excellently plotted and marvellously written, with an almost Dickensian juxtaposition of the hilarious and the tragic.

82. Never Mind by Edward St Aubyn.

What an absolutely appalling book! It is certainly beautifully written, with some of the finest prose I have come across recently, but the characters and the content are simply ghastly. What makes it even worse is the fact that the story is largely true, drawn from the author’s own early life during which he was severely abused (indeed, repeatedly raped) by his father, with tacit complicity, if not direct collusion, from his mother who largely neglected him throughout the rest of his childhood.

The book is the first volume in a series of five recounting various stages in the life of Patrick Metcalfe, an avatar for St Aubyn himself. The action, such as it is, in this first volume all happens within the space of one day, with the focus flitting between a series of characters, none of whom show any vaguely empathetic traits. Even five-year-old Patrick quickly shows himself to be a particularly unpleasant young boy, who takes time to reflect on some of his own bullying behaviour. His parents are steeped in their own respective inadequacies, and devote most of their time to scoring points off each other, or drinking, or (more commonly) both.

The overall impact of the novel is strange – the combination of the horrific content and the enchanting prose has an almost hypnotic effect, though not sufficient to make me want to read any more of the series. We often consider the triumph of style over substance, but despite St Aubyn’s best efforts it lost out here, with disastrous effect. My first reaction upon finishing this book was that I felt I really needed a decent shower.

I think this is the same Mark Lawson who has written non-fiction books about the Kennedy assassination (I think I recall he is a conspiracist, but not one of the really wold ones).

I don't think so. This is the broadcaster who used to present Radio 4's 'Front Row' daily arts review.

You're quite right, that's Mark Lane. I should have checked before posting;)

I haven't come across him though I have to confess to enjoying reading some of the conspiracy theories.

83. Van Gogh's Ear by Bernadette Murphy.*

If people know anything at all about Vincent Van Gogh it is presumably that he cut off his ear and committed suicide. I think when I was younger I conflated these two incidents, somehow imagining he committed suicide by cutting off his ear. They were in fact separated by a couple of years during which van Gogh’s mental health deteriorated to a fatal degree.

Though Dutch, van Gogh spent the greater part of his painting life in France, and much of it in the city of Arles in Provence. By dint of circumstance Bernadette Murphy found herself living in Provence, not far from Arles, and while recuperating from illness decided to investigate van Gogh’s time there, and the events leading to his final capitulation.

She began by trying to establish how he came to cut off his ear, and, indeed, how much of it he removed. Like me, she had originally imagined that he had cut off the whole of his ear, though some simple experimentation she decided that that would not have been possible. The local press in late nineteenth century Arles contained a few references to a disturbance involving the artist, though details were sparse. Undeterred, this simply spurred her to search further, leading her to visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and contact a range of academics all around the world.

The book is fascinating, not just for what it reveals about van Gogh’s descent into madness and despair, but also as a manual for a capable amateur undertaking academic research. Murphy learns the techniques of research as she goes along, and is eager to share her discoveries. The book works on so many separate levels: not just a biography of van Gogh but a potted guide to his art, and also that of Paul Gaugin who shared lodgings with the Dutchman in ‘The Yellow House’ (which was itself the subject of many of his paintings). Murphy also gives us a brief history of Arles, and a detailed topography of Provence. She pulls all this off with considerable brio, too. Though the subject matter is often challenging, and even gory, she writes with great clarity and engages the reader from the start.

84. The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie.

In my early teens, some forty years ago now, I encountered Agatha Christie’s novels, and, as is perhaps customary with teenage obsession, started working through them, as if driven to complete the set as quickly as possible. One of the first of her books that I read was this one, The Secret of Chimneys, and at the time I thought it was about as good as literature could get.

It features neither Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple (although the recent television adaptation did recast it as one of Miss Marple’s cases), and it isn’t even a true whodunit, being instead a simple thriller, straight out of the John Buchan mould. Certainly all the key ingredients of a boisterous story are there – stolen jewels, beautiful but mysterious women, a stately home and quasi-Balkan intrigue (it was, after all, written just a few years after the end of the First World War when the map of Europe had been redrawn under the auspices of Versailles, and newly-minted states were strewn across the continent) and a handsome, intelligent and boundlessly gallant hero thrown in. Sadly, other clichés of the 1920s shocker are also to the fore, and the book is shot through with casual anti-Semitism manifested through a succession of throwaway remarks from most of the characters.

The story does rattle along, and I could see why I enjoyed it so much at the age of thirteen. Forty years on I found it rather irritating. None of the characters displayed any vestige of realism. Of course, one doesn’t read Agatha Christie for her gritty verisimilitude, but this book also lacked her lightness of touch with regard both to characters and plot. It was one of her ealier books, and she was clearly still getting to grips with the genre.

85. Going Out Live by Mark Lawson.

Although written nearly fifteen years ago, Mark Lawson’s novel about the perils and insecurities of life as a television and radio presenter retains a vivid currency. Richard Fleming presents a weekday radio talk show during the prestigious ‘drive time’ slot, as well as a weekly arts-based television chat show. Drawing from his own experience in both media Lawson gives a hilarious insight into the tribulations of the presenter, required to cope with guests who are either overly garrulous or virtually struck dumb. Ratings and audience share figures are paramount, and each presenter is ferociously jealous, not just of their rivals from other programmes, but also of co-presenters, or more peripheral colleagues such as the news reader or weather forecaster, while there is the additional risk that the travel or sports correspondent might upstage them in the readers’ affections. On top of all this, the presenter has to cope with a constant stream of commentary through his earpiece from colleagues in the production team.

Lawson clearly knows his stuff, having been a successful and longstanding presenter in both media. At the start of the novel Fleming is in the ascendant, confident that he has both his roles under control. He is, however, less confident and self-assured than his public persona might suggest. It gradually emerges that he has certain idiosyncrasies, including a dislike of confronting his own appearance (to the extent that he covers any mirrors in his dressing room or studio with brown paper, and prefers to shave ‘blind’, without the guidance of his reflection. He also appears to have certain secrets in his personal life. No-one seems to know anything about his first marriage, and he has recently been receiving some very unwholesome mail.

The novel is by turns chilling and hilarious (even both simultaneously at times). Fleming’s narrative, in the form of a private memoir, is interspersed with transcripts from a series of interviews with other characters that represent contributions to a documentary designed to recount the events leading up to a gruesome climax. Part of the attraction of the novel is the constant misdirection into which the reader is suckered. Lawson also used the novel as a platform from which to satirise the whole world of the promotional interview and the cult of celebrity itself. Caustic, yet also self-deprecating, one wonders whether Fleming can take the poison as well as dish it out. I rather imagine I would have enjoyed Richard Fleming’s radio shows – I certainly enjoyed this novel.

86. A Divided Spy by Charles Cumming.
Thomas Kell had been through even before the start of this third novel to feature him. In A Foreign Country he was struggling to cope with life on suspension from MI5 following his involvement as ‘Witness X’ in a high profile trial arising from the alleged extraordinary rendition of a suspected terrorist by a CIA officer. Brought back into the fold following his contribution to the rescue of his former boss’s son, he then suffered the loss of his latest girlfriend, killed as part of the collateral damage from an operation in Istanbul that went awry.

As A Divided Spy opens he is still wracked alternately by grief and guilt over the death of Rachel Wallinger. He is, however, shocked out of his torpor when a former associate contacts him with news about the Minasian, Soviet agent believed to have been the instigator of Rachel’s death. Glad of an avenue back into ‘the game’, Kell runs his own unofficial operation to try to ensnare Minasian. Things don’t go as planned.

Cumming is masterful at building suspension and constructing delicately layered plots. Of course, in the nature of things I don’t know much about the world of secret services. This book did, however, have a pleasing air of plausibility, with a consistent internal logic. The story may progress more quickly than one of John le Carre’s plots, but displays the same meticulous planning. Kell is subject to the same frustrations, hopes and failings that Smiley and le Carre’s other protagonists display. Gripping, plausible and. Most importantly, entertaining.

>132 Eyejaybee:
Of course, one doesn’t read Agatha Christie for her gritty verisimilitude

I loved this. Great review.

87. Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome.

I was prompted to venture down memory lane following a conversation with one of my colleagues after he had taken his daughter to see the new ‘Swallows and Amazons’ film, and what a jot it proved. I loved the Swallows and Amazon books forty odd years ago and was a little worried that the intervening years might have eroded my capacity to enjoy the book with the same fervour as before. This has, after all, happened with several books that I have revisited after several years.

It was, however, a delightful experience. The book is beautifully written, and is a paean to imagination: not just the writer’s feat of imagination in conjuring up such a heartening story, but the joy of children’s imagination, with all the young characters delighting in creating alternative fantasy explanations for the world around them.

The Swallows fond themselves back in the Lake District where they have been despatched to stay with the Jackson family for the last few weeks before they return to school while their mother has taken their baby sister Bridget out to visit their father who, as a naval officer, is currently based in Malta. Reunited with Nancy and Peggy, the Amazons, who live among the Lakes, they plan an expedition to find the North Pole. Meanwhile they encounter Dorothea and Dick Callum, who have also been sent to spend a few weeks away from home while their scholarly parents fulfil some academic commitments. Ransome’s handling of the meeting is beautifully done, viewed from the Callums’ perspective and capturing the simultaneous yearning to belong and a desire to remain aloof.

Was Ransome harking back to a golden age of childhood largely of his own imagining? Possibly, though I remember my own school holidays being spent rambling miles away from home, climbing trees, playing in streams and clambering over farm equipment, though rather than exploring the seven seas our games tended to be re-enactments of the Second World War (with particular reference to the Lofoten Raid for reason I cannot now explain).

Beautifully written and illustrated, this book remains a treasure. I think I might try Pigeon Post soon, too.

88. A Very English Scandal by John Preston.*

Jeremy Thorpe seemed to have it all. Personal charm, success as a politician following an equally accomplished reputation as a barrister, and a public image of integrity and resolution. With the sharp acuity of hindsight, it is all too easy to see him as riding for a fall. John Preston’s book certainly leaves a very different picture of Thorpe’s career.

The Thorpe Affair is perhaps the first political scandal that I remember with any clarity. As leader of the Liberal Party during the early 1970s he came close to holding the balance of power following the inconclusive first general election of 1974 when it seemed for a while that he might form a coalition with Edward Heath’s Conservative Party, in what now seems a precursor to the coalition negotiations that followed the 2010 election which would eventually see Britain’s third party securing a say in government.

The scandal surrounded Thorpe’s homosexuality and in particular his relationship with Norman Scott, sometime male model and generally feckless drifter through life. Their first sexual encounter (which Preston describes, based upon Scott’s own account, in terms that make it sound little short of a brutal rape by Thorpe) occurred in Thorpe’s mother’s house in the early 1960s. These encounters were repeated a few times subsequently, with Thorpe imprudently writing various letters to Scott.. Scott’s life followed a difficult, and generally impecunious, course while Thorpe went from strength to strength, rising within the Liberal Party before eventually becoming its leader following the resignation of Jo Grimond.

While the public were unaware of Thorpe’s inclination (at a time when homosexuality had only just stopped being illegal), many people within political circles did know if it. That circle included Peter Bessell, one of Thorpe’s fellow Liberal MPs. Bessell himself was a heterosexual philanderer and would be business tycoon, though with the opposite of the Midas touch, seeming to have an infallible ability to render every business opportunity an abject failure. Bessell’s greatest success seems to have been in his role as Thorpe’s minder, and for more than a decade he would oversee arrangements to keep Scott from causing trouble, acting as a conduit for the transfer of low level finance from Thorpe to Scott, to try to prevent him from making their former relationship public. There were various attempts to retrieve the letters that Thorpe had sent to Scott, but these were never completed successfully. As his status in the public eye rose, Thorpe became increasingly eager to prevent Scott from bringing down the house of cards.

As everyone knows, the denouement of this fraught situation was an incident in Exmoor when Andrew Newton, a former airline pilot who had been hired as a hit man, shot Rinka, Scott’s Great Dane, and then turned the gun on Scott himself, only to find that it had jammed and would not fire. This eventually led to a prosecution of Newton who was imprisoned for illegal possession of a firearm. As stories continued to circulate, a further trial of Thorpe and various associates for conspiracy to murder was held at the Old Bailey.

Thorpe emerges from the book as a desperately ambitious, cold and infinitely selfish man, obsessed with his position and incapable of genuine friendship that did not serve his own interests. He was, however, capable of inspiring intense, if bizarre, loyalty from his associates, even when he treated them abominably. Bessel, for instance, though a successful politician in his own right, seems to have been incapable of stopping himself from bowing to Thorpe’s wishes, even when fully aware of their enormity. He was not the only one, and there were plenty of others who allowed the sanctity of the Establishment to sway their actions.

Preston’s account is lucid, and reads almost like a thriller, though his command of the facts prevents it from sinking into quasi-tabloid sensationalism.

89. Crisis by Frank Gardner.
Frank Gardner spent years as a foreign correspondent, travelling to some of the world’s most embattled areas. In 2004 he was shot six times by Al-Qaeda sympathisers, and his cameraman died in the same assault. Since then he has been the BBC’s Security Correspondent. He does, therefore, know his stuff when it comes to the interaction of the various intelligence agencies, and it shows in this novel.

The pace is fairly furious, with the action moving between London, North Korea and the more remote reaches of the Colombian rain forest. The pace never lags, and his protagonist, Luke Carlton (formerly in the Special Boat Service and now on contract to MI6) is eminently resourceful. The book is, however, rooted in realism, despite the hectic pace at which the plot develops, and pays attention to current themes such as rendition and what means are legally acceptable for the intelligence and enforcement services, even when faced with the potentially greatest threats to national security. While the pace if fairly furious, and action abounds, I felt it still veered more towards the le Carre school of espionage writing than that of Ian Fleming. Gardner lacks the measure and glorious cadence of le Carre’s purple prose, of course, but then who doesn’t?

Very entertaining, and I look forward to Carlton’s next outing.

I'm glad Winter Holiday didn't disappoint from adult eyes. That series is the one set of books I've managed to take my time with, using them as a sort of tonic when I really need a lift (which is a bit silly really, since I love to reread). I'll be getting to Pigeon Post sometime this fall.

>139 mabith: I have just embarked upon Pigeon Post, interspersing it with John le Carre's memoirs The Pigeon Tunnel, though that is purely coincidental and not evidence of any sort of pigeon fixation on my part. So far it is just as marvellous as I recall from childhood.

90. The Kindly Ones by Anthony Powell.

Re-reading this marvellous novel was immensely entertaining. This sixth volume of Powell's majestic Dance to the Music of Time sequence starts with a recapitulation of memories of Nick Jenkins's childhood, and in particular the suitably apocalyptic events that occurred in Stonehurst, the remote bungalow a few miles from Aldershot in which he grew up, on what proved to be the day on which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.

We are reintroduced to both General Conyers and Jenkins's meddlesome Uncle Giles, and also at last have some insight into Jenkins's family life. We also encounter Dr Trelawney, self-styled thaumaturge-cum-alchemist, whose presence in the neighbourhood cast pangs of fear into the young Jenkins's mind.

After a glimpse into Jenkins' childhood, with a brief but characteristically disruptive cameo from Uncle Giles, we are brought back to the months leading up to the Second World War, and the struggle to eke out an economic subsistence during an aesthetically unsympathetic time. Hugh Moreland plays a big role, as does the menacing Kenneth Widmerpool, as pompous and odious as ever.
In this particular volume General Conyers, old, venerable and seen by many as a relic from a bygone age suddenly establishes himself as one of the pivotal figures in the sequence. and is unmasked as an innovator and conduit for modern though.

Simply wonderful!

91. The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carre.*

John le Carré is widely accepted as perhaps the greatest writer of spy fiction. I would, however, go further and suggest that he is, quite simply, one of the greatest novelists in any genre. His novels display an acute understanding of the human condition, and his characters are always so finely drawn that the reader feels he knows them.

The Pigeon Tunnel is not a conventional autobiography but, rather, a selection of memoirs and includes among its highlights le Carré’s pen portraits of Richard Burton (who so memorably brought the tortured Alec Leamas to the big screen in the film of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold) and Alec Guinness (who I can’t avoid seeing whenever I reread any of the stories featuring George Smiley), together with a sad encounter with Fritz Lang. The longest individual piece focuses on Ronnie, the author’s errant father, whose fictional counterpart enlivened the largely autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy.

The pieces are all written with le Carré’s glorious prose which though immediately recognisable remains inimitable. There are some self-deprecating notes about his time in the intelligence world, though, predictably, we learn few actual details. He also tells us nothing about his time as a teacher at Eton – indeed this spell of his life, about which I would love to learn more, is only referred to a couple of times, and then only in passing. We do learn a little about the mechanics of his writing – like Iris Murdoch, his novels are written by hand rather than typed – and we are given a slight insight into the research he undertakes for his books, though most of his work remains a mystery. As with Anthony Powell’s marvellous Dance to the Music of Time sequence, in which the reader learns next to nothing about the author even after reading twelves volumes of a novel so clearly based upon the writer’s life, we don’t emerge from this book knowing very much more about John le Carré. That doesn’t matter, though. The book is enchanting and beguiling in its own right, and a joy to read.

92. Nutshell by Ian McEwan.

How does Ian McEwan do it? Forty years ago he was being hailed as one of the enfants terribles of English letters, along with Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, and his early stories and novels drew a lot of press attention as a consequence of their graphic content and often uncomfortable subject matter. They also drew a lot of critical attention, however, as they were beautifully written. A few decades and several novels later, McEwan is recognised as one of the foremost living novelists, but he is still experimenting and taking his work in new directions.

His latest novel takes the form of a narrative delivered by a nine-month old foetus, on the cusp of being born, whose aural window on the world has allowed him to follow the unconventional vicissitudes of what proves to be a rather complicated family life. As if this unusual context were not enough for the reader to take on board, the novel also resonates with references to Hamlet. The baby’s mother is Trudy, rather than Gertrude, and the wicked uncle answers to Claude rather than Claudius, but the parallels abound. The erudite foetus is even happy to quote James Joyce at times, to succinct comic effect, and the allusions to Shakespeare’s play are manifold and apposite, but never overpowering.

Of course, all of the above might alarm a reader who simply wants a gripping and entertaining story, but they should not be concerned. McEwan has the skill to experiment with the form of the novel without compromising the substance. The story is a thriller, and the tension builds readily from the beginning. Indeed, within a couple of pages, the narration is so engaging that the unconventional source is immediately accepted.

This is yet another in McEwan’s now lengthy line of winners, each different from the rest. Like so many of his previous novels, such as On Chesil Beach, Solar, and Sweet Tooth, my one regret was that I finished it too soon, though I am confident that I shall be re-reading it before very long.

93. Pigeon Post by Arthur Ransome.

There is very little sailing in this sixth instalment in Arthur Ransome’s marvellous series of books set in the early 1930s and featuring the Swallows and Amazons, together with the Ds. The Walker children and Dick and Dorothea Callum have made their way to the Lake District at the beginning of the summer holidays. The Swallow is not yet available, however, and as the eight children would leave the Amazon heavily overcrowded they have decided instead to explore the High Topps, the moor land overlooking the lake. Nancy and Peggy have been making preparations to explore some of the old abandoned mine working that are scattered all over the moorland, in the belief that they might be able to prospect for gold. Their mother is concerned about them camping too far away from home to be in regular contact, which is where the pigeons come in. The Amazons have acquired three homing pigeons which they will take with them, despatching one each day with a message, and then sending someone back home each fourth day to retrieve them and collect further stores. An added complication is the prolonged drought that has beset the area, leaving the moors as dry as tinder, and bring the threat of heathland fires.

Ransome develops the story brilliantly. He clearly understands children’s approach to life and he never patronises them., The prose is simple and lucid, and he captures the relationships between the different children with great facility. The children are immensely resourceful, but in a perfectly plausible manner. That is, perhaps, one aspect of the book that dates the novel. No-one seems to question the propriety of allowing a group of eight children to camp unattended out on the moors. While their ages are never explicitly stated, I imagine that Roger, the youngest, was probably nine or ten, while Nancy and John, the oldest two, are probably twelve or thirteen at most. In Britain in 2016, social services would be intervening, and their families would be under investigation for neglect.

The novel does demonstrate Ransome’s own imagination, and his deep understanding of the way that children’s imagination works. All of the Swallows, Amazons and the Ds allow themselves to be absorbed into the world that they have created, in which the local village becomes ‘Rio’, corned beef becomes ‘pemmican’ and bottles of ginger beer become ‘grog’. Similarly, once they are camping on the High Topps they become utterly immersed in the world of prospecting, defending their discovering and terrified of rivals ‘jumping’ their claim. Ransome’s characters were clearly all very well read, and raised on adventure stories of the same calibre as his own works.

It is well over forty years since I first read this book. At that time, I thought it was the best in this series, and one of my all-time favourites. I was gratified to find that those views still hold true.

Great review of the le Carre novel! Now I can't wait to read that book.

94. 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded by Jon Savage*

I was just three in 1966 so I have no direct recollection of the year, and have tended to look back on it as just another part of the Sixties. Like most people, I have tended to assume that the Sixties was a golden period. Hindsight does, however, over wear rose tinted spectacles, and while there was some absolutely marvellous music being produced, that would influence and inspire much that came later, the charts in 1966 were also heavily populated with some dire records that might almost make us question man as nature’s last word. Fifty years on Jon Savage has produced a fascinating analysis of the music that was being produced in 1966, and the social, political and economic context.

Surprisingly for a book by an English journalist that looks at 1966 in such detail, the World Cup victory scarcely garners a mention. Savage does, however, look in considerable detail at the prevailing political movements of the day. America was, of course, sinking further into engagement in Vietnam, and the draft loomed over teenagers across the country. Protests against the war were rife, and reflected in popular music. There was, however, also a significant conservative backlash. One of the biggest hits of the year in the USA was ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets’, which extolled the virtues of military service and patriotic duty. In Britain, the end of the year saw Jim Reeves’s sentimental and pro-establishment eulogy for armed service, ‘Distant Drums’, top the chart for four weeks.

It was also a year of vicious race riots, provoked by widely publicised scenes of police brutality against African Americans (sadly still far too prevalent fifty years later), and in many states concert audiences were still segregated. Savage documents these developments in detail (though never overburdening the reader). Martin Luther King was still alive and campaigning for peaceful revolution, though patience had worn thin among the African American community and the more forthright radical views propounded by Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers were gaining increased traction. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California, and immediately imposed a conservative regime, sending the police and National Guard into university campuses.

Savage looks closely at The Beatles, who toured America. Having been kings amongst men for much of the decade to date, they found themselves suddenly less popular than they had been. Other bands, including The Rolling Stones and The Kinks, were challenging their vice like grip on the home charts, and they suddenly looked tired and fed up with it all. Returning from America, they all went their separate ways for a break, before returning for some bizarre photoshoots in which they could not have looked more uncomfortable.

There was a healthily eclectic aspect to music. Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the Velvet Underground were the principal avant-garde acts, playing to mixed reception around America. Motown broke through, with the Supremes having a string of hits on both sides of the Atlantic. Cream were formed towards the end of the year, heralding the era of the supergroup.

1966 was also the year in which LSD broke through, and the impact upon the music world was phenomenal. Savage gives a detailed analysis of how its use spread through America, espoused by the underground magazine network and celebrated by ‘gurus’ such as Timothy Leary. Savage relates this with a refreshing clarity.

Savage manages to combine comprehensive detail, supported by extensive footnotes and references, with an engaging account that keeps the reader’s attention.

95. The Madonna of the Astrolabe by J. I. M. Stewart.

I have always been a fan of the roman fleuve, and count Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, C P Snow’s Strangers and Brothers and especially Simon Raven’s Alms for Oblivion sequences among my favourites. I had tended to group J. I. M. Stewart's marvellous five novel sequence A Staircase in Surrey as being on a par with them. It does, after all, include Young Pattullo, which is possibly my favourite novel ever (out of about five thousand that I have read to date).

I have, however, found myself pulled up short while re-reading the sequence. The first three volumes had been as enjoyable as ever, but I found myself thoroughly out of sorts with this instalment, and am going through a grievous process of reassessment. The book picks up almost immediately after the end of its predecessor, A Memorial Service, with Duncan Pattullo finding himself in the third term of his first year as a Fellow of his old Oxford college. His aging mentor (and distant relative) Arnold Lempriere is concerned about the state of the College's historic and imposing tower, and it gradually becomes apparent that extensive and unavoidably expensive restoration work will be required, at a cost considerably beyond the College's current means. Meanwhile the likeable Nick Junkin has been soliciting support among the Fellows for the College’s Dramatic Society to be allowed to stage Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great in the quadrangle.

Pattullo, as one would expect, is playing his part to help Junkin’s project but is rather distracted by the sudden reappearance in his life of his former wife, the beautiful but utterly ghastly Penny, who seems bent on strewing mischief in her wake. At this point an old master is discovered in a lumber room at the base of the College’s threatened tower. The painting depicts the Madonna and Child, the latter of whom is clutching an astrolabe. Could this be salvation for the College?

Stewart handles his characters with dexterity and affection, steering them through the rapids and pitfalls (hey, I can mix metaphors with the best of them!) of this short (just eight weeks) but hectic final term. Duncan Pattullo is sensitive and always plausible and the humour is intelligent and engaging. I wish I had had tutors like that when I was an undergraduate! I did, however, find the whole sub-plot involving Penny Pattullo added nothing and, indeed, detracted quite a lot from the flow of the story. Considering how deftly Stewart writes elsewhere, this novel seems a poor companion to the rest of the sequence.

96. Neuromancer by William Gibson.

This is the novel that heralded the onset of the cyberpunk genre. Set in an unspecified yet not too distant future, moving between Japan and the United States, it follows the exploits of Case, a former computer hacker who is down on his luck and sinking into drug addiction, having crossed his former bosses. The punishment they meted out involved the disabling of his central nervous system, rendering him essential powerless to pursue his previous hacking. Case is struggling to stay afloat, wheeling and dealing in a range of different scams when he is tracked down by Molly, a highly capable street fighter who works for the shady, ex-military character Armitage. Armitage offers to have Case healed, in return for his participation in a heist, the details of which only gradually emerge.

The action moves at a fairly hectic pace. Case and Molly are dragged through a number of perilous encounters as they strive to fulfil Armitage’s commission. The book offers an impressive blend of science fiction and old fashioned thriller. What is, perhaps, most notable about it is the fact that it was published in 1984, long before the internet had come within the purview of anyone but the most advanced of computer programmers, and when the concept of hacking, now an everyday occurrence against which we constantly arm ourselves, was the sole reserve of high level international espionage.

The depiction of cyberspace is, of course, vastly different from today’s reality, though that scarcely matters. Gibson’s futuristic underworld is a chilling and scary place, and the frantic pace of Case’s life resembles his own chemically fuelled hallucinations.

97. Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris

This is a glorious study of revenge and Machiavellian intrigue, set against the background of St Oswald’s, a minor public school that looms over its local area. The story is told through interleaved narratives – one from curmudgeonly Classics teacher Roy Straitley, an old boy of the school who returned as a teacher and, having put in thirty years, is now in reach of his century of terms (an achievement that would see his name entered on one of the Honours Boards that deck the School’s hall). As an arch traditionalist, teaching the most traditional of subjects, Straitley finds himself beset by the School’s current senior management team which is bent upon modernising the school to aid its constant struggle to keep attracting new pupils. Straitley finds himself increasingly irritated, and also ostracised, by the proliferation of management jargon which seems to find little room for the consideration of the needs of the pupils or staff.

The new school year brings with it a crop of new teachers, one of whom writes a second narrative which is woven throughout Straitley's. We learn that, unbeknown to anyone else in the Common Room, this new teacher is already very familiar with St Oswald’s. Their father had been the School’s Porter and they had grown up in the school's gatehouse. While growing up the teacher had developed an overwhelming obsession with to school, even to the extent of masquerading as one of the junior boys. This new member of staff is desperate to undermine the school, as an act of revenge for what they see as a lifetime of exclusion and slights (conscious or otherwise) delivered by pupils and masters alike.

The story is utterly spellbinding. Harris’s use of language is delightful, and her portrayal of Straitley as a lone voice of sanity battling against waves of hollow management talk and psychobabble is highly amusing (though also bitterly poignant by dint of its plausibility). I also found many alarming (delicious?) echoes of my own old school. I have always loved stories set in old fashioned schools, and this is definitely one of the best of the genre that I have read.

>144 Eyejaybee: I think Ransome was also incredibly gifted at writing the adults in his stories. They have felt so real and natural to me. They're (mostly) not super strict, but they also aren't the super-idealized, perfect adult many writers use.

>150 mabith: Yes, I agree. Very natural and utterly plausible.

98. Golden Hill by Francis Spufford.

This was one a genuinely serendipitous discovery. I hadn’t heard anything about this book, or previously encountered Francis Spufford’s writing. I just happened to be in Foyle’s at the right moment as one of the staff was setting out a pile of new books and this one caught my eye.

It is simply blissful: a rollicking tale set in New York in 1746, where the community is starting to divide between those unswervingly loyal to King George II and dissenters calling for greater democratic rights colonies. Still a long way from the Boston Tea Party and the cries of ‘no taxation without representation’, but the House of Hanover had been shaken by the failure of the Jacobite rebellion earlier in the year.

Into this potentially volatile mix comes Richard Smith, newly landed off the boat from England. No sooner has he alighted than he runs to a local broker and presents a bill for one thousand pounds drawn on an agency in London. The broker is concerned, and not without reason. One thousand pounds was a huge sum at that time, and one which threatened the broker’s trading capital. Smith does little to allay those concerns, refusing to divulge either the source of, or his intentions for, the sum in question.

Smith is left to his own devices, waiting for the bill to clear, though his hopes of keeping a low profile are thwarted and he finds himself caught up in a series of adventures and mishaps. Spufford has obviously done considerable research into this period, and he paints a jaunty picture of eighteenth century New York. Its population in 1746 has been estimated at around 7,000, miniscule in comparison to the 700,000 people then living in London. Smith certainly experiences culture shock at the rather parochial attitudes he has to deal with.

Spufford has scored a huge success, creating a novel set in the eighteenth century that reads very like a novel from that period, though without the sententious moralising that seemed to be the bane of that age. (Come on, own up, how many people genuinely read through all those dreary chapters at the beginning of each new section of ‘Tom Jones’?). It seemed to emulate the best bits of Tristam Shandy, and throw in a sliver of Breaking Bad (but without the rage, squalor and despair). The novel races along, and the reader is swept up in the flow. This was one of those books where I found that dreadful quandary: I was very eager to finish the book to find out how the various plot lines were resolved, yet I also felt that I didn’t want the book to end.

Definitely putting Golden Hill on my list, I don't read all that much fiction or non-fiction set in that period.

Yes, sounds interesting, I've also added it to my wishlist.

99. The Intercom Conspiracy by Eric Ambler.

Eric Ambler achieved considerable commercial and critical success during the 1930s and 1940s as the author of pacy spy thrillers, with novels such as ‘The Mask of Dimitrios’ and ‘Journey Into Fear’. Although nowadays they might seem rather insubstantial and fanciful, at the time of publication they were feted for what was seen as their gritty reality.

‘The Intercom Conspiracy’ marked a departure from the action thriller into new, more theoretical territory. Two heads of counterintelligence departments in neighbouring Scandinavian countries fear that their respective imminent retirements might be spent in little better than penury, and begin to explore how they might alleviate such a depressing state of affairs. They hit upon the idea of creating such a nuisance for their intelligence counterparts around the world, on either side of the Iron Curtain, by drip feeding nuggets of military intelligence, of fluctuating value, with a view to being paid off for their future silence. They select ‘Intercom’, a technical newsletter that was until recently owned by a cranky American ex-General, as the conduit for their leaks. As the novel opens, the general has just died, and Intercom is up for sale.

The novel takes the form of a series of narratives from various characters who bore the brunt of the fallout from the protagonists’ scheme, principally Theodore Carter, the disgruntled and dishevelled editor of Intercom, and his daughter. The format is clever, and deftly handled, with the different narratives reflecting the contrasting styles and perspectives of each writer. Sadly, however, after a sound start, the plot grinds to a halt, bowed down by the weight of its own intricacy.

100. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome.

Having recently dabbled in nostalgia and re-read Arthur Ransome’s ‘Winter Holiday’ and ‘Pigeon Post’ I suppose it was almost inevitable that I would find myself embarking on ‘Swallows and Amazons’ for the first time in some forty years. And why not! From the opening scene, with Roger ‘tacking’ up the field to check with his mother whether he would be allowed to join the rest of the Walker children camping on Wild Cat Island, through to the close, and the imminent return to the real world of school and city life, the book is totally delightful.

Of course, life is very different now from when Arthur Ransome wrote this classic story, and Mrs Walker would find herself castigated, and probably even prosecuted, for neglect if she were to allow her four children, aged presumably between seven and eleven, to going camping and sailing, wholly unaccompanied; the children themselves would probably be taken into care. The only vague concession to health and safety is Mrs Walker’s ruling that Roger is not allowed to carry or use matches. The book was first published in 1930, and was probably already eulogising a Corinthian past largely of Ransome’s own imagining.

Ransome’s own imagining is pretty powerful though. He succeeds in creating six child characters, all of whom have clearly contrasting personalities, and he captures their perspective of the world with great clarity. He also pulls off the harder trick of writing adults who meld into the children’s world seamlessly. At the risk of sinking into technicality, he is also a master of metafiction. The children themselves all have marvellous imaginations, recasting the Cumbrian lake into a new world waiting to be explored, reassigning all the local features with names drawn from maritime history. Perhaps he overendows the children in this way – given their ages, it seems amazing that they have heard of half the places or books that they talk about so readily. This, however, could not matter less, and it merely adds to the reader’s sense of complete immersion in the fantasy world that Ransome has created.

Most importantly, though, it is simply a rattling good story that resonates with the joy of unfettered imagination.

101. Out of Bounds by Val McDermid.

I have always enjoyed Val McDermid’s novels, and have always wondered how she manages to be so prolific without letting the quality slip. This latest book once again features the resourceful Detective Chief inspector Karen Pirie, who heads up Police Scotland’s Historical Crimes Unit, reviewing so called ‘cold cases’, and demonstrates McDermid’s facility for interlacing different plot lines to great effect.

The book opens with some young men from Fife on a lads’ might out which, after too many drinks, ends up with one of them hot-wiring a car and taking them for a high speed jaunt. Needless to say, this misadventure ends tragically with three of the men dead and one left comatose. Just another sordid and all too frequent a story, except that a routine DNA sample from one of them shows a link to traces left at the scene of a vicious rape and murder fourteen years ago. This sparks off a new case, or, rather, a new investigation into a very old case for DCI Pirie’s team.

Meanwhile, in the small town of Kinross in Fife a man is found dead in a local park. As the victim was known for his occasional periods of depression and social dislocation, as well as a recurring obsession with conspiracy theories, the local police are inclined to dismiss the death as suicide. Becoming apprised of the death by chance, DCI Pirie is not convinced, especially when she learns that the dead man’s mother had herself been the victim of a sensational murder twenty years ago. As DCI Pirie keeps reminding us, murder doesn’t run in families … does it?

To my mind the great strength of McDermid’s books is the compassionate hinterland that she bestows upon her characters, which adds to their credibility. Karen Pirie has featured in two previous novels and, as this one starts, is still mourning the death of her lover. Her grief leaves her suffering from insomnia which in turn drives her to walk some of the backways of Edinburgh by night. On one of her forays she comes across a gathering of Syrian refugees standing around a brazier on some wasteland. Meeting them again a few times she learns that they meet in this unlikely setting as it offers the only opportunity for them to gather in peace simply to socialise, and remember what they have left behind. Pirie resolves to try to help them. She is, however, far from being too good to be true, and all too readily lets her exasperation break through, especially towards her assistant, though he would probably try the patience of genuine saints, too.

Like so many of McDermid’s other strong, engaging characters, Pirie is a great networker. Her contacts are spread far and wide, and she calls on them as required. She is not a superwoman, but she is an accomplished, conscientious and professional detective, who knows how to play the game, and knows when, and when not, to push her luck. Beset by an ignorant and inadequate boss (and I think we all know how that works), she repeatedly runs rings around him, leaving the reader cheering her on.

The plot, or rather, plots, go through sinuous twists and turns, but McDermid never loses control. Very accomplished crime writing from McDermid, yet again.

102. The Railways: Trains, Nation, Network and People by Simon Bradley.*

A puerile man would make some joke here about the hardback version of this book having a dust-anorak (and probably a high viz one at that) instead of a jacket, but such a thought would, of course, never occur to a mature reader such as myself.

Such levity is, however, out of place. Simon Bradley has clearly undertaken exhaustive research and produced a marvellous book. I can imagine some readers’ eyes rolling at the ‘exhaustive research’ and immediately imagining a dry and dusty tome, redolent of all the prejudices that modern life heaps upon any study of rail transport (to which my feeble opening joke pandered in the most craven manner).

Don’t worry. There is nothing dusty or dry about this book. Bradley has pulled off the rare trick of delivering a comprehensive history of rail travel in Britain which, in addition to enlightening the reader about numerous aspects of the social and cultural development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, never fails to entertain as well as instruct.

This is not a train spotter’s book. In the brief foreword Bradley acknowledges certain tendencies in that direction during his own youth, but concedes that there is already a massive body of literature devoted to the romance and magic of the steam locomotive, and chooses to steer clear of it himself. He does, however, delve very deeply into virtually every other aspect of rail travel in Britain. There are intriguing explorations of the history of the separate classes of ticket, and the varying experiences of the different social classes, as well as tangential forays into the development of concessions to passenger comfort and convenience such as the introduction of heating, lighting and functional toilets, and then even the provision of hot and cold food and drink. He even offers an interesting potted history of vandalism on the railway. Growing up in the 1970s and remembering outraged news coverage of completely wrecked ‘football specials’, I had always assumed that this was a problem that first emerged during that troubled decade, but it had in fact been a troubling trend for more than a century by then. Other crimes more serious still, including robbery, rape and even murder had also bedevilled the railways from their inception.

There are very few aspects of life that weren’t touched by the burgeoning railway network. One of the greatest changes, which affected everyone arose from the need for reliable timetables, and led to the end of local time. Previously every city set its clocks by reference to local sunrise and sunset, but this parochial approach led to confusion when considering the arrival and departure times for trains travelling considerable distances. The answer was the imposition of Greenwich Mean Time across the whole country.

The growth of the newspaper industry during the nineteenth century, for example, was spawned entirely by the spread of the railways, opening up substantial new markets to the London dailies, enabling readers in the rest of the country beyond the Home Counties to read the papers on the day of their publications. In another diverting tangent, Bradley offers a potted history of W H Smith & Son, who won the contract for setting up stalls at most of the mainline stations, from which they sold a wide range of items in addition to the predictable newspapers and books. They proved so successful that they went on to run a massive lending library run through their station stalls, and it was only after they lost the contract for some stations that they relocated onto the high street. The success of the railway-based business of W H Smith & Son actually led to the proliferation of cheaply produced books during the mid-nineteenth century, spreading the habit of reading more widely than had ever been the case before.

Bradley is not above wry observation about some of the mishaps that bedevilled the early days of rail travel. One potential riddle for early travellers was the issue of how one’s servants should be accommodated, and at what rate they should be charged. This was eventually resolved by the introduction of carriages with mixed compartments: first class for the aristocracy with adjacent second or third class for their retinue of attendants. Early carriages tended to be made of wood and modelled on stage coaches – indeed, many actually were coaches mounted on a trolley. As such they were immensely vulnerable to fire and Bradley relates one incident from the 1840s in which a lady and her maid found their carriage catching fire, ignited by a flaming smut cast back from the locomotive. As their coach burned down, they managed to escape onto the trolley on which it rested, from which they were able to sound an alarm. Sadly the maid fell off the trolley before she could be rescued. This was not the end of her woes as, once new of her fate was conveyed to the engine driver he reversed the locomotive along the track, only to run over her stunned and unconscious body.

One of the major figures overshadowing the development of the train in nineteenth century England, particularly in the West Country where his Great Western Railway predominated, was Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Right celebrated as a titan of both civil and mechanical engineering, Bradley also demonstrates that he was surprisingly accident prone, barely surprising a number of brushes with death including various rail accidents, falling off the footplate of several locomotives and choking on a sovereign that he mistakenly swallowed during the performance of a conjuring trick.

Bravo, Mr Bradley. This is one of the most enjoyable non-fiction books I have read for a long time.

103. The Knives by Richard Kelly.

This book came so close to being a very good novel, but sadly it fell at the last hurdle. Former soldier David Blaylock, who saw active service in Afghanistan, has gone into politics as a pragmatic Conservative and, against all odds, won and then retained a constituency in Teeside. Shortly thereafter, he is appointed Home Secretary, where he has to balance an increasingly fractious relationship with the police while simultaneously relying upon their unquestioning loyalty as he pursues the war against terror.

There are some clear and utterly plausible insights into the administrative side of the life of a minister, wading through submissions and correspondence while also flitting from meeting to meeting, absorbing his briefing on the way. This was one of the few novels about the political world that I have read that captures that mundane aspect of the ministerial role. Unfortunately, while Kelly captures the context with great clarity, he falls down when it comes to plot. The story develops with tortuous slowness, rendering the novel an exercise in turgidity.

104. Viral by Helen Fitzgerald.

There is no gentle build up, carefully developing the scene and setting a context, with this novel. Helen Fitzgerald pitches the reader straight into the story with one of the most arresting opening lines of recent years: ‘I sucked twelve cocks in Magalouf.’ This exploit is captured on the mobile phones of several onlookers and participants in the revelry and posted online where it duly goes viral. As the story develops, the number of times the footage has been viewed escalates at exponential rates.

Hitherto Su-Jin (known almost exclusively as Su) has been a model daughter, pupil and citizen, studying hard at school, working hard at a part-time evening and weekend job and securing a place to study medicine at the prestigious Edinburgh University. Adored by her adoptive parents, the only slight fly in the ointment of her life has been the fractious relationship with her slightly younger sister. Against her better judgement, Su allowed herself to be persuaded to accompany her sister and a couple of friends on a jaunt to Magalouf to celebrate the end of school and their imminent departure to university. After a week of increasingly wild behaviour, Su ends up in The Coconut Lounge where her recollection of what happens ends.

Su was born in Korea and given up by her natural mother within hours of her birth. Ruth and Bernard Oliphant had longed for a child but after a series of crushing setbacks and traumatic miscarriages had chosen to adopt. Within weeks of collecting Su Ruth found herself pregnant, giving birth to Leah just a few months later. While Su is a runaway success at everything she sets her hand to, Leah is a sullen, solipsistic underachiever, resentful of finding herself so frequently in her sister’s shadow.

Fitzgerald alternates the narrative perspective between various characters, managing to strike stark comparisons in their behaviour and responses. We start with Su’s aghast reaction as she wakes up the next day and discovers the footage already viral on the net. She flees from her sister and the other friends, and decides not to accompany them on the flight home. We then encounter her mother, Ruth, a Sheriff in the Glasgow court who is the ultimate control freak. She learns of the footage from her husband, Bernard, an ineffectual American musician who seems to have lost his way in life (probably a consequence of the relentless eclipse of his wife). Meanwhile Leah is a brilliantly captured disgruntled teenager: self-absorbed and convinced that everyone is against her.

As the story proceeds we gain further insights into each of the characters, building up a clear understanding of what drives them. There are painful truths for everyone, not least Ruth’s growing realisation that she prefers her adopted daughter to her natural one.

The novel is well constructed and tightly plotted. My one quibble was the sheer efficiency with which Ruth responds to her daughter’s predicament. She just seemed too flawlessly and coldly calculated.

105. Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz.

This novel is a very entertaining and accomplished homage to the classic whodunit book in general, and Agatha Christie’s mysteries in particular, and revolves around a lengthy extract from a novel written by one of the characters.

Over the years I have become I am rather wary of extended meta fiction as I find that too many novelists struggle to sustain the illusion of a book-within-a-book. There are some wonderful exceptions, of course, such as Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Blind Assassin’ in which she pulls off a triple-whammy with a book written by one of her characters which in turn feature a story written by one of the meta characters. The action moves seamlessly between the three stylistically contrasted narratives (all of which are called ‘The Blind Assassin’), culminating in a finely crafted conclusion. In my experience, however, such a feat is the exception rather than the rule.

I had no such worries about Anthony Horowitz’s ability to sustain a plausible novel within a novel. In recent years he has been commissioned by the literary estates of both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming to write new books in the Sherlock Holmes and James Bond series, and has met the challenge admirably. Indeed, I far preferred his ‘Trigger Mortis’ to Sebastian Faulks’s addition to the Bond oeuvre, and found it completely matched the originals in style and content.

In ‘Magpie Murders’ Horowitz gives free rein to his stylistic variations. The novel is narrated by Susan Ryeland, chief editor at a small publishing house. She is handed the manuscript of the latest novel (also called ‘Magpie Murders’) written by Alan Conway. Conway is feted as creator of a hugely successful series of whodunnits set in the 1950s and solved by Atticus Pund, a concentration camp survivor who has made his home in London. The Pund stories have sold in their millions, and crime fiction connoisseurs place Pund on a par with Hercule Poirot. Conway himself, however, is less popular, with a reputation as a ‘difficult’ man. As the novel opens, Susan is about to start reading the latest manuscript when she learns that Conway has died, falling from a tower at his large Suffolk home. We are then presented with the manuscript as submitted to her.

Horowitz captures the tone marvellously, and Conway’s novel within the novel is entirely gripping. I would certainly have happily read the rest of the series if they existed. He then extends his exhibition of dexterity with a personal memoir written about Conway by his sister, which shows a completely different yet equally plausible stylistic voice. Predictably enough, I suppose, Susan Ryeland comes to doubt the received story about Conway’s death, and starts to investigate. Aspects of her investigation start to display uncanny resonances with Conway’s last novel.

All in all, this was very clever, very accomplished and very entertaining.

106. Rather Be The Devil by Ian Rankin.

John Rebus is proving to be one of the most durable of fictional crime fighters. Now retired not just from Lothian and Borders police but also from the cold case team that he had joined after leaving the mainstream force, he has a lot of time on his hands. He also has plenty on his mind since, as the novel opens, he is waiting for the results of a biopsy taken after doctors discovered a shadow on his lung. As a consequence of this he has given up smoking, rendering him even more thrawn than ever.

Meanwhile his former would-be adversary turned grudging friend, Detective Inspector Malcolm Fox, previously local head of the Professional Standards Division, has been transferred to the elite Police Scotland Crime Squad based at Gartcosh near Glasgow. Siobhan Clarke, long time work partner of Rebus (and fleetingly romantic partner of Fox) is still in Edinburgh, slightly resentful of the opportunity afforded Fox, and concerned about Rebus’s health.

Fox is commissioned to investigate Edinburgh ‘businessman’ Darryl Christie, another former adversary of Rebus, Fox and Clarke, who is suspected of involvement in organised money laundering through the electronic gambling machines in his chain of betting shops. Meanwhile, a suspected associate of Christie, financial adviser Anthony Brough, grandson of the former owner of Brough’s private bank, has gone missing. Nearly forty years earlier Brough’s father had been a suspect in a murder scandal that ensnared much of Edinburgh’s top society. And then, back in the present, Christie is found severely beaten up in his own garden.

What follows in an intricately woven story that shifts between the past and present as Rebus and Co struggle to unravel a financial morass mired against a background of underworld alliances and gang conflicts. Of course, Rebus’s sworn enemy, Maurice Gerald Cafferty is there to muddy the waters with his own brand of Mephistophelean woe, too.

Rankin always offers robust and plausible plots, which benefit from the use of genuine locations. This time around, though, I felt that the principal charades lacked their customary solidity. There was a coarseness about Rebus in this book that had been absent, or more deeply hidden in previous volumes in the series. Clarke, too, lacks some of her edge, though who could blame her for lacking some of her brio after years of bailing Rebus out of the mire. Even with these slight cavils, this is still an entertaining and enjoyable book, and I am confident that the series could sustain several more volumes yet.

107. The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wolf.*

I choose new books to read in a variety of ways. I tend to pore over the weekly review pages in the press, and I often pick up recommendations from friends or colleagues. Sometimes, however, there is one of those marvellous serendipitous moments when you pick a book up entirely by chance and it turns out to be a gem. On this occasion it hadn’t started well. I found myself unexpectedly without a book to read on the journey home from the office, having been sold the dummy by the one I had been reading on the way into work. I had been confident that there were another thirty or forty pages left, enough to tide me over the journey home, only to discover that the publisher had padded the book out with the first two or three chapters of the next book in the series. Shocked at the prospect if a bookless journey home I dashed into Foyles at Waterloo Station and this was the first book that took my eye, despite3 my woeful ignorance over Alexander Humboldt.

It is a wonderful book. Essentially a biography of Alexander von Humboldt, famous traveller and natural historian, it offers so much more. Humboldt was an extraordinary man, and enjoyed immense fame throughout his own lifetime. He travelled extensively, without regard for comfort or his own safety, collecting specimens of local flora and fauna wherever he went, and cataloguing his findings. His wanderlust led him to cross the Andes on foot, and without any mountaineering kit, sketching everything he saw as he went. He is credited with being the first biologist to identify nature as a series of interlaced ecosytems, vulnerable to sudden changes or human intervention.

Andrea Wulf has clearly researched Humboldt’s life exhaustively, though the book is not a dry catalogue of his achievements. She offers enticing vignettes of Humboldt’s friendships with Goethe (now, of course, primarily remembered as a literary figure, though he considered himself first and foremost as a scientist), and Thomas Jefferson. He also knew Simon Bolivar well, and was cited by him as a major inspiration.

A fascinating book. Entertaining and enlightening – biography at its best.

I'm so glad to hear that the Rebus books are still entertaining, even with so many of them! I've only just started the series but I think he's fantastic.

I think that the series is marvellous, and I always particularly enjoy them because I know Edinburgh very well. The first one that I read was 'Strip Jack' which is, I think, the fourth. I later went back to read the earlier ones and did like them, though they lack the depth of the later ones, and I wonder whether if I had read the first one when it came out, I would have bothered to look for later ones. I think that with 'Black and Blue' Rankin moved on to a higher plane, and it is amazing that he has managed to sustain or even exceed that level ever since.

I found the same thing with Reginald Hill's 'Dalziel and Pascoe' books which I came to mid-series. The earliest books were very ordinary and lacked the humour and Bute of the later ones, and if I had read them first I would not have gone back for more.

108. Spare Me the Truth by C J Carver.

This had the makings of an excellent thriller, and I found myself thoroughly enjoying it until the last seventy or eighty pages, where it became simply ridiculous.

The basic premise of the story is that Dan Forrester has suffered an extreme form of dissociative amnesia, provoked by having witnessed the traumatic death of his young son. It gradually emerges, however, that the past that his wife and friends have reconstructed for him is not complete. Approached out of the blue by Stella Reavey, a colleague from his former life, he starts to find slight cracks in the veneer of the new life into which he has settled. Unable to resolve his doubts alone, he resolves to visit Stella Reavey, only to find her being treated urgently by her daughter (a GP) after suffering a heart attack. The daughter and Dan find that Stella’s life was full of secrets, some of them deadly.

Meanwhile, disgraced former detective Lucy Davies has been banished from her post on the Metropolitan Police Force and transferred to what she considers as the relative obscurity of the Stockton-on-Tees force, where she removed from CID and put back on the beat. Unable ever to cut corners or let go of her doubts and suspicions, she discovered a missing student who has been the subject of a nationwide search. She is horribly battered but still alive. Though no longer her case, Lucy continues to probe the circumstances and discovers that this kidnapping was merely the latest in a string of bizarre and ghastly abductions and murders.

So far, so good, and the story develops with great promise (far more so than might be deduced from my hurried synopsis above). Carver writes simply but engagingly, and hooks the reader right from the start. The characters are drawn in broad strokes, and there is little in the way of nuance in the depiction of their personalities, but that doesn’t seem to matter. This is an action-driven story. The wheels did come off, though in the final few chapters. I suspect that the author had let the plot run wild and wasn’t sure how to resolve it, and unfortunately chose poorly when it came to a denouement.

109. The Harbour Master by Daniel Pembrey.

I bought this book on impulse, being in Amsterdam at the time and intrigued to see this English novel on sale in Schiphol Airport. The setting is accurately conveyed, and lends a depth to the story.

Henk van der Pol is a jaded and cynical detective, based in Amsterdam’s IJ Tunnel police station, whose beat covers the central railway station, the harbour and the famous red light district. With thirty years’ service behind him, van der Pol has seen it all, and is weary from the infighting between his senior officers, and their relentless efforts to harvest favourable publicity.

As the novel opens, van der Pol has himself witnessed the discovery of a woman’s body floating in the harbour. She had been beaten before being dumped in the water, and it emerges that she had been a prostitute working in the nearby red light district. Van der pol puts feelers out to try to discover more about her, but no-one is talking, not even his regular informants within the city’s murky underworld. As the investigation proceeds, a number of people become implicated: senior police officers, politicians and gangsters. There is even a cameo appearance from some Russian Hell’s Angels, and van der Pol also finds himself in Brussels, immersed in red tape.

I enjoyed the book but felt that Pembrey just tried too hard. Like a lot of crime books that I have read recently, he seemed more concerned with generating as many intricacies of plot as possible, rather than concentrating on developing a sound, coherent story line and relying upon the quality of his writing and the strength of his characters to sustain the novel.

110. The Valley of Bones by Anthony Powell..

This seventh volume of Anthony Powell's majestic semi-autobiographical roman fleuve opens with Nicholas Jenkins arriving in North Wales to join his regiment in the very early days of the Second World War. Despite his age (he is in his mid-thirties) he has managed to secure a commission as a second lieutenant, and finds himself serving under Captain Rowland Gwatkin.

Before the war Gwatkin had worked in a bank in the same area of Wales from which most of the members of the regiment’s 'other ranks' were drawn, though most of them had been miners. Though an essentially prosaic man, Gwatkin is prey to a romantic fascination with every aspect of army life, though he seldom demonstrates the skill to carry his military dream through to fruition.

This is the first of three volumes of 'A Dance to the Music of Time' that cover the Second World War, and, taken together they constitute one of the finest accounts of that conflict. Jenkins does not see active service in any theatre of war, and spends much of his time engaged in routine regimental duties, but this gives him a marvellous opportunity to exercise his laconic observation. Among Jenkins's fellow subalterns are Idwal Kedward, an ambitious and capable young man endowed with extraordinarily blunt speech, and Bithel (we never learn his forename) a down at heel opportunist who is wholly out of his depth but desperate to perform as well as he can.

Bithel's greatest problems arise from his occasional but ferocious drunkenness and the various myths he has promulgated about himself and his background (claims to be a brother of the officer of that name who secured a VC in the 1914-18 War, and to have played rugby for Wales in his youth are just two examples). The character of Bithel is a prime example of Powell's dexterity at blending humour with an underlying melancholy (perhaps the emotion that most powerfully runs through the whole sequence). Steeped in inadequacy, Bithel somehow manages to overcome, or at least dodge the plethora of challenges that come his way.

As with most of the rest of the novels in this sequence, nothing much happens, but the book remains utterly gripping. Another triumph!

111. Swallowdale by Arthur Ransome.

The Swallows and Amazons return for another instalment of blissful fun, camping and exploring in the Lake District. A year on from the events chronicled in ‘Swallows and Amazons’, the Walker children come back to the Lakes, expecting to camp once more on Wild Cat Island along with their friends Nancy and Peggy Blackett, known as The Amazons. Things do not go to plan.

On their first outing of the year, an accident befalls the Swallow, the dinghy adopted by the Walkers, leaving them having to take on the role of shipwreck survivors. Meanwhile the Amazons are beset with family duty. Their great aunt, who brought up their mother and Uncle Jim (better known as Captain Flint) has returned to the family house, and Nancy and Peggy are required to be on their best behaviour which means acting like young ladies rather than running wild and wreaking havoc in their customary tomboy way.

Ransome’s writing is as masterful as ever, combining superb children’s adventure stories, in excellent clear prose, while managing to eulogise the pursuit of an outdoor life without ever sinking into sanctimony. His own imagination was clearly powerful, and he imparts this enthusiasm to his characters, both adults and children. He never patronises the children, either the characters or his readers. Widely read himself as a boy, he clearly expects a similar literary background from his readers.

Like John Buchan’s novels, written at similar times, Ransome’s books are easily parodied now as representing a very middle class, anodyne perspective on life. That is, however, unfair (both to Ransome and to Buchan). They both wrote with effortless lucidity, and understood the nature of adventure. The Walkers are certainly middle class, but the children all interact perfectly politely and naturally with all the ‘natives’ (i.e. locals) whom they meet, including farmers, charcoal burners and loggers. There is never any hint of awareness of any class divide.

Arthur Ransome’s books do hark back to a different world, on that is now long gone, though I suspect that that was true even at the time they were first published, between the World Wars. Like Buchan, he may be invoking a golden or Corinthian age largely of his own imagining, but that does not make the books any less magical. Well over forty years since I first read it, ‘Swallowdale’ remains a delight.

112. The Masters by C. P. Snow

This is one of my favourite novels ... ever!
I began my working life with a brief spell as a (very) Junior Fellow of an Oxford College and as a consequence I have always enjoyed reading novels set in academia. My own short-lived Fellowship, at Oriel College, was during the mid-1980s, almost fifty years after the events in this novel took place, and ‘The Masters’ is, of course, set in that other place, over in the fens. I could, however, recognise so much of what happened in this book. The conversations between the Fellows, the orotundity of speech, the rigidity and formality of their manners … it all just seemed like yesterday!

I first read ‘The Masters’ more than thirty years ago, while in my final year as an undergraduate, as I ploughed through the whole of C P Snow's eleven volume semi-autobiographical novel sequence ‘Strangers and Brothers’. I remember from that first reading that I considered this novel, and indeed the sequence as a whole, as being singularly lacking in emotion. While I clearly recall having enjoyed this volume more than the rest, I didn't really think of it again until five or six years later, when the Conservative Party went through its internal leadership selection process to appoint a successor to Margaret Thatcher after she was ousted in November 1990. Out of the blue something prompted me to re-read this novel, and I was amazed: it seemed to be a different book to the one I had read just a few years earlier and I found that it positively seethes with emotion.

The book was written in the 1950s but is set in 1937 in an unnamed Cambridge College (generally believed to be King's, where Snow himself had been a Fellow before the war). Like the rest of the sequence it is narrated by Lewis Eliot, a barrister who had at that time been a Fellow of the College for about three years, though he still also maintained up his private practice in London. Eliot has had his own personal turmoils in the past and had decided to pursue the field of academic law for a while as a form of emotional rehabilitation.

The novel opens with the news that Vernon Royce, the Master of the College, has just been diagnosed as terminally ill, and is expected to die within the next few months. The remaining Fellows have to elect a successor from among themselves, and it soon emerges that there are only two candidates likely to draw any viable support: Dr Redvers Crawford, an eminent physiologist, and Dr Paul Jago, an English scholar scarcely known beyond the walls of the College, but viewed as having great insight into people and known for the ambition of his ideas. Crawford is to the left of centre politically while Jago is a true blue reactionary.

Snow captures the different personalities, and animosities, marvellously. There are bitter rivalries, jealousies and conflicting aspirations, all of which prey upon the Fellows and render the forthcoming election particularly sensitive. Among the Fellows there is a wide range of scholarly accomplishment. Some have achieved success and recognition far beyond the ivory tower while others have lost their way after a promising start. The portrayal of the Senior Fellow, Professor M H L Gay, is particularly effective. He is a medievalist, renowned and honoured around the world for his success in translating the Icelandic sagas, and never tires of reminding his fellow Fellows about his honorary degrees.

The tension mounts as the old Master's health gradually fails, and the election draws closer. Snow's dissection of the emotions of a tight-knit group of colleagues and the relations they have to maintain is utterly engaging, and grips the reader with the same compulsion as the best spy or mystery stories. Since re-reading it in 1990 I seem to read it again every two or three years, and the conclusion and the various twists still contrive to surprise me.

113. Mortal Causes by Ian Rankin.

This is the sixth novel featuring John Rebus, and was the first in the series to tackle political issues. (While one of the central characters in ‘Strip Jack’ was an MP, the plot did not engage with politics.) A common trait in Rankin’s books is that they tend to open with the action already underway – he doesn’t do gentle build ups. Another characteristic that has contributed to the success of the series is that, wherever possible, he uses real locations, and constantly demonstrates the immense contrasts between the Edinburgh known around the world as a beautiful capital city beloved by tourists from all over the world and the crime-ridden, gang-driven underworld that exists just a few miles from Princes Street.

In this book we are literally plunged into the depths of the Old Town, in Mary King’s Close, a street that had been sealed and buried beneath the Royal Mile to prevent the spread of an eighteenth century plague outbreak. A young man has been taken down into Mary King’s Close and murdered in a particularly brutal manner. John Rebus, drawing on his experiences as a soldier in Northern Ireland during the height of The Troubles, immediately recognises that the victim has been ‘six packed, a punishment doled out by paramilitary units on both sides of the divide.

Rebus is co-opted into a Scottish Crime Squad operation that is monitoring the rise in sectarian violence on the mainland, which allows Rankin to explore the tensions that still persisted in Scotland in the 1990s. Much of the action takes place in or around the fractious (and for once fictitious) Garibaldi housing estate, known as the Gar-B. A youth centre set up on the estate by the local Catholic church with a view to giving the local teenagers somewhere safe to go seems to have gone rogue. Asked by his old friend, Father Conor Leary, to investigate what is going on, Rebus finds himself in a completely different world, where religious prejudice is rife, and the graffiti over the Gar-B mirrors the hatred seen in housing estates across Belfast.

As always, Rankin’s characters are immensely believable, and the plot develops very plausibly. It is interesting to see Siobhan Clarke playing a very minor role – within two or three books she would become a major character, second only to Rebus himself in terms of her role in the stories. Once again, Edinburgh itself is almost a character in its own right, and there is even a cameo appearance from Maurice Gerald Cafferty (‘Big Ger’).

A strong addition to the Rebus canon.

114. Conclave by Robert Harris.

Robert Harris has made a successful career out if carefully researched historical novels with gripping plots and soundly crafted characters (often based upon real counterparts). He has, for example, reinvented Cicero for a modern audience in his novels ‘Imperium’, ‘Lustrum’ and ‘Dictator’, while his ‘An Officer and a Spy’ explored the Dreyfus Affair, succeeding in highlighting the dreadful exercise of anti-Semitism while simultaneously debasing some of the hagiography that had subsequently attached itself to Dreyfus himself, who, it seems, was not a particularly pleasant person.

With ‘Conclave’ he is back in the present – indeed, slightly in the future as the action takes place in some unspecified but not distant year in which one character can refer to recent events that happened back in 2017. Harris’s penchant for exhaustive historical research is not wasted, however. As the title would suggest, the novel is set in the Vatican during the election of a new Pope, and Harris provides a wealth of detail about the procedure undertaken by the Cardinals. The Pope is not just a spiritual leader, heading the Roman Catholic faith in his role as ‘God’s Vicar on Earth’; he is also the head of state of the Vatican State, and responsible for the appointment of the principal officers of state.

The book opens with Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the Vatican State, being summoned to the (never named) Pope’s quarters, where he is informed of the Pontiff’s death. A few other senior Cardinals are already there, and the Pope’s room has been cleared and sealed before Lomeli’s arrival. As Dean of the Vatican, however, Lomeli is responsible for overseeing the Conclave, in which all the Cardinals of the Roman Catholic church gather together, shut away in rooms within the Sistine Chapel, to elect the new Pope from among their own number.

The secrets of the Conclave are even more sacrosanct than those of a jury, and little is known of how they arrive at their decisions. Harris draws upon the prescribed instructions, originating from the thirteenth century though formalised under seal by Pope John Paul II in 1996. He gives us a marvellous depiction of the exercise of ambition. I was reminded of
C P Snow’s excellent novel ‘The Masters’, which describes the election to appoint a new head of a Cambridge College in 1937. As with Snow’s book, ‘Conclave’ follows the machinations of the different factions to promote their preferred candidate. Some of the front runners are more reluctant than others, but eventually they are all caught up in the yearning to be first among equals.

This might make it all sound very dry. Nothing could be further from the case. Harris knows how to unwind a gripping yarn, and he draws the reader in completely, while managing painlessly to impart a considerable amount of theological history along the way.

115. The Special Dead by Lin Anderson.

I never quite felt I had got to grips with this novel. I kept expecting to reach that tipping point at which I know I am enjoying the book and feel properly caught up in it, but that never happened.

It might not be fair for me to judge the novel – it is, I think, the tenth instalment on a series featuring pathologist Rhona MacLeod, but was the first that I had read, so I recognised that I was coming to established characters with their own psychological hinterlands about which I was wholly ignorant. I don’t think that was the whole problem, though. I have started any number of series midway through, and still enjoyed them. Indeed, there are a lot of series of books that I have only enjoyed because I have joined them several volumes in. For instance, I doubt whether I would have bothered to read any other Dalziel and Pascoe books if I had read ‘A Clubbable Woman’ (the first in the series) when it first came out. The same might also be said for Ian Rankin’s Rebus books if I had started with ‘Knots and Crosses’. Both are now among my favourite series .

My problem with this book lay more in the implausibility of the plot and the clumsiness of the characterisation. I’m sorry but this was not one for me

116. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

This book has received terrific plaudits from critics all around the world, and won last year’s Pulitzer Prize. It is certainly a very clever novel, containing an almost Dickensian mix of moments of great hilarity counterbalanced by others of tragedy. Somehow, though, it just didn’t work for me.

The basic premise is certainly appealing. The protagonist, having worked as senior aide to the General of the South Vietnamese secret police, escapes from Saigon in April 1975 on one of the final American military planes to depart before the occupation of the city by the North Vietnamese Army. He then recounts how he adapts to life in California, though he remains a sleeper agent for the next forty years. Viet Thanh Nguyen uses this context to make some satirical observations about life in America and the American perspective of history.

Unfortunately, I felt that the novel was simply far too long and the execution just too clumsy. That was a pity because the idea was a good one.

117. Blueeyedboy by Joanne Harris.

oanne Harris takes us into the northern town of Malbry, home of St Oswald’s School which featured so gruesomely in her marvellous novels Gentlemen and Players (2005) and Different Class (2015). Indeed, the school pays a peripheral role again her in the background of the protagonist’s upbringing.

Though I found this less engaging than the other two novels, it demonstrates all Harris’s characteristic skill at building a story. Once again we have two separate narratives, drawn from blog postings under screen nicknames. The predominant one, from ‘blueeyedboy’ himself, takes the form of a selection of brief memoirs in which he catalogues his fraught life and expresses his Machiavellian schemes to exact vengeance for a multitude of slights, both real and imagined. The other is from ‘Albertine’, who remains a stranger to the reader, though it is clear that she has encountered blueeyedboy in real life, though his actual identity is withheld from her.

Harris is a master of that format, and wields it again with great dexterity, allowing the tension to build steadily throughout the story, as the enormity of blueeyedboy’s crimes grows. She also knows how to misdirect the reader with complete ease. Even though I knew that that was what she does, I still fell for it hook, line and sinker.

118. Exposure by Helen Dunmore.

Helen Dunmore’s latest novel is a great success, combining an evocative and emotional love story with a beguiling espionage story set in cold war Britain in 1960. I found it especially interesting as much of the story is set in Muswell Hill, where I live, and which, despite a remove of fifty years, I recognised completely.

The novel is bleak. The weather seems to be cold or wet, or (most frequently) both, and life is hard. Simon Callington, a minor official in one of the branches of the intelligence service, lives in Muswell Hill with his wife, Lily, and their three children. We gradually learn that Lily is Jewish and had been born in Germany, whence she fled with her mother in 1938 to escape persecution. Having been drilled in English ways by her mother in a bid to assimilate as quickly as possible, she can now no longer speak German, though she has a facility with other languages which enables her to land a job as a teacher at a girls’ school in Highgate.

As the novel opens, Simon‘s boss suffers a bizarre accident at home as a consequence of which he breaks his leg and is hospitalised. He calls Simon and begs a favour of him, putting him in an untenable position. He and Lily find their life placed under close scrutiny.

Dunmore writes excellently. The prose just flows along, and the reader is immersed in the story immediately. Her characters are immensely plausible, and the plot is sound, watertight and hooks the reader’s attention.

I hadn’t read any of her novels before, but will definitely be looking for more of them.

Hi Ian, I read Dunmore's post-WWI The Lie recently and enjoyed it, though I wasn't keen on the ending. I have a few others of hers waiting to be read.

Glad to see another positive review of an adult Helen Dunmore novel. I have a couple on my to-read list, but found the middle grade/YA novel by her (Ingo) to be very unsatisfactory. Annoyed I didn't start at the adult end, but that other was more readily available for whatever reason.

>178 mabith: I think she can certainly write very well. I did occasionally find her book a little over ponderous, but the strength of the story overcame those slight falterings.

119. Virtual Light by William Gibson.

‘Virtual Light’ is a gripping thriller, set in an unspecified near future following a partial collapse of authority in America arising from the combined impacts of earthquakes and plague. It opens in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco and features a large community now living on the Golden Gate Bridge which evolved into a sort of sanctuary beyond the reach of mainstream law and order.

Chevette Washington, a bicycle courier Inadvertently finds herself on the fringe of a high society party. Having been hassled by one of the guests she wanders off to explore. When she returns to the main party room she sees that the man who had hassled her is now asleep with something sticking out of his pocket. Uncharacteristically Chevette steals this mysterious object and then leaves the party. As she emerges into the street she investigates the fruits of her theft and finds a pair of very dark and unexpectedly heavy sunglasses.

It transpires, however, that these are not ordinary sunglasses but are, instead, Virtual Light (VL) spectacles. When switched on they offer a new means of conveying data about whatever the wearer might be looking at. This stolen pair also contains top secret information about plans for the reconstruction of the recently devastated San Francisco. This information is immensely valuable and the owner (not the man from whom Chevette stole them - he was a mere intermediary) will stop at nothing to retrieve them.

Meanwhile former cop Berry Rydell, having recently lost his post with IntenSecure, a shady independent "rentacop" conglomerate with contacts everywhere, has been recruited by the sinister Mr Warbaby who has himself been commissioned to retrieve the missing glasses. His and Chevette’s paths are about to meet.

Gibson’s great gift has been the plausibility of his vision of a tortured future in which technological developments lend themselves to sinister activities, while society as a whole is fractured. Communes based around new and unorthodox religions abound, and there is increasing polarisation between the wealthy, who live in the safety of gated communities, and the disenfranchised poor, left largely to their own devices. It is not an appealing future, but all too easy to accept.

I recognise that the synopsis above may make the novel sound unduly fraught. William Gibson manages it to convey it all very deftly and the story flows seamlessly.

120. The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood.

Margaret Atwood might stake a convincing claim to be Queen of Dystopia. Over the years she has given us a range of dysfunctional societies from ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to ‘Oryx and Crace’ and its companion volumes. She has made a triumphant return to this fruitful territory with ‘The Heart Goes Last’.

Charmaine and Stan are struggling. Indeed, having had to relinquish their house when they failed to service the mortgage, they are now reduced to living in their car in one of the rougher areas of urban California. Charmaine has managed to land a job waitressing in a sleazy bar, but there are no job opportunities at all for Stan. Nearing desperation, he approaches his wastrel brother, Con, who has always lived on the fringes of society in the hinterland between indigence and organised crime.

As they reach their lowest ebb, Charmaine sees a television advert for a programme called ‘Consilience’ (a blending of ‘constructive’ and ‘resilience’) which offers a new start to people in their position. Thinking that they have nothing to lose, she persuades Stan to apply with her, and after some cursory vetting they are accepted. ‘Consilience’ is a new, pragmatic approach to society. In return for having a new start in a safe, regulated city, participants in the programme have to spend every other month in Positron, a local prison, where they undertake a range of different jobs which contribute to the financial viability of the programme.

As with all such brave new worlds, Charmaine and Stan are initially delighted to have had the opportunity to rebuild their lives and get back on an even footing. It only gradually dawns on them that, having chosen to enter Consilience, there seems to be no option to leave.

Atwood’s description of the running of Consilience is utterly plausible. She has constructed a fictional city that would clearly work, with its own infrastructure, tax hierarchy and internal governance structures. Being Atwood, however, she conveys all this by implication, rather than tedious enumeration. The story fairly fizzes along, and the reader’s empathy for her characters’ plight is never stretched. Her great skill is in making the ordinary and mundane seem significant, and it is her understanding of the everyday that provides the foundation for her success

Sounds intriguing, Ian. I found The Handmaid's Tale intriguing also when I read it in 2014, though a bit unfathomable in places (and it's a bit too frighteningly similar to some of Trump's views for comfortable reading now!). I must try some of her others.

121 The Picts and The Martyrs by Arthur Ransome.

This was the last completed novel in the Swallows and Amazons series to be set in the Lake District, and shows Arthur Ransome tackling more serious issues than had been evident in the previous novels.
Indeed, the Swallows are absent from this adventure, with the principal focus falling on Dorothea and Dick Callum (the Ds). It is summer 1931 or 1932 and the Ds have travelled up to the Lake directly from their respective schools at the start of the holidays. The plan is that they will stay with the Amazons (Nancy and Ruth Blackett) while they wait for their own boat (the Scarab) to be finished. The four of them will then go camping on Wild Cat Island where they will await the Swallows who will join them in a couple of weeks.

Upon arrival at Beckfoot, however, the Ds find that the Amazons’ mother is away, convalescing from a recent illness, and the Amazons are keeping house themselves with the assistance of Cook. The Amazons are on their best behaviour, having promised to do nothing even vaguely adventurous (which includes departing to the island) until their mother returns in a week’s time.

Their fun is interrupted by an unexpected exchange of telegrams with Miss turner, the Amazons’ Great Aunt, who cast such a pall over the Swallows’ and Amazons’ plans two years previously. She has been informed of Mrs Blackett’s sojourn and, appalled at the thought of her great nieces left to their own devices, has decided to descend on Beckfoot to ‘look after them’. This is appalling news. The Great Aunt has very firm ideas about what constitutes appropriate behaviour for young ladies, and they do not encompass sailing, camping or having friends to stay while their mother is absent. In what now seems an extraordinary step, the Ds are persuaded to set up home in a dilapidated old house in the woods not far from Beckfoot, and to keep out of sight of the Great Aunt, living like Picts of old. Meanwhile Nancy and Peggy take on the role of martyrs, excelling themselves in proper deportment and behaviour, struggling to convince the great Aunt that they are indeed ‘young ladies’ and not the tearaways that she believes them to be.

It seems unbelievable today to see how casually the various adults in the story accept that Dorothea and Dick should be turfed out of Beckfoot and sent to live in a hut for a few days. Such causal concern for children’s welfare and safeguarding today would result in an intervention by local social services. On the day of their eviction from Beckfoot Dorothea writes about it quite cheerfully to her mother, her principal concern being to ask her father for more information about the original Picts. Dorothea’s mother replies the next day with a total lack of concern about her children’s sudden homelessness, being primarily concerned to learn how soon the new boat would be ready.

The book is written with Ransome’s customary simplicity, which keeps the story moving forward briskly while also imparting a lot of information to redress the likely ignorance of his largely metropolitan readership. After the briefest demonstration from a worthy local, city-raised Dorothea and Dick find themselves ‘guddling’ for trout from the nearby beck, though their attempts to gut a rabbit and less adroit.
Ransome understood children very well. These stories were, after all, inspired by his own exploits from childhood holidays in the Lakes with his brothers. Timothy Steading, a mining engineer acquaintance of the Amazons’ Uncle Jim, seem to represent the voice of reason, though even he seems quite happy to accept the temporary enforced exile of the Ds into the forest as entirely reasonable. Of course, the key aspect is that Ransome so completely beguiles the reader that we all accept it too.

I can’t really expand upon the more sombre issues mentioned in my first paragraph without risking spoilers. Suffice it to say that, when it appears that something may have gone seriously wrong, Ransome rises to the occasion. The children’s attitudes and conflicting emotions are perfectly and plausibly portrayed.

This is less ebullient than other books in the series such as the original ‘Swallows and Amazons’ and ‘Pigeon Post’ but shows the central figures growing more mature and sensitive. It leaves the reader pondering what they might all have done in later life.

122. Swing Time by Zadie Smith.

I have never quite managed to make the leap of faith about Zadie Smith’s books. I remember enjoying her debut, ‘White Teeth’ (though even with that I had some reservations about the ending), and ‘On Beauty’ (despite the lack of any single appealing character), but I struggled with ‘NW’ and found her second novel, ‘The Autograph Man’, almost completely impenetrable.

I was, therefore, feeling uncertain as I embarked upon this one, though my qualms initially seemed wholly allayed. The opening chapters tell of the unnamed narrator’s early experiences attending dance classes with her friend Tracey. Though ostensibly from a very similar background to the narrator, Tracey is viewed with great alarm by the narrator’s mother, who sees her as most likely a bad influence on her impressionable daughter. The narrator’s mother is an ardent autodidact, constantly striving to improve herself, and wary of anything that might threaten her daughter’s path to a better life. Zadie Smith captures these episodes marvellously, presenting them with a sharp plausibility.

As the story progressed, however, and the narrator found herself working as one of four personal assistants for a successful Australian singer (a sort of cross between Madonna and Kylie), I struggled to retain my interest. The story seemed to be following a roller-coaster path of peaks and troughs. Every now and then I would find my interest whetted sharply, only to have it beaten down again by a stretch that bordered on the tedious. Ms Smith does have a great facility with words, but I suspect that there was simply not enough material here to sustain a full novel, however beautifully expressed.

Well, that's it for another year. Here are my highs and lows for 2016, ir oder of reading rather than preference:

a) Favourite ‘new to me’ fiction books of 2016
1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
2. Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz
3. The Allegations by Mark Lawson
4. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
5. Different Class by Joanne Harris
6. Oryx and Crace by Margaret Atwood
7. Nutshell by Ian McEwan
8. Golden Hill by Francis Spufford
9. Rather be the Devil by Ian Rankin
10. Conclave by Robert Harris

b) Favourite non-fiction books of 2016
1. Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories by Thomas Grant
2. A Buzz in The Meadow by Dave Goulsen
3. A Very English Scandal by John Preston
4. The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees by Robert Penn
5. 1971: Never a Dull Moment by David Hepworth
6. 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded by Jon Savage
7. The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carre
8. Van Gogh’s Ear by Bernadette Murphy
9. The Railways: Trains, Nation, Network and People by Simon Bradley

c) Favourite re-reads of 2016
1. Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
2. Pigeon Post by Arthur Ransome
3. Jeeves in the Offing by P. G. Wodehouse
4. Dispatches by Michael Herr
5. Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris

d) Books I enjoyed least during 2016
1. Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje
2. The Rose of Tibet by Lionel Davidson
3. Never Mind by Patrick St Aubyn
4. Tiny Stations by Dixe Wills
5. Thirst by Benjamin Warner

My reading exploits for 2017 can be found at https://www.librarything.com/topic/245108.