Past Caring

After this paragraph, spoilers abound, but right now you’re safe. If you’ve never read a Goddard novel, do it. His stories are long, complex and wholly satisfying if not entirely original. I read a lot of thrillers and mysteries, so quite often I can predict how a plot point is going to turn. The thing of it is, Goddard binds his readers to the story with this knowledge not by astounding you every five minutes with some fantastical twist. He doesn’t need smoke and mirrors to keep a reader going. He does it by knowing how to set tension, creating interesting characters that still have surprises up their sleeves and by helping you get ahead of the story and urging the protagonist to catch up. I’ve read his first novel (this one) show more and his latest (Long Time Coming) and both are equally good; quality, long-arc thrillers spiced with historical detail and real-life characters. I will definitely read more.

Spoilers set to kill.

While only my second Goddard novel, I’m not surprised at how he weaves his tales. This one is long and complex with lots of players, but I loved every minute of it. Edwin’s memoir is so tantalizing as a device and for itself and so was the search for the post-script. As soon as its existence was revealed I knew where it had to be hidden and silently urged Martin to think and could hardly bear his fumbling when I knew where it was all along! It takes a deft hand to tie a reader to the story so completely. The current trend seems to want to only do this with unknowable and unforeseeable twists in the story, but Goddard does it with knowledge, binding you to his protagonists through mutual desire for success.

From Martin’s dissipated self-interest to Eve’s two-faced game playing and Edwin’s ineffectual victimhood the story never felt slack or stale even though I could guess a lot of it. What else but a secret marriage would be Edwin’s undoing? What else could have been Martin’s undoing? Of course Eve was not as she seemed. Alex was on shaky ground to begin with. And of course Elizabeth would always be the long-suffering innocent. The only thing that threw me was Leo’s ultimate purpose. It seemed really strange to me that he’d take out his vitriol and long-distilled hatred on an innocent old woman who had nothing to do with his circumstances. Strange, but the way he morphed from kindly patron to vicious criminal mastermind was very well done. Sure he was a bit of a cliché and the whole gun incident set up the penultimate ending, with Martin’s reward at the end being the capper. Satisfying if not wholly original. I’ll definitely read more of Goddard in future. show less

Robert Goddard is one of the most reliable authors writing in the mystery genre today. A Goddard book is a journey and an adventure - and I’ve really enjoyed everything I’ve read of his.

However, I was a bit taken aback by this in the early chapters. It didn’t seem his usual voice - I found the characters, the settings and the juxtaposition of past and present disconcerting. It didn’t take me long, though, to get caught up in the tale – and then I couldn’t put it down.

Martin Radford, the narrator, is an unlikely hero. It is the mid 1970s and he is enlisted to research a seventy-year-old mystery. Radford is a down-at-heel disreputable unemployed history teacher with a past – and, it seems, not much of a future. He is, show more effectively, a nondescript little bourgeois with contacts from his Cambridge days - he has all the social graces and some of their advantages, but he's squandered his opportunities because of his flawed character. He took the gig, at first, as an excuse for a bit of a jaunt and a chance to earn some spare cash; however, it quickly turns into a real mystery. As he delves into the past, his own failures come back to haunt him and he must anticipate threats to his own life.

Goddard does an excellent job of seamlessly mixing fact and fiction. The backdrop for his mystery is the pre-World War One British Liberal Government constitutional crisis. Edwin Stafford was a young minister in Asquith’s Cabinet and a close friend of the young Winston Churchill. Much was expected of him but resigned when in his prime in 1909. Using themes of political rivalry between Asquith, Lloyd George, and Churchill, and the radical intervention of the Suffragette movement, Goddard constructs an engrossing page-turner of a novel. The tragedy of Edwin Strafford and of those who cannot move on from the past is put across with great impact.

This is Robert Goddard's first book. They always say that an author's first book is the one they really wanted to write, and in this case it shows. I think it is the best of all his work, with believable characters in an almost unbelievable situation that is yet firmly grounded in history. I couldn't put it down, and I came nowhere near guessing the solution. show less

I am a huge Robert Goddard fan having read...I thought...everything he’s ever written. Seems I was wrong since somehow this gem missed my radar. Like most all of Goddard’s books there are twists, double twists...red herrings...theories that seem plausible, until they aren’t...then at the last it all comes together. At the end, you feel Martin gave the book its title as events leads him to the point that he is “past caring”. The ending... despite its being somewhat expected... still felt right and the reader feels that things are finally as they should be.

Goddard has a gift for flawed protagonists/narrators--they're usually quite seriously flawed. You sometimes don't want to like them . . . but then you do anyhow. Says a little something about us. Or about narrative conventions. And he has a pretty deft hand at plotting a historical mystery, as well. Lacks the heft of the best LeCarre, but certainly in that league. Goddard dependably writes very good genre novels, and this is another one of them.

Past Caring didn't grab me immediately, but finally it hooked me in. I found it extremely frustrating in places, as I wanted to yell at the naive protagonist every few pages to not be a complete idiot, which he inevitably was. Sheesh. There were a few too many contrivances in this story on top of a story. The modern day plot mimics the older mysterious story, the plot devices are often so deliberately stuck under our noses (don't leave that letter on the mantle to answer the phone!!). But it moved. And some of the characters are delicious, both the good ones and bad ones. There's even a sex scene on the beach.

I can't help wondering just how misogynistic the author is. The only woman who comes off reasonably well is SO good, I don't show more quite believe her. The men aren't much better, except for the protagonist, who often portrays himself as weak, and is so. The best character is Madeira, the island itself, which sounds divine.

So for involvement, eventually, lots of points, for aggravating plot, not so many, for some really interesting characters, a reasonable number. Let's say 3 1/2 stars. show less

This is the second book I’ve read for the Great Transworld Crime Caper. As soon as I read the synopsis of the book I thought it sounded like my sort of book, within a few pages I knew I’d made a good choice.

The plot is split between the present (though that’s in the 1980s, back when the book was written) and the past, as historian Martin Radford tries to investigate what happened to Edwin Strafford back in the 1910s. Edwin’s story is told through his memoir, both plots are gripping and once they started to overlap I found it increasingly hard to put the book down.

I didn’t find the characters in the book particularly easy to like, the majority of them are working to their own personal agenda and seem to have little trouble with show more doing whatever it takes to get to their goal. Many of the characters are however interesting, I enjoyed reading about Elizabeth, Edwin’s fiancée.

Edwin’s memoir covers his time as a politician and his experiences of the women’s suffrage movement. I found this to be very interesting reading, though as it’s a time of history I don’t know much about I couldn’t comment on it’s historical accuracy.

The book is very readable, and the jumps between the present set narration and the past account provided by the memoir were very smooth. I have previously read books that use diaries and memoirs for flashbacks that have failed in what they were trying to do – Goddard pulls it off very well. I’ll certainly be recommending this book in the future. show less

This novel tells two stories, firstly that of an early 20th century British cabinet minister, Edwin Strafford, who suddenly and mysteriously loses his job and his fiance without a clue as to why this is happening to him. His career is ruined and he ends up a minor consular official in Madeira. It is also about a young historian Martin Radford, divorced and unemployed and visiting a friend in Madeira in the 1970s. He is hired to investigate the story of Edwin Strafford, starting with a recenty discovered Strafford journal. The story is well plotted, well-written in a style reminiscent of the early 20th century. (I think I might have liked it if the style had varied more between the journal and the more modern story.)