100TWC - Day 99: Friendship

This post has a lot of tags. It started off with more but I blew Blogger's limit. I didn't even know there was a limit! See, friendship touches so many areas of my life that Blogger can't cope. I'm half expecting it to seize up in the middle of this post. Let's see how we get on...

With the last post of my 100-day (aka 100-theme) writing challenge in sight, friendship has been much on my mind. I've had some really nice comments and feedback on here, but what's been even better, and more surprising, is the feedback I've had in real life. Whenever I've met up with friends at least one of them has commented on each occasion how much they've been enjoying the writing. I've been enjoying it too, of course, in fact that's one of the things I'll be including in the "lessons learned" follow-up post I'll be writing over the weekend. But it's one thing to gain enjoyment from something yourself, and totally another thing to find out that you've been giving enjoyment to others. Writing can be a solitary experience (all writers say this, at least those who speak/write/email to me) with -- often -- not much in the way of validation or appreciation, so it's really cool to hear the opinions of readers, which posts they liked best and why, etc.

I'd also be really interested to hear which ones folk thought didn't work out so well. To see how this matches my own feelings, for one thing, but also because it's all part of the learning experience. Just doing this stuff has helped me improve enormously, but really good feedback that mentions the bad as well as the good, is also a huge help.

I appear to have drifted off topic somewhat, so to drag it back to friendship: I've been lucky. When I talk about the times we have with mates -- the trips to the Lakes, weekends away, meals out (and in) -- the single most common response is how unusual it is for a bunch of guys to have kept a communal friendship going for so long. I'm not sure how rare it is in the great scheme of things, but those who comment on it seem to think it's pretty rare. Much more common for women to have a "girly group of friends"; less so for guys to have a "blokey group", apparently.

I've known for many years that social groups depend on key individuals to hold them together. I had an old colleagues network at one time -- around two dozen people who all used to work together in the same part of the organisation until one dark day a reorganisation came along and scattered us all across the company. Some left for other jobs, some took the opportunity for early retirement, most split up into three or four units, separated by geography, department and skill set. For several years after the split, we would get together two or three times a year (Christmas, obviously, and then one or two other meals or social events like bowling, walking, pub crawls). These were all marvellous events, well attended and very popular, but they all had a single individual -- the same guy in every case -- as the instigator. And then one day he stopped doing it. And none of us have ever met up again since that day.

The small group of friends I always refer to as my "Nottingham" mates (even though only two of them live there now) have strength in depth when it comes to organising get-togethers. It's not driven by just one of us. Once a few weeks, or a months, have gone by since our last meet, one or other of us will get in touch to set something else up. Often we don't need to do this, as we arrange it in advance at the previous one. It's a source of infinite variety, pleasure, amusement and fun to Nikki and I to be able to be part of this, as I'm sure anyone who is lucky enough to have their own strong ties of friendship will understand. Friends, they say, are the family you choose, and I would tag that with "lines I wish I'd written" if there was any space left in the tag list :0)

As I've discovered (and blogged about before), friends come at you from all parts of life, and another group that I've been blessed to reconnect with -- a few years back now -- has been the curry crew. We may only meet once a month, but I find myself looking forward to those evenings immensely. The conversation always flows, it's always stimulating and amusing, and the food is only the icing on the cake (if curry can be said to be any kind of icing).

I have a small number of friends that fall into another different category. All of the aforementioned might be classed as "regular" friends, and if such a term fits then this small number I'm talking about now might correspondingly be referred to as "irregular" friends. People who, over the years, have meandered in and out of my life seemingly at random, but who whenever we meet will pick up the threads of friendship (and even conversation!) and knit them back into something recognisable within a few hours. I met one such person outside a hotel once, a few years back. Having not seen him for more than five years, suddenly there he was, leaving a hotel at which I had arrived to meet someone else. We only had chance for twenty minutes frantic catching up and exchanging of current contact details, but it rekindled some long-buried memories and the spark of yet another friendship stretching back to the mid 1970s. We originally met at university and the names of other uni friends crop up regularly in the strangest places. Naturally the Internet is the perfect medium for this and over the years I've had the occasional email from old friends who've read this blog, or seen my profile on LinkedIn, or Friends Reunited, or found my website through Google.

There is a downside to this though. The reality of how easy it is to lose touch with people was brought home to me when I attended a school reunion about 15 years ago. It was such a strange experience I vowed never to attend one again (although I was tempted a couple of years back when they held a 25th -- or was it 30th? -- reunion). Not only the experience -- spending 3 or 4 hours in a function room with 50 people who at one time I saw on a daily basis but who, with one exception, I hadn't seen for 15 years -- but the aftermath. The impact of the realisation that I had completely lost touch with all of them, even those I'd thought of as close friends, really hit me surprisingly hard. I guess it just shows that friends are more than simply people you spend time with. Just as it's easy to be lonely in a crowded room, rubbing shoulders with a bunch of people every day for six years doesn't necessarily make them your friends. It knocked me for six a bit, did that.

The Long and Winding Road

The exact date I started writing War of Nutrition is lost in the mists of history, but it was a long time ago. The earliest date on the oldest file I have in my WoN folder is in the second half of 2000 - a first draft synopsis - but obviously that's the day it was last saved, not when I started it.

It's changed a lot since then. I finished the (final version of the) plot in 2001 and it took seven years (count 'em) to travel from there to the end of the first full draft. I've posted before about how I'm the antithesis of a writer who writes "because he must." Most of the time I feel compelled NOT to write. And then guilty about it.

But somehow, between the house moves and the decorating and the holidays and the day job (*spit*), the book what I wrote got writted. And edited for grammar correction. But of course, as writers the world over will tell you, writing a book is the easy part. So it was that I began the Age of Submissions, back in August 2008.

Even though every word I read on the subject of querying agents unanimously warned it would be a long and heart-breaking process, I was convinced the first one I sent out would result in a deal. Probably for a million dollars. I'd crafted a knock-out query letter. No-one could resist. 50 query letters (and three revisions of the letter content) later I had to admit my experience was, well, long. I can't say it was heart-breaking. No-one had said the book was crap. Mainly because no-one had read it. I'd had no requests for full, or even partial, submissions. It was all "we're too busy" or "this isn't what we're looking for." So rather than being heartbroken I was just meh.

Until, almost a year later, I read the magic words: "Thank you for your query. We read it with some interest and would like to see the full manuscript." I hardly slept that night with excitement, daft bugger that I am. The 12-week reading period elapsed and when I heard nothing I followed up. They weren't still locked in thrall at the greatness of my prose. They'd simply not bothered to say no.

After another year I had a second request for a partial, followed (five months later) by a second rejection. It was at this point I decided radical surgery was needed. Two-and-a-half years of perspective allowed me to see what should have been clear much earlier: I had an 80,000-word novel hiding in a 100,000-word fat suit.

I rewrote. Hard.

And this time, even my inner self - the one who always tells the truth - was happy with the result. This version was The One. I sent out a few more queries, but everyone was still too busy. However there was a distinct change in the tone of the rejections. They were almost unanimous in declaring the novel a "strong project" or an "intriguing idea" and even went so far as to express regret that they had no space to take me on. That, combined with the experiences of one or two friends and the urging of a few more, led me to decide to abandon the traditional publishing route on whose door I had spent more than three years knocking, in favour of epublishing. And the full story of how I came to that decision, is a post for another day!

Book Swap

Chorlton’s "Big Green Festival" today and the book club were invited to man a book swap stall again. I did this once before, at our first book swap back in 2007, but hadn't been involved the last couple of times. This year the previous organisers of the book swap table weren't available, but this coincided with us having rather a lot of books we wanted to get rid of, so I volunteered. I turned up this morning with one plastic crate full and another containing half a dozen hardbacks.

The festival proper opened from 11am to 6pm, but that's a long time to be stood behind a table full of books smiling politely while passersby sift through the multiple copies of book club cast-offs looking for a good read. I never intended to stay for the whole afternoon, but I'd assumed - since several other book club members had volunteered to help man the stall - that I wouldn't be the "last man standing" and could hand over to someone else. This cunning plan also hid the main reason for leaving early: not to be left with piles of books to look after.

We may have only done four of these, but that's enough experience to know that we always end up with way more books than we start with, and I was under strict instructions not to bring the remainder back home. But at 4pm, having been left on my own since my only two helpers had to leave around 1.30, I had no option but to pack the books back into my plastic crates (which were now BOTH full to the point of books falling off the top) and start to carry them to the gate.

In between carrying off one box and returning for the second some generous individual had come along and dumped FIVE carrier bags full of books on the table. My reaction by that stage was "you have got to be joking." Less than two hours before the event closed? I left them there.

Even so, returning home with two full crates is not the most popular move I've ever made :-/

Book Review: If On A Winter's Night A Traveler

Well-respected author, renowned for his "experimental" style and inventive short stories and novels, Wikipedia introduces Italo Calvino thus: "Lionised in Britain and America, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature."

So it's perhaps unfortunate that my first exposure to him came through possibly his most inaccessible work. A book about a reader trying to read a book, where the odd-numbered chapters are written in the second person and attempt to tell you what you, the reader, are doing and thinking, and the even-numbered chapters are chapters from the book "you" are trying to read. So, the first question that might come to mind is "Why?" closely followed by "What?"

If you're sufficiently interested you can do some research on the concept of metafiction. This book is widely reviewed as being "fresh, original, clever, inventive, masterful," etc, etc. But there are almost as many negative reviews where you'll find words such as "boring, too clever, tedious, impenetrable."

So, the ultimate Marmite book, then? Possibly. I guess it very much depends on whether you're looking for something different and potentially intriguing, and prepared to wade through chapter after chapter of nothing much happening to get it. And, if and when you finally do "get it", was it all worth it? I firmly believe there's a reason so few books are written in the second person. It doesn't work. Or at least, it doesn't work for a fair percentage of readers (me included), and why would an author contemplate using such a device when it's guaranteed to limit his or her audience? Personally, I don't like being told that "I" am doing this or that, or thinking this or that, when clearly I am not. Suspension of disbelief doesn't even come into it, as there is no belief created in the first place.

Apparently those sequential first chapters, while initially appearing to be random and unconnected, are in fact connected in some nebulous way and contribute somehow to the eventual resolution (inasmuch as this novel can be said to have a resolution - when it comprehensively fails to end in another explosion of "cleverness") but you'd have to really want to hunt for these clues and quite frankly I was so bored with the whole thing I gave up halfway through, as have a number of reviewers before me. A handful of bookclub readers said they had given up in the past but found it easier to read at the second attempt. Maybe knowing in advance how the book "works" gives you some protection from the tedium.

But for me, I'm happy to agree with an Amazon reviewer who asked why, when there are so many other books out there to read and so little time in which to read them, would you bother wasting any of that precious time on this?

I have always had a problem with books that are too clever for their own good - Cloud Atlas being the most often mentioned example. But this takes cleverness (and hence problem) to a whole other level. It is overtly cynical and manipulative of the reader. Yes, fiction in general does this. Obviously. Stories are intended to move you, transport you to other worlds, other lives, other experiences. Have we learned anything new by having that fact rammed down our throats by Calvino? Is it really "playful" as some reviewers put it? Or is it exploitative? I don't care. I just don't want to know.

Book Review: Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife

The book club choice for January. Usually a fairly relaxed read, because we don't have a book, or a meeting, in December. Unfortunately I ordered it, without paying much attention, from an Amazon marketplace dealer in New Jersey, so it took most of December to arrive.

After the first couple of chapters I began to think this would be one of those books that I'd abandon. Firmin -- you can read extensively about him online but briefly the runt of a litter of 13 rats who develops a taste for eating books and discovers that this leads to enlightenment through some weird process of absorption through digestion -- takes, I think it is fair to say, a while to get going.

Many of the online reviews revel in the slow pace of the start. The detailed description of life as a young rat living in a bookstore, the trials and tribulations of being the 13th rat born to a mother who, as nature dictates, only has 12 teats. His discovery of books and his long-distance, always doomed, relationship (or attempt at one) with the bookseller. I just found it hard going. By the time I'd read a third of the novel I was convinced I was going to give up, but I've abandoned so many book club books. I decided to press on and see what happened. So for me the story didn't really take off until the second half when Firmin meets, and eventually starts to lodge with, the writer Jerry. And unlike many of my book club contemporaries I found Firmin's sojourns to the cinema, and his surreal encounter with Ginger Rogers, added to the story. It ended up being, if not exactly a fulfilling read, then at least quirky, original, and reasonably entertaining.

While researching other readers' views on Firmin prior to writing this (more to see whether the idea another book club reader had -- that Firmin is, in fact, the alter ego of Jerry the writer -- was really as inventive and original as it sounded during the meeting), I came across an interview with the author, Sam Savage, from 2008. Savage wrote Firmin when he was 67, and this extract from the interview I found unexpectedly moving:

'He pauses, then says: "Of course, everyone asks me now why I waited so long to write. And I give different answers. I had always wanted to be a writer: I'd written a lot of poetry, which I didn't like then and don't like now. I used to publish it every now and then, but I found it very unsatisfactory.

"Anyway, when we moved up here, we had to clear everything out, all our books and papers and everything. And I found fragments of novels, whole chapters that I've written over the past 35 or 40 years, and I'd read them, and I'd think: this is not bad. I thought I'd abandoned these because they were terrible. But not only did I not remember writing them, I couldn't recognise the person who did write them.

"So I suppose that in one sense the person who wrote Firmin didn't come into existence till later, and I couldn't have written it at any other time. But also, Firmin's essential experience is of failure - failure to write, failure to complete - and I'd had that experience. You can't have that at 30, because you think it's going to happen: you have to reach a certain age before you realise that it isn't.

"I thought I'd give classes on writer's block," he continues, "because I know the solution: it is to give up. Not pretend to give up, but really give up. I'd stopped writing for several years, I had a sailboat and I was going to sail around the world, and I thought that that was what I'd do before I died. I'm not going to be a writer, I thought, I'm not going to write.

"Now there's something in Buddhism - called, I think, the great death - where people go to the master, and they struggle, and they memorise the texts and the sutras and so forth, and they meditate and they meditate, and they don't achieve it, and then they give up. Right? Ain't gonna come. And then you have all those Zen parables, where the old man goes off, and he's sweeping, and he knocks the pebble into the bamboo, and - there it is. Enlightenment.

"And you can't give up like that when you're young," he sums up.

"You can only give up like that when you realise your life is approaching its end. I did, and it just came. Like a miracle."'

(You can read the full review and interview here.)

For someone (clue: it's me) who's been struggling to find the impetus, the energy, the motivation to write another novel after having spent 7 years writing the first and not having any success with publishers in the three years since, Savage's words felt something like a blessing. The cynical side of me laughed a hollow laugh and thought "Christ! I can't even give up properly!" but the small boy who always wanted to be a writer? Well, his ears perked up (well, OK, I was reading rather than listening, but I don't like the image of eyes perking up. Even if they can) and he thought Yeah. This guy didn't make it until he was 67. I'm only 54. There's time.

Book meme revisited

Last time I did one of these was way back in May 2008. This one comes, via Diane, courtesy of the BBC, who believe "most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here." Which is very disdainful of them. Or are they just trying to make people feel better, in an age where - supposedly - fewer people are reading, and those who are, are reading less?

Anyway, the instructions say "Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt", so let's see how we get on. I've chosen to underline the ones I've read, rather than using bold. Bold formatting doesn't show up too well on this blog.

1) Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2) The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3) Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4) Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5) To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (review here)
6) The Bible
7) Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8) Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9) His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10) Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11) Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12) Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13) Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14) Complete Works of Shakespeare
15) Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (review here)
16) The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17) Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18) Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19) The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20) Middlemarch - George Eliot
21) Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22) The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23) The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
24) War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26) Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (review here)
27) Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28) Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29) Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30) The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31) Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32) David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33) Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34) Emma -Jane Austen
35) Persuasion - Jane Austen
36) The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis (um... this is part of the Chronicles of Narnia - see #33)
37) The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39) Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40) Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41) Animal Farm - George Orwell
42) The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43) One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44) A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45) The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46) Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47) Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48) The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49) Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50) Atonement - Ian McEwan
51) Life of Pi - Yann Martel (review here)
52) Dune - Frank Herbert
53) Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54) Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55) A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56) The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57) A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58) Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60) Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61) Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63) The Secret History - Donna Tartt (review here)
64) The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65) Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66) On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67) Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68) Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69) Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70) Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71) Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72) Dracula - Bram Stoker
73) The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74) Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75) Ulysses - James Joyce
76) The Inferno - Dante
77) Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78) Germinal - Emile Zola
79) Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80) Possession - AS Byatt
81) A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82) Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell (and God! Was it BORING)
83) The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84) The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85) Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86) A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87) Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88) The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (yes, I really have read the whole lot)
90) The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91) Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92) The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93) The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks (review here)
94) Watership Down - Richard Adams
95) A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96) A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (one of my favourite books ever! - and not normally my sort of thing)
97) The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98) Hamlet - William Shakespeare (another strange entry, given that it's included in #14)
99) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

41 read, and 6 partials. Many of the ones I've not read wouldn't interest me, or I haven't even heard of. There are also a few that I intend to read (some that I've intended to read for years!) and undoubtedly some of those titles will be on the book club list before long!

Book Review: The Wasp Factory

I'm familiar with Iain Banks' work, but until now only in his guise as Iain M. Banks, science fiction author. This is the first non-SF work of his that I've read, and probably, since it was his first novel, the best place to start.

I have a long-standing ambivalence to reviewing very well-known works. What, after all, can I say that hasn't already been said a hundred times (or to be entirely accurate, in the case of the reviews on Amazon, one hundred and thirty-five times)? But in terms of being well known, The Wasp Factory is in a league of its own. According to Wikipedia: "A 1997 poll of over 25,000 readers listed The Wasp Factory as one of the top 100 books of the 20th century."

If I hadn't already learned this was a debut novel, I think I would have worked it out for myself. It has distinct echoes of another debut novel - much less famous (at least, outside his immediate circle of friends) - by an acquaintance of mine. It is however, much more accomplished in its characterisation, use of language, and plotting. Only the smallest hints of apprenticeship remain in odd little corners of the narrative. In the main, it's an impressive piece, even though the subject matter is not something I'd normally choose. Geographically, emotionally and physically, the overarching impression of the story for me was one of claustrophobia. Frank inhabits a small Scottish island - reached from the mainland only via a bridge - which he rarely leaves, since his birth was unregistered and he doesn't attend school. His rituals are rigid, many of the places he spends his time are small and inaccessible - the attic room, the dugout - and he is alone for most of the time.

His story is surprising, unpredictable, and told with total candour. A compelling clarity and absence of sentiment that is immediately recognisable as the innermost thoughts of an adolescent boy in all their brutality and horror. Unlike many of the book club books of recent months, while easily as weird as the weirdest of them, this held my interest right up to the last page. And on attaining that page there was a welcome lack of "so what?" in the ending. Not a book I would expect to read again, but definitely enjoyable as a one-off if you're looking for something different.

Kindle Edition

November's book club selection, voted in last night, is The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. Many thousands of reviews of this online, it was highly controversial and acclaimed when first published, it's been around for 25 years, and it was a runaway winner in our monthly poll, the other choices only managing one vote each. Sounds like it will be a cracking read, if a little... grim... in parts.

So here I am on Amazon first thing this morning, putting in my order, rather disturbed to discover the following...

Formats:
Kindle Edition £4.51
Paperback £4.75

Huh? You're telling me all that paper manufacture, typesetting, print run, ink, cutting, binding, packing into boxes, shipping to the distributor, storage, shipping to the store, that is no longer necessary because of "the wonder" of Kindle... all that... translates into a retail saving of 24 PENCE???

Good grief.

Not that saving money is the main reason for buying a Kindle, but I'd have expected a bigger differential. At that rate and assuming I went for the non-3G version, I'd have to buy 455 books before I'd made back the outlay. Something which, at recent rates of purchase, would take about 20 years!

Book Review: The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

The book club member doing the choosing for this month is a fan of detective fiction. I know this on account of the fact that every one of her three choices occupied that genre. I dunno where these fans of a certain genre get off, foisting their preferences on a largely unwilling membership. You'd never catch a science fiction fan doing that.

I think the voting went so massively in favour of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher because it's based on a true story. Personally I'd have preferred Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. I saw it dramatised on BBC Children's telly when I was a boy but somehow never got around to reading the book. Anyway, this is what we were stuck with, and as it turned out "stuck with" is the right way to describe it.

I wrote "based on a true story" above but it would be more accurate to say the book recounts the true story. More or less verbatim. With just enough additional prose to tie all the pieces together, it assembles the facts from newspaper reports, police notes, eye witness interviews, court transcriptions and such other information as is attainable through research, and then presents them chronologically with minimal interpretation and virtually no embellishment. What I had thought would make the book interesting and unique - the fact that it represents itself as the first true detective story (at least insofar as it occurs fairly close to the formation of Scotland Yard, when detectives were first invented) and the beginning of a cultural icon that remains popular to this day: the mystery of a murder in a locked house with multiple occupants - actually didn't help to make the story compelling at all, for me.

The Kent family - a complex set up involving a large number of children and step-children along with the master of the house, his second wife (originally the nanny) and their coterie of servants - go to bed one night and wake up the following morning to the discovery that one of them - the youngest - has been taken from his bed and murdered.

So the book unravels as a series of events, observations on various character traits of the players, a little bit of history of each as far as it's relevant to the story (and, later, straying into aspects totally irrelevant), in a way that I found almost entirely unprepossessing and worthy of only the most marginal interest. I suppose it didn't help that I'd worked out who the murderer was by about halfway through the first chapter, and only the small question of finding out whether or not I was right kept me going. Once again the book's sleeve is full of reviews calling it "absolutely riveting", "brilliant" and "gripping" but naturally the publishers aren't going to print sleeve notes revealing it to be "boring", "tedious" or "terminally dull" are they?

The author makes no attempt to heighten the mystery, or represent the chief detective - the eponymous Whicher - as anything other than a methodically plodding introvert with about as much charisma as a bowl of porridge, whose previous "successes" as a detective uniformly arise from his habit of deciding who did it and then badgering them until they confess. I begin to see who the TV detective Columbo was based on.

The "revelations" about the private life of the Kent family are dreadfully predictable and once the murderer has confessed and been imprisoned the book degenerates into a chronicle of how that prison time is spent, and what happens subsequently to all the other detectives, lawyers and family members over the next (would you believe it?) hundred years. The whole work could easily have been shortened by a third, which might have helped the crawling pace of the narrative. In the end the only positive thing I can find to say about it is that I was surprised by the ending - but only because it came much sooner than expected, the last quarter of the book being made up of footnotes and bibliography.

Book Review: Stuart - A Life Backwards

Young volunteer at a Cambridge hostel for the homeless meets young homeless man and they decide to write the story of the latter's life. Backwards. Only it's not entirely backwards, since it ends, rather than begins, with his death, having shortly before the end discussed his childhood and its attendant traumas.

The chapters deal with blocks of time from Stuart's life, and these are taken in reverse order, but within each chapter time flows in its normal direction. So the narrative takes the form of a kind of running stitch - leaping backwards behind the scenes to start at a point several years before the previous stitch, but then moving forwards during the course of the chapter.

Masters is neither totally absorbed by, nor totally aloof from, Stuart. Their partnership in the creation of the work leads to what appears to be a "real" friendship - possibly, even, the only one Stuart has ever had - and indeed this is perhaps one reason for the criticisms that this isn't a "proper" biography. But the author skilfully avoids the traps of sentimentality, solutionising, or preaching when recounting the problems that Stuart deals with daily, whether these be internally or externally generated.

Perhaps the single most important thing this book taught me is that there are no simple explanations for why someone becomes homeless, or remains homeless, and similarly there are no simple solutions. But there are other lessons too. That it can happen to anyone, for example. Both homelessness and injustice. There's a lot of "there but for the grace of God" in this, but it is never mawkish, boorish, or overly focussed on the often horrific facts of Stuart's existence.

It's one of those books that, while it's occasionally an uncomfortable read, also occasionally has you laughing out loud. It certainly provoked one of the most interesting debates we've had for a long time at book club.

Book Review: Timolean Vieta Come Home

The book club choice for July, and I think it received most votes on account of being the smallest of the three selections on offer, and also having relatively large print. Everyone knew that, even if it was crap, it would be a short and easy read.

I nearly didn't get past page seven. The sentence "His then boyfriend, a middle-aged Austrian music publisher whose name had slipped from memory but whose big, grey moustache and fierce, hooded eyes lingered on, had just announced that he was going to sleep in the spare room that night, and that Cockcroft could suck his own stupid penis for a change." brought me to an abrupt stop, wondering whether I really wanted to read any more like that (assuming there would be some more). But I was reminded of the reaction of another book club member from years back - she hasn't been to the meetings for about three years - to a line in a book I had recommended. May's The Many-Coloured Land. One of the minor characters says something about "having to get himself some gash" on his return from a long space mission, a sentence which had had a similar effect on her, back then, as Dan Rhodes' line had just had on me. I resolved to plod on.

Only it wasn't really plodding. The book did indeed turn out to be a very easy, if somewhat unstimulating and unsatisfying, read. Its online reviews frequently make much of Rhodes' beautifully crafted prose. A shame, then, that someone with such talent for the written word should use them to say not very much of any interest. The book is a series of short stories masquerading as a novel, with the stories thinly connected by the meanderings of the eponymous dog, who has been kicked out on account of the antipathy of his owner Cockcroft's latest lover. Cockcroft himself, his life, loves past and present, and many failures - as a composer, friend, lover and even human being - feature large in those parts of the book not devoted to the many characters the dog meets on his travels, but as Rhodes gives us little or nothing to like about Cockcroft, his reminiscences and liaisons never get under the reader's skin. Since the dog himself is little more than a narrative device, he elicits no sympathy either, and the people he meets and whose stories we read about in the aforementioned lambent prose, are come and gone in an instant far too brief for empathy or identification.

So once again, a book club read has left me with a huge feeling of "so what?" It's true that it is far more enjoyable to read a well-written book than a poorly written one, but no matter how well written it is, if the subject matter is nothing more than a loose agglomeration of everyday people doing everyday things, what IS the point? I may as well have been watching Emmerdale.

Book Review: Fatal Revenant

Way back in October 2008 I reported finding the first two books of Stephen Donaldson's Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I read book 1 on our Lakes week last October and since then I've been waiting for a chance to pick up book 2. This week has provided that chance and I've been devouring Fatal Revenant's 856 pages since Sunday morning.

I don't want to give too much away, but I will say I found this every bit as riveting as the first book. It's true that you have to be prepared to do battle with Donaldson's style when he's writing about the Land. The constant repetition of his heroes' fear, anguish, trepidation, suffering, loss and uncertainty which was such a signature feature of the first two trilogies is here once again, in spades, and it can get very wearing.

But overwhelmingly, this is a monumental success. Not only does Donaldson pick up the threads of every story, race and being that has gone before, and weave them into a narrative that fits as comfortably as an old cardigan, but he then skilfully embroiders that cardigan with a host of new characters, races and situations that are so cleverly explained and so thoroughly well thought-out that you can't tell the embroidery was never part of the original cardigan.

Moreover Donaldson's skill as a story teller, already epic at the time he wrote the first Chronicles, has achieved a hitherto undreamt of level of mastery. The complexity of this tale, as Linden Avery confronts a host of opponents some of whom endure bitter rivalries of their own and hence can occasionally appear to be her allies, others who are virtually their own hero and foe simultaneously, and continues to journey with a rare admixture of characters each of whom has a mystery to solve or at least one hidden aspect, is breathtaking. One of the most satisfying and rewarding reads I can remember for many years.

Book Review: The Secret History

Yet another in the seemingly endless series of novels chosen by the book club which are heralded, hyped, and lauded and yet for me don't quite live up to expectations. This is the book that took years to write, was written while the author spent time with a hugely intellectual and erudite company, and whose pecuniary success has meant that Donna Tartt has been able to spend the rest of her life (to date) languidly contemplating her literary navel, and polishing her subsequent manuscripts until they meet her own exacting standards of shininess, which results in her dropping them off at the rate of approximately one per decade.

"Haunting, compelling and brilliant," gushes the Times critic on the front cover. I'd give him (or her) one out of three at best. Brilliant it may be, but I found it neither haunting nor compelling.

It's a good enough read, don't get me wrong. In parts it fairly zips along, verging in places almost on the gripping. But then it begins to meander, losing its way in the minutiae of student life and recording the passage of time with infinite care and detail when a simple paragraph starting "The following Spring..." would suffice. One of the club members, with classical Greek learning in her background, suggested that Tartt was attempting to mirror a Greek tragedy (throughout the book and not only in the part where the group attempt to recreate a bacchanal). If true then it's a clever idea, as an intellectual challenge, but slightly pointless in the knowledge that it will bypass 99.9% of your audience. Still, don't let me be accused of supporting dumbing down.

Much of the writing is excellent but in places it loses any pretensions to grandeur and becomes almost clunky. I was left with the impression that Tartt had dashed off a draft in her own style and then spent several years going over the text, overlaying it with clever and artful prose in an effort to - well - polish it as I mentioned above, and that she'd simply missed a bit here and there.

The real downfall of the piece though, is the assembly of unbelievable characters. Dark and moody Henry, stoically battling his demons (or alternatively just being a boring snob); coquettish Camilla who can't quite manage on her own (not very 20th century that is it? But very classical Greek, apparently); charming and well-connected Julian who despite having travelled the world and met just about every famous person you ever heard of, is now content to hide away in an academic backwater teaching a handful of drugged-up ne'er-do-wells and getting up the nose of the college board.

So in the end my impression is that it's a load of old tosh. Readable, well-written (for the most part) tosh, but tosh all the same.

Book Review: The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

Catching up with my book reviews, this was the book club choice for February - the one I've just finished reading.

It's the story of a young native American half-breed boy whose mother was an alcoholic, partly because his father had run off as soon as he found out she was pregnant, and whose head was run over by a mail truck when he was only seven. Despite serious injury to his skull the boy survives and the book follows his "adventures" through intensive care, rehab, a school for unwanted native American children with various problems, and a Mormon foster home, until he eventually fetches up in a surprising place that I won't spoil by revealing.

For only the second time in my life (the first time being with John Brunner's Shockwave Rider) I persevered with a book against all reason to find that the last third of the text made up for the hard grind of the first two-thirds. And it was a hard grind. From one perspective the story is unremittingly grim. Schoolboy violence, drugs, murder, parental abuse, societal abuse, Edgar runs the gamut. Yet Udall's narrative retains a light touch with moments of laugh-out-loud humour. Even so, by halfway through I still hadn't developed much in the way of caring about the main character. Things began to pick up a little once he arrived at the Madsen household and from there on the book began to give something back, turning eventually into a story I'm glad I read, even though I'll almost certainly never read it again.

With a couple of notable exceptions the book club denizens agreed, in general, with my feelings, giving the book relatively high scores and fifth place out of the 42 books we've now read. (You can see the latest club league table here, if you're interested)

Book Review: The Other Hand

It occurred to me recently that I'm way behind with my book reviews. In fact the last one I wrote was in August last year, but having looked back at what's happened since, I've not been as lax as first thought. In September we read The Leopard, which was SO dull I didn't get past chapter four. October we were in the Lakes, so I missed out on reading Brave New World, and I never made it past the starting blocks with November's The Go-Between, which brings us neatly to the first book of this year: The Other Hand by Chris Cleave.

Told from two perspectives - the Nigerian refugee girl "Little Bee" and the British magazine editor Sarah whom she meets while Sarah is on holiday with her husband Andrew - this story epitomises the modern novel for me. As in, it totally fails to live up to either the hype on the cover or the effusively gushing reviews that you will find only a short Google away.

Parts of it are funny, especially the many references to Sarah's young son in his Batman persona, but much of it is dull, or contrived, or hints at possible interesting diversions which are never followed up (an example being the colourful characters who share Little Bee's time in the immigrants' detention centre, but then disappear without trace once she sets off to find Sarah and Andrew).

Sarah is one of the most self-absorbed characters I've ever read, to the point of being a cipher. Everything around her - son, husband, lover, job, house, holiday - is there for the sole purpose of providing her with entertainment and diversion. As you might imagine this rapidly becomes tedious beyond belief, and descends into farce when her lover's job (which he constantly and unbelievably recklessly verges on throwing away) proves to be nothing but a plot device designed to allow Sarah to accompany Little Bee back to Nigeria when she is inevitably deported.

The cover blurb insists that it doesn't want to reveal too much about the book in case it spoils the "truly special story." To my mind, that would be "special" in a way that might make you turn away in discomfited embarrassment, if you know what I mean. It seems most of the book club agreed with me too, since their votes but The Other Hand firmly in 39th place (out of 42 read).

Book review: The Book Thief

August's book club book - The Book Thief - is a hugely bestselling, award-winning, and well-reviewed account of the events that befall young Liesel Meminger during World War II after she is orphaned and sent to live on Himmel Street with foster parents Hans and Rosa Hubermann. The book is narrated by Death, who despite his stereotypical depiction on the cover art, insists that he doesn't have a skull-like face, or a scythe.

The Book Thief is undoubtedly well-written, in a literary way. As usual with literary works it has almost no plot to speak of, but meanders its way pleasantly enough through Liesel's few years on Himmel Street. There are no spoilers here (unlike in that Wikipedia entry linked above), but several things conspired to dull my enjoyment of this book to the point where it ended up on the metaphorical pile of those I've read and ended up thinking "so what."

So much of this novel seems cynically designed to appeal to lovers of literary work. To make it stand out from the crowd, rather than concentrating on its story. The device of using Death as narrator adds nothing to the work, and Zusak's depiction of Death has none of the humour of Pratchett's Mort, and none of the chill horror of the traditional Grim Reaper. He's just a sad old gatherer of souls, disinterestedly looking upon the lives of those he waits to collect and enjoying only the faintest and most occasional glimmer of excitement when he comes across a story like that of the book thief. How apt. Because only someone with an equally boring and monotonous existence could revel in this tale.

Even the descriptive passages and figurative language felt calculated to me. Calculated to elicit the maximum effect from the literati as they ooh and ahh over each new turn of phrase. 'Tears like wire', 'hair like splinters (or twigs) brushed away from a face with a wooden hand'. As if the author pored over his work groping and grasping for an original way to say something and - yes - finding it, but in the end, so what? Mostly they stuck out like the points on barbed wire, scratching my eyes as they scanned the text.

One or two of the characters stood out - Hans and Rudy are probably worth mentioning - but overall I couldn't develop any empathy with any of them until the last 30-40 pages, by which time I'd long since written the book off. I'm not a huge fan of WWII literature in any case (see my February review) so in the end this was just another heap of meh. I gave it 5 out of 10, but in the group discussion it gained two 10s and a good smattering of 9s, so don't take my word for it.

Book Review: Stranger in a Strange Land

For only the second time in three years, I chose the book club book for this month. I offered a choice of (what I thought were) three outstanding SF novels from different times, and this - Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land - won the vote.

Billed as "the most famous science fantasy novel of all time" (Heinlein was never known for his reticence) I've been trying to remember when I last read this. The obvious answer is "thirty years ago" but I don't think it's quite as long as that. What I *do* remember is a lasting impression of a book I enjoyed immensely, back then.

So... what book was that then? Because when I started rereading this, I thought it was the most pompous, inflated, self-important drivel I'd ever read, with stilted dialogue and unbelievable leaps of plot. The idea is great, the execution? Not so good.

Clearly, the book hasn't changed. But somewhere in the intervening 25-30 years, I have. And so have social mores. And on top of that, the landscape of acceptability, equality and political correctness has shifted radically, as if borne on sociopsychological tectonic plates. The end result is that Stranger has been left behind in the very early 60s and now reads like an anachronistic diatribe rather than a piece of cutting-edge science fiction.

There's a famous quote from the book (which I won't bother repeating here) on the subject of rape and my God! It leaps out at you as (now) totally incongruous and... well... just plain wrong-headed. Much of this conspired to dull the enjoyment of what I had expected to be a pleasant experience, refreshing my youthful memories of a damned good read. Instead I found whole swathes of text tedious in the extreme. Even the better parts were less than good. My self-created illusions about this author were severely dented and I regretfully concluded that I won't be able to bring myself to reread any of my (reasonably extensive) collection of Heinlein for fear of repeating this unhappy few weeks. Honestly, I couldn't wait for it to be over. What a disappointment.

Book Review: The Full Montezuma

This is less of a book review and more of a warning. I can't really review it properly as I didn't get past the fifth chapter, so I'll just say: steer clear.

Peter Moore is a humorous travel writer in the mould of Bill Bryson. Whether his other books match Bryson's I'll never know, because on the evidence of this one I don't even want to bother trying. In fact I hesitated to put the two names in the same sentence. In this book Moore sets off to travel across Mexico with his current girlfriend, whom he's only known for six weeks and to whom he constantly refers as the "girl next door" or, more often, simply "the GND."

I don't want to waste too much of my time or yours on this dreck so briefly: it's sloppily written, cliché-ridden, doesn't tell you much about the places they visit, displays an almost total lack of editing and is completely unfunny.

Moore's website makes occasional reference to his critics, assuming them to be frustrated authors. Well I'm happy to bolster his preconceptions in that one regard. Because this is yet another book that makes you think "Christ, I can write WAY better than this," and yet there his books sit, on the bookstore shelves, having managed somehow to be published, while mine continues to bounce back from agencies as if it's on elastic.

Book Review: Never Let Me Go

February's book was Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. When we held the club meeting, the first question anyone asked was "did we think this was a science-fiction novel?"

Umm... no. SF is defined by its exacting depiction of the science, along with the fiction. Ishiguro comprehensively (and irritatingly) fails to address any of the science surrounding his central premise. We never find out exactly what is being "donated" and when, or anything about the cloning process. Indeed he's on record as stating that the novel isn't about clones, it's about human relationships, and how people treat other people. His use of flashback, combined with the personal narrative style, allows Ishiguro to jump from half-revealed truth to half-completed story and back again constantly, which I found distracting in the extreme, and also quite false. This is a novel, after all, not a transcription of one person's random thoughts.

Throughout the novel issues and revelations are hinted at but never really explored. Neither society's apparent treatment of the "students," nor the students' own unrealistic behaviour in the face of the knowledge of what the future holds for them really rings true. What's left is the feeling that the author was interested only in writing a "literary novel" for its own sake, rather than exploring his, admittedly interesting and original, story concept in any way that would provide any satisfaction or resolution. In common with his other work (apparently), his words paint a cold, bleak landscape entirely populated by cold, emotionally repressed characters.

Enjoy the book for its expressive and descriptive language, but don't expect to care for any of the characters - they can't even bring themselves to care about each other - or to gain any insights into any of the many questions it asks.

Finally I must also give more iPublicity to this "satirical" review on the Guardian site which was pointed out to me by another club member. It's not only hilariously accurate if you've read the book but also gives an uncanny flavour of the whole thing if you haven't.

Book Review: If This Is A Man

A little late with this, the book club choice for January: Primo Levi's "If This Is A Man." Strictly speaking, two books in one, as it includes "The Truce" in the second half, but I didn't read that. To be honest, I'd had enough after the first couple of chapters and couldn't face another entire book of the same, no matter how short.

From what others said, I may have peaked too soon. The second book is supposed to have a jollier aspect than the first, but as far as I'm concerned it's no great loss. Let's face it, the second could hardly be more dour and depressing than the first, which is a recounting of Levi's time in Auschwitz in painful detail. Literally painful - he enumerates his sores, and beatings, and hunger, and cold.

I think this is probably a book that everyone in the "civilised" world should read, but that doesn't mean I think they'd enjoy reading it. I didn't. I wanted it to be over. And I felt guilty wanting that. Countless reviews bang on about Levi's beautifully crafted prose, and yes, it's true, the book is astonishingly well written. But to me that didn't help. The subject matter is still what it is, and the more illuminating it is, the more depressing.

Among all the horrors that Levi describes, what stood out for me is that no matter how much privilege, rank, and power are stripped away from men, even when they are stood naked in the mud and rain with nothing to their name but a few dirty rags of clothing and a spoon with which to eat their daily ration of foul soup, when even that very name is removed and they are referred to only as a number, even then men will find a way of imposing hierarchy to differentiate themselves from their fellows. To subjugate some, thereby improving one's chances of survival. To defer to others, for the same reason. Even when survival means nothing more than the chance to stand naked and freezing in the snow for another day, men - humans, I should perhaps say rather - will still do whatever it takes. Because the alternative is, for them, too frightening to contemplate.

That's what stood out, from his writing. But there was another aspect to reading this book. The way it makes you think about yourself. How would I react, I wondered? Would I be one of the ones prepared to do anything, say anything, eat anything, to survive? Or would I give up, and play the part of one of those Levi so eloquently describes, who wander around for weeks, sometimes months, with dead eyes, waiting for their body to catch up with what has already happened to their spirit?