Juxtabook

The Book of Summers by Emylia Hall

The Book of Summers by Emylia Hall is a review copy which is why I read it. I would have never have been drawn to such a saccharine cover otherwise. It's external sweet shop tones belie the rather tough well written interior however, so I am very glad to have been given a copy.

The book begins with Beth Lowe, a young professional in London, living in a flat and awaiting her father on a visit from Devon. He brings with him a parcel for Beth from Hungary with a letter telling Beth her mother has died and a photograph album displaying the photographs of seven consecutive summers of her late childhood. The Book of Summers is structured around this album as Beth tells us the stories of those summers, of her parent's marital breakdown, of her own relationships with both her mother and father and of her growing-up and falling in love with a Hungarian boy Tamas.

The album idea and series of flash backs are, like the cover design, rather overworked features of some forms of genre fiction (Chick lit? Holiday reading? Maeve Binchy chest flatteners? Take your pick) and at this point I'd have been wondering what the heck the publicist thought they were doing sending this to me had not I been immediately enchanted with both Hall's prose and the protagonist Beth. Not, in the end, that I particularly like Beth (she is self-focused, juvenile, and full of misplaced anger and loyalties) but that in itself already lifts this novel away from what it first appears. Unlike typical holiday reading you need not identify with the main character, nor like her at all; she is too real, and like a colleague or a neighbour one just accepts.

Throughout the book has so much to recommend it. The handling of the troubled teenage years is done beautifully and if I am frustrated by Beth's rather arrested emotional development, then the events of her youth and the progression from happy child to surly adult is clean, clear and believable. The descriptions of life in Devon versus Hungary are lively, colourful and full of believable details. Relationships too are handled well, believable but not too tidy.

In the end I found myself thoroughly enjoying the book. As a bookseller I should know better than to judge a book by its cover. But what of the reader who picks this up seeking holiday reading? Well, it is a lovely read but it also has a very dark heart, and it is one that darkens as you finish the book and think about the events over the next days. On a sunbed I'd have been rather un-nerved by this. The colours of this book, despite the summers of the title, seem rather more autumnal to me. It has pretensions to literary fiction but it is at the more entertaining end of that spectrum. To me it is a warm throw and open fire kind of book, to mull over as the nights draw in.

All in all a very readable and worthwhile book, rather oddly packaged.

The Book of Summers by Emylia Hall is due out in paperback this week.

Daylight Saving by Edward Hogan

Daylight Saving, published this week, is novelist Edward Hogan's first book for young adults. I was delighted to receive a copy to review. I am considerably less pleased now to have to write a review because it was so very, very good I'm going to sound like the author's mother. Do others find it hardest to review their favourite books? Anyway ...

Daniel and his father are on holiday, the worst kind of mid-teen holiday where nothing between parent and child seems to go right. Daniel is awkward and embarrassed about his father, himself, everything. His father is over-concerned about Daniel and fussing in the wrong ways. He also drinks too much. Both father and son are heartbroken over the end of the parents' marriage and neither is doing well to handle it. The October half-term break is supposed to clear the air, help them heal a little but from the start this seems unlikely. Then Daniel meets Lexi. This is no obvious teen romance but a subtler relationship where both parties gain strength and balance from the friendship. It is also a supernatural relationship. Daniel realises something terrible has happened to Lexi and it is destined to be repeated unless he can find a way to stop it.

The friendship is balanced against a superbly handled plot. As a ghost story it has plenty of tension but the overall effect, thanks to the wonderful characterisation, is delightful rather than scary. The setting of the half-term week with its definite end and the contained panic of that key hour, when the clocks go back (hence the title) keeps everything ticking briskly. This is not just the usual few hours left of the holiday friendship but something altogether more sinister. Lexi, as the victim, was a remarkably strong, clear cut, personality. She is the least victim-like of victims, and the narrative neither pities her nor makes light of what happens. She moves away from being defined by the event by seemingly changing elements and appearing to defy time itself as she swishes on her watery way.

Hogan writes terribly well about teenagers: Christopher in The Hunger Trace and the slightly younger Vincent from Blackmoor are wonderfully real creations with the charm, irritability, irrationality, insecurity and quirkiness of the complex creature that is a teenager. He is just as successful in Daylight Saving. There is nothing trite about the portrayal of Daniel and Lexi, no making light of feelings, nothing in the narrative of Hogan, the grown-up pulling the strings. Remarkably for such a book, a ghost story that relies on the power of the build-up, there is no let-down at the end. The final hour is as exciting as can be, and the personal resolutions for the characters are plausible and satisfying and I loved the last sentence of the book.

The cover of my copy has a female figure cutting through water and this sense of buoyancy, movement and purpose is on every page of the book: in the plot, in the charcterisation and finally in the resolution. Whilst remaining suitable throughout for its intended audience, it had enough of the scary stuff to keep this hardened fan of the supernatural gothic engaged too. No quibbles, Daylight Saving is just perfect for anyone from the teens up, and I'm honestly not his mother!

Jill by Philip Larkin

I've had a lot of pleasure over the years disliking the poetry of Larkin (like the style, hate the substance) and so it was with little enthusiasm that I opened Jill, one of Larkin's two novels. Shock, horror, I enjoyed every page. Not that it is without faults, but it is very much a piece of juvenilia and Larkin pleads for leniency in the introduction to my 1986 Faber edition.

John Kemp, fresh from grammar school in northern England, is about to start at Oxford University. We meet him on the train where his social inadequacies (desire to be seen to be doing the right thing combined with no understanding of what that actually is) sees him fail to eat his lunch, and then get ostentatiously and embarrassingly fed by all those sitting near him. This kind of amusing-cum-squirm-inducing moment is where the book's success lies. I can't imagine anyone having quite as many of these moments as John Kemp but we've all had enough of them to feel considerable empathy.

Once at college our young friend gets into worse pickles seemingly by the hour, is intimidated by the public school boys and repulsed by the peculiarities of the other grammar school boys. By page 100 there was still no sign of the promised 'Jill' from the cover but she appears soon after in the midst of John's loneliness and was not at all what I was expecting.

There is more to this than a kind of poor-man's-Alan-Bennett northern boy frustration, but not much more. John is engaging enough to keep the interest in this short book and Jill is a clever little twist. In the end though it is a bit like Margaret Drabble's early work: elegant enough prose, but what's the point? The whole thing is so terribly middle class, and it's a version of the middle class that existed only briefly in the middle years of the twentieth century. It is also full of that rather demeaning distance with which Larkin deals with women. Again, to some extent this was perhaps a natural feature of the age, an age of single sex education apart from anything else, but other characters in the book lack the ineptitude and peculiarities of John (doing my best to avoid spoilers here but one could write reams on attitudes to women as displayed in Jill).

Jill does have one more point of interest though in the history of the novel. This is a sort of 'campus' novel and it has as its focus a working class young man out of his milieu. Larkin, in his introduction, notes that James Gindin has suggested that Jill contained the first such of these working-class heroes but he notes:

...if it is true, I feel bound to say that it was unintentional. In 1940 our impulse was still to minimize social differences rather than exaggerate them.

And herein lies its interest. In 1940, in time of war, one can believe that there was a genuine unifying effect. Larkin's John Kemp is not really horribly out of place: much of his isolation is in his head. It is more the perceived social inadequacies of an unconfident young man than rabid social commentary. This gives the portrait a subtlety that surprises in so young an author, and also in comparison with the rather in-your-face humour of the Lucky Jim style of novel that came shortly afterwards.

In the end, Jill is rather a sweet little book, an interlude in social and literary history, and a pleasant though undemanding read.

Reading Round-up

Like most purveyors of used books I can safely say 2011 has not been one of the best. In order to generate enough sales I have to upload new stock like crazy as most sales come from the last couple of hundred books one catalogues. Doing this is keeping things ticking over for my business but it does mean that I have been rubbish at blogging this year. I also have not had so much time for reading or for commenting on your blogs for which I am sorry. Anyway, here is a little look at what I have been reading recently.

The Ascent of Isaac Steward by Mike French is the most peculiar, luxuriously grotesque and enchanting of books. Isaac Steward has lost his wife and sons, he can't remember how or why and if he does what will the knowledge do to him and how will he ever find a way out of the inevitable abyss? What this densely compact novel does is take us through the psychology of grief and denial in the most weird and inventive ways. Nothing is quite as it seems and the parameters of the story serve to disorientate the reader. Wth a situation so extreme only an extreme handling of language will do. Words are very much Mike French's tools and what he constructs is not quite like anything else I've ever read.

To be honest the dense richness of this Michelin starred linguistic meal is such that I struggled to deal with it over the first chapters. Once I stopped trying to consume it greedily and treated it as a tasting menu, small courses, one at a time, then I enjoyed it immensely. There is no denying that this book is hard, and hard in a way that so few books, even those of great literary merit, are now. But why should we always expect that easy-greedy read? I am pleased that a book so evidently defying all marketing genres found a publisher. I read a chapter a day and it was like being a student again. The pleasure in deciphering a chapter each morning was the same I once got from tackling a difficult poem. Neither this style of prose, nor poetry, are my reading mediums of first choice but I thank Mike French for reminding me why hard is good, and I should try it more often. The Ascent of Isaac Steward is a real neo-modernist triumph and in a nihilistic world is definitely worth your time and patience. There is a quote on the back of my copy by R. N. Morris that describes it as 'reminiscent of the surrealist literary experiments of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake but blessedly readable' and I would agree with that. This work is a literary mountain but it is a perfectly climbable one, and boy, what a view.

Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky by Patrick Hamilton has been on my bedside heap for ages and I've had twitter conversations with several people about it. It has taken me absolutely ages to read, because of my time constraints, but has been a total pleasure from start to finish. Hamilton is best known for his plays Gaslight and Rope, the second of which may or may not have been murdered by Hitchcock for the film, depending on your point of view. In Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky you get three novels for the price of one as it was originally published as three separate works: 'The Midnight Bell', 'The Siege of Pleasure' and 'The Plains of Cement'. The overlapping narratives deal with the lives of pub waiter Bob, prostitute Jenny, and plain but good-hearted bar maid Ella. Bob is an aspiring writer with the goodly sum of £80 saved in the bank, he falls for Jenny and the narrative leads us on a will-they/won't-they pathos laden jaunt through those twenty thousand streets, and ordinary workaday London. Hamilton's ability to build a scene and people it with characters that could step off the page is very filmic in quality, and explains his best known successes. On the page not every manoeuvre is totally successful but Bob, Ella and Jenny are beautifully drawn and many of the pub scenes are hilarious. It would make a wonderful screen play and there is a BBC adaptation. I have dropped heavy hints to Santa on that one. All in all it's made me want to read Hamilton's complete works. What a joy if they're anything like this.

My last little treasure for this post is set quite close in time and place to Hamilton's work: Crewe Train by Rose Macaulay. I read and loved The Towers of Trebizond by Macaulay when I had it in stock and kept meaning to extricate it from the business for myself but never got round to it and last week I sold it! The horror! I shall have to buy it now, alongside the delightful Crewe Train. The world it depicts couldn't be more different to that of Twenty Thousand Streets. The heroine Denham is very much in the noble savage mode. Having had a free range childhood under the care of an indolent and careless father in the middle of nowhere (specifically Andorra) she finds herself living in her aunt's home in the heart of literary London. The story of her attempts to adjust and deal with the word-driven people around her is a timely one for those of us who live in a fiction-fuelled frenzy. Denholm shows just how we irritate the unconverted. I love Macaulay's writing and the sense that she keeps the reader at the end of a yoyo string, pulling us in and allowing us to see just as much of her creation as she chooses before she drops us below the line of vision again. One always gets the feeling that her books are like icebergs with so much more we can't see: omitted and deleted scenes that she won't be making available for the DVD. A bizarre and delightful book, the sort to read and re-read.

Like Bees to Honey by Caroline Smailes

Gosh I don't think I have a font size big enough to do justice to just how lovely this book is. Bereaved and depressed, Nina leaves her family in the UK and goes home to Malta. Having become pregnant out of wedlock years earlier her Maltese family have cut her off. She goes to make peace with, quite literally, the ghosts of her past.

The basic mechanics of plot are quite simple so this review is confined to the sumptuous interiors: of Nina, of Malta, of the Maltese houses and churches, and of the ghosts that haunt Nina. Nor am going to quote anything as this book is a meal not a snack.

In Like Bees to Honey Caroline Smailes has written a sweet and emotional book that manages never to be sentimental or cloying, and when your themes are death, redemption, love, homecomings and food, that's quite a trick to pull off. It is beautifully written with luscious descriptions of food and buildings, mixed with fluttering ribbons of Maltese speech, and layered with the psychological detritus of letters and memoir and flights of fancy. Throughout there is word and syllable level repetition that gives the otherwise limpid narrative a reassuringly solid and material form balancing dark and light as beautifully aurally as the twists and turns of the narrative balance thematically. Every page is quite the most gorgeous experience.

This is the kind of book that makes you want to rush out and buy eight copies to wrap in tissue and ribbon and place on plates as place setting at Christmas. It is that gorgeous. The food would probably go cold though. Enjoy!

You can visit Caroline Smailes' website here  and her twitter profile here.

Reading Round-up

So what have I been reading whilst up to my eyes in work and rampaging 7 year old girls on their school holidays? First up is the delightful Nimrod's Shadow . Part of the Fiction Uncovered promotion, which is how I spotted it, it is a satifyingly enigmatic read. The time slip narrative moves between the Edwardian and present day and begins in realistic enough fashion before tumbling you into flights of melodramatic maddness. Chris Palling pulled off the trick of making the historical part seem solid and real and modern part ethreal and elusive. Taking the "now" and defamiliarising it to such an extent brings the Edwardian artist closer to us in a way now ammount of realistic historically accurate writing could have done on its own. The lovely story, delightful dog, and fantastic narrtive fireworks, all mean this has gone straight to my re-read pile.

Passion by Jude Morgan was even better than the wonderful The Taste of Sorrow. Like The Taste of Sorrow it is a multifaceated fictional treatment of intertwining literary lives, in this case Lady Caroline Lamb, Augusta Leigh, Mary Shelley and Fanny Brawne, the WAGS of the Romantics, so to speak. Like the Bronte inspired novel Morgan again amazes with his ability to keep so many complex characters both real and different. Caro Lamb is rendered Mad, Bad and Dangerous to know through a wonderful and increasingly rambling and self-deluded first person narrative. Fanny Brawne is as strong pert and 'minx' like as you could hope and her relationship with the doomed Keats is nonetheless tragic for knowing what will happen in the end. I willed Keats to live as I always do but as poor Fanny discovers will alone is never enough. Mary Shelley suffers long and hard and I got lots of enjoyment from disliking Shelley. Augusta Leigh, Byron's half sister and possible lover, was the one I knew least about, but she was perhaps my favourite by the end.

Despite the huge undertaking of creating realistic psychological portraits of four extremely different women Morgan further excels himself with strong supporting cast: the poets themselves are beautifully drawn, William Godwin is neatly knocked off his Radical pedestal, Annabella Milbanke is not so much a portrait as a chilling self-focused carving in marble. Most delightful of all are the childhoods of the four women, where the earlier Romantic poet showed the "Growth of a Poet's Mind" from his childhood environment in The Prelude, Morgan shows how the women of these later poets were equally formed by their early lives. Utterly enchanting from start to finish I have not the teeniest quibble with a single syllable of Passion.

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Conan Doyle was also one of my summer reads. Rather a murky misty atmosphere and hardly a beach book but apt for the damp and chilly place yorkshire has been over the last month. Spending time with Mr Holmes is always a pleasure despite the many and varied faults and I enjoyed this immensely. The dog, needless to say, is less engaging than little Nimrod above. I read it in Leopard's Collected Editions with an introduction and an afterword by John Fowles. I am not knocked-out by Fowles' fiction but his critiques here were spot on. Amazon's page say in the "Product Description" that the introduction is by Trevor McDonald. Ignore them they know nothing! 

Agent 6 by Tom Rob Smith

I am new to Tom Rob Smith's Russian thrillers. The initial subject matter, the murder of children, had put me off but once I got past the opening scenes in Child 44, Smith's opener to this trilogy, I was hooked. The conundrum is how you investigate a crime when officially that crime cannot exist. In Soviet Russia such violence was something that might occur in the uncivilised west but not in the equitable USSR. The hero Leo is initially involved in the cover-up of a child's murder but as events crowd round him he moves on and discovers the unthinkable. His transformation from willing agent of the state to unofficial-detective-on-the-run is philosophically fascinating and without doubt is one of the most exciting books I've read. That was Child 44 but the book I am reviewing here is Agent 6, the last in the trilogy which came out last week.

Agent 6 is set some years after Child 44. Leo and his family live a settled life. Leo has put his morals before his career and as a result his wife, a teacher, is the one whose career has taken off. In the early chapters of the book something terrible happens to Leo that shapes the rest of the book. This is less of a page-turner than Child 44, it is more studied and less driven as we watch Leo almost anaesthetised by the shock. To find peace he must find Agent 6 and to find Agent 6 he will have to get to the USA. How's an ex-secret service officer to do that during the Cold War? Well, it takes him decades. The central section of the book is set during another European attempt to invade Afghanistan. The Russians in the 1980s found the local Afghan population very hard to subdue. Can Leo get out of Afghanistan to the west before the Russians or the Afghans kill him?

This central setting is the strength of the book. Afghanistan in the 1980s is nicely realised. The tensions for the locals between the demands of their religion and those of communism are effectively realised through Leo's side-kick, a junior officer being trained by Leo. In the end Leo must save them both before at last getting Agent 6 in his sights.

Agent 6 is about different kinds of totalitarianism, about fanaticism on all sides, and what the west turns a blind eye to in its dealing with non-democratic regimes. Stylistically it is very different to Child 44 and the style suits the subject. Leo is not the handsome career soldier he once was. He is older, slower, suffering from mental health problems, but experienced in the manoeuvrings of governments and secret service departments like a chess grandmaster. Agent 6 is not so much a thriller (and I think you might be disappointed if you read it as such) as an intricate game, a history lesson, philosophy in action.

Agent 6 is quiet but truly engaging where Child 44 merely excites. It is a more mature work with a more mature hero, and a very brave ending. I loved it.

Bloomsday Book Review: Saints and Scholars by Terry Eagleton

Saints and Scholars is the only novel by literary critic Terry Eagleton. So why am I reviewing it today when it is written by a Lancastrian not a Dubliner? Because one of the three main characters is one Leopold Bloom.

Bloom is joined by two real life figures in this bizarre intellectual game. James Connolly was an Irish republican who was very badly injured in the 1916 Easter Rising. He was unable to walk and when he was executed by a British firing squad because of his leadership role in the Easter Rising he had to sit on a chair. Eagleton imagines that Connolly survives this encounter with the firing squad and, still injured but functioning, is on the run. In a remote cottage in the Irish countryside he hides to find there Bloom escaping from the pages of Ulysses and Ludwig Wittgenstein fleeing Cambridge, Bertrand Russell, and his own intellectual sufferings. Other characters include Nikolai Bakhtin, brother of the rather more famous Mikhail, sobbing into his drink in an Irish bar. Poor Leopold Bloom has escaped his life in Dublin because his wife has eloped with Stephen Dedalus and he is caught between the brilliant but dizzy Wittgenstein and the passionate and angry Connolly. Wittgenstein thinks Bloom's a Cambridge scholar sent by Russell, and Connolly thinks he's a spy. Bloom is frightened out of consciousness but ends up discussing his wife's elopement with Nikolai over cocoa. Never was a plot more bizarre.

The plot is preposterous but mercifully short. The dialogue mindbogglingly witty and erudite. And Eagleton is funny, very funny, even in Literary Theory: An Introduction he is funny, and that's no small achievement. Wittgenstein as a character is a fine comic turn having sent himself demented with his philosophical angst and habit of reading "only detective stories and St Augustine".

Wittgenstein sat in the single chair, examined the ceiling closely, looked with sudden anger at Russell as though he had just broken wind, and placed his hand to his throat as though testing himself for strangulation. This was the room in which he conducted his seminars, sitting in silence for ten minutes or more while his eyes rolled and his body writhed in agony, labouring to give birth to an insight. His colleagues would sit around watching him attentively, like the world press viewing the last threshings of a gas chamber victim or a group of doctors observing an acutely constipated patient.

'A man,' Wittgenstein announced suddenly, 'might have a stoat or other small animal in his clothing and be unaware of it.'

Full of Joycean quirks, philosophy, Irish history, drinking, and literariness it will most likely appeal to the David Lodge fan with all those literary jokes and stylistic star turns, though frankly it is more like David Lodge crossed with Tristram Shandy. An oddity of a book, it is well worth picking up if you see one. It is out of print but there are copies on Amazon and Biblio. And, as it happens, I have one in stock available for the grand total of £1.50 plus postage. Not a sale that I'll retire on, but do enquire if you're interested!

The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby

The The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby has been on my wish list for a long time. South Riding is one of my favourite books and I love the sparky independence of Sarah Burton. She walks a good middle path between Fanny Price and Becky Sharp as a heroine! I had high hopes for The Crowded Street therefore and I wasn't disappointed.

The Crowded Street is one of a long line of books from the early twentieth century that deal with middle class women with a brain trying to balance their emotional lives with their career, when merely thinking of a career was in itself pretty daring. It reminded me throughout of The New House by Lettuce Cooper but where The New House is a very emotionally controlled and contained novel (set as it is over one day) The Crowded Street is much more chaotic, and I don't necessarily mean that in the pejorative sense.

We begin with a childhood party in 1900. Poor Muriel, who is nothing like Sarah Burton from South Riding, gets it all wrong. She is too timid and doesn't get enough partners for her dance card. She suffers the humiliation of her mother's intervention and the rather patronising kindness of a popular boy who does eventually dance with her. Mortified she seeks solace in the quiet of the supper room. She is tempted by a bowl of sweets, she knows that they are for her, as one of the children, at least eventually, so she gives in and takes one. She is caught red handed committing this solecism of helping herself. Poor Muriel, "The Party was spoilt, The Party was spoilt."

This event, presented as a prologue, sets the tone for the novel. Muriel is a social failure, only in the most minor things, but this enough. We follow her through school, and though her twenties. Muriel's life is the terrible pedestrian one of the unmarried married Edwardian daughter. The defining features are relationships, good and bad, with the women around her: her mother, always focused on getting things right socially; her sister Connie, strong willed and selfish; Clare, daughter of an actress and a right little dazzling starlet; and motherless vicar's daughter's Delia, intelligent, independent, caustic and radical (and remarkably like Vera Brittain).

Where The New House is brilliant but a tad claustrophobic The Crowded Street is brilliant but a tad flat. Neither book is one to read if you are feeling down, in fact (reader response theory alert!) these are books where the version you experience will very much depend on what you bring to the reading yourself. Whether Muriel is irritating or sympathetic, for example, would I think change on different readings. She is such a self-conscious personality, a social wall-flower. In the narrative itself she remains elusive though you are looking at her all the time. It is like looking at a very faded water colour and inevitably you have to bring some definition and colour from your own mood to the book. This is not to say that this is a fault, rather it is actually, I think, a very clever handling of the characterisation, to make the central character so ethereal.

Leavening things are some nice social set pieces, dances, tennis parties and at-homes where little things matter a lot. There are also some times away from the Yorkshire village, at boarding school, in Scarborough during WWI, and a brief period staying at what seems like an Edwardian prototype of Cold Comfort Farmwhere Muriel, if she but knew it, was playing at being Flora Poste before Stella Gibbon had thought of her, amongst some rather twisted rural characters.

The Scarborough section is a great piece of historical writing. Holtby was in Scarborough during WWI when it was shelled by the Germans. The description of the bewilderment and fear of the civilians affects is very nicely caught. As the sick are moved away from the coast by the few available cars, the able-bodied take to their heels. As Muriel and her companions run away the army trucks full of raw recruits are driving past them in the other direction to deal with what was a suspected invasion. One can only imagine the disaster that would have followed if they had been required to engage in combat.

Although Muriel's life is flat the narrative can often be witty and light:

Some women take to crochet as others do to cigarettes.

All in all, The Crowded Street caught me in the right mood and I thought it was a lovely book. I can see though that it will not be for everyone, nor would it seem lovely every time. It does seem in many ways ahead of its time being published some years before either The New House or Cold Comfort Farm, and that is almost a good enough reason to read it on its own.

The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan

The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan has possibly the worst opening page I have ever read. Apart from that it is a beautiful book and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Its risible opening is a mixture of sexual fantasy and an account of the death of Maria Bronte nee Branwell, mother of the Bronte sisters. Clearly not a combination with a lot of potential, unless you're trying to be funny, and I don't think Morgan was. In short The Taste of Sorrow is a fictional version of the lives of the Bronte siblings. Once we get going it very quickly becomes utterly beguiling. It is a very emotional realisation of the lives of six people not least because it is their relationships with each other, as much as their relationship with their writing, that dictates the tone of the novel. It is easy to forget, seeing them as we do through the prism of their writing, that of course the defining feature of their lives was not their work but what they were to each other, to their friends, to their father and aunt, and in Charlotte's case to her husband. The lovely thing about The Taste of Sorrow is that the characters that are created, and created utterly without cliche, would make a very readable novel even had they never put pen to paper in any meaningful way. And of course three of the siblings don't ever do that.

One of the great delights of this book is that its opening section, focusing on Maria, Elizabeth and the very young Charlotte, is not rushed in order that we can get to the famous threesome. Instead Morgan takes real time to build a convincing portrait of the eldest sisters: brave and intelligent Maria, and kindly and steady Elizabeth. "Maria will inspire her, and Elizabeth will comfort her," says the Rev Bronte as he sends Charlotte to Cowan Bridge School after her sisters.

The portraits of the father and aunt are slightly tending to caricature, not unlike Nellie and Joseph in Wuthering Heights, but are nonetheless sharply drawn. Swift dialogue nails a temperament to the page:

"Pray for Lord Byron's soul?" Again the stony chuckle. "Well, I dare say you can try."

And Aunt Branwell crystallises as the words flow past.

The emotional enormity of those early losses manages to be both elegant and unsparing. Charlotte tries to convey Cowan Bridge to Branwell:

"You couldn't get near the fire," she said at last. "The big girls shut you out so. You hung about hoping... But mostly you had to imagine yourself warm. You had to have the fire inside."

And when the time for Elizabeth's funeral comes Charlotte cannot console herself, as she had done since she was a child who'd just lost her mother, by thinking of her two elder sisters as barriers against the world leaving her safely in the middle of her siblings. After an abortive, and prophetic, attempt to push Branwell forward in the funeral procession, "You're the boy, you should follow Papa," realisation dawns that she is now at the head both literally and metaphorically and she doesn't like it, not one bit:

So she went first; after the coffin (so light, swooping up), after Aunt and Papa, she led the way, and stepped out into the gentle sunlight with such a feeling of stinging merciless exposure that she wanted to throw her arms in protection against a world besetting her; a world where there was no longer any middle to inhabit, only edge, brunt naked extremity.

Throughout the prose is this rich, this emotional. However it suits the biographical tale, and balances the physical bleakness of the lives of the four Brontes who reach adulthood, and the end result feels balanced, and witty, and light. There are lovely moments throughout, though we immerse ourselves in Branwell's nightmare and Charlotte's depressions, as we must.

If I had read the first page in a bookshop I'd have dropped this book like a hot brick. Which would have been a shame. I read it only because it was lent by a friend with a strong recommendation. In the end it was such a great pleasure, despite knowing the facts of the Brontes inside out, to see them walking and talking and writing and thinking in front of me. I loved it so much that I got my paws on a copy of Morgan's Passion, on Byron, Shelley and Keats, straight away.

 
What do you think of using real lives as the mainstay of a novel?

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Mansfield Park is in many ways an odd book. I should preface what I am about say by noting that I enjoyed every page during my recent re-reading. I didn't love it with a passion, or find myself racing to the end which I still do with both Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice (though Anne and Elizabeth always get their men so I don't know what I am so worried about). I did just quite simply, enjoy it.

I first read Mansfield Park in my teens, probably when I was 18 or 19. I had read four of Austen's mature works by then, and I found Mansfield P. a bit of a chore in comparison. My age and being bogged down in exams may well have coloured what I thought, hence the re-read. I should also add that I am not going to go on about the slave trade; the arguments on that are well rehearsed by Edward Said and others. Let's face it Austen just doesn't do the big picture.

So, how did I find it this time round? Well, and I am going to assume that you've read the book here so Spoiler Alert, I was less irritated by Fanny Price herself and much more irritated by Fanny's invidious position. Georgette Heyer has a novel called Charity Girl which illustrates with rather less subtlety (and much more humour) the horrors for the poor child cousin living with her thoughtless family. The notion of 'distinction' appears so cruel to modern eyes: the differences in life expectation of the cousins with expectations, like the Bertrams, and the poor cousin (who has similar genes and the same education and manners but not the dosh or the country pile), is truly distasteful, especially when enforced with such glee by Mrs Norris. As an adult I found some sympathy and admiration for Fanny's self-contained nature, and her ability to by-and-large keep her spirits up in the most lowering circumstances. Whilst the teenage me wanted her to rail and rebel, the adult can see the pointlessness of that, as poor Fanny is trapped in ways more thorough and more frightening that anything we can understand now.

Edmund I found did not wear so well, in the transition from teen-reader to adult reader. Although his kindness and his ability to empathise with the young Fanny when he was just a teenager himself are both endearing features his stupidity in his assessment of Mary Crawford (when he does see right through her on first meeting before losing his marbles) is so crass as to almost be a failure in consistent characterisation.

Mary though I admired, not as a person but in the drawing of her character. I think in many ways she is Austen's most skillfully written, and it was sheer admiration I think, at Austen's light-touch building of personailty that made the book so enjoyable. Mary is so neatly done. She is not cruel, nor in any way awful like Mrs Norris (or Caroline Bingley): she is complex, and self-focused rather than merely selfish. She just does not seem to possess the mental furniture that would let her truly perceive anyone else. Despite all her scheming she plays both Edmund and Fanny wrongly on all counts, quite simply because she does not see them properly. The wonderful final scene between Mary and Edmund, and the necklace scene between Mary and Fanny, are masterpieces of misunderstanding. When E. M. Forster wrote 'only connect' he could have had Mary in mind (and indeed he has some neat things to say about characterisation in Mansfiled Park in Aspects of the Novel). It is this moral greyness that is so hard to realise on the page. Mary reminds me of Mrs Gaskell at her best: no sense of pantomime baddie. Cynthia and Roger in Wives and Daughters have much in common with Mary and Edmund.

In the end, it seems to me, that Mansfield Park is about active kindness. Both Fanny and Edmund, depsite their faults, are actively kind. They seek to understand others and forgive their failings (which is why the criticism of priggishness is often aimed at them), and then to actively do them good, in the sense of seeking their greater happiness, rather than merely moralising (an argument against them being priggish).

Sir Thomas is also kind but his is a detached laconic kindness, lacking in full understanding because he doesn't take the trouble to see people for what they really are. He does not deliberately wash his hands of his family like Mr Bennet, indeed he seeks their general good, but his detachment of personality means that he never truly understands his daughters, nor Mrs Norris nor Fanny, and in trying not to be cruel he fails in any real or active kindness. He fails to stop Maria's marriage because he is not confident enough in his knowledge of his daughter to properly see through her protestations, he has failed to transmit any of his natural understanding of right and wrong to three of his four children, he is cruel to Fanny when she turns down Henry Crawford more out of bewilderment than malice. As a portrait of a failed parent he is far more subtly drawn than Mr Bennet and unlike Mr Bennet (who declares Wickham to be his favourite son-in-law, as though it is still ok to be merely witty after all his family have gone through; not that I don't laugh at that line every time, but it is rather scary) he is redeemed somewhat at the end: the narrative gives him a second chance with Julia and her husband, and in taking pleasure in Fanny and Edmund's happiness, and young Tom's newly steady character, but we're left with the bad taste of Maria as victim condemned to life in a cottage with the awful Mrs Norris, while we note that he is the kind of man who won't inflict an erring daughter on the neighbours, whatever the consequences for her.

As well as the 'only connect' lets give them the imperative 'be kind'. And it is the nature of Mansfield Park's success that you are left with a strong feeling of wishing the characters well, so real is their projected afterlife .

Mansfield Park is one of Austen's less well loved books, how did you enjoy it and have you, or would you give it a re-read?

 Edited to add: there's a very nice piece on Mansfield Park by Anne Stott over on Normblog.

Reading Round-Up: Crime Fiction

A few quick thoughts on books I have not had time to write longer reviews for...

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin was one I have been wanting to read since coming across Geranium Cat's review of Edmund Crispin and his style. I notice Harriet Devine has been reading Crispin too. I loved the witty writing and all the literary allusions. I loved the aside about Larkin, the famous joke about taking the left fork as they were published by Gollancz and the less famous one about the lorry driver who has exhausted the volumes at his circulating library as getting too big for his "Boots". I cared rather less about who did it, and parts of the plot were preposterous. I like the detective Gervase Fen enough to want to read another but do regret the lovely writing is at the expense of the plot and characterisation that you get with the leading Golden Age women writers like Sayers or Allingham.

Michael Innes was another classic crime writer I had not tried and, intrigued by a review on Cornflower, I asked for, and got, Death at the President's Lodging for Christmas. Again, I loved the writing though it is rather dense for a crime work. I like Appleby and the portrayal of the relationships of the dons, but again, I felt the work was all writing and the plot and characters were not quite on the button.

The female crime writers of the early to mid-twentieth century seem to be adept at creating not only a novel with a crisp plot but also a world of believable and subtle motive, shades of moral greyness and a real fear of the shadow of the hangman's noose, especially in Sayer's work. In contrast there is something a bit too cold and knowing about both Innes and Crispin coupled with something of a moral detachment. I however will read Crispin again as his writing was such fun. Googling for articles on Crispin I came across several comparisons with the writing of Doctor Who. I could indeed see Crispin's style working there and see him enjoying the Brenda and Effie series too. Despite his deficiencies I was so taken with Crispin that I already have Buried for Pleasure and Love Lies Bleeding out of the library. Innes I will try again but he better win me over a little more.

Questions for you, oh knowledgable readers:

1. If I give Michael Innes another go, it will be his last chance - which of his works do you recommend to win me over?

2. Which male early to mid-twentieth century crime writer gives us the rounded world and fuller and less daft plots of Allingham and Sayers? Who else shall I try from this era?

Dragging Juxtabook into the twenty-first century with current writer R N Morris we promptly go back to the nineteenth century where he sets his books. I loved both the St Petersburg mysteries which I read recently, A Gentle Axe and A Vengeful Longing. They feature Fyodor Dostoevsky's detective from Crime and Punishment, Porfiry Petrovich and cleverly blend atmospheric historical fiction with gripping crime plots. Of the two I preferred the second, the character of Porfiry Petrovich seemed more cogent and I like the interplay with a new sidekick that he acquires. For the non-Russian-novel reader I would say that although quite short, there is something Dickensian in scope, in the range of characters, of classes, of subjects in these novels. If you like Bleak House then you'll like the St Petersburg novels. The only draw back is the same as with any Russian style work: the baffling names! The fourth St Petersburg novel is published this week: The Cleansing Flames is out on 19th May in paperback.

The Tenth Man by Graham Greene

The Tenth Man by Graham Greene is little more than a novella. Greene hardly remembered the manuscript (which was rediscovered in the early 1980s) and had thought it little more than a couple of pages long. He was somewhat surprised by discovering it was actually 'a complete short novel of thirty thousand words'. It had been written as a scenario for a film when he was under contract to MGM in the 1940s and had subsequently been forgotten by everyone including its author.

Despite being intended as a suggested film, the writing of it is as professional and polished as anything else by Greene; he said he prefered it to his much better known short work The Third Man which was of course filmed. It begins with an appalling proposition and follows the equally appalling emotional aftershocks through to their conclusion.

Towards the end of the war a wealthy lawyer called Chavel and an poor man Janvier are incarcerated by the Nazis in occupied France. The French resistance have killed a military governor and a German sergeant. As punishment the Germans intended to decimate the prisoners: to literally kill one in ten. To make it worse the prisoners themselves must decide who among them is to die. After much arguing they draw straws. Chavel is one of those selected to die and he can't bear it:

I'll give you everything I've got,' Chavel said, his voice breaking with despair, 'money, land, everything ...

And so Janvier steps forward and offers to take his place. Chavel signs all his worldly good over to Janvier and gets to keep his life. Janvier makes a will leaving all his worldly goods, once Chavel's, to his sister and mother.

The second section of the book opens after the war. Chavel, alive but poor, is drawn back to his family home. He can't keep away. There are many vagrants looking for work after the war. Why shouldn't he seek work with Janvier's family. Under an assumed name he finds himself in the midst of the misery he has helped cause, with bereaved mother and sister who would rather have remained poor and have Janvier return to them. Chavel finds himself becoming attached not just to the house but also to the sister but she hates the very name Chavel. She is eaten up with anger for the man who bought his life at the expense of her brother.

The remainder is played out with several unexpected twists and with all the looking at the heart of the matter than you might expect from Greene. It would have made for a very interesting film had it been made in the 1940s as its concerns are very fixed in that time.

I love Greene's novels. Their emotional introspection are like no others, and they make wonderful films of psychological depth. My favourite is probably The Fallen Idol (Ralph Richardson), a wonderful thriller about a boy who thinks he observes a murder*. It is sad that The Tenth Man did not capture someone's attention at MGM. It is presented in this edition with an explanatory introduction by Greene as well as two other brief outlines of films he wrote for MGM: Jim Braddon and the War Criminal and Nobody to Blame. Altogether this is a fascinating tome.

*Originally a short story under another title The Third Man and the Fallen Idol it is now in an edition by Vintage.

The Hunger Trace by Edward Hogan

I haven't been this excited by someone's writing since I first read Margaret Atwood when I was 18. I had already loved and reviewed Blackmoor when I opened The Hunger Trace with all the trepidation that one has when confronting a second work: will it live up to the expectations set up by the first? A resounding "Yes" in this case.

The Hunger Trace has similarities with Blackmoor in that the narrative traces how the events of the past continue to shape the lives of the central characters. We meet Louisa, a rather embittered middle-aged loner, who lives both with and for her birds of prey; and Maggie, the young widow who battles to save her wildlife park inherited from her older husband David. Maggie has also inherited David's difficult teenage son Christopher. The novel opens with a hilarious scene when the two women try to catch a herd of ibex, cornering them them with trolleys and an old van in a supermarket car park. The escaped animals encapsulate Maggie's difficulties. The wildlife park and its occupants are out of her control.

Louisa is a disgruntled neighbour, hard to reach and hard to help. She blows hot and cold for both Maggie and the damaged Christopher and the flashbacks reveal the hold the park and the late David have on her. Louisa's character is gently teased out by events and we gradually come to understand why she cannot bring herself to either embrace Maggie's friendship or leave.

Hogan's great strength is his characterisation. Christopher is given the irritating verbal ticks of the teenager, and is, erm, irritating as a result. He makes you want to both laugh and weep at the same time. It is a triumph of Hogan's writing that despite the reader's natural desire to shake the boy, in the end he is a sympathetic character, greater than the sum of the parts of unintentional comedian and solipsistic drama queen. Maggie on the other hand is loyal and forgiving and frankly too damn good to be true. Hogan is amazing when writing about women (Beth in Blackmoor is unforgettable and Louisa here is quite something too) so this is a rare slip in an otherwise first rate novel.

I love Hogan's use of detail:

...Louisa looked at the pictures of the village on the pub wall. She enjoyed the way each photograph, going backwards in time, stripped away more of the human traces: roads lost their stripes and curbs; the barn conversions became barns again, and eventually the pub itself disappeared, replaced by woodland.

In a novel that begins with empty spaces, early morning roads and car parks, and the acres of the parkland, Hogan reverses the process he describes above. He layers people and events with the complicated interplay of personalities and past baggage onto the greens and greys of the opening spaces. The smallest things can become significant: a fence post, a field drain, a missing ibex. It is an ethereal novel of smoke and mist and foliage and feathers and it would appear a contradiction that the characters at the end stand forward, strongly lit, and are not at all subsumed by the detail. If a Pre-Raphaelite painting could be turned into a prose style then this is how it would read.

Hogan's writing pulsates with the dual quality of sucess in the now and the feeling that despite the achievements of his first two works he is doing this with only yet a tentative grasp on his pen. Blackmoor and The Hunger Trace , remarkable though they are, feel like the start, like he has barely realised how good he is yet. What heights he will reach when he does!

The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley

You will either love or hate The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley. I love it. It is the second of three volumes (to date) featuring the precocious eleven year sleuth Flavia de Luce. It is set in a quintessential 1950s village skillfully constructed by the Canadian author with all the Golden Age crime fan could desire in the way of churches, vicars, village greens and tea shops.

Flavia lives in rambling country house with her bullying elder sisters Feely and Daffy, and her eccentric, stamp collecting father. Her mother is dead. She is a lonely child, witty and insightful, and mad about chemistry. With her trusty bike she roams the village and its surrounding countryside getting into scrapes and finding out more about her neighbours than anyone bargains for, be it her family or the local police. The house is a post-war shambles; it is the sort of building so large and ill maintained that an entire chemistry lab can be forgotten about in one disused wing.

Whilst an excellent piece of crime fiction in its own right it is also a wonderful pastiche. It evokes all that was good in the Golden Age crime novel but the distance in time lends it an ironic air. I notice that a review from The Guardian describes as a cross between Dodie Smith's I Capture The Castle and The Adams family. there is some truth in that, but it reminded me more of cross between the gothic excesses of Patrick Hamilton's Gaslight with early lives of the Mitford sisters (I can see Decca as Flavia) and Enid Blyton's Find-Outers: Fatty has his disguises where Flavia has her chemistry lab.

At the start of The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag Flavia, on one of her excursions, meets a travelling puppet theatre company. Rupert star of the BBC, and Nialla, the latest in a string of pretty assistants, run the little show. Sharper than her years, Flavia guesses all is not well in their relationship and when their performance at the church hall ends in murder, Flavia is determined to revisit the death of a small boy some years earlier in her search for the truth.

Leavening it above the average historical crime novel are is its humour and its adroit handling of minor characters. Along side the crime the book is very funny. The story of the English literature loving WWII German airmen being shot down outside Haworth was a highlight that I was compelled to read aloud to anyone who could be persuaded to listen. But it is also poignant, and in its handling of handyman Dogger and his post-war trauma is really quite delicate.

The village of Bishop Lacey is wonderfully imagined and ticks all the cosy boxes, but like the potentially annoying Flavia, who at one stage attempts to poison her own sister, all is not sweetness and light. This is a murder story for grown-ups and any sweetness has a very dark centre. The tea room does after all have an interconnecting door with the undertakers. If you don't like Flavia you won't like the book, but I loved Flavia and I found Bradley's very twenty-first century resurrection of the world of Allingham and Christie simply addictive.

Harbour by John Ajvide Lindqvist

It has been a long time since I have read anything like Harbour by John Ajvide Lindqvist and certainly would not have picked a copy of this up in a bookshop based on the cover. The fact that I have enjoyed Let the Right One in would not have been enough. This nonchalance on my part would have been a mistake. Harbour is a wonderful book and I am very glad Quercus sent me a copy.

The start of the novel is traumatic. Anders, his wife, and their daughter Maja are out for a snowy walk round the Swedish archipelago where Anders grew up. One minute their daughter is there and the next she has gone. No trace of her is ever found. This part is over quickly and is played very simply by the author with no wallowing, thoughof course her absence is an integral part of the novel. Two years pass and in the wake of the tragedy Anders and his wife have separated as a result of his inability to handle Maja's loss and his consequent descent in alchoholism. Anders then returns to the island to his old home, and to his grandmother and step-grandfather, Anna-Greta and Simon. He gradually becomes aware that messages about Maja appear to be left around and that he is starting to think like her.

There's the big bed, that's where Mummy and Daddy sleep, I can go over there if I'm scared. This is my beautiful bed, there's bamse. I am six years old. My name is Maja. I know that I am loved.

In his fragile mental state what can this mean?

The geography is everything in this novel. Ice, wind and water form the crux of the book and in this sense it is a "white gothic" novel like Blackmoor. Any horror is understated and largely psychological, and what physical manifestations arise are watery ones; there's danger but no blood and gore, so the squeamish reader is fairly safe. This is not to say this it is not a novel that lacks psychological thrills. I was on the edge of my seat with Harbour as much as I was absorbed in the engaging characters, and the characters are good. Harbour is worth reading for the magical Simon and Anna-Greta alone.

It was as if [Anna-Greta] lived only on clear, salty air, and when the day came for her to pass away she would probably do exactly that. Just take a step to one side. Dissolve into a north-westerly wind as it whirled around the lighthouse at North Point, then out across the sea.

There is much here too for the child of the '80s. Lyrics by Morrissey permeate the book and form part of a vital scene between Anders and a sort of watery ghost from his past. Lovers of the music of The Smiths will find much to enjoy.

For a book that kicks off with a child disappearing and alcoholism it is surprisingly uplifting. The ending is very satisfying and the journey to get there is often magical and theatrical. It is hard not to think of the The Snow Queen and Kay and Gerda, and also Anna-Greta and Simon both in different ways resemble a kind of Gandalf or Aslan or Dumbledore without the associated deification. Which is not to say it is a child's book, emphatically no, but it has a sense of enchantment that one rarely gets with adult fiction, even in Stephen King whose writing is the closest I can think of here. If reading gothic fiction or even horror is not something you usually do, don't be put off, this character-lead thriller might take you out of your comfort zone but you may well feel the trip was well worth while.

The paperback edition of Harbour is due out in May.

Blackmoor by Edward Hogan

I mentioned last week that my book-free progress through the library was arrested by the Hilary Mantel quote on the front of this, the superb Blackmoor by Edward Hogan. It is a good job the quote was there as the otherwise faux Bronte cover is very misleading. A green cloak is mentioned but floor-length blue Victoriana - I don't think think so.

I devoured this book in two sittings largely because of the arresting atmosphere but plot and characterisation are both largely spot on as well.

Early in the book we're give a newspaper quotation from 1992:

     A Blackmoor woman jumped to her death

from the second floor window of her house

last Thursday.

     Witnesses believe that Elizabeth Cart-

wright, 36, of Slack Lane, had watched her

young son fall from the same window

moments before. The boy, a toddler, had

landed safely in a flower basin below the

house.

The tale is told in two strands: in the modern day, in a most unobtrusive and well-handled present tense, we follow the boy, now a sensitive teenager Vincent as he finds out more about his past and his mother; and in flash backs, in the conventional past tense, we follow the decline of a pit village in the Derbyshire moors in the 1980s and early 1990s, the intertwined lives of its inhabitants and the lives of George Cartwright and his near blind albino wife Beth.

Locals are suspicious of Beth with her translucent looks and strange ways of looking out of partially-seeing eyes.

In his teens George was drawn to the scarcity of Beth Fisher, whose distinctions had made a recluse of her. She was an exotic sight - that scythe-slash of long white hair flashing past the window as she walked the right of way between the houses. At school she tilted her head down and to the left and looked at him out of the corner of her eyes, nervous, yet appraising. He liked that. He liked the way you could see the network of veins through her skin.

Even in the late twentieth century there is almost an anti-witch reaction against her "distinction" and George is not equipped to handle it nor can he cope with Beth's depressions where her personality becomes as bleak as her colouring.

Critic and poet Tom Paulin calls the opening of Mrs Gaskell's Wives and Daughters "white gothic" and I thought immediately that that was a brilliant description. It applies here in Blackmoor too. In Wives and Daughters the book starts with a brief moment from Molly Gibson's childhood where on a white hot summer's day Molly is struck with a sort of sunstroke. The swirling heat and dizziness in the ultra bright light is terrifying. It is like a white light version of Jane Eyre's red room. In Blackmoor the paleness of Beth is both reflective and translucent, visually visceral, and in the bright light of the open moortop village is a stunning counterbalance to the usual dark and lowering portrayals of moorland. This is the White Peak and the wind squeals like finger nails down glass. Beth scares the villagers with her looks and the coincidence of incidents and accidents that follow her innocent wake. The incidents involving gas and fire are terrifying but also light: light as air, light as smoke, as blazing as fire. This is white gothic done superbly well.

Young Vincent in the modern day is a beautifully drawn character with a believable balance of teenage angst and a sensitive individuality. His dead mother Beth, though fascinating, is less sharply drawn. Perhaps because Beth is so pale on the inside in her depression that she feels she hardly knows herself. As a reader I was drawn to both characters, and was equally involved in both narrative threads.

This was a debut, and though wonderful, it had a few creaky moments. The character of George is very hard to pin down. Unlike Beth there was no real narrative reason for the vagaries of characterisation here, and though people change George did not seem the same man in both threads, and I was never really sure why his relationship with Beth took the path it did. Beth and Vincent are so engaging though, that George's failings become a small quibble. This will be yet another book I want to buy as it returns to the library, as I know it will bear several re-reads. I was so glad I ignored the cover and took Hilary Mantel at her word. It is, as she says, "powerful and confident" and "utterly distinctive".

******************************************************

Blackmoor is also reviewed by Dovegreyreader and The Fiction Desk . The Hunger Trace by Edward Hogan, his second novel, is due out in March and I can't wait.

If you want to hear Tom Paulin speak about Wives and Daughters (one of my all time favourite books) you need the wonderful and inexpensive DVD of the BBC serialisation. One of the extras is a thirty minute piece called, "Who the Dickens was Mrs Gaskell?"

The Detective Branch by Andrew Pepper

Cross a Shardlake novel with The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher and what do you get? Pyke. Elegant, character driven, tightly-plotted historical crime. Marvellous.

If book tokens have come your way over Christmas and you enjoy detective fiction then you could do little better than this, the latest Pyke novel The Detective Branch. I've joined the series at book four and enjoyed it very much.

Pyke is the head of the embryonic Detective Branch in 1840s London. In this novel we get a brief flashback to his time in a London orphanage 40 years earlier before being immediately confronted in Pyke's present day with three bodies in a pawnbroker's shop, all shot dead. Pyke is a complex character, less easily likeable than Shardlake but just as three dimensional. And despite his flaws it is hard to lose sympathy with him. His home life, like many detectives, is less than smooth but the relationships between Pyke, his teenage son Felix, and his uncle Godfrey are never less than real. Pyke walks a difficult line between loving his job, loving his son and being a successful parent. Over and over he makes mistakes out of weakness or ineptitude but you can't help feeling sorry for him and nor do you stop wanting him to succeed with Felix.

Pyke's personal and emotional life is well integrated with the fast paced plot. Like in the Shardlake books you can almost smell the historical setting, it is so alive, and the crimes, and clues, and minor characters are all wonderfully Victorian. Its literariness is not at the expense of the reader's basic urge to turn the page and as Pyke gets closer to the truth and farther from safety the end remains a genuine mystery till it is upon you.

More than just a page turner though, there is much thought on the social consequences of policing and on the ethics of the law:

A man is killed and every effort is made to apprehend the murderer. But hundreds, thousands, die each year from starvation disease and poverty and we act as if it doesn't matter.

It is the many levels of Pyke that I found so engaging. I am not a fan of the modern "gritty" police procedural. I find they lack the charm of the golden age detective and yet don't really succeed in their grittiness either. With Pyke's London Andrew Pepper manages to create a place that combines real charm, in the characters of Pyke's family, and real villains; he uses Pyke as a force for good, but recognises that good actions have unintended consequences and that good consequences sometimes require immoral actions. Pyke is not really a philosopher and he is certainly not a hero; he is just a man reacting to circumstances, ploughing a furrow that is better than most but is not always good. The Detective Branch is modern Victoriana at its very best.

Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink

Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink is an exploration of presences and absences and homecomings of all kinds. Engaging on every page it is a complex ethical, philosophical and literary mystery.

Based loosely on the Odyssey the tale begins with Peter Debauer's reminiscences of his post-war childhood visits to his late father's parents in Switzerland. The absence of his father shapes Peter's thoughts as a boy but he is relatively happy in his childhood. His grandparents are editors of pulp fiction. As paper is rationed back in Germany, when Peter returns home for the summer he is given the galleys of some of the books to use as scrap paper with the injunction that he should not read the books as they are not good or suitable literature. He obeys this injunction for many years but then finds himself reading part of one by accident. He does not have the start or the finish but the passage he has describes a soldier's homecoming: the waiting outside the front door, the thinking of the wife as she has been during his absence, the walking up the path, the hand on the door ...

Years later he finds the same galley wrapping something he had put in storage. He reads it again:

Too Bad. I would have liked to read again about what happened when he rang the bell, the door opened, and his wife stood before him. And I would have loved to know what happened after that. But even though I didn't expect to learn more than I had when I had read it the first time, I found it exciting, as if this time I could read on to the end.

Ulysses of course opened the door to the tapestry-making Penelope, her suitors and the unfortunate maids. Peter becomes obsessed with the homecomings in the galley he has read whilst experiencing various homecomings in his own life, and like Ulysses does not always treat the other participants fairly. Peter's researches into the mysterious book and its author cannot help but have dramatic consequence for his life. The plot is lively, tight and unexpected despite the parallels with other literary works. The ethical and philosophical conundrums thrown up are fascinating but do not make the book feel like a heavy, weighted text.

Like The Reader, Schlink's most famous work, Homecoming is not always an easy read. Schlink has a knack for making one's humanity an uncomfortable and inescapable thing. It is, however, also a book of journeys and quests and beautifully layered characters with something of the capital "I " of the best Romantic Bildungsroman. Cross Great Expectations by Charles Dickens with Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad and you'd get a novel very like Homecoming, and with such parentage it cannot help but be good. It is one I borrowed from the library but I will have to buy it; it will be one to re-read often.

The Yellow Room by Christopher Bowden

The Yellow Room by Christopher Bowden is an elegant mystery focusing on the locked rooms of our recent past, our parents and grandparents, their stories, their loves, losses, and mistakes. Astoundingly it is self-published. I say astoundingly, not because I am surprised that the author thinks it should be deserving of an audience (it undoubtedly is), but because no agent or publisher agrees with him.

The tale begins with a prologue showing us Jessica Tate, in the present day, mulling her recent choices as she waits for her boyfriend Duncan. A flash back to 1953 shows us tantalising glimpses of a love affair and a murder.

Jessica has begun to visit her family's past after clearing out her grandmother's cottage after her grandmother's death. In a box labelled 'Postcards etc.' Jessica finds the ephemera of her grandmother's life: the green shield stamps, old theatre programmes, and at the bottom a guide to a country house, Brockley Hall, and slipped inside it a black and white photograph of a young man kept with a newspaper cutting. We follow Jessica as she investigates why the Yellow Room, mentioned and underlined by an unknown hand in her inherited house guide, is missing from the modern version, and discovers who the man in the photograph really is.

There are so many good things about this book. I love the eras and continents travesed as we follow events in the 1950s (with brief details of earlier lives) and modern day, in England and in Kenya (during the Mau Mau uprising). I like that the courting Miles and Pamela, just down from Oxford and out for her first season respectively, are call the  'Down and Outers'. I love Pamela and Miles and manservant Lorca as they struggle to maintain their post-war life. I love that Lady Pamela likes to err on another fur than Elinor Glyn.  I love that Jessica has a pile of Georgette Heyer's with her grandmother's name on the flyleaf and that Lady Pamela reminisces about her sons' childhood when looking at a pile of G. A. Henty novels.

Over all The Yellow Room is an intriguing novel of books and houses and families, which makes English and colonial Kenyan mid-twentieth century social history utterly fascinating. There's a quote of praise on the front from Julian Fellowes and I am sure anyone captivated by Gosford Park or Downton Abbey will thoroughly enjoy Christopher Bowden's book. I love books focused on buildings, The Franchise Affair comes straight to mind, and The Yellow Room is up there with the best of them. Publishers don't want you help you read this book, ignore them please and buy it anyway.