The Dying Breed

Take a cocktail of child neglect, deviant priests, alcoholism and horse racing and you can be pretty sure that you’re dealing with Irish detective fiction. The Dying Breed is the latest installment of playwright Declan Hughes’s series featuring private detective Ed Loy. Loy is the usual highly moral, hugely likeable, but dysfunctional (too many personal ghosts) private detective, but Hughes is a very entertaining writer with (as you might expect) a sure sense of dramatic pace. With each of the Ed Loy novels Hughes becomes more and more confident with the genre and you get a real sense of the fun that the author is having writing this. My sense is that this is detective fiction as written by a real fan.

The Woman in the Dunes

In April I was at a conference on ‘The Fairy Tale after Angela Carter’ and I was fortunate enough to meet up with Marc Sebastian-Jones from Macclesfield who lives and works in Tokyo, teaching English at university. We talked at some length about Japanese literature, specifically about Murakami (both of them) and the new generation of writers, such as Natsuo Kirinoand Hitomi Kanehara. He told me that to fully appreciate where these new writers were coming from, then I had to read some of the clasics of twentieth-century Japanese literature. It seemed like sensible advice and he insisted that I start with Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes.

Having read it I can see exactly what he meant and certainly you can start to see where the influence of Kafka and surrealism comes in. The book concerns an entymologist who goes off to a remote village in the dunes in search of a rare insect. He finds himself imprisoned by the villagers in a house with a young widow, unable to escape by climbing up the fragile dunes and destined to spend all night clearing the house of the sand that falls on it all day long. It tells of his despair and growing acceptance of (and dependence on) his situation.  It reminded me very strongly of Kafka’s The Trial with the same strong mythological echoes. Reading this has certainly informed my reading of other Japanese literature, so thanks, Marc, for the advice.

Lost in a Good Book

This is the second book in Jasper Fforde’s series about Thursday Next and I’m still undecided as to what I think about it. There are times when I find his writing slick and funny and I enjoy the varied literary and cultural references that pepper the book. And yet there are other moments when I find his writing rather clumsy and unfunny and, to be honest, a little infantile. It took me a while to get into this and when I did, I enjoyed it, but it didn’t enthuse me. You probably have to be prepared to completely abandon yourself to the silliness of Fforde’s books to really enjoy them, but for me the writing just isn’t strong enough to persuade me to do that.

69

69 is Ryu Murakami’s homage to 1969, the year of student riots in Japan, to the sixties culture in general and to adolescence. I found it a very engaging and funny read (it made me laugh out loud, which I rarely do when reading a book), not least because so much of one’s own life is recognisable and I’m now of an age when I can laugh at my own adolescence. Needless to say, it is most unlike Murakami’s other books, lacking, as it does, the violence and amorality of Inthe Miso Soup and Audition, but it is a book in whose company an afternoon would be well spent.

The Redeemer

The Redeemer is the latest novel from Norwegian crime fiction writer Jo Nesbo featuring Oslo detective Harry Hole. If you like your detective heroes/anti-heroes as amoral, alcoholic and contradictory, then they don’t come much more dysfunctional than Harry Hole. This is a superbly-paced thriller, bristling with political comment and whilst Hole is as disrespectful of the law as any of his adversaries, he doesn’t confuse legal justice with moral justice and no matter how low he sinks, we keep on forgiving him and rooting for him, in spite of his complete failure as a human being. There are many great Scandanavian crime fiction writers out there at the moment, butr for me, Nesbo is the one who is constantly pushing at the boundaries.

Back to the Blog

It has been a long time since I put a post up on this blog. I went through a period of simply not finding the time or opportunity to write anything and yet I still carried on reading and a backlog of reviews started piling up. Then I simply fell out of the habit. So now it’s time to get back on track and the first thing to do will be to fill you all in with what I’ve been reading since Easter. There will, therefore, be a series of short reviews appearing over the next few days until I’m back on course. These will probably be much shorter than the usual ones, perhaps only a couple of sentences, but I want to catch up with myself and then I can get back to blogging properly. Anyway, the moment has passed, as I really need to blog within a few days of finishing a book while thoughts are still fresh in my mind. So, forgive me from being absent from the blog for a little while, give me a week or so to catch up with myself and then normal service will be resumed.

The Voices of the Children

This year is the centenary of the birth of George Ewart Evans who was born in the Welsh Valleys mining community of Abercynon. Evans is now best known as the pioneer of oral history in the UK with his groundbreaking work after the war, collecting the stories and memories of the working class community in rural Suffolk where he eventually settled, his best known work amnogst many being perhaps Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay. However, Evans was also a writer of poetry and fiction and Voices of the Children is his semi-autobiographical novel of growing up in a large family in the Valleys between the wars. First published in 1947 it has now been republished, with an introduction by George Brinley Evans (another writer and ex-miner from the Valleys who first met Evans when he was interviewed for an oral history about mining), as part of the excellent new Library of Wales series, edited by Dai Smith and published by Parthian.

The strength of this book is not its narrative – of which there is surprisingly little – but its description of everyday life in the Valleys through the eyes of an adolescent. One hesitates to call it a novel as such, it is more of a fictionalised memoir, but it is a book about growing up and, as the title suggests, Evans captures the voice of the child, whilst retaining the perceptiveness of the adult. Evans’s own experiences as an adolescent and a young man in Abercynon led him to become a lifelong commited communist and the social and political context is never far from the narrative here, although there is nothing heavy-handed about it.

Most of all the writing is beautifully evocative of the era and, as might be expected, Evans is particularly expert in capturing the everyday speech of the characters. It is a very affectionate piece of writing and Evans’s own hiraeth, his longing for the Valleys, is very evident. In part it is the nostalgic writing of the exile, but it is nonetheless beautifully written and Evans writes with convincing authority – you know he knows what he is talking about. If you want to find out about the culture of the Welsh Valleys, then there are worse places to start than The Voices of the Children.

Borderlands

Brian McGilloway is a relative newcomer on the crime fiction scene, but is further evidence of the impression that Irish writers are making on the genre. First published in2007, Borderlands is the first in the series of novels concerning Inspector Benedict Devlin of An Garda Siochana, the Republic’s police force. The second is already out in paperback and the third was published in hardback last week, so McGilloway promises a prolific output over the coming years.

As with any ‘first in the series’ crime novel, much energy is spent on establishing the character of Devlin, his milieu and his relationships with his family and colleagues. This is done well and McGilloway has established some solid foundations for the series. Devlin’s patch is the border area between the Republic and the north of Ireland and the context of cross-border crime and the co-operation and competition between the two separate police forces is a rich one that the author exploits well. Devlin is also a character who is rather unusual in contemporary crime fiction in that he sits in contrast to the more fashionable dystfunctional, contradictory, morally erratic detectives favoured by most other writers. Devlin is instead happily married with children with nothing more than a few minor imperfections in his character. The other unusual thing about the novel is that McGilloway writes in the first person – Devlin is the narrator as well. Th is suggests that McGilloway is paying homage to Philip Marlowe, as much as anything and although it seems a little unusual to start with (I can’t help reading Marlowe without the voice of Humhrey Bogart in my head and that doesn’t work here!), I soon got used to the device and came to like it.

Otherwise the novel is a straightforward police precedural involving local organised crime, drugs, prostitution and the secret histories of local business and politicians. A familiar landscape then, but well-written,  enjoyable and a quick read. I’ll look forward to the next.

Audition

Aoyama is a documentary maker and has not had a serious relationship for seven years since the death of his wife. His friends and his teenage son persuade him to consider remarrying and so a plot his hatched between Aoyama and his best friend to find the perfect wife. Under the pretext of making a film, auditions are held, except the young hopefuls are auditioning for the role of wife, rather than a starring part in any film. Aoyama immediately falls for the beautiful ballerina Yamasaki Asami. As their relationship develops and Aoyama’s obsession grows, he asks her tomarry him and when she accepts, he decides it is time to come clean and tell her the truth, including that he has a teenage son.

The premise of Ryu Murakami’s short novel is pretty straightforward and as I was reading it I was lulled into a false state of security. I thought I was reading a book primarily about male middle-aged angst, but as the story develops it becomes darker and darker. In its reveiw of his earlier book Piercing, the Times Literary Supplement described it as a “smart and snappy psychosexual thriller and a commentary on the violent things men and women do to one another.” If anything this would be an understatement if applied to Audition. Not only is this a stylishly and succinctly written book, it is also a book about truth, lies and morality and our perceptions of these. The final scene is as shocking and violent as anything I’ve read this year (including McCarthy) and exceeds In the Miso Soup and Piercing in this respect. But as your stomach is churning at the events described, you cannot help but admire the work of both writer and translator.

The Eyre Affair

A couple of weeks ago I found myself having to stay overnight in Swindon, where in a conversation it was suggested to me that Jasper Fforde had put Swindon on the literary map. So knowing that Gemma was a keen Fforde fan, The Eyre Affair duly arrived in the post from Solihull. Certainly I whizzed through the novel in hardly any time at all, but I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. It is one of the silliest novels I’ve read in a long time, but also one of the most inventive. A number of years ago I read a coupleof Terry Pratchett novels and whilst I could fully appreciate their attraction (I take my hat off to him in his ability to keep a lot of teenage boys reading and I also remember seeing him at a conference give a very articulate and robust defence of the sci-fi/fantasy genre), I didn’t find them as funny as everyone else seemed to. I found the humour a bit derivative and schoolboy-ish and, although I didn’t hate the books, I didn’t feel inspired to keep reading his novels.

In a number of ways Fforde reminded me of Pratchett, especially in respect of his ‘fantasy world’, but also in respect of the ’sub-Pythonesque’ humour. But Fforde also locks into the genre of the crime novel, which appeals to me far more than the fantasy genre of Pratchett. Furthermore, Fforde is writing for the book fan – his reference points are the great works of English literature and Fforde knows his stuff extermely well and, as a reader, I found myself playing spot the reference. What really carried the book for me, though, was the sheer joy and energy of the writing. Fforde is clearly someone who writes because it’s what he enjoys doing and whilst he is not always the most stylish of writers, his enthusiasm shines through and rubs of on  the reader. At least it did with me.

So, I enjoyed this book and will read some more in the series. I doubt if I’ll become a diehard Fforde fan, but I can happily spend some more easy-reading time in his company and will enjoy the novels for what they are.