Philip Kerr – The One From The Other

Twenty years ago, Kerr wrote the Berlin Noir trilogy of books, following a private eye called Bernie Gunther, working in Nazi Germany. They were, unsurprisingly, very dark but they were also very good, gripping and atmospheric. He’s now returned to Gunther with three more books, The One From The Other is the first. It’s set in 1949, while Germany undergoes a de-Nazification process. There’s no need to have read any of the previous novels in order to appreciate this one.

Once again, the best aspect of the novel is Kerr’s sense of place, the atmosphere envelopes the story. While Forsyth’s The Odessa File treated the subject as a straight fight between good and evil, Kerr is excellent at drawing out the ambiguities, where everyone is compromised, and the spectrum ranges from pitch black to flinty grey with not much in the way of purity. Virtue brings no reward at all.

The plotting is tight, with enough twists to keep you on your toes, but with sufficient foreshadowing that you don’t suddenly have credibility evaporate with a surprise coming out of nowhere. There are a few gumshoe cliches, this one by far the worst: “I would head to the Hofbrauhaus and spend the evening with a nice brunette. Several brunettes probably – the silent kind with nice creamy heads and not a hard luck story between them, all lined up along a bartop.” Other than that, horrible, exception, the writing is very good, and the book works both as genre fiction and beyond that.

James Baldwin – If Beale Street Could Talk

If you ever are asked to illustrate the maxim about not judging a book from it’s cover, then I suggest this is a perfect example. The cover could be used for a Harlequin romance, and both front and back covers are plastered with quotations about what a wonderful love story it is.

I can only assume that this was a desperate attempt by the publishers not to frighten people off, this is not a love story, this is an angry book. It’s angry at the system, the white man, and those who substitute faith for decency. But if it is a polemic, it is no less effective as a work of fiction. The love story might not be the main theme of the book, but it is convincingly written, and the family relationships that form the emotional core of the book are superbly done. The prose snaps, the dialogue crackles (not sure if anything pops).

David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas

It’s a difficult task to get a reader immersed in a story, rip it away from them mid-flow, replacing it with a completely different story, set in another period, told in another voice. But Mitchell doesn’t just manage this, he repeats the trick four times, before reversing the process in the second half of the book to bring the stories to their conclusions. The stories are supposed to be linked, but the connections are slight and each story could stand alone, without reference to the others. What keeps the page turning is the spellbinding quality of the prose, and Mitchell’s mastery of language.

Murukami/Wodehouse

Haruki Murukami – Dance Dance Dance

Murukami usually arouses contradictory feelings in me. I love his writing style, but I hate stories where impossible events happen. I have no problem with unlikely or improbable plot twists, (indeed many of my favourite authors depend on them) or sci-fi/fantasy books that from the start posit a different reality. But I dislike following a realistic narrative only for something extraordinary to be mixed in. And Murakami likes to do that, a great deal.

But although such elements are present in Dance Dance Dance, they don’t affect the storyline. Which is an engrossing one, with engaging characters. None of the characters or their relationships with each other really convince but it doesn’t really matter; while the traditional whodunit element is undermined by the main character fundamentally not caring who did it, beyond the extent to which it effects himself. This is a common pose in detective story anti-heroes, but its refreshing to see it being stuck to, rather than being undermined by better instincts or love.

P.G. Wodehouse – The Girl in Blue

Although Wodehouse was amazingly consistent in quality over a very lengthy career, his milieu of the idle rich worked better in their untroubled pre-World War 2 idyll. After that, with their stately homes only kept up for Americans to rent and good domestic staff hard to find, his inconsequential froth begins to jar slightly against reality.

So, finding that the heroine in this story is an air hostess is a disappointment. Air travel should have no part in Wodehouse’s world. He’s also guilty of pinching jokes from earlier works (the joke about arriving slowly because of needing spikes and running shoes was also in Do Butlers Burgle Banks).

Despite this, reading Wodehouse is never hard work, and anyone who doesn’t get a warm fuzzy feeling from passages like this…

“Hullo! Is there something wrong, darling? You look like a startled codfish. Suits you, of course. Very becoming. But it gives me the idea that something has happened to upset you.”

…is missing out

Book Reviews

As I buy all my books (and indeed pretty much everything else apart from food) from charity shops any review of the books I’m reading is unlikely to be characterised by theme or contemporaneity. However, the combination of being an exceptionally quick reader, a very brisk reviewer and not having much else to do with my time means that I should be able to provide quantity at least.