Fiction Reading Round-Up

Here we go with a review of novels that I read earlier in the year and didn’t get around to reviewing. Eight books that deserve recognition, even though not all hit the right spot for me.

The Behaviour of Moths * Poppy Adams

From her lookout in the crumbling mansion that was her childhood home, Ginny watches and waits for her younger sister to arrive. Vivien has not set foot in the house since she left nearly fifty years ago; the reclusive Ginny has rarely ventured out, retreating into the precise routines that define her days, carrying on her father’s solitary work studying moths.

Is it wrong for me to say that the bits of the book about moths are more interesting than the story of the two sisters? I normally like an unreliable narrator, here partnered with time shifts and carefully parcelled out revelations, but I was slightly frustrated that there was too much room for the reader to guess what was going on, particularly about Ginny. What, if anything, was actually “wrong” with her? Donated this one as soon as I had finished it.

The City of Mirrors * Justin Cronin

The world we knew is gone. What world will rise in its place? The Twelve have been destroyed and the terrifying hundred-year reign of darkness that descended upon the world has ended. The survivors are stepping outside their walls, determined to build society anew—and daring to dream of a hopeful future.

Which doesn’t tell you that much, not surprising given that this is the long-awaited (by me) final volume in The Passage trilogy, bought because I enjoyed the first two and was very keen to see how it all ended.I’ve had it for a while and picked it up at this point because we had started watching the TV adaptation, which started promisingly but which I lost interest in after a few episodes.

I loved this book. The ending was very satisfying and I found the detour into the background of Zero (the Big Bad Guy) gripping, though I’m aware not everyone agrees. If you need a post-apocalyptic vampire thriller (and who doesn’t) then this series is for you.

Convent on Styx * Gladys Mitchell

The nuns of the Order of Companions of the Poor summon eminent psychiatrist and sleuth Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley to investigate a series of anonymous letters, but when she arrives the prime suspect has just been found drowned in the convent school pond with, appropriately enough, her own massive Family Bible.

A late Mrs Bradley mystery, published in 1975, this was a very enjoyable and easy (in the best sense) read. There is a convent, there are nuns (obvs), there is a school attached and so there are inquisitive schoolgirls, and there is more than one mysterious death to be solved. Mrs B doesn’t turn up until halfway through the novel but that gives the reader plenty of time to get to know all of the characters, which makes the story all the more enjoyable. I may have picked this edition up because I loved the cover.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things * Iain Reid

I’m thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks. It lingers. It’s always there. Always. Jake once said, “Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can’t fake a thought.” And here’s what I’m thinking: I don’t want to be here.

Apparently, when I read this back in January (I KNOW) my reaction as expressed on Goodreads was “Still thinking about this one. Enjoyed it enough to read to the end but also somewhat frustrated by the story.”

Basically, I found it totally bizarre and I’m not at all sure that I understood it. Perhaps I should read it again and see if it makes more sense a second time. Or I could just wait for the Netflix adaptation, though goodness only knows how they will film this one.

The Affinity Bridge * George Mann

Welcome to the bizarre and dangerous world of Victorian London, a city teetering on the edge of revolution. Its people are ushering in a new era of technology, dazzled each day by new inventions. […] But beneath this shiny veneer of progress lurks a sinister side. For this is also a world where ghostly policemen haunt the fog-laden alleyways of Whitechapel, where cadavers can rise from the dead and where Sir Maurice Newbury, Gentleman Investigator for the Crown, works tirelessly to protect the Empire from her foes.

Way back in the dawn of time, otherwise known as January 2014, I read The Executioner’s Heart, not realising that it was the latest in the Newbury & Hobbes series. I finally got around to reading this, the very first, thoroughly enjoyed it and will be reading them all.

Currently * Sarah Mensinga

Every year, Nerene’s village shelters in Varasay City while the surrounding lands flood. Yet Varasay only protects those who obey its laws, and after Nerene’s best friend starts a riot, he’s in danger of being cast out. Nerene manages to find Lord Osperacy, a travelling thief with enough power and money to save her friend, but he’ll only help her if she agrees to work for him.

Sarah is a hugely talented artist and illustrator (I have her clever portrait of Anne Boleyn hanging beside my desk) and this is her first novel. I really enjoyed it. The world-building, which I understand is inspired by early 20th-century travel on ocean liners is really strong. Nerene is engaging and likeable and I was rooting for her all the way. An excellent fantasy, and Sarah also has a YouTube channel where she shares an illustrated audiobook version of the novel. Go look!

Black Helicopters * Caitlín R. Kiernan

Says Goodreads:

A dark jewel of a novella, this definitive edition of Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Black Helicopters is the expanded and completed version of the World Fantasy Award-nominated original.

I appreciated the writing but I think I would have got more out of the novella and just generally understood it better if I had read Agents of Dreamland first. So I will do that and may then re-read this one to see if it works better that way. I can feel that it’s impressive but it didn’t speak to me in the way I thought it would.

Real Tigers * Mick Herron

London’s Slough House is where disgraced MI5 operatives are reassigned to spend the rest of their spy careers pushing paper. But when one of these “slow horses” is kidnapped by a former soldier bent on revenge, the agents must breach the defences of Regent’s Park to steal valuable intel in exchange for their comrade’s safety.

Another excellent entry in the Slough House/Jackson Lamb series. So realistic that whenever I’m in the Barbican area I look for the office building (full disclosure – I haven’t found it yet). Strong plotting and characterisation as always, though I’m sure any resemblance to the current floppy-haired British PM is totally coincidental (though probably spot on!) I’ve already bought the next one.

Red Sparrow

mv5bmta3mdkxotc4nddeqtjeqwpwz15bbwu4mdaxnzgyntqz._v1_sy1000_cr0,0,674,1000_al_ Jennifer Lawrence stars in Red Sparrow, an undoubtedly for grown-ups spy thriller, where she plays Domenika, a ballet dancer so badly injured in an onstage “accident” that she will not dance again, and as she just so happens to have an uncle who is senior in the Russian secret service she ends up recruited into the Red Sparrows, via a rather sordid piece of entrapment she is required to carry out as a favour for uncle and which goes spectacularly wrong, .

At the Sparrow Academy she is trained to submit her body for use by the state and is finally despatched to sort out a CIA agent and find out the name of a mole inside the Russian spy operation.

If you think this is going to turn out to be a female James Bond, with gadgets and cocktails and frocks and romantic seductions, you are going to be very wrong. This is a really grim, at times disturbing and unpleasant depiction of what this sort of thing might actually look like in the real world, and it is not at all pretty. There is rape, torture and general mayhem presented in very graphic terms but with a glossy sheen on top.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t enjoy this film, despite some of the things I’ve mentioned above which made me uncomfortable while watching it, and even more so afterwards when thinking about it. There are some positives.

Jennifer Lawrence is pretty good in a rather unforgiving role, there are some wonderfully British Russians and much as I don’t normally warm to Joel Edgerton he is well cast as the CIA agent. The fact that the actor playing the really nasty uncle is made up to look more than Putin-adjacent is very entertaining.

And there is double cross piled on triple cross to the extent that until the very, very late stages I couldn’t tell what was actually going to happen.

It doesn’t entirely deliver but it’s good to see an action film with a decent budget aimed squarely at those of us no longer in our twenties. I am still stunned that this wasn’t rated 18.

Grim and unrelenting so watch with caution.

Dazzling details: directed by Francis Lawrence (no relation), Red Sparrow is 140 minutes long and rated (shakes head) 15 for (takes deep breath) strong bloody violence, gore, sexual violence, sex, very strong language

2018 Christmas Haul

As is traditional around these here parts, I thought I’d pull together a quick post to ~~boast about~~, sorry, update everyone on the cool books and other stuff that I got for Christmas.

Book stuff

Queen Victoria’s Matchmaking by Deborah Cadbury – “In the late nineteenth century, Queen Victoria had over thirty surviving grandchildren. To maintain and increase power in Europe, she hoped to manoeuvre them into dynastic marriages.”

The Rig by Roger Levy – An astounding SF thriller for fans of Adrian Tchaikovsky, Neal Stephenson, Alastair Reynolds and David Mitchell says the blurb.

Melmoth by Sarah Perry – “Twenty years ago Helen Franklin did something she cannot forgive herself for, and she has spent every day since barricading herself against its memory. But her sheltered life is about to change.”

A Gentleman’s Murder by Christopher Huang – “The year is 1924. The cobblestoned streets of St. James ring with jazz as Britain races forward into an age of peace and prosperity. London’s back alleys, however, are filled with broken soldiers and still enshadowed by the lingering horrors of the Great War.”

Excellent Intentions by Richard Hull – “Great Barwick’s least popular man is murdered on a train. Twelve jurors sit in court. Four suspects are identified but which of them is on trial?”

Thomas Cromwell by Diarmaid MacCulloch – how many biographies of Master Cromwell does one need? All of them!

Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds – “Cassandra Darke is an art dealer, mean, selfish, solitary by nature, living in Chelsea in a house worth £7 million.” A modern-day Scrooge?

Non-book stuff

The Meg – Jason Statham versus an enormous shark; I know who my money is on…

Ghost Stories – Based on Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson’s original Olivier nominated stage production, the same team have co-written and directed this adaptation for the big screen.

Mission Impossible: Fallout – Loved this in the cinema so it had to be added to the permanent collection

The Steampunk Tarot – Retooling the gears of the Rider-Waite tradition, the artwork evokes the imagery and spirit of this unique visual style. Another deck for my collection.

Something 16th century? Check. At least one crime novel? Check. Something horror adjacent? Check. Tom Cruise? Check.

Well, everything seems in order here!

Slow Horses & Dead Lions

I was drawn to reading the Slough House series of novels by Mick Herron via a recommendation from Jen Williams (@sennydreadful on Twitter and a fine author herself), and before I finished the first one had already bought the second.

That should tell you something.

Slough House is the (as far as we know, fictional) part of MI5 and located near the Barbican in London. It’s where those members of the service who have blotted their copybooks are sent to endure a miserable, slow decline in the hopes that they will see sense and voluntarily resign; in my experience in the civil service the equivalent is being assigned to Special Projects or being sent to work in the library when you aren’t a librarian, though to be honest I could never understand why that was thought to be a punishment.

Anyway, the books.

Slow Horses is the terribly tortuous punning name given to those who “work” there, carrying out a series of meaningless tasks and boring paperwork. But Jackson Lamb knows what he’s doing and when, in the first novel, he senses that there is something not right at all about the hooded figure tied up and threatened with death on the interwebs, he finds a way for his team to get involved in a proper mission to resolve the issue. I won’t say any more about that.

In Dead Lions, the fallout from the previous novel is still being felt – and that’s one of the things I like about the series, it builds on what’s gone before – and when a former colleague is found dead on a bus (that’s what you get these days on rail replacement services) he feels the need to investigate, at a time when a couple of members of his team have been assigned to protect a visiting Russian oligarch. It slowly become clear that the two issues are connected.

I really enjoy a good spy novel – one of my favourite reading experiences was le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy which I found in my then father-in-law’s bookshelf (and why didn’t the BBC film that?) – and these are wonderfully seedy, with that depressed air you get in some parts of the public service where everything seems futile. The characters are really strong, there are the obligatory wheels within wheels and of course lots and lots of double crossing. And when things happen there are real consequences.

There is a very good interview with Mick Herron in the Guardian which gives some insight into the characters he’s created, and this in particular made me laugh:

[…] I’m a London-bound commuter and an open-plan-office worker, and anyone who’s been either of those things knows that bile and venom are only ever a hair’s-breadth away.

So true.

I fully intend to read the whole series and if you like a good post-Cold War spy story you should give them a try too.