ACHUKAreviews

Perfect Architect

By Leave a Comment

Jayne Joso

Alcemi

9780956012524

May 2011

181 pp

Whole book read

Yes

This caught my eye. It has a simple but distinctive red jacket design and I have always been interested in the life of architects.
The start of the novel is told exclusively in an exchange of letters between the recently widowed Gaia (whose husband had been one of the leading architects of his time) and Selene. Initially, Gaia suspects she is writing to a young mistress of her dead husband, and the gradual disabusing of this notion is humorously and very beguilingly handled. Indeed, Selene is a delightfully witty and life-affirming creation.
It is something of a shame that the novel could not have been conceived as a wholly epistolary construction, because when the action moves away from the exchange of letters and the compelling relationship between Gaia and Selene, the novel loses its hold on the reader to the extent that the resulting four-way competition to design the perfect home for Gaia to move into and reconstruct her life in never achieves any traction. Whilst the letters are perfectly pitched, Joso is less assured when it comes to character dialogue. The American architect in particular is an embarrassing pastiche.
Nevertheless, I’m glad it caught my eye.

August

By Leave a Comment

Bernard Beckett

Quercus

9780857387899

September 2011

203 pp

Whole book read

Yes

I had not read Genesis, this author’s award winning previous novel, nor indeed any of his earlier books for that matter. Although August is, in many ways, a deeply unpleasant novel, and very different from the one I was expecting, it is also, partly by virtue of being so unusual, a very interesting work of fiction.
The book’s title refers both to to the theologian St Augustine and the eponymous establishment that Tristan (one of the book’s two main characters) attends. I had laughably selected the book to read on the train thinking the title referred to the month August and that the jacket strapline – “A thriller that will turn you upside down” – promised a lightweight 200pp diversion. How wrong could I have been? And how shamefully ignorant of the tenor of the previous novel which had been selected for the Guardian Children’s Book Prize two years ago.
Part of the book’s unpleasantness stems from the situation which opens the novel, persists throughout, and the scatology of which the author seems to take perverse delight in describing.
A car has just crashed and is lodged upturned half-way down a ravine. Tristan, the driver, and Grace, the passenger, are trapped inside.
It soon becomes apparent that this circumstance is not going to be the prelude to a conventional ‘thriller’ – in fact it is hard to see how the book can be so described, when the novel is in fact a fairly demanding philosophical exploration of free will and determinism. The only real thrills in the novel are intellectual ones stemming from Tristan’s attempts to outwit the manipulative rector at St Augustine’s and prove that his actions are freely chosen and not predetermined.
It is a tribute to Beckett’s ability as a writer that he manages to make this aspect of the novel – its crux – completely engrossing.
The stories of Grace’s and Tristan’s lives leading up to the car-crash are told in recollection. Neither really existed for me as a believable character, even and especially in the last quarter of the novel when the independent and codependent lives of each are given more space. But being moved about character is not what this book is about.

Small Change For Stuart

By Leave a Comment

Lissa Evans

Doubleday

9780385618007

May 2011

278 pp

Whole book read

Yes Yes Yes

What makes me like this book so much? Is it that it concerns a collection of old threepenny bits, those belovedly brassy coins of childhood? Is it because it is such a well-formed object of a physical book, a beautifully proportioned small hardback with pleasingly designed dustjacket and chapter heading illustrations (both by Temujin Doran)? Is it because it reads so smoothly, with not a word wrong-footing the inner ear? Of course these things help, but novels ultimately have to make their impact by virtue of characters and narrative, rather than style, form or inanimate objects.

Stuart, very short for his age and with a surname (Horten) that doesn’t help matters, is 10 years old when he has to move away to a new town, leaving all his friends behind. His new neighbours, the Kingsley triplets, do not believe him when he tells them how old he is. These neighbours are highly entertaining creations, as is Stuart’s father, a writer of crosswords, who always chooses the longest words to describe things.
A great-uncle of Stuart’s used to live and work as a magician in the town they have moved to. The discovered collection of threepenny bits and the subsequently collected sequence of clues lead Stuart (and, eventually, one of the triplets) on an adventure of discovery to find the lost workshop of Teeny-Tiny Horten.

Perfect reading for children aged 7-10, and highly recommended as a readaloud class novel for teachers of Y4 or Y5. The author is a radio and television producer. She has written two or three adult books. This is her first children’s novel. It ought not to be the last.

Eye Of The Crow

By Leave a Comment

Shane Peacock

Tundra Books

9780887768507

September 2007

250 pp

Whole book read

Read On? YES

Andrea Deakin sent me this Canadian winner of the 2008 Arthur Ellis Best Juvenile Crime Novel Award quite some time ago, but I only recently picked it up. And enjoyed it. It is well-written and well-paced, though on balance I would have preferred the narrative in a traditional past tense, rather than the rather stylised continuous present used by Peacock.
The dustjacket of Tundra’s hardback edition shows a detailed Victorian streetmap of central London on the reverse, and the city details in the story are amongst the features that make this an enthralling read.
Young Sherlock – depicted here at times almost like a Spiderman hero – sets out to prove a man wrongly accused of murder innocent of the crime. It’s a colourful tale involving crows, glass eyeballs and several quite harrowing scenes. For Conan Doyle aficionados there are familiars in the cast, including the name Lestrade.
The first book in a series.

Long Reach

By 2 Comments

Peter Cocks

Walker Books

9781406324754

January 2011

402 pp

stopped at p92

Read On? NO

It’s getting difficult to actually finish some of the books I pick up these days, so I have decided that, rather than ignore them, it would be better to confront the situation and actually record the point at which I give up on a book, for whatever reason.
Sometimes it is the awkwardness of the prose. I was once at a launch party and was discussing with the husband of a fellow reviewer why he did not read children’s books. He picked up a copy of the launch title, opened it at the first page, and seemingly at random pointed at a sentence in the middle of a paragraph. He didn’t need to add any further explanation. It was a horribly worded sentence. Children love a good story and will happily pass over stylistic hiccups if the narrative is sufficiently gripping. This, it seems to me, is taken too much for granted by contemporary children’s authors and their editors. There are too many books that are awkward to read aloud, that have a sentence to stumble over on every page.
Sometimes, I find myself thinking ‘Who on earth is the target readership for this title?’ Largely because of the 17yr old character’s life amid “fast cars and flash women” you are probably talking Y7+ or age 12+ here. But by 14+, if not earlier, surely any adolescent boy (this is male-oriented writing) wanting to read a good thriller will be turning to a fully-blown adult thriller, something a little more savage than Eddie Savage. So the target audience is very narrow indeed, and one notoriously difficult to reach.
It’s a shame because Cocks writes well enough and the book grabs the attention at the start. But it falls hopelessly in between the appetite for true juvenile thriller-writing, as so well served by the likes of Horowitz, and the adult genre. Cocks and his publisher clearly think there is some middle ground waiting to be served. I think they’re wrong. It takes a quirky one-off like Kevin Brooks to really reach the teenage audience with thriller-style material.

The Glass Demon

By Leave a Comment

Helen Grant

Penguin

978-0-141-32576-7

May 2010

At times I had to keep reminding myself that Lin and Michel are both in their late teens (indeed, Michel drives them both around in his car) because their manner is not the teenage manner as more usually portrayed in contemporary young adult literature, and also because the adventure that unfolds is, for all its menace and melodrama, very much in the mould of younger children going out and attempting to solve a mystery without adult intervention.
This all works to the book’s advantage and results in a novel that is at one and the same time an older children’s mystery and a chilling, Hawthornesque tale of murder and malevolence for adults.
Lin’s father, an academic driven by an idee fixe, uproots his family to Germany, determined to discover the long lost Allerheiligen stained glass. Even before entering their rented property they stumble upon the first body – an old man apparently fallen dead while picking apples, small shards of shattered glass noticed only by Lin at the time. Not long afterwards the family is all but completely unravelled when Lin’s younger brother comes close to being impaled by a spear while sleeping in his cot.
The local police so closely follow protocol and procedure that the family themselves feel under suspicion.
Just as she did in her first novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, Grant cranks up the drama and excitement with impeccable pace and timing. The story would make a fabulous two-part BBC thriller, expecially because each of the characters is so well-realised, from the ineffectual young stepmother, to the darkly dashing priest. And there would be wonderful bit parts for the stonewalling police.
Can’t wait for novel number three!

Tender Morsels

By Leave a Comment

Margo Lanagan

David Fickling Books

9780385613231

July 2009

At the start of this book (the first I have read by Lanagan) I was totally under its spell, immediately gripped by the bawdy and earthy lyricism used to describe the abuse suffered by Liga at the hands of her father, an appalling and horribly believable character.
But at the halfway point (it is a book of roughly 500 pages) I realised my interest in Liga and her daughters had been fatally undermined both by the way the plot takes sudden trips into an alternative reality and the way Lanagan’s wordiness begins to grate.
So I closed the book, unfinished, recognising that this was largely the result of personal taste (I have seen Lanagan compared with Angela Carter, another writer I have never been able to settle into) rather than any reflection on the quality of the book and its likely appeal to readers who relish lushness of style and structure rather than spareness.

Revolver

By Leave a Comment

Marcus Sedgwick

Orion

978-1-84255-186-8

July 2009

This book has done something important for me. And it has done it in a way so utterly and compellingly convincing that I shall henceforth consider Marcus Sedgwick a writer of the very highest order. I know others have long held him in that regard. I have admired some books of his, but none has registered that complete sense of satisfaction that you get when you read a book by a master of their trade. Let’s be honest, few books do this completely. Two of my lodestars that I use when I have finished a book I have enjoyed are Robert Cormier and Sonya Hartnett. Yes, I think to myself, this book was good, but was it that good?
Well, I have to tell you that Revolver IS that good. And for the life of me I cannot imagine the conversation that must have gone on around the table between the judges of the Guardian Prize (to be announced on Thursday 8th October) that led to Sedgwick’s book failing to make the crossing from longlist to shortlist. It is a shocking omission. This book should be on the shortlist of each and every fiction prize of the coming year, and that includes adult lists, because the story it tells is entirely unpatronising. If any book deserves to have ‘crossover’ success, it is this one. Fans of Cormac McCarthy, viewers of Deadwood alike will find familiar themes confronted with a moving, moral grandeur.
Marcus Sedgwick, you are the real deal. Revolver is a very fine achievement. A book that will stand the test of time as surely as one of the late stories of Tolstoy.

Killing God

By Leave a Comment

Kevin Brooks

Penguin

978-0141319124

June 2009


Killing God is Kevin Brooks’ ninth novel and it’s as fine as anything he’s written. Of his previous work it has most in common with his third novel, Kissing The Rain, a book that was told in the unforgettable, stream of consciousness voice of an overweight boy, Moo Nelson.
The voice dominating Brooks’ latest novel is that of a 15 year old girl called Dawn Bundy, obsessed with the music of The Jesus And Mary Chain (to the extent of calling her two dogs Jesus and Mary, much to the annoyance of her church-attending neighbours) and constantly referring back to when she was 13 years old, a time when something of huge signficance happened to turn her into the reclusive “totally unattractive” person she now considers herself to be.
Just as with Kissing The Rain, it is not sufficient to describe this as a story told in the first-person. What we get in this novel is much more than a narrative. We get the experience of feeling completely at one with the character, not merely following her story, but experiencing life as she experiences it, hearing the frequently quoted Jesus and Mary Chain lyrics in our head, sensing the menacing discomfort when the normally unfriendly Mel and Taylor visit her and spend time in her bedroom plying her with alcohol.
It seems to me that Brooks does something even more impressive than Joyce’s famous Molly Bloom soliloquy, because he manages to have Dawn slip seamlessly between her stream of consciousness inner monologue, and her recounting of both past and present incidents. We gradually learn that the striking title of the novel (given a fittingly striking typographical cover design by http://the-parish.com/) is linked to the disappearance of her father, a character every bit as shambolic as Frank Gallagher from the TV series Shameless, who shortly before his disappearance became a God addict, making Dawn and her mother’s life more unbearable than ever.
Since he’s been gone, mother and daughter have been able to indulge and console themselves in various material luxuries – a big flastscreen TV, laptop, ipod etc. – thanks to a bag of cash the father left behind. This becomes a key factor in the developing climax of the book, as does the the trigger for the father’s disappearance two years previously.
Of the book’s ending I can say only that it makes the novel’s title entirely apposite.
There are the de rigeur ‘grateful acknowledgements’ to Jim & William Reid for permission to use The Jesus And Mary Chain lyrics. I dare say the Scottish brothers are fairly grateful to Brooks in return for giving their music such high profile and thereby winning them new fans.

Ice Shock

By Leave a Comment

M. G. Harris

Scholastic

9781407104034

March 2009

I’d dipped into the first Joshua Files title, Invisible City, and into this book as well, sufficiently enough to be able to know that they were well-written pacy adventures but Ice Shock is the first I have read from cover to cover. Assisted by good publisher publicity and promotion (which has included video trailers), clever presentation (the paperbacks have come in colourfully translucent plastic slipcases), and the well-judged online presence of the author herself (M. G. Harris has her own website, blog and twitter), the Joshua Files series is already, and deservingly so, a publishing success. Fans have to wait until early 2010 for the third installment, and after the stunning climactic pages of this novel, I imagine that for many readers, especially those who read the book 6 months ago when it was first released, that will be a wait too long.
Despite not having read Invisible City I had no trouble being sucked into the action of Ice Shock. There are many escapades and close shaves for the main character, Josh, before, in the course of a truly compelling finale, the significance of the book’s title becomes apparent.
Harris handles the Mexican backdrop to her narrative (both in terms of location and history) skillfully and cleverly combines it with nuggets of pseudo science and archaeology to leave the reader suitably poised between understanding and puzzlement.
This is simply great storytelling on a level suited to the audience.
Josh’s blog entries are used to help consolidate elements of the storyline – a helpful narrative technique – but in a way that makes complete sense in terms of Josh’s need to keep his actions and whereabouts secret.