realthog | books #20-#25

It seems no one else is undertaking the second year of the Fifty Buke Challenge, which is a bit of a pity because I enjoyed reading other people's views on the stuff they were reading. Well, dammit, I don't care if I'm the only one: it's useful for me to have a record of what I've read (and it also, on occasion, shames me into picking up a worthier book than I otherwise might). Besides, I can crosspost my notes here onto GoodReads, where everyone'll think I'm being virtuously industrious by reviewing lots of books rather than merely giving five stars to all of my own . . .

book #20: Captain Alatriste (1996) by Arturo Perez-Reverte (trans from the Spanish 2005 by Margaret Sayers Peden)

Last year I enjoyed this author's The Club Dumas quite a lot, so had high hopes for this one. They were, alas, moderately dashed. It sets out to be a rattling Dumas-style adventure in 1620s Madrid, as the ex-soldier-now-paid-thug Alatriste accepts an assassination commission from which, at the very last minute, he pulls back, thereby finding himself in hot water as powerful forces within the Spanish court both fume that he's disobeyed their murderous instructions and realize that he's in a position, should he blab, to cause severe ructions -- the intended assassination victims being none other than a traveling-incognito future Charles I of England and "Steenie". It's also the story of the boy Inigo, rendered fatherless on the battlefield and now quasi-apprenticed to Alatriste.

The pages turn easily enough, but at the end of the book I was left with the feeling that, despite a reasonable number of events, in a sense nothing much had really happened. Had this been a true story, it'd have been one of those footnotes of history that deserve to remain footnotes.

Okay for passing the time on a train journey, then, but not much more. I gather this is the first in a series, so perhaps the books will begin to add up to something more substantial. The translation's generally pretty good, although there were about three places where, brows furrowing as I tried to work out what the text was telling me, I concluded I was suffering the consequence of translationary screwups that either the copyeditor or the translator herself ought to have sorted out.

book #21: Half -Moon Investigations (2006) by Eoin Colfer

I was planning to get round at last to reading the author's Artemis Fowl and somehow ended up with this book in my hands instead. 12-year-old Fletcher Moon, nicknamed "Half" because he's small, is obsessed with the notion of being a detective. There's a crime wave hitting his school, and he's commissioned by one of the "pink girls" to solve the mystery of a stolen lock of a pop star's hair, bought from eBay and now purloined. Following clues, he discovers this theft is part of a much larger and far more alarming picture; to solve the case he has to ally himself with Red Sharkey, the unrecognized honest member of the local petty-crime lords.

The first score or so of pages of this book are electric, Colfer catches the Chandleresque tone very nicely indeed as he introduces Moon and the situation. But then he strips back the style to something more serviceable, clearly feeling the hardboiled voice would get in the way of the storytelling. I'm not sure he made the right decision. Even though the tale rattles along very nicely and I was never bored, it was those half-dozen instances later on where the PI verbal whipcracks re-emerged for a page or two that I really sat up and enjoyed myself. Colfer must be given full credit for making this a real mystery that it's important be solved, despite its being set largely among schoolchildren.

All in all, I found this plenty of fun but a bit lighter weight than it needed to have been.

book #22: The Link: A Victorian Mystery (1969) by Robin Maugham

Told sequentially by a number of different narrators, this novel is based loosely on the Tichborne Case (as was the very different novel Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey). It's the mid-19th century. Sex addict James Steede, set to inherit a title and a modest fortune, flees his domineering mother and his possibly pregnant girlfriend -- he's primarily homosexual but isn't averse to heterosexual liaisons -- for a life on the ocean wave, finally landing, after much gay revelry in the Americas, in Australia, safely anonymous because (in an insurance scam) a ship in which he traveled is supposed to have been lost at sea with the death of all aboard. Years later, his mother advertises for the return of her son, whom she's convinced is still alive.

Someone arrives back at the ol' family pile in England who's the spitting image of the missing James and can answer all sorts of questions about intimate personal and family details . . . but is this in fact James? Further, is the genuineness or otherwise of his claim as important to the likely outcome of the law case as the turmoil of conflicting special interests surrounding the investigation?

I found the opening one-third of this book a trifle daunting, to be honest, because James, who narrates this section (and is thus in the role of identification character), delights in telling us all about his various gay escapades and his enjoyment of them; my reaction was as if stuck next to that obsessive soccer fan on the train who insists on telling you all the details of Really Good soccer matches he's attended on the grounds that, sooner or later, through his doing so he'll make you see sense and start loving soccer as much as he does. (If he were talking about cricket, on the other hand, he wouldn't be a bore at all . . .) But Maugham's a surprisingly good tale-teller, so I weathered those hundred pages and thereafter was absolutely absorbed. I'm not sure he delivered the "terror and surprise . . . unforgettable climax" the blurb-writer promises, and nor is this really a mystery, whatever its subtitle indicates; but overall I enjoyed it a surprising amount.

book #23: The Answer (1955) by Philip Wylie

I'm not sure this should be included in the numbering, since it's only a novella and not even a very long novella, but it was separately published in hard covers so what the hell. It's an antiwar fable and has survived the passage of time quite well. After each of two US and Soviet H-bomb tests an injured angel flutters from the sky and dies. Two different political systems must endeavour to cope with the implications, and in the event both fail. In a way Wylie was doing the same sort of thing as I did more recently in my Leaving Fortusa, using fantasy in a sciencefictional setting to work out moral/ethical questions, although otherwise the works are extremely different. I can't think why it took me so long to get round to reading this little book, which I bought nearly a decade ago.

book #24: The Almost Moon (2007) by Alice Sebold

I moderately enjoyed this author's The Lovely Bones a couple of years back: I thought it was pretty okay, no more, and certainly hardly deserving of all the hyperbolic accolades. My reaction to this book is extraordinarily similar. Helen Knightly, driven momentarily beyond the borders of reason by the dementia of her mother, kills the old woman. We follow her over the next day or two as she attempts to deal with the consequences of her action; at the same time we learn much about her earlier life, and about how her mother's elegantly expressed madness (mainly agoraphobia, bringing with it an extraordinary self-centredness) has effectively harmed, and in instances destroyed, three generations. A dull-as-ditchwater start -- pages and pages of fastidious detailing of Helen's actions and introspections in the immediate aftermath of the deed -- gives way to a very entertaining narrative that occupies the rest of the book.

book #25: The Defection of A.J. Lewinter (1973) by Robert Littell

A ceramics specialist involved in designing the nose-cones for MIRV missiles defects to the USSR, and the various intelligence organizations on both sides of the Iron Curtain attempt to evaluate the defection. Is it important? Is it a genuine defection or a US attempt to embarrass the Soviets or plant an agent among them? What could Lewinter know that might be of any significance? And so on and so forth, to endless ramification. Lewinter himself barely appears in the book, and we never discover the answer to any of these questions; the central character is really the swirling paranoia endemic on either side during the Cold War, and not just in the intelligence communities. We're shocked by the ruthlessness with which some of the Russians behave in service of this paranoia; but Littell portrays their US counterparts behaving equally coldbloodedly. These are the dimwits who spend an inordinate amount of our tax dollars on what they insist is realpolitik when in fact it's just buffoonery -- buffoonery that'd be hilarious if it didn't destroy so many lives and strangle at birth so many endeavours that might improve the human lot. Neither side is remotely interested in -- regards as entirely trivial -- what is, if it works, the item of real value that Lewinter bears: the technology for an improved and environmentally friendly method of waste disposal.

This isn't the masterpiece of the spy thriller genre promised on the cover, for the very good reason it's not a thriller at all, and clearly has no intention whatsoever of trying to be one. Instead, it's a satire -- quite often a very funny one, more often a very dark one. It's in no sense a gripping read; but I think it's probably a very good book. I'm glad I read it, and in due course I may very well read it again.

As an aside, Penguin should be ashamed of themselves. I read the 2003 reissue, which has clearly been OCRed and typeset from an earlier edition without the benefit of any competent proofreading. There's a minor character whose surname I still don't know, because two different versions of it (Ferri and Fern) turn up with equal frequency. There are countless irritating minor literals (missing close-quotes are a frequent culprit), and in several places the text is so garbled as to be incomprehensible. This is beyond shoddy.