further buke catch-up

[realthog]

A few more books written up . . .


The Lighthouse (2005) by P.D. James

On a remote island off the coast of Southwest England, used as a getaway by the influential, the famous novelist Nathan Oliver is found one morning murdered -- hanged from the topmost railing of the island's fastidiously restored lighthouse. Since there were fewer than a dozen people on the island at the time, and since it's unlikely anyone could have come ashore secretly, the task of solving the murder would seem a simple one for Alan Dalglish and his crew. Yet lots of old coals have to be raked over, and a great deal of James's cumbersome prose negotiated, before the fairly unsurprising solution is revealed. There's plenty of clumsy dialogue, too, of the "You know all this already but I'm going to tell it to you anyway" variety. Aside from a rock-climbing sequence that's genuinely suspenseful, events just sort of . . . lumber on. Even so, the book's moderately enjoyable; just a shame that all the time I was reading it I was thinking it could have been done far better at half the length.


Bite Me: A Love Story (2010) by Christopher Moore

The infuriating Goth Abby Normal, whom I first encountered in Moore's A Dirty Job -- a novel I liked very much -- here takes more or less centre stage in a tale of vampirism, narrating a good deal of the book in her own inimitable style. Others of the characters from A Dirty Job reprise here (and, I sense, have already done so in the intervening novel You Suck). The tale is very funny -- I laughed a lot -- and quite extraordinarily smutty, yet I came away from it dissatisfied: where A Dirty Job was one of those triumphs that would have been a fine fantasy novel (and in fact a very ambitious one) even without the jokes, Bite Me seems to exist almost solely as a vehicle for the jokes. There are some great comic scenes -- as when Abby is "turned" and tries to impress her boyfriend with her Awesome Powers, or when the Emperor of San Francisco is used as bait for an aeons-old vampiress in a Safeway store -- but overall the book's a bit forgettable.


The Last Resort: A Mystery (1996; trans 2005 by Kristina Cordero) by Carmen Posadas

Elderly, gay Spanish Londoner Rafael, knowing that there is nothing left in life for him, decides to spend a few weeks in a remote, luxury Moroccan hotel, then put an end to it all. Just before he departs, his gossipy niece tells him the latest juicy details about a Spanish crime passionel, and when he arrives at the hotel just whom should he find there but the delectable widow everyone assumes killed her husband in that scandalous case. Slowly, slowly, glacially slowly, Rafael decides he might as well kill one of the other adulterous, duplicitous guests at the hotel before making his own planned exit. This unbearably mannered, arch book offers fairly solid tedium up to about the 30% mark, shows a few flickers of wit and interest thereabouts, and then settles back into tedium for the long haul. I found it quite a struggle to get to the end.


Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (1992) by Ruth Rendell

Reg Wexford (described pompously on the cover of the US edition as "Inspector Reginald Wexford", f'r gawd's sake, as if they were hoping to make you think he was another goddam Brit cop-with-a-knighthood, or at least an "Hon" to put to his name) has to tackle one of the goriest cases of his career, when an internationally renowned local author has her head blown apart by a gunman or gunmen who also slay her husband and daughter; only her granddaughter Daisy survives. Doing his usual bluff best to tread the path of goodness while yet solving the crime as efficiently as possible, and trying to cope at the same time with his increasing estrangement from his daughter over her latest disastrous choice of lovers, Reg Wexford pushes aside countless red herrings until finally the solution becomes obvious. I got there a little ahead of him, in fact, which means either that I am Very Very Clever or that, years ago, I saw the British TV adaptation (with the great George Baker), even though I have no memory of having done so. It's ironic that, Rendell having made her name with the Wexford books, these now seem among the lesser of her books; at the same time, they can sometimes, depending upon my mood, seem more approachable than her psychological thrillers. I enjoyed this one more than the past few Wexfords I've read.


Ravens (2009) by George Dawes Green

A Nawth Carolina family, the Boatwrights, who win a huge jackpot in the lottery are descended upon by an opportunistic psychopath, Shaw, and his increasingly reluctant sidekick who terrorize the Boatwrights into splitting the winnings with them; more than that, the Boatwrights must publicly declare how much they love Shaw and regard him as almost one of the family. The public of course swallows tis wholesale, and a cult builds up around Shaw; worse still, the Boatwrights, with the exception of teen daughter Tara, in Stockholm-Syndrome fashion begin to swallow the bullshit too.

I really like the movies based on this author's two earlier novels, especially The Caveman's Valentine, so, even though I've not read those two, I leapt upon this. I found it, alas, pretty lightweight.


The Supernaturalist (2004) by Eoin Colfer

Colfer is best known for his humorous fantasies -- like the Artemis Fowl series -- and I expected this to be more of the same. Although this has some humour interspersed, especially early on, in fact it's a pretty dour -- and really fairly damn' fine -- piece of science fiction. In a future dystopian city, young Cosmo escapes from the sadistic clutches of those who run the orphanage in which he's been incarcerated and used as a guinea pig for various potentially lethal drugs and allies himself with a gang of outcasts who, like himself, can see the ethereal parasites that, Valkyrie-like, cluster to any scene of death, the grosser the better, and feast upon the souls of the dying. Using technology they have developed, the outcasts slaughter as many of these being as they can, despite the ignorant efforts of the city authorities to stop them. But is everything the way Cosmo and his buddies think it is? This is a surprisingly serious, surprisingly good piece of work.


Corpse Whisperer (2007) by Chris Redding

Grace Harmony, like her mother before her, has a strange parapsychological talent: the corpses of the murdered can speak to her, and she then can whip back through time either to avert the murder or to solve the crime. It's always worked out well before; in this most recent instance, however, everything is much more complicated, and not just because she falls in love with one of the men involved in the case. Again and again Grace finds herself looping back through time and, as in Ken Grimwood's Replay, finding herself unable to do much about the way she's changing it simply by doing this. It's a great premise, but . . .

Corpse Whisperer bears all the hallmarks of a self-published novel: the basic grammatical errors, the typos, the Thog's Masterclass howlers, the double letter spaces in strange and unexpected places, you name it. A major character is sometimes a cop, sometimes a retired-cop-turned-private-eye. On a couple of occasions we're readied for major plot features that are then dismissed in a few lines, as if the relevant part of the synopsis had been substituted for the heralded several pages of dramatic narrative. That the setup should surely create dozens of time paradoxes is simply ignored. And so on. All in all, there's a feeling of careless haste about the text, as if the author cared more about filling the pages than telling the tale -- a great shame, since the premise offered so much.


The Prince of Mist (1993; trans 2010 by Lucia Graves) by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

It's hardly a secret that I'm nuts about Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind and very fond indeed of his The Angel's Game. Apparently he published four novels in Spanish before those, all for a YA/adult audience, of which this was the first. During WWII young Max's dad decides the family would be safer living away from the big city, and so he rents them a house in a seaside village, dominated by a huge lighthouse. Even before they get there, strange things start happening: the station clock runs backwards, a malign cat attaches itself to the family, and so on. Soon Max discovers an isolated sculpture garden filled with effigies of circus characters that seem to change position when no one's looking and one of which seems to be the embodiment of evil -- which indeed he proves to be: the satanic Prince of Mist, Dr. Cain. Along with his older sister and the adoptive grandson of the lighthouse keeper, Max succeeds in driving back Dr. Cain -- at least for now, and only at a very great cost.

This book's an astonishingly fast read -- despite having to contend with a full workload, I started it one afternoon and had it finished by the time I put the light out the next day. As seems to be the case with almost all modern Spanish-language novels, there were occasional plot conundra, but I waved those merrily away as I continued on the helterskelter ride. The tale doesn't have the sheer storytelling, mythopoeic power of The Shadow of the Wind, but it certainly has me panting for the translated publication in May of Zafon's next YA adventure, The Midnight Palace.


The Pyramid, and Four Other Kurt Wallander Mysteries (1999; trans 2008 by Ebba Segerberg with Laurie Thompson) by Henning Mankell

Pam and I have watched and enjoyed several of the Kenneth Branagh Wallander mysteries, and so I thought it was about time I read some of the Real Thing; as chance would have it, what I picked was not one of the novels but a sort of later adjunct to the series, a fat volume containing two short novels, a novella, and a couple of novelettes.

I was left very much in two minds as to whether I wanted to read any more. Segerberg's translation really plods; there are countless sentences that exhibit a sort of magnetic fridge poetry effect -- you know all the components are present and correct, but no one's taken the trouble to put them in the right order. I assume it's not the translator's fault that the prose style consists largely of lots of single-clause sentences, so that no proper rhythm can ever be built up. It's a fact. Like this. See what I mean? On and on it goes. And obviously it's not the translator's fault that in two consecutive stories the bad guy points a gun at Wallander for a long moment, Wallander waits to die, and the bad guy then blows his own brains out. The first time it was moderately suspenseful; the second time, not so much.

One of the novelettes, "The Man with the Mask", is quite extraordinarily slight. The other, "The Man on the Beach", has more of a tale to tell -- where could the murdered man have gone to those days he went to the seaside, walked along the beach, and then seemed to vanish beyond anyone's ken? The first story in the book, the short novel "Wallander's First Case", held my attention perhaps best of all; the young Wallander's neighbor dies in suspicious circumstances and Wallander sets out to solve the crime even though he's not yet a detective, just a humble plod. "The Death of the Photographer" focuses on the disparity between a person's public image and the reality of them; and the same is true of the final, longer short novel "The Pyramid", in which the core mystery concerns the execution-style killings of two supposedly sweet old ladies who run a sewing-accessories shop.

None of these tales is outright bad -- with the arguable exception of "The Man in the Mask" -- but none of them much moved me, either . . . and, as I say, I found the style extremely rebarbative. So maybe I'll try one of the novels. Someday. Maybe. Or perhaps not. It's like that. Yo?

Comments

[mylefteye.livejournal.com]

I read Chris Moore's first vampire novel, Bloodsucking Fiends, and thought it was excellent, but I was so disappointed with two other novels by him - Practical Demonkeeping and Coyote Blue - I haven't tried any others. You recommend I read A Dirty Job, then?

Think I'll check out the Eoin Colfer book. Sounds my kinda thang.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

You recommend I read A Dirty Job, then?

I liked it quite a lot. Other goodies include Fluke and particularly Lamb. As you say, he goes up and down quite a lot from one book to the next.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

The Wallander series works much better at novel length, I found: I had a similar reaction to you to the novellas, but enjoyed some of the novels hugely.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

I'll maybe give 'em a try when I have time, then. Could you recommend a good one to start with?

I was wondering if it might just be the translation I was having difficulty with.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I started at the beginning, I have to say, but the one I liked best was Sidetracked.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I doubt I'll have the time/energy to commit myself to reading the entire series, so I'll make a note of Sidetracked and see how things go from there.

We quite enjoy the TV series. I gather the Swedish versions are even better.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

The Swedish show is much better: it's far less sentimental, for a start.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

I'll have to see if I can lay hands on it. Hm -- Netflix has just sent me an invitation to a free one-month trial . . .

[realthog.livejournal.com]

By the way, this is the first comment in a while for which I got an email notification. It took more than 24 hours to reach me, mind you. But at least there's a possibility LJ may finally have solved its problem, hurrah!