bukes #64-#70

Time for another rapid catch-up. Really I should get into the habit of quickly jotting down my thoughts here after each book, but it's normally late at night when I finish a book, and there's no way I'm going to drag myself out of bed, reboot the puter, etc., and the next morning I have other things to do than write book notes. And so the pile keeps growing. I'm hoping that by December 31 I'll have got to the stage where I won't be desperately trying to write up a dozen book notes before midnight . . .

book #64: Burning Up (1999) by Caroline B. Cooney

This is an older children's/YA novel, and I wish there'd been more of this kind of stuff around when I was a kid. Young Macey lives in the swanky Connecticut burb that's been home to her family for generations. As a school project, she decides to delve into the history of a local burnt-out barn . . . and is surprised to run into a wall of adult hostility to the notion. It could have ended there -- why rock the boat? -- but Macey's attitudes mature quite a lot when she and a few classmates visit an inner-city church to do charitable work, see the deprivation of the kids there, and make friends; they mature even more when, soon after, one of those kids is murdered. With her new boyfriend, Macey pushes ahead and discovers why the barn was torched, and the levels of guilt and bigotry buried beneath the genial facades of some of her family members and their friends. The writing's good, the relationships are well handled, and difficult topics are handled more substantively than in many an adult "issues" novel. What's not to like?

book #65: The Little Friend (2002) by Donna Tartt

Although I read these two books -- this and Burning Up -- a couple of months apart, the process of piling, retrieving from pile and re-piling next to the computer has brought them together: a nice piece of serendipity, because in a way the two are thematically companion-pieces. One is lean, and effective for that reason; the other achieves every bit of that effectiveness through being long and generous with its plot and writing.

It's a small Mississippi town in the latter part of the 1970s. A decade or more ago, when Harriet was just a baby, her elder brother was found hanging from a tree; the murder, if murder it was, has never been solved. Now she's a headstrong tomboy, quite capable of intimidating most of the adults around her, and worshipped by a younger boy, Hely. Having read plenty of Sherlock Holmes for practical tips, she sets out -- with Hely as her distinctly unreliable Watson -- to catch her brother's murderer and exact vengeance. Her attention soon focuses on a local family of petty and not-so-petty criminals, the Ratliffs. To begin with she underestimates the dangers of investigating the Ratliffs; in later stages of the book it becomes alarmingly clear to her and us that she's stepped into a vipers' nest and will be lucky to escape with her life.

Talking of vipers, one of the funniest segments of this novel -- which skilfully blends humour into its high drama -- concerns a visiting snakehandler, enticed to town by the fundamentalist bible-thumper Ratliff brother Eugene, unaware that one of his brothers has plans to put the snake crates to nefarious use. In the end, it's Harriet who puts the snakes themselves to near-lethal use. But this book is so rich with memorable sequences that it seems misleading to single one out; a particular subtext that I enjoyed was the understated notion that the institutionalized racism pertaining in Mississippi during the decades leading up to this story was a tool of repression that had been used to destroy the lives of poor whites and blacks alike, only most of the whites were too ill-educated or themselves too racist to recognize what was going on.

The writing's for the most part pretty wonderful (albeit marred by the occasional annoying grammatical lapse, notably the lay/laid error), and there are scenes toward the end of the book that make it plain Tartt could have had a successful career as a thriller writer had she so chosen: genuine white-knuckle stuff.

book #66: The Man Who Wasn't There (1988) by Pat Barker

A short novel/longish novella that's in a way an extension of the Walter Mitty idea. Young Colin knows nothing of his father except that he must have fought -- and died? -- in Europe during World War II. His mother won't tell him anything; neither will any of the other adults around him. So, as he wanders around his postwar neighbourhood, Colin acts out some of what he believes his father's glorious adventures must have been -- and makes of them a mental movie whose script Barkers offers us intertwined with the main narrative. The effect's often very funny, sometimes extremely moving. Still, I think Barker was wise not to try to extend this to a full-scale novel; The Man Who Wasn't There is just long enough the way it is.

Oh, and it has nothing to do with the Coen Brothers movie of the same name.

book #67: I'll Bury My Dead (1953) by James Hadley Chase

Before Harlequin became exclusively a romance publisher it released the same sort of mix as most of the other pulp houses of the day, typified by hardboiled thrillers with garishly suggestive covers. To honour its 60th anniversary, the firm has released half a dozen of those early titles in facsimile editions. They've matched the paper (even the smell!), the stained edges -- everything except the price (although I was content enough to lash out $6.99 for this one).

James Hadley Chase was author of the much better known No Orchids for Miss Blandish, the first film version of which scandalized at least one nation, 'way back when. He was one of those British authors who attempted to mimic the American hardboiled pulp style using a phrase book and a copy of Websters. So far as I know, none of these authors were actually any good -- Peter Cheyney was the other major name -- but in their own clunkily written fashion they had a certain odd charm, assuming you weren't put off by the body count and the appalling moral the stories seemed to be trying to convey. So I read I'll Bury My Dead with little more in mind than a nostalgic wander down Memory Lane . . . and I was absolutely right to have kept my expectations in check.

Plot? Oh, yes, it does have one of those. Nick English is an extraordinarily rich entrepreneur who is barely less thuggish and corrupt than the villains. Someone bumps off his estranged, blackmailing brother. Even though Nick regarded his brother as a waste of space, blood is thicker than water -- or is it that Nick takes the murder as a personal affront? -- and so off he goes in quest of vengeance.

book #68: End in Tears (2005) by Ruth Rendell

I've long been a great fan of Ruth Rendell's (and Barbara Vine's!) standalone psychological thrillers, but somehow I've never taken as much to her Inspector Wexford mysteries . . . even though I was devoted to their tv adaptations, many years ago, starring the excellent George Baker. The early books in the series didn't quite hook me the way various of their rivals did; the later ones seem to me undecided as to whether to be psychological thrillers or detective novels, and end up dithering somewhere in between. All of that said, a mediocre Rendell novel is better than many other crime writers can manage at the top of their game.

In this one, a local Kingsmarkham lass is beaten to death with a lump of concrete. Soon Wexford and his team realize this was in fact the second attempt on the girl's life: a few months earlier, someone dropped a concrete block off a bridge in hopes of killing her, but hit the wrong car. And, as the police deepen their investigation, another young woman connected with the case is bumped off, presumably by the same killer intent on covering up his tracks. In due course Wexford discovers the women were operating a particularly mean-minded scam; unearthing this leads him to criminals aplenty, but he has to go a step further to identify the true murderer.

All in all, good entertainment despite one or two loud plot-creaks.

book #69: Play It Again (1995) by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

Yes, it's the son of the actor . . . and so I fully expected this curio to be pretty ghastly. My expectations seemed confirmed by the fact that it bore a laudatory cover quote from Connie Chung; all this proves is that Bogart is pals with Connie Chung. Still, you know the principle: You bought it, so you better read it, buster.

And in fact it's quite good . . . although I found some aspects of it a bit disquieting.

As the front-flap blurb explains, our hero, R.J. Brooks, is "the only son of a legendary [now dead] movie tough guy and his most glamorous leading lady"; compare and contrast with the back-flap bio, which tells us that the author is the "son of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall". To get away from his ghastly mother, Brooks has set himself up as a seedy P.I. handling "matrimonial cases"; but his life changes when his mother is discovered murdered in the midst of a sex act with her latest studly toyboy. Do you think there are maybe some issues here?

That aside, the tale rattles along fairly nattily, and there's a sufficient quota of snappy noir-style one-liners. Had Bogart published the book under a pseudonym, this wouldn't have been a concern: I might have wondered if the reference were to HB and Bacall, but it wouldn't much have bothered me. Who knows? Perhaps this was Bogart Jr's original intent but his agent/publisher persuaded him otherwise?

book #70: Dark Lord of Derkholm (1998) by Diana Wynne Jones

I'm not sure if DWJ wrote this novel ahead of her wonderful The Tough Guide to Fantasyland or after it, or if she was working on the two of them simultaneously. (She may also have been doing some writing for The Encyclopedia of Fantasy at the same time. Busy, busy.) Whatever, the two books have clearly influenced each other very strongly.

Mr Chesney has for long been organizing annual tours from the mundane world to the fantastical otherworld where all true template high/epic fantasy novels take place . . . or don't except when the droves of tourist parties are there, because for the rest of the year the otherworld is relative peaceable: it's only for the tourists' benefit that wars are fought, dragons slain, nations pillaged, etc. It is a mystery as to what hold Mr Chesney has on the Powers That Be such that no one can call a halt to this yearly devastation.

Each year a different Dark Lord must be chosen to represent the ultimate embodiment (or emspectrement, I spose) of Evil, to be the loser in the Final Battle before it's time for the tourists to toddle off back through the interdimensional portal to their mundane lives. This year it's the turn of the pacifist wizard Derk to be the Great Adversary, a chore he has to accept even though he'd rather continue practising his hobby of creating portmanteau creatures through, um, magical genetics, kind of. Luckily he has his children -- both human and otherwise -- to help him out.

I had lots of fun with this book, which is not only frequently hilarious but also constantly inventive. It reinforced my contention that Diana Wynne Jones is the thinking reader's preferred alternative to J.K. Rowling.