books #4-#15

[realthog]

Here's a catch-up post on books read for leisure during the first part of this year. The order's a bit random, and certainly doesn't reflect the order in which I read them. I'll start with one I began for research and ended up sneaking away from my desk to an armchair for because I was enjoying it so much -- and devoured in a single day.

book #4: Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World (2005) by David King

Olof Rudbeck was the discoverer of the lymph system, a keen astronomer, a composer, a singer, an instrumentalist, a top-flight architect -- in short, a sort of paradigm for Renaissance Man (the plant genus Rudbeckia was named in honour of him and his son, another Olof) -- yet he devoted most of his life to an attempt to prove first that Sweden was the land of the Hyperboreans and then that Atlantis was in fact Sweden, with its capital at Old Uppsala. What was disconcerting for me was that, if we ignore those of his claims that were obviously just products of a fevered overenthusiasm, he actually made a pretty good case for his thesis, one that was hailed by, inter alia, the Royal Society and Sir Isaac Newton. The real reason his monumental books (I use the plural because the later supplements far surpassed in extent the original) have been forgotten is that, shortly after his death, Sweden stumbled from being a major power to humiliation as a conquered, looted nation, not because his theories failed in the eyes of his peers; in such a context, the notion that the country might have been a supertechnological civilization at the dawn of time, etc., came to seem laughable.

King's style is highly readable, on occasion verging, it has to be admitted, just over the line into the facile, and one or two interesting strands of background international politics seem to get forgotten before, chapters later, being rather summarily tied off. But those are quibbles. Overall, this book's highly recommended.

book #5: The Green Ripper (1979) by John D. MacDonald

McGee has decided that maybe, at last, he's found the Real Thing with Gretel, but then she's ruthlessly murdered -- worse, he and Meyer discover this is just one of a long series of killings involved with the plans of anarchistic revolutionaries hiding behind the mask of a religious cult, the Church of the Apocrypha. Except that, of course, the revolutionaries are actually being run by far more sinister forces . . . In due course, McGee infiltrates one of their armed training camps, and after that it becomes a question of kill or be killed.

This is the most violent of the Travis McGee novels I can remember reading -- although it's been a long while since last I did so, so maybe the others have a similar body-count!

book #6: Cauldron (2007) by Jack McDevitt

I'm a fan of McDevitt's to the extent that I've always enjoyed reading his books, and keep telling myself I should read more of them, so I was licking my chops as I settled down to this one. I've got to confess I was pretty spectacularly disappointed. Earth's interstellar enterprise looks to be falling into abeyance because of the apathy of shortsighted politoicians, so the discovery by a physicist called Jon Silvestri of a new principle of faster-than-light travel that makes the far extremes of the galaxy a mere jaunt away rescues the effort just in time. For about two-thirds of the book, Our Heroes (who include McDevitt's series protagonist Priscilla Hutchins) try to get the thing to work. In the remaining one-third, they go off to the Galactic Core, having a couple of adventures en route and another when they get there. This all reads less like a novel, more like a rather tired fixup (to use the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction's terminology). My guess is this bridges the gap between two periods of McDevitt's future history -- that this is just a sort of a transitional passage within a larger scheme, as it were -- but that's no real excuse.

Needless to say, it's been shortlisted for a Nebula. I despair.

book #7: My Teacher Glows in the Dark (1991) by Bruce Coville

Odd, the workings of serendipity. This came off the pile just now immediately after the McDevitt book, and I realize that in a way they're not so dissimilar in terms of plot. This time it's a kid, Peter, who's transported to the far reaches of the galaxy, where He Has Adventures. A mighty difference is that this book can't be more than about 20% of the length of McDevitt's. It's also far more lightly written (and has better jokes). One could make the same sort of criticisms of it, I guess, as I have of Cauldron, yet in this instance, long before I'd had a chance to weary of the lack of a proper plot, I'd finished the book. No classic, but I'll be looking out for others in the series.

book #8: The Geographer's Library (2005) by Jon Fasman

This is another book I salivated over before reading. In the event I enjoyed it quite a lot, though it didn't fully live up to my probably somewhat overinflated expectations. Paul Tomm is a junior reporter for and in fact almost the entire reportorial staff of a small-town Connecticut newspaper. He's told to do an obituary when reclusive and distinctly odd local university professor Jaan Puhapaev dies, and his nascent journalistic antenna goes into overdrive -- or whatever it is journalistic antennae do when their owners get suspicious -- especially when the pathologist who was examining the body dies in a mysterious hit-and-run. In his efforts to show both prof and pathologist were murdered, Paul sort of halfway unravels the mystery in the midst of a brief but torrid love affair with the dead prof's next-door neighbour. Interspersed within the main tale are shortish sections tracing the histories of a "library" of alchemical artefacts which, together, drive an enormous backstory of which Paul, and the reader, will only ever be able to discover a small part.

This is a very well told book, and for the most part I was turning the pages steadily (although I confess I skipped occasional pages where the author was essentially listing, catalogue-style, the alchemical attributes of the artefacts). Trouble is, I've read quite a few books written with this general structure over the past few years, and far too few of them seem to do anything with the juxtaposition they present of ancient and modern, as it were. The Geographer's Library really doesn't stand up as a mystery novel, and I'm not sure it does either as the intellectual exercise we're supposed to think it is. Certainly it's worth the time of reading, but it's not the humdinger I'd hoped for.

book #9: Take My Life (1967) by Winston Graham

Graham seems almost forgotten now, but there was a time from about the mid-'60s onwards when he was (deservedly) regarded as almost the major practitioner of the psychological thriller. Among those the best remembered is undoubtedly Marnie, famously filmed (so-soishly) by Hitchcock, but my own favourite (of those I read) was The Walking Stick, which carried the true Winston Graham hallmark of keeping me up all night to finish it. But Graham served his apprenticeship writing more straightforward detections, and Take My Life was one of these. The husband of newly married opera singer Philippa Shelley is almost inadvertently framed for a murder he didn't commit, and -- Scotland Yard not being much interested in looking beyond the obvious suspect -- it's up to her to prove him innocent before the death penalty ends all discussions of the matter. Change the setting a bit and you'd have the story at the heart of various classic noir movies.

Not classic Graham, but good satisfying stuff anyway.

book #10: Candyland (2001) by Evan Hunter and Ed McBain

Good friend sarcobatuslent me this so I'll do things better the next time I write a McBain homage. (To be honest, I don't like rewalking paths I've trod before, so The City in These Pages is going to be it for the McBain homages . . . unless, of course, someone waves a fat cheque . . .) The book's conceit is obvious: this is the first and only collaboration between Sal Lombino's two major noms de plume. In its first half, written by Hunter, sex-addicted LA architect is on the loose overnight in NYC after a business meeting, and during his trawling of the sexual underworld as he attempts to get laid he puts himself in just the right places at just the right times to be regarded by the cops, as they investigate a homicide the following day, as Suspect #1. Of course, he's back in LA by now and unaware of any of this . . . unless, of course, he actually did kill the dead prostitute (it says a lot for McBain/Hunter's skill that this is always a possibility). In the second half of the book, written by McBain in something approaching 87th Precinct style, Emma Boyle of the NYPD's Special Victims Unit is called in to help with the homicide investigation and unravels the crime.

A real page-turner, as you'd expect. Pretty damn' raunchy in places, too.

book #11: R is for Ricochet (2004) by Sue Grafton

A pretty good entry in the fairly reliable Kinsey Millhone series. Plutocrat's daughter Reba Lafferty was a wild one who mixed with bad company until finally the law caught up with her and put her away for a few years. Now she's due out on probation, and adoring daddy Nord Lafferty commissions Kinsey to babysit his daughter and make sure she settles back into civilian life, this time without all the booze and the drugs and stuff. And, of course, it proves to be not nearly so simple as anyone expected . . . Lots of fun to read, somewhat forgettable afterwards.

book #12: Red Doll (1986) by Juan Luis Cebrian, translated by Philip W. Silver

This is one of those wonderful European novels that, had it been written in English, would never have found an anglophone publisher: it's not slick, it doesn't follow well-worn paths, it requires the reader to think a bit, etc. In the aftermath of the long Franco nightmare, Juan, an advisor to the Spanish President, is in Paris for a conference when he and a much younger attendee, the startlingly redheaded Begona, fall head-over-heels in love. It's not something either can resist, despite the fact that Juan does still love his family and Begona in many ways dislikes everything Juan stands for.

Even amid his passion, Juan knows his country's secret services will be aware of his adulterous affair; what he underestimates is the extent to which the various factions within Spain's still turbulent power structure will attempt to make use of the information. And, when this does become evident, he faces a tormenting question: was he merely seduced by his Red Doll as a political gambit, or is their near-obsessive love genuine?

The translation's good. This isn't a very long book, and I picked it up expecting to read it fairly quickly; in the event I found myself taking the time to savour it.

book #13: The Visitors (1980) by Clifford Simak

I picked this up at a Worldcon a few years back. Time was, I thought there could never be such a thing as a boring Simak novel, even though some of the later books of his I'd read had been a bit, well, lacking in sustenance. Sadly, The Visitors proved to be dull as ditchwater. The aliens arrive in the form of lots of big, featureless black boxes that arrive in forest areas and start devouring trees. One does so on the outskirts of Lone Pine, Minnesota, and Simak's usual roster of small-town characters start trying to make contact with it, or at least to cope with its presence. Oh how I longed for the days of The Big Back Yard or They Walked Like Men . . .

book #14: Double Indemnity (1936/1944) by James M. Cain

Yes, believe it or not but I'd never read this -- even though I've owned it for many years, bringing it across with me from the UK a decade ago: it still has its Oxfam Bookshop "30p" sticker on the front. The story is known to all from the great Barbara Stanwyck movie . . . except that it isn't, not really. The story in the novel is quite a lot more complex, both plotwise and emotionally; and I was startled to find myself wishing very much that Billy Wilder/Raymond Chandler had bloody well stuck to it, because it's actually far more satisfying. (I must try to get hold of the 1973 tv-movie remake to see what they did with it.) If, like me until just a few weeks ago, you've always been meaning to read the book but never gotten around to it, hearken to my strong recommendation.

Now, where have I shelved my almost equally vintage copy of Mildred Pierce . . .?

book #15: The Portrait (2005) by Iain Pears

A few months ago I read and adored Pears's big fat science-historical mystery-type novel An Instance of the Fingerpost and adored it so much I went out and bought a better copy than the somewhat battered one I had so that Pam could read the book the way it ought to be read -- and, now I face it, so that I could have a nicer copy if ever I re-read the book myself, which is not beyond the bounds of possibility. Whatever, when I spotted The Portrait in the library the other day, there was no question but that it go home with me.

It's a very much slighter book in every sense of the word -- indeed, it's more like a very, very long novella than a novel, all narrated as he paints by early-20th-century portraitist Henry MacAlpine to his subject, critic and heartless bastard William Nasmyth. Slowly, as the past history of the two men -- and more importantly of the undervalued (because female) painter Evelyn -- unfolds, we discover why MacAlpine has lured Nasmyth to this remote island off Brittany for the portrait, and what he hopes to achieve with that portrait.

I'm not sure Pears quite pulls off the endeavour. At the end of the book I felt thoroughly satisfied by the last fifty pages I'd read, but the buildup to those last fifty pages had far too often seemed to drag. Had this been published as an ordinary-length novella -- say, 25-35,000 words -- rather than an (at a guess) 55,000-word shortish novel, I think it would have been artistically more successful. As it was, I had the sensation I was looking at one of a master's interesting but decidedly lesser paintings.

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And now I must go have supper and . . . BEER. Proofreading this can wait.

Comments

[briansiano.livejournal.com]

_The Green Ripper_ really is atypically violent for a McGee novel. I wouldn't have recommended that one to start, because it gives the impression that the series is just a variation on other series adventure novels like _the Punisher_.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Thanks for confirming my impression. I devoured the series in the mid-/late '70s or so, and have gone back on occasion for rereads . . . but not for a good many years. I seem to remember there was some pretty disturbing stuff in The Dreadful Lemon Sky (was it?), but nothing quite like the carnage in The Green Ripper. That said, in the latter book it's not gratuitous: it springs inevitably from the plot.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Agree entirely - I don't think any of the others run to more than three or four deaths in total, and usually they end with McGee up against one or two big bads, not the wholesale carnage of Green Ripper.

[sarcobatus.livejournal.com]

Candyland is yours to keep. I need to make room for in-coming bukes. . . ;)

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Oooo, oodles of thanks! How can I repay, etc.?

I wish I hadn't sneezed into it now . . .

[sarcobatus.livejournal.com]

"How can I repay, etc.?"

Hmmm . . . I'm gonna have to think on that one awhile . . .
*strokes chin whiskers*

[realthog.livejournal.com]

You have chin whiskers?

[sarcobatus.livejournal.com]

"You have chin whiskers?"

You're too easy. I'm going to have to call you Easy Barnett from now on.

Of course I don't have chin whiskers. I shave them off.

[avengangle.livejournal.com]

I loved My Teacher Flunked the Planet. Of course, I loved it in sixth grade, so I don't know how I'd love it now. But I remember it as being the best of the series.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip!

[quietselkie.livejournal.com]

Was there actually beer???

I keep looking at Fingerpost where it sits leering on the shelf at the shop. I haven't been able to get anyone whose reading tastes I share to read it and report back favorably, but that doesn't stop me lingering near it from time to time. Just not sure I'm ready to commit to another read quite that size quite so soon. I want some short, sweep-me-away brain candy for a change.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Was there actually beer???

Yesh.

I keep looking at Fingerpost where it sits leering on the shelf at the shop.

My guess is you'd enjoy it a lot.

[melindadansky.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's a lot of books!

Are you on www.goodreads.com? They're like Facebook for people who read. You can keep track of your bookshelf and write reviews. The reviews can be posted automatically to live journal. The also have an author program.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"Are you on www.goodreads.com?"

Yes, although I hardly ever get round to doing anything about it; a bit embarrassing, because most of my friends there are very conscientious about keeping their pages up to date. I was thinking of cheating a bit, if I have time, by copy'n'pasting the notes from here over onto goodreads.

If you're a goodreads member and want to hook up, my monicker is the same as here: realthog.