realthog

Time for the next roundup of probably inaccurate notes and generally half-baked yet arrogantly presented conclusions. I'm not going to be able to catch up entirely tonight with this record of books read, but I can at least make a start.

book #40: Notes on a Scandal (What was She Thinking?) (2003) by Zoe Heller

Sheba, a young and yummy female art teacher in a not marvelous London school begins an affair with one of her (male) pupils, Connolly, and commits the sin of enjoying it despite the fact the boy's an obvious turnip. Disgrace, public humiliation, possibly prison lie at the end of it all, but none of these things matter. The sole clouds on her horizon are her friends among the faculty, the troglodytic Fatty Hodge and the ghastly old spinster Barbara Covett. It's Barbara who's decided to write an account of the whole fiasco, supposedly to help her "friend"; in fact her narrative, which is this novel, is a document that reveals less about Sheba, her motivations and the affair than it does about Barbara herself, in particular her possessiveness, her need to dominate, and possibly (although this is a likely unjustified inference of mine) her suppressed lesbian yearnings for Sheba.

A lot of the time while I was reading this I was reminded of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, another novel where the commentary is more important than the main narrative, and where the point is the unwitting revealing by the commenter of who the commenter really is. Heller isn't as skilled a player as Nabokov was at this sort of game and isn't up for the kind of narrative trickstery Nabokov managed as if by reflex, and Notes on a Scandal curiously loses out through making fewer and lesser demands on the reader than Pale Fire does; yet there's a huge amount of pleasure -- and a lot of laughter -- to be derived from this book. Notes on a Scandal is unlikely to turn out to be your book of the year, but it could very well turn out to be your book of the month.

book #41: Cold Case (2000) by Stephen White

A year or so before I grew weary of Jonathan Kellerman's increasingly tired Alex Delaware mysteries I came across Stephen White's Alan Gregory mysteries. At first I assumed I was getting just Delaware ripoffs (psychologist helps fat local police detective solve crimes; the telling was fresher and more enthusiastic, yet the scenario was hellish familiar) with an admixture of Patricia Cornwell (the fat local police detective is a bigot, yet somehow curiously gawsh-lovable for all that), and I suspect this was what the publisher initially assumed as well -- when I went back and read some of the early books in the series and their blurbs, I became sure of it -- yet White and Gregory soon developed a real voice and style of their own. This is not always a good thing -- a couple of the White/Gregory books have been pretty damn' silly -- yet for most of the time there's a great vigour in these books that you don't so much expect any longer from the corporate mainstream of US thrillerdom.

This is perhaps one of the sillier White/Gregory novels, but I enjoyed it anyway. Some years ago Colorado was shocked by the brutal mutilationary double murder of a couple of teenage girls; yet the case was never solved, thanks to the apathy and incompetence of the local cops. Now an organization of super-detectives and forensic poobahs called Locard (after the famed French detective), dedicated to picking up cold cases, decides to "adopt" this one -- and Alan Gregory and public prosecutor wife Lauren are called in to help. Natch, there are still plenty of rural numbnutses who want to keep the case forever dead, and some of these bozos are murderous . . .

There's 'way too much soap opera here, and the later sequences require your disbelief to be not so much suspended as floated away on a beautiful blue balloon, but all in all the brightness of White's telling made me willing to forgive a lot and to keep turning the pages.

Okay, so there were a couple of testing moments:

Dept of Mammary Bilocation: "She hugged me from behind, one of her breasts heavy on each side of my neck."

Dept of Optical Rodeo: "Her unpatched eye captured both of mine . . ."

book #42: A Certain Chemistry (2003) by Mil Millington

I must have laughed loud and long a couple of dozen times or more while reading the first 100 pages of this 404-page book; and I must have laughed about three times all told, and then only in a charitable way, during the rest of it.

Tom Cartwright's a ghostwriter in Edinburgh, Scotland; he's a deft and willing hack and he lives with a girlfriend called Sara with whom I promptly fell in, and remained in, love. But, however skilled Tom is with the written word, he's an idiot. When the chance comes along to earn oodles of dosh ghosting the autobiography of TV soap star and public heart throb Georgina Nye -- "She's been voted the best arse in the UK by the readers of two major magazines" (quoted from memory) -- he grabs both chance and soon thereafter the admired arse with both hands.

Most of this refreshingly badly written novel thereafter is devoted to sexual rompery and Tom's difficulties in deceiving and later attempting to mollify Sara. The best character in the book is Tom's hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-swearing and all-round hard-as-nails agent Amy, who every time she appeared had me grinning (partly through recognition; I'm sure I've met her at BEA or the London Book Fair); unfortunately she didn't appear often enough.

I'm not sure quite why I became so irritated by this book. I think the reason might well be that Tom is such a depressingly nauseating, selfish, egocentric protagonist. Normally I like amoral protagonists, because they possess a certain detached wit; not so poor Tom. I imagine if you're 13 you'd love this book.

book #43: Cast Adrift (2004) by Peter Guttridge

"The King of Crime Comedy" -- Shots Magazine boasts the cover, so, natch, dreaming of Colin Watson and Simon Brett and Robert Barnard and a bucketload of others, I grabbed Cast Adrift. I can't tell you how disappointed I was. This has to be the ghastliest book I've read in a very long time. It's a late entry in the Nick Madrid series; I can only assume the earlier entries were a whole hell of a lot better, as described by various worthies, plus trade journals like Publishing News, who're quoted on the back of the book. Heaven forfend all the praise might have anything to do with Guttridge's job as Crime Fiction Reviews Editor for The Observer.

Nick Madrid and his frightful pal Bridget are in Mexico on the set of a budget-strapped pirate-movie musical. Everyone's screwing everyone else and that's jolly hilarious. Nick's not very good at screwing -- how much more hilarity can you bear? -- but he manages to bed all sorts of wonderfully lovely babes anyway: reader, my ribs are just one big solid ache. There are homosexual, Rastafarian, Elgar-loving modern-day pirates. Oh, spare me, spare me; nothing like a few prejudice-reinforcing jokes about gays, eh? And I'm just mentioning the good bits.

Oh, and there are appalling displays of ignorance/carelessness. The dinosaurs apparently died out a mere six million years ago (page 100; and, no, it's not a typo, because this wrong datum is repeated on the next page). Our hero listens to the end of BBC Radio 4's Today programme at 9am (page 162) . . . which might seem reasonable enough until you realize he's doing the listening in Mexico, which is displaced by several hours from GMT. And so on. In the normal way, this is the kind of stuff you expect the copyeditor to have picked up, if no one else did; but on the basis of a few scattered evidences I suspect the copyeditor here was confronted by a nightmare, and performed something herculean to clear up as much as s/he did.

Why didn't I just throw Cast Adrift at the wall after the first 50 pages or so? I'd have proved my manly stamina by then. Well, I guess I kept going because, perhaps half a dozen times during the book, I did actually laugh. That was enough to delude me into the futile hope that surely things must get better. Er . . .

'Course, maybe I'm just being jealous.

book #44: Circle of Assassins (2007) by Steven Rigolisi

I shared a panel with Steve Rigolisi a couple of weeks ago, and was intrigued enough by his descriptions of his books that I decided I had to get hold of one. This is it.

The novel is #2 in his Tales from the Back Page sequence, whose conceit is that each story starts with a small ad in the back of The Clarion -- which is essentially Manhattan's famous Village Voice. In this case the ad reads:

REVENGE IS SWEET!
Every day we are brutalized by those who hurt us, take advantage of us, steal what is ours [. . .] Enough is enough! It's time to turn the tables. Write to A care of Box 270. (For entertainment purposes only.)

What "A" is setting up is, if you like, an elaboration of the old Strangers in a Train plot: five people will each murder the foe of one of the others; because there's no logical connection between each of the five murderers and their victims, they'll surely all get off scot-free -- especially since the scheme that's being set up ensures that no one, not even "A", knows the true identity of anyone else.

Well, yes. An English prof wishes her supposedly sexist, misogynist head of department to go permanent bye-bye. A subliterate Italian youth can't bear the thought of his idolized sister marrying the guy she loves. The elderly resident of a shabby-genteel area would like to see the demise of the recently arrived drug dealer whose presence is threatening to turn it into a slum. A priest despises the sociopathic hypocrisy of a local cop. And "A" himself wants to see a murderous paedophile rubbed out.

For a while I wasn't sure I was going to get on with this book. Its first 50 pages or so forgo straightforward storytelling in favour of reproducing relevant documents; this can be an enthralling narrative technique, but I'm not sure Rigolisi quite pulls it off. Thereafter, though, I was completely engaged. This book isn't really a thriller -- more like a dark comedy of manners -- but it's as engrossing as one. I have to confess I quibble with the morality of Nick Lang -- the partner of the murdered cop, latterly trying to clear everything up in the wake of all the killings -- but that was an irritation I found I could live with.

I'll be keeping an eye open for more of Rigolisi's Tales from the Back Page.

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Next: books by Sarah Langan, Ian Watson and Will Clarke.