The Black House

I really should resurrect Eagleton Notes properly because last night I finished Peter May's book The Blackhouse.  I can think of no book I have read for many years that kept me so riveted to it: particularly towards the end when I couldn't put the light out until I'd finished it.  It's complex (though not really complicated)  and, in parts, implausible (are not most novels?) but the characters and places are so real it's uncanny.  Having lived the majority of my years on Lewis makes it all the more poignant and I can see many of the characters in people I know or am acquainted with.  Contrary to at least one reviewer I do not think it is insulting in any way to the people of what has long been my home.  Every place has it's characters both good and bad and Lewis is no different.  Some of the less central characters who are there for the embellishment of the story though not from Ness are immediately recognisable (sometimes as an amalgamation of real people).

The descriptions of the Island and the places (I'm fortunate enough through my work, for example, to have been all over the Lews Castle before it was declared dangerous and closed to the public) are wonderfully evocative of the place and reading the book here in New Zealand I was transported back to Lewis: almost like being beamed there à la Star Trek.

Oh yes, the story.  Police officer, unpleasant senior police officer, friendly and loyal police officer colleague, murder, deaths and so much more (some of which would sow ideas which could give the stories - this is not one story - away).  Frankly you don't need to have a synopsis: it seems to me in many ways that the murder is just a way of having a setting on which to hang (sorry) the characters who are really what I think the novel is all about.

I would stick my neck out and say that I think that anyone I know who reads this book will enjoy it at one level or another.

I bought it on Kindle (as I will now do the others in the trilogy) but when I return to Lewis I will have to have the real copies as well. 

Frances Garrood, Novelist

I have now read Frances Garrood's three novels: all on Kindle. Usually I would write separate reviews (usually being a rather loose term given that I haven't written any book reviews for several years) on Eagleton Book Notes but this is one post and it isn't a review. Why? Several reasons: I follow Frances's blog and feel that I know her (to the extent that I am more acquainted with her than with any other published novelist) and although quite different there is a commonality shared by the three books.

Any book that starts off "Nobody expected Ernest to die.  Least of all Ernest." had to be worth some further exploration.  So I explored and found a source of enjoyment, pathos and a whole gamut of emotions.   One of the things that all three books have in common is that they are about ordinary (well, fairly ordinary) people doing what fairly ordinary people do.  Another is that I can't help the feeling when I read some of the interpersonal relationships that the author is speaking with a great deal of personal experience.  I know that there is a theme that recurs in all the books of which I have some experience and I don't see that anyone could just imagine the emotions that go with being in that situation.  But then I'm not an author and I don't have a very vivid imagination.

Getting back to Dead Ernest this is not, in many ways, a comfortable book.  Leastways I found parts of it very uncomfortable indeed.  Unfortunately without giving far too much away I can't really say more.  

I enjoyed the books.  If you are a person who is very uncomfortable with emotional issues then you may, just may, be able to enjoy these on another level but you will miss out.  I'd suggest you give them a try anyway.  The order doesn't really matter.

I do know that Meike who blogs at From My Mental Library has written reviews of all three books.   I wanted to write the opening to this post without re-reading her reviews but I shall now go and do that and I would also suggest that you read her posts at Dead Ernest, Basic Theology For Fallen Women and The Birds, Bees and Other Secrets.

The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-time

The cover note says that this is a murder mystery novel like no other.  The detective and narrator is Christopher Boone.  Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger’s Syndrome [although that is not mentioned in the text of the book].  He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings.  He loves lists, patterns and the truth.  He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched.  He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour’s dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down.

“This will not be a funny book," says Christopher. "I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them."   But that’s not altogether the case.  It is a book with humour and pathos.   I am acquainted with people with Asperger’s Syndrome and to be able to gain an appreciation through this book of how they see the world  was a challenge and an education.

The eyes of a child are often used to portray the frailties of adults and human life in general and this not only uses the eyes and mind of a child but it strips everything he sees of emotion and narrates it in a cold and logical format which I found at the same time both simple and hard to read. 

I’m not sure that this can really be described as a murder mystery novel but it is a book which I found hard to put down and impossible to ignore.  I also learned quite a lot about maths!

My only reservation is that when the author got to the end of the book it was as if he suddenly just gave up and finished writing.

Would I recommend it?  Without hesitation.  Even if you don’t enjoy the story you will learn about a human condition and that will help you to understand an alternative view of life.  That has to be a Good Thing.

Quotes:

Because time is not like space.  And when you put something down somewhere, like a protractor or a biscuit, you can have a map in your head to tell you where you have left it, but even if you don’t have a map in your head it will still be there because a map is a representation of things that actually exist so that you can find the protractor or the biscuit again.  And a timetable is a map of time, except that if you don’t have a timetable time is not there like the landing and the garden and the route to school. Because time is only the relationship between the way different things change, like the earth going round the sun and atoms vibrating and clocks ticking and day and night and waking up and going to sleep , and it is like west and nor-nor-east which won’t exist when the earth stops existing and falls into the sun because it’s only a relationship between the North Pole and the South Pole and everywhere else, like Mogadishu and Sunderland and Canberra.

People believe in God because the world is very complicated and they think it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as a flying squirrel or the human eye or a brain could happen by chance.  But they should think logically and if they thought logically they would see that they can only ask this question because it has already happened and they exist.

After posting this I remembered that Scriptor Senex had read it when he was here last year.  See his blog entry at  A Book Every Six Days.

The Matchmaker of Périgord

I have absolutely no idea how or where I first saw this book.  All I can remember is that Julia Stewart’s book caught my eye when it was published in 2007 and I knew that I had to read it.  Perhaps it was because I am acquainted with the Périgord region of France (and in particular the real towns mentioned in the novel although I was unaware of that before I read it). 

I received it as part of a Christmas present and it was waiting for me when I returned from New Zealand.  I finished it a few hours ago over a leisurely lunch. As I was reading it (which I managed in a matter of a few days – a record for me when not on a plane?) I was occasionally reminded of Tom Sharp’s Blot on The Landscape (1975) and Porterhouse Blue (1974) which I read in the ‘70s.  I enjoyed them but I could never get into any of his other books and abandoned the attempts. 

As soon as I started it I needed to know how it ended.  On occasions it irritated me.  On occasions I just enjoyed the style and prose which borrows from the same school as Alexander McCall Smith when it comes to describing things.  The Matchmaker, for example, never wears plain ‘sandals’ but always ’supermarket leather sandals’  It is, however, an absolutely delightful read with not a nasty thought to be found on any page. 

Quotes:

‘I’ve never eaten frogs in my life.  Nobody in their right mind would.  Have you?’  ‘Of course not!  Only tourists do.’

Love is like a good cassoulet, it needs time and determination.  Some bits are delicious, while others might be a bit rancid and make you wince.  You may even come across the odd surprise like a little green button, but you have to consider the whole dish.

Without love we are just shadows.

Once the villagers had settled their argument as to whose limbs were whose, they got to their knees and it wasn’t long before they were able to stand.  Eventually they found they could focus, and even remembered their own names.  When they staggered out of the bar and saw the frightful state that the village was in, their hearts immediately soared, knowing that the chances of the English buying homes in Amour-sur-Belle were now even more remote.

…the Comité des Fetes announced that the celebrations to mark Patrice Baudin’s recovery from vegetarianism would be held that afternoon.

However, possibly the best quote of all is the last two sentences of the book and to get there you’ll just have to read it.  I think it was worth it.

Birdsong

I mentioned in March that I’d read Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks and that I knew that I’d made notes at the time.  I never found them.  They may, of course, have been in one of the two notebooks I lost over the last few months.  I know from discussions with others who have read it that views about it are not always the same as mine.  In fact several people couldn’t finish it; not because it was a bad novel but because they detested the realism of the images it portrayed.

To me the plot, actually the plots, involving all the usual suspects in a war novel – love, sex, hatred and violence only scratch the surface – is almost irrelevant to the impact the book had on me.

I was trying to recall the plots around which the novel is woven and the fact that I managed to do so says more for the plot than it does for my memory.  For me, however, what I remember was the raw emotion and detail in which the horrors of life in the trenches and, worse still, the tunnels under the trenches, is described.  My imagination is not good but I didn’t need it to feel as though I was there with the narrator in hell.  I found it even worse when I realised that so many people whom I had known, and know, experienced that and never mentioned it.  I understood why some people such as my school teachers who had been in the trenches were as they were.

This book is not an easy read.  To me, however, it had a greater impact than almost any other book I can recall.  Somehow the horrors of Tolstoy’s War and Peace which I read in two different translations I enjoyed it so much,  were unreal in comparison.  But I was much younger then!  If I were to compile a ‘must be read’ list then this book would be very near the top.

Quotes:

We are contemptuous of gunfire, but we have lost the power to be afraid.  Shells will fall on the reserve lines and we will not stop talking.  There is still blood though no on sees.  A boy lay without legs where the men took their tea from the cooker.  They stepped over him.

No child or future generation will ever know what this was like.  They will never understand.   When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them.  We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings.  We will seal what we have seen in the silence of out hearts and no words will reach us.

The Careful Use of Compliments

Now I’m getting really frustrated.  I’m a devotee (second time I’ve used that tonight) of Alexander McCall Smith’s Isobel Dalhousie Novels – or are they the Sunday Philosophy Club Novels?  The publishers don’t seem able to decide.  So why am I frustrated?  Because I thought that I’d read this novel fairly recently but it was obviously some months ago.  And therein lies the problem with these novels.  They all seem to run one into another but not necessarily in sequence and even trying to work out some of the underlying plots which transfer from one to another can be difficult even a few weeks after having read one.  In this case I didn’t even note any quotes for repeating.  

The next one in the series is The Comfort of Saturdays.  I shall, of course, pick it up off the coffee table some time soon and read it and enjoy it and, hopefully, blog on it more speedily.   One thing I can be absolutely certain about is that it will contain a reference (or two or three) to Auden.  Another is that I will, as sure as it will rain tomorrow, enjoy it.

If you are, by any chance, a person who hasn’t read one of the series then do so, starting at the beginning with The Sunday Philosophy Club.  I’m sure that you won’t be disappointed.

Death of a Gossip

It’s a while since I read this and I realised when I started this sentence that I couldn’t even recall the plot.  Presumably someone died at some stage.  Then it came back to me.  There is something rather comforting in the predictability of books such as this.  It’s undemanding and involves death through murder in a feel-good sort of way.

As a devotee of the BBC series Hamish Macbeth based on these novels I was surprised to discover that the Hamish of the TV series does not quite fit with the Hamish of the book; well, not the one I remember anyway.  I suppose that I shouldn’t have been surprised but I did rather prefer the TV Hamish.

Even I (a person who reads novels, even light ones, as though they were legal tomes) managed to read this in a few hours in small bite-sized chunks.  It can safely be said, therefore, that it’s not long or demanding.  But it is good fun and there are much worse ways of spending a few hours - even if they did happen to be on a ‘plane journey when the alternatives were hardly throwing themselves at me.

Would I recommend it?  Yeah, why not.  I’m sure you’d enjoy it ‘cos, frankly, there’s nothing not to enjoy about it.