Breakfast At Libraries

A ghost story about a disused railway waiting room haunted by shell-shocked soldiers from the First World War? Featuring an intrepid ghost-hunter and his attractive assistant? A bit like that particularly creepy series of Sapphire & Steel that gave us all nightmares when we were little? That's got to be great, shiversome fun, right?

Wrong. Because The Waiting Room is a tedious mish-mash of clichés and absurd 'plot' developments, written with little technical proficiency. If I'm going to read a book with a dire plot and unbelievable two-dimensional characters, I at least want the author to be able to avoid a full page of nothing but subject-verb-object sentences. Unfortunately Cottam fails in that regard. I want them to know - what with them being professional novelists and all - what the word 'protagonist' means. But apparently Cottam doesn't; it's misused twice in The Waiting Room. I want them to at least have done some basic research about the sorts of lives the characters lead and what would and wouldn't be plausible for them - but no, Cottam refers to his main character having appeared in two TV programmes which would never in a million years have been made, far less broadcast, as they would have contravened every broadcasting rule in the book and seen their makers fined out of existence. I'd also kind of hope that the author might be able to write snappy, convincing dialogue. But guess what? The dialogue in The Waiting Room is abysmal. Everyone speaks in the same portentous, ludicrously unrealistic manner, from an 11-year-old boy to a rock star to a Belgian priest (a character who seems to serve no purpose whatsoever except to be a transparent stereotype). I believed in none of them, still less gave a damn about their welfare.

I believe I mentioned the plot. The initial premise, the aforementioned haunted railway station, seemed fun. Sadly it was all downhill from there, meandering into a confused mess of vague occult practices, time-slips and a largely arbitrary appearance from the ghost of Wilfred Owen. Oh, and when Owen crops up, the main character drops into his casual conversation a few biographical details off the top of his head in one of the most amateurish pieces of exposition I've ever seen outside a bad amateur writers' group. As a particularly avid admirer of Owen's work, I just winced at the pointless references to him. I got the impression that the author studied him for A-level and wanted to show off about it, because his fleeting appearance here really serves no other purpose.

Admittedly there are some creepy moments. The character of Patrick Ross, a soulless remnant from the trenches somehow resurrected shortly after his death, really is utterly horrid and genuinely scary, despite some glaring unfilled plot holes that arise around his existence. And some of the scenes in the waiting room itself are - well, the ideas are scary. But they're mostly so badly executed via Cottam's plodding, lumpen prose that the atmosphere is simply sucked out of them.

All in all, pretty dire. Watch that series of Sapphire & Steel instead.

I love Jonathan Coe. Have I mentioned that before? If I haven't, I'm amazed, because I generally mention it quite a lot. However, whenever he writes a new book I approach it with trepidation in case I'm disappointed, because even my favourite writers are capable of going off the boil. See Chuck Palahniuk, for instance, who has written some truly brilliant novels but hasn't really managed to turn out anything decent since Diary. So I started reading The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim feeling slightly nervous.

My fears were unfounded. I loved it.

Jonathan Coe seems to specialise in protagonists who are hapless, floundering their way through their circumstances with only half the information they need to make sense of them. Maxwell Sim is one of these characters: a lonely, dull, mediocre man, he is alone in middle-age after the departure of his wife and his distant teenage daughter. His mother is dead; his relationship with his eccentric father isn't so much dysfunctional as barely existent. There's no one problem he's seeking to solve, exactly, no one mystery he's seeking to unravel as he drives from the home counties to Shetland in order to sell environmentally-friendly toothbrushes from a company Prius. It's more a case of mysteries being solved for him through a series of explanations coming his way by chance. Short stories written by his ex-wife, a psychology essay by an old friend, a bin-bag full of postcards and a memoir in a faded ringbinder from his father's abandoned flat all help Maxwell and the reader start to piece together the story of his misfortune. Memories of awkward incidents, confused images of childhood holidays and misinterpreted events, abound, and are gradually clarified and reinvented as we find the clues to Maxwell's secrets (secrets even he doesn't seem to know he has).

Some people might find Maxwell hard to like. He's the sort of man who bores strangers seated next to him on planes. Hopeless at reading people's intentions and desperately insecure, he's scared of change - he likes chain restaurants, motorway service stations and the reassuringly bland advice of his sat-nav. But for all his faults, he's essentially a nice man, trying to do his best. There's a bit of Maxwell in all of us. If there's not a bit of Maxwell in you, you are probably an insufferably over-confident twat.

Like the hero of one of Jonathan Coe's previous novels, What A Carve-up, in which the hero is haunted by an obsession with Yuri Gagarin, Maxwell Sim becomes fascinated by yachtsman Donald Crowhurst, who faked the log-book for a round-the-world yacht race and went slowly mad in the process. Maxwell's own journey isn't on the scale of Crowhurst's, but for him, it has the same significance, and his gradual breakdown is inevitable.

Also inevitable, perhaps, is the novel's end, when you really think about it. But that doesn't make it any less gobsmacking. Let's just say that it's wholly unexpected, and yet entirely logical.

In short, another outstanding book from Jonathan Coe. Can't wait for the next one.

The Crimson Petal and the White is currently being serialised by the BBC, and a great adaptation it is too. But if you don't read the book, you'll be seriously missing out.

It's a hefty commitment at well over 800 pages, but apart from the sheer weight of it straining my wrists, it couldn't have been less of a chore to read. From the opening pages, in which a sly, conspiratorial narrator invites the reader to spy, voyeur-like, on the characters, to the ambiguous, startling conclusion, I was gripped by this dark Victorian tale.

The apparently cold-hearted prostitute Sugar, largely unloved, frequently unlovely and often unlovable, is a dream of a character. She is complicated, ambiguous and contradictory, and yet I found it impossible not to cheer her on even at the height of her scheming. William Rackham, the weak-willed perfume manufacturer who 'buys' her from her increasingly terrifying mother and madam, Mrs Castaway, is absurd and dangerous by turns. In fact, William is a living embodiment of the saying 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing'. His position as a wealthy man in a 19th century patriarchy - a position he only reaches in the first place with Sugar as both his motivation and unofficial assistant - means that his snap decisions and capricious whims can have a horrifying effect, sometimes unwitting and sometimes deliberate, on the women around him. Casually neglecting his disappointingly female offspring and simultaneously idolising and despising his disturbed young wife Agnes, he often professes to be in love with Sugar - but will he tire of her one day and put her to one side, just as he shuts away his inconvenient wife and child?

Written in the style of a Victorian novel and exploring a number of Victorian themes and structural devices, The Crimson Petal and The White has numerous subplots, among them the touching but tragic story of William's pious, sexually-frustrated brother Henry and his unrequited love for charity worker Mrs Fox, whose sturdy pragmatism and refusal to be beaten something as trifling as tuberculosis makes her the antithesis of the naive, fragile Agnes Rackham and her obsession with 'the Season'. There is also Agnes' slowly-revealed back-story, through which we learn that her genteel, pampered upbringing has in its own peculiar way been just as harmful as Sugar's miserable early years with her abusive mother.

Throughout the book, women's choices are restricted and their fates dictated, even when it comes to what to do with their own bodies. Sugar was forced into prostitution by her mother when she was still a child and her life depends on submitting to William's sexual demands. Agnes' finishing-school education has left her so lacking in knowledge about her own body that she believes her periods to be a demonic disease and was so traumatised by giving birth in complete ignorance that she cannot acknowledge the presence of her own daughter; moreover, her enforced conversion to Anglicanism by her stepfather has left her racked with religious guilt. Dosed with laudanum and submitted to humiliating medical examinations, it's possible that she has even less freedom than Sugar. In the meantime, Sugar attempts to educate Sophie, who longs to be an explorer, about geography, literature and science, only to be told that music and French would be more appropriate to prepare her for courting. Mrs Fox, desperately in love with Henry Rackham and longing to marry him and take him to bed, is powerless to take control of the relationship because of her gender.

Despite being crammed with details, some of them uncomfortably grubby and visceral, some of them comic and some of them quietly domestic, The Crimson Petal and the White is never boring and never once feels over-written. Perhaps this is because every one of those details, no matter small, is significant and revealing. There isn't a line in the novel from which we don't learn something important and not a line that didn't draw me in just that little bit further. By the end, I cared desperately about Sugar, despite her ambiguity, despite her dubious choices, despite that little streak of nastiness that still sometimes surfaced in her. A brilliant must-read, not just for the engrossing story and the three-dimensional characters, but for its fascinating exploration of Victorian life and society.

I really wanted to like The Thing On The Shore. According to his author biog, Tom Fletcher is still only in his 20s and lives locally to me; plus, I'm always looking out for new horror that's intelligent and well-written but also gripping and fun.

Unfortunately, The Thing On The Shore didn't really meet those criteria.

I did come away from the book feeling that the author showed promise. The three central characters, Arthur, Yasmin and Bony, were realistically unexceptional without ever being dull, and the setting - the bleak, blustery, unattractive stretch of the Cumbria coastline that lies in the shadow of Sellafield - is captured perfectly, with all its storms, seedy pubs and 'regenerated' sea fronts. Also brilliantly rendered is the corporate call-centre in which Arthur and Yasmin work, its employees being gradually worn down by the tedium of the daily grind and the endless soul-sapping pressures of targets and restructures. If anything, the real horror in this novel comes from the daily lives into which the characters have unwillingly settled. Because the actual horror plot, for me, simply doesn't come up to scratch.

The general idea is that there is a sinister in-between world called the Interstice, known only to a few, that can be accessed via telecommunications. Various explanations and hypotheses are bandied around, about where a phone call 'exists' when it's between receivers, but they are vague and inadequate. The Interstice itself is poorly and briefly described and its connection to the sea - which one might be forgiven for imagining to be in some way important to the story after reading endless descriptions of Arthur's mother drowning herself in it, Arthur and his friends watching the storms from the pier, Bony discovering a mysterious 'thing' on the beach and Arthur fishing for mutant crabs - is apparently arbitrary and seems to be largely forgotten by the end of the book. Artemis Black, attempting to access the Interstice on behalf of his sinister employers in between bullying his workers and date-raping 17-year-olds, is the utterly unbelievable pantomime villain who conducts a cliche-ridden ceremony towards the end to bring the inhabitants of the Interstice into the real world. A few Lovecraftian things slither around for about five minutes. Arthur's friends come to the rescue. The End.

Really, that's pretty much it plot-wise. Not much else happens, and what does happen happens mostly for very little reason. The Thing of the title is a red herring (not literally, of course) and seems to be an idea that the author had for which he couldn't think of a more interesting use; Yasmin and Bony go to bed together entirely unconvincingly. Most of the supporting characters are arbitrarily inserted, such as Arthur's manager, Bracket, and his pregnant wife, who seem to exist solely for the author to expound a half-baked theory about why people like Animal Crossing on the Nintendo DS. Because apparently, Tom Fletcher likes gaming. I don't know this, of course, but if he doesn't, the lengthy descriptions of Super Mario Galaxy are a pretty odd thing with which to pepper his writing. I assume that by including them he is trying to say something about people allowing themselves, mentally, to enter 'other worlds', and there is some portentous discussion about Mario being able to jump into a pipe and emerge in another, parallel world-within-a-world which is presumably analogous to the Interstice (which apparently looks, by the way, rather like a retro video game itself). But for me, these passages just needed a damn good edit. They weren't the only thing that would have benefited from being slashed through with a red pen, either: I didn't need to read on three separate occasions, for example, that Artemis feels most at home and most powerful in the bland, soulless, corporate environments of chain hotels and generic offices.

I finished The Thing On The Shore feeling irritated. It seemed like a waste of an author's early promise, and read like a mish-mash of fuzzy-edged ideas and concepts that didn't quite gel together and didn't really have any clear resolution. The parts of the book that were done well were done very well indeed - but the rest? Sorry, but I can't say they worked for me.