Breakfast At Libraries

For some reason, despite her books clearly being right up my alley, so to speak, I'd never read anything by Austrian-born British children's author Eva Ibbotson. Fortunately, then, my friend Caroline kindly stepped in and sent me a copy of The Star of Kazan, one of her own favourites, as a birthday gift a couple of weeks ago.


As you might have seen if you've read my previous two blog entries, I've read some rather depressing stuff lately. Bleak. Gritty. Dark. Which is all very well, but sometimes you just want to read a lovely cosy children's adventure, and The Star of Kazan was certainly that.

The book tells the story of Annika, a little girl found in a church as a baby and brought up by two servant women in the house of three eccentric Viennese professors. Happy enough though Annika is - she's expected to be a dab hand at apple strudel, but she also has plenty of time for playing with her friends and enjoying birthday treats - she still wonders who her real mother might be, and whether she'll ever come back for her. When a rich lady turns up, claiming Annika as her own, however, things don't quite pan out as Annika hopes, and the story becomes a captivating adventure of mystery, resourcefulness and friendship.

With a heartwarming charm and sense of adventure and intrigue reminiscent of many of the best classic children's adventures from A Little Princess to The Wolves of Willoughby Chase to the stories of Diana Wynne Jones, The Star of Kazan is atmospheric, frequently funny and full of immensely memorable characters, including some immensely horrid villains. Annika is a likeable and completely believable heroine, too. Plus, the affection with which Ibbotson describes the city of Vienna means that the city almost becomes a character in its own right, and I defy anyone to read this book without immediately wanting to hop on to the next EasyJet flight there to eat coffee and cake, ride the Ferris wheel at the Prater and watch the world-famous Lipizzaner stallions at the Spanish Riding School.

It's all tremendous fun, and a brilliantly cosy, comforting yet unputdownable read which has cheered me up a great deal while I've been miserably laid up with flu.

Jeremy Dyson is one of the co-creators of The League of Gentlemen, although you won't have seen him on screen because he's the mysterious non-acting one. As you might expect, then, What Happens Now opens with a comically sinister scene in which a relatively mundane event terrifies a child. It's an excellent beginning, and establishes a recurring theme of the book: childhood fears of, on the face of it, relatively minor incidents having a long-lasting psychological impact well into the adult lives of Dyson's characters.

This aspect of Dyson's work reminds me a little bit of Jonathan Coe, who happens to be one of my all-time favourite authors. Coe's characters are often haunted by shadowy recollections of childhood trauma, sometimes in ways even they don't fully understand, and as Dyson's story unfolds, it's clear that Alistair Black and Alice Zealand, who once acted together as teenagers in a TV drama, have been irrevocably affected by their experience. The question is, why?



One of the beautiful things about Jonathan Coe's work is the exquisitely-meshed perfection with which every delicate cog of his stories has slotted elegantly into place by the time his books end, and I have to say that Dyson doesn't quite achieve this. Mysteries are mostly cleared up, but things to which considerable time is devoted in the novel are not what I would call properly resolved, or prove to be simply less significant than expected. In this kind of novel, this just makes them seem superfluous, perhaps a little self-indulgent on the author's part. I wanted to find out more about certain aspects of Alistair's life, for instance, and Alice's on-off relationship, as an adult, with a celebrated young artist simply didn't have enough background or connection to the rest of the story beyond serving as a fairly heavy-handed illustration of her apparently inability to commit. One or two characters are also a little overdone: Steve, the cocky co-star opposite whom Alistair and Alice act as teenagers has been cranked up just a couple of notches too high, so a pivotal event involving all three didn't chill me quite as much as it probably should have done simply because I couldn't really believe in Steve as a character.

However, that's not to say What Happens Now isn't an immensely engaging and often fascinating read, and nervous, shy, perpetually embarrassed Alistair Black, with his ever-increasing neuroses, is an entirely believable and largely sympathetic character - which makes the novel's conclusion all the more affecting. What Happens Now is a novel full of misfortunes and misunderstandings, some trivial and some devastating, with an oddly wistful but always unsettling undertone.

What They Do In The Dark by Amanda Coe is actually quite funny at times. It also does a nice line in 70s childhood nostalgia, with lots of references that will make people start to wax lyrical about Spangles and clackers. Sounds fun, does it? Well, don't be fooled. It isn't.

It so isn't.

That's not to say that What They Do In The Dark isn't an excellent book. The writing is brilliant throughout; the characters are utterly believable; the setting and period are evoked with a skill. And it's gripping: even when frankly, not a great deal seemed to be happening, I found it impossible to put down. Three ten-year-old girls, all leading very different lives indeed, are connected by circumstance over a period of several months in a Yorkshire town. There's Gemma - bright, middle-class and popular and, in a material sense at least, perhaps a little spoilt. Then there's her classmate, Pauline. Pauline is the school bully, horribly neglected and living in squalid conditions with a violent, drug-using extended family. And finally, Lallie Paluza, a young TV star of the Lena Zavaroni ilk, whose comic persona and typically childish attention-seeking are tempered by an eerily knowing maturity. Gemma and Pauline, while barely even qualifying as 'friends', are thrown together by coincidences and conflicts. Lallie's link to them is more peripheral - she appears to live her life entirely in the company of adults - as her first straight acting role, in which she plays the victim of an implied paedophile in a creepy arthouse production starring Dirk Bogarde, is filmed in the other girls' home town.



Superficially, the three characters have nothing in common, but it's what links them  on a deeper level that brings an inevitable darkness, an itchy, fidgety, uncomfortable atmosphere, to the book. All three girls are, to varying extents, victims of abuse. Pauline is an obvious victim of cruelty, and her home life is an appalling series of mounting horrors; it almost comes as no surprise to learn that she's already starting to follow in her prostitute mother's footsteps. Gemma, on the other hand, leads an almost over-protected life, and yet still finds herself at risk from a particularly insidious predator. And Lallie ... well, there are a lot of unanswered questions on that score, and she does have a diminutive adult stand-in who, from a distance, can easily be mistaken for her. But it's up to the reader to make up their own mind about Lallie, whose ability to play all too convincingly the part of a confused child victim of a middle-aged man's grooming is notable.

This is a book, then, about the abuse of little girls, and its consequences, which are horrific. The build-up of events is gradual. There are hints, suggestions and clues that continue to mount until the atmosphere becomes so tense and oppressive that it's almost as if there's a dank, foetid cloud hanging over the novel, before it reaches shocking - and for me, almost unreadably unpleasant - conclusion. The ending is entirely unexpected, almost jaw-droppingly so, and yet at the same time, seems perfectly believable, and it's this sickening feeling of credibility that makes it so difficult, so uncomfortable, to accept.

As far as the author's craft goes, I can barely fault What They Do In The Dark. There is a subplot involving a young Hollywood film producer, visiting the UK to consider Lallie for a role in a Disney film, which, while at times key to the chain of events that form Lallie's storyline, seems perhaps more detailed than necessary at times, but apart from that, I can find nothing about the writing of this book to complain about. Coe's use of varying points of view - Pauline and Gemma themselves, most obviously, but also Lallie's agent, and an ageing character actress who observes the child star on set - is extremely effective and the whole novel is a masterclass in pace and plot. The subject matter, too, is probably extremely worthy: there are valid and indeed essential points made by this novel, and in an extremely powerful way. But equally, it's a disturbing, uncomfortable read after which I couldn't sleep and wanted to scrub my brain clean with Domestos. I think we can safely say I shan't be reading it again.

The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore is published by Hammer, of Hammer Horror fame, and has been widely discussed in the press as the author's first horror story. But it's really not what I'd call horror. It's eerie, yes, and has a slightly unsettling, dreamlike quality to it, but if anything, what it most closely resembles is those quietly magical time-slip novels of my childhood: Charlotte Sometimes, perhaps, or Tom's Midnight Garden.

I visited Sarajevo last year. It's a lovely city with a relaxed atmosphere and charming, sociable, polite people, and its suburbs extend into the mountains that rise all around it. When you walk through its pedestrianised areas, where people seem to be constantly out for a stroll, meeting for coffee or a beer or a plate of cevapi (little beef sausages cooked over wood-fires and served inside soft, puffy pillows of delicious homemade flatbread) it's almost impossible to imagine that as recently as the 1990s Sarajevo was the world's most dangerous city. Officially, in fact, according to UN statistics, the worst place on earth in which to live. It's simply inconceivable that those mountains, bathed in the autumn sunshine, harboured snipers who shot half-starved civilians dead as they crossed the street to queue outside the city's brewery, the only source of safe drinking water left in Sarajevo, or that mortar shells were fired incessantly into the street, destroying homes, cafes, churches, mosques and lives. And then you look down, and you see the Sarajevo Roses in the pavements: pitted, scarred marks in the stone where mortars have exploded, filled in with scarlet resin to denote the deaths of civilian victims.



The Cellist of Sarajevo is a short, tightly-written novel set during the long period in which Sarajevo was under siege during the Bosnian war. Following the stories of three principal characters, it presents us with vignettes of their lives in hellish conditions and their coping strategies, while the cellist of the title (loosely based on a real musician) plays 22 concerts in the street, heedless of Serbian snipers, to mark the deaths of 22 people who died in a bread queue outside his flat. There's Kenan, who risks his life collecting water on a daily basis not just for himself but for a cantankerous neighbour he doesn't even like; Dragan, alone in Sarajevo after his wife and son have fled as refugees; and Arrow, a young girl recruited as a counter-sniper from her university shooting team, who has been assigned to protect the cellist from 'the men in the hills'.

At times a deeply affecting read - I cried into my pillow several times - The Cellist of Sarajevo is a perceptive, observant novel. Yes, it's about war, but it's also about identity and integrity. Arrow wonders if, by making her hate them for who they are as much as what they do, the Serbian snipers have won the war already. Dragan realises that being Sarajevan is something he can never abandon, and that Sarajevo is as much part of his identity as his very being. And yet he's no longer sure which Sarajevo is the real one: the relaxed, friendly city of his past, or the desolate war-zone of the present. Kenan, dreaming of a day when his daughter will be able to eat ice-cream with him in the street before going to the cinema 'with a boyfriend he isn't sure he likes' instead of being a virtual prisoner in their apartment, worries that he is a coward because he isn't fighting on the frontline with the Bosnian army, even as he risks his life simply to collect clean water. But deep down, he knows he will lose not only something of his humanity but also his Sarajevan-ness if he's forced to fight against people who were once his neighbours.

Steven Galloway's real skill in The Cellist of Sarajevo is depicting horrific events on a small scale and in clear, simple prose. There's not a speck of melodrama in the text, and it's never maudlin - and it's all the more powerful for that.

I have read plenty of horror novels in my time. Almost all of them have started well, creating an unsettling atmosphere full of creepy chills. Where I find many horror writers go wrong, however, is in failing to build this mounting unease to a suitably scary climax.  I'd find a lot of horror far more satisfying if the authors could just deliver on a book's early promise, sustaining the scares to the end, but all too often, a horror novel will start well but will descend into daftness in its final quarter, as if the author used up all their best efforts earlier in the book and then panicked.

Genus by Jonathan Trigell is set in a future dystopia in which society is more or less segregated along genetic lines: the 'Generich' are genetically engineered, disease-immune human beings bred by parents who have been able to pay to select certain characteristics for them, while the 'Unimproved' are, well, us. Normal people. Except in the world of Genus, they've become a sort of festering underclass mostly confined to inner city slum areas such as King's Cross, now known as 'The Kross'. The novel balances (a lot of) social commentary with Huxleyesque science fiction and a thrillerish plot about a series of murders, shifting points of view between a number of characters.



Genus is full of clever satire and brilliantly-written description, and I found myself fascinated by many aspects of the future it depicts, along with some, at least, of the characters. Holman, an Unimproved artist with stunted legs who appears to be a sort of futuristic Toulouse-Lautrec, drifting through the underbelly of The Kross and taking his subject matter from its inhabitants, particularly captured my imagination. The Regans, a gangland family who are all apparently clones of one other, also fascinated me, as did Holman's wealthy mother, and blind soldier Crick.

However, I felt some other characters were less successful - corrupt policeman Gunt struck me as, well, just a bit dull, and his storyline repetitive - and there were certainly times when I would rather the author hadn't been quite so heavy-handed when it came to signalling parallels with historic and current events. For instance, in some particular developments that have clear similarities with the Plague and the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, which are extremely and deliberately obvious in the author's description of them, I really didn't then need to have him sum up by telling us The Kross has become a 'plague ghetto', just in case we hadn't noticed what he was trying to do. I also felt the plot lost its way somewhat in the middle section of the novel, at which point it started to feel rather self-indulgent for a while - but thankfully it picked up again admirably as the novel raced to a gripping conclusion.

Genus was a novel that grew on me as I was reading, and my criticisms of it are relatively minor. By and large it's a difficult book to put down. Trigell builds his dystopia with careful detail and rich description that gives you a real sense of being part of this urban hell of poverty, lawlessness and neglect, and the perceptive, quotable passages worth marking would consume a pack of Post-Its. It raises some excellent questions about the way society treats those it has placed on the bottom rung of the ladder - I assume Genus was written before last summer's riots, but there is an event in the book that is chillingly similar - and paints a grim picture of where we might be expected to go from here.