Breakfast At Libraries: April 2012

Saturday, 28 April 2012

Ancient Light by John Banville

Recently, The Guardian's Books website featured a couple of my reviews in their reader reviews roundup, and offered to send me some books 'from the cupboard'. To my surprise their selections were not just brand new hardcovers of the new Peter Carey and Anne Tyler books, but also an advance copy of the yet-to-be-published novel from Booker winner John Banville.

Ancient Light is beautifully written, full of allusions and hints and obscured suggestions, to the point where the experience of reading it felt more like reading a full-length prose-poem than a novel. Ostensibly about an ageing actor reminiscing about his boyhood affair with his best friend's mother and grieving for his adult daughter, who has died some years before in mysterious circumstances, it's really a novel about the past, about the fragility of memory and how what has gone before affects everything still to come - 'everywhere we look,' one character says, 'we are looking into the past' - even when the past is something unfixed and mutable, reshaped by unreliable recollection. Even when theatre actor Alexander Cleave, who narrates the novel, is unexpectedly drawn out of retirement by a leading film role, the part proves to have peculiar and occasionally almost sinister links with the death of his daughter - and with Alexander himself.

The book is full of foreshadowing, odd parallels and veiled hints - to the point where the novel at times, particularly in the 'present day' sections about Cleave's film work, his research into Axel Vander and his relationship with his young co-star Dawn Devonport - feels like a strange narrative puzzle, an 80,000 word crossword clue with no clear delineation between the real, the remembered and the imagined. I found myself wondering, when I'd finished it, if I should go back to the beginning and start again just so I could spot the treasures buried within the prose. It's also deeply moving, sometimes rather unsettling and occasionally funny.

The problem is, however, that most of the characters simply don't ring true for me, and the supremacy of style over substance means that beautiful though Banville's book is, I was ultimately left wanting when I finished it. I believe there are other Banville novels in which some of the characters from Ancient Light make their first appearances, and perhaps if I'd read them, Ancient Light would have been a richer, intertextual reading experience. But I haven't, and while there was much about the book that I loved, Ancient Light falls short of the standard I'd been led to expect from Banville.

Monday, 9 April 2012

A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin

The title of A Kiss Before Dying conjures up, for me, an image of a 1950s pulp thriller with a fabulous, stylish cover featuring a woman who looks like the hourglassy one from Mad Men and a man in a fedora concealing a gun. And indeed, that's pretty much exactly what A Kiss Before Dying is, on the face of it - it's a crime novel published in 1953 about a handsome psychopath who preys upon a series of rich young women in a bid to secure a stake in their father's fortune. Google Image Search informs me that I wasn't even far wrong with the original cover:

And yet, while A Kiss Before Dying, by the late Ira Levin, has all the signature style and undeniable glamour of a somewhat noirish American thriller, not to mention a characteristically sensationalist plot, there's plenty to set it apart.

(Oh, and disappointingly, today's cover actually looks like this. Nowhere near as much fun, but ultimately probably more credible):

The story begins with an unnamed young man plotting the death of his fiancée, Dorothy Kingship - a pretty, rich, naive college student. Having planned to marry her to get his hands on some of her father's money, he's furious to learn that she's pregnant. This being somewhere around 1950, this seems likely to force them to marry immediately and incur the wrath of Dorothy's father, who will almost certainly disinherit her as a result, leaving the nameless protagonist poorer than ever and saddled with a wife and child he never wanted as well as ruining his master-plan. Consequently, when pills from a backstreet abortionist fail to work their magic, the only alternative, he feels, is murder.

It's chilling, tense and (like the much-maligned and underrated 1950s shocker, Peyton Place) remarkably evocative of its time and setting. And it's a decent enough thriller plot, of course. All pretty straightforward...

But then, Levin pulls a particularly clever trick. He switches the novel's point of view. Suddenly, we're in the position of Ellen Kingship, trying to discover who has wronged her younger sister. All she knows is that she has to look for a handsome, charming blond college boy in his mid-20s (his academic career having been interrupted by World War II, of course). There are a number of contenders. And it could be any of them. Terrifyingly, any of these affable, bright, all-American boys Ellen meets could have the mind of a psychopathic killer - a mind into which we, as readers, already have a horrific insight.

Those familiar with Ira Levin's best-known works - Rosemary's Baby, The Boys From Brazil, The Stepford Wives, all of which became immensely successful films - will know that his books tend to stretch plausibility a little, and yes, A Kiss Before Dying does this too. But somehow, it's all so neatly plotted in every detail, with every character so absolutely spot-on for the roles they have to play in the story, that I found myself believing every word. It may be pulp-influenced at times, and at times it's a wee bit overblown, but the writing is so sharp that it simply doesn't matter, and Levin has been astute in building his characters convincingly to give them credible motivation.

As in his other books that I mentioned, Levin uses A Kiss Before Dying to tug at a sinister, dysfunctional thread that unravels the fragile tapestry of a classic American setting to reveal a dark, calculating cruelty lying beneath. Nobody and nothing are what they seem in Levin's novels, and reading this book is like stepping into the world of a stylish Hitchcock film full of beautiful women, fabulous outfits, ever-building tension, surprise plot twists and ambiguously charming men who may or may not be calculating killers.

Ed King by David Guterson

Ed King is a modern-day American re-telling of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, in which the abandoned child of a 15-year-old English au pair is secretly adopted and brought up to be a high-achieving golden boy. This foundling builds his own billion-dollar IT company, only to discover that his parents were not who he thought they were and worse, neither is his wife. It's clever, sharp and often funny, and yet there just seems to be something missing.

That something could, I suppose, be suspense - after all, the two things everyone knows about Oedipus is that he inadvertently killed his father and slept with his mother, so the experience of reading Ed King is largely a matter of waiting patiently to see how Guterson will arrange for Ed to do these things, rather than being shocked when he does.

Or perhaps what's missing is any real degree of sympathy with the protagonist. Ed is neither interesting nor likeable: he's a spoilt narcissist who seems to breeze through life with only one small glitch when he's briefly depressed about killing someone, and is inexplicably irresistible to women of all ages from the age of about 12 upwards. Consequently, after endless plodding pages about his brattish teenage behaviour and tedious college years, full of hubris and a sense of entitlement, I found it remarkably hard to care about his fate.

Admittedly, the supporting characters are more engaging. Walter, Ed's father, is a sad, inadequate little man who pays a troubled English teenager to look after his children, and although there's little about Walter to like, his deeply creepy attraction to Diane, sense of inadequacy and nagging dissatisfaction with his lot makes him interesting, at least. Diane herself is complex, clever and resourceful, albeit far from scrupulous. However, I found her relationship with her deadbeat half-brother deeply unconvincing, and hard as he tries, Guterson simply can't write colloquial British dialogue with any degree of authenticity. There were times when I winced. It's as if the author did lots of research and made lots of notes from English films and books, and then tried to include everything he'd learnt, meaning that a lot of the scenes with Diane and her brother, or even just from Diane's point of view, seem awkward and forced to an English reader.

The way Guterson has updated the Oedipus myth to subvert the American Dream is undeniably clever. Mythical Oracles are replaced with mysterious tarot readers and King's company's own super-advanced search engines. Pythia is King's company; the Greek chorus that frames the narrative takes the form of online forum users. It's all very skilfully done and often witty, and a large part of my enjoyment of this book came from spotting the allusions and parallels - even when they're painted with a pretty broad brush.

Unfortunately, however, overall the book is often quite simply rather dull. The nature of the story means that there are many chapters which just feel like endless plodding exposition in the build-up to 'and now he realises he's married to his mum', which of course, we all know is coming anyway. If Guterson had just made it all a bit less obvious, a bit less clunky, not so slavishly devoted to Sophocles' plot, I'd have enjoyed Ed King a great deal more.

Thursday, 5 April 2012

Hollow Pike by James Dawson

Even when I was a teenager, I found it hard to think from the perspective of a teenager, so I approached James Dawson’s young adult horror novel Hollow Pike with some trepidation. I read plenty of children’s and young adult fiction, but this, with a plot heavy on the school bullies and boyfriends, struck me as a book that might not have the same crossover appeal – for me, at least – as something like James Treadwell’s recent Advent. However, while I definitely think an adult has to consciously try to put themselves into a teenage mindset to get into Hollow Pike, once I managed to do that I did thoroughly enjoy it.

It’s a sharp, witty book with an oft-used basic premise – teenager Lis London moves to a new town, doesn’t fit in with the cool kids and finds creepy goings-on afoot. The local drinking establishments are all named after pubs from horror films and Laura Riggs and her cronies, the roost-ruling queen bees at Lis’s new school, are straight from Heathers. There’s hints of The Craft in there, of Buffy, of Scream – but it’s all slick, entertaining and well-executed with the pace and tension of a well-constructed thriller, and it's crammed with clever pop culture references, homages and in-jokes.

Lis is a strong and believable central character, attempting to find her niche in her new school’s social hierarchy while plagued by strange dreams, haunted by the village’s reputed history of witchcraft and watched by mysterious birds. While the ‘horror’ in Hollow Pike ostensibly comes from the supernatural elements and mysterious deaths in the woods, the ordinary teenage fears and pressures Lis faces seem just as scary at times: she's trying to reinvent herself after being bullied at her previous school, and it’s impossible not to sympathise when she realises that she’ll have to choose between hanging around with people she actually likes and making herself a target for bullying yet again, or staying safe with the cool kids while simultaneously becoming everything she’s ever hated. I was less sympathetic, and indeed less interested, when it came to her crush on geek-turned-hunk Danny, but to be fair, Lis herself isn’t very sympathetic to herself about it either at times.

The tone is sometimes a wee bit too excitable for my liking - too many exclamation marks and moments where Lis and her friends absolutely have to do things right now - and there were times when this felt more like reading the novelisation of a pre-existing film than an original story. I can imagine producers wanting to snap up the movie rights pronto, because in many ways I think this narrative feels as much like a teen horror movie as it does a novel.

However, I did still have a lot of fun reading Hollow Pike - it's a guilty pleasure of a rollercoaster ride that kept me turning the pages. Buy it for your teenage daughter and nick it when she's finished.

Tuesday, 3 April 2012

The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths

Keen to know what happened to forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway after the end of Elly Griffiths’ crime début The Crossing Places, I started reading the second instalment in her story, The Janus Stone, straight away. Much as I did with The Crossing Places I raced through The Janus Stone, in which Ruth is called into determine the age of a child’s skeleton unearthed beneath a house with a chequered past. This time, however, things are further complicated by Ruth’s unexpected pregnancy, the result of a one-night-stand with Harry Nelson, the gruff (and happily married) DCI in charge of the case.

Much as I enjoyed The Crossing Places, there were plot elements that I found faintly ludicrous, and I must say the same applies (perhaps to a slightly lesser extent) here. The story follows much the same formula as its predecessor – bones are discovered, Ruth helps Harry in his investigation along with a supporting cast of recurring characters, Ruth ends up in jeopardy as a result – but it’s all good fun. There’s dark creepiness aplenty and a few shocks, but don’t come to these books looking for gritty realism. There’s a touch of pantomime about the character eventually revealed as the villain, and it all gets a little bit Hammer Horror in places.

Ruth and Harry’s relationship – now platonic – remains convincing, and Harry manages to remain largely likeable despite being a man who has cheated on his wife. His slim, attractive hairdresser, that Griffiths could lazily have depicted as a airheaded cow, is in fact intelligent, kind and interested in the arts, a wise choice on the author’s part as it stirs up all sorts of conflicting emotions for not just Harry and Ruth (who, while fond of each other, are in many ways profoundly unsuited to one another) but also the reader. However fond you are of Ruth, it’s hard to want Harry’s apparently happy marriage to end.

Several more characters return to The Janus Stone from the previous book, most of whom are welcome. I could live without Ruth’s flighty friend Shona, who strikes me as something of a stereotype and contributes little, but the rest of the cast – as I tend to think of them; these books do have the feel of a quality TV crime drama – are three-dimensional and engaging. The setting isn’t as richly described as it was in The Crossing Places, but I should be fair and point out that in The Crossing Places the geography was integral to the plot, which isn’t the case here, so that’s probably to be expected.

Once again, then, a gripping if unlikely story, a bit of Roman mythology thrown in, some genuinely funny observations, and characters I wanted to greet like old friends. I’ll be saving the next book in the series for a rainy afternoon or perhaps a long journey, rather than getting stuck in straightaway, as for me the recurring plot structures and characters won’t benefit from being read in quick succession, but I’ll certainly be continuing to follow Ruth’s progress.

My next read? Um... a young adult novel about teen bullying and witchcraft. I'm not really looking for depth in my reading at the moment, am I? Stay tuned for my review of James Dawson's Hollow Pike, a book I may have to pretend to be 15 to get my head round.