Breakfast At Libraries: April 2013

Thursday, 25 April 2013

The Chessmen by Peter May

The Chessmen is the final novel in Peter May’s crime trilogy set on the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland’s remote Western Isles. I found the first instalment, The Blackhouse, interesting and atmospheric but flawed in terms of character development, but thought book two, The Lewis Man, was excellent.

Unfortunately I think The Chessmen is by far the weakest of the three. In its favour, it does have many of the features that attracted me to its predecessors, including sharply accurate descriptions of the beautiful but sometimes bleak island landscape and the realities, both positive and negative, of a life lived in such an environment; a strong lead character in returning islander and ex-policeman Fin Macleod; and evocative flashback sections that build up the interwoven back-stories of the characters, many of whom appear in all three novels (Donald Murray, teenage rebel turned Free Church minister, is perhaps the most interesting of these).

However, the plot of The Chessmen really did stretch my credulity past breaking point. I won’t reveal much about that, as this is essentially a whodunnit after all, but apart from the sheer unlikeliness of the murder plotline’s outcome, which I simply couldn’t believe for a second, we’re also expected to accept that Fin had a number of school friends who formed an internationally famous Celtic rock band for whom he was once a student roadie. This wouldn’t be too much of a stretch had the two previous instalments in the series not also had many lengthy flashbacks to Fin’s teen years in which this is barely mentioned, despite it obviously having been of enormous significance to him – and, at the time, the island itself.

Moreover, while the flashback scenes in the previous two books were the most absorbing chapters, revealing, chilling and full of atmosphere, I found it hard to care much about bickering resentment between a group of bored teenagers fighting over a girl.

The lack of development of Fin’s character and relationships in The Chessmen also disappointed me. His relationship with his former childhood sweetheart Marsaili seems to be at a sort of sulky stalemate throughout, and the son and grandchild he should still be getting to know barely appear, so the interesting implications of a man who has recently lost a little boy in hit-and-run accident suddenly finding himself with a whole new family are simply ignored.

I don’t know if Peter May has any intention of writing a fourth Isle of Lewis novel. If he does, I hope it’s a return to the strong form of The Lewis Man rather than more of what we see in The Chessmen.

Monday, 15 April 2013

Silent Saturday by Helen Grant

Silent Saturday is the first in a planned trilogy by Helen Grant, author of The Glass Demon, which I reviewed here, as well as a number of other acclaimed dark, mysterious YA thrillers. If you don’t generally consider yourself fan of YA fiction, don’t let the label put you off as there is nothing about Grant’s books that doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of adult readers and if you hadn’t been told in advance that Silent Saturday was YA fiction, the only clue you’d find is the age of the protagonist. The plot is complex, the characters are often ambiguous and we see some of the action unfold from the point of view of a psychopathic murderer, with few holds barred. Above all, unlike far too many YA authors, Helen Grant never, ever patronises her intended audience.

Seventeen-year-old Veerle lives on the outskirts of Brussels with her neurotic mother Claudine, who not only worries obsessively about Veerle’s safety but also relies on her as an interpreter. Bored with her suburban life and stifled by the over-protective Claudine, Veerle is understandably attracted to risky pursuits such as scaling practice walls at the local climbing centre. On her way home one winter night, she decides on impulse to investigate a flickering light in an abandoned building, and it’s there that she becomes involved with the Koekoeken, or Cuckoos, a secret society dedicated to breaking into empty properties. They don’t rob them, or vandalise them, or even squat in them – in fact, they generally perform a small maintenance task or improvement before they leave. What the Koekoeken have in common seems to a fascination with the very emptiness of the buildings they enter, from crumbling castles to the modern homes of holidaying millionaires or absent expats, and the thrill of the forbidden.

The very concept of the Koekoeken would probably have been enough to hold my interest as a subject for a novel in itself, so fascinated was I by the idea, but in fact, Silent Saturday also sees Veerle and her old childhood friend Kris pitted against a possible serial killer and raises intriguing questions about Veerle’s past that Veerle herself is strangely unable to answer. The plot is gripping, the atmosphere chillingly creepy, the characters extremely well-drawn. Veerle herself, for instance, is a likeable but utterly believable 17-year-old on the cusp of adulthood, defiant without being stereotypically rebellious, shrewd without being boringly sensible, capable of falling for a good-looking boy without losing her mind over him, occasionally vulnerable but never in need of rescuing.

Helen Grant also somehow manages to make everything that happens in Silent Saturday remarkably plausible. If you’ve read novels with teenage/child detectives battling adult criminals and thought ‘But why the hell haven’t they just told the police?’ you won’t find yourself similarly irritated here: while the decisions Veerle and Kris make are not always wise ones, there is a clear and credible logic to them.

I loved the Brussels setting of Silent Saturday. Helen Grant builds a tremendous sense of sinister, foreboding atmosphere in the key scenes that makes this a genuinely chilling, tense read. The unique atmosphere of places – specifically empty places – is perfectly evoked with a fine-tuned eeriness.

But there’s more than that: as a child, nothing fascinated me more than novels which revealed the casual everyday details of life in other European countries, and the Flemish setting of Silent Saturday is absolutely spot-on here. I am the sort of person who will never tire of visiting a foreign city and marvelling over small details like metro maps, the ranges of things sold by newsagents, TV commercials for mysterious sandwich spreads and weirdly unfamiliar fast-food chains. The very revelation that in Belgium, the church bells don’t ring on Easter Saturday because children are told that the bells have flown to Rome to collect the Easter eggs was frankly enough to make me hop up and down with joy. I realise it’s possibly odd to get so excited about other people’s Easter traditions or a reference to someone having a 'cellophane-wrapped sweet roll with jam in it' for breakfast, and maybe it’s just me, but anyway – Silent Saturday evokes that very feeling of slight unfamiliarity, that little insight into lives that differ in so many small but somehow significant details from our own. I also enjoyed the importance of language in the book, which comes partly from it being set in a country divided by its inhabitants’ mother tongues. Veerle’s French-speaking mother Claudine is isolated and frustrated by her inability to understand Flemish, making her a bitter outsider in her own native country, and the plot is kicked into action by Veerle losing her temper with a non-Flemish-speaking expat who criticises her English.

As I mentioned at the start, Silent Saturday is book one of a planned trilogy, so although it does work as a standalone read, don’t expect all your questions to be answered on the final page. There’s plenty of intrigue left for books two and three – and I for one can’t wait. If you have a teenager, particularly a teenage daughter, get them hooked on the Forbidden Spaces trilogy now; if you haven’t, enjoy Silent Saturday for yourself.

Light Boxes by Shane Jones

I don't much like talking about my own depression, and I don't like reading about other people's - certainly not in any detail, anyway. It's ... well, depressing. And more than that, it's just plain boring, in the same way that backache is boring, or indigestion. It’s not some sort of exciting, tortured melancholy of the kind you can imagine afflicting a Romantic poet in a billowing shirt. It’s just painfully monotonous and dully oppressive.

This is probably why the only book about depression to have really touched me in any way is Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt (not only my favourite book about mental illness but also one of my favourite books full stop). I'd like to say the second was the one I finished reading at the weekend - Light Boxes by Shane Jones - but unfortunately it fell into the trap of becoming an extended metaphor for the Tortured Creative, letting itself (and me) down considerably.

Light Boxes is a poetic, surreal novella about a town suppressed by a seemingly everlasting February. There is a literal February – bitterly cold, dark and grey with no Christmas to look forward to – and a personification of it, a strange, god-like ‘creator’ in the sky who appears to have a lot in common with writers of novels. The townspeople, whose principal interest flight, have been forbidden by February to fly their strangely life-affirming balloons, and their children begin to disappear. Stricken with a horrible sense of desolation, the townspeople declare war on February in a bid to bring the joy and hope back into their lives, 'that sadness will rise from our bones and evaporate in the sunlight the way morning fog burns off the river in summer'.

Light Boxes is certainly a book that would benefit from repeated re-reading, as despite its low page count, each carefully crafted sentence is packed with meaning, and there are allusions and imagery to be deciphered in every line. There are constant surprises, too: stark realism will sometimes break through the whimsical fantasy, such as February’s own hopelessly inadequate list of 'possible cures' - 'Yoga and meditation; Consumption of St John's Wort; Mood diary' - and the use of ‘light boxes’ to beat the gloom of winter.

There are a number of characters from whose point of view the story is told, although I felt they were ciphers rather than fully-realised individuals, and where I felt Light Boxes became disappointing was when we began to learn more about February himself, who is flagged up not as the personification of depression itself but as an obvious parallel to a miserable writer, creating a fairy tale fantasy world 'to try to cure bouts of sadness', like the ones listed (clunkily) in the middle of the book. Apparently in love with a girl 'who smells of honey and smoke' and desperate to prove something to her, he begins to behave like an Old Testament God, crushing his characters into bleak conformity and meting out vengeful punishments for their rebellions. Certainly the loss of their children and the toxic moss which creeps over everything in its path and kills their livestock have the hint of Biblical plagues about them.

Heavily conceptual and low on plot, Light Boxes is surprisingly engaging for what is essentially an extended metaphor in the form of a short novel. But for me, when it all becomes clear that February is essentially the sort of person whom I can imagine live-tweeting his mental anguish, the shrewd truths within this otherwise touching fairy tale are sadly diluted.

Sunday, 7 April 2013

The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson

The Daylight Gate, like Helen Dunmore's The Greatcoat, is a Hammer title, and part of their series of horror-themed novels by literary authors. Jeanette Winterson's contribution is a re-imagining of the lives and trial of the famous Pendle witches of the 17th century - but the Pendle witches of history were innocent victims of Puritan paranoia and sheer spite. In The Daylight Gate, there's certainly a witchcraft of sorts going on. It's just that, what with Alice Nutter and her elixir of youth and Elizabeth Device and her cauldrons and curses, Winterson seems unable to decide whether her Pendle witches are more akin to Snow White's stepmother or the Three Witches from Macbeth.

I love Hammer horror. I love reading about the Pendle witches. I love much of Jeanette Winterson's work. But I didn't love The Daylight Gate. It's fair to say there were certain things I liked about it: some sections had real atmosphere, and some of the more bizarre details of the witches' practices and their imprisonment and trial are fascinating and chilling. I live only a short drive from Pendle Hill and have walked up it, and I do think Winterson evokes its foreboding air rather well at times. But ultimately it was disappointing.

Part of the problem is that the different gears of The Daylight Gate just don't seem to interlock adequately at any point. I think it's unlikely that Winterson's attempt to bring together anti-Catholic prejudices, the social degradation of women and the poor, gory torture scenes, schlocky Satanism, the fate of a fugitive from the Gunpowder Plot and a bisexual love triangle would have succeeded particularly well even in a 600-page blockbuster, but in a book as short as this - a book so short that it felt rather cursory at times - it was never going to work. It was more or less at the point where Shakespeare turned up as a character for no good reason that I suspected I would be disappointed by this book, and unfortunately I wasn't wrong.

What I had hoped from this novel is that it would have the feel of an old 'folk horror' film, and in some ways there are those elements present - think Blood On Satan's Claw or Witchfinder General, for example. The Daylight Gate has grisly torture scenes and sinister yokels aplenty, along with a bisexual protagonist whose antics with both her lovers are reminiscent of the hilariously gratuitous soft-focus topless scenes of early 70s Hammer. But at no point when I was reading The Daylight Gate did I really feel that the author cared about the Pendle witches themselves, Hammer's horror heritage, or indeed the horror genre itself. There was something about The Daylight Gate that made me feel I was being patronised, as if Winterson wrote this book thinking it would be jolly good fun to slum it.