Breakfast At Libraries: May 2013

Wednesday, 29 May 2013

The Orphan Choir by Sophie Hannah

The Orphan Choir is the third novel I've read in Hammer's series of horror novels by by non-horror authors - the others being Helen Dunmore's The Greatcoat, which I loved, and Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate, which I wanted to love but didn't. By crime writer and poet Sophie Hannah, The Orphan Choir is part ghost story, part psychological thriller, with a tense, oppressive atmosphere and an intriguingly unreliable narrator.

The story opens with narrator Louise driven to distraction by a feckless, selfish neighbour who plagues her regularly with his loud music. (If Louise's reaction to this seems extreme, I speak as someone who once suffered a similar problem with my own neighbour and I assure that Louise's taut, paranoid fury is all too plausible.) Despite the support of Pat Jervis, the Environmental Health Officer who arrives to investigate the noise in the middle of the night, the noise continues - and this time, it seems that Louise's neighbour has found a new way to torment her. He's stopped playing his former repertoire of 80s hits, and instead, he's moved on to choral church music, sung by boy choristers. Desperately missing her seven-year-old son Joseph, who has recently begun boarding at a prestigious choir school and feeling horribly claustrophobic as work on the exterior of the house generates endless dust and blocks out natural light, Louise appears to descend into obsession and hysteria. A second home in an almost disturbingly peaceful gated community in the countryside could be the answer ... or will the voices of the choir follow her there too?

One of the great successes of The Orphan Choir is the deftly constructed narrative. It's Louise herself who tells the story, and it's often hard for the reader to gauge the state of Louise's mental health - just at is for her occasionally dismissive but ultimately confused husband Stuart. Louise is sharply witty and observant but she's also prone to paranoia and erratic behaviour at times. Could the biggest danger faced by Louise, and even her son Joseph, actually be Louise herself? Is it possible that the voices she hears and the visions she sees are figments of an increasingly over-active imagination? In this sense, I heard echoes of The Turn of the Screw in The Orphan Choir, and that, of course, can only be an excellent thing.

The Orphan Choir works well, then, as a psychological mystery - but what of the ghost story? Well, I'm glad to say that Sophie Hannah has made a fine job of her foray into supernatural horror, and Hannah has an excellent command of those essential elements of eerie, slowly escalating suspense characteristic of all the best ghost literature. I found The Orphan Choir tense, chilling and unsettling, and it seems clear to me that Sophie Hannah has a genuine respect and understanding for the genre (something I found sadly lacking in Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate).

This is a short read, into which Sophie Hannah has somehow managed to pack numerous twists without ever making this slim little volume feel rushed or over-complicated: the careful layering of tension and atmosphere is executed at the perfect pace as The Orphan Choir edges creepily towards its climax. Suitably for a novel with Hammer connections, there's a strong gothic flavour, but it's employed in a modern setting, to excellent effect. The Orphan Choir is a beautifully constructed, atmospheric chiller which I highly recommend - and if you've got time to read it one sitting, so much the better, as once you get to the halfway point, you won't want to put it down.

Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux

In an age when our written words are more publicly available than ever, thanks to blogging, social networking, self-published e-books and internet message boards, Marcel Theroux’s Strange Bodies presents us with a prospect that seems even more sinister than it otherwise might: the notion that our personalities, our consciousness, our very being, could be reproduced solely from our written output.

Told through a combination of written forms including a psychiatrist’s case notes and the memoir of one of her patients, Strange Bodies explores some expansive themes, including identity, our thirst for immortality, scientific ethics and what really makes us the people we are.

Like Theroux’s dystopian novel Far North, which I've also reviewed, Strange Bodies has many of the trappings of science-fiction, but this is almost incidental – genre-wise, this is literary fiction more akin to, say, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go or the speculative works of Margaret Atwood than full-on sci-fi. The plot has all the drive and thrust of a thriller, with Nicholas Slopen, an academic whose specialism is the life and work of Samuel Johnson, finding himself pulled into a dangerous scientific conspiracy growing from a seed planted in the former Soviet Union, but Strange Bodies is much more than that. It’s also a thought-provoking novel about language and how it shapes our identities and relationships.

Nicholas is a convincingly inept hero with numerous faults, although his growing awareness of them and his increasingly heightened understanding as the story unfolds mean it’s impossible for the reader not to sympathise with him, often deeply, and his relationship with Jack, an outwardly brutish savant with a seemingly unique talent, is perhaps one of the most touching elements of the book. Theroux also paints a vivid and plausible picture of the fluctuating mental health of Nicholas, and others, throughout: sometimes the fear of madness (as Samuel Johnson himself knew only too well) is worse than madness itself.

Weaving in numerous literary allusions and references, as well as elements of Frankenstein and age-old myths of doppelgangers and golems, Strange Bodies is an exceptionally well-executed novel, often sharply observant, in which the different themes interlock with the neat intricacy of meticulously-crafted clockwork.

Monday, 6 May 2013

Accidents Happen by Louise Millar

If you're looking for a page-turning psychological thriller to read on holiday, you could do worse than Louise Millar's Accidents Happen - if SJ Watson's Before I Go To Sleep is your kind of thing, perhaps. Don't, however, turn to this one for gritty realism: it's not strong on plausibility.

The protagonist of Accidents Happen is Kate, an affluent middle-class widow who, after losing first her parents and then her husband in tragic circumstances, has been left convinced that she is 'cursed' and suffering from an anxiety disorder somewhere on the obsessive-compulsive spectrum, constantly running through statistics and probability sums in her head in order to reduce the risk inherent in everything she or her 10-year-old son Jack does. As her anxiety spirals so far out of control that her wealthy in-laws are concerned for Jack's welfare, Kate meets Jago, a professor of maths who has recently published a book about risk in the 'popular science' genre. Jago is certain he can help Kate to overcome her problems with a sort of immersion therapy, encouraging her to carry out what amount to grown-up dares to re-accustom herself to minor risk-taking, and his approach seems to be working. Yet Kate still has a nagging doubt that someone or something may be gaining access to her house, and Jack seems to share the same fear. Are they so consumed by Kate's neuroses that they are seeing dangers where none exist? Or could this be the one and only time when Kate and Jack really are in danger?

The basic premise of Accidents Happen is an original one, and one that captured my attention right from the start. I could easily see that Kate's problem was entirely credible, given her history, and found her an easy character with whom to sympathise as she tries to do the best for her son in parallel with the well-meant but sometimes stifling input of her late husband's family. Jack, too, is wholly believable: at almost eleven, he's just at the age where a desire for more independence sometimes conflicts with day-to-day childhood doubts over outdoor sleepovers and walks down creepy country lanes.

Louise Millar withholds various snippets of information from us throughout the book to keep us turning the pages, revealing something significant every few chapters to keep up our interest and raise our suspicions. Accidents Happen is full of secrets and unspoken family tensions and as such, it's certainly a suspense-packed read. Where I think it falls down is in the characterisation of Jago, who is supposed to be a sufficiently likeable charmer to set Kate's heart fluttering for the first time after her husband's death, but merely came across to me as an insufferably smug pillock from whom any sensible woman would have walked away on date one, and in the ending, which I simply found so implausible as to be almost disappointing. I can't deny that it's been very cleverly worked out, but I just found it impossible to believe and executed at a pace that seemed rushed. I could have accepted how terribly unlikely it all was if it had been revealed more gradually, but having it all thrown at me within such a short space of time did give me, to quote Through The Looking Glass, the sensation of 'believing six impossible things before breakfast'.

Accidents Happen (again, rather like Before I Go To Sleep) is a book that benefits from a certain disengagement of one's brain when you read it. Try to forget that none of this would happen in a million years, and just sit back and enjoy it.

Fever by Mary Beth Keane

If you are as grimly fascinated as I am by epidemics and other mysterious disease outbreaks, you may well have heard of Typhoid Mary. Typhoid Mary was Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant living in New York at around the turn of the century, who became the first person ever to be identified as an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, the often fatal fever which periodically broke out in the overcrowded, insanitary conditions of the city at the time. This in itself would be interesting enough, but what made Mary famous - or rather infamous - was that she repeatedly ignored warnings about her condition once released from quarantine and continued, under various false pretences, to undertake work as a cook, repeatedly infecting (and consequently killing) people who ate her food.

Fever is a fictionalised account of Mary Mallon's life, told largely from her point of view, although to a lesser extent, it is also the story of her infuriatingly feckless partner, Alfred. It's a fascinating tale and Mary Beth Keane builds a vivid picture of New York in the early 1900s, teeming with recent immigrants struggling to better themselves in desperate poverty, packed into tenement blocks, paying to sleep on cots in other people's kitchens, scrubbing clothes in Chinese laundries, selling cheap wooden toys from hired carts. This is a city in which horses that collapse on the job are left to rot in the street and boarding houses cram ten beds to a room and make their occupants share a single chamber pot. Yet at the same time, it's also a city in which a 14-year-old girl, as Mary is when she manages to survive the journey from County Tyrone to Ellis Island, can start her life all over again and make something of herself. Mary is an excellent cook, her skills sought after. It's Mary who supports Alfred, her partner, not the other way round; it's Mary who can save up enough of her wages to buy the very same hat her employer wears.

Mary herself is a complicated and - as you might expect - not always likeable character, and yet Mary Beth Keane has done an outstanding job in making her into someone with whom we can sympathise despite her often poor choices: Keane is extremely skilful when it comes to helping us understand Mary's decisions and rationale. The legality of her first enforced period in quarantine is dubious at best: separated from her partner and everything she knows, she is left with nothing to do to amuse herself, a strong and healthy woman surrounded by the dying and regularly subjected to humiliating tests and sampling while information is concealed from her and it's easy to see what a damaging effect this experience could be. Similarly, it becomes clear how and why cooking is so important to her, and why a life as a laundrywoman (the occupation chosen for her by the Department of Health when she is released) simply won't do: it's not just the poor wages and the exploitative hours, it's the lack of respect she commands, the lack of an opportunity to show that she's good at something, to create something to be proud of. Mary is intelligent, perceptive and tough, and she is probably not entirely wrong in her belief that 'They blamed her because she was opinionated, and Irish, and unmarried, and didn't bow to them.'

I did at times find it hard to reconcile Mary's intelligence and determination with her relationship with Alfred, with whom, on and off, she lives. Like Mary, Alfred makes repeatedly poor choices, but unlike Mary, his choices are impulsive and ill-considered; also unlike Mary, he lacks determination and pragmatism and has a serious drink problem. I found it hard to understand what Mary saw in Alfred and why she continued to love him - but perhaps we all know someone who seems inexplicably tied to a partner who seems depressingly unsuitable for them.

If you already know, as I did, what happened to the real Mary Mallon, the plot of Fever contains few surprises, and in fact, even if you don't, it's pretty straightforward stuff with a rather episodic structure and nothing unexpected. But this is a novel full of atmosphere and crammed with arresting little details about a stage in New York's history that seems strangely out of control - a 'best of times, worst of times' sort of period, full of the excitement of an up-and-coming melting pot of city in which great things are happening, yet at the same time, strangely out of control. Skyscrapers are being built and scientific advances are being made in epidemiology and healthcare, yet at the same time, families are dying in appalling slum housing and working in dangerous sweatshops: among the smart, orderly new architecture of the growing city and its officious bureaucracy, there is a swarming, chaotic poverty for which the spread of a deadly disease becomes an apt metaphor.