Breakfast At Libraries: July 2013

Sunday, 28 July 2013

Into The Darkest Corner by Elizabeth Haynes

I seem to have read a lot of psychological thrillers lately, I suspect mainly because they tend to be quick, easy-reading page-turners and I haven't been in the right frame of mind to cope with a great deal more than that in recent months. This one, Into The Darkest Corner, is the debut novel by Elizabeth Haynes, who apparently produced the first draft as part of NaNoWriMo - an impressive achievement.

The story is told through alternating narratives, one in more or less the present day and one dated several years previously. At first, you might be forgiven for thinking they're also about two different women: Catherine, the narrator of the flashback sequences, is a carefree, sociable party animal who spends every evening drinking with a large group of equally gregarious friends and is no stranger to the one-night-stands, whereas Cathy is an ultra-cautious loner who has to summon up every ounce of courage simply to attend her office Christmas party and is burdened with severe OCD and anxiety. However, they are of course the same person, and it's a measure of Haynes' skill that she's able to make this dramatic personality change convincing, so that just enough of Catherine is retained in Cathy to make us believe in her transformation.

I also found it plausible that the trauma Catherine has suffered would be sufficient to bring that transformation about. Mentally (and physically) scarred from a horrific experience with Lee, a previous boyfriend, Cathy's present-day narrative begins with her meeting Stuart, her kind, attractive neighbour, and deciding to take positive steps towards addressing her mental health problems. However, this coincides with Lee's release from prison, and soon, Cathy starts to see small signs that someone might have been in her flat. Is her mind playing tricks on her, or has Lee decided to return to finish what he started years before?

Into The Darkest Corner is unlikely to score many points for literary style but it is a very compelling read, and disturbingly realistic at times - some elements are cranked up a notch in the name of poetic licence but the portrait of Lee's abusive, controlling hold over Catherine is all too believable, and the more graphic accounts of his actions can make for uncomfortable reading as a result, particularly for women who may have similar experiences. There's nothing about the treatment of the subject matter that's sensationalist or exploitative, but it is brutal, stark and uncompromising.

While I strongly empathised with Catherine once her relationship with Lee had deteriorated, and also very much so in her new life as Cathy, I found her somewhat tiresome at the start of the flashbacks: not only does she seem to behave as if she's on a permanent hen-night, but she seems pretty superficial. We're supposed to believe that she has fallen head over heels in love with Lee, but this manifests itself solely in her endless gloating over his hunky looks and their incessant shagging, and as Catherine obviously has no problem meeting men, I couldn't quite see what was supposed to be so special about Lee himself. The plot does rely heavily on Lee having an awful lot of charisma and charm, but to me, he seems short on both. It's likely, though, that this says more about me than it does about the novel.

Like most thrillers of this nature, parts of the plot do pivot on unlikely coincidences and there are certainly a few moments where one has that same 'Why are you going to into that darkened room to investigate that scary noise on your own,, you silly woman?' feeling that one has when watching certain types of horror film. But Into The Darkest Corner is still a very strong debut for Elizabeth Haynes, and definitely one that's hard to put down. Haynes has written two more books since this one, and I'll be looking out for them.

Friday, 26 July 2013

Big Brother by Lionel Shriver

I wonder if I would have formed the same opinion about Lionel Shriver’s latest novel Big Brother, about a woman who takes it upon herself to help her morbidly obese older brother to lose 16 stone, had I not already known that Shriver’s real-life brother was similarly overweight and died (almost certainly as a result) at 55. It’s possible that I might have been less sympathetic to the narrator of Big Brother, an almost reluctantly successful entrepreneur from a somewhat dysfunctional showbiz family, if I hadn’t read of Lionel Shriver’s own pain at her brother’s ill-health, as on the face of it, I couldn’t find a great deal to like about Pandora for her own sake.

Neither, in fact, could I find much to like about her husband Fletcher, whose obsession with health food is clearly an eating disorder in its own right, or Edison, the ‘big brother’ of the title. Not that this should matter – it’s possible to care about characters without finding them likeable – but their company became frustrating at times, not least because I found them all rather two-dimensional. Edison, a jazz musician, speaks in dated jive talk, all ‘dig’ and ‘cat’ and ‘man’. Admittedly this is disparaged in the novel, with Pandora admitting that it seems ridiculous but asserting that this is really how those on the jazz scene (and Shriver is married to a jazz drummer, so I assume she would know) - but it doesn't make it any less irritating or cliched. Also, it appears that because Edison is fat, he must also be crass, untidy and clumsy – because hey, all fat people are, right? Pandora’s father Travis is a TV actor who obsesses endlessly over his long-gone 70s heyday, and, like Edison, I found him stereotypical and unrealistic; ditto Pandora’s sullen stepson, a standard-issue moody teenager, and her sweet stepdaughter, whose cute, saintly demeanour simply doesn't ring true, even when it's rather endearing.

That said, Big Brother still bears many of the hallmarks that made Shriver’s smash-hit We Need To Talk About Kevin such a gripping read. The astute commentary on marriage and family relationships is once again compelling, as is the novel's sharp topicality, the unreliable narrator and the often acutely uncomfortable viewpoint from which she tells her story – such is Pandora’s all-out revulsion at Edison's behaviour and condition that I felt desperately sorry for him, while at the same time knowing that I’m just as guilty as she is of having certain kneejerk reactions to those who are vastly overweight (even as someone who used to be five stone heavier than I am now, no stranger to being fat). Big Brother’s observations on Western relationships with food in the 21^st century are also sharp and relevant, although at times made the book feel more like an essay than a novel.

Big Brother is also strong on family resentment and rivalry. Pandora, for all she professes to love her husband Fletcher, is constantly in competition with him and threatened by his physical fitness; knowing that he insists on sticking to a strict, obsessively healthy diet while she is somewhat overweight, she leaves him bite-sized samples of desserts that she leaves, tantalisingly presented, in the kitchen for him to find. Fletcher himself seems to be inwardly bitter that his own business as a furniture-maker is infinitely less successful than Pandora’s company. Baby Monotonous makes bespoke dolls that parrot the pet catchphrases of clients’ loved ones, an enterprise Fletcher calls Baby Moronic despite it buying his home and feeding his family (his teenage children having been adopted by Pandora after a custody battle with their drug addict mother). This competitive undercurrent extends to Pandora and Edison, too - one point, Edison even suggests that his binge-eating was triggered by seeing his sister on the cover of a business magazine while his career as a jazz pianist was in irrevocable decline – and, most of all, between Edison and Fletcher, polar opposites openly vying for Pandora’s care and attention.

The book is split into three sections. The first deals with Edison’s arrival for a two-month visit, having found himself homeless and not having seen his sister for four years. During these years, he has more than doubled in weight and is now struggling with mobility and sleep apnoea, and his presence in the neat, ordered family home causes a constant strain, partly because he is careless and untidy but mostly because his immense bulk and eating binges embarrass and repulse the rest of the family. The second section follows Pandora’s decision to risk her marriage by moving out of the family home to supervise Edison on an all-liquid, protein shake extreme weight loss diet. The third – well, it would be giving away far too much to reveal what happens here, but I will say that the final part of the book struck me at first as a terrible cop-out but then, when I really thought about it, seemed brave and even redeeming. A foreboding cloud of guilt hangs over this novel, which seems all the more poignant in the context of Shriver's own relationship with her late brother.

Big Brother raises pertinent questions about the way we look upon those who are extremely overweight and about the irreversible effect of our childhoods on our adult lives. Despite its faults – the flatness of most of the characters and the tendency to drift into polemic, for instance – this is a thought-provoking and sometimes unsettling read that is at once spikily satirical and deeply sad, without any trace whatsoever of sentimentality.

Wednesday, 24 July 2013

Border Songs by Jim Lynch

I thoroughly enjoyed Jim Lynch's previous novel, The Highest Tide, a gently-paced, thoughtful book about a young nature-loving boy in a small coastal town who discovers a rare giant squid washed up on his beloved beach. I had high hopes, then, for Border Songs, Lynch's second novel.

Set at the western end of the meandering US-Canada border, and focusing on the rural community that straddles it - a community in which Canadian nationals can chat to their American neighbours over the delineating ditch - Border Songs centres on American Brandon Vanderkool, a shy, affable, six-foot-eight oddball who reluctantly joins the local Border Patrol. Brandon, whose uncanny powers of observation and unique perspective helps him accidentally intercept more illegal activity on the border than anyone else, becomes the catalyst for a gradual building of unease and paranoia.

There are other characters too. Among them are Brandon's father, whose cows are falling sick on his ailing dairy farm while he channels all his efforts into building a yacht, and his gentle, understanding mother, trying to fight early onset Alzheimer's. On the Canadian side, there's troubled Madeline Rousseau and her sideline in the marijuana business, and her father Wayne, passing his time by replicating the creations of Thomas Edison. Border Songs is a beautifully detailed, sometimes tragicomic portrait of the border community and its eccentric idiosyncrasies. No character is a stereotype and each and every one of them has something in them that touches the reader in some way or another, even the characters who don't seem immediately sympathetic.

Border Songs is a surprisingly harmonious mixture of gentle satire and an almost poetic, bittersweet melancholy, punctuated with Brandon's litany of bird calls. It's about what makes us different and what makes us the same, about how even the outsiders among us can find some sort of niche, and how there are some among us who simply see things that others don't.

What Border Songs isn't is a significant departure from The Highest Tide, however. Like Lynch's first novel, Border Songs has a nature-obsessed hero, countless references to wildlife species and habits, and is set in a small community in decline in which an unlikely loner becomes the reluctant focal point for a brief period before small-town life settles back into an easy rhythm once again. I loved both books and felt an instant affinity with the principle character in each one, but when I come to read Lynch's third book I'll be looking forward to seeing something perhaps a little different.

Saturday, 13 July 2013

What I read on my holidays

I'm back from a road trip down the east coast of the USA, from Washington DC to Miami Beach with a detour down to Key West. Needless to say, this was fabulous, but more importantly, what did I read while I was away? The answer is 'not as much as I thought I would', but I did manage the following - two thrillers and a historical adventure.

Reginald Hill is best known as the author of the Dalziel and Pascoe detective series, but The Woodcutter is a standalone novel in its own right and unconnected to Dalziel and Pascoe. I haven't read any of the Dalziel and Pascoe novels, so I don't know how The Woodcutter compares to them, but I found it to be an interesting revenge thriller with some clever twists, clearly influenced by The Count of Monte Cristo (acknowledged by the author through the placement of a copy of the novel in the protagonist's prison cell).

Wilfred 'Wolf' Hadda is a wealthy self-made businessman with a working class rural background and a possibly shady past, married to the daughter of a Cumbrian aristocrat and with a circle of upper-class friends. At the start of the novel, his empire crumbles around him as he's arrested not just for fraud but also for child porn offences. Subsequently, his prison psychologist - young and pretty, naturally - tries to unpick the reasons for Wolf's apparent offences, and finds herself drawn into his complex world of secrets and deception.

While I enjoyed The Woodcutter and found Wolf's story a compelling one, there's no doubt that the novel could have been 100 pages shorter, and there were some elements of the plot that stretched the suspension of my disbelief to breaking point: would a man really name his multinational business after his former secret service pseudonym, for a start? I also found it a little hard to reconcile aspects of Wolf's character with others' assertions that he is universally liked by all who meet him. Even prior to his arrest, which leaves him disfigured and embittered, his behaviour and manner doesn't suggest to me a man who would automatically charm everyone he encounters; I didn't find him especially likeable myself. I was also mildly irritated by the ugly-middle-aged-man-is-mysteriously-irresistible-to-exotic-young-woman-in-her-20s aspect of the novel, which seems to be a constant wish-fulfilment device employed by male thriller writers (see also Stieg Larsson).

That said, The Woodcutter was a diverting read overall that combined elements of spy fiction, adventure, detective novel and psychological thriller to good effect, albeit with one or two holes in its plot. I also enjoyed the different techniques Hill used to tell the story, with varying narrators and points-of-view all bringing a new layer of perspective and a couple of revelations I really wasn't expecting. Definitely a good one for a plane journey.

My next read was She Rises by Kate Worsley, set in the 1740s. Worsley was apparently mentored by Sarah Waters during the writing of this book, and it certainly has a lot in common with novels like Tipping The Velvet and Fingersmith as well as Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie. It's the often dark, frequently surprising historical tale of an estranged brother and sister. Louise, a rural dairy maid is sent to the port of Harwich to become lady's maid to the spoilt, unpredictable daughter of a wealthy naval captain. Luke, at the age of 15, disappears without trace after being press-ganged in a tavern and forced to go to sea with the Royal Navy.

At first, I found Luke's story much more involving than Louise's, not least because its very premise is so terrifying, but as Louise's relationship with her capricious, calculating mistress Rebecca takes a more intense turn, I began to find her equally fascinating (although not necessarily likeable at times, and capable of some infuriatingly questionable decisions, she's all the more interesting for that). Both Luke and Louise are thrown into utterly unfamiliar worlds and forced to make sense of new and challenging surroundings as well as forming unusual relationships, some not entirely healthy, and watching them grow in confidence and strength of character is a pleasure. When the stories of Louise and Luke finally converge in a highly original way, it's extremely effective, if not entirely unforeseen.

She Rises is a truly gripping story of gender, sexuality, class and the mysterious power of the sea, and it has all the brilliantly vivid evocation of time and place that I love to see in historical fiction. The sights, sounds and smells of an 18th century naval ship, unpleasant as they are, are brought to life with immense skill, as are the narrative points of view of Louise and Luke. Excellent stuff and almost impossible to put down - I read this beautifully written, compelling novel well into the night to finish it.

My final holiday read, which I raced through in a couple of hours on the plane journey home, was The Magpies by Mark Edwards. Kirsty and Jamie buy their first home together, a pleasant flat in a London suburb, and are initially delighted with their new neighbours - an eccentric herbalist, an easy-going children's writer and his wife, and the Newtons, a couple downstairs who seem keen to be friends. But it doesn't take long before a tragedy strikes and Kirsty and Jamie's relationship with the Newtons sours. Are Chris and Lucy Newton just difficult neighbours, or is something more sinister afoot?

The Magpies is a genuinely chilling psychological thriller that, to anyone who has had the sort of neighbours who seem determined to make one's life a misery, seems horribly plausible at times. Jamie and Kirsty - although I couldn't help feeling I'd find them slightly irritating if I met them, with their smug inability to keep their hands off each other and their slightly sitcom-cliche style best mates - are certainly believable as a young couple making their first step on to the property ladder and planning to start a family. Less believable, however, are some of their reactions to the horrors that unfold around them. I find it hard to accept, for example, that anyone who believed an intruder with a key to their property had been letting themselves in and creeping around wouldn't immediately change their front door's locks. For a thriller, it's a little lacking in surprises too. As a throwaway, pacy psychological thriller to read on a plane, though, it was entertaining enough and certainly kept me turning the pages.