Breakfast At Libraries: May 2014

Saturday, 31 May 2014

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

"How angry am I? You don't want to know."

But we do want to know, and over the course of The Woman Upstairs, we find out just how angry Nora Eldridge is - but why?

Nora is a single woman in her early 40s, who tells the story of a short period in her life a few years previously, during which she developed an overwhelming, obsessive attraction to the Shahid family: Reza, a charming little boy who enters the third-grade class Nora teaches, his Lebanese father Skandar, a renowned academic, and Sirena, a charismatic Italian artist seeking a co-tenant for a studio. Nora, whose own artistic endeavours were long ago thwarted partly by a lack of confidence and partly by time spent caring for her dying mother, is so captivated by Sirena's exotic, vivacious energy and charm that she agrees to share the studio rent as Sirena works on a large-scale installation influenced by Alice In Wonderland. Just as Sirena's art is expansive and extravagant, Nora's is contained and meticulous: a series of miniature, boxed reconstructions of rooms inhabited by doomed, iconic women from Virginia Woolf to Edie Sedgwick.

Cleverly, Claire Messud makes a point of having Nora explain that it isn't the Shahids' family unit she is attracted to. She is obsessed with them all as individuals, equally physically attracted to Skandar and Sirena and desperately maternal and protective towards Reza, and consequently, her interactions with them all are tinged with an unsettling jealousy. Concealing so much from those around her - an attempt to seek advice from her friends Didi and Esther sees them essentially suggesting she pull herself together - Nora is painfully honest with the reader, and there were plenty of moments when I felt excruciatingly embarrassed for her. For all Sirena's effusive gratitude, Skandar's keenness to engage Nora in political and philosophical debate and Reza's easily-expressed affection, it's not hard for the reader to guess that Nora's importance to the Shahids is convenient and fleeting, and deep down, Nora appears to understand this too - which in a way, simply serves to accentuate the hopelessness of the situation.

If there's anything that lets this book down it's the Shahids themselves, who never seem quite interesting enough to live up to Nora's fixation. Moreover, I can't quite buy into the idea of an intelligent, forward-thinking woman in her late 30s being quite as bowled over by their sheer foreignness as Nora seems to be. Skandar struck me as bordering on dull; the charisma that seems to overcome Nora from the first moment she meets him simply doesn't transfer from the page. I also failed to find the detail of Nora's art installation particularly convincing; it all seems a little too contrived, too whimsical, too close to cliche to be something that could ever take the art world by storm.

That said, The Woman Upstairs is a fascinating read with a wholly believable protagonist. It's a long way from being packed with incident - this is not a plot-driven novel and Messud's prose is often overtly 'literary', with no fear of the intricately constructed sentence - but never failed to hold my interest, not least because Nora's quiet disappointment over the loss of the Shahids from her everyday life simply doesn't seem enough to justify the bitter fury with which she opens the book. When we finally discover the straw that broke the camel's back, it comes as a genuine shock.

Friday, 23 May 2014

Defending Jacob by William Landay

Generally speaking I don’t tend to be a great fan of that very American of genres, the legal thriller, but I made an exception for Defending Jacob by former lawyer William Landay, partly because of the great reviews and partly because I have a morbid fascination with murderous children. I’m glad I did – it’s a well-constructed, engrossing read with a strong cast of realistic, cleverly observed characters.

The child in question is the Jacob of the novel’s title, a 14-year-old boy accused of stabbing a classmate to death on his way to school. Jacob is the son of Andy Barber, a senior prosecutor at the district attorney’s office, who is not only convinced that his outwardly normal child could not possibly have committed murder, but also thinks he has an idea who the culprit could be: a local paedophile with a string of – albeit relatively minor – sexual assault convictions for offences against young boys. The rest of the novel deals with the court case itself, and the devastating effect such a situation has on the Barbers’ family life.

If this were all there was to Defending Jacob, it would be an engaging but straightforward courtroom drama, the stuff of reasonably high-quality made-for-tv movies. Fortunately, though, the story and the characters are much more complex than that. Regardless of guilt or innocence, Jacob may not be the average kid his parents believe him to be, and there’s no shortage of skeletons in Andy’s cupboard either, secrets of which even his wife is unaware. Intriguingly, the narrative is inter-cut with a court transcript in which Andy, not Jacob, has been brought before the grand jury. Is Andy as trustworthy a narrator as we might expect a public prosecutor and a charming, upstanding member of a middle-class, smalltown New England community to be?

Defending Jacob asks all sorts of questions of its characters, and its readers. As the evidence builds against Jacob, will even his parents start to question his testimony, and how could those nagging doubts affect their family relationships? How far might a parent go to protect their child from a prison sentence? There are also interesting legal questions about the possibility of a ‘murder gene’ – essentially, we’re asked to wonder if there is really such a thing as a ‘bad seed’. This is a book that will force you to confront some of your own prejudices and question what your own motives might be if your own family found itself in a similarly nightmarish situation.

As you might expect from a writer with a legal background, William Landay’s prose is strong on precision and detail. This might infuriate those who are looking for faster, pacier plot progress, but I enjoyed the meticulousness with which Landay builds his story, and was certainly never bored. Every character sketch (of which there are many) is pin-sharp, and Andy’s digressions are astute and revealing. Despite the narrator’s inherent unreliability – he is, after all, a skilled court room lawyer, and his story is full of carefully delayed revelations and selective omissions – it’s hard not to feel sympathy and a degree of affinity with him.

If I have a complaint, it’s that the main twist in the tale feels a little hastily executed, largely because its pace seems out of step with the rest of the book, and makes the novel’s conclusion slightly abrupt. I also found some of the court room scenes slightly hard to follow at times, although that’s almost certainly down to my lack of knowledge of the US legal system.

Beside that, however, it’s hard to find much fault with Defending Jacob. My attention was held from the first page to the last – and beyond.

Monday, 19 May 2014

Mice by Gordon Reece

Aimed at a young adult readership, Mice is a short, dark thriller narrated by Shelley, a 16-year-old girl living in a remote cottage with her mother - or perhaps 'hiding' would be more accurate, because Shelley and her mother are 'mice', perpetual victims who have retreated into isolation to escape the bullying influences that have come to dominate their lives. Shelley's now absent father was controlling and, it's hinted, violent; Shelley herself has been bullied so badly at school that she's now educated at home.

For a time, their life at the cottage seems safe and secure, as they decide they need nobody but each other to exist happily, tucked away from other people. But when something happens to disrupt the equilibrium, it seems that Shelley and her mother can't survive as mice for much longer.

As a thriller, Mice certainly succeeds - I would defy anyone not to keep turning the pages to the end. However, the plot is really secondary to a more ambiguous message as Shelley and her mother change and grow with their changed circumstances. Reece wisely leaves the reader to form their own opinions about what the novel's end really means for Shelley, and I can imagine the open-ended conclusion providing rich fodder for many a book club debate.

I would suspect that opinions will differ, too, about the relationship between mother and daughter. Are they devoted soulmates with the perfect parent-child bond, or are they feeding each other's neuroses, encouraging each other's status as victims? There are certainly times when the reader might guiltily have an inkling of why both women seem to fall prey to bullies: while nobody could ever a million years suggest they could have deserved anything that's happened to them, their weak timidity can be irksome in the extreme.

While Mice raises many interesting - albeit not very subtly presented - questions, there are still times when it
doesn't quite work. The character of Shelley regularly failed to convince me as a real teenage girl, and I also felt the degree of change in her former friends, latterly her tormentors, was a little too extreme and heavy-handed to be credible. Moreover, I couldn't believe for a moment the reaction of Shelley's school to her difficulties.

I think perhaps I was looking for a little more from Mice than I felt it really delivered. I'd have liked more measured progress in terms of plot and character, a little more complexity. I appreciate that I'm in my late 30s, however, and am therefore a long way from this young adult novel's target audience.

Wednesday, 14 May 2014

The Second Life of Amy Archer by RS Pateman

The Second Life of Amy Archer is one those high-concept thrillers that seem to be all over the place at the moment. Beth Archer's daughter Amy went missing ten years ago from a London park, leaving Beth unable to move on or find any sort of peace. Shortly after the anniversary of Amy's disappearance, Beth is contacted by Libby, a much younger woman from Manchester, who claims that she knows where Amy is - and that she's still alive. The complication is that Amy is now called Esme, and in the ten years since Beth last saw her, she hasn't aged a single day.

Can Esme really be the reincarnation of pretty, perfect Amy? Certainly she seems to know far more about Amy and her life than she could possibly have been coached to know from the newspapers. Beth, understandably, is simultaneously desperate to believe that Esme and Amy are one and the same, and yet struggles to believe that reincarnation could be possible. Can she trust Libby and Esme? What about Ian, a local psychic who claims to know something about the case? And how will Brian, Beth's former husband, now remarried with two more children, react?

I can't deny that the basic premise of The Second Life of Amy Archer is an excellent plot driver, and the author's skill in characterisation really comes to the fore in Beth, a fascinatingly unreliable narrator consumed with guilt and grief. Just when we find ourselves wholly sympathetic towards her, there'll be a flash of mistrustful paranoia, a sudden mood-swing, a surprising judgement. There are times when every character in The Second Life of Amy Archer could be deceiving another, and this constant atmosphere of fearful uncertainty is one of the book's great strengths.

The book's biggest fault lies with the ending - or rather, last one-fifth or so of the story. My issue with it is not any lack of resolution, but rather that it seems a little anticlimactic, a little out of equilibrium with the novel's structure. I could also find fault with some of the dialogue, which too often had a touch of the Radio 4 drama script about it rather than reading authentically as the speech of real, ordinary people. I also felt that there were a few things relevant to the mystery plot that were 'forgotten' only to be brought up all-too-conveniently later, which felt like a tiny bit of a cop-out.

That said, it's an intriguing page-turner with a fascinating premise, and I'd happily read more by the same author.

Saturday, 10 May 2014

Stormbird by Conn Iggulden

At the risk of sounding like a) a nerd and b) a really weird nerd, the Wars of the Roses are my favourite wars. They've got everything: complicated dynasties full of jealousy and resentment, political scheming, a divided nation, family feuds, innumerable fascinating personalities, unlikely love stories, surprising ascents to power and a great deal of violence. I don't think you could want much more.

For this reason I was particularly keen to read Stormbird, the first novel in a planned series of Wars of the Roses historical epics by Conn Iggulden, and I'm delighted to say I wasn't disappointed.

Although many of the characters and events depicted in Stormbird are very much real, don't expect this to be Wolf Hall: if anything, it's more comparable to A Game of Thrones. Rather than making a single individual the centre of the story, Iggulden gives us large cast of characters, all with different perspectives on the events that unfold. Among them are Margaret of Anjou, a teenage bride from France married off to the oddly simple-minded English king Henry VI; Derry Brewer, his pragmatic advisor and rebel leader Jack Cade, among others. Margaret, perhaps, stands out the most for me; her ability to extract the best from her situation and her gradual increase in confidence and strength is impressive.

The writing is sharp and vivid throughout, and the dialogue feels fresh and natural without losing its sense of time and place.

Stormbird is nothing if not action-packed; the (numerous) battle and combat scenes are a grisly rollercoaster ride and the story proceeds at a rollicking pace. However, there is more to it: all the characters are three-dimensional and well-developed and the novel is rich with vivid historical detail too. Moreover, by looking at the impact of the events that begin the Wars of the Roses on every level of society, the novel gives a wider context to the events we know from history lessons and gives an interesting insight into the effects of the conflict on individuals on both sides of the English Channel. I'm looking forward to the next instalment in this epic tale.