Breakfast At Libraries

Unless you avoid the news to the extent that you have actually been walking around wearing ear-plugs and blinkers for the past two years, you are probably already aware that crime writer Robert Galbraith, whose debut novel The Cuckoo's Calling was published in 2013, is in fact JK Rowling writing under a pseudonym. If you've read the Harry Potter books you'll also know that they are as much mystery stories as they are fantasy novels, with neat, intricate plots scattered liberally with clever hints and clues, so it doesn't surprise me at all that Rowling was inclined to move into the detective genre.

As I've mentioned before, I have a Kindle (although I now have a different model to the one I reviewed in that post). However, I do still buy physical books. If I want a book that's a really lovely edition or has a lot of illustrations or photographs I buy them new, and I often look in second-hand shops for paperback novels.

It was my birthday last week so I had the week off work and we did quite a bit of travelling around. My boyfriend's hobby took us to York and Newcastle and an incredibly cheap TravelZoo hotel deal meant we could just about afford a trip to Wales towards the end of the week. I did a bit of shopping for books in charity shops and independent second-hand bookshops, and I also got given some nice books for my birthday and spent some of the money I was given on books in Waterstones.

My Waterstones purchases were A Natural History of Ghosts by Roger Clarke and The Fabled Coast by Sophia Kingshill and Jennifer Westwood.

I've been wanting to read A Natural History of Ghosts for ages. Roger Clarke has been fascinated by ghosts for most of his life, although is quite open about the fact that he's never seen one (and I would probably be less keen to read his book if he claimed he had). I don't believe in ghosts but I love ghost stories and I do think it's very interesting that so many people are truly convinced that they have had ghostly experiences. This book is about different types of ghosts people believe in and also looks at the science, psychology and cultural history of ghosts and ghost stories. It's been very favourably reviewed and I'm looking forward to reading it.

The Horror Stories book is an anthology of classic supernatural fiction from the 19th and early 20th century, a very influential period for horror fiction. It's edited by Darryl Jones and has some of my favourite stories in it as well as some I haven't read yet, and it's another well-chosen gift for me.

Having been obsessed with the folk horror genre ever since I was a child, I was quite excited to see that RS Pateman, author of The Second Life of Amy Archer, has written a novel about a girl and her mother moving to a Gloucestershire village full of insular, superstitious locals, unsettling rural traditions and grim local legends.

Set in 17th century Amsterdam, The Miniaturist begins with country girl Nella, barely eighteen, arriving at the home of the husband she hardly knows following their recently arranged marriage. Johannes isn't at home, and Nella is immediately drawn into the odd, secretive world of the Brandt household, full of hints, whispers and mysterious arguments over Johanne's business affairs. There's Marin, Johannes' domineering spinster sister who seems unwilling to relinquish her role as mistress of the household, and servants Cornelia and Otto - the latter a black footman ostensibly now free after being purchased by Brandt as a slave.

When Johannes does finally return home, his wedding gift to his bride is essentially a dolls' house: an expensively crafted cabinet* divided into rooms to replicate the Brandts' own house. Nella, bored and resentful and with Johannes' funds at her disposal, sets about ordering items for the cabinet from a mysterious 'miniaturist' - but more things arrive than she ever requests. Furthermore, each one reveals an uncanny knowledge, even a prescience, of the household which is, it seems, one with plenty of secrets, scandals and surprises.

The historical detail of The Miniaturist is rich and immersive and the characters are brilliantly vivid; I finished the book feeling almost like a part of the household myself. Nella herself is an extremely engaging protagonist, admirably resourceful and determined as well as possessing an appealing capacity for forgiveness that never tips over into weakness. Despite the obvious restrictions placed upon her not only as a woman but also as a resident of the strictly religious Calvinist society of Holland in the 1600s - at one point, the city's burgomasters ban gingerbread men lest their human form be interpreted as Catholic idolatry - Nella is spirited and defiant. It is, in fact, the female characters who ultimately take control in this novel.

How realistic this is might well be up for debate. Certainly some of the characters' attitudes and sensibilities, including Nella's, seem a great deal more modern than one might expect. This undoubtedly gives today's readers an easier ride when it comes to establishing an affinity with them, but it does stretch credibility at times.

My only other issue with this book is the miniaturist of the title. The miniaturist's knowledge of Nella's household and the strange ability of the tiny creations to mirror reality is the central mystery of the novel, an ongoing and gripping plot strand that is woven into the rest of the (not inconsiderable) action. And yet its resolution, while on some levels symbolic, is ultimately unsatisfactory - so much so that it almost feels as if the author set out to write one book, ended up writing another but couldn't quite bring herself to edit out all traces of the original.

That isn't to say that the  work of the miniaturist isn't fascinating, or that it adds nothing to the atmospheric quality of the novel - but it seems that this element of the story was simply unsustainable when it came to the need to bring it to an adequate conclusion. It's lucky that there was a great deal else going on in The Miniaturist, or I would have felt a lot more cheated than I did.

In short, I adored the characters that populated the world of The Miniaturist, and I loved the story itself, heartbreaking though it sometimes is. I was also completely drawn in by the exquisitely realised setting and period. If it weren't for the anticlimax towards the end of the novel, this would have been a five-star read.

*Apparently, the inspiration for Nella Oortman Brandt and her cabinet of miniatures came from this exhibit in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, which once belonged to a real Petronella Oortman who married a merchant called Johannes Brandt. Everything else Jessie Burton tells us about Nella and Johannes is, I assume, entirely fictional. 

We Were Liars falls into the 'young adult' category, with a group of teenagers as the primary characters and 17-year-old Cadence as the narrator. It does, however, work well as a 'crossover' novel that will appeal to adult readers as well as its core teenage readership. I can't pretend that, at the age of 39, I didn't cringe slightly at the adolescent intensity of Cadence's feelings for her childhood friend Gat, but by and large, this book worked perfectly well for me as an adult reader.

Cadence is the eldest grandchild in the Sinclair family, an extremely rich New England dynasty headed by 'Granddad' Harris Sinclair. The Sinclairs are sufficiently well-off to own a private island off the New England coast, dotted with purpose-built homes of various size which are allotted to Harris and his three daughters and their children. Cadence, in theory, is the heir to the Sinclair fortune, but the estate is vast and easily carved up, and Granddad is becoming increasingly capricious and tyrannical as he begins to show signs of dementia and wordlessly mourns his late wife, Tipper. Every summer, the whole family assembles on the island, and the four eldest grandchildren - the 'Liars' - form an intense and unbreakable bond.

It is, on most levels, hard to feel sorry for the Sinclair children. They go to private schools, have everything they need, and have ridiculous rich-American-people names like Mirren and Taft. Even the supposed poor boy - a distant step-relative, distinct from the blonde, blue-eyed Sinclairs because he happens to have an Indian mother - is called 'Gatwick' and lives in relative affluence in central New York. They have the island to themselves, servants at their beck and call, access to a motor boat and a constant supply of delicious picnics, almost as if they were some sort of modern day American Famous Five.

However, all is not as it seems, and it's a solid endorsement of E Lockhart's skill that as the book progresses we become fully aware that money doesn't solve all problems - and can even create them, too. Cadence's distinctive voice gives us a narrative peppered with jarring, fractured moments, and with strange moments of inability to distinguish metaphor from reality. Because something terrible happens to Cadence during her fifteenth summer with the Liars, leaving her debilitated by severe migraines, reliant on strong medication and, most importantly, completely unable to remember anything about that summer at all.

We Were Liars is a compelling and at times unsettling psychological mystery, convincingly written in the voice of a bright, sharp teenager who gradually becomes painfully aware of her own shortcomings as well as her family's. Cadence is not always likeable and frequently spoilt, but it's impossible not to feel sorry for her even as the very worst of her character slowly reveals itself. Some may consider the eventual unveiling of the truth about Cadence's accident to be a little gimmicky, but it is beautifully handled and almost painfully heartbreaking, even for those who have little patience with teen angst and spoilt little rich girls.

Beyond the character of Cadence, I can't honestly say the other main players are particularly well-rounded. Cadence's cold, brittle mother and her two sisters battle for their father's affections like King Lear's daughters - or rather, like King Lear's daughters if Cordelia had never existed; in other words, they are barely distinct from one another. Cadence's cousins Johnny and Mirren and love interest Gat are charming enough but not tremendously distinctive. If anything, it's Granddad Harris who stands out, but his role is relatively small.

All that said, I thoroughly enjoyed We Were Liars, with its clear, uncluttered prose, insightful observations and its smart, unpatronising treatment of teenage angst and family strife. If you have a teenage daughter who hasn't read this yet, buy it for her pronto.

 

I've seen Hold The Dark billed as a 'literary thriller'. I don't think this is a particularly accurate description, however. It begins with the investigation of a death, but there's no mystery as such - at least, not the type of mystery that would characterise a thriller.

William Giraldi's short, sparse novel opens with three children being killed by wolves in the remote Alaskan village of Keelut. Medora Slone, the mother of the third child to be taken and now grieving alone while her soldier husband Vernon serves in the Middle East, contacts a nature writer and wolf expert Russell Core to track and kill the wolf thought to have carried off her young son, Bailey.

It's clear from the start that Medora is at best unstable, while Core himself, his wife semi-comatose in a nursing home and his daughter estranged, is also suffering from obvious depression. Keelut itself is a bleak, isolated community which, as is pointed out to Core, has little in common with the Alaska of, say, Anchorage or Juneau. Keelut feels like a dangerous frontier settlement beyond the edge of civilisation, with all the lawlessness and insularity this entails. The further into the empty wilderness of the Arctic tundra the characters travel, the less humane - and the less human - they seem to become. There is a great deal of violence in this novel, and a great deal of strange otherness; shamanistic practices, psychogeography and ancient superstitions abound, interspersed with senseless brutality.

Giraldi counteracts the outright weirdness of the characters' behaviour with a terse, matter-of-fact prose style that has echoes of Cormac McCarthy. This is effective at times, but there is a problem for me in that no matter how odd and unsettling things are, we rarely see any kind of realistic reaction either from Core or from Donald Marium, the police detective whose role, like Core's, is be the outsider's point of view when it comes to Keelut and its people. Blunt, unadorned sentences describing shocking behaviour or bizarre remarks are one thing, but it's quite another for such behaviour or speech to go unchallenged, even unacknowledged, by other characters, and I began to find this frustrating and jarring as the novel progressed.

Hold The Dark is at times a fascinating and well-crafted novel. However, for me its strengths lie in the depiction of the Arctic landscape and its effect on the communities scratching a living within it, rather than in the individual characters or plot (there is, in fact, very little plot, and a revelation about Medora and Vernon that comes towards the end of the story is far from unexpected). Keelut's men are almost entirely forces of elemental anger and violence; its women are solely there to be mysterious, dangerous 'seers' with odd powers of prediction and manipulation. Core and Marium, incomers from a more comprehensible world, stray dangerously close to cliche.