Category: books

Day 496: My First Classics Club Review! The Long Ships

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Cover for The Long ShipsBest Book of the Week!
Today I’m posting my first review for The Classics Club, the one chosen for me by the Classics Club Spin #5!  The Long Ships is a great start to the Classics Club for me. I found it to be a rousing adventure story full of deadpan humor.

This book is the result of Bengtsson’s desire to write a realistic novel about the Vikings. A poet, Bengtsson also wrote essays and a biography of Charles XII, but he became more widely known for The Long Ships.

His protagonist Orm Tostesson is only a boy when the novel begins. Orm is eager to go a-viking to Ireland with his father and older brother, but his mother tends to be protective of him, so he stays home. Shortly after the men leave, he attempts to stop some sheep stealing on the part of a group of Vikings from Lister and is kidnapped by them. The Vikings soon find him an able and intelligent companion, so he becomes part of their crew rather than being kept a slave.

In the course of their adventures down the western coast of Europe, they are initially successful but eventually are captured and sold as galley slaves. In return for a service they performed for a Jew from Córdoba, they are freed to serve as bodyguards for lord Almansur, the regent and imprisoner of the young Caliph of Córdoba. There they serve for years until circumstances force them to flee for home.

This voyage is the first of three related in the novel, during which “Red” Orm meets his bride to be, loses her when his best friend Toke steals her father’s concubine, goes a-viking to England to try to retrieve her from English priests, and many years later travels down the Dnieper to bring back a stash of hidden gold. Even when he is settled at home, he is involved in tiffs with his neighbors, attempts to murder him on the orders of the evil King Sven, visits from unusual acquaintances, rowdy celebrations, and a Thing, a convocation of various groups of Vikings for settling their differences.

There is plenty of action in this novel, but what I find most charming are its air of insouciance and its ongoing (although somewhat grisly) humor. It has a sense of playfulness, especially about the differences between the Norsemen’s old religion, Christianity, and Islam, to which Orm and his fellows are temporarily forced to convert. Take, for example, this passage from the prologue, about the arrival of the shaven men, or priests, in Skania:

They had many strange tales to relate, and at first people were curious and listened to them eagerly, and women found it pleasant to be baptized by these foreigners and to be presented with a white shift. Before long, however, the foreigners began to run short of the shifts, and people wearied of their sermons, finding them tedious and their matter doubtful . . . . So then there was something of a decline in conversions, and the shaven men, who talked incessantly of peace and were above all very violent in their denunciation of the gods, were one by one seized by devout persons and were hung up on sacred ash trees and shot at with arrows, and offered to the birds of Odin.

To give you another idea of the humor in this novel, a Viking tells a story of a wedding that broke up into a fight. When the bride sees the groom’s friends beating up one of her relatives, she hits the groom with a torch, which starts his hair on fire, beginning another fire in which 11 people are killed. Everyone agrees that it was the best wedding they ever attended.

The story of Red Orm is told in a detached manner but by a truly talented storyteller. It is full of sly humor and observations of human folly. I really enjoyed it.

Day 495: Just One Evil Act

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Cover for Just One Evil ActI can chart my changing attitude toward Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley mystery/thrillers simply by how I treat the new books. I used to get them as soon as they were available and read them immediately. This one I had for a couple of months before reading it. They are still page turners, don’t misunderstand me, but George has put her characters, and fans, through a lot.

George is not a proponent of the idea of keeping her characters’ private lives out of her mystery novels—very much the opposite. At first their absorbing lives made these novels stand out. But by now she has put Lynley through a brother accused of murder, a fiancée marrying his best friend, a seemingly hopeless romance, a murdered wife, and an ill-judged affair with his alcoholic boss. Heretofore, Sergeant Barbara Havers, although sometimes rebellious and unruly, has been a rock of good judgment, often better at finding the criminal than Lynley is. So, now it’s her turn to go off the deep end.

At the end of the previous novel, Believing the Lie, Barbara’s neighbor Taymullah Azhar had his sweet young daughter Hadiyyah kidnapped by the girl’s mother Angelina, who returned to Azhar pretending a reconciliation in order to get an opportunity to take the child. The situation is complicated because the parents never married and Azhar’s name is not on Hadiyyah’s birth certification, so for now he has no legal right to her (although, if that is so, since Angelina abandoned them, British law must be really weird). In addition, he has no idea where they have gone.

The Met can’t apparently help him, so Barbara takes Azhar to a private investigator, Dwayne Doughty, and they hire him to find Angelina and Hadiyyah. Eventually, though, Doughty reports back that there is no trace of the two to be found.

The tables turn quickly, though, when Angelina returns with her lover Lorenzo Mura, claiming that Hadiyyah has been kidnapped from them, so Azhar must have taken her. When it appears that Azhar is just as alarmed as Angelina and that he has an alibi for the time of the kidnapping, they all return to Lucca, Italy, where Angelina and Mura have been living. Inspector Lynley is assigned to go along as liaison between the parents and the Italian police. Isabelle Ardery, the boss, refuses to let Barbara come along.

Barbara absolutely refuses to believe that Azhar has had anything to do with the kidnapping. She has already given information to a tabloid journalist to create enough furor in Britain about the kidnapping for someone to be assigned to the case, and that liaison with Mitchell Corsico is not only a breach of trust but a major source of drama—and irritation—for the rest of the novel. The novel ends with Corsico assuming Barbara is in his debt. I certainly hope George doesn’t plan to pursue that subplot, because I found it to be too far over the top, with the journalist demanding more disclosures about every 15 minutes (an exaggeration, admittedly) and always when Barbara urgently needs to be doing something else.

Unfortunately for Barbara, as she breaks all the rules set by her new boss, John Stewart, to investigate the case from her end, it begins to look as though Azhar did indeed plan the kidnapping and execute it with the help of some of Doughty’s contacts in Italy. We readers actually know where Hadiyyah is, although we don’t know the identity of her kidnapper. But we also soon learn that her kidnapper has died, leaving Lynley and the excellent Italian detective Salvatore Lo Bianco to figure out who he was and where he put the child. Lo Bianco’s efforts are hindered by the actions of his incompetent boss.

In the midst of all this, Angelina dies, and it becomes obvious that she was murdered. Soon, it looks as though Azhar could be implicated in that, too.

My problem with this novel is Barbara’s behavior, as she goes overboard to protect Azhar. First, there are the leaks to Corsico which, after the first one, seem totally unnecessary. Then she begins concealing and attempting to alter evidence. I won’t go on. Even worse is how this trouble is wrapped up at the end of the novel, either by a cheat or a completely unlikely act on the part of Ardery.

You can tell I had a mixed reaction to this novel. On the one hand, it is extremely gripping. On the other hand, especially if you have been following the series and care about Barbara, you occasionally want to throw the book across the room. For the last four or five books, I’ve been wondering whether to quit the series, but I always end up picking up the next one.

Finally, I was upset by how the novel ends for Azhar and Hadiyyah, who for a large part of the series have been two of the most likable characters.

Day 494: A View of the Harbour

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Cover for A View of the HarborElizabeth Taylor was a mid-twentieth century writer who was interested in the realistic depiction of ordinary lives, particularly those of the working class. In A View of the Harbour, she provides glimpses into the lives of residents along the harbor of a shabby seaside village in post-World War II England.

Newby has seen better days. The trendy tourist area has moved away around the point, and all that is left aside from a few houses are a wax museum, a pub, a small store, a closed-down fun fair, and a lighthouse.

The main characters of this novel are Beth and Robert, a married couple, and Beth’s longtime friend Tory, recently divorced. Beth labors under the delusion that she is observant, but most of her focus is on her writing, as she is an author. Toward her family she is myopic. She doesn’t see when her five-year-old daughter Stevie is manipulating her, and she pays very little attention to her older daughter, Prudence, or to her husband. All family drama provides fodder for her prose.

Most people in town seem to think Prudence is slow, but she has noticed something that others haven’t—that her father is secretly visiting Tory.

Tory is torn between her feelings for Robert and her loyalty to Beth. She mostly seems to be at loose ends, however. She still cares for her ex-husband Teddy and makes a point of stopping in to see him if she is in London. In Newby she flirts with Bertram, a retired naval officer with ambitions to be a painter but little talent, and dallies with Robert.

Loneliness is a strong theme of this novel. Tory is clearly lonely, even though she is beautiful and has no trouble attracting attention. The attention she wants, from Teddy, is not available. Lily is a recent widow who goes to the pub nightly for companionship. She is timid and terrified of the walk home in the dark. The proprietor of the wax museum, she is afraid to pass the figures on the way up to her flat. The brief attention she gets from Bertram ends unfortunately.

Maisie, the hard-working daughter of invalid Mrs. Bracey, manages to attract Eddie, the boarder, but Mrs. Bracey is immediately jealous of the distraction of Maisie’s attention. Mrs. Bracey is a complex character. We have sympathy for her because she is paralyzed, but she has a terrible tongue and is a vicious gossip. She easily finds a way to squash Maisie’s romance.

Taylor’s characters are too realistic to be entirely likable, although Beth is less at fault than Robert or Tory. I found Maisie and Prudence the most sympathetic of the characters.

Taylor is highly regarded but relatively unknown because she was overshadowed in her time by the more famous Elizabeth Taylor. Her writing is observant of the small details of life. Although there is not much humor in the novel, Tory’s letters from her young son at school are believable and funny. My overall impression of the novel is that the lives of its characters are as sad and dilapidated as the village.

Day 493: Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End

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Cover for Between Summer's Longing and Winter's EndBest Book of the Week!
Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End is difficult to place in genre because while it is about the investigation of a crime and its repercussions, it is also reminiscent of the more cerebral of John Le Carré’s political thrillers without so much being a thriller as a record of law enforcement incompetence. The novel is crammed with characters who are mostly concerned with pursuing their own agendas, whether it be the chief constable of Sweden with his ridiculous intellectual exercises or a member of the secret police who is more concerned with pursing graft and sexual exploits than doing his job.

The novel is a fictional dissection of the possible scenario behind the true-life assassination of the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986. It is the first of a trilogy of which only two novels have been published in English, but it stands fairly well on its own.

Between Summer’s Longing begins with an apparent suicide. A man living in a student apartment in Stockholm plunges to his death from his window. The apartment door is locked from the inside, and there does not appear to be any other explanation for the incident, even though the man’s shoe fell shortly after the body, killing the small dog that had just saved his master’s life from the falling body. The dead man is identified as John Krassner, an American journalist.

There are a few odd things about the crime scene, including the unusual message the man apparently left as a suicide note and the lack of a manuscript he had supposedly been writing. Still, everyone appears to be ready to wrap things up when police Superintendent Lars M. Johansson discovers that his own name and address are on a slip of paper inside a hollow heel of the man’s shoe.

In a separate time stream, the novel returns to several months earlier when the Swedish secret police get a tip to keep an eye on John Krassner. Chief Operations Officer Berg is informed by his people that they are having difficulty finding out what Krassner is up to because he seldom leaves his room, which is close by that of several students. He puts police Superintendent Waltin in charge of an operation to lure Krassner out of the house at a time when it will be empty and send an independent operative in to search his apartment. That operation takes place the night Krassner is killed, but Waltin’s operative assures him he was finished and out before the death.

Persson takes us down some labyrinthine trails before finally getting to the assassination and also before we find out exactly what happened to Krassner. In the meantime we encounter espionage agents, secret societies, sexual deviants, drunks, and incompetents, almost all of whom work for the regular or secret police or the government. If there is any hero of the novel, it is Superintendent Johansson, who figures almost everything out.

The novel is gripping and well written except for a couple of murky passages, but I wasn’t sure if I found them murky because of my own lack of understanding of Swedish politics of the 80’s or if they were perhaps even purposefully murky. Persson himself was a whistle blower in the Swedish police, so it should not be a surprise to learn that the novel is cynical, sly, and full of intrigue.

Day 492: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

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Cover for The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt KidThe Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is billed as a memoir, but it is even more a collection of information and odd facts about 1950’s America, each chapter headed by a strange newspaper clipping from the time. This book is one of nostalgia similar to the work of Jean Shepherd, the humorist whose works centered on a slightly earlier time and author of the books that spawned A Christmas Story.

The memoirs bear many similarities to Shepherd’s, possibly because of the similarities in the imaginations and predilections of young boys, although Bryson’s continue on into the 1960’s and lose a lot of their innocence as the boys become obsessed with gaining glimpses of naked women and stealing beer. I’m guessing that a lot of the humor, with its emphasis on body functions and pranks, would be more amusing to men than to women.

Still, I found the book mildly funny. It turns out that I am roughly one month older than Bill Bryson, so I can vividly remember many of the things that Bryson relates as curiosities, clambering under our desks for the absurd air raid drills, for example, or going to view model air-raid shelters. Bryson grew up in Des Moines, a much bigger town than my own, so his memories are a little more urban than mine.

One place where my memory differs from his is in his repeated assertions that the Russians would never bomb Des Moines. When I was in the seventh grade, I distinctly remember being forced to watch an “educational” film during which we were informed that our town was among the top three bombing targets in the country (which is, of course, absurd, but we believed it). My subsequent informal research (occasionally asking people) has lead me to believe that every school child in America was told the same thing.

Readers Bryson’s age can take a brief look back through time in an afternoon of light reading. Younger readers might be surprised at some of the tidbits Bryson has uncovered, but they were no surprise to me.

Day 491: The Here and Now

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Cover for The Here and NowI know that Ann Brashares is a popular author of books for teens and young adults, although I have not read her before. The Here and Now is a departure for her, though, because, although set in the present, it is in the science fiction genre.

Prenna and her people are from the future. They migrated back, fleeing from horrible conditions in our future, including a starving planet and a virulent disease called the blood plague that kills virtually everyone who is exposed to it. Prenna and her mother live with the others who came with them, and although they interact with “time natives,” they must obey stringent rules about staying uninvolved with them. Prenna finds this irksome and is aware of people being sent away for innocent mistakes.

Although she flies below the radar at school, Prenna has one friend, Ethan, who behaves sometimes as if he knows something about her. He does. She does not remember, but he witnessed her arrival a few years before. Prenna likes Ethan, but she is forced to keep their friendship on a superficial level.

Prenna’s contact with a homeless man sets up an unexpected chain of events. While trying to discover the cause of the man’s death, she and Ethan begin to believe they can change the course of the future by preventing one act.

I have written before about some characteristics of much young adult/teen fiction that I find annoying. One is a certain style of first-person narration that sounds too much like an adult trying to sound like a teen. It is used in this novel, only it is made worse by the preponderance of choppy sentences, especially in the dialogue. If Brashares believes teens can’t think and talk in complex sentences, she should read the dialogue in The Fault in Our Stars (which admittedly may be too sophisticated but strikes me as authentic). This tendency is worsened by the use of the present tense, almost always a poor choice for fiction.

But let’s look at the plot and characters, since those are what teens will think about. The only characters who are more than moderately developed are Prenna and Ethan. Brashares makes the mistake of believing we will automatically care about Prenna before we really get to know her. As for the other characters, Prenna’s mother is a total enigma who won’t even eat dinner with her daughter, although that is never explained. The other adults in Prenna’s group are basically cartoon villains.

http://www.netgalley.comWhether you can enjoy the plot depends on how much you can suspend your disbelief. I will just point out two things, as vaguely as possible. The first is the unlikelihood of Patient #1 of the blood plague being the same person whose totally separate act causes potential massive efforts to stop the horrible effects of global warming to be stillborn. (And by the way, I didn’t really appreciate the lecture about global warming that suddenly pops into the dialogue.) The second is the completely unbelievable results of Prenna and Ethan’s adventure.

I frankly had a very difficult time getting through this short novel. Teens may enjoy it, but I did not.

Day 490: The Glass Palace

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Cover for The Glass PalaceBest Book of the Week!
In the late 19th century, the kingdom of Burma was one of the wealthiest in southeast Asia. Its people were all literate, and no one in the country went hungry. Hundreds of thousands of Indians and people from other nearby countries traveled there to work on the waterways or the teak plantations.

In 1885, the Burmese government imposed a fine on a British trading company for avoiding taxes by under-reporting the amount of teak it was exporting. The British government used this incident as a pretext for invading the country and taking the royal family captive. King Thebaw and Queen Supalayat and their children, along with a few servants, were deported to India, where they were kept captive for the rest of the king’s life in a crumbling, poorly maintained house. Their personal possessions, including the king’s valuable jewelry collection, were confiscated and returned to England.

It is around this shameful incident that the beginning of The Glass Palace is constructed, an ambitious novel that tells the recent history of India and Burma/Myanmar through the stories of several related families. Rajkumar is a 10-year-old Indian orphan whose mother died in their attempt to reach Burma, and he is working at a small cooking stall near the palace when it is breached. He witnesses the removal of the queen and the princesses, and is struck by the beauty of Dolly, their young servant. Dolly is the only one of the lady’s maids who chooses to follow the royal family into exile.

Rajkumar goes to work for a Malayan businessman named Saya John Martins. With Saya John’s help and advice, Rajkumar eventually makes his fortune in the teak industry and finally travels to India to look for Dolly. She accepts his proposal and returns to Burma with her friend Uma, the recent widow of the first Indian Collector, the official in charge of the Burmese royal family.

These are just the bare bones of a dual story rich in characters and detail, on the one hand that of Rajkumar’s efforts to better himself, on the other hand that of the lives of Dolly and the royal family in exile. But this novel is not a love story, and that is just the beginning of this novel, which continues until the present. The novel follows the fates of Rajkumar and Dolly’s children and grandchildren and those of Uma’s nieces and nephews in India and Burma as the families intermarry with each other and with Saya John’s children. As we follow the fortunes of some family members in Burma and Malaya, other family members get involved in the Indian movement for independence from the British empire.

During the Japanese invasion and bombings of Burma and Malaya during World War II, various family members struggle to survive, one an Indian soldier in the British army, one a rubber plantation owner, one a photographer who disappears in Malaya. Rajkumar and Dolly and their daughter-in-law and grandchild are forced with thousands of other Indians to make the thousand-mile trek back to India.

Ghosh is interested in telling a complex story of culture and  history, so he keeps us at a remove from his characters, but that does not make the novel any less moving. The novel does an amazing job of exploring the roots of problems in Myanmar and India through its exposition of events and the varying points of view of its characters. This is a captivating and ambitious novel.

Day 489: Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion

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Cover for Queen AnneHistorically, the legacy of the reign of the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, has been marred by allegations that Anne was a weak woman who was ruled by her favorites. The accomplishments of her reign have been attributed to men she entrusted with leadership roles, most notably John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. Similarly, the wrongs perpetrated during her reign have been imputed to the misguidance of her favorites. Historian and biographer Anne Somerset’s new book exhaustively shows that Anne, to the contrary, was a sensible and conscientious ruler, most consistent in her views and often very stubborn, although private and reserved.

Much of what was popularly known about Queen Anne came from the writings of Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough, who was Anne’s close friend and confidante for many years before becoming her bitter enemy. Even when they were close, the duchess seems to have been a demanding harridan, whose idea of her own power and desserts grew too rapacious and who treated the queen abominably for years. Having read a biography of the duchess several years ago, I approached this book believing Anne was a weak and silly woman, but it has made me change my mind.

Somerset makes an interesting point that Anne’s lack of charisma and physical appearance may have hurt her legacy. Although the portrait of the young Anne reveals a beautiful lady, by the time of her reign she was grossly overweight and plagued by serious physical ailments. These were diagnosed at the time as various disorders, including gout, but a modern look at her symptoms indicates that she may have suffered from lupus, a serious autoimmune disease. For the most part she soldiered on uncomplaining to do her duty for her country.

This book lucidly explains the complex issues that echoed throughout Anne’s reign, including the ouster of King James II, Anne’s father, and the refusal to acknowledge his son, Anne’s half brother James Francis Edward Stuart, as a legitimate heir to the throne because of his Catholicism; the bitter feuds between the Whigs and the Tories; and the War of the Spanish Succession. The book is thorough in its research and very well written. Although I tired at times of its dissection of a seemingly endless series of disputes among those vying for power, I think the book offers a considered and balanced look at Queen Anne’s life and reign.

I received a copy of this book free through a giveaway on Goodreads.