Review 2062: The Prisoner of Zenda

~ whatmeread ~ 9 Comments

When I was making up my Classics Club list, I thought it might be fun to read The Prisoner of Zenda, a book I’ve heard of for years. I was surprised to find it was really good!

Rudolf Rassendyll is the younger brother of a British nobleman whose family has a tradition that an ancestress had an affair with a Ruritanian prince, bestowing on some of the family a pointed nose and red hair that Rudolph has himself. The family also stays away from Ruritania, but when Rudolf hears there is to be a coronation of the new king, he decides to attend.

Since Strelsau, the city where the coronation is to be held, is going to be crowded, he decides to stay in the village of Zenda and travel in for the ceremony. He lands in Zenda the day before and, while wandering in the woods, encounters the King, who looks exactly like him except for a beard. Amused, the King invites him to Zenda Castle, where he is staying as a guest of his brother, Duke Michael.

When the King drinks a bottle of wine gifted by Michael, his attendants can’t wake him. Duke Michael has drugged him so he’ll miss his coronation. The King’s attendants, Fritz and Sapt, talk Rudolf into impersonating the King just for the coronation. But things don’t go exactly as planned.

This adventure story is fast moving with interesting characters and lots of action. A fun read!

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Review 2061: The Seat of the Scornful

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

In the first scene of The Seat of the Scornful, we meet Justice Ireton, who really believes that an innocent man cannot be found guilty in his court. He lets a convicted man leave the court thinking he is going to be hanged when the justice intends to sentence him to life, as if that’s not punishment enough.

Later, his daughter Connie comes to see him at his seaside retreat, bringing along her fiancé, Anthony Morrell, a flashy dresser of Italian extraction whom Ireton immediately distrusts. Morrell, once alone with the justice, accepts an offer of £3000 to leave Connie alone.

The next night, the girl at the telephone exchange receives a call asking for help at the justice’s cottage followed by a gunshot. The justice is discovered seated at his desk holding a gun with Morrell’s body on the floor, shot in the head. Ireton claims to have been cooking in the kitchen when he heard a shot and came in to find the body and the gun.

Carr’s ungainly amateur detective, Gideon Fell, works with Inspector Graham to figure out what happened. Early the next morning Morrell’s lawyer explains that Morrell is actually a wealthy man with his own candy company who intended to give Ireton the £3000 as a gift for Connie to teach him a lesson.

Although the actual solution to this murder is very simple, it is followed by a series of fairly unbelievable events. However, I have a much bigger problem, without saying too much, with how Fell wraps up the case. Let’s just say that the victim, who was obviously not a nice guy but wasn’t the creep Ireton thought him, is not regarded at all. The introduction to the British Library edition says that other readers have questioned the book’s ethics. Let me say that I think the ending is extremely classist, that if Morrell had been a different type of person, the ending would have been different. Edwards states that Carr, Agatha Christie, and Anthony Berkeley were all pondering whether any murder is justified. Well, this one isn’t.

I received a copy of this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2060: Moominsummer Madness

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I intended to read Moominsummer Madness for the 1954 Club last spring, but it didn’t arrive from the library in time. So, I read it when it did arrive.

The Moomin family are on holiday when a huge tidal wave floods the valley. Their house gets flooded and they end up taking refuge on what they think is a floating house but is actually a theater.

Moomintroll and his friend Snork Maiden are separated from the others when they camp out for the night in a tree and the theater is cut loose. And Little My also gets lost when she falls through a trap door.

I usually try to review children’s books in terms of how attractive they might be to both kids and adults. Kids like books with lots of silliness, which is probably why these books are so popular. They don’t have much internal logic, though. I thought the book was only slightly interesting.

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Review 2059: The Fortune Men

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

I didn’t read what The Fortune Men was about ahead of time, because I was reading it for my Booker prize project. That meant that at first I wasn’t sure why the novel switched between the stories of two characters, Mahmood Mattan, a Somali stoker who is a gambler and a petty thief, and Violet Volacki, a middle-aged Jewish storekeeper. However, when I turned to the back of the book, I learned that Mattan was the last man in Cardiff to be sentenced to death for the murder of Violet Volacki in 1952 and that years later he was found to have been wrongfully convicted.

Mahmood is not a perfect man. He has quit going to sea to be near his Welsh wife and children, but work is hard to find for a black man, and he has too much time on his hands. He spends it gambling and womanizing and occasionally stealing. He has a big mouth and he lies a lot. But he is not a murderer.

When the police come to see him because a woman was robbed and her throat cut, he doesn’t tell the exact truth about where he was, because he was dangling after a Russian woman and he doesn’t want his wife to know. A black man, possibly a Somali, was seen outside the store, but even after the victim’s sister and niece say it was not Mahmood, it’s pretty clear that the police decide it was him and look for people to place him there. After a reward is announced, plenty of them pop up.

This novel is well-written and should have been haunting, but first I kept having problems staying with it, and later, even after I got more interested, I felt distanced from the characters and the story. Mohamed went on side trips through the memory of Mahmood’s life that should have made readers feel closer to him, but I did not, and I noticed Goodreads reviewers complaining about the same thing.

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Review 2058: Crudo

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

If I had ever heard of Kathy Acker, I might have appreciated Crudo, which I read for my James Tait Black project, more. The novel incorporates her writing and depicts a woman named Kathy who has had a double mastectomy and otherwise seems to echo Acker’s life except that it is set in 2017, some years after her death.

The novel is primarily a character study. Its events, with some reminiscences, are days leading up to her wedding and the month afterwards. She is extremely neurotic and sometimes seems almost paralyzed by world events. She is commitment phobic and yet is getting married, so she obsesses about that. She thinks in very graphic terms and expresses herself crudely at times. She decides to do something and changes her mind. She has screaming fits because the deck was painted brown.

Altogether, she is a difficult and infuriating woman. I didn’t like her at all, which interfered with my enjoyment of the novel.

Laing’s writing is clean and vivid. She appropriates the words of others as did Acker, but her appropriations are noted at the end of the novel.

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Review 2057: The Man in the Brown Suit

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

The Man in the Brown Suit is one of Agatha Christie’s early novels, and it isn’t quite like any of her others. Although it has a mystery of sorts, it’s not really one readers can figure out. Instead, it’s more of a romance/adventure story. The only thing that links it to some of her other novels is the presence of Colonel Race.

Anne Beddingfield has led a boring life, so when her father dies, the first things she wants is adventure. It seems obvious to her that she should go to London. While she is standing at the end of the train platform with another man, he looks up behind her and sees something that makes him back up quickly and fall off the platform in front of the train. When a man claiming to be a doctor checks him, Anne notices that he doesn’t check him correctly and in fact takes something from his pocket. She follows him out of the station and picks up a paper that he drops.

The man had been wearing a brown suit, and when Anne hears that a man in a brown suit is suspected of murdering a woman in a vacant house belonging to Eustace Pedler, she connects the two. She also figures out that the paper indicates an assignation to take place on a ship bound for South Africa, so she buys a passage on the ship.

The novel is written in such a jaunty style that it’s hard to take its dangerous situations seriously, and Anne has a rather primitive idea of a romantic partner (as are the ideas she expresses about men and women), but the novel is entertaining, as Anne falls into one predicament after another. She ends up with proposals from three different men, and although I think she picks the wrong one, Christie has had an exercise in fun.

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Reading Thirkell’s Barsetshire Series in Order: #18 The Old Bank House + #17 Love Among the Ruins Wrap-up

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Thanks to my stalwarts who participated by commenting, even though one was unable to get a copy of Love Among the Ruins this month. They are

  • Liz Dexter
  • Penelope Gough

Our next book is The Old Bank House. Yes, I’m going to the bitter end, even if no one can follow. So far, it has not been painful. I am posting my review on Wednesday, November 30. I hope a few of you will pop in and join me in reading it or some of the others coming up.

And here’s our badge.

Review 2056: Bewilderment

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

Theo Byrne is an astrobiologist whose job is to search for life on other worlds. He is also a bereft widower and the father of Robin, a troubled nine-year-old boy. Robin is kind and super-intelligent, very concerned about animals, but he is also hyper-anxious and prone to horrible fits of rage. He has received conflicting diagnoses, and Theo doesn’t want to subject his growing brain to psychotropic drugs.

After a few incidents at school, Theo is aware that he soon may be butting heads with social services. So, when Stryker, a scientist at the university where Theo works, offers Robin a place in his experimental but noninvasive treatment studies, Theo accepts. The treatments seem to work magically well, but at the same time Theo fears that Robin is becoming a different person.

Theo and his environmental activist wife have brought Robin up to appreciate the abundance and beauty of natural life, so some of the most beautiful moments in this novel come during their camp-outs. Theo also entertains Robin with bedtime stories about the kinds of life that may be on other planets.

Powers has created an absolutely convincing story about the inner life of a fragile boy and his father, who is trying very hard but who himself is unusual and slightly off-kilter. He has set it in a slightly dystopian time with a Trump-like president and a background of social and environmental disintegration. The references in the beginning to the novel Flowers for Algernon set the tone for where the novel is going and despite a few smiles, there is no doubt that it is going there. Here is another troubling novel from Powers, very sad and powerful.

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Review 2055: #ThirkellBar! Love Among the Ruins

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

We meet many of the characters we’ve come to love in Love Among the Ruins, but principally the Marlings, the Beltons, the Deans, and the Leslies.

With a short stop-off to the Warings, where Mr. and Mrs. Waring have given over most of their mansion to their son-in-law, Philip Winter, for a boys’ school, the novel begins with the Leslie/Marling family, who are planning a birthday party for their beloved Lady Emily. Lady Emily tires easily and is sometimes confused, but still presents her overwhelming and charming personality. She is being capably cared for by her daughter, Agnes Graham, and Miss Merriman.

Lucy Marling has been manfully trying to keep her father’s estate running as neither of her brothers seem interested. They have no money, but she thinks if she can convince her father to sell some land, she can keep the rest going. But he is unwilling. Desperate to cultivate some wasteland, she looks to Mr. Adams for advice.

Oliver Marling is worried about Lucy, as she doesn’t seem to be marrying anyone and is depressed about her struggles with the estate. But Lucy is in love with Captain Freddie Belton and knows he doesn’t return her feelings. Oliver himself is spending a lot of time with Jessica Dean, the actress.

Jessica’s older sister Sue, a Red Cross librarian, has earned everyone’s respect with her quiet capability, and she has earned more than that from Freddie Belton. But a misunderstanding is keeping them apart. In the meantime, young Clarissa Graham is determined to land Freddie. And lest we forget Charles Belton, he has fallen, as do many younger men, for Agnes Graham.

This novel dwells a good deal on the difficult situation the British were in after the war, with limits on food, clothing, and gas, while apparently, I didn’t quite understand it, trying to prevent farmers from raising pigs. There are lots of snarky comments about the government, referred to as They, but I’m happy to say, far less snobbishness than in some of the previous novels. There is in some characters, though, an awareness of who is county and who is not, and it looks like the Deans may shortly be accepted as county.

The activities of this novel are centered around the fates of several characters, the Conservative Party Convention, and the Barsetshire Pig Show, so there’s a lot going on. I know Thirkell’s post-war novels were not considered her best, but I enjoyed this one about the same as the others, so so far, for me at least, they are not decreasing in enjoyment.

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