Here are my thoughts on the books I have read since my last book review:
The Unhappy Medium: Tom Fool by T.J.Brown, [Book 2]
I read this a few weeks ago and I've already forgotten a great deal about it, which probably tells you all you need to know. I can honestly say that I enjoyed both books in this series, but they aren't the type of novel that makes you think, or changes your life, or even remains for very long in your consciousness.
Book 2 is about art theft and some characters from Book 1 reappear. It is mildly amusing, fast-paced, good fun, and it entertained me for a few hours.
*** [passes time in a pleasant way]
White Silence, Dark Light, Long Shadows by Jodi Taylor
This new series by Jodi Taylor has several things in common with her Chronicles Of St Mary's series, as I believe I mentioned in a previous review. I have now read all three of the Elizabeth Cage series, all that Taylor has published so far, and I have to admit that they were page-turners. They kept me awake for most of the night on at least three occasions. However, I am quite easy to please when it comes to mildly comic fantasy set in the contemporary world.
As with the St Mary's books, the novels aren't without plot loopholes, or at least things you question while you're reading. I can't quite understand why Elizabeth Cage keeps returning to Rushford, for instance, or why she and Michael Jones haven't got down and dirty yet. However, the third book provides answers to several questions readers of books one and two might have, resolving some issues and raising others.
These books are a bit of a mish-mash of different fantasy motifs, psychological horror, modern mystery and dystopian communities, but they aren't hard-core. There are some scary set-pieces, but it is 'cosy' scary rather than ''hide behind the settee peering out between your fingers' terrifying. The books have an oddly old-fashioned, Hammer-horror, atmosphere. Modern technology takes a back seat. Elizabeth Cage might be a magnet for paranormal activity and weird shenanigans, but she is also a heroine who wouldn't be completely out of place in a 1950s suburb. I quite like this oddness, myself, though I admit it isn't everyone's cup of tea.
Taylor's stories tend to twist and turn, sometimes implausibly, and this series is definitely compelling, if you can suspend your disbelief. We are talking genre-fiction here, guys, however - this isn't literary fiction, and there is a degree of light-heartedness here and there which lovers of horror might not approve of.
**** [recommended]
Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
You will know by now that I am a MASSIVE Kate Atkinson fan, and I admit that I haven't reached the end of her latest novel yet so this review is a little premature. However, I thought I would write something here about it, nevertheless.
I'm not keen on the title, and not just because 'gaiety' is difficult to spell. It doesn't quite tell me what to expect - it's a bit vague, a bit melodramatic, despite also being quite apt for a novel concerned with London nightclubs in the 1920s. This isn't a 'bright young things' novel like Evelyn Waugh's 'Vile Bodies', however. It is about the grimy underworld of post-WW1 London, a world where the ruthless Old Ma Coker and her family run several lucrative nightclubs, notably The Amethyst, and where a spate of murders and handbag-snatching are taking place. This is a world of gangs and corrupt policemen, drugs and criminals, illegal abortionists and missing girls. The Coker offspring's contempt for the 'bright young things' is expressed forcefully several times.
Gwendolin Kelling, a librarian from York, is in London searching for two runaway teenage girls, Freda and Florence. There she meets Inspector Frobisher, tasked with ridding Bow Street of its corruption, homesick for the rural Shropshire where he grew up, and unhappily married to a French would-be suicide driven to drugs and despair by the loss of her child. Niven Coker, Mrs Coker's eldest son, is a man of almost James-Bondian mystery, driving a cream Hispano-Suiza, always accompanied by his German shepherd dog, Keeper. At the point I am at, it is hard to tell whether he is a good guy or a bad one. As always, with Kate Atkinson, no one wears the right coloured hat.
In fact, the best-selling novel 'The Green Hat' by Michael Arlen is a motif running through the story, and always, along with the 'Bright Young Things' themselves, with a sneer. One of my reservations about the novel is that, at times, it wears it's period research a little too obviously. Atkinson is at her best when she uses her imagination. One of her characteristic devices is to have characters respond verbally to things that other characters have only thought, not said aloud, which began to jar for me in this novel. Nevertheless it fits with the slender thread of the almost-supernatural that weaves through the story - Mrs Coker's recurring hallucination of Maud, a dead night-club hostess, and her 'reading' of cards and tea-leaves, for instance. You feel that Atkinson is always itching to bring in some magical realism.
My favourite sections were those which tell Freda's story. Despite being a 'stage child', I found Freda an appealing character. Similarly, Gwendolin is compelling too, though she reminds me of Harriet Vane.
I haven't read the entire book yet so it is unfair to judge it too soon, but it is not gripping me quite as much as other Atkinson books I have read. Her Jackson Brody novels are utterly absorbing, and I love Life After Life and A God In Ruins. I even loved Emotionally Weird, which had very mixed reviews, and her book of short stories Not The End Of The World, which many people I know loathed. Maybe by the time I reach the end of The Shrines Of Gaiety, I'll love this one too - but so far it is falling a little short of my expectations.
14 October update:
I have now read the entire novel and my opinion of it has changed a little. This is, like many of Atkinson's novels, an exercise in exploring the nature of writing itself. As with other of her novels, she uses intertextuality (the amusing excerpts from Ramsay's putative novel, among other things), highlighting the role of artifice and satirising people who think writing a novel is easy. Atkinson shuffles back and forth in time, sometimes describing exactly the same event but from another character's viewpoint, which is particularly effective in what is, at least in part, a crime novel. But it is the ending of the novel which highlights the fictionality of novels most obviously. It is both satisfying and also pared down, with a deliberate feeling that it is being rushed, invented as the writer goes along. The various plot threads come together in often implausible ways, but with a bright fizz of energy as everything is rounded off neatly. Yet the final plot strand mentioned is left open, in an enjoyable way. This is very self-conscious writing and few novelists could pull it off as well as Atkinson does.
Atkinson's sense of humour glimmers throughout. Frequently, I found myself being deeply frustrated by Frobisher's inability to actually do anything about police corruption or about the spate of murders in the city. He only discovers what the bad cops are up to by being told by another character. He never finds Florence and he finds Freda completely serendipitously after saving her life in a random act of heroism. He is actually a fairly incompetent police officer, and it is amusing how he always seems to just miss the crucial clue. Gwendolin Kelling, breezy and capable, is much better than him. Their relationship is funny and convincing. Frobisher's fate too feels like the sort of thing a novelist might do when she doesn't really know how to resolve a situation she has created - there is a deus ex machina aspect to it, but the contrivance feels planned and deliberate nevertheless. Atkinson is playing around with fictional cliches, plot stereotypes, narrative expectations.
The novel has a strong feminist undercurrent. The misogyny exhibited by many of the men in the book is shocking. This is a novel where the influence of the #MeToo movement is apparent, but where women generally come out on top.
***** [highly recommended - not the best Kate Atkinson book I've read but still up there in the five-star bracket]
No comments:
Post a Comment