Book Reviews: What I've read since last month

 Transcriptions & Human Croquet Kate Atkinson

   

Anyone who has read the book reviews on my blog before will know I am a huge Kate Atkinson fan. During the past month, I have read the last two of her novels downloaded onto my Kindle and I suspect this means I’m up-to-date with her current oeuvre, so no more to read for a while, sadly.

Human Croquet was a title I had on my Kindle for years without reading. I actually thought it was by Rose Tremain, though that wasn’t why I was avoiding reading it as I like her books too. It just kept slipping out of my sight-line, for some reason. Anyway, I have now read it. It is a novel about fairytales and Shakespeare and forests, common themes in Atkinson’s work. Transcriptions, a novel about spies in WW2 and the BBC in the 1950s, has a central character called Juliet and frequent references to Shakespeare.

            Having read Atkinson’s masterpieces A God in Ruins and Life After Life within the past six months, and having very recently re-read her stunning debut Behind The Scenes In The Museum, I was at first rather underwhelmed by Human Croquet. It had Atkinson’s characteristic humour, diversions into the almost-magical and the certainly weird, but these moments were finally explained away by ‘reality’. The apparent time-slips and alternative realities in the novel were very compelling to me however, though they are given a mundane explanation at the end. Atkinson has great skill at conveying the experience of dysfunctional family relationships and this book displays this power very vividly. It also contains at least one monstrous human being.

            By contrast, Transcriptions isn’t concerned with families but with the loyalties and betrayals of wartime colleagues and friends, bound together and split apart by duty and ideology (and by shared trauma). It is a novel whose central theme is fidelity – it asks us to consider the meaning of faithfulness, of patriotism, of the truth, and of treason and duplicity. Like all Atkinson’s novels, it has moments of great humour. Juliet is a mistress of dry wit, and there are several set-piece scenes, particularly in the early part of the story, where her youthful naivity makes her a deeply unreliable and comic character. But this is a serious novel, ultimately, dealing with grave, sometimes frightening, realities. Overall, I found Juliet herself a rather distant, unsympathetic character. I don’t think I would like her if we met, whereas I could imagine liking the central character of Human Croquet in real life. The adult Juliet has an emotional control that makes her seem distant – she is interesting and cares about others, but she is such a private person, for reasons that become clear as the novel progresses, that it is difficult to fully warm to her.

            Both novels are definitely worth a read, particularly if you’re an Atkinson fan.

 

***** Excellent – highly recommended, though not her absolute best

 

Breathing Lessons Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler sets her novels in Baltimore, and you do get a flavour of the city from them. However, what they really give you is an insight into human relationships, particularly those within families. Like Kate Atkinson, she is a mistress of the domestic drama – unshowy, unflamboyant, often quietly profound, often humorous, always devastatingly realistic, she unpicks the strands that bind and divide people, with immense skill.

            She is best known for her 1985 novel, The Accidental Tourist, which was made into an excellent film starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. This novel, along with her 1982 novel Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant (my personal favourite) and Breathing Lessons (1988) were all shortlisted for The Pulitzer Prize, and she has won and been nominated for many other awards.

            Her central skill is in her attention to detail. Without becoming pedantic or clogged down in the trivial, she manages to capture the nuances of everyday relationships with superb intricacy. Her characters sound like real people. The couple in Breathing Lessons have the sorts of arguments we all do, and speak in the sort of language real people do, just with a Baltimore accent. They engage in throwaway bickering, they have banal conversations which often disguise deeper emotions, they misunderstand each other and sometimes understand each other more than they let on. They say things which the readers, with our broader knowledge of what different characters are thinking, recognize as revealing aspects of their characters unknown to themselves.

            The action in Breathing Lessons takes place during one day, when Ira and Maggie Moran are driving to a friend’s funeral and then home again. Along the way, they have several minor adventures and there are numerous opportunities for them to reminisce and squabble and wind each other up, and to forgive and understand each other’s idiosyncracies. We find out about their youth and how they met, about their children and their grandchild. The book is frequently laugh-out-loud funny and occasionally brings tears to your eyes. The characters are utterly believable, and the tone is generous, sensitive, sympathetic, but always unsentimental. I loved this novel, though it isn’t as good as Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant, which I believe everyone ought to read.

            Many of Kate Atkinson’s novels are set in the mid twentieth century, and many of Anne Tyler’s novels were written in a contemporary world which is now decades old. The advantages of this are that characters don’t have mobile phones and the internet – they feel like they are about a different world in some ways. However, human relationships don’t change. It is only in characters’ interactions with their contemporary milieu that things are expressed differently perhaps – the essential tensions and bonds between people remain much the same from generation to generation. Atkinson is a more whimsical writer, more likely to engage in magic realism than Tyler, but both are extremely good at conveying the subtleties of marriage, parenthood, and friendship.

***** Highly recommended

 

Burns Books series by Liz Hedgecock

   

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This is an unchallenging series of comic fantasy novels about a magical bookshop. It has a magical cat, dangerous books, an immortal owner, vampires, a coffee shop (by book 2) – oh, and an ordinary, modern young woman with a degree in Business Studies who becomes it’s manager. What’s not to like?

            Well, it is written in a very straightforward and rather unexciting way and the plots are remarkably simple. It is essentially a child’s book but for grown-ups. Everything is explained, even spelled-out – very little is a surprise for the reader, unless the reader is someone who is very easily surprised. Characters are uncomplicated and predictable, and above all never horrifying or genuinely scary. There is a lot of narrating of everyday activity iike serving customers and filling shelves and choosing what to have for your tea. The central character, Jemma James, is perfectly likeable but deeply unrealistic. She is sweet, kind, warm, efficient, rather naïve, has a comical faith in modern HR procedures and business-speak, and has the rather chaste relationship with the young man who runs the bookshop’s coffee shop of a girl-next-door from a 1950s or 60s novel that your mum would approve of you reading.

All this means you don’t have to worry about having your emotions put through the wringer. You won’t be kept awake by the exciting plot twists or sudden unexpected diversions, as everything is well-signposted. This is definitely ‘cozy’ fantasy. Words like ‘gentle’, ‘restful’, ‘undemanding’ come to mind when I think of how to describe the series. It is in fact excellent bedtime reading if you like mild fantasy of a rather unimaginative kind. Hedgecock does this stuff very well, and it is a definite niche for aspiring writers.

*** good bedtime reading if you like ‘cozy’ as a genre