He's a 20 year old student in Paris and already an annoying little moralist with a peck-peck judgementalism, and she, beautiful and in her mid-forties with a suspect past, just wants to 'have fun'.
This tiresome and unoriginal story grinds on and on, becomes increasingly irritating, and eventually fizzes out.
Thankfully.
(Normally Text does a lot better than this. Thankfully.)
If you're at all fascinated by religion and philosophy, and particularly the 'God debate' Terry Eagleton's latest book is a must read.
It's a superbly written survey of Enlightenment, Idealist, Romantic, Modern and Postmodern thinkers, and its thesis is this: 'It is remarkable how long it took modernity to achieve an authentic atheism....Not believing in God is a far more arduous affair than is generally imagined. Whenever the Almighty seems safely dispatched, he is always liable to stage a reappearance in one disguise or another. Secular concepts contain so much religious baggage that religious faith is not easily consigned to a benighted past'.
You could safely categorise this book as yet another big boot up the arse to the hated Richard Dawkins and his ilk who he mercilessly attacked in his wonderful 2009 polemic Reason, Faith and Revolution. Dawkins and Sam Harris are 'old-fashioned nineteenth century rationalists who dismiss religious belief without grasping the kind of phenomenon that is is meant to be'.
Eagleton also has fun with the unctuous Alain de Botton and his Religion for Atheists: 'A committed atheist like himself, de Botton argues, can still find religion 'sporadically interesting, useful and consoling', which makes it sound rather like rustling up a souffle when you are feeling low'.
But a word of warning: don't attempt this book unless you want to seriously engage on an academic level with its arguments. Eagleton inhabits a rather rarefied atmosphere with his God and his European philosophers. As is his usual style it could be called a huge exercise in name-dropping, and therefore tedious in the extreme. And in a real sense, apart from the final challenging chapter on Postmodernism, it could have been written fifty years ago.
Nevertheless, as a huge fan, I persevered, and can safely say it was well worth it.
This just released book by award-winning Guardian journalist Luke Harding is absolutely riveting.
It's a very comprehensive telling of the whole Edward Snowden affair from the very beginning to just a few weeks ago. It's as objective as it's possible to be, but it's obviously sympathetic to Snowden's motives, actions and his current plight and vulnerability - stuck in Russia with a very uncertain future.
There are many heroes in this fascinating story of our times. Not just Snowden, but the editors and journalists who risked so much, who dared to confront the powerful political and security establishments of the US and Britain and expose their manifest wrongdoing - Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, being a clear case in point.
Harding weaves all the elements of this complex tale together seamlessly. In lucid prose he clarifies the technical and legal dimensions and the background political dramas as well.
I can't recommend this book highly enough.
Another brilliant effort from McKinty. This one has a force and clarity that is compelling. The plot, part simple mystery and part political thriller, has a pace and drive that is relentless.
Detective Inspector Sean Duffy is a tough, smart, rebellious, warm and witty hero. And has courage in spades.
One of McKinty's strengths is his real ear for dialogue - he captures the grit and earthiness that bring these Irish characters so marvelously alive. But most importantly he thrusts the reader into the heart of 'The Troubles', the violent political Catholic/Protestant upheaval of Northern Ireland in the 70's and 80's, and makes you feel its terror, both at street level and in the higher echelons of power.
He is historically and culturally literate and litters his narrative with insightful allusions to Irish history and myth. Like Ian Rankin he has his protagonist fill his lonely hours with great music, both rock and classical. And like Rebus, Duffy relishes a drink - whatever the hour or occasion. They are grounded and human and I like that a lot.
I understand McKinty envisaged only a trilogy for Sean Duffy, and 'In the Morning I'll Be Gone' is the third (as well as being the best). I hope sincerely that he revisits that intention and gives us plenty more of this intriguing character and setting.
After all, for many of us baby boomers the Troubles were a vibrant part of the soundtrack of our lives. It's a period rich in meaning and memory and McKinty does it justice.
Perhaps this long but hugely enjoyable novel should more properly have been called Death after Death. Characters, loved and unloved, are continually dying, usually in war. This is England in its darkest days. I doubt the London blitz has ever been rendered so dramatically and faithfully in fiction.
Highly regarded British author Kate Atkinson not only tells a superb and compelling story, but playfully indulges in a fair bit of 'meta', the license fiction rather than history gives her. She explores a range of countless possibilities and contingencies through the vicissitudes of her characters' lives and times. The structure is time shifts, but also, controversially, plot shifts.
It's a Zelig-like chameleon device but the question is does it let the author too easily off the hook? It's rather convenient not to have to tease out the dramatic consequences of rather serious events like death, rape and domestic violence. Ursula is raped at age 16, but was she really? She's still a virgin at age 23. Is her dreadful marriage and the awful violence she suffers at the hands of her husband real? I guess not. It's never referred to subsequently. Is her decade-long sojourn in Hitler's Germany (including marriage to a Nazi, giving birth to a child and taking German citizenship) 'real'? All these critical sequences turn out in the end to be just literary artifices. Similarly Ursula's frequent deaths along the way. And Teddy, her beloved brother: did he die in the war or didn't he?
As the novel unfolds we realise therefore that we don't know Ursula really much at all. We are being continually teased and our growing attachment to Ursula and others in her life continually undermined. We're thwarted at every turn by a literary device that serves little creative purpose.
Of course it serves some purpose. Our fragile grip on life as we're swept up in events is just that - fragile. So many things could have gone in other ways. I get this. But it's not terribly profound or insightful, it seems to me.
I would have preferred it if Atkinson remained faithful to her large and powerful narrative arc and refrained from structurally undermining it by short 'para-life' excursions. It's as if the impulse to tell domestic tales has overwhelmed her.
Because Ursula Dodd is a wonderful creation; full of life, intelligent, courageous and modern. She's impossible not to fall in love with. Her sister-in-law Izzie is no less delightful. The novel gives us an insightful portrait of women and their invariably awful lot through the 20th century. Though imprisoned in loveless marriages and stultifying social expectations, they are the very backbone of survival and progress.
However, in the end, I nod to the Guardian reviewer who wrote: 'Life After Life gives us a heroine whose fictional underpinning is permanently exposed, whose artificial status is never in doubt; and yet one who feels painfully, horribly real to us'.
(By the way, whoever wrote the blurb for this book should be taken out and shot. 'What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?' There is one reader who had no idea what the author was trying to do! It is absurd. And the book is rather poorly edited. Run-on commas infest virtually every page. Grrr)
A few comments on some recent popular fiction I've read over the last month or so:
Jennifer duBois' Cartwheel was inspired by American student Amanda Knox's predicament in Italy where she was charged and found guilty of the murder of her flatmate but was subsequently acquitted (although that judgement is currently under review). DuBois is at pains to point out however that her novel is entirely fictional, and she's set it in Buenos Aires in Argentina.
It's received pretty good reviews but in my opinion it's a major failure and for a very obvious reason. It's massively over-written. Every emotion, thought, action and reaction of every character, no matter how minor, is analyzed to within an inch of its life. There's a yawning disconnect between the overwrought hyper dramatic philosophising rhetoric and the simple story. An uncomplicated crime drama is far too small a canvass for this sort of stuff and inevitably gets buried. Endless psychologising does not good fiction make. And the ending proves my point. It's a complete, undramatic fizzle, as if the author forgot she actually embarked on a crime novel.
Like a classical musician playing a pop song, we get a clash of registers, and it's all wrong.
Hannah Kent's debut novel Burial Rites is based on the true story of the last execution in Iceland in 1829. Agnes Magnusdottir was condemned to death for her part in the brutal murder of two men.
I enjoyed this book immensely. It's beautifully written in spare uncomplicated prose and moves along at a decent consistent pace. And the resolution is just perfect.
Sometimes it gets a bit exposition heavy as all the characters are introduced and the story's elements and context put together. We're looking back at what happened and various players are filling things in for us. There are a few too many irritating minor country yokels for my sophisticated tastes, but eventually we get a full spread of ordinary reactions to a 'murderer in our midst', from ignorant prejudice to the more intelligent and sympathetic.
Kent keeps a steady hand all through this, and the tension builds. We're never sure of the truth till right at the end. I can't give the ending away other than to say it's a massive tick for the Danish/Icelandic justice system. Superbly done.
British writer Robert Harris' An Officer and a Spy is, quite simply, brilliant. BRILLIANT. His last novel, The Fear Index, was dreadful, but this is outstanding. He's returned to his home turf of politics and history. It's a compelling novelisation of the French military and political scandal of the late 1800's known as the 'Dreyfus Affair', perhaps the most famous miscarriage of justice in history. All propelled by a vicious anti-semitism.
What makes this book so engrossing is the story's relevance to our own times: an intelligence system gone rogue, justice corrupted in the name of national security, the persecution of a minority aided and abetted by a conservative establishment press, the age-old instinct by the powerful to cover up their crimes, and the relentless hounding of a whistle blower.
Read this book.
Every new Rankin is worth reading, but his latest, Saints of the Shadow Bible, is fairly ordinary and far from one of his best. It's for Rebus fans only.
Rankin sets up a nice contrast though between old policing methods and the new: John Rebus, a drinking, smoking, street smart, can do, rule breaking and effective operator, with a real nose; versus Malcolm Fox, the teetotalling, fastidious, process-driven, bureaucrat - 'paper pushing rather than blood and guts' as Fox's father puts it.
Not bad, but I wouldn't rush out to buy it.
Mark Rubbo, MD of Readings, suggested I do myself a favour and read this extraordinary book. His enthusiasm for it was infectious so I bought it, and $45 later, am sooo glad I did!
It's simply one of the best books I've read all year. And there have been loads of great books published in 2013.
As the author himself notes 'My Promised Land is not an academic work of history. Rather, it is a journey through contemporary and historic Israel, recounting the larger Israel saga by telling several dozen specific Israeli stories that are significant and poignant.'
What emerges is an overwhelming sense of a nation in the midst of an existential crisis - a nation in denial. Surrounded by a sea of 1.5 billion antagonistic Muslims, 300 million seething Arabs and 2 million angry Palestinians, and a rabid, nuclear-arming Iran committed to its destruction, Israel exists on the edge of a precipice - this despite all that it has achieved for its liberated, creative and dynamic people over the last 100 or so years.
I can't recommend this beautifully written, compassionate, and thrilling book highly enough. Do yourself a favour and read it.
