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.
The subtitle says it all really - it was a war and it was a revolution.
Respected technology and media writer Fred Vogelstein has written an amazingly detailed and lucid account of the incredible corporate drama around the invention of Apple's iPhone and Google's competitor the Android operating system.
He gets inside the two companies by talking to many of the key managers and engineers involved from day one. There's much more than technical and design stuff here, though there's plenty of that. There are highly personal stories of friendships destroyed, betrayals, enmities, hatreds, etc. All the rich details that make this recent history so fascinating and important.
I really couldn't put this book down. It reads like a novel - a blow-by-blow intense unfolding story. And it brings Steve Jobs and his management style alive, as well as Google's Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt.
'Google wants to kill the iPhone. We won't let them. Their Don't be Evil mantra? It's bullshit.' (Steve Jobs)
If you want to get beyond the tedious partisan bullshit that passes for mature economic debate in this country then you could do a lot worse than read this important new book by highly regarded Australian economist Ross Garnaut.
It is an exceptionally good piece of work. Garnaut surveys and critiques our economic fortunes over the last 40 or so years, but concentrates mainly on the two key periods of the Hawke/Keating 'Reform Era' in the 80's, and the China boom years since 2000 which are now decidedly coming to a swift end.
He labels this post 2000 period of rising national wealth and personal incomes 'The Great Australian Complacency'. His point is we've seriously dropped the ball on economic reform while we gloated about our good fortune, and as a result are very vulnerable to a great economic deterioration in the near future.
The best parts of Garnaut's thesis are the chapters outlining his ideas for reform: Federal/State relations (yes, that old chestnut, but Garnaut's suggestions are radical and refreshing); the public sector, particularly health and education; utilities; transport; infrastructure; financial services; corporate welfare (he wants it seriously wound back - yay!); the tax system, and lots more.
He concludes with an excellent and quite damning critique of our efforts on the climate change front (particularly Abbot's proposed abolition of the ETS and his Direct Action proposal), the increasingly strident and perverse lobbying efforts by industry sectors opposed to essential economic reforms (like the appalling campaign against the mining tax by the mining industry), and the Murdoch media's uncritical sucking up to the flimsiest of conservative agendas.
His message is crystal clear: unless we take up the challenge of seriously increasing our productivity and competitiveness Australia's economic future looks grim indeed.
Our politicians need to read this remarkably good little book, and so do you.
(And by the way Black Inc Books, why no bloody index, you cheap sods?)
Bitter Wash Road is Australian crime writer Garry Disher's strongest work to date. It comes pretty close to Peter Temple's classic The Broken Shore in achievement. It's not your average crime thriller. It's a social critique of considerable substance. As well, it has a strong coherent plot, beautifully resolved.
Disher invokes a genuine country Australian atmosphere in all its dry unforgiving hardness. The menace is so thick you could cut it with a knife. We're talking territory not far from Snowtown here - a dark, backward place, where deviance thrives.
The main character, Hirsch, is a former whistle blower in the detective division of the South Australian police force, and hated. He's been demoted, shoved back in uniform and shunted to a one-man hole miles from nowhere to the north of Adelaide.
His police colleagues in the wider region are mean, dumb, ugly and threatening. It's a brutal, racist and sexist culture. And Hirsch's reputation for 'treachery' proceeds him.
Hirsch uncovers massive corruption, murder and paedophilia. The region's farming, commercial and legal establishment, as well as senior police, are all involved in some way.
But Hirsch is no push-over. He's got courage, moral and physical, in spades. After being served up so many lame and deeply irritating main protagonists in the recent rash of new fiction from Australia's 'iconic' literary novelists over the last few months it is just so refreshing to be presented with a sympathetic main character who can credibly be described as a hero.
If you've not read any of Disher's Wyatt or Peninsula thrillers then Bitter Wash Road is by far the best introduction to this major writer you could read. I can't recommend it highly enough.
