If you loved Koch's last novel The Dinner you're going to be real disappointed in his new one I'm afraid.
It lacks all the elements that made The Dinner so superb. There's no tension or subtlety, no suggestiveness or nuance, no sureness of touch. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was an early manuscript whipped into some sort of shape for publication to capitalise on the huge success of The Dinner.
There is a death and a rape, but we know the killer very early on and the sex was consensual if it happened at all.
It has the same basic theme as The Dinner. The evil lies in the ordinary man - a teacher in The Dinner, a GP here - rather than the larger than life, vulgar and frequently sinning, actor on the public stage.
But there are far too many red herrings and meaningless characters in this one, meaning the plot meanders all over the place and struggles to retain the reader's interest. It certainly didn't retain mine.
Sure, there are some nice elements. The depiction of the everyday life and times of an experienced doctor is very well done. Koch captures the disillusion and 'seen it all before' cynicism exceptionally well, and spins some delightful comedy out of it. You'll never look at your GP the same again. He also has an uncanny ability to bring the dynamics of marriage and family relationships to life in all their glory and horror. There's no sentimentality here.
In essence though the book is a major disappointment. Three stars out of five.
This novel, which is exceptionally good, beat off the front runner for this year's Miles Franklin award. This was a surprise and a profound disappointment to many people, who had considered Richard Flanagan's magnificent The Narrow Road to the Deep North a sure thing.
So did I. (http://notaboutbooks.blogspot.fr/2013/10/richard-flanagans-incredible-narrow.html)
Word on the grapevine is that the judges were split. Whether that's true or not, I consider they made the wrong decision, just as they did last year in choosing Michelle De Kretser's Questions of Travel.
Wyld's book is a spare and beautifully written story of a young woman's flight from horror, pain and abuse. In a real sense it's a testimony to the ugliness of men. We are spared no lacerating detail of the harsh, brutal treatment handed out to the woman by the cruel and violent men she encounters in country Australia as she flees from the consequences of a tragedy she caused as a reckless 15 year old in Darwin. Eventually she finds her way to a peaceful Isle off the coast of England where she lives alone and tends sheep.
But the dark beast of horror still pursues her.
While brilliantly rendered Wyld's novel has a fairly narrow scope and no where near the ambition, emotional power or intellectual depth of Flanagan's. You have to ask yourself whether the Miles Franklin judges have been spooked by the breakaway Stella Prize for women writers. Is a decidedly masculine work like Flanagan's handicapped from the start?
As I said, the judges, for the second year in a row, have made the wrong decision.
This is J.K.Rowling's second crime thriller in the Cormoran Strike, Private Detective, series.
The growing relationship between Strike and his admin assistant Robin is the heart of the book. It is very well done, particularly Robin's tense relationship with her fiancé Mathew and his distaste for her underpaid job. I was so hoping that she would dump this upper class witless prick and bed Strike, but, alas, it wasn't to be.
The central part of the book however - the crime thriller aspect - is pure unadulterated rubbish. A famous novelist is brutally murdered and everyone associated with him - his publisher, editor, agent, wife, lover, a fellow author - is in the frame. The victim had submitted a manuscript for his next book that lays into each of them. It's a savage, thinly disguised exposure of all their perversities and dark secrets. The manuscript is called 'Bombyx Mori' ( Latin for silkworm).
Strike's previous case, the murder of a young celebrity model, made him famous because he solved the crime and outsmarted the police. The media loved it.
So Rowling has him outsmarting the police again. Ho hum. All the suspects in this new case are hugely unlikable but, this being publishing, they all like to talk over lunch or drinks. They're a miserable bunch of sexual deviants, drunks and conceited bores. It's just horrible spending so much time with them, but Rowling's obviously got it in for all of these book industry types and we all have to suffer.
The denouement is rather absurd. Strike works out who the murderer is, but as readers we have to wait for dozens of pages before we're told. In the meantime the police, of course, have charged someone else. The murderer's identity is supposed to resolve all those unanswered questions and tie all the loose ends up, but it's just a puzzle by now and the whole thing is pretty meaningless and uninteresting, and Rowling indulges in some awful sentimentality. I'd given up caring.
I doubt I'll be reading the third Strike novel.
Sent from my iPhonehttp://www.mugglenet.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/The-Silkworm1.jpg
This 600 page monster has left me sort of flabbergasted and confused.
I just can't figure out what I think of it. Half the book is an utterly beguiling story of a boy from a wealthy, aristocratic background who grows up in France in his mother's chateau, and who befriends the plucky daughter of his mother's caretaker. The children are home-schooled by a young classically trained Jesuit priest (of dubious sexual inclinations) and both are revealed as highly intelligent. Their relationship deepens. Both characters are warm and intriguing and very engaging. It's the 1950's and they are children of the French Resistance. It's the heart of the book, very dramatic, and I loved it.
The other part of this novel, however, is a major let-down. In fact the first 120 or so pages are all over the place. We're in the land of today's trashy media, as vulgar as reality TV. Strange characters come and go and we're left unengaged. We're talking the Vanderbilt family fortune and the grasping herd of misfits and uglies desperate to suck on its teat. Hospital's gone overboard - there's even a Bernie Madoff!
The French boy is a Vanderbilt of integrity who is offended by it and wants nothing to do with it.
The book is his journey from riches to rags. As Hospital says in her Author's Note at the end 'Only now that I have finished the novel have I realised that I have been overturning an American literary archetype. The Claimant is The Great Gatsby in reverse.'
There is a completely bizarre Australian connection. The French boy, desperate to escape his identity and past, turns up in later life at the end of the novel as a farmer in Queensland. The French girl joins him. This is so contrived as to be embarrassing. It is cloying, sentimental and cringeworthy, and I got the real sense that this Queensland born and bred author was just indulging in that sin that besets so many - a bit of Queensland boosterism.
There's melodrama. There's gothic. There's even this line: 'They made savage love, like tigers' (p546).
Oh please!
(Here is an excellent review in The Australian by Peter Craven. Here is a lame review by Lucy Nelson in the Sydney Morning Herald, who can't even spell the name of the main character!)
I've always found myself more comfortable on the margins of Conventional Wisdom critiquing it rather than on the inside articulating it.
Which is why I've been fascinated by the writings of the so-called 'climate skeptics' for a number of years now. They've had an awfully bad run in the main stream media, and thus not too many people read their books.
But Professors Ian Plimer and Bob Carter - both geologists - have written excellent and challenging books, as has Nigel Lawson, former British Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Plimer's just released Not for Greens is another of his trademark hard-hitting, passionate, take no prisoners offerings. His voice is that of an old curmudgeon banging remorselessly on about the larger truths in the climate debate - larger, more important insights, fed by geology.
According to climate scientists Plimer is a 'denier' from a parallel universe. But for a boy from Broken Hill like me, whose father spent his entire working life underground, that universe is a far richer and more intellectually satisfying place than the visions of apocalypse manufactured by today's climate alarmists.
Plimer is a natural born polemicist. He writes with verve, wit and frequent unremitting savagery. He's always pungent and spares the reader no technical detail in getting his message across. The book demands your concentration.
The energy chapter for example is superb, and worth buying the book for alone. He's simply excellent on the deplorable economics of renewable energy sources such as wind farms, solar and biomass; And his explanation of how fracking works, its economic importance, and the politics around it is fascinating and persuasive.
But unfortunately the book has so many weaknesses it's hard to know where to start. Firstly, Plimer would get far more traction and credibility if he stopped talking exclusively to old white men, and accepted the challenge to talk to younger people. His extreme cartooning of the Greens for example is a real turn-off. It's low rent and embarrassing. On virtually every page he resorts to stuff like this: 'The great thing about an underground mine is that it is a green-free zone' (p230). And possibly gay-free as well? Any decent publisher would have cut this rubbish out.
The book has a stupid title and a totally meaningless subtitle. The blurb on the back cover is woefully inadequate and was obviously written by the author himself - always a bad thing. It gives no hint as to the real substance of the book. Typically, for so many Australian books these days, there is no author photo, no index and the copy editing is shameful. It's also been badly (if at all) proofread. In other words it's been put together by rank amateurs.
(Dear editor: it is quite commonly accepted in Australia these days that 1000 million is one billion. So the earth is 4.5 billion years old, not '4500 million'. This dated editorial style irritates all the way through the book).
There are too many manufacturing and chemical details re iron and steel production down the years that are simply not key to the book. A good editor would have chopped this. There's no need for the reader to be informed in detail about the Bessemer process of steel making, how magnesium oxide is made, or how nickel sulfides are mined. This is a series of lectures from Mining 101 and they go on and on and the students are asleep at their desks.
However Plimer's enthusiasm for mining is infectious and he does succeed in conveying the enormous complexity that mining operations involve. We're not just a quarry, just 'digging up and shipping stuff out'.
I've read all of Plimer's stuff over the years, so I'm used to his cantankerous style, but I've little doubt that most readers will be thoroughly put off. If one of these days he could get himself a mainstream quality publisher who could manage his wayward emotional outbursts and discipline him to focus more clearly on the gentle art of persuasion he could do himself and a much wider public a great service.
A few months ago I favourably reviewed (here) Guardian journalist Luke Harding's The Snowden Files. It was the story of whistle blower Edward Snowden and the Guardian's heroic role in disclosing the data he extracted from the NSA (National Security Agency) while working as a contractor for the US Department of Defence.
Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for the Guardian at the time, and the one trusted journalist sought out by Snowden to facilitate the publication of the story, also builds in this just released book a dramatic narrative around all the events, issues, personalities and conflicts associated with the whole, incredibly dangerous enterprise.
It's a beautifully written story of passionate, courageous journalism and a gripping read.
Edward Snowden himself is portrayed as an amazing young man. His courage, integrity, intelligence, strategic and media sense, and utter commitment to honesty is inspiring.
He did not want to go to prison, he said. 'I'm going to try not to. But if that's the outcome from all of this, and I know there's a huge chance that it will be, I decided a while ago that I can live with whatever they do to me. The only thing I can't live with is knowing I did nothing.' (p51)
Greenwald's passion and obsession with exposing the truth, doing justice to Snowden, and not giving an inch to subservient, 'government embracing' media is a lesson to all so-called political journalists.
He outlines in detail all the NSA's surveillance systems, including how Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, YouTube and other tech companies were compliant and cooperative despite their denials.
'Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide...The [NSA] is devoted to one overarching mission: to prevent the slightest piece of electronic communication from evading its systemic grasp.'
Threats against Greenwald by government spokespeople and establishment-defending journalists, who refused to refer to him as a journalist, resorting to handles like 'co-conspirator' and 'activist', were, and continue to be, shameful.
The absurd personal attacks on Snowden by the mainstream press, even quality press like the New York Times, the New Yorker and CNN, were lazy and dishonest lies.
Greenwald gets very reflective in the latter third of the book. He asks how and why the establishment protects itself, and reviews the literature on the psychological effects of the awareness of surveillance on people as they go about their normal lives.
The final chapter, The Fourth Estate, is an insightful essay on journalism and its relationship to the instruments of government and power. It's also a damning indictment of so much of contemporary journalism which has stooped to be little more than a mouthpiece for government interests.
No Place to Hide is a seriously good and worthwhile book. It's also a riveting read.
(Apologies for the lousy cover image above. It's Penguin's 'Commonwealth' edition and it's a strikingly bad cover anyway. And there's no photo of the author nor any index. Cheap.)
I have to confess I'm a bit of a sucker for books that come with four or five frontispiece pages of highly positive review snippets from around the world, like these:
'By the end you're exhausted and delighted by the relentless stream of literary adrenaline which the narrator has continuously injected into your veins' (Le Figuro)
'Dicker writes a story full of such intelligence and subtlety that you can only regret the fact it comes to an end. A novel that works on so many levels: a crime story, a love story, a comedy of manners, but equally an incisive critique of the art of the modern author.' (Elsevier).
There are twelve more of these, all heaping lavish, breathless praise on this first novel by young Swiss author Joel Dicker.
The problem is the book is simply awful - an unmitigated disaster on just about every level.
The core narrative is the love affair between Harry Quebert, a writer in his mid thirties, and Nola Kerrigan, an apparently gorgeous, blond, 15 year old teenager. Yes, she's fifteen. The setting is a small town in New Hampshire.
They spend a lot of time together, in Harry's house, and even go on a four day vacation to Martha's Vineyard, where they 'lived as if in a dream, in that beautiful hotel by the ocean. They swam, they walked, they ate together in the hotel's large dining room, and nobody looked at them or asked them any questions. On Martha's Vineyard, they were able to live.'
No, we're not told by the narrator whether they were intimate, that is, whether they HAD SEX. All through the book the notion that Harry, this mature, sympathetic character, who recognises his love for this young girl is wrong and must end, but makes no real effort to do so, is in all probability indulging in a heinous crime, well that uncomfortable fact is simply ignored. We're in the realm of 'pure joyous love' here people. That is good and great, right?
All the characters in the novel, and there are plenty, are bold stroke and dramatic stereotypes. The young are good, the police are corrupt, small towns are full of provincial, ignorant types, etc. Some of the characters are even delightfully rendered, like the brash Barnasky, the New York publisher, and the young narrator Marcus' mother, a delicious Jewish creation.
Books like this always have multiple and baffling twists and turns and this one is no exception. The problem is the ultimate resolution is about as emotionally unsatisfactory as it is possible to get. It's a complete mess. It's barely credible and quite silly. As a reader I felt deflated and sort of angry.
So here's my quote, if the publisher would like to include it: 'The reviews quoted here, apart from mine, are rubbish'.
