GREAT READS FOR JULY 2012
The
Inquisitor, by Mark Allen Smith
His business is fronted by Harry, a hand-picked
computer whiz; their combined fees are
astronomical – but they’re worth it: no
client has ever voiced dissatisfaction or demanded their money back for a job
less than well done. Geiger is at the
top of his game – and he is also a terribly damaged man with recurring
nightmares and migraines that a lesser mortal would beg release from: the torturer is tortured from within.
Geiger has only one rule in his fearsome business: he never deals with children. Not ever.
So he is horrified to find that, instead being presented with a man
accused by the ‘client’ of stealing and hiding a priceless work of art, he is
given the man’s son – a mistake, the client’s representative states, but
perhaps Geiger could work on the son to reveal the whereabouts of his father?
Until this point I felt little empathy with Geiger
and Harry, his P.A. Despite Mr. Smith’s
obvious talents as a writer he failed to connect with me for the first 50 pages
– until the appearance of the child Ezra, 12 years old and terrified out of his
wits: the child’s rescue by Geiger and
the bond formed between the unlikely pair as they try to escape their ruthless
pursuers is the main thrust of the plot.
Geiger is forced by terrible events to face his past, a time so horrific
that he had completely blocked it from his consciousness, turning himself into
little more than a cipher to do so. Now
he is compelled to confront old demons so that he can conquer the new – and keep
Ezra, Harry and himself from being killed.
Mr. Smith has had much experience in film-making and
screenwriting and this is his first novel.
He has made an excellent debut into the difficult genre of suspense and
thriller writing – so many who tell such stories are distressingly formulaic
and predictable, but Mr. Smith has presented us with a different kind of
protagonist: not only can he inflict
pain, but he is also capable of bearing it, and despite the moral questions
posed by his actions throughout the story it is impossible for the reader to
feel that Geiger is anything less than heroic in his intentions. The novel’s ending is suitably ambiguous,
which makes me hope that Geiger and Harry will meet again in the future –
fingers crossed!
Talulla
Rising, by Glen Duncan
Jake Marlowe, The eponymous Last Werewolf, was killed
at the end of the first book;
unbeknownst to him, his lover Talulla Demetriou manages to survive the
attack that ends his 200 year-old existence – and she is pregnant with his
twins. She is helped to hide from
countless enemies by Cloquet, a former enemy and perennial loser who becomes
her helpmeet and staunch ‘minder’; she
gives his life the sense of purpose it has always lacked – after all, it’s a
big job to find a suitable victim for slaughter every month when the moon
rises. Not everyone can do it!
Unfortunately for Talulla, word of her pregnancy has
reached some very unsavoury (and smelly) ears:
it is believed by a certain cult of vampires that the consumption of a
werewolf baby at a certain time of the year will give them the ability to march
around in daylight, instead of dissolving into an odiferous puddle of ash as
soon as the sun hits them. Talulla is a
marked woman/werewolf, captured and completely disabled by the nasties as she
is giving birth and forced to watch helplessly as the vampires make off with
her little son. Luckily (depending on which way you look at it) the kidnappers
were unaware – as was she! – that another child was on its way: Talulla’s little girl is spared the same fate
as her twin.
Thereafter begins a mad pursuit through Europe to try
to track down Talulla’s enemies before they destroy her child, and on the way she
encounters to her utter astonishment other
werewolves, all new - it seems Jake was a little careless in his
‘relations’ with a certain prostitute, who in turn managed to infect several
other people: Werewolves rule, Dude!
Mr. Duncan’s plotting is bombproof: in case the reader wonders where our hairy
heroine gets the money to charge around the planet recruiting allies and
helpers, well, Jake left her his considerable fortune, amassed over two hundred
years, for a start. No matter how many
times I looked for a ‘Yeah, right!’ slipup I never found one; the action never flags and some great new
characters have been added to the mix.
I’m happy to say that this is that rare thing: a sequel that packs just as much punch as the
first, and is just as engaging. And Glen
Duncan can’t end things there because (by his own admission) he needs the
money! All to the good, I say. Highly recommended.
Peaches
for Monsieur le Curé
It has been eight years since Vianne left Lansquenet
and much has changed. New people have
arrived to settle in the village:
Muslims. At first, all was
well: Lansquenet is not intolerant and
while not rolling out a brass band welcome to strangers is not shunning the new
arrivals either. Everyone rubs along
well enough – until Monsieur le Curé objects to the creation
of a minaret in an old water tower: it
breaks local noise regulations, he says, but really he finds it a personal
offence to hear that foreign chanting in competition to his church bells. The priest and the local Muslim leader are on
a collision course.
More sinister events occur – the curé
finds that his position as village priest is being eroded from within when
dissatisfied parishioners feel that they need a ‘21st century man of
God’: father Reynaud feels the winds of
change and they are chilling.
Ms. Harris writes very well of bigotry and
racism. She does not shy away from
examining the actions and reactions of one culture as it pits itself against
another, and portrays only too clearly the evil that men can perpetrate in the
name of religion. Her countless fans
will find this third ‘episode’ in Vianne Rocher’s travels as satisfying as the
first two, but I have to say that a very pat and convenient fate for two of the
major characters was a disappointment and less than worthy of a writer of Ms.
Harris’s talents: my first thought was
that she had grown tired of her story and wanted to give it a quick and tidy
ending. So far I haven’t changed my mind.
Happily gay star of stage and TV screen Julian Clary
has written his third novel, ‘Briefs Encountered’, in part an homage to Noel
Coward, towering icon of 20th century British theatre, but more a
mystery story concerning Coward’s beloved home of thirty years in Kent,’Goldenhurst’
and the influence, pernicious and otherwise, the house had on him and
subsequent owners – including Mr. Clary!
Yes, our Julian doesn’t resist making himself one of
the characters in the book – being himself of course, one would think, but
making himself low-rent enough to cause shudders of disdain amongst his queenly
contemporaries in alternating ‘modern’ sections of the story, where he owns
‘Goldenhurst’ for barely a year (re-naming it with a snigger ‘Priest’s Hole
House) before selling it with indecent haste for a knockdown price to Richard
Stent, a celebrated actor renowned for his uncannily accurate portrayal of
Coward in a filmography of the great playwright.
Stent is initially thrilled with his new
purchase; despite his fame he knows that
his career is finite and is fully aware that with approaching age satisfying
dramatic roles will eventually dry up, but he gets a huge boost from the fact
that he is now living in a house that once belonged to his idol – the trouble
is, there seem to be a lot of other occupants as well, Things that go Bump in
the Night kinds of occupants: this house
is not a Happy Home!
Unfortunate events start to occur at an alarming
rate, as they do in alternating chapters for Noel Coward and his great love
American stockbroker Jack Wilson. ‘Goldenhurst’
has a unique way of showing its disapproval for those it doesn’t like, and Jack
is one of them.
So is Jess, Richard’s wonderfully efficient but
possessive P.A. It is patently clear to
everyone but Richard, that though he is as gay as a hat (yes, this story is
crammed to the gunnels with very merry people!) Jess is unhealthily obsessed
with her unsuspecting boss – oh, absolutely everybody can see the writing on
the wall: it’s all going to end in
tears. And it does, but as this is a
story about a celebrated actor, playwright, musical star and wit who modestly
admitted that he ‘had a talent to amuse’, there are also more delicious
one-liners and tart humour than a body can memorise in a bid to pass off as her
own at the next dinner potty. How
tarsome, but what a pleasure to read such sparkling dialogue.
Having said that, I have to say that Julian, the dear
boy, will never become a literary Giant:
he needs a better editor than he has – or perhaps this was the best his
editor could do with what she was given:
either way, there are some pretty clunky passages in his narrative. Even so, Mr. Clary manages to move the plot
along at a cracking pace; his characters
(except for the villains) are loads of fun, celeb names are dropped like
sequins and importantly, comparisons are drawn between sexual morés
of the nineteen twenties and thirties when to Mr. Coward’s perpetual fear and
dismay, it was illegal for two consenting males to engage in sexual activity,
to the present day, where same-sex couples may join together in civil union. Regardless of its flaws, Mr. Clary’s latest
is an entertainment extraordinaire, worth reading for the humour alone. Lashings
of fun.
Snowdrops,
by A. D. Miller
A. D. Miller’s superb
first novel reveals corruption on many different levels. He spent several years
as the Moscow correspondent for The Economist, so is eminently qualified to
describe in the most eloquent and brutal terms the loss of Russia’s moral
compass - which has probably been
missing in action for generations.
In 21st century
Moscow anything and anybody can be bought for a price, and that ruined, tawdry
and fascinating city’s inhabitants have turned confidence trickery and fraud
into an art form – and they don’t stop at fleecing gullible foreigners: their own compatriots are fair game,
too. Everyone is on the make and on the
take; everyone wears a mask of false
friendship and bonhomie, especially whenever some poor gullible fool is paying
the bill, and reality, when it finally rears its judgmental head, is merciless.
The story is narrated by
Nick, a British lawyer approaching forty, sent by his London firm to represent
them in Moscow to oversee deals connecting banks to Russian ‘investors’ in
oil-rich Siberia: there is an indecent
amount of money to be made by banks lending startup money to finance new oil
terminals; they are falling over themselves to advance money
to the new breed of Russian entrepreneur, and Nick’s firm is there to do the
legal work and charge huge fees. Money
for jam, until he and his colleagues start dealing with the Cossack, an
oligarch with a shadowy past and a talent for being out of contact in matters
of urgency. They begin arranging the
finance for him to construct a new terminal in Murmansk, advancing hundreds of
millions of dollars – oh, life is going well, there will be fat bonuses for
all, with a possible partnership for Nick, and everyone is just about swimming
in all the vodka tossed back in the many toasts to their success.
Nick has also started the
romance of his life with Masha, a beautiful damsel in distress that he
prevented from being mugged in the Metro;
she has been suitably grateful since and she and her ‘sister’ are his
firm friends, especially when they find out that he is a lawyer. And at that point Nick’s slide into
corruption begins – gradually but inexorably, he is involved in a scheme to
remove an old lady from her desirable central Moscow apartment, shifting her to
a new high-rise flat on the outskirts of the city. Nick completes all the tedious legal work, even
advances a hefty loan himself to expedite matters, all in the name of Love,
only to discover eventually, predictably, that he has been conned – out of his
money and out of his reputation, and left only with the bitter, guilty
realisation that he ignored all the warning signs (and there were many) in a
futile bid to hang on to his ephemeral romance.
More unpleasant revelations follow, and life for Nick will never be the
same again: his naiveté has been his downfall.
A.D. Miller has written a
superlative modern morality tale, examining venality and abandonment of
principle from many angles. He also
peoples his work with great characters, beautifully observed and entirely
convincing, and as a bonus – in case the reader will think that the story is an
unmitigated tragedy from start to finish – there is a rich vein of humour
throughout the novel, and the lasting impression that people the world over
will do what they must – and what is easiest – to survive.
And the very last word
must go to someone who summed Nick up most succinctly on the Remarks sheet
inside the library book: ‘Naïve fool –
shouldn’t be left walking around loose.’
That person stated in a
single sentence what has just taken me a whole page! Ah, it’s a dreadful thing to be a verbal diahrroetic.
The
Beginner’s Goodbye, by Anne Tyler
Her latest protagonist is
Aaron Woolcott, an editor who works in the family business set up by his
father, a firm that specialises in Beginner’s Guides to every conceivable
thing, and a vanity press for those paying to publish their own work. He has been handicapped since a childhood
illness deformed his right arm and leg and has fought ever since against his
overprotective mother and sister for his right to take care of himself – he truly believes that,
though he is living with very big disadvantages in his life, he is still
‘pretty happy’. And he becomes happier
still when he meets Dorothy Rosales, a radiology specialist. (he’s checking out
contributors to the Beginner’s Guide to Cancer.
DON’T SPEAK!). Dorothy views him with
suspicion: she is sure his interest in
her is because she would be the ultimate caregiver, given her obvious medical
skills and his obvious disabilities. She
is not the least bit interested in that kind of relationship and it takes some
time to convince her that he wants her because she DOESN’T wish to take care of
him.
Eventually, Aaron prevails
and they marry four months after meeting, embarking on a marriage that turns
out to be unsatisfactory for both of them – until Dorothy is killed in a freak accident. Aaron then has to deal with all the stages of
grieving, the anger he feels towards her for leaving him, and his own guilt
when he realises that there is a yawning gulf between being cared for and cared
about. The reader journeys gladly with
him through this big, painful learning curve, for Ms. Tyler fills her pages
with lovely minor characters, each trying to help Aaron in their own different
ways to survive – the casseroles and advice pile up at an astonishing rate! –
and her sure touch for comedy in the most unlikely circumstances increases the
reader’s enjoyment in every chapter.
Highly recommended.
