GREAT READS FOR SEPTEMBER, 2015
Disclaimer, by Renee Knight
Catherine and her husband
Robert have just downsized to a smaller house;
the move has been fraught with the usual chaos – things lost, misplaced,
and things mysteriously appearing without any logic at all, like the book on
her bedside table, ‘The Perfect Stranger’.
How did it get there? She doesn’t
remember buying it or receiving it as a gift, but it is late and she is
tired; she’ll read a few pages to relax.
Until she realises that the usual disclaimer ‘any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead etc, has a neat red line through
it, and as Cath reads on it is clear that what she is reading is account of the
disastrous (for her) holiday that she, Robert and their 5 year-old son Nick had
in Spain twenty years before: the
horrendous secret that she thought would never be revealed is now the plot of
this mysterious book, and she is its main character – and the villain of the
piece.
Ms Knight’s debut novel is a finely constructed story which expertly
manipulates the reader’s sensibilities;
for most of the novel we are suitably outraged at Catherine’s duplicity; we feel her husband’s shock and grief at her
presumed betrayal – all orchestrated expertly by a man who has lost everything,
and has laid the blame for his family’s ruin squarely on her shoulders. His revenge is intended to be
all-encompassing and absolute: everything
he loved is dead – by her actions. He will make her suffer as he does. Then he will drive her to her
(self-inflicted) death: it is only what
she deserves, but not until her husband, son, and reputation are lost to her,
then there will be no way back. There
will be no recovery from the grievous consequences of her selfishness, and it
gives him enormous satisfaction to see every part of his vengeful plan
unfolding without a hitch: finally, in
its last stages, his life has some meaning.
Ms Knight’s characters are uniformly credible and well
realised, from Cath herself who degenerates from a strong-minded 21st
century woman used to calling the shots at work and in her family life to a
floundering, near hysterical shadow of herself;
Robert, the honourable lawyer and supportive husband, unmanned
completely by his wife’s betrayal, then hating her for it; and Nick, their only child, an aimless
drop-out with a drug problem: he reacts
to his mother’s supposed sins by going on an enormous binge, ending up in
hospital with a life-threatening stroke - and finally, that last terrible event
gives Cath the impetus she needs: it is
time to fight back.
There is a satisfying resolution, if not an entirely
happy ending, to the story: Ms Knight
prefers reality to hearts and flowers, and that’s as it should be, for her
characters all live in the real world, with varying degrees of success. As do
we. FIVE STARS.
Time
and Time Again, by Ben Elton
Ben Elton has written many books on subjects we would all rather not think about, climate
change and the end of the world being cases in point. He is not afraid to question and explore the
consequences of man’s actions on earth, that beautiful planet that is his home,
and expose through clever fiction mankind’s sorry blunders.
This time, he poses the question put to Hugh Stanton, a
man who has lost everything worthwhile in his life: ‘if you had one chance to change history,
where would you go? What would you
do? WHO would you kill to make the world
a better place?’
The year is 2025.
Stanton is a retired SAS officer, an historian, and a shattered man,
having lost his wife and two children to a hit-and-run driver six months
previously. There is nothing left for
him in life, and he doesn’t know why he accepted the invitation to spend
Christmas with Professor Sally McCluskey, his old Cambridge history teacher at
Trinity college in Cambridge. His
enthusiasm for doing anything at all is so low that he hopes he will have a
fatal accident on his motor bike on the way – he could never kill himself, but
if there was an accident, he would welcome it.
Sadly, he survives the journey.
And finds that Christmas without his beloved family, whilst full of
grief, is survivable, because Professor McCluskey has a mission for him, asking
the big question: ‘If you had one chance
to change history ….?’
The
Companions of Chronos (the God of Time), a closed society of retired university
Dons wish him to journey back to 1914 to alter history, thus preventing the
Great War. They have a set of equations
from the great Physicist Sir Isaac Newton proving that time alters its axis by
a fraction every 111 years, making it possible for a person to travel back in
time, enabling him to alter whatever major world event had influenced the world
for the bad: the Companions have decided
in advance that ‘The Shots Heard Around the World’, fired by Serbian Gavrilo
Princip, killing ArchDuke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Grand Duchess
Sophie, must be prevented. If Princip
were killed instead, there would be no excuse for war to be declared.
BUT.
As
insurance, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany should be dispatched, too, simply because
he wanted war. He had been building up
his army and navy for years, and would eventually find a reason to start the
conflict. So Stanton is tasked with a
double murder to change the course of 20th century history, to save
the lives of millions of young men in the flower of their youth, and to bring
peace and plenty to those countries who would have been ruined and obliterated
by war.
What
an enterprise! What a task! Stanton is thrilled with his world-altering mission
– until he finds that the New World springing from his actions is even worse
than the Old: can he change destiny
again so that the old order prevails?
As
always, Mr Elton rockets the reader through the pages of his alternative
history at a frantic pace. His prose,
whilst not exactly purple, is very often highly coloured, but did I care? Of course not. No-one (with the exception of Stephen King
and his ‘11.22.63’) could make time travel through turbulent historic events
more gripping than Ben Elton; and no-one can make the reader agonise more
about what we are doing to our planet than he.
FOUR
STARS.
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