Posted by Sari
I rather think I am now on top of my reading-list. This should be it. How weird. I have also read Temeraire, but if you want to know what I thought about that, go and get yourself the next Tähtivaeltaja. I feel like a bad fan because it is the only genre novel I have read for awhile, if you don't count maybe marginally fantastic Russell and Mitchell.
Mary Doria Russell: Dreamers of the Day
Mary Doria Russell’s first novel, The
Sparrow was one of the better books I have read, and it’s beauty and horror
lingered on in my mind, so much so that I have never read the sequel because it
would either be as harrowing as the original or it would not be as harrowing
and would tarnish the excperience of reading the Sparrow.
Dreamers of the Day, which I bought because
it is an Arabian Lawrence novel and written by Russell is a very different
animal. It is a story of Agnes Shanklin, an
accidental heiress (influenza has killed all her relatives) who takes a
Cooks tour trip to Cairo
in 1921. There she and her dachshund Rose bump into the bigwigs of the Europe who are splitting up near-east in the aftermath of
the First World War. As Agnes’s late sister knew Lawrence, she gains access to their circle,
and is able to observe the process from the outside.
Dreamers of the Day is surprisingly quiet
and reflective novel and even though Russell stated that her inspiration was to
open up the history of the crises in the modern Middle East, the story in the
end is less about Lawrence, Churchill and Gertrude Bell, and more about Agnes
and her growth. Which is fine by me, because I absolutely loved her, she must
rank as one of my favourite protagonists ever. Beautiful novel, whimsical ending, great
protagonist and an interesting glimpse to the conference which shaped the
modern Middle East. There is no bad here.
David Mitchell: Black Swan Green
Mitchell’s
Black Swan Green is very different from his earlier output, it is pretty much
no-frills bildungsroman, a month of the life of a young boy growing up in a
small town, Black Swan Green of the title during the Falklands
war. Jason is thirteen, stammers and writes poetry under a pseudonym so that
his mates won’t find out.
I am
not sure why I liked this very realistic growing-up story so much better than
the more imaginative and symbolic Kafka on the Shore, but I did. Perhaps it is
because Black Swan Green communicates so well the feel of the 1980s, and I was
about Jason’s age in 1982. I also liked how aware Jason is of the complex and
fragile hierarchies at school and at playground, there was something terribly
honest and lifelike in his calculating efforts to stay in middle of the pack. Finally,
as with all Mitchell’s books I have so far read, as a novel it is impeccable. The
structure is carefully thought out, the register never falters, and the
language sings. I did not expect to like this book, but darn, I did. And for those who like their prose in Finnish,
Sammakko is publishing Black Swan Green in Finnish in October.
Alan Hollinghurst: Swimming-Pool Library
Hollinghursts
Booker-winning Line of Beauty is instantly recognisable vision of 1980s thatcherite
Britain
and managed quite brilliantly juxtapose the new Tory elite and pre-AIDS gay
scene with each other. Swimming-pool library juxtaposes two different gay
experiences with each other as it alternates between the modern(ish) day
exploits of Will Beckwith and the diaries of elderly Lord Nantwich whose
biography Will is engaged to write. It is an intelligent, well structured book
wich carefully teases out the the contrasts and comparaisons between periods,
between gay as other and other as oriental, but somehow I found it much colder
than Line of Beauty, perhaps because Will is not particulary sympathetic
protagonist.
Steven Saylor: Roma
There is a
genre of historical novels, where the author follows the lives of a family or a
place (or both) through centuries. Edward Rutherfurd has made a career out of
them. Saylor, known best from his Roma Sub Rosa –series of mysteries set in the
ancient Rome,
takes a crack at the genre with his tale of roman republic from the foundations
of the city to Caesar and Augustus. It is necessarily episodic tale following
the members of the same family through the seven odd hundred years. Though
Saylor’s knowledge and scope are commendable, I found the whole less than
satisfying. I tend to dislike novels where point of view characters change, and
thus every time got into the rhythm of the narrative, the story changed. This
of course, is not so much a problem with the book but with the reader.
Edward Marston: Painted Lady
Painted
Lady is a part of a series, and avery run of the mill detective story set in
regency London, where architect Christopher Redmayne and a puritan constable
Jonathan Bale investigate the murder of a lord whose beautiful wife was the
object unwanted affections of a party of unsavoury men about town. It is
difficult to put a finger to why I was less than enthused about the book, maybe
it is that even if the scenes between Araminta and her maid might pass the
Bechdel test, the female characters are still so noticeably thinner than male
characters that it lessens my enjoyment of otherwise passable historical
mystery.
Thomas Pakenham: Scramble for
Africa
As we seem
to be in the middle of a new scramble for Africa, it was very educational to
read about the first one. Pakenham’s Scramble for Africa is a basic primer to
how the European states took over Africa in a pretty much unplanned scramble,
extended their european rivalries to that continent and created the divisions which
plague Africa even today. The book jumps all over the continent, trying to tell
the story in a roughly chronological order, but manages even so to create
fairly lucid narrative, and the story itself is nothing less than fascinating.
This is an old-fashioned narrative history about the imperial powers and their
actions, and thus Africans themselves are pretty much reduced to objects of
conquest without any voice of their own. Considering the scope of the book,
this is defendable approach, but if one wants to have an even half-way accurate
picture of the history of the period in Africa, other books written with other
viewpoints and with a more theoretical approach are a must.
Rex Stout: Fer-de-Lance
As I now
own all but one of Stout’s Wolfe books, I was struck by a desire to re-read
them in order. After Sayers Stout is my favourite mystery writer because of his
characters and his language. The great big polysyllabics rolling from Wolfe’s
tongue just get me every time… First on
the list was Fer-de-Lance, the book that introduced Archie and Wolfe to the
world in 1634. Here Fred Durkin brings Wolfe a case of a missing Though Archie is remarkably like himself, and
most of Wolfe’s eccentricities are present, the series is this inaugral
adventure still finding its feet, and I would not recommend it as a starting
point for a novice. The murder is rather over-the-top (a poisoned dart in a
golf-club), and I found the resolution less satisfactory than many other Wolfe
novels. Average but still enjoyable.
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