One month in, almost!
1 It Ends at Midnight - Harriet Tyce
2 The Pact Sharon Bolton
3 Fatherland (audio) Robert Harris
4 Jews Don't Count David Baddiel
5 House of Glass Hadley Freeman
6 Booth Karen Joy Fowler
I'm putting excellent books in bold as they do over on MN, and it's a good reminder of that, although as others have pointed out on this thread, good ones tend to stay with you a while. With that in mind I've pretty much forgotten the gist of my first two psychological crime novels. I picked the Harriet Tyce one because I really liked her "Blood Orange" novel but this latest one didn't really do it for me, starts off with two bodies found impaled on railings outside Georgian town house in Edinburgh and then rewinds, most of which I've forgotten. already The Sharon Bolton book, slightly better but equally implausible. Bored and over privileged sixth form students dare each other to do really stupid things, one being driving the wrong way up a motorway in the early hours of the morning with the horrific outcome of wiping out a family in a head on collision. One of the girls who wasn't the driver agrees to take the rap on the basis when she comes out of prison the others will grant her every wish. By that time I hated them all for being so reckless.
I got Fatherland by Robert Harris on audio from my library, it wasn't what I expected, quite short in the form of a play and due to a poor sound quality and mumbling I could hear a lot of it so may get the book at a later stage. The premise of the book is a dystopian setting in the 1960s of a Third Reich having won the war.
Jews Don't Count David Baddiel's where the author puts forward the argument that Jews, for various reasons, are not seen as minority group and somehow the prejudice directed from both the right and left is somehow something they have brought upon themselves. This theme is explored in much greater depth in the next book being:
House of Glass. Journalist Hadley Freeman pieces together the 20th century history of her grandmother's life from photographs and bits and pieces she found in a shoe box after her death. Grandmother Sala/Sarah and her three brothers start their impoverished lives in the Poland of their childhood, a country they hated not least of all for it's ongoing antisemitism. As young adults they leave for a Paris of 1930s where many of their cousins have already settled. France represents to them a land of opportunity and through sheer hard graft they prosper, one brother in particular who starts his own fashion house and later on as an art dealer becomes very wealthy. Throwing off the shackles of the previous existence, the siblings develop a deep love for the French way of life but whilst the anti semitism is possibly not so overt as it was in Poland it nevertheless it is still there particularly as they gradually move towards the end of that decade. Before the outbreak of the war, Hadley's grandmother meets and marries an American and moves to Long Island and whilst she is in relative safety there, she misses her beloved Paris and her family. furthermore once again in this the third country she finds herself living in, the thinly veiled anti semitism is still there bubbling away never far from the surface as indeed are her feelings of anxiety and disquiet remembering the pogroms of her childhood in Poland and the fact that at least one of her siblings and many of her cousins will perish in concentration camps before the war is over. As with the Baddiel book Hadley Freeman's family history illustrates the feelings of being part of a marginalised people vilified by both the right and the left for a whole gamut of theories, ranging from Jews are Bolsheviks, communists, agitators to being part of a cabal of wealthy industrialists bankers who control the world, overlooking the fact as far as that one is concerned, like Hadley's grandmother and brothers , many were born into abject poverty, or the most spurious reason of all The Jews killed Jesus. I think the disquiet that many Jews feel as to whether they will ever really feel safe anywhere is possibly a theme that is explored in both these books particularly as sadly anti semitism has again re-emerged, in worst case scenarios pointing the fingers at Jews per se, as if they collectively responsible for the worst excesses of successive Israeli governments brutal handling of the Palestinians.
Deeply sad in parts, I loved this book and found her family history really engrossing, well researched and well written.
Booth - Karen Joy Fowler The Booth of the title being John Wilkes Booth who has the dubious claim to fame of being the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. This is much the story of the whole Booth family rather than him in isolation. The patriarch of which was an eminent English Shakespearean actor of his time who moved his family from London to Baltimore. John Wilkes Booth was one of the younger siblings in the household, he doesn't really feature that large as at least one brother and sister who play more prominent parts in the narrative. It's also hard to understand quite how he went against the grain in supporting the Confederates whilst living in the northern states and quite at odds with his family in that support and they were greatly vilified after the event by association not to mention horrified as well, so much so one sister and family move back to England for the rest of her life.
Much of the book is about the acting experiences of firstly his father and a couple of his brothers. It seems there was quite an appreciation of the theatre back in mid 19th century America and John's father spent large parts of his life on tour, that was not without it's problems, travelling up and down the Eastern Seaboard was relatively easy compared to performances way out west in San Francisco which involved a steam ship down to Panama, hacking their way through the narrowest part of that country, the building of the canal was half a century in the future, then on reaching the Pacific coast another boat up to San Francisco, so difficult a journey took months, it seems one of the brothers just stayed there and didn't come back for several years until a railroad was put into Panama. In fact that particular brother appeared to find it easier to cross the Pacific and tour Australia rather than do the return journey to Maryland.
As a historical novel I thought it was really well written particularly the interactions between the various members of the family.
My next month's reading will start with
The Rising Tide - Ann Cleeves firstly as it's a library book that can't be renewed and then I hope to get my hands on the latest Elly Griffiths, can't wait!
