Used Books Blog

Restless by William Boyd is a fascinating novel that exposes the British Security Coordination (BSC), an extensive British covert spy operation aimed at persuading the US to enter World War II. However, this engrossing spy intrigue is hamstrung by non sequitur characters and over-reaching thematic metaphors.

Restless takes place in two time lines: the mid-1970s and early 1940s. The reader joins Ruth Gilmartin as she discovers the mysterious and heretofore unknown past of her mother - Eva Delectorskaya.

The chapters that chronicle Eva’s indoctrination and participation in the BSC are absorbing and suspenseful. Unfortunately, the chapters that follow Ruth’s daily life wind up a disappointment. Her world is populated with a number of characters and plot lines that never connect to the rest of the story. At the end of the novel I simply regarded these passages as unwanted filler. Instead, I wanted three more detailed chapters on Eva and her relationship with Lucas Romer, her BSC mentor.

The activities of BSC agents, the cat and mouse tactics, are what drive Restless. The concept behind the BSC was to use the media to actively bring the US into WWII. The BSC did this by surreptitiously planting fake stories that pointed at Nazi aggression or expansion past Europe. The BSC was an extensive spy network dedicated to information and spin!

Information wasn’t neutral … if it was believed or even half believed, then everything began subtly to change as a result - the ripple effect could have consequences no one could foresee.

In today’s information rich society, particularly in an election year, this theme resonates strongly. The fact that it was taking place 60 years ago is both interesting and frightening given what could be accomplished today.

The other downfall of Restless is Boyd’s seeming need to make the novel about more than just the personal stories that reveal the BSC. Does anyone really know another person? Are we all waiting for the proverbial other shoe (aka death) to drop? These themes and metaphors are a stretch and, frankly, detracted from my enjoyment of the taut spy thriller that was at the core of Restless.

Last but not least, there was no acknowledgment or afterword that told me what parts of the novel were based on fact. Instead I had to search the Internet to find … a fantastic piece Boyd did in The Guardian titled The Secret Persuaders. If only Boyd had used more of this material in Restless!

I’m being hard on Boyd because Restless was good but had the potential to be great. Ladies, don’t be scared away by the idea that this is a nuts and bolts spy story. It isn’t. The main characters are strong women embroiled in a great and sometimes romantic intrigue. Both my wife and I enjoyed Restless by William Boyd, with reservations, and recommend it as good summer reading.

The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi covers a wide range of weighty topics without seeming to lose focus and never sounds preachy. The story follows Karim Amir, a teenager in middle-class suburban London, born to an English mother and Indian father. Karim’s coming of age story explores themes of family, love, sexuality and racism.

At under 300 pages it’s a wonder Kureishi is able to cover so much ground with so few words. It’s not that his writing isn’t incisive (it is!), it’s simply economical and efficient. A simple page or two and you can feel the suffocating boredom of Karim’s family life like dust trapped in stale sunlight. But before you have a chance to fully digest and process the scene you’re on to the next vignette.

Purposeful or not, the speed in which events occur mirror the accelerated development that takes place during those teenage years. The time when everything seems to happen at once. It dawns on you that your parents are people with their own foibles; you’re experimenting with sex; you gorge yourself on music as a proxy for self-identity; you fall in love or lust; and you begin to comprehend subtext, drafted into a new and messy adult reality.

The Buddha of Suburbia would be an above average novel if limited to just these ’standard’ story lines. Overlay the cultural and racial tension and The Buddha of Suburbia becomes unique. It is no longer a Catcher in the Rye variant (not a phony), but a layered period piece and social indictment with self-identity as the centering plot device; whether it is Karim’s struggle to find his place in the world; or generations of Indian immigrants grappling with native versus adoptive customs; or the definition of family relationships in modern society.

However, I never really ‘felt’ for Karim, though I understood and appreciated his motivations and actions. Karim seems somewhat disconnected and aloof, which may be how Kureishi is able to quickly navigate from one thematic element to the other. I wanted to feel more for Karim, but instead I felt for his situation. Objective empathy instead of visceral reaction.

This made The Buddha of Suburbia more entertaining and light, yet less penetrating. Despite this lack of emotional depth, I recommend reading Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia.

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby is a novel about four very different people who unexpectedly meet on the top of a high-rise building on New Year’s Eve. Great rooftop party perhaps? No. As the title might give away, all four found their way to the roof to commit suicide. Sounds depressing, but if you’ve read (or seen) any of Hornby’s work you’ll know that it will be a (dark) comic romp.

Sure enough, A Long Way Down is a hyper-glib rim-shot of a novel that uses humor to explore the topics of loneliness, desolation and loss. Nearly all of Hornby’s work has a dark, troublesome theme residing at its core. His work is about how people find their way in the world, how they deal with hardship, how they … manage, which at times seems tough at best and impossible at worst. Laughter seems the best medicine.

Hornby has a bit of real-life experience to draw upon in this arena, given that his son is autistic. It’s tough for me not to read some of that background into his portrayal of Maureen, a middle-aged single mother with a severely handicapped son who keeps her housebound most of the time. The difficulty of that love shines around the wit of the words like an aura. You can’t help but feel it there.

The three other characters are Martin, a scandalized daytime tabloid star; JJ, a rock musician who believes his life is his career and his career is finished; and Jess, a young foul-mouthed girl without an emotional filter who lives in the shadow of her missing older sister. None of the four jump from the roof that night. Don’t worry, that’s not a spoiler! The book is about how they get on. It’s about how they band together and continue to live, despite their differences and despite any real fairy tale ending.

I like Hornby’s work and picked him up when High Fidelity was in paperback. I find it notable that his work translates extremely well to the big screen. While High Fidelity the movie was good, About A Boy the movie may be better than the book given the great performance by Hugh Grant. Speaking of Hugh Grant, it might be a stretch but the character of Martin seems like it could be loosely based on the scandalized actor.

A Long Way Down also covers some of the same material as Douglas Coupland’s Eleanor Rigby and there are similarities in wit and tone. However, the plot and format of A Long Way Down is somewhat formulaic. And even the interplay and dialog, while funny, doesn’t quite encapsulate the book. In the end, it’s a mood and a determination of life that is extracted.

It feels good, and at the end of the day that’s what most of Hornby’s work seems to wish upon the reader.

Jasper Fforde’s The Well of Lost Plots is third in the Thursday Next literary detective series. Thursday (our hero and literary cop) is pregnant by a husband who no longer exists and is hiding out in an unpublished murder mystery (something like a poorly constructed blend of Patricia Cornwell and John Grisham.) Makes perfect sense right? Well, if you’re a fan it does and I am a fan.

To enjoy Jasper Fforde’s novels you should make sure you have a funny bone. Once that’s been confirmed you might want to brush up on your classic literary works. While the plot is generally of the soap opera or spy thriller genre, it is wrapped in a literary fun house where you’ll meet Heathcliff from Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and speak frequently of Shakespearean works. Fforde’s alternate universe includes time-travel, a menacing corporate entity aptly named Goliath, and is populated by Neanderthals and dodos which have been genetically re-engineered.

Fforde uses the absurd for both comic effect and astute social commentary. And he’s keenly interested in the act of writing and reading. That is perhaps the highlight of The Well of Lost Plots. The plot surrounds an upgrade to how a book is read, aptly described as an operating system. The new version is UltraWord, which would help books gain market share on a populace that is reading less and less. One of the benefits of the upgrade would allow the reader to do away with all of the ‘he said’, ’she replied’, ‘he shouted’ and any other identifiers of who was actually speaking each line of dialog. To me, I can image Fforde exasperated with these markers, but at the same time chiding readers for the inability to simply engage and partake in the reading experience.

The Well of Lost Plots is Fforde’s most ambitious thought exercise into the creation of a book world. On this level the book is the best of the series. From a plot and narrative perspective, it is just this side of satisfying. While I recommend The Well of Lost Plots, any reader should read the series in order, starting with The Eyre Affair. For a sneak peek at the oddities you will find, visit the fabulous Jasper Fforde website.

Atonement is the first Ian McEwan novel I’ve read. I’ll pick up another but with a bit of trepidation. Atonement has been linked - repeatedly - to Jane Austen’s work. The first act of this four act novel certainly has all the hallmarks. In fact, I found the first 40-50 pages to be difficult to get through. I kept looking at the praise on the back jacket and thinking that I had to read on because that many reviewers couldn’t all be so wrong.

I’m glad I got through those slow, overly descriptive first pages. (I just about closed the book when I read something about how the sun made parallelograms on the floor.) Midway through the first act a tension finally begins to build and I became drawn into the plot. The first act is set in 1935 where we meet the Tallis family, in particular young Briony and her older sister Cecilia. Briony witnesses events between Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant whom the Tallis family has supported in his educational pursuits. The interpretation of this event puts into motion the rest of the novel.

The first act is all very Austen, very English, prim and class based. It is the second act that details Robbie Turner’s time in France during World War II that transformed this novel. The bleak nature of war and the ability to survive (or not) are laid bare for the reader. Not in a overly sentimental way where you feel you’re being manipulated, but just a honest narrow account of what occurred. In many ways, Atonement is a bit like Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. The beginning in no way prepares you for what is to come. The contrast is stark and I found this device to work to McEwan’s advantage.

The third act is interesting and at this point the plot and love story drive the reader through the narrative as they wish to find out what happens. You know you’re on to something good when you really and truly are reading because you are seeking that resolution. McEwan does this superbly. However, there is a small fourth act which in some ways feels like an editor’s addition. Perhaps not, but I find myself frustrated with the fourth act for a number of reasons, the least of which is a too tidy bookend of the novel.

Atonement is extremely enjoyable, insidiously readable and frustrating.

If you’re looking for shiny-happy science-fiction then I suggest you pass by Market Forces and Richard K. Morgan all together. On the other hand, if you like dark science fiction with an edge, aren’t afraid of a bit of blood here a bit of sex there, then Richard K. Morgan should be right up your alley. Morgan is, in many ways, an updated Philip K. Dick - which is a huge compliment in my book. Now granted, he doesn’t have the legacy yet, and hopefully Richard won’t be eating cat food or going bonkers like Dick, but … his work is sometimes very similar.

In Market Forces, Morgan merges geo-political globalisation (he’s British so I figure I’ll use the ’s’ instead of the ‘z’) and class warfare issues with Mad Max driving action sequences. Morgan’s characters are always honest in their duality, of doing bad for the sake of good, or simply doing bad and acknowledging that it’s what has to happen. Now mind you, sometimes you get the hint of real politics being throw about, but it’s light enough for me not to notice or not to care. That’s how early Tom Clancy read for me versus the late Clancy which just feels like some political pamphlet dressed up in plot and military tech specs.

There is a bit of fun melodrama here and there in Market Forces as well as interesting vignettes about the corporate world and what it takes to survive and thrive. It’s bleak, it’s powerful and it’s a great read. If you’re a student of what makes books or scripts great it is the idea that someone has to change, has a decision to make and that’s just the case in Market Forces. Chris Faulkner has a decision to make as his life intensifies and careers out of control. His decision seems linked to some … truism. It’s this central theme that keeps you wanting to read to the end, and it’s an ending you’ll want to read. No doubt about that.

Truly a wonder when 700+ pages seems to be too few to contain a story. But that’s just what Susanna Clarke does in her debut novel. A great yarn that unfolds satisfyingly slowly. In fact, it’s over 100 pages before you even meet Jonathan Strange!

I don’t think of myself as a magic buff, but first Glen David Gold’s Carter Beats the Devil and now Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell have captured my imagination. I admit, I have an odd memory of Doug Henning’s distinctive ‘thank you’ and have a certain soft spot for the Philadelphia infused Penn and Teller. But I won’t be striking out to find more magic related reading unless it meets the high-level that Gold and Clarke established.

I’d heard quite a bit about The Curious Incident prior to picking it up - which may have tainted my reading of the book. I know many others had the same problem with Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genuis. Thankfully for me, I didn’t have that problem with AHWOSG, and picked it up after seeing someone reading it on BART. That was not the case with The Curious Incident, which I’d heard many a person gush over.

Sure, it’s quirky and stylistically interesting given the point of view of the main character. But other authors have tackled similar territory far better, most notably in Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. Yes, the story does take a few mild turns that might raise eyebrows but they weren’t altogether unforeseen. I mean really, you didn’t see a few of those twists coming?

It was enjoyable, but simply that.