Books of 2023 Part 2: 30-21

 30) Blue Flowers - Carola Saavedra

This book was kind of an intriguing premise that I think ended up getting lost a bit in its execution. It starts with a love letter written to an unnamed recipient from the sender identified only by the initial "A". We then find out in the following chapter that the person who opens and reads this letter is not the intended recipient at all, but the new occupant of the house where it was addressed. This is basically both the premise, and the entire story, as the book consists of alternating love letters and the story of the man who receives and reads them, and the effect these letters have on his own life and relationships. Where the book falls down for me is that the letters themselves are all very long, and they're written from a perspective of having recently separated, where there doesn't seem to be much of an end goal. The writer is not necessarily trying to get back with the recipient, but is rather writing out her own feelings and recounting the last day they spent together, but revealing it piece by piece, letter by letter. Her writing therefore comes across as quite self-indulgent and overly elaborate and floral as she interrogates profundities like the nature of love and how their relationship came to the end that it did. There is verisimilitude in the sense that she wouldn't need to reveal all the details of the breakup all at once since they both supposedly lived through it, but the letters started to get tedious to me, and the story overall did likewise, because it was following the same formula but never making any progress to a next step. The story of the actual recipient and how he starts to fantasise about meeting the writer of these letters became more intriguing but at the same time, more ambivalent and actually rather disturbing by the end and depth of his obsession. I honestly feel this would work better as a short story - that would be necessarily more efficiently written - that could really pack quite an emotional punch; the premise and Saavedra's execution doesn't really add value from having stretched the premise out to a 200-page novel.

29) A Delicate Truth - John LeCarré

I went through a few stages when reading this (I think it's now my third LeCarré novel), and the stages I went through I think were deliberately designed by LeCarré's tinkering (HA. Pun. Because he wrote... nevermind) with the more conventional story structure. The first chapter takes us through the stages of an unknown operative known only by his undercover pseudonym bearing witness to an anti-terrorist operation in Gibraltar, whose outcome remains ambiguous by the end of the chapter. Then the second chapter takes us to a completely new protagonist at a completely different time, and it's only at the end of this chapter that the connection to the first becomes clear. The third chapter yanks us to yet another brand new protagonist at yet another time, and only here do the three chapters finally coalesce into a coherent whole. All of this made for quite compelling reading though, because there was another layer of mystery overlain on LeCarré's bailiwick of ambiguous espionage fiction, in this case namely the mystery that he was casting over his own narrative and how each of these characters play their role. It helps of course that his writing is always tight, and efficient, and his in-depth understanding of the inner workings and politics of Whitehall and their international relations are always on conscious display in even the most banal interpersonal dialogue. But unfortunately for me, once the substance of that extraneous mystery became revealed, the narrative became far more conventional. It becomes more of a typical spy thriller, with our operatives working against the clock to discover and reveal the "delicate" truth before their enemies discover that they're after it. It has the same page-turner quality, but there are some thinner parts to the narrative: a couple of extremely questionable decisions from characters that feel a bit ridiculous even in the context of the story, and there's a bit of a tacked-on romance subplot that plays a slight role late in the story but isn't really delved into in great depth so it felt a bit unnecessary. Ultimately I got pretty much what I expected from this: a cerebral thriller with a touch of commentary on international politics. I did feel early on that it would go in a different direction and perhaps be even more subversive than his commentary usually is, but despite a couple of odd forays into deep state conspiracy theory territory, I don't feel there was much more going on here than a typical cover-up thriller and that ultimately felt a bit of a letdown after an intriguing narrative conceit.

28) From a Low and Quiet Sea - Donal Ryan

This was an interesting book in some ways because I read it two books after reading the very book that preceded this, A Delicate Truth by John Le Carré, and this has the same subversive story structure as that in terms of switching between narratives and perspectives. The first part is the story of a doctor in a war-torn part of the world (I think it's later implied it's Syria) trying to get his family to safety through people smugglers; it then switches quite dramatically to be from the perspective of Lampy, a young Irish man living in a small town around the Limerick area, while the third part tells another story from the same area from another character's perspective and at another time. When the first shift occurred the story was striking me as if the point was to contrast the suffering of the Syrian doctor and his family with the trivial concerns that bother people in everyday Irish life. That may be one of its purposes, but like the LeCarré (or more aptly, like an early Alejandro González Iñárritu film), the stories all end up converging at the conclusion, and it's really the third story that obfuscates the book's overall purpose to me. This third part takes the form of a man in a confessional telling the story of how he started with small sins as a child before developing these as a grown-up to the point where he now sees himself as beyond redemption. While the stories all dovetail at the end, it all feels like a bit of a coincidence contrived by the author rather than the coincidences serving some grander thematic purpose. To continue with the Iñarritu comparison, the third story fits into this the way the Japanese story fits in with the other far-more-intertwined stories in Babel, and its connection to the first story is really only philosophically hinted at in the very last few paragraphs of the book. So the conceit of the book being about these parallel stories that come together, it didn't really successfully draw me in. And as much as I was successfully drawn in by the individual stories, the fact that there isn't really any thematic connection and they only exist in the same universe in the sense that, you know, they all happen on earth, just means that the ambition of the story falls flat beyond just being "a story of three different people doing stuff". I guess I'm sounding critical on it though mainly because I thought it was a good book, but I feel like Ryan could have done more to draw out resonance between the stories or even sharp contrasts, but I feel like they existed completely independently and manifested in their own styles so it's really only a narrative gewgaw that allows them to coexist at all; just some minor additions and tweaks could have taken me aback a great deal more when the conclusion comes about.

 27) The Friend - Sigrid Nunez

It was a long time after finishing this book that I ended up writing it up, mainly because I was finishing it while we were moving house and unpacking, which then bled into Christmas and I ended up just forgetting large chunks of it. The truth is I found the book a bit patchy anyway, and that just serves as a reminder that it's completely the wrong book to leave a long gap in between finishing and summarising one's thoughts on, since there isn't a very clear story here to piece together as a reminder. The book is the form of a kind of stream of consciousness but largely written in the second person by our unnamed narrator as she dictates this story and her thoughts to a close writer friend who has recently passed away. I say a "kind of stream of consciousness" because the writing is more structured and easy to follow than that term usually conjures up, but the point is the narrative consists of a series of unconnected thoughts and anecdotes where the narrator will be reminded of something or will muse on something else, and most of the time these little skits and slices of life are not really connected to each other. There is an overarching story, or at least a story that develops, and that's where the title of the book comes: specifically the "friend" refers to an enormous Great Dane left behind by "you" the departed friend, and whom our narrator adopts following his death. The blurb and so forth seem to suggest that this book is about the relationship she develops with the dog - and it is - but because the writing is so disconnected it felt like more of a sideshow to her musings to me, and in fact it took me a while to realise that "the friend" of the title referred to the dog, and not the relationship between narrator and dead-guy (since she reveals that throughout his life she was notoriously close to this womanising academic, without becoming one of his conquests). Mostly what this book gave me though was the voice of a well-read, erudite woman with great life experience, and as scattered as her thoughts were and patchy the narrative was, I did enjoy her company throughout. It's important to note though that part of the reason I feel I enjoyed her company was that a lot of the literary touchstones she referenced - Flannery O'Connor, Kafka, J.M Coetzee among many others - I myself am quite familiar with, so I could understand the references quite well (the exception being Rilke, who is probably referenced more often and in more depth than others). I can imagine this book falling quite flat - as, for instance, did The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco for me - if the constant literary name-drops were unfamiliar to the reader, but in my case the musings and observations were interesting and engaging, and that made the reading overall a success, even if the story was unclear and the ultimate point of the story a bit elusive as well.

26) Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy 

I think this book has been in my local library for years, but I always felt I had to read the rest of the Border trilogy first, and when I read The Crossing I felt I didn’t need to have waited until I read All the Pretty Horses first, as those two books are completely unrelated. This one however completes the trilogy and is useful to have read the previous two as it unites the main protagonists of the previous two books and explores their lives after all the traumatic incidents of their own individual stories. I had high hopes for that premise but I think I probably liked this the least of the three. For the most part it felt a bit like it was going through the motions, and I didn't really get a great sense of what was 'at stake' in this book. I think by contrast with the other two, this one felt more 'grown up' like John and Billy had survived to tell the tales but no longer being boys, this felt like less of a life or death struggle and there wasn't that sense of the innocence of adolescence being corrupted by the brutal landscape they inhabited. Here they feel part of that landscape, and the only real crisis of the story becomes a star-crossed love story, which in itself felt a little familiar and a lot of the story beats kind of predictable. Not that McCarthy is ever a predictable writer, but it encapsulates my not really feeling the emotional stakes: there felt to be a fatalism to the way this story unfolds, and having surpassed all the trials in All the Pretty Horses, John Grady Cooper's love story felt like a bit of an indulgence rather than constantly struggling against the odds just to survive. McCarthy weaves the story deftly though, and while I wasn't fully invested in the characters on this occasion he does paint the characters and their own feelings with enough clarity that I'm engaged with the story. But ultimately what would have felt like a decent if not harrowing conclusion to the story did lose track a bit in the epilogue where an ageing Billy meets an old Mexican (?) man who outlines his philosophy about life and death, which felt like McCarthy proselytising at the end when the exact same message was portrayed with plenty of clarity simply through the events we've just read through. It felt both tacked on and protracted and actually kind of cheapened a lot of McCarthy's impressive narrative voice that's so efficient otherwise throughout this trilogy.

25) The End of the Affair - Graham Greene

I've resisted reading this one for a long time, mainly because I went through a Graham Greene-reading phase a few years ago where I read all the books in my local library except for this one, and the reason for skipping this was that I've watched Neil Jordan's film adaptation of the same, and I loved that film adaptation so I just didn't have the enthusiasm for reading this book. It's been a few years now, so I was luckily able to read this with most of the plot points only vaguely recalled enough so it still developed with some surprises as it came along. But if I'm honest, the truth is I think I still prefer the film adaptation, whereas other Greene books have intrinsically worked their magic on me in a way that this one didn't. Part of my fuzzy remembrance of the film may be to blame: for instance I thought that the reason for Sarah breaking off the affair of the title was more of a revelation later in the story; this may be an adjustment made by Jordan and Greene himself (who wrote the screenplay for the adaptation) but I think it's more that Jordan makes more of a 'twist' of it whereas here it's just a middle section of the narrative, and because it's delivered through Sarah's journal entries we don't really get Bendrix's reaction to them in real time. I also found the film wonderfully melodramatic in an oldskool 50s kind of way, and the score really helps bring out the emotions in the style; in prose form it feels a bit stodgy when you're trying to evoke the same feelings. But really the main issue (and I apologise for the fact that this book writeup is largely a comparison between page and screen but that's just how I experienced this book) is that Bendrix in first-person narrator form is really quite insufferable; by contrast the film of this is really the film that solidifed my rule about Ralph Fiennes which goes: there are two types of films: films that aren't as good as they could have been, and films with Ralph Fiennes in them. Even in his self-serving obnoxiousness, Fiennes has an unmistakeable charm to him and the attachment people have to him makes more sense in the film, whereas in this book I just found him a pompous twerp, didn't enjoy his company at all and didn't understand why everybody else sought him out so much. I mean part of the point of the book is that he's an unreliable narrator, starting out making it a story about hate and anger at Sarah and the fact that she broke off their affair so suddenly and the revelations that happen make him question his whole outlook. But with only his perspective to show it, his misguidedness becomes quite annoying and the less I found I could relate to him, the more the emotion of the book became lost on me. The point is that usually when I read a book after seeing the film adaptation, I find new depths that I hadn't found in the film (or the perspective of the story is completely different, as per One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). But I think Greene's perspective in his narrative is especially Catholic - this does feel in some ways the most overtly 'grappling with Catholicism' of all of his very Catholic books - and it becomes a bit back-and-forth between the different contradictions the characters are feeling. The film in some ways probably simplifies this to make it a more straightforward narrative, but apart from Bendrix's obnoxiousness I found the wallowing in contradictions and faith and disbelief felt a bit too dense to wade through in order to find that emotional resonance.

24) Murder in the Crooked House - Soji Shimada

This is the second time I feel I've picked up two similarly-themed books in the same library trip because I read this shortly after Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie, and consequently couldn't help but compare the two. This one definitely has a post-modern self-awareness to it, in that Shimada presents the narrative alongside a number of illustrations and diagrams showing the layout of the house and various crime scenes so that he frequently winks at the audience and invites us (at times explicitly) along the quest to solve the puzzle. This means that I wasn't at all really drawn into the drama, and there's an excess of that self-awareness as it goes on that basically makes it more of a puzzle than a compelling story. I believe Shimada is a veteran of the crime fiction scene in Japan even though this was my first exposure to him, so I feel like he understands his audience and in that sense this book is quite fun as a piece of pure entertainment, but it has little beyond that. Those same qualities also made the book drag a bit for me, especially in act 2 when the police investigators who are staying in this crooked house and preventing everybody leaving while they try to solve the mystery have these long dialogues where they just discuss all the aspects of the case but frequently interject with comments about how frustrated they're becoming and how they can't make head or tail of it. That sort of drags a bit because Shimada tends not to reveal any new clues during this section, but keeps circling back to the same puzzles that they've been dealing with before, but primarily this dragged for the very reason that I had correctly identified the murderer in the first act, and I'd correctly guessed it because frankly there are only two viable suspects and it's obvious it could only be one of those. Meanwhile the investigators constantly keep returning to motive, and trying to work out which of the 12 or so people in the house could possibly have the motive and drawing blanks, and I kept silently screaming at them "It doesn't matter! It's obvious who did it! Just work out how they did it and worry about the motive later!". There's one particular plot point that happens early on, where I knew what was going on mainly because it has distinct echoes of a similar plot point in Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia, and Shimada includes an irritatingly deliberate obfuscation of the facts, which then becomes this big twist down the line when the connection between two (quite obviously connected) mysteries becomes clear to the characters. That irritated me early on because I was thinking, why is nobody drawing this connection between these two events when they're so obviously related or at least could be related even if you haven’t read Murder in Mesopotamia. In the end, the answer to the mystery, the way it's revealed and the way all the clues fit together, that's all quite enjoyable so to Shimada's credit, he does understand that his key task in crafting this story is to set up the puzzle and make sure the logic all works and then work the story around it, but there were just a couple of glaring issues where he was too self-consciously skirting the clues to avoid giving it away, yet I felt like he basically knocked over all the other vases in trying to deftly tiptoe around the really precious one. It's an enjoyable country house murder novel that is very aware of how enjoyable it could be and sometimes tries too hard to entertain with its puzzle rather than focusing on the story.

23) Eventide - Therese Bohman

No reason to have picked this up; it felt quite short and quite written by a woman so that was enough, sight unseen. I think ultimately this is an interesting book more because of the themes that aren't explicitly stated rather than because of the action. Story-wise anything that centres around the academia of art history is unlikely to be chock full of car chases of course. The story revolves around Karolina Andersson, an academic who focuses on the depiction of women throughout a particular period of art history. While women are the focus of her work, the story that this narrative tells centres almost entirely on Karolina’s interactions with men. Having just left her husband after twenty years, she finds herself ricocheting from one romantic misadventure to another. It's clearly implied that Karolina remains an attractive woman and she becomes the object of desire for a series of professional and casual acquaintances - but seldom the object of actual lasting affection. The book explores Karolina's reflections and feelings during this time with a mix of pathos and what could only be described as self-pity, which brings me to one of Bohman's presumably deliberate but strange choices, which is to have left this book narrated in third-person. Given that we spend the entirety of the book in Karolina's company, often in her thoughts about herself and her future and her love life, it seems like a strange choice not to move to first person voice. At the point where I realised this I wondered then if it was a deliberate choice, in that some parts of the story revolve around awkward social exchanges and misadventures, and viewing it from the outside gives it more of a sitcom feel rather than the embarrassing cringe one could experience seeing it through her own eyes. But it's also an interesting perspective since frankly this book I think would fail the Bechdel test quite astoundingly for a book entirely about a woman trying to figure out her life. I can remember only one exchange between women in the entire book, that involves a PhD student in her department offering Karolina a cinnamon bun (which Karolina refuses). I can't help but feel there's an implied internalised misogyny in Karolina's character, in that she struggles to find or even seek any meaningful female company and seems to place all of her self-worth on the value that men give her. Which does make the denouement of the story more effective when it comes. Without going into detail Karolina up-ends a couple of her male relationships in one fell swoop, which frees her into a newfound sense of independence with a sense of uncertainty where hitherto she's been seeking little beyond validation from her male admirers. It's an engaging and clever ending that renders what could have been a dull, academically-minded book into a more trenchant exploration of femininity and self-realisation.

22) Permafrost - Alastair Reynolds 

This book suffers from a number of the same issues I found with Made Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky (still to come of course), but I think this one handles them a lot better. Of course I picked both of these up purely because they were short, so it seems a bit cavalier that I complain about them both ultimately feeling too short, but that's the case. Maybe I would never have read these if they'd been as long as I feel they needed to be, but that's a hypothetical story for another day. For now, there is Permafrost: set in a post-apocalyptic scenario in remote Russia, it tells the story of a kind of ‘humanity's last hope’ where they are harnessing the power of time travel to alter the present by salvaging parts of the past. The premise is solid and I think the story beats are generally well executed as well; unlike Made Things I feel this story relied less on genre tropes, but I think that's more because Reynolds uses them more skilfully so they serve a purpose in the narrative rather than just patching together the bits and pieces of his story in a rush to get to the finish line. What didn't really work for me here though is the fact that the chronology jumps all over the place. That feels like a stylistic trope Reynolds has employed to no great purpose here, when realistically this story would pack far more of an emotional punch if we followed it chronologically from our protagonist Valentina being recruited (with maybe a bit more back-story at that point than we're given, too) to join this experiment through to the experiment's inner workings and then the complications that set in. There's some prolepsis used here in the back-and-forth chronology but Reynolds doesn't manage to use this prolepsis to give us any sense of impending doom during the other timeframes, it just ends up feeling like stuff that happens later that I already knew about. It gives me less chance to get emotionally invested in the dilemma and in the fact that humanity's entire future is at stake here, so the fact that this - like Tchaikovsky's book - feels rushed in its efforts to get to the denouement ends up cheapening a lot of the payoff. I'm a bit surprised by the ending here, and the fact that it ostensibly seems hopeful and optimistic, whereas I found the predicament at the conclusion quite ambivalent and I was really unsure what was going to happen next. I think that's the greatest shortcoming here: the climax is so rushed that Reynolds doesn't seem to consider a "what if I'm wrong" scenario and instead charges through in the assumption that they're not wrong. So what could have been a big cathartic ending if he'd weighed up other possibilities ends up just leaving me confused and a bit led down the garden path.

21) The Sandman: Book One - Neil Gaiman

On a whim I had a look at the graphic novels section at my local library and hit upon this. I've read enough about this series online, including from people who - like me - are mixed to negative on Gaiman's novels, but consider The Sandman (in its entirety at least) to be a masterpiece. Odd side note is that I came home with this among a dozen other books from the library and that night I got informed that someone had put a reserve on this. So apparently I was lucky to get it when I did, but it also drove me to finish this off quickly so I could return it. So I'm quite far from considering this a masterpiece from having read just part one of four of the published series (and even then I feel like the particular collection in this volume, besides being based chronological on publication, seems a bit arbitrary in its end point). I can see potential for it to get to a masterpiece place, but this really felt like a disconnected collection of story threads revolving around a single character and never really synthesised into something greater than those bits and pieces. As such there are definitely published issues within this that are stronger and more affecting than others, but being a comic book neophyte I often wished that some storylines would continue for longer. Instead the title character here, the lord of the dream realm, seems to have a glib omnipotence to him so every conflict that arises seems to be more or less resolved by him easily defeating the antagonist in the end, regardless of what effects flow on from there. In most cases the following volume doesn't directly follow on from the previous either, which means that after part 1 here I'm left with an overall impression of a bunch of tangled threads that have no connection to each other, and certainly no grander purpose either. I do feel that if I get around to reading books 2-4, I'll either look back on this impression after book one as [understandable but also] misguided knowing that Gaiman will eventually tie everything together for some grand vision, or I'll look back and think I'm being generous now to even allow for the unfinished nature of my reading. There are definitely good parts to this, especially his post-modern intertextuality mingling together classic mythology, medieval and modern English texts and popular culture of the twentieth century, and I do find the character of the Sandman intriguingly ambiguous in his motivations, but each time I felt like the story was heading somewhere, that volume would be wrapped up a little too neatly and the next one began with a completely new idea to explore. I do find the art here impressive too for what it's worth, not really being my thing, and the style is innovative and engaging, so I certainly wouldn't mind finishing off the whole series at some point possibly even all this year, but I find myself at the end of volume one asking "what else is there?"