Sometimes is it a very good thing that someone had the presence of mind to invent this thing called the Bank Holiday. It can be used for so many useful things: traveling, exploring local parks, shopping (but usually not for as long as one would like), drinking, eating, sleeping in late and, of course... reading. Again it is Sunday and once again I find myself sitting at my little table behind my laptop. This time with the Kinks blasting their greatest hits into the living room as another one has bitten the dust!
#### SPOILER ALERT ####
Double Whammy - Carl Hiaasen
I have read a fair few detectives but I do not think I have ever read one with as strange a topic: cheating in Bass fishing tournaments. I have to admit that I do not pretend to understand why grown men (and perhaps some women too?) would want to spend a miserable (or sunny) Sunday afternoon sitting on the banks of lakes and rivers waiting to catch something that you could go and buy in the supermarket already filleted and ready to cook. I do not quite see the appeal of waiting for something to bite and then throwing it back. Be that as it may.... the proposition of a detective story set in the fishing world seemed an interesting one.
Unfortunately for Mr Hiaasen my interest in the book floundered quite quickly. The main character we meet, RJ Decker, does not really hold a lot of interest for me. He is not a "commanding" presence as a detective or character. He is presented with a back story of having been a good newspaper photographer with a short fuse who, in a moment of madness clobbered some guy and ended up going to jail for it. He then ends up working for insurance companies trying to bust people committing insurance fraud. Decker is emotionally deadened by all that he has seen and he never wants to go back looking at people just through the lens of a camera. As such this idea works for me.. someone who is so shocked by the violence he has to shoot that it stays with him. However, this emotional turmoil is not really expanded upon or explored too much as Hiaasen has to get on with the story.
Naturally, Decker has an ex wife he still has feelings for and he has a cop friend in the force who still helps him out every now and then. He also has an semi nasty employer that wants him to do his job and annoys him with phone calls every now and again. Decker lives in a trailer park as (naturally) he wants to be away form the big bad world he has seen through the lens of his camera. He is presented as a guy with not too many ties to this world. He gets hired by Gault to find out how certain individuals are able to rig fishing competitions and to get photographic evidence of this. Gault is presented as the classic "one sandwich short of a picnic" baddo. It is no real surprise that he ends up turning on Decker and is the one who is behind most of the killing in the book. Trust me... revealing this to you now will not reduce the "enjoyment" of the book. The whole thing is set up so clearly from the start that after meeting Gault once you know there is more to him than Hiaasen lets on at first. This is one of my biggest gripes with the book.. nothing in it is that surprising. Not one of the good guys you meet are who they seem at first. The nutter is not that much of a nutter but a former governor, the state trooper is not the bad ass you think but a good friend of the former governor and thus a friend to Decker, the bait girlfriend (sister of Gault) seems to play along at first but turns later (blood and water and all that I guess). After meeting a few of the characters you kind of wait for the other shoe to drop to find out who they really are or what they are really here for. Not a lot really. the book could have done without half the characters in it.
So, back to the story line: fish fraud is being committed and the bad guys must be stopped. Decker is hired and goes off to some backwater town to trace the culprits. Naturally Decker finds an old friend of his working at the local newspaper at the hub of the fishy behaviour and he uses him to get some local info on the local fishing boys. His friend Ott then takes it upon himself to do a bit of snooping and ends up dead. Decker meets a weirdo called Skink who likes to eat road kill and who also happened to end up helping him solve the case. As you would expect there are some more bodies on the way to the end of the story and at one point Decker is even in the frame for the murder of a few of them. There is a second smaller strand of the story that deals with the guy who runs some kind of religious TV network and I believe Mr Hiaasen wants us to understand the true nature of these kinds of power hungry God wielding hypocrites and I have to say Mr Hiaasen... point taken. The Reverend Weeb is probably the only bad guy who is not what he pretends to be. To the outside world he is a God fearing man wanting to build the perfect environment for his flock but behind the scenes he is a hedonistic devil incarnate. Weeb is a man with a mission but as Mr Hiaasen kindly explains his background you realise that there will be no chance of him succeeding in anything he does so that ends that threat. Fortunately for the reader the rest of the bad guys are all stupid and bad and there are plenty of bodies before the last page is turned and the ways they die just get more and more over the top as the story goes on. The first guy "just" gets beaten to death and dropped of a boat but I kind of feel sorry for the last guy to die. He gets his head blown up by a small camera loaded with plastic explosives which is a bit unnecessary as he already had the head of a dead dog hanging off his arm (trust me, it's a hoot how it got there!). As if the gangrene toxins spreading through his body was not already doing a good job of killing him, he had to be blown up too. Actually Poochy was probably one of the most gripping things in the story if I'm honest.
So.... any good?? Not really.
It reads kind of fast, Decker is okay as a character, as are some of the other characters (there is just not that much content to them). The conversations read okay, not too stilted. The action moves along swiftly although it is never pumping with adrenaline or edge of your seat stuff. It has promise in some parts but as a whole it is just not gripping or entertaining enough. There is no ominous threat that needs to be dealt with - who really cares about rich boys fiddling one another out of some prize money none of them need or another fishing boat. There is no truly bad guy that needs to be caught - Gault is a bad guy but he is presented almost as a parody of himself and not as someone who is out to destroy everyone. The rest of characters are just not that interesting, not even Skink, the former governor. He would have been more interesting as a governor and ally for Decker but Hiaasen made him the weirdo. All the characters get a little back story that is supposed to make you relate to them more and understand them better but the attempt feels contrived and forced as if Hiaasen wants you to like the good guys. There are some funny scenes with Decker and Skink but overall the book is a bit of a let down.
Title: Double Whammy
Author: Carl Hiaasen
442 pages
Pan Books
ISBN nr 0-330-30987-0
Books to be read: 70
PS: I am also eagerly awaiting the arrival of my two new CDs - one by Caro Emerald and the other by Aloe Blacc. Both are a special treat to myself to celebrate my promotion to Project Manager.
Sunday 29 May 2011
Sunday 22 May 2011
Only the lonely
This Sunday saw the end of one book and the start of another.
It also saw, once again the realisation that books do give me so much comfort and joy. One of the great things about books is that they give you a glimpse of something new and different at your fingertips without having to leave your home. You can explore someone else's world and imagination whenever you want, at your own pace, in a way that suits you. You can even bring your pyamas to the party if you want to. A book will not care one hoot about the laundry that is stacking up, the dishes that need to be done or the fact that you should probably more sociable and go to that party that you said you might go to.
Sometimes it feels like I could be stranded on an deserted island somewhere and that my books would be enough company to see me through any crisis I would need to face. Do not get me wrong I love people. I love watching people go by on a busy street and think of where they have been or are going. I love observing what people get up to when they think they are not observed. I could spend an entire holiday sitting somewhere sipping coffee and wondering about the people passing me by and imagining what their lives are like.. but books are not bad either.
#### SPOILER ALERT ####
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
This book is on the 100 books list of the BBC so I can cross of one of that lengthy reading list. It is also one that I have had lying around for a while and have thought of reading and then decided against it and then thought of reading and then again decided against it. I think I did this because perhaps I thought it was going to be all serious for some reason. It is.. and it isn't. I find it hard to think of the book as just a series of characters thrown together into a story. Just recounting their story in this review would not really serve the complexity of the characters very well and I would rather give you my impressions. This book made me think about other books I have read and how it contrast to them but more of that later. I hope that mr Marquez will forgive me for abbreviating him to GGM in this review.
Since finishing it earlier today I have wondered about the title more than anything. I am not sure I quite get it? I think I do, but I am not sure.. it might be one of those ones open for multiple interpretations. The story itself is vast and stretches over many years (could even be a hundred years!!) and many generations of the same family. The whole book feels vast! There is much in the chapters than what he is GGM is giving you and you feel that in between the pages and around the characters that you are given there is much more to be discovered. That is the beauty of the book really. It almost drowns you in this family chronicle of many characters that all living the same place for most of their lives. There are some family members that manage to escape Macondo but essentially Macondo is the place where the family begins and ends and where all the most important things happen. The richness in the story does not come from various locations, exotic destinations or travel. It comes from the characters, from the family and how they interact with one another. I guess that the "solitude" of the title could be applicable to the characters. For the fact that they all live in the same village, most of them in the same house for most of the time and yet most of them are alone in their own little world and deal with their own worries and woes. They seem to live beside one another but not always with each other.
In essence the book is a family chronicle of the Buendia family. You get a sort of chronological account of how the family was started and who married who and how the relationships work or do not. At times it is a complated story as many of the family member get given the same name and time is not exactly linear but goes through a few diversions and re-routes along the way. You can be reading a chapter dealing with the life of one of characters when someone else is mentioned and then you get some of their life being retold but at a different time from when you started the chapter. GGM goes back and forth through time and switches the focus between different characters. He will talk about different times in people's live inside the same chapter. He will mention someone as being dead at the start of one chapter and bring them back to life in the tale of another family member's life in the next chapter. This means that as a reader you have to be on your toes and try to follow who is still there when you are in the chapter thet you are in. At times it makes it hard to follow the story line of the book. Towards the end you realise that it does not matter too much as by the end of the book everyone ends up dead anyway and the family dynasty has ended for good.
In a way you are as the last Aurelio is on the final few pages of the book. You have been reading the history of a family that is at times disjointed and skips ahead an back in time while you know that the end is inevitable.
Another thing that I found was that when reading the story you feel that there is something unreal going on. That the world that these characters live in is not quite like ours. Their lives are much more simple and restricted to ours nowadays. Things happen to these people that do not happen to us. Some are followed around but butterflies, some have relationships that seem the influence the state of their livestock, some women seem to know more that they should, one of the matriarchs of the family goes blind without anyone noticing and yet she sees more than any of them. There is a feeling of something other worldly going on at times... as if it is another world they live in.
Most of the family members live to a very old age, some die young some die a virgin death, some start revolutions that never amount to anything. They all live in their little village and wait for the world to come and find them. Perhaps because they live only in Macondo they are amazed by the outside world and the wonders that it has to give them. Fist of this is through the visits of the gypsies, later on the railway finds them and even a big banana plantation comes to town. The family has some strange practices and some strange ways of dealing with problems. Sometimes you cannot help but feel sorry for their ignorance of the modern world and their reluctance to accept change. On the other hand you feel that all they are trying to do is to hang onto what they know and believe in. They are trying to hold on to the power of their family and their beliefs. However, in the end progress is what does them in. Outsiders come and destroy the community, even try to destroy the family. The village survives (sort of) but it is never the way it was and slowly but surely things fall apart more and more until it all ends with the last two family members, their little boy with a pigtail (after Ursula warned them!!!) and a house that is falling apart around them.
I also found that the style of this book is very different from what I am used to. Most English / American / European writers that I have ready are more stripped down than GGM. The way GGM weaves his story is back and forth and that is unusual. I guess that when you read a detective story you tend to get an event and then we get the whodunnit. With a Koontz you get an event and things spiral from there - you focus on what happened and then find out how it fits together. You find out bits and pieces of information and piece them together to get to the end. You tend to get a story from A to B and perhaps a stop off at C in the middle and some back story. But the feel of it is more down to earth, stripped down and realistic. It is not that the language GGM he uses is more lyrical I think it is just the way he tells the story that is different and the underlying suggestion of something else, possibly not natural but supernatural going on that makes the difference.
Are the characters entertaining and gripping? Yes, most definitely. I have never met a better bunch of characters that are weird and wonderful and yet are normal human beings with normal hopes and fears.
Is it at times confusing and hard to follow the storyline? Yes.
Is it worth is in the end? Yes.. oooh yes. It is a rich story in style of writing and characters and is definitely worth a read.
Author: Gabriel Gracia Marquez.
Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude
422 pages
Penguin Books
ISBN nr 0-14-027876-1
Books to be read: 71
It also saw, once again the realisation that books do give me so much comfort and joy. One of the great things about books is that they give you a glimpse of something new and different at your fingertips without having to leave your home. You can explore someone else's world and imagination whenever you want, at your own pace, in a way that suits you. You can even bring your pyamas to the party if you want to. A book will not care one hoot about the laundry that is stacking up, the dishes that need to be done or the fact that you should probably more sociable and go to that party that you said you might go to.
Sometimes it feels like I could be stranded on an deserted island somewhere and that my books would be enough company to see me through any crisis I would need to face. Do not get me wrong I love people. I love watching people go by on a busy street and think of where they have been or are going. I love observing what people get up to when they think they are not observed. I could spend an entire holiday sitting somewhere sipping coffee and wondering about the people passing me by and imagining what their lives are like.. but books are not bad either.
#### SPOILER ALERT ####
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
This book is on the 100 books list of the BBC so I can cross of one of that lengthy reading list. It is also one that I have had lying around for a while and have thought of reading and then decided against it and then thought of reading and then again decided against it. I think I did this because perhaps I thought it was going to be all serious for some reason. It is.. and it isn't. I find it hard to think of the book as just a series of characters thrown together into a story. Just recounting their story in this review would not really serve the complexity of the characters very well and I would rather give you my impressions. This book made me think about other books I have read and how it contrast to them but more of that later. I hope that mr Marquez will forgive me for abbreviating him to GGM in this review.
Since finishing it earlier today I have wondered about the title more than anything. I am not sure I quite get it? I think I do, but I am not sure.. it might be one of those ones open for multiple interpretations. The story itself is vast and stretches over many years (could even be a hundred years!!) and many generations of the same family. The whole book feels vast! There is much in the chapters than what he is GGM is giving you and you feel that in between the pages and around the characters that you are given there is much more to be discovered. That is the beauty of the book really. It almost drowns you in this family chronicle of many characters that all living the same place for most of their lives. There are some family members that manage to escape Macondo but essentially Macondo is the place where the family begins and ends and where all the most important things happen. The richness in the story does not come from various locations, exotic destinations or travel. It comes from the characters, from the family and how they interact with one another. I guess that the "solitude" of the title could be applicable to the characters. For the fact that they all live in the same village, most of them in the same house for most of the time and yet most of them are alone in their own little world and deal with their own worries and woes. They seem to live beside one another but not always with each other.
In essence the book is a family chronicle of the Buendia family. You get a sort of chronological account of how the family was started and who married who and how the relationships work or do not. At times it is a complated story as many of the family member get given the same name and time is not exactly linear but goes through a few diversions and re-routes along the way. You can be reading a chapter dealing with the life of one of characters when someone else is mentioned and then you get some of their life being retold but at a different time from when you started the chapter. GGM goes back and forth through time and switches the focus between different characters. He will talk about different times in people's live inside the same chapter. He will mention someone as being dead at the start of one chapter and bring them back to life in the tale of another family member's life in the next chapter. This means that as a reader you have to be on your toes and try to follow who is still there when you are in the chapter thet you are in. At times it makes it hard to follow the story line of the book. Towards the end you realise that it does not matter too much as by the end of the book everyone ends up dead anyway and the family dynasty has ended for good.
In a way you are as the last Aurelio is on the final few pages of the book. You have been reading the history of a family that is at times disjointed and skips ahead an back in time while you know that the end is inevitable.
Another thing that I found was that when reading the story you feel that there is something unreal going on. That the world that these characters live in is not quite like ours. Their lives are much more simple and restricted to ours nowadays. Things happen to these people that do not happen to us. Some are followed around but butterflies, some have relationships that seem the influence the state of their livestock, some women seem to know more that they should, one of the matriarchs of the family goes blind without anyone noticing and yet she sees more than any of them. There is a feeling of something other worldly going on at times... as if it is another world they live in.
Most of the family members live to a very old age, some die young some die a virgin death, some start revolutions that never amount to anything. They all live in their little village and wait for the world to come and find them. Perhaps because they live only in Macondo they are amazed by the outside world and the wonders that it has to give them. Fist of this is through the visits of the gypsies, later on the railway finds them and even a big banana plantation comes to town. The family has some strange practices and some strange ways of dealing with problems. Sometimes you cannot help but feel sorry for their ignorance of the modern world and their reluctance to accept change. On the other hand you feel that all they are trying to do is to hang onto what they know and believe in. They are trying to hold on to the power of their family and their beliefs. However, in the end progress is what does them in. Outsiders come and destroy the community, even try to destroy the family. The village survives (sort of) but it is never the way it was and slowly but surely things fall apart more and more until it all ends with the last two family members, their little boy with a pigtail (after Ursula warned them!!!) and a house that is falling apart around them.
I also found that the style of this book is very different from what I am used to. Most English / American / European writers that I have ready are more stripped down than GGM. The way GGM weaves his story is back and forth and that is unusual. I guess that when you read a detective story you tend to get an event and then we get the whodunnit. With a Koontz you get an event and things spiral from there - you focus on what happened and then find out how it fits together. You find out bits and pieces of information and piece them together to get to the end. You tend to get a story from A to B and perhaps a stop off at C in the middle and some back story. But the feel of it is more down to earth, stripped down and realistic. It is not that the language GGM he uses is more lyrical I think it is just the way he tells the story that is different and the underlying suggestion of something else, possibly not natural but supernatural going on that makes the difference.
Are the characters entertaining and gripping? Yes, most definitely. I have never met a better bunch of characters that are weird and wonderful and yet are normal human beings with normal hopes and fears.
Is it at times confusing and hard to follow the storyline? Yes.
Is it worth is in the end? Yes.. oooh yes. It is a rich story in style of writing and characters and is definitely worth a read.
Author: Gabriel Gracia Marquez.
Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude
422 pages
Penguin Books
ISBN nr 0-14-027876-1
Books to be read: 71
Wednesday 18 May 2011
Another late arrival
Went out for a lovely meal of tapas and ice cream tonight with one of my friends and also got BBG2 (Belated Birthday Gift 2). It was another book and this time it was a whopper. My bookshelves are now graced by the slightly bulky presence of the Gormenghast Trilogy. This is another one I might have to save for when I have some serious time to read as it is over 900 pages but although the task is daunting I just know it will be worth it.
Books given as present: 1
Books to be read: 72
I am hoping to decrease the count by 1 over the next few days but if I keep going out for meals or getting distracted by chores it may not be until the weekend that I can get down to some serious reading. Mr Gabriel Garcia Marquez awaits me though... I can hear him tempting me from the pages of the book.. whispering to me to pick up the book and finish what I started.
PS: for those who are dying to know what the other one was I was given.. it was The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Books given as present: 1
Books to be read: 72
I am hoping to decrease the count by 1 over the next few days but if I keep going out for meals or getting distracted by chores it may not be until the weekend that I can get down to some serious reading. Mr Gabriel Garcia Marquez awaits me though... I can hear him tempting me from the pages of the book.. whispering to me to pick up the book and finish what I started.
PS: for those who are dying to know what the other one was I was given.. it was The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Tuesday 10 May 2011
One more
I got a belated birthday present today and it was a book!!!! It was one I had been thinking of getting myself but my friend got it for me so he saved me the trouble of hunting it down myself. By the way, he keeps threatening to "cure" me of my book addiction by burning all my books - like that's going to stop me buying books!? Au contraire mon ami.. I will just have to replace the ones I truly love and buy more books then... right?!
Naturally I was thrilled with this gift of a book but it does mean I have to update the stats again.
Books given as present: 1
Books to be read: 71
Naturally I was thrilled with this gift of a book but it does mean I have to update the stats again.
Books given as present: 1
Books to be read: 71
Sunday 8 May 2011
Back and Forth
I seem to be on a bit of a reading binge at the moment. After finishing the last one I went straight into this one and read it over a Late Friday, most of Saturday and early Sunday. The reading fitted in neatly between doing the laundry, getting my passport photographs done and getting the weekly shop done.
#### SPOILER ALERT ####
The Resurrectionist - James Bradley
I remember buying this one for the title. It intrigued me. The small amount that I do know about resurrectionism made me wonder how you could use it in a novel and how the main character's life would be affected by it. Unfortunately for me the blurb on the back (which partly peaked my interest in this novel) is a bit misleading. In the story our Gabriel does end up working with Lucan but I do not feel that it is because he is "drawn" to him, or that it is Lucan who introduces Gabrield to the "sinister and mysterious underworld of Georgian London". Gabriel does, however, make a journey that will change his lie forever, in more ways than one. Another thing that I want to mention is that my edition of the book had a little "Richard and Judy's Summer Read" sticker on it. Let me tell you right now that for me this book is not a light summer read! "Summer read" suggest to me something more uplifting and light in subject matter and/or characters than this one gives you. There is some seriously gory stuff in it and it is not a nice and fluffy beach read. The first two pages had me almost put it down and at times during reading it I have wondered if I really wanted to know more about the business of resurrectionism. The company that Gabriel keeps is not of the fine-Georgian-gentleman kind and his world is a harsh place to live.
I am not sure how I feel about this one... I managed to get through it really quickly and I really wanted to know how Gabriel's life was going to develop. The chapters are short and at times divided into smaller paragraphs which moves the story along nicely. The one thing that I do not like about the way it is written is that mr Bradley seems to think it necessary to tell part of the story in flashbacks instead of just keeping it linear. Most of it is told as it happens but at times something happens and we fast forward to a few months/weeks or years later to then in the next chapter catch up on what has happened. I do not really see why he does this? It makes more sense to keep the story line flowing from past to present, moving forward. I am not sure if Bradley does it to try and keep me interested in the story (make me wander if he is going to tell me what happened) or because he wants to try and trick me into having my own ideas of what may have happened in the mean time and then find out how wrong or right I am. Either way it does not really work for me.The story would not have lost anything by just telling it chronologically. There would have been enough power and tension in the chronological narrative to work with and I would have been less annoyed at him for one.
So what is the story about; Gabriel a young man is sent to study with an anatomist mr Poll. No prizes for guessing that this is where the gruesomeness of the book comes from. They deal with bodies gotten from the fresh graves of the citizens of London. It is dark, secretive and heavy work mostly carried out under cover of darkness of in the very late or very early hours of the day. In the first few pages of the book Bradley describes how the bodies arrive and how they clean them up ready for the master to do his work. Is description is really realistic and gives you a very good idea of ow it might have been for Gabriel to do this work and how it wold affect him. It also show how quickly you get used to even the seemingly most gruesome tasks. Gabriel is supposed to be studying to be a anatomist as well but he does not seem to do much studying and instead, through one of the people he works with, discovers a whole new side of London he finds much more fascinating than becoming an anatomist. As you might expect this discovery leads him into a life of drink, irresponsible behaviour and conflict with his boss. He causes problems for his boss and there are people around him who do not take kindly to this and who have long memories! There are people around him who try and keep him on the straight an narrow but Gabriel has lost his heart to a pretty girl, his money to the gambling dens. He seems to want to get out of the life he is in but in trying to do so he only gets sucked in further to the world of corpse collecting.
Very often it feels that Gabriel is fighting not only the world but himself as well. He does not want to do the work that he does, he does not want to take the opium that he does, he wishes he did not love the girl as much as he does, he does not want to work for Lucan and submit to his will... but he does. All he wants is to be free, somewhere else but where he is. That to him seems to be the answer to his happiness. If only he could be free of all that holds him down - work, love, friends, enemies, debts, death. In a way the life that Gabriel has chosen for himself has broken his spirit, has broken his will. Even when he manages to make a new life for himself he is not free of what he has seen and done before. In the end maybe the only thing he does learn is that no-one is free of his or her past. However much he tries to break free of his past it always seems to find him.
I can see that the title of the book is very apt. In one way it applies to Gabriel who is resurrected several times. At first he goes from innocent boy to working in the anatomist's morgue. Then he goes from obedient servant to his master to loose cannon, driven by pleasure, addiction and lust. His next phase is working for Lucan, getting involved in the nastier side of grave robbing even graduating to murder later on. Then he dies.... only to be reborn years later in Australia. In a way this last part really only emphasises what we already know: Man cannot escape his past! Gabriel has changed his life around, changed his name as well as his habits. He seems sober, more balance. But this might just be because he consciously keeps himself away from people and society. He likes being alone and finds comfort in it. He draws birds and teaches the local children and women to draw. That is all he seems to want from life. He finds it hard to take a bird's life.. strange how it is so much harder for him than taking a human life now? He admires the birds, thinks they are surely truly free and perhaps, therefore happier and luckier than he is.
I cannot deny that the mood in the book is very dark and there is a lot of death and decay in it - human and moral. The message that it seems to want to give is that man can remake his life although he cannot escape who he is. Gabriel went to the Colonies (Australia) where just about every man's ancestor was a convict and he manages to build a new life for himself but his past comes to find him even in this new world. He might be safe from those who mean him harm in England but in this new world he manages to find trouble just as easily.
Although I understand why this last part was written (Gabriel is reborn as Thomas) it does sometimes feel like it was stuck at the end to try and resolve some outstanding issue.. however, which one? I already get the fact the he is reborn when he goes to the colonies as a convict and that his past still catches up with him. And what the thing with the girl is all about is beyond me? he is damaged goods and he is no good at saying the right thing at the right time.. and..? Apart from history repeating itself the whole last part does not really serve any purpose... not sure it is worth it just to have the crawling out of the grave scene for.
Title: The Resurrectionist
Author: James Bradley
333 pages
Faber and Faber
ISBN nr 978-0-571-23276-5
Books to be read: 70
#### SPOILER ALERT ####
The Resurrectionist - James Bradley
I remember buying this one for the title. It intrigued me. The small amount that I do know about resurrectionism made me wonder how you could use it in a novel and how the main character's life would be affected by it. Unfortunately for me the blurb on the back (which partly peaked my interest in this novel) is a bit misleading. In the story our Gabriel does end up working with Lucan but I do not feel that it is because he is "drawn" to him, or that it is Lucan who introduces Gabrield to the "sinister and mysterious underworld of Georgian London". Gabriel does, however, make a journey that will change his lie forever, in more ways than one. Another thing that I want to mention is that my edition of the book had a little "Richard and Judy's Summer Read" sticker on it. Let me tell you right now that for me this book is not a light summer read! "Summer read" suggest to me something more uplifting and light in subject matter and/or characters than this one gives you. There is some seriously gory stuff in it and it is not a nice and fluffy beach read. The first two pages had me almost put it down and at times during reading it I have wondered if I really wanted to know more about the business of resurrectionism. The company that Gabriel keeps is not of the fine-Georgian-gentleman kind and his world is a harsh place to live.
I am not sure how I feel about this one... I managed to get through it really quickly and I really wanted to know how Gabriel's life was going to develop. The chapters are short and at times divided into smaller paragraphs which moves the story along nicely. The one thing that I do not like about the way it is written is that mr Bradley seems to think it necessary to tell part of the story in flashbacks instead of just keeping it linear. Most of it is told as it happens but at times something happens and we fast forward to a few months/weeks or years later to then in the next chapter catch up on what has happened. I do not really see why he does this? It makes more sense to keep the story line flowing from past to present, moving forward. I am not sure if Bradley does it to try and keep me interested in the story (make me wander if he is going to tell me what happened) or because he wants to try and trick me into having my own ideas of what may have happened in the mean time and then find out how wrong or right I am. Either way it does not really work for me.The story would not have lost anything by just telling it chronologically. There would have been enough power and tension in the chronological narrative to work with and I would have been less annoyed at him for one.
So what is the story about; Gabriel a young man is sent to study with an anatomist mr Poll. No prizes for guessing that this is where the gruesomeness of the book comes from. They deal with bodies gotten from the fresh graves of the citizens of London. It is dark, secretive and heavy work mostly carried out under cover of darkness of in the very late or very early hours of the day. In the first few pages of the book Bradley describes how the bodies arrive and how they clean them up ready for the master to do his work. Is description is really realistic and gives you a very good idea of ow it might have been for Gabriel to do this work and how it wold affect him. It also show how quickly you get used to even the seemingly most gruesome tasks. Gabriel is supposed to be studying to be a anatomist as well but he does not seem to do much studying and instead, through one of the people he works with, discovers a whole new side of London he finds much more fascinating than becoming an anatomist. As you might expect this discovery leads him into a life of drink, irresponsible behaviour and conflict with his boss. He causes problems for his boss and there are people around him who do not take kindly to this and who have long memories! There are people around him who try and keep him on the straight an narrow but Gabriel has lost his heart to a pretty girl, his money to the gambling dens. He seems to want to get out of the life he is in but in trying to do so he only gets sucked in further to the world of corpse collecting.
Very often it feels that Gabriel is fighting not only the world but himself as well. He does not want to do the work that he does, he does not want to take the opium that he does, he wishes he did not love the girl as much as he does, he does not want to work for Lucan and submit to his will... but he does. All he wants is to be free, somewhere else but where he is. That to him seems to be the answer to his happiness. If only he could be free of all that holds him down - work, love, friends, enemies, debts, death. In a way the life that Gabriel has chosen for himself has broken his spirit, has broken his will. Even when he manages to make a new life for himself he is not free of what he has seen and done before. In the end maybe the only thing he does learn is that no-one is free of his or her past. However much he tries to break free of his past it always seems to find him.
I can see that the title of the book is very apt. In one way it applies to Gabriel who is resurrected several times. At first he goes from innocent boy to working in the anatomist's morgue. Then he goes from obedient servant to his master to loose cannon, driven by pleasure, addiction and lust. His next phase is working for Lucan, getting involved in the nastier side of grave robbing even graduating to murder later on. Then he dies.... only to be reborn years later in Australia. In a way this last part really only emphasises what we already know: Man cannot escape his past! Gabriel has changed his life around, changed his name as well as his habits. He seems sober, more balance. But this might just be because he consciously keeps himself away from people and society. He likes being alone and finds comfort in it. He draws birds and teaches the local children and women to draw. That is all he seems to want from life. He finds it hard to take a bird's life.. strange how it is so much harder for him than taking a human life now? He admires the birds, thinks they are surely truly free and perhaps, therefore happier and luckier than he is.
I cannot deny that the mood in the book is very dark and there is a lot of death and decay in it - human and moral. The message that it seems to want to give is that man can remake his life although he cannot escape who he is. Gabriel went to the Colonies (Australia) where just about every man's ancestor was a convict and he manages to build a new life for himself but his past comes to find him even in this new world. He might be safe from those who mean him harm in England but in this new world he manages to find trouble just as easily.
Although I understand why this last part was written (Gabriel is reborn as Thomas) it does sometimes feel like it was stuck at the end to try and resolve some outstanding issue.. however, which one? I already get the fact the he is reborn when he goes to the colonies as a convict and that his past still catches up with him. And what the thing with the girl is all about is beyond me? he is damaged goods and he is no good at saying the right thing at the right time.. and..? Apart from history repeating itself the whole last part does not really serve any purpose... not sure it is worth it just to have the crawling out of the grave scene for.
Title: The Resurrectionist
Author: James Bradley
333 pages
Faber and Faber
ISBN nr 978-0-571-23276-5
Books to be read: 70
Thursday 5 May 2011
My kind of Girl
Now that I have finally managed to pull myself out of holiday mode it was high time to update my Blog again. The first week back at work is almost over and I have actually managed to finish another book in the few days since my Mum went back to Holland and the holiday ended. I had been reading a few pages here and there during Mum's visit but I finished it off over the Bank Holiday Monday we had.... that's what they are for these Bank Holidays... reading and relaxing!
#### SPOILER ALERT ####
After the Funeral - Agatha Christie
The last book to feature our intrepid detective mr Poirot I understand.
As usual with Agatha I made absolutely no attempt to try and figure out "who dunnit". In the few books of hers I have read I have found that she sets them in such a way that about half the people we meet in the story could have committed the crime and she manages to make the look all equally guilty. All characters will each do or say something which makes me think that they are the ones that did the deed... and invariably I am wrong! So I just give up and enjoy the ride and marvel at how well she sets it all up.
The book starts with the funeral of the head of a family, the dearly beloved mr Abernathie. All the relatives gather to say their final goodbyes and we get introduced to the family member one by one. The family lawyer mr Entwhistle very kindly provides us with a very good sketch of each of them so we know who's who from the start. The lawyer proves invaluable to us as readers and to Mr Poirot as well. He is a very observant man and he is willing to travel around to the various family members to do a bit of sleuthing. We spend about half the book meeting the family members and upping the body count - not only does Mr Abernathie meet an untimely end, we also lose Cora Lansquenet (his sister) to an axe wielding fined and then we almost lose her companion miss Gilchrist due to a poisoned wedding cake. In a way they all seem linked and can be explained away as someone just being greedy and wanting to get a bit more money out of the estate.
The book hinges around a remark made by one of the family members after the funeral. It raises doubts with our lawyer friend about how mr Abernathie died and when shortly afterwards mr Abernathie's sister also ends up dead there are plenty of candidates for the role of killer. Part of me kind of assumed that the two murders were linked but later on I realised that this is Agatha Christie and they might not be. What that would then mean for who was the possible murderer was a question I did not pursue.
Interestingly Poirot himself does not show up until we are well into the story (Chapter 12, page 128). This is after both corpses are in the ground and after the wedding cake incident. He is approached by mr Entwhistle to see if all is what it seems with the death of mr Abernathie. He seems to stroll onto the scene just to be an observer and cannot be said to be a man of great vigour and action. He does not really blast onto the scene and takes commands, dazzling you with his insights as he goes along (like Holmes would). But as he himself says, the answers will come from the people, observing them and listening to what they say and how they react. He gets others to do the legwork or him. The scene where this man reports back to him is quite funny!
What I found interesting as well is the attitude that the different family members have towards Poirot. I have to say that he does intentionally make himself sound more "foreign" than he really is but still most of them consider him to be a foreigner who obviously does not speak their language very well, does not follow their conversations, is probably a bit stupid and is just there as a bit of a nuisance to be tolerated as he might be interested in buying their mansion. Because of this they tend to talk more freely even when he is around. This, of course works immensely in Poirot's favour as he can then just sit back, observe and draw his conclusions.
I am not going to tell you who did it! Suffice it to say that how he comes to the conclusion is quite clever I did not see it coming at all. He gets his (wo)man through noticing only a few minute little details, this then sets him a train of thought that leads him to the killer. It's a bit vexing that as a reader you think that you notice similar details but with all the attention to detail in the world I cannot see myself ending up at the same conclusions as Poirot. And even more annoyingly, when you do think you are on the right track the rug gets pulled from under your feet in the next chapter! To me, this makes the the book a frustratingly good read! It is also well paced, with well drawn characters, there's conflict between family members, we have suggestions of possible motives for murder for all the characters (although some seem exempt from suspicion... which made me suspicious!), there is some good and not to mention funny dialogue in there as well.
As I mentioned in a previous Agatha Christie review, I love her books. I know that whenever I read one of hers the garden path is going to be well worn out before she gets through with me but who cares about being right when the read is so much fun.
Title: After the Funeral
Author: Agatha Christie
251 pages
Fontana/Collins
ISBN nr 0-0-616275-4
Books to be read: 71
#### SPOILER ALERT ####
After the Funeral - Agatha Christie
The last book to feature our intrepid detective mr Poirot I understand.
As usual with Agatha I made absolutely no attempt to try and figure out "who dunnit". In the few books of hers I have read I have found that she sets them in such a way that about half the people we meet in the story could have committed the crime and she manages to make the look all equally guilty. All characters will each do or say something which makes me think that they are the ones that did the deed... and invariably I am wrong! So I just give up and enjoy the ride and marvel at how well she sets it all up.
The book starts with the funeral of the head of a family, the dearly beloved mr Abernathie. All the relatives gather to say their final goodbyes and we get introduced to the family member one by one. The family lawyer mr Entwhistle very kindly provides us with a very good sketch of each of them so we know who's who from the start. The lawyer proves invaluable to us as readers and to Mr Poirot as well. He is a very observant man and he is willing to travel around to the various family members to do a bit of sleuthing. We spend about half the book meeting the family members and upping the body count - not only does Mr Abernathie meet an untimely end, we also lose Cora Lansquenet (his sister) to an axe wielding fined and then we almost lose her companion miss Gilchrist due to a poisoned wedding cake. In a way they all seem linked and can be explained away as someone just being greedy and wanting to get a bit more money out of the estate.
The book hinges around a remark made by one of the family members after the funeral. It raises doubts with our lawyer friend about how mr Abernathie died and when shortly afterwards mr Abernathie's sister also ends up dead there are plenty of candidates for the role of killer. Part of me kind of assumed that the two murders were linked but later on I realised that this is Agatha Christie and they might not be. What that would then mean for who was the possible murderer was a question I did not pursue.
Interestingly Poirot himself does not show up until we are well into the story (Chapter 12, page 128). This is after both corpses are in the ground and after the wedding cake incident. He is approached by mr Entwhistle to see if all is what it seems with the death of mr Abernathie. He seems to stroll onto the scene just to be an observer and cannot be said to be a man of great vigour and action. He does not really blast onto the scene and takes commands, dazzling you with his insights as he goes along (like Holmes would). But as he himself says, the answers will come from the people, observing them and listening to what they say and how they react. He gets others to do the legwork or him. The scene where this man reports back to him is quite funny!
What I found interesting as well is the attitude that the different family members have towards Poirot. I have to say that he does intentionally make himself sound more "foreign" than he really is but still most of them consider him to be a foreigner who obviously does not speak their language very well, does not follow their conversations, is probably a bit stupid and is just there as a bit of a nuisance to be tolerated as he might be interested in buying their mansion. Because of this they tend to talk more freely even when he is around. This, of course works immensely in Poirot's favour as he can then just sit back, observe and draw his conclusions.
I am not going to tell you who did it! Suffice it to say that how he comes to the conclusion is quite clever I did not see it coming at all. He gets his (wo)man through noticing only a few minute little details, this then sets him a train of thought that leads him to the killer. It's a bit vexing that as a reader you think that you notice similar details but with all the attention to detail in the world I cannot see myself ending up at the same conclusions as Poirot. And even more annoyingly, when you do think you are on the right track the rug gets pulled from under your feet in the next chapter! To me, this makes the the book a frustratingly good read! It is also well paced, with well drawn characters, there's conflict between family members, we have suggestions of possible motives for murder for all the characters (although some seem exempt from suspicion... which made me suspicious!), there is some good and not to mention funny dialogue in there as well.
As I mentioned in a previous Agatha Christie review, I love her books. I know that whenever I read one of hers the garden path is going to be well worn out before she gets through with me but who cares about being right when the read is so much fun.
Title: After the Funeral
Author: Agatha Christie
251 pages
Fontana/Collins
ISBN nr 0-0-616275-4
Books to be read: 71
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