Pure, by Andrew Miller
Young and still somewhat idealistic, provincial engineer Jean-Baptiste Baratte has come to the Palace of Versailles seeking a prestigious commission that he hopes will make his fortune. His only previous work since completing his education was the construction of a bridge over the corner of a lake on the estate of the Comte de S- and it is through the patronage of the Comte that he is given an audience with a nameless Minister in need of the assistance of a good, malleable engineer. Unfortunately for Baratte, instead of an illustrious nation-defining building project, he is given the Church of Les Innocents.
Paris in 1785 is a city undergoing rapid change. It is a city rife with danger, turmoil and unpleasant odours and Baratte’s church is responsible for at least one of these problems. The cemetery of Les Innocents is the oldest in Paris and it is overflowing, its stench tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Jean-Baptiste Baratte is charged with demolishing the Church, emptying the pits of the cemetery of occupants and purifying the land. However, while the officials of the king may be keen to see the end of Les Innocents, the cemetery’s roots are embedded deep in the hearts and minds of the people who live nearby to it and they are far less convinced of the wisdom of disturbing the past.
With Pure Andrew Miller has successfully captured the tones, sights and smells of Paris on the cusp of revolution. He has masterfully recreated the city and the detail of Les Innocents and the surrounding neighbourhood. The condition and pungent nature of the cemetery is brought vividly to life and the effect that the atmosphere as well as the physical presence of the place has on those who encounter it is both powerful and believable. The conditions of the burial pits themselves are detailed but not gory and the number of pits that must be excavated highlights how quickly a distressing scene can be transformed into a monotonous, mechanical task. The differing impacts that Miller suggests proximity to the cemetery can have on different people and groups is also interesting and illuminating. While the cemetery is home to Jeanne and her father, it is something to be feared and respected by the Monnards while at the same time it is a means of salvation as well as peril to the miners who are brought in to do the dirty work. As for Baratte, it seems likely that Les Innocents will either make or break him.
Jean-Baptiste Baratte is an engaging central character. While not exactly heroic, he does seem to act for what he believes to be the best and, even though given no other option, he does try to fulfil his obligations at Les Innocents. The way he develops and matures over the course of his year at Les Innocents echoes the way in which the spirit of Paris is similarly developed, shaped and hardened over the same period. In what could have been an overwhelmingly dark novel, Baratte is also a useful character for injecting humour into a bleak situation. This is most obviously true in the case of his getting lost in Versailles and in his purchase of the pistachio green suit, but more subtly so in terms of his career as a sloganeering revolutionary.
In addition to Baratte and Les Inncoents itself, Miller has created a detailed cast of supporting characters. Armand the erstwhile church organist manages to be both infuriating and engaging while Heloise remains delightfully enigmatic. There seem to be any number of eccentrics living in the vicinity of the Church and even those supposed nobodies brought in to do the heavy lifting have their own secrets and stories to tell. As well as the wholly imagined characters, Miller succeeds in working a number of real historical personalities into the narrative. The most interesting of these must be Doctor Guillotin, who would of course be ultimately remembered for something far-removed from his compassion and medical expertise.
Saying this, the cemetery is a total scene stealer and so there are a number of characters who do not get as much exposure as they deserve. While the Monnard parents are fairly straightforward, it would have been nice to have Ziguette feature more prominently, perhaps towards the end of the novel, so that her motivation could be better understood and her future more clearly visualised. Similarly, Marie seemed to be marching to the beat of her own drum but exactly where she wanted to head was never really established. However, it is due to the strength of the characters Miller has created that this desire to know more arises rather than from any particular failure in characterisation.
Pure is a brilliant historical novel and a worthy winner of the Costa Novel Award. Andrew Miller has a gift for expression and an eye for historical detail. There is a decidedly dream-like quality to his storytelling and this powerfully evokes the sense of fluidity that filled Paris in 1785 as ideas churned, ideologies hardened and revolution stalked the streets. At times both unsettling and engaging, Pure is a first-rate example of explosive, relevant historical fiction.
It Chooses You, by Miranda July
It Chooses You – which could act as a companion piece to Miranda July’s recently released second film, The Future – is about as filmic as a book can be. A collection of transcribed interviews and photographs, it’s as eclectic as a short story collection and as unobtrusive as a good documentary.
The book details July’s struggle to progress with her screenplay for The Future, and her decision to embark on a series of meetings with people she finds through the PennySaver, a Los Angeles classified magazine that falls through her door every Tuesday – all of which eventually impact on her approach to the film. The advertisers, who vary in age, wealth and gender, sell items of questionable value - Care Bears, an old hair dryer or other people’s photograph albums. Each item reflects quietly on its owner, and all the items – and the people selling them – are sensitively captured by Brigitte Sire, the photographer who accompanies July on her excursions.
The Iliad, a new translation, by Stephen Mitchell
Heresy I know, but the one image I couldn’t get out of my mind while reading this new translation of the Iliad was of a passionate and golden skinned C3P0 seated in front of a semicircle of furry little Ewoks and telling the battle of Endor. He’s simplified the story and added rhyming repetitions to help the little things visualize it all and he emphasizes key parts with lots of arm waving and sound effects. All around them the grown ups are celebrating with much food and drink, half listening to the story they already know well and all the while plotting and planning their next moves in little huddles around the camp fires or outside in the dark.
Stephen Mitchell isn’t really into the arm waving and sound effects though. Previous translators went to great lengths to convert the onomatopoeic-ish Greek into onomatopoeic-ish English, but not this one. This is converted into simplified modernish American without too much rhyme and rather lacking in rhythm. The net result is a translation, or rather adaptation, that doesn’t scan too well as either a written or spoken work. But it is nicely simplified.
The Map, by T S Learner
Following on from the success of her début novel Sphinx, selling 100,000 copies Learner, a British born playwright, has produced The Map, a similar style tome of a novel that combines history, politics, espionage and mysticism.
It is set in the 1950′s following the Second World War and on the fringes of the Cold War. It starts with a gritty and promising insight into the life of August Winthrop, an American who has previously fought with the International Brigade in 1937, an Oxford Classics academic, and maverick CIA operative with strong political ideals. Read more
Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles: The Authorized Adaptation, by Dennis Calero
Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is widely regarded as one of the greatest books in science fiction. It is a series of short stories, often called ‘future histories’, which are both self-contained and which contribute to the narrative whole. It was originally published in 1950, and had 28 parts starting in 1999 and ending in 2057. It tells the tale of man’s colonisation of Mars while things aren’t going so well back on Earth. There are Martians to contend with too. Or are they merely ghosts, or even delusions?
Dennis Calero, who has previously worked on Legion of Super-Heroes and Cowboys & Aliens, has taken Bradbury’s tales and turned them into a graphic novel. The timescales are the same, but only 14 of the short stories are presented. It has been a few years since I last read the novel version, but I do remember that I did enjoy it, and it left me with an overwhelming sense of awe and wonder. Is it fair to compare this edition with the prose? Maybe not, but what it should still present is a coherent narrative structure in a series of short tales.
Siege, by Simon Kernick
Simon Kernick is the best thing to come out of Slough in… well, ever, and by a wide margin. Since making his debut in 2002 with The Business of Dying, he has established a name for himself as one of the nation’s best thriller writers, crafting books with pace, violence, and above all, a high degree of authenticity.
Siege opens with a devastating terrorist attack on London, followed by a high-stakes hostage situation in the city’s historic Stanhope Hotel. The hostage takers are ruthless in the extreme; they establish control immediately by killing without mercy. Not only that, but their planning has been meticulous, and as the plot unfolds, Kernick reveals some additional tricks up their sleeve.
God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens
God is Not Great has sat near the top of my to-be-read pile for some time, but unfortunately, the earliest opportunity to read it has come shortly after the author’s death. As such, a favourable review risks being consigned to the reams of heartfelt fawning that followed Hitch’s passing, and a negative one could smack of the kind of intentionally critical comment that sought to remind us that aside from being a towering intellect and a peerless debater, Hitchens could also be a pompous prig. There is an enormous temptation here to review the man rather than his work, particularly when the work transparently carries so much of its author‘s own character. With every sentence, that baritone voice can be heard as if he were still at the lectern, eviscerating religious apologists with wit and verve.
The first thing that should be said about God is Not Great is that it contributes nothing really new to the religion debate. As Hitchens acknowledges in his rousing conclusion, religion is the longest running debate in the history of mankind, and aside from the creeping barrage of scientific progress rendering it increasingly redundant in understanding the cosmos, no real new ground has been broken on the subject for centuries. Instead, what Hitchens serves up is a whistle-stop tour of the iniquities of religion. God is Not Great has the air of a prosecutor summing up; and what a damning summing up it is. With characteristic literary swagger, Hitchens lists the failings of faith -
Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organised religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.
The Battle of Midway, by Craig L. Symonds
There’s a chapter in Craig L. Symonds non-fiction The Battle of Midway which recounts, in gripping detail, perhaps one of the most infamous incidents in the Pacific leg of the Second World War, but which stands out as a particular tense and churning highlight in a book full of them. The incident involves the ill-fated American carrier Hornet. Not ill-fated to be sunk, it survived such a fate, but to practically miss the battle entirely. This particular infamous incident has been called the Flight to Nowhere, which just sums up all you need to know.
Reading in detail the stacked deck of lost chances, mistakes and plain bad luck, through which the American forces repeatedly suffered makes it astonishing to believe they won the battle at all, an outcome which shouldn’t be considered a spoiler given its vaunted position in American culture, perhaps because the victory was so momentous. And also Craig L. Symonds says so on the blurb.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer
The Weird is a monster volume of 1152 pages ( each page featuring a double column!), a compendium of last century’s weird fiction, including SF, horror and fantasy as well as mainstream fiction with a distinct odd or bizarre taste. Editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer pursue with this book their most ambitious project by providing what supposedly is the definitive anthology in that area.
Needless to say, the reader (and the reviewer) are so overwhelmed by the amount of the fictional material that it is impossible to take into consideration or comment upon the single stories included therein.
Ian Fleming’s Commandos: The Story of 30 Assault Unit in WWII, by Nicholas Rankin
After the great success of Churchill’s Wizards, Nicholas Rankin returns to the same formula by finding an unusual angle for telling the story of a relatively obscure, though highly distinguished, military unit. 30 Assault Unit was an innovative formation – a specialist group of commandos whose job was to go in with frontline troops and capture enemy intelligence, especially technical information. As a Royal Navy unit, their focus was on naval material (radar, submarines, torpedos, and so on) and the man behind their formation was Commander Ian Fleming, RNVR, a senior assistant to the Admiralty’s Director of Naval Intelligence, and of course the man who went on to create the character of that legendary spy, James Bond.
Rankin seems to have two objectives with this book – to tell the story of 30 AU, which is notable in itself, and to explain how Fleming’s wartime experiences influenced his later writing career. In terms of the former: 30 AU were present on the botched Dieppe raid, served on North Africa, Sicily and Italy and went in with the troops on D-Day. Using the commando spirit of improvisation and daring they achieved some great ‘pinches’ (captures of intelligence), including vital contributions to efforts going on at Bletchley Park to crack the fiendish German Enigma code. That same commando spirit also got them in to trouble sometimes , and they were a thorn in the side of senior commanders on at least one occasion – however Rankin clearly feels it was a worthwhile endeavour, not least with the capture of the entire archive of the German Navy by a tiny squad of 30 AU members (you wouldn’t have wanted to play poker with any of these men, they often played a weak hand amazingly well).
Cold Wind, by CJ Box
For years, Joe Pickett has been plagued by the mother-in-law from Hell. A perennial divorcee and gold-digger, Missy has constantly denigrated his profession and his manhood, attempted to drive a wedge between Joe’s daughters, and on one occasion even asked Joe to leave his wife for what Missy perceives to be the greater good. And so, when Cold Wind begins and she is arrested for the murder of her multi-millionaire husband, Joe isn’t the first to leap to her defence. However, Joe is what he is; a man committed to justice and with a knack for digging up the truth, and he soon puts both character traits to use in attempting to blow apart a suspiciously strong case against his mother-in-law.
Missy has always been a powerful peripheral character, popping up to drive a thorn into Joe’s side at regular intervals. Leaping from one lucrative divorce to another, she has acted utterly without morals throughout the series, but has she really made the leap from parasite to black widow? It’s an engaging mystery, with Box giving the perennial antagonist centre-stage to great effect.
Blue Remembered Earth, by Alastair Reynolds
Geoffrey and Sunday Akinya are the black sheep of the family. He lives in Africa and researches elephant psychology, she lives in an off the grid area on the moon and earns a marginal living as an artist and sculptress. The family, primarily Hector and Lucas, have written them off but would still welcome them into the business if they wanted in. That business being the mining of resources in the outer solar system and shipping them wherever needed, their corporation one of the biggest around.
When Eunice, the reclusive family matriarch, dies everything starts to change. After the family has gathered for the funeral Geoffrey is asked if he could tie up a loose end by visiting an old deposit box on the moon and bringing back whatever Eunice left there. Security and biometrics being what they are it can only be done by a family member, but it’s not particularly important so he’s the obvious person to go. Charming. The condition is that he tells on-one else what he finds, especially Sunday: the incentive lots more funding for his research. Geoffrey, like Alan Grant before him, can’t resist the chance of extra funding and the breadcrumb chase is on.
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Hailsham is not like other boarding schools. The students and their guardians have a bit of a different relationship, and mystery shrouds not only their purpose but also the need for them to produce art which is then sent to a so-called gallery. The students are aware of their purpose – they are clones, intended to donate organs to others until they ‘complete’. Their lives will be spent first counselling other donors, and then donating themselves, in a literal sense. But nothing is overtly stated, and no one asks the questions that are really important.
Kathy, the narrator, tells her tale in the framework of her friendships with Tommy and Ruth, a young couple she attended Hailsham with. As they move out and begin their independent paths, the truth starts imposing on their dreams and they begin to look for answers no one will want to hear. But who will help them, when clones aren’t really thought of as humans?
Fated, by S G Browne
‘Rule 1 – Don’t get involved with humans’ – to be followed by the immortal beings working for Jerry, or as most people know him, God. From Greed, to Destiny, Karma, Integrity, Hope and Death, humans have some pre-assigned fates and destinies; some are also given choices about how they go about their lives.
Fate, AKA Fabio, has had his role for over 200 000 years. Most of his humans are dealt a bad fate as opposed to the positive direction of destiny and Fabio, has over the last couple of thousand years become rather demoralised by his role; fed up of seeing humans head towards a future of doom and gloom after making bad choices. Many being drug addicts, alcoholics or general losers. He rather fancies his chances influencing people’s lives for the better, but then that breaks one of the fundamental rules…
Nowhere to Run, by CJ Box
Nowhere to Run is the tenth in the Joe Pickett series, and after a decade of writing (condensed to twelve months for those of us in the UK), author CJ Box is in no danger of running out of steam.
The tale begins in the Sierra Madre mountains. Following reports of butchered elk and damaged tents, Joe is running one last check on the area prior to leaving for good after a year in enforced exile. As he rides deeper into the wilderness, Joe is filled with a sense of foreboding and a desire to turn back, and with good reason; his journey soon finds him in more danger than ever before.
Charles Dickens: A Life, by Claire Tomalin
The bicentenary of Charles Dickens’ birth has seen the Dickens industry spring into action as busily as the mills in Hard Times’ Coketown. Our fascination with this Victorian writer shows no sign of abating. His appeal is not simply to academics and students of English literature, as the numerous film versions of Dickens’s Christmas Carol on our TV screens each festive season testify. Dickens managed to penetrate the public consciousness of both his own times and ours to an extraordinary degree. Viking’s biography of Charles Dickens is, therefore, both timely and welcome. Tomalin, the acclaimed and award-winning biographer of writers including Samuel Pepys and Thomas Hardy, is particularly well-placed to write his biography as she is the author of The Invisible Woman, a revelatory biography about Charles Dickens’s mistress Nelly Ternan, published in 1990. Read more
Little Bones, by Janette Jenkins
The year 1900 dawns on Jane Stretch, born with a disorder that causes her bones to grow oddly, or not enough and alone in the world after being abandoned by her sister and both of her parents. The debt they leave her with, needing to pay the landlady for the room, soon puts her in a bit of a bind. But help is on the way; that same landlady offers her a position assisting her husband, Dr Swift. Before she gets a chance to think about it, Jane is helping the doctor administer a tincture designed to cause spontaneous abortion. She holds the women’s hands, mops up their sick, and provides them with a kind and listening ear.
London at the turn of the last century provides a soot-stained, foggy backdrop to her story as she wends her way through a world unprepared to cope with her – how different she is, and how despite her deformities she is as intelligent as, or more intelligent than, the next girl. But abortion is against the law, and the doctor’s growing dependence on alcohol places her in a dangerous position indeed. Will she find happiness at last? Read more
Stolen Souls, by Stuart Neville
Galya is a girl from Ukraine. Tricked into coming to Ireland with promises of a good job, she found herself slaving on a mushroom farm before she was taken into Belfast to be groomed into becoming a hooker. When a Lithuanian gangster tries to force himself on her in order to “break her in”, she kills him and shortly afterwards finds herself on the run from his friends who want their revenge. Afraid and in a city where she knows nothing and no-one her only hope is the man with the cross, who gave her his phone number. Little does Galya know that her only hope is to turn into her worst nightmare.
Detective Inspector Jack Lennon was hoping to have a quiet Christmas with his daughter when he’s put in charge of the case of a murdered Lithuanian man. When three other men are also murdered, it seems that Jack may have a war between rival gangs on his hands. However, it isn’t long before Jack finds himself looking for the girl who is rumoured to have murdered the first man, unaware that others are looking for her too and that forces very close to him are determined to stop him from solving his case at all cost.
The Locked Ward: The Memoir of a Psychiatric Orderly, by Dennis O’Donnell
As a society, we like to think we’ve come some way in our treatment of, and attitudes to, mental health. We look in horror at the Victorian model, priding ourselves on our humanity because we no longer lock the mentally ill away for life, and refrain from driving chisels into their frontal lobes. And yet, the situation remains far from perfect. Psychiatric patients remain misunderstood, marginalised and, in certain circumstances, mocked. As such, The Locked Ward is a book of tremendous value.
Dennis O’Donnell gave up life as an English teacher to work as a psychiatric orderly in the ICPU (Intensive Psychiatric Care Unit) of a large, unnamed hospital in central Scotland. In The Locked Ward, he tells us a series of tales from the front line of psych care. Through a string of short chapters, some dealing with broad themes, some with the stories of individual patients, O’Donnell offers a raw and lucid account of life on the ward. Read more
The Lewis Man, by Peter May
The Lewis Man is the second in Peter May’s planned Lewis trilogy, a crime-based saga set on the Hebridean island of Lewis. The opening chapter, The Blackhouse, was a triumph in terms of both place and character, and as such, hopes will be high for the follow up.
It opens, as far more typical crime books so often do, with the discovery of a body, that of a brutally murdered man. Beneath the acidic peat of Lewis, the corpse has lain undisturbed, preserved perfectly for an unknown amount of time, possibly even millennia. A pathologist sets about solving that particular mystery, and in doing so, throws up several more in its place, pulling former Detective Inspector Fin Macleod back to the island of his youth.
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The Bookgeeks Interview
Blaine Harden
Blaine Harden is an author and journalist who reports for PBS Frontline and contributes to The Economist. He worked for The Washington Post as a correspondent in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as in New York and Seattle. He was also a national correspondent for The New York Times and writer for the Times Magazine.
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