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Please Don't Stop The Music - Jane Lovering
by shutitoff I'm not going to lie - I'm not a fan of chic lit. However, I was pleasantly surprised at the beginning of Please Don't Stop the Music. It began as an engaging read with interesting characters. I liked that Ben Davies (how's that for a rock star name...) isn't your usual dreamy hulk of a man, and I was intrigued by the secrets central to ... the characters of Saskia, Ben and Jemima. But I discovered that the only reason that you can't guess the twists is that they are utterly, inconceivably unbelievable. The novel started to drag a bit for me about a third of the way in, because Jem is constantly running. Every second page she starts to pack her bags, and it gets tiresome. And then the big reveal: she was in a street gang? Really? Her style of narration just didn't indicate this at all. It reminds me of the film adaptation of Great Expectation in which Pip laughably laments how he "wants to be a gentleman," in his little toffy-posh accent. She is just not street and it doesn't make sense. And Ben is deaf, that's his secret. You don't know this for most of the book, probably because it makes no sense either. Absolutely none. And as a literary device it just reeks of privilege - it's patronising and actually works to diminish the experiences of real deaf people. (If you're into romance novels with believable and well-drawn deaf characters, I suggest you read this blog post and read one of the books highlighted there instead.) But the part about Please Don't Stop the Music which I found most abhorrent was the way in which the event leading to Rosie's conception of Harry was just glossed over. She was literally raped. It doesn't make it okay that he was drunk, that it 'didn't last very long,' or that the rapist 'mistook her for his wife.' Rape. In closing, Jane Lovering, if you're not going to adequately address the issues which confront the homeless, rape survivors, or the deaf, please stop publishing Please Don't Stop the Music. Read the complete review |
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Stone's Fall - Iain Pears
by SWSt Book artwork can play an important role in attracting readers. When we saw Stone's Fall in a charity shop, we decided to take a punt on it because the artwork made it look "interesting". If you believe Mrs SWSt, the book lived up to that initial promise; personally, I thought the artwork was significantly more interesting than ... the book itself. When Victorian industrialist John Stone is found dead, having apparently fallen (or been pushed) from a window in his home, the repercussions are significant. Stone is a leading figure in British industry and his companies a crucial part of the British Empire's economy. His will makes a mysterious bequest to his unknown child, and his widow hires a former reporter to try and track him down. Stone's Fall is split into three different sections which gradually work their way back in time. It starts in 1909 with Stone's death, moving to Paris in 1890, whilst the final section shifts to 1867 Venice before revealing how these sections all tie together. There is nothing new about the idea of telling a story backwards, but Pears handles the structure well so that the reader is rarely confused, even if they are slightly mystified. Each section actually feels like a story in its own right, whilst at the same time they are always clearly connected (although the full implications do not become clear until the very final pages.) Sadly, the book suffered from a number of issues. The level of interest of the three segments varied wildly. Mrs SWSt said the book grabbed her from the start, but that's not an opinion I shared. It took such a long time for anything to happen (and involves such detailed accounts of business and economic activity) that I found part one a real struggle to get into. To be perfectly honest, if I were not one of those people that stubbornly persists with a book once I've started it, I would have given up on Stone's Fall before I reached the end of part one. Part two got my hopes up. The pace quickened and the book became more interesting. The plot was also more engaging and gave greater insights into human nature and behaviour to make the characters interesting. During part two, I finally began to see why Mrs SWSt found the title so appealing and was actually quite sad when it ended. Sadly, this proved to be a false dawn as part three has more in common with part one, and once again felt quite dull and pedestrian. By the time I reached the end of the book (which pulls all the plot strands together) I no longer really cared that much: I simply wanted to get the book finished. Part three felt very uneven and some of the plotting rather strained and unlikely - completely at odds with what we had learned about some of the characters in the previous two sections. It is quite clever the way the plot comes together in the end and how well Pears conceals his true intentions. It's always clear that something is slightly amiss, but it's not immediately obvious what. Readers will, of course, try to guess the outcome but I suspect that few will succeed. It's actually so obvious that you overlook it and try to over-complicate things, which at least means the denouement preserves the element of surprise. Where Pears does excel is in his writing style. Yes, it can be somewhat turgid, but in terms of the language and style, he perfectly captures the feel of a turn of the century novel, using the same flowery language and excessive use of adjectives. It might sound a little odd to modern ears, but it works well in the context of a book which is pretending to be a period Victorian work. This verbose approach does make for a big book - almost 600 pages of small, densely packed text in the paperback edition - which can be rather daunting. Whilst chapters themselves are not that long (typically 20-30 pages) they feel long because the text is small and breaks in chapters are few and far between. I found that this impacted on its readability and it wasn't a book that particularly lent itself to picking up and reading during a few spare moments. A real annoyance was the lax editing and typography, with a number of really obvious spelling or grammatical errors. I suppose it's possible I noticed them more and was less forgiving because I wasn't really enjoying the book, but some were so obvious that it is pretty unforgivable that they slipped through. As I said, opinion was divided in the SWSt household. Mrs SWSt really enjoyed it I found it dull. For what it's worth, my dad also read it and shared my opinion. Perhaps it's just a book that might appeal more to women? Who knows? The book costs around £5-6 (print or electronic) to buy new, which is way too much. You can get copies of it second hand for a couple of pounds and I couldn't advocate spending any more than this. Basic Information -------------------------- Stone's Fall Iain Pears Vintage, 2010 ISBN: 978-0099516170 © Copyright SWSt 2013 Read the complete review |
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Incendiary - Chris Cleave
by brokenangel Having read and loved 'The Other Hand' by Chris Cleave, I was keen to read his first novel, 'Incendiary', and snapped it up when I saw it on sale for £2 at my local charity shop. The book won several respectable prizes when it was first published and is an international best seller. The author has published three books to date ... which have all been well-received in literary circles. The blurb Instead of having a traditional blurb on the back page a nameless narrator tells the reader that she's not a perfect mother, that she cheated and was punished but she loved her child and she will tell you the perfect truth. While this is attention-grabbing, it doesn't actually tell you very much. If you are happily intrigued and don't want to know any more, I suggest you skip over the next section...and possibly the whole body of the review! This lack of information is a marketing device that has presumably served Cleave well as his second book has less guidance than this one and the blurb for his third book simply states that it is 'about the limits of human endurance, both physical and emotional'. (Apparently it's actually about Olympic cycling.) The idea While engaging in an illicit liaison, a woman loses her husband and son in a terrorist attack on a premiership football match. She struggles to cope with her bereavement and her sense of guilt and develops relationships with two journalists and a senior police officer who all have their own connections to the attack and to her. In an effort to prevent more "boy-shaped holes" being made in the world she begins to write a letter to Osama Bin Laden (and, as she reassures him, western leaders, too). After all, while she recognises that The Sun would simply dismiss him as EVIL, she is sure that if he only understood the pain he was causing then he would stop blowing up boys. This book is her letter. Writing a letter The narrator is working class and lives in Bethnal Green. This is a significant point in itself as much is made in the novel about the different experiences, expectations and treatment of working class and middle class people. Presumably in order to make this background clear, Cleve writes how he feels a woman in this situation in life might. This means that commas are frequently absent and many sentences deliberately 'run on', by which I mean there are also a number of full stops which are simply missing. Initially this irritated me greatly, partly because of my teaching background and partly because punctuation exists for a reason and I did sometimes have to reread bits to make sense of the narrative. Gradually I stopped noticing this so much, although the repeated use of "would of" and "could of" (instead of "would have" and "could have") continued to grate until the end! The narrator also sometimes writes in capital letters when writing something she imagines The Sun using as a headline. Some readers may find this attempt at verisimilitude irritating or even patronising (working class = uneducated, tabloid reading etc.) but it may be worth persevering if your complaint is the former rather than the latter. If it is the latter, you are likely to find that it only gets worse. Despite being uneducated the narrator is evidently meant to be wise and witty and makes effective use of metaphor and simile to help describe her world. The narrative is a pleasure to read as the prose has a rhythm of its own even as it describes horrible things. Rather than organising the letter into chapters there are simply four sections, one for each season. This seems very appropriate as the story begins in Spring, the season associated with new lives and hope, and gets darker as the seasons change and move closer to winter. The sections are not of equal length and by the time I reached Summer I had forgotten I was reading a section headed Spring! The lack of chapters means it can be difficult to find a good point to put the book down. It also reflects the slightly meandering nature of the story, which is largely chronological but follows the narrator's thought processes as much as actual events. I found this style quite appealing as it felt very immediate and raw, like I was really experiencing the narrator's thoughts. For some reason, perhaps to reinforce that this is a diary-style piece of writing, dialogue is prefaced by dashes rather than being identified by speech marks. Again, this was a minor irritation until I became used to it. Writing a woman Chris Cleave, a male writer, places himself in the mind of a female character, which is no mean feat when imagining her losing her family, having sex and losing her mind. I felt that he did this successfully: if I did not know from reading his previous book that this was a male writer I would not have guessed. Writing tragedy I found the book became more difficult as it developed. The initial dramatic events are shocking but plausible. However, as the narrative progresses and the narrator's relationships developed I did not find those developments particularly convincing. I thought some of the changes were almost surreal and felt that if I could not believe in what the characters were saying and doing then I could not believe in the story. The journalists, Petra and Jasper, were alternately lovely and awful while often acting rather bizarrely. I have never been in any of the situations the book describes so I could be mistaken about their plausibility but for me this detracted from my enjoyment. I also felt that Cleave was using the characters' relationships to make some points about class which I personally was not particularly interested in. Or rather, the way in which the narrator repeatedly commented on class became a little irksome to me. More interesting is the erosion of civil liberties that follow the initial incident and how the population reacts. London's reactions to the earlier events and particularly the twist in the middle - which is probably easy to anticipate if you think about it but I didn't and found it shocking - were convincing and very, very frightening. The book certainly develops in tension as it continues and the ending is quite startling as well as sad. Despite the plot's focus on a horrific event and its terrible consequences, there is a good amount of humour in the narration, which is essential to stop this becoming completely bleak and depressing (everyone is out for themselves or mad or both). For instance: 'This is London Osama so if I do ever forget to mention the weather you just imagine it's raining and cold and you won't be far off.' The narrator's attempts to converse with the international terrorist that she refers to simply as Osama become increasingly surreal as the narrative continues and she comments on links and divisions between them, theorising about the possibility of him stacking shelves in Tesco's and managing not to behead his fellow workers and record their executions. In this way the humour effectively builds tension as well as helping to release it as the reader can see how tenuous the narrator's grip on reality has become. Some difficulties I like to read about characters I can respect or perhaps empathise with to some degree, but none of the main characters in this story are particularly nice and and at times they are all utterly repellent. For instance, I am not sure why Cleave chooses to have his narrator fornicating adulterously when the incident happens; I assume it is to help explain her descent into post-traumatic stress disorder, but it means the reader is likely to begin the book by feeling, at best, ambivalent towards a wife who cheats on her husband and leaves her young son alone at home to go to the pub. (Cleave justifies this behaviour in a number of ways but I still found it rather disconcerting.) In a horrible coincidence, 'Incendiary' was released to UK bookshops on on July 7th 2005 - the date of terrorist attacks on London tubes and buses (7/7). Given the proximity of the book to the attacks, some reviewers have suggested that Cleave exaggerates the reaction of politicians and public in her fiction. Reading about the restrictions in place in the novel I felt that perhaps Cleave did have rather less faith in Londoners than he could have done. Cleave has noted that there is a difference in magnitude between the event he imagines and the events of 7/7, and has suggested that there are more similarities than we might, as a society, like to admit. Regardless, when I was reading the book it reminded me more of a dystopian vision of the future - like we find in Orwell's '1984' or Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' - than a feasible reality in today's England. However, that may well be just my naivety speaking and the measures taken in the novel did not seem completely implausible. Furthermore, when comparing the developments in London to the developments in the characters' relationships the former began to seem positively convincing! Perhaps the biggest problem is simply the bleakness of Cleave's vision. Despite the often almost jaunty tone in which the nameless narrator recounts what happens to her, she gradually sickens of the world around her - and so does the reader - until she, and we, are forced to question to what extent this is a world worth saving. This is not a cheery beach read and such pessimism will not suit all tastes. The film There is a film based on the novel but a quick read of the synopsis confirms that it takes a significantly different direction to the book, so if you have seen and enjoyed the film you will want to be aware that the book is much darker. Conclusions I am still not entirely sure what I thought of this book. It was a powerful and compelling read - I read it in two days - which was beautifully written despite the deliberately uneducated style of narration. The subject matter is an important one and Cleave makes valuable points about the dangers inherent in an emotional response to terrorism. The rush of events compels you onwards and the moments of humour sparkle in what is otherwise really rather grim reading. I think it is definitely worth reading, but 'enjoyment' is not quite the result. In a word: disturbing. Most readers seem to love it or hate it, which is worth £7.99 of anyone's money. (Even if you hate it you'll have plenty to think about and to say about it.) This seems to be the standard price point for a book of this sort of format and length (338 pages) although it is available for less in all the usual places online. Although I still can't quite decide if I liked it, I found it very powerful and am glad that I read it. I will continue to keep an eye out for other books by Cleave and to recommend 'The Other Hand' in particular. Read this if: - you are interested in powerful stories that deal with loss, grief and madness; - you have enjoyed other books by Cleave due to his writing style, or enjoy books which make poetic use of prose; - you are interested in reading about the impact terrorism can have on places and lives. Avoid this if: - deliberate lack of punctuation and grammatical errors are likely to annoy you to the extent that you cannot enjoy the story they help to shape; - you are of a particularly sensitive or squeamish disposition as there is some description of the dead and dying (this is graphic without being gory so my sensitive stomach was fine); - you like a simple story with at least one primary character you can like or admire without significant reservations. Read the complete review |
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Author: James Hogg / Fiction Book / 224 pages / Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd / Released: 1 Feb 1997 |
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Author: Horace Walpole / Fiction Book / 176 pages / Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks / Released: 14 Aug 2008 |
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1 review Author: Natasa Dragnic / Fiction Book / 272 pages / Publisher: Chatto & Windus / Released: 7 Jun 2012 |
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1 review Author: Raffaella Barker / Fiction Book / 208 pages / Publisher: Macmillan Children's Books / Released: 6 May 2005 |
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1 review Author: Jude Deveraux / Fiction Book / 480 pages / Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia / Released: 15 Feb 2003 |
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1 review Author: Georgette Heyer / Fiction Book / 368 pages / Publisher: Arrow / Released: 1 Jan 2004 |
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Genre: Fiction / Fiction Book / Author: Chris Ayres / Hardcover / Publication Date: 2009 / Publisher: Grove Press |
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Genre: Fiction / Fiction Book / Author: Mia March / Papberback / Publication Date: 2012 |
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1 review Genre: Fiction / Fiction Book / Author: Susanna Gregory / Hardcover / Publication Date: 2012 / Publisher: Sphere |
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1 review Genre: Fiction / Fiction Book / Author: Leah Fleming / Paperback / Publication Date: 2012 / Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd |
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