Category: Book Reviews

IN THE DARKNESS

Karin Fossum , sometimes called the “ Norwegian Queen of Crime,” is one of Scandinavia’s foremost  crime writers. Her  Inspector Konrad Sejer series first appeared in 1995 and  now runs to ten. Publication in English began in 2002 with “Don’t Look Back”, chronologically second, and now at last we have the book that first introduced Sejer.

Fossum is different.  A published poet at 20, she has worked as a nurse and in drug rehabilitation, and is noted for her empathy with the perpetrators as well as the victims of crime. Her books are thought provoking and often explore a  particular theme. Here, for example she examines the notion of prostitution as a career choice. Her style is understated and deceptively simple but compelling.

She tends to base her stories in small rural communities rather than the big city and the crimes are, relatively, uncomplicated but often with unforeseen consequences and a surprise twist in the end. She views many of those involved as ordinary people pushed over the edge.

July 2012

Her detectives play somewhat of a subsidiary role, with little focus on their private lives and thoughts except in so far as they advance the plot. In Sejer there is none of the brooding male detective encountered in  Nesbo or Mankel, or closer to home.  Indeed Fossum has said of Sejer that he is not intended to be a major character but is “in the book because he has a job to do.”

Originally entitled “Eva’s Eyes”, most of the book is told through the  eyes of an artist, Eva Magnus. Walking by the river with her daughter they see a body floating to the surface. He is identified as a man missing for months, throughout the Norwegian winter, for whom the trail has gone cold. He went missing around the same time as the murder  of a prostitute, still unsolved, but efforts to link the two have proved fruitless.

Following a break Sejer finds the common thread and begins to put the pieces together. For all her dismissiveness of him, he emerges in these pages as formidable and worldly-wise.

PHANTOM

Harry Hole is back, a detective in the classic hard boiled mode, world weary, flawed,  but with a passion for justice. Harry is also Norwegian, and his creator, Jo Nesbo, stakes a claim to being the  best crime writer to emerge from Scandinavia. The comparisons are with Henning Mankel and Wallender rather than Stieg Larsson. The only tattoos in evidence in this, the ninth in the Harry Hole series, are those on the Russian criminals Harry encounters.

Jo Nesbo is himself an interesting character. A promising footballer, he played with the current Norwegian champions Molde before  his dreams of playing for Spurs were shattered  together  with his cruciate ligaments. After graduation, he became a stockbroker and financial analyst and along the way founded a successful rock band, Di Derre. Burn out, and a trip to Australia prompted a lifestyle change and the first Harry Hole novel appeared in 1997 (the O is pronounced like the U in Una). His reputation has grown with each book.  The last, The Leopard, was a best seller here and  in the UK and another (The Snowman) is being made into a film directed by Martin Scorsese.

In Phantom , Harry has returned to Oslo after three years in Hong Kong. His alcoholism has been tamed and he is still the formidable dogged investigator of old. No longer a policeman, he is back to investigate a case already closed, that of a junkie killed by another. He reignites his old relationship with the woman of his life and her son, for whom he was the surrogate father. He plunges into the other Oslo, an underworld of drugs and crime, a marked contrast to the city’s prosperous public face.  On the way we get  insights into how the modern drug  supply network operates including a classic account of smuggling by air.

There is a fresh version of heroin on the street – violin – and the addicts are queuing  up for their  fix. It is synthetic, highly potent, and in short supply, controlled by a mysterious new figure on the local scene – “the Man from Dubai.” His dealers wear trademark Arsenal shirts, his enforcers are Russian, his philosophy is simple. You mess with him – you die.  Meanwhile the authorities  are preening themselves over an apparent clean-up of Oslo, with a decline in  drug deaths and a rise in successful police busts of drug pushers. Throw in sex, hints of police and official corruption and you have all the ingredients for a page turner.

As the book progresses, Harry’s demons resurface. His Achilles heel remains drink and “will he won’t he” is a subtext for much of the book, marked also by his encounters with a strange  priest­- like figure, complete with clerical collar, who shares the same flop house hotel Harry uses as a base. But, as the body count mounts and Harry gets close to the truth and to the criminal mastermind there are unpalatable realities to be confronted and faced down. Another winner for Nesbo.

March 2012

Bruce Arnold and Jason O’Toole: The End of the Party

RTE’s “Inside the Cowen Government” demonstrated that there is no lack of interest in the events which led to  the virtual annihilation of Fianna Fail as a political force in last February’s election. “The End of the Party” traces its demise from the heady days of its three in a row success in 2007 to its worst ever electoral performance. It’s a story without heroes, with the possible improbable exception of Charlie McCreevy. It is also a story without a happy ending as Ireland’s economic woes of recent years continue unabated.

This is an angry book, with the emotions of the authors clearly showing as they attempt to outline how we got from where we were to where we are. There are swipes at Bertie Ahern,  with the meltdown of both country and party traced to his tenure, and at the Greens for turning “yellow” by entering coalition. But the main opprobrium is focussed on Brian Cowen, and his Finance Minister, the late Brian Lenihan. The main events of the  three turbulent years to last February are burned in most people’s memories, and, indeed the book is less a narrative account of the Cowen premiership and more a collection of snapshots of its highs (few)  and lows (many).

Brian Cowen became Taoiseach in early May 2008 and was immediately pitchforked into  the Lisbon Referendum campaign. Possibly distracted by his elevation, he got off to a bad start, admitting he had not read the whole Treaty. It was downhill from then on, with the tactical errors of Nice One repeated by the Yes side. The advocates of a “No” vote, marshalled by the able and articulate  Declan Ganley, ran a superb campaign and won by a clear margin.

With  government finances collapsing in tandem  with the end of the building boom, an emergency budget was scheduled for early October2008. It demonstrated more tactical ineptitude and necessitated an embarrassing volte face over a proposal to remove automatic medical cards from the over-70s. By then however, the fate of the  government, and of the country,  had been decided.

On the night of 29 September 2008, Cowen and Lenihan, fearing an immediate collapse of the Irish banks, and with other Cabinet members consulted by phone, issued an  unlimited guarantee on all deposits and borrowings of six major Irish banks.  It was the defining moment of Cowen’s government. The information available then suggested a considerable but manageable exposure of several billion; as we now know this was wrong by many multiples. The entrails of this will continue to be pored over for a long time to come and this book does its fair share, posing all the obvious (and not so obvious) questions.

As the banking horror story unfolded,  Fianna Fail’s support declined . It dropped below 30% in the wake of the guarantee and never really recovered, slipping to 23 % in early 2010 and hitting 18% as the year ended. Not even a resounding success in the Lisbon rerun helped. The authors are particularly incensed at the decision to hold a second referendum castigating the  Yes campaign as a mixture of “fear, lies and an array of blatant illegalities”.

Then and thereafter, the book suggests it was a case of holding on in the hope that something would turn up. There was too much respect for the ECB and not enough cognisance that most of Ireland’s trade was with countries outside the Eurozone. There are chapters on NAMA (condemned), the first cabinet reshuffle (remember that? Killeen and Carey in), and Brian Cowen’s drinking as well as his failure or inability to communicate.

The pace picks up as the end approaches, and the book is riveting enough in the final chapters. “The Sad Autumn of 2010” introduces the effective denouement, the arrival of Ajai Chopra and the Bailout, the terms humiliating, even the way the procedure was handled cringe making. The government was comprehensively bankrupt. Indeed, as the authors note “the reality…. at the end of November, was a set of fiscal circumstances about which people could do nothing, and a level of anger and hatred about which they could do a great deal”. Fianna Fail “had lied to them, betrayed them, robbed them and misled them”.

There are chapters also on the competing claims, from Fitzpatrick and Dunne, about the extent of Brian Cowen’s contacts with Anglo Irish Bank. There is next to nothing about the invisible elephant, Ireland’s structural budget deficit. But these are secondary. The Guarantee and the Bailout did for the Brians and Fianna Fail.

November 2011

BLOOD HARVEST: S. J. BOLTON

 I have to confess I’d never heard of S.J. Bolton before now. The piece below was almost totally written before I read the author’s notes on her website about  writing the book. My conclusions were actually borne out by her comments.

It will probably come as no surprise that I liked the book – a lot. In part it was because it was set in the area of England where I grew up – indeed there are references to the market in the small town where  I lived – Rawtenstall – and the story is rich in the atmospherics of the  curious rural/urban setting of the Lancashire/Yorkshire borders. The author is from the area, though is a bit coy about specifying exactly where.

I read the book at a setting, and enjoyed it so much that I took out and read her two previous books, Sacrifice and Awakening. All three books have certain similarities of style and content, and frankly I think this one is the best of the three – it’s more controlled and slightly more believable and with fewer loose ends. Sacrifice, for example, set in the Shetlands, features a cult carrying out savage and ritualistic killings; the book ends without any explanation of the how and the why of the ritual. Awakening , set in Dorset, features deadly poisonous snakes, though it is memorable for another reason- an Elmer Gantry, Ian Paisley style Pentecostal preacher.

All three share some great descriptive pieces of locations, all have been meticulously researched and all feature as heroes (though perhaps that’s too strong a word) outsiders or loners. There are strong hints that perhaps Ms.Bolton is related to a Cof E clergyman though there are in addition enough references to horse riding and to the activities of a rural vet to point to a personal familiarity with rural life in general. In two of the books also the heroine has a physical disability or deformity. In all three the heroine has a medical qualification.

I wasn’t sure at first whether Blood Harvest was scheduled to have a supernatural element (along the lines of John Connolly) to help the story along. This after encountering the early graveyard settings and the sightings of a mysterious figure. Indeed it could have functioned well as a ghost story, suitably amended. If you google the author, her notes on writing the book bear out her interest in a supernatural thriller as well as acceptance that it was never a runner. She also reveals that the opening incident, of a subsidence adjacent to an old cemetery, beside a new house, was based on an actual event which happened to her sister and family. This gave her the germ of the idea for the story (hence the dedication of the book “To the Coopers”).

She set the story also in a location very close to where she grew up, though calling the village in the book Heptonclough (rather than Heptonstall), a clearly mythical Pennine town fringing one of the moors straddling the Lancashire/ Yorkshire border, not too far from Halifax. Throw in also the gothic setting of a ruined abbey, an accompanying later church and crypts and you have a dual purpose backdrop (a ruined church is central to Awakening also). I would not be surprised  were she to try a supernatural thriller before much longer.

The hero is a distinctly unclergy-like clergyman, a Geordie (it’s hard to picture a vicar or priest with a Geordie accent) whose preoccupation seems to be with pursuing the heroine rather than tending to his flock. The heroine is a wheelchair bound psychiatrist with a passion for horse riding. The tragic figure is provided in the first instance by a young woman riven by guilt over the death of her infant child in a fire.

The story includes intriguing references and examples of English rural customs such as the harvest festival , corn dollies, Pennine spirals and the like. The festival unique to the book is the Blood Harvest festival , a late autumn occurrence dating back to times when superfluous livestock were solemnly ritually slaughtered for consumption over the winter. (There’s some interesting stuff in Wikipedia on the various pre-Christian annual festivals – look up Wheel of the Year; cf also references to Bealtaine Lammas and Samhain festivals.)The book features an interesting variant on Bonfire Night (5 November) suggesting that it was in some way an adaptation of the earlier All Souls festival. (Possibly it was – but the fact remains that Guy Fawkes was found in the House of Lords on the night of 4 November)

The body count begins to mount – mostly very young girls, indeed the theme, according to the author, is children in danger. The tale as it eventually unfolds involves incest and pedophilia in an almost droit de seigneur  fashion towards young local children by the  town’s patriarchal magnate. Interwoven with this is a sad tale of generations of children in the locality suffering from congenital hypothyroidism, a disorder arising from a diet deficient in iodine, which in the case of the townspeople of Heptonclough was attributable to eating locally produced vegetables!  Environmentalists take note!

By the end justice has been done, the bad vanquished, the vicar has decided he doesn’t have a vocation and the novel’s sad Ophelia has met her fate. The surprising killer, though with mitigating circumstances – insanity – is female. The psychiatrist heroine is recuperating but unwilling/unable to allow the budding relationship with the vicar to develop. Interestingly, in Awakening, the facially disfigured heroine,  who is a vet, also has trouble relating to others (though with a very valid reason), while in Sacrifice the heroine doctor long harbours grave suspicions of her husband.

I found the book to be a page turner and a very good read, but then perhaps I was biased from the off. The book uses widely the device of short chapters (83 in 380 pages before a lengthy blockbuster final chapter); this is a considerable development from her earlier novels, where the chapter lengths were roughly one and a half or twice as long. There are fewer loose ends, in the form, inter alia, of the introduction of secondary characters, never fully developed  but with important roles to play. The author herself seems to be pleased with the character development in Blood Harvest, and to regard it as an advance in style, with which I concur.

A further development in her evolution as an author is that  in her most recent books she seems to be creating a serial heroine – Policewoman Lacey Flint –  for the future. On balance a writer to watch, certainly one to enjoy. Seven out of ten.

18/4

TINY SUNBIRDS FAR AWAY ; CHRISTIE WATSON

1.The title comes from one of Nigeria’s indigenous birds – the Tiny Sunbird, Nectarinia Minulla, a year round resident, one of 28 species of sunbird.

2. The Author is a former  paediatric nurse (at Great Ormond Street), proud of her profession. This is her first novel. She lives in South London with her Muslim husband and three children, having spent several years living in Nigeria. The book has been shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Awards, to be announced on 4 January next.

3.There is a very interesting short (2’30”) YouTube video interview with the author in which she describes the novel as the story of a family, how it fractures and how it can come together again. She speaks of drawing inspiration for some of the characters from her immediate family.

Brief Outline of the Novel

4.The novel is narrated by the heroine, Blessing, who for most of it is a 12/13 year old girl. It opens in Lagos where the family lives a comfortable middle class existence, with most modern comforts. This is soon shattered when the father (incidentally a drunkard and a wife-beater ) is caught with another woman, breaks up the marriage and the family (mother, Blessing and her older brother Ezikiel) is ejected from home and surroundings and forced to return to the mother’s family, living in rural squalor in a village near Warri, a city in the oil-rich Niger Delta. The rest of the novel takes place there. (Compare and contrast this with what would happen in the event of a marriage break up caused by the husband’s infidelity in Ireland, Britain or Europe.)

5. The culture shock is almost total. Their new home is racked by poverty and has little furniture, no electricity, no clean water (it has to be bought and carried – by the women – from a location 20 minutes away), no sanitation, and primitive harsh schooling. The grandfather who is a firm, if sometimes benign, head of a Muslim household, has no job and drinks heavily (Remy Martin!), while romancing about his qualifications as a petroleum engineer and his hopes of getting  a management position in the nearby foreign owned oil company ( the Western Oil Company). Inter alia the household supports a driver/factotum, who has 4 wives and 17 children living nearby.

6. The family has no money, apart from what Blessing’s mother brought. The children are obliged to give up school since they cannot afford the fees, scuppering Ezikiel’s hopes of becoming a doctor. He is asthmatic and has a chronic allergy to nuts. His diet, therefore, suffers since they cannot afford palm oil for cooking but use ground nut oil to fry any meat (which must be fried to kill bacteria). His grandfather, Alhaji, a fool who believes Marmite is a universal cure, refuses to believe Ezikiel has allergies. Mocked by his companions for having no sons, he takes a second much younger wife who is almost a caricature, to the discomfiture of all, including his first wife, the grandmother.

7. As the story proceeds, the women have to provide. The mother gets a job in the bar in the oil company’s compound. The grandmother, it is revealed, is a local midwife, while the number 2 wife becomes a professional mourner. They get by. Ezekiel goes back to school, but Blessing’s return is vetoed by her grandfather; she becomes apprenticed to her grandmother. Meanwhile their environment begins to loom ever larger in the story. There is considerable local resentment and gang violence over the foreign exploitation of the local oil reserves and the effects this unregulated development is having on the environment – polluted river water, noxious atmosphere, etc – as well as the poverty and lack of job opportunities for the locals. Ezikiel, an innocent, is shot in an incident and hospitalised.

8. He is only released from hospital when his bill is paid. But by whom?  Cue the white oil worker, Dan, who has befriended the mother and is picking up the family’s bills. In classic fashion he is at first rejected by the family, then gradually accepted as it appears he loves and intends marrying the mother. He finds a ghost job for the grandfather, who rebuffs him temporarily as his daydreams of a management position are exposed as fantasy.  Ezikiel has become radicalised by his circumstances, accuses his mother of prostituting herself and attacks Dan as a foreign exploiter. He is expelled from school and eventually leaves to join one of the anti-oil company militias – the Sibeye Boys.

9. The story proceeds to a somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion, with  a hostage taking (Dan at his wedding), a terrorist incident with  tragedy for the family (the involvement and death of Ezikiel) and an unexpectedly benign outcome  involving the release of Dan without payment of ransom,  his subsequent marriage to Blessing’s mother and their move to London, leaving Blessing behind. Fast forwarding, she still lives in the village, has children of her own, including twins (in some societies bad luck) and narrates her story to them.

Subtexts and Subplots.

10. There are several subplots. The main one, which is fascinating, concerns the work of a rural tribal midwife in Nigeria. A number of childbirths, uncomplicated, difficult or tragic, are described in unrelenting detail. It’s definitely not for the squeamish. The stoic acceptance of the delivery by the mothers, the cutting and stitching where necessary, all without anaesthetic, has considerable impact. As does the gradual initiation of young Blessing into the role of assistant and then full midwife.

11. On balance the midwife elements are positive and uplifting, showing the basic nobility of the women,  mothers and  those attending , in dire circumstances of poverty dirt and disease. Stalking this scenario, however, is a darker side, the presence, the threat, the tradition , of female genital mutilation. There is the delivery made more difficult and agonising for the unfortunate mother, who had suffered it and was sewn up again afterwards, the wish of another mother to have her new born daughter circumcised immediately , and the enduring image of the grandmother  sketching out for Blessing ,with a stick in the dirt, the four types of female genital circumcision.

12. The other main subplot concerns the tension and interaction between the locals and the Western Oil Company. Not only is their environment and way of life suffering from the casual untrammelled exploitation of the oil in the ground, but there is the strong feeling among the locals that they are getting nothing in return, apart from a few security jobs. People are being brought in to do jobs the locals consider they could do. They  are clear that there is corruption including of their own politicians going on, and inevitably there is a reaction. Armed militias develop, including some working for the oil company and terrorist incidents, hostage-taking and bunkering of oil become common.

13. White executives travel everywhere under armed guard. The family are at first suspicious of Dan’s relationship with Blessing’s mother; there are clearly precedents for  local women working in the company’s bar to take up with white men just there on contract. The family’s expectation is that Dan will abandon Blessing’s mother when his contract is up. But Dan is made of softer stuff! His hobby is ornithology not sport (it is in his list of Nigerian birds that Blessing finds reference to the “tiny sunbird”). He resists rather clumsy advances from the number 2 wife, and he goes through with the marriage to Blessing’s mother even after the kidnap. How often does that happen in reality? The motives of Dan, his past history, and the emotions and attitude of Blessing’s mother to their relationship, are passed over – but then again the story is being told through the eyes of a young girl.

Comments

14.The book is an excellent easy read. I read the 400 pages at two sittings.

15. It is gripping, sympathetic and draws the reader into the story. It has moments of tragedy (some of the childbirths, Ezikiel), comedy (the foolish beliefs and antics of the grandfather and those of number 2 wife), suspense, at times fairly grisly (childbirths, the imagined fate of hostage Dan); and it has, presumably intentionally, a happy ending.

16. It delivers its messages gently but memorably. It paints the grim reality of life in an African country and  village, without, incidentally, including most of the worst case scenarios. Food is short, but there is never famine. There are hints of potential sexual  assault on Blessing  (unless a bribe is paid) but no brutal rape. There is lack of electricity, with all that implies, lack of sanitation, without any of the attendant diseases, and very rudimentary hygiene in circumstances without clean water, again without the consequences that might be expected. There are darker glimpses – female genital mutilation for one, which Blessing declares she will never perform, references to the deliberate abandonment of twins as bad luck – though the number 2 wife has twins, and so ,we learn on the last page, does Blessing herself.  There is also the hint of the African woman selling her body for much needed money, though Dan appears as the hero who does right!

17. In short, the book is a gentle and compelling introduction for a reader in Europe or North America to the daily realities of existence for  many people in the developing world  . At the same time there is emphasis in the book of what unites people everywhere. Ezikiel , and one of the new mothers, will not be treated medically unless they can pay, and Ezikiel cannot leave hospital without paying his bill in full. How different is that to practices in the USA?  Christie Watson in her video claims her father-in-law in England, like the grandfather character, has both his own mosque and a snail farm!  Again, viewers of one of the Lifestyle Channels on Sky TV may recall, from “A Life in Spain” one aspiring entrepreneur setting up a snail farm in Spain. The message is that people are the same everywhere. And Ezikiel, with his idealism and resentment, particularly against Dan, sounds like a typical rebellious teenager.

18. Does Christie  tell the story convincingly through the eyes of her narrator, Blessing? We learn only at the end that she is now considerably older as she narrates, with children of her own. (There is one probable anachronism here; Ezikiel is buried in his Chelsea Essien shirt; Essien only signed for Chelsea in 2005, which makes the time line difficult. But then again, Christie may not support Chelsea!) She certainly makes a good fist of it, conveying much of how an adolescent girl would feel in those changed circumstances. Yet ultimately the premise that someone, irrespective of colour or race, would be transported  so quickly and definitively from a comfortable middle class standard of living to a life with a poor family in the countryside, and then eschew a chance to leave and travel to London, is somewhat implausible.

19.On the other hand, the book is didactic – probably intentionally. And it achieves its purpose. It shows the gulf in lifestyles, with the subtext of how fortunate we are to be born where we are. And it does so in an entertaining, heart-warming and moving manner. It is no wonder it has been short listed for the Costa Awards  Would I recommend it ? Definitely. An ideal Christmas present? Certainly.

20 December 2011