Category Archives: Book Reviews

Pocket Review – Snow by John Banville

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Snow by John Banville.

This book, on the surface, is a standard murder- in –the- big- house whodunit but underneath it’s a commentary on the state of the nation, the Irish Nation in 1957. Ireland (the 26 counties at least), has been free of British rule since 1921 and the Catholic majority now rule the roost.  The sleuth, Detective Inspector St. John Strafford,   is a the son of protestant landed gentry, burdened by the curses of his class – good manners, left handedness and hemophilia.  He’s an outsider now that the caste system has been turned on its head and Banville, like the good writer he is, shows this in a variety of subtle and amusing ways.

Archbishop Mc Quaid, the archbishop of Dublin, is one of the characters in the book and his long and sanctimonious arm reaches into every aspect of Irish society. He serves as a reminder that the Irish traded one oppressor, the English, for another more subtle oppressor, the Catholic Church. There is a chilling chapter about abuse in Irish residential industrial schools which brings to mind what happened to indigenous children in Canadian residential schools.

On top of all that there’s a dead priest, an intricate plot and sex scenes you will not find in Agatha Christie.

Verdict:

Read it, recommend it to a friend!

Runcible

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Runcible

The other day
I came across the word ‘runcible’
as in ‘runcible spoon’.

The word was invented by Edward Lear
as in ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’.

There is something risible about the word ‘runcible’
as in ‘laughter provoking’
which is different than ‘laughable’,
‘laughable’ has connotations of contempt
as in ‘derisible’ meaning ‘worthy of derision’,
‘derisible’ is almost an anagram of ‘desirable’
but back to ‘runcible’,
there is a great bounce, a great versatility to the word:

he walked out the morning after
humming a runcible tune

he had a runcible air about him
an odour that lingered
long after he had left the room.

the sun rose, red and runcible
in a diffident sky

I once spent the best part of six hour plane journey trying to describe the sunrise. There was no inflight entertainment, I could have used the downloadable app but I couldn’t imagine watching out of date Jason Bateman movies for 6 hours on my phone, so I had picked up a Craig Johnson novel, The Cold Dish, to get me through the flight.
This is the first novel in the Walt Longmire series. Walt is a sheriff in modern day Absaroka County, Wyoming. His wife has been dead 4 years and his life is a bit of a mess but there are various people looking out for him including his best friend, Henry Standing Bear. I know what you are thinking – an American law man with a Native American sidekick!! Anyway Craig Johnson navigates this well enough. There are a number of women in Walt’s life, including his daughter Cady, his dispatcher Ruby, a café owner Dorothy, Vic –his deputy, and Vonnie – a romantic interest. Vonnie is rich, beautiful, and troubled. They are all strong women and they don’t take no shit from Walt.
Walt is at Henry’s bar talking to Vonnie when he gets a call from Vic that a body has been found in a gulley up in the mountains. Walt heads to the scene, the body is hard to get at and the crime scene is complicated by the fact that a herd of sheep has surrounded the body, shat upon it and chewed at the clothes. The body turns out to be Cody Pritchard, a local boy who was involved in the rape of a girl from the reservation and got off lightly. It’s early morning by the time the crime scene has been secured and there is this moment after a long night where Walt, the narrator, says : “I gazed back up to the patch of sage and scrub weed and watched the sun free itself from the red hills”.
This is what amazes me about novelists, they have to handle character, plot, dialogue and create a world for characters to inhabit, for events to occur and they still find time to come up with lines like I have just quoted. So that was it for me, I spent the rest of the flight trying to come up with different ways to describe the sunrise.

As for the book, it’s well worth a read. Craig Johnson creates believable characters, characters to care about, to root for and the whole thing meanders along laconically with lots of witty banter and joshing – the kind of  joshing you would find in a small town cafe at 10  in the morning, one of those cafes with gingham tables and a robust waitress with chemically damaged hair who won’t take any shit from the bunch of plaid shirted retired guys who turn up every morning to shoot the breeze.

the sun rose, red and runcible
in a diffident sky .

Taking part in Open Link Weekend over at earthweal

Slim Discovers John Grisham

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A few years back, Slim was about to board a plane when he realized that he had brought nothing to read on the flight. He rushed to the nearest airport shop where he was confronted with a row of paperbacks. Each paperback had the author’s name and the book title in embossed gold letters on the front cover; in each case, the author’s name was equal in size to the book’s title. He became fixated on the name, “Danielle Steel” – its one broad vowel, its five slender vowels, four of  them “e’s”; and what about all those “l’s”! It was like a little poem in itself.

His flight was called for the last time, so Slim quickly grabbed “Sycamore Row” by John Grisham and boarded the flight.

This is a great book, not great as in “the Great American Novel” or “great literature” but great as in “Great Britain” or the “Great Divide”. In other words it’s big, about 1.75 inches thick. Slim found the first half inch to be tough going. It’s a simple enough story at first. A small town Mississippi businessman, Seth Hubbard, suffering from an incurable disease hangs himself. Shortly after, Jake Brigance, a local lawyer receives a handwritten will in which Seth leaves most of his considerable wealth to Lettie, his black housekeeper, contradicting a previous will in which everything was left to his children. Naturally, the children are not pleased and everyone starts to lawyer up.

This book is packed with the characters, some of whom could be called “stock” or perhaps, “restocked”. It’s as if Grisham went to Character Depot and picked up a bunch of characters that other novelists had returned. There is a crusty, cranky judge and a couple of cranky, crusty older lawyers with or recovering from a drink problem. There is a black lawyer with a whole pack of race cards in his back pocket. The main character, Jake, also a lawyer, has one major flaw and that is that he has no flaws. The housekeeper, Lettie, is saintly and beyond reproach. Seth’s children and their children are venal, money grabbing losers who had no time for Seth when he was alive. Jake’s wife is long suffering and uncomplaining and of course there is a cafe on the town square where blue collar workers, farmers and deputies  gather for breakfast in the morning and there’s a waitress called Dell who trades insults with the customers and knows everyone’s business.

While reading about this café, called The Coffee Shop, Slim has a series of revelations. Dell is described as “a gum-smacking, sassy gal” who, while pouring Jake’s coffee, manages to “bump him with her ample ass – the same routine six mornings a week”.  Slim realizes that Grisham has actually assigned a physical attribute to one of his characters. Dell’s ass is “ample”. He realizes then that he has no idea what the main character, Jake, looks like. Is he tall, short, fat, skinny? Does he have black, blond, brown, grey hair? Is he bald? What does Jakes’ wife Carla look like? So far she is nothing more than five letters on a page. He then realizes that the only reason he knows that Dell’s ass is ample is because Grisham needs that ass to perform an action and that action would not have the same effect if Dell’s ass wasn’t ample. He can’t risk not describing Dell’s ass.

By the way, who says “sassy gal” anymore? Elsewhere in the book, Grisham describes a prostitute in the bar which Simeon – Lettie’s no-good, drinking, gambling, philandering husband – hangs out, as “comely”; as in “as I walked out one morning, I met a comely maiden, on her way to the county fair”. It’s like he’s picking up his adjectives at a rural flea market.

Across the square from The Coffee Shop is the Tea Shoppe. This is where the white collar workers gather to discuss “interest rates and world politics” as opposed to “football, local politics and bass fishing”. What a neatly polarized world this is – black people, white people, blue collar, white collar. The poor white collar workers don’t get to discuss bass fishing and they have to meet in a café with an Olde Worlde name which further establishes them as effete and pretentious. Jake, on the other hand, though white collar, is accepted at the blue collar café, so right away we know he is authentic, he is to be trusted.

Chapter 17 takes place in the Tea Shoppe and here Grisham dispenses with names as well as adjectives. Nearly the whole chapter is taken up with a discussion between a lawyer, a banker, a merchant, an insurance agent and a realtor. These characters exist to provide background and update the reader on what is happening with the main characters. Lettie, for example, and her fast growing collection of family members have moved into a bigger house and there is a long discussion about how she can afford the rent. The merchant is there to ask the questions while the realtor, banker and lawyer are there to provide answers based on their respective professional expertise. The lawyer then takes center stage to answer questions on legal aspects of the case so that the reader is informed enough to understand what is going to happen in subsequent chapters. These characters then disappear.

This chapter gives perhaps the best insight into Grisham’s modus operandi. Every word he writes must serve or advance the plot, if it doesn’t, it is not required. After all, he has a town full of characters to keep moving and a story to tell and complex legal issues to convey in an understandable way and only 600 pages to do it in and Slim finds it irritating to be manipulated so obviously. At every turn, he can hear the whirring and clunking and banging and clanging of the mechanism driving this monster of a book but that’s not what really bothers him. What really bothers him is that he cannot put the book down. He really wants to know if Lettie gets her fortune and he is worried that her loser husband will gamble it all away and what about Jake? Will he make enough money from the case to buy that dream home for Carla? Will Jake, Carla and their daughter Hanna be safe because this guy who burned down Jake’s last house has just been released from prison and has a score to settle with Jake and Slim cares about them and he is nearly 300 pages away from finding out!

Sunrise/ The Cold Dish (Craig Johnson)

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Sunrise I

the sun rises red-eyed
after another long night
tending to the needy side
of the planet.

This poem came about because of a plane journey, a six hour plane journey, with no inflight entertainment. I could have used the downloadable app but I couldn’t imagine watching out of date Jason Bateman movies for 6 hours on my phone, so I picked up a Craig Johnson novel, The Cold Dish, to get me through the flight.
This is the first novel in the Walt Longmire series. Walt is a sheriff in modern day Absaroka County, Wyoming. His wife has been dead 4 years and his life is a bit of a mess but there are various people looking out for him including his best friend, Henry Standing Bear. I know what you are thinking – an American law man with a Native American sidekick!! Anyway Craig Johnson navigates this well enough. There are a number of women in Walt’s life, including his daughter Cady, his dispatcher Ruby, a café owner Dorothy, Vic –his deputy, and Vonnie – a romantic interest. Vonnie is rich, beautiful, and troubled. They are all strong women and they don’t take no shit from Walt.
Walt is at Henry’s bar talking to Vonnie when he gets a call from Vic that a body has been found in a gulley up in the mountains. Walt heads to the scene, the body is hard to get at and the crime scene is complicated by the fact that a herd of sheep has surrounded the body, shat upon it and chewed at the clothes. The body turns out to be Cody Pritchard, a local boy who was involved in the rape of a girl from the reservation and got off lightly. It’s early morning by the time the crime scene has been secured and there is this moment after a long night where Walt, the narrator, says : “I gazed back up to the patch of sage and scrub weed and watched the sun free itself from the red hills”.
This is what amazes me about novelists, they have to handle character, plot, dialogue and create a world for characters to inhabit, for events to occur and they still find time to come up with lines like I have just quoted. So that was it for me, I spent the rest of the flight trying to come up with different ways to describe the sunrise. The first attempt you have already read above, here, for better or for worse, is attempt number 2:

Sunrise II

The sun rises bleary-eyed
having spent another night
attending
one of those wild parties
to which, we
are never invited.

As for the book, it’s well worth a read. Craig Johnson creates believable characters, characters to care about, to root for and the whole thing meanders along laconically with lots of witty banter and joshing – the kind of  joshing you would find in a small town cafe at 10  in the morning, one of those cafes with gingham tables and a robust waitress with chemically damaged hair who won’t take any shit from the bunch of plaid shirted retired guys who turn up every morning to shoot the breeze.

 

Photos : Sunrise on Planet Cistern.

 

Slim Discovers John Grisham

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A few weeks back, Slim was about to board a plane when he realized that he had brought nothing to read on the flight. He rushed to the nearest airport shop where he was confronted with a row of paperbacks. Each paperback had the author’s name and the book title in embossed gold letters on the front cover; in each case, the author’s name was equal in size to the book’s title. He became fixated on the name, “Danielle Steel” – its one broad vowel, its five slender vowels, four of  them “e’s”; and what about all those “l’s”! It was like a little poem in itself.

His flight was called for the last time, so Slim quickly grabbed “Sycamore Row” by John Grisham and boarded the flight.

This is a great book, not great as in “the Great American Novel” or “great literature” but great as in “Great Britain” or the “Great Divide”. In other words it’s big, about 1.75 inches thick. Slim found the first half inch to be tough going. It’s a simple enough story at first. A small town Mississippi businessman, Seth Hubbard, suffering from an incurable disease hangs himself. Shortly after, Jake Brigance, a local lawyer receives a handwritten will in which Seth leaves most of his considerable wealth to Lettie, his black housekeeper, contradicting a previous will in which everything was left to his children. Naturally, the children are not pleased and everyone starts to lawyer up.

This book is packed with the characters, some of whom could be called “stock” or perhaps, “restocked”. It’s as if Grisham went to Character Depot and picked up a bunch of characters that other novelists had returned. There is a crusty, cranky judge and a couple of cranky, crusty older lawyers with or recovering from a drink problem. There is a black lawyer with a whole pack of race cards in his back pocket. The main character, Jake, also a lawyer, has one major flaw and that is that he has no flaws. The housekeeper, Lettie, is saintly and beyond reproach. Seth’s children and their children are venal, money grabbing losers who had no time for Seth when he was alive. Jake’s wife is long suffering and uncomplaining and of course there is a cafe on the town square where blue collar workers, farmers and deputies  gather for breakfast in the morning and there’s a waitress called Dell who trades insults with the customers and knows everyone’s business.

While reading about this café, called The Coffee Shop, Slim has a series of revelations. Dell is described as “a gum-smacking, sassy gal” who, while pouring Jake’s coffee, manages to “bump him with her ample ass – the same routine six mornings a week”.  Slim realizes that Grisham has actually assigned a physical attribute to one of his characters. Dell’s ass is “ample”. He realizes then that he has no idea what the main character, Jake, looks like. Is he tall, short, fat, skinny? Does he have black, blond, brown, grey hair? Is he bald? What does Jakes’ wife Carla look like? So far she is nothing more than five letters on a page. He then realizes that the only reason he knows that Dell’s ass is ample is because Grisham needs that ass to perform an action and that action would not have the same effect if Dell’s ass wasn’t ample. He can’t risk not describing Dell’s ass.

 

By the way, who says “sassy gal” anymore? Elsewhere in the book, Grisham describes a prostitute in the bar which Simeon – Lettie’s no-good, drinking, gambling, philandering husband – hangs out, as “comely”; as in “as I walked out one morning, I met a comely maiden, on her way to the county fair”. It’s like he’s picking up his adjectives at a rural flea market.

Across the square from The Coffee Shop is the Tea Shoppe. This is where the white collar workers gather to discuss “interest rates and world politics” as opposed to “football, local politics and bass fishing”. What a neatly polarized world this is – black people, white people, blue collar, white collar. The poor white collar workers don’t get to discuss bass fishing and they have to meet in a café with an Olde Worlde name which further establishes them as effete and pretentious. Jake, on the other hand, though white collar, is accepted at the blue collar café, so right away we know he is authentic, he is to be trusted.

Chapter 17 takes place in the Tea Shoppe and here Grisham dispenses with names as well as adjectives. Nearly the whole chapter is taken up with a discussion between a lawyer, a banker, a merchant, an insurance agent and a realtor. These characters exist to provide background and update the reader on what is happening with the main characters. Lettie, for example, and her fast growing collection of family members have moved into a bigger house and there is a long discussion about how she can afford the rent. The merchant is there to ask the questions while the realtor, banker and lawyer are there to provide answers based on their respective professional expertise. The lawyer then takes center stage to answer questions on legal aspects of the case so that the reader is informed enough to understand what is going to happen in subsequent chapters. These characters then disappear.

This chapter gives perhaps the best insight into Grisham’s modus operandi. Every word he writes must serve or advance the plot, if it doesn’t, it is not required. After all, he has a town full of characters to keep moving and a story to tell and complex legal issues to convey in an understandable way and only 600 pages to do it in and Slim finds it irritating to be manipulated so obviously. At every turn, he can hear the whirring and clunking and banging and clanging of the mechanism driving this monster of a book but that’s not what really bothers him. What really bothers him is that he cannot put the book down. He really wants to know if Lettie gets her fortune and he is worried that her loser husband will gamble it all away and what about Jake? Will he make enough money from the case to buy that dream home for Carla? Will Jake, Carla and their daughter Hanna be safe because this guy who burned down Jake’s last house has just been released from prison and has a score to settle with Jake and Slim cares about them and he is nearly 300 pages away from finding out!