Just For Lookin' Thru

Boyle pits victim against criminal in this dual perspective novel about identity theft. Dr Dana Halter is deaf, and a teacher of the deaf, living her life to the full, working, engaged to Bridger, a computer graphics film editor, and attempting to write a novel about language based on a historical figure – the mute wild boy of Aveyron. Always running late, she gets pulled over for a minor traffic violation and she is plunged into chaos. Someone has been using her name and is wanted all over the States for various felonies. Already a character with attitude, Dana’s steady anger at the world and everyone in it escalates when she is thrown, pitilessly, into jail for the weekend where she suffers indignity and humiliation. Her rage continues unabated throughout the novel as she obsessively tracks the fraudster who is to blame, forcing her fiancée to accompany her on her quest for revenge. Fiancée Bridger is unfailingly supportive and kind, but she gives him nothing. Nowhere in the entire s...

McEwan’s novel about ambition, personal betrayal and revenge features Clive, a modern composer trying to complete a major orchestral work, his friend Vernon, an editor trying to save his ailing newspaper, and Garmony, an unscrupulous right-wing politician on the rise. In common, all three have, in previous years, been lovers of recently dead Molly. They meet at her funeral and the story follows the next few weeks of the men’s lives. Vernon and Clive act as one another’s conscience, each infuriating the other. Which is more important, honesty, friendship and trust or Vernon’s newspaper and Clive’s symphony? The novel presents the difficulties of balancing personal and public morality, the importance of private shame and public reputation, the conflict between taking a moral decision for the greater good, or putting first ones own desires. Not just a simple exposé of a politician with a vulnerable side, Amsterdam is full of double standards and surprises, and takes a long, cynical look a...

Hobbs writing immerses the reader in the world of an eighteenth century preacher in rural Cornwall. The preacher is an earnest young man aged 27 and the novel is a study of his thoughts and preoccupations about death, faith, religious doubt, and freedom. Working six days a week in a forge, as apprentice to a smith, he spends the Sabbath day walking many miles over the country to preach, often without food, and frequently to find a sparse congregation. He develops a fascination for a blind girl, Harriet, whose own faith in God is absolute, and his visits to her are mannah to his soul. Hobbs beautifully captures the young preacher’s urgent desire to deliver his message, to show the rural folk that God is there for them, as their redeemer and provider, yet the evidence around him is of poverty and want, and he despairs that people seem to have turned away from God and become too concerned with material needs and desires. What is most striking is the sense of grief and loneliness, and the ...

Evangeline is 29 and pregnant. She thinks about the baby she is about to have, and remembers her own mother who died when she was eight. She is sent to live on a Welsh farm with her grandparents who she had never met; she adapts, and develops a deep affection for them, the farm and the landscape. Eve Green is an observant novel, sensitively written, with close detail that allows the reader to become absorbed in the world of the story. Fletcher writes with a great sense of affection for people and place and, although I was astonished to find the editor had missed the phrase ‘bored of’, there are some deft touches; ‘I felt that our secrets had been pressed together, twisted into the same shape, and that they couldn’t be peeled apart again.’ Memories are interwoven with her childhood perspective of detail from one long, hot summer, when a girl from the village went missing. Fletcher inserts little pieces of supposition, as a child might speculate, and builds up tension around Eve’s childh...

John Sharpe drives repeatedly round a ring road all day musing on his wife, his baby son, his business, his upbringing, his family, and the GM trials that his company are undertaking. There is close detail about potatoes, childbirth and sex. Sharpe thinks about various characters which tells us something about them but, unlike the characterizations and minute observation evident throughout In The Place of Fallen Leaves, I am left feeling I do not know these people, nor does Sharpe, and nor does he know himself. I warm to none of them. There are three occasions when he plainly contradicts himself; he says he went to a therapist, then says he made it up; he says he met his wife hitchhiking, then says he met her playing football; says she fell head over heels for him, then that she settled for him after loving someone else more deeply. These deliberate contradictions are strangely psychotic and disturbing. Sharpe is left to continue on his way.

A novel beautifully written from the perspective of a teenage girl in rural Devon. Observations of the people around her, the farm and the countryside during one long, hot summer, are perceptive, intuitive, acute and touching and Pears captures the subtleties and sensitivities of a range of characters with apparent effortlessness. To read about them is to know them. He describes the forebearance of disappointed women, gives them the dignity of acceptance, and elicits understanding rather than sympathy. To pity these women would be to diminish their resolution and fortitude. He writes the Rector particularly well; gets inside his head, and gives the reader a wonderful sense of the man’s thoughts and his wisdom. He achieves this by writing the narrative about simple scenes and straightforward people with a mature eloquence, and peppering the narrative with short pieces of dialect which brings life and expression to the characters. The reader sees the story unfold through Alison’s unsophi...

I loved this beautifully paced, insightful and wise Russian tale about the arrogance and disrespect of youth towards the older generation, contrasted with the dignity, good manners, liberalism and respect of the country estate ‘little aristocrats’. Turgenev writes with great sensitivity, evoking the profound social change and conveying characters’ deep emotion without ever stating it; such understated writing and unhurried pace comforts and absorbs. He leaves the reader to infer what goes unsaid and, in this short novel, puts across a gently ironic overview of the social structure of the time; the liberal enlightened landowners are caught between trying, on the one hand, to give ‘their’ peasants autonomy, while on the other hand, they have the peasants mocking them and not seeming to want responsibility for their own living. The blurring of the old boundaries and systems is disquieting to everyone. He does kill off the dangerous young student scientist nihilist, who is a threat to ever...

An intriguing young woman escapes from post-Revolutionary France without money or assistance. Nameless, she has to rely on herself or charity. Another lengthy novel from Burney, to try a modern reader, but illuminating with regard to the overwhelming importance of name and connections – not personal worth, similar in that regard to Cecilia. The unnamed heroine frustrates because she does not defend herself, and is pursued from pillar to post, and because she self-sacrifices again and again. She repels Harleigh, who is surely her destined mate. Initially this is because she gave her word, in honour, to prevent the dramatic suicide of another woman, Elinor, who is in love with him, that she would not marry Harleigh. Elinor is a bizarre and fascinating character, melodramatic and constantly seeking death, inspired by what she perceives as the glorious deaths during and after the French Revolution, so Ellis (as our heroine comes to be called) seems really wet in comparison to the impassion...

It’s interesting to re-read this novel after a gap of over thirty years. What struck me forcibly aged around thirteen, was the violence and cruelty, particularly the hanging of Isabella's dog, which I barely noticed this time around. Reading it now, although Catherine and Heathcliff are really unpleasant characters, wilful, capricious, filthy tempered, and devoid of a discernible soft side, even towards each other, I am struck by the decency of Edgar Linton. As a teenager I thought him intolerably wet and uninteresting. The mistreatment of the adopted Heathcliff by his new siblings is slightly mitigated by Catherine befriending him later, but his isolated state, as an unwelcome guests is pitiful. The later mistreatment of both Heathcliff and Catherine, by her elder brother Hindley, is harder to understand, and so seems to be wilful power abuse on his part. Hindley Earnshaw is the villain of the piece, because of his neglect of his sister, and cruelty to Catherine and Heathcliff, wh...

Burney's eighteenth-century novel gives a fascinating insight into 18th century upper class life. It is a study of hypocrisy and selfishness, shallow characters with money, with emphasis on the mistaken importance of appearance, and not of character or substance. Cecilia is saintly but misjudged, talked about but not interrogated. Others all speak for her and about her, and the idea of feminine powerlessness and silence is heavily pursued, as is the idea of the failure of those around her to perceive true quality. It is Dickensian in places, especially because Cecilia is a saintly virgin, but also because Burney writes about the suffering of the poor, who depended on handouts, charity, and employment. When employed by the rich, Burney writes of the appalling frequency of their going unpaid, which leads to destitution, illness and death. The rich live the high life, run up debts, and have nointention of paying their bills. There is an extraordinary depiction of men. All fail Cecilia...

This lightweight frivolous novel centres around an implausible heroine called Joey who is rich, clever, and beautiful, yet aggressive like a man. She lacks any softness or femininity and is written as a sportswoman and swimming champion. This last accounts for her surviving when her husband, Chaz, throws her off a cruise ship on their first anniversary cruise. However, he doesn't know she has survived. The plot is farcical and contains some stereotypes, such as the thick thug, Tool, who has a soft side, and has Joey fortuitously meet an ex-detective, Mick. Inevitably they become lovers and he is able to help her to get revenge. The thug comes around to their point of view, simple beast that he is. Hiaasen takes the ridiculing of Joey's treachorous husband to a level reminiscent of Tom Sharpe's writing. There are some funny images but it is unsurprising, an acceptable summer read.

This novel is tough going at the beginning due to the crazy prose and frenzied sections on characters, detailing how and why they are each unstable. There is no linear narrative or sense to be made. However, some sense begins when narratives cross over, where character descriptions and actions refer to the behaviour of other characters, so a mental picture gradually begins to form. The best part here is a section describing the emotions associated with flight terror which has previously been treated with flippancy. Here it is gripping; it draws the reader into the reality of bomb raids and the fear of premature death in a metal coffin, all fire, noise and confusion. There is also an enjoyable and lengthy section on the madness of commerce which focuses on Milo Minderbender's purchase and redistribution of produce simply to create a market, and is a daft but funny critique of the capitalist system. The following section discusses religion which is looking good, but requires close at...