The Heart’s Invisible Furies – John Boyne

In 1945, Catherine Goggin, sixteen years old and newly discovered pregnant, is denounced as a whore by the Goleen parish priest in front of the congregation and sent packing from the church. Her response is to get on the bus to Dublin and start a new life, A life in which a baby cannot figure, so the child is given to a nun to place in a new home.

Skip to 1952 and we discover that home is with Charles and Maud Avery, an unconventional couple, who are bringing up Cyril, now seven, with kindly disinterest while constantly reminding him that he is ‘not a real Avery’. The pattern is set to revisit Cyril’s life every seven years when we share significant events, often humorous, sometimes tragic.

This short review, avoiding spoilers, can only hint at the scrapes, the inner turmoil, the compromises, and the betrayals involved. Suffice it to say that Cyril, being young, gay and living in Ireland in the 1960s and 70s, has problems. While the church and state sponsored discrimination reduces in later decades, his outsider status never goes away.

It is a small-scale epic, which builds up an eclectic cast of characters that weave in and out of the narrative over the decades. It is told in the first person by Cyril in a style that is engaging, authentic, and compassionately human.

Though long at 700 pages, it reads much shorter due to its episodic structure and fluent, frequently funny, prose. Highly recommended.

Mr Wilder & Me – Jonathan Coe

Mr Wilder is Billy Wilder, American film maker, whose career spanned five decades and included such classics as The Apartment and Some Like It Hot. Me, in the context of this novel, is Calista Frangopoulou, a woman of mixed Greek and English heritage.

Their paths cross in 1976 when Calista, on a student backpacking holiday to the US, finds herself in Hollywood having dinner with the already famous director, his scriptwriting partner Iz Diamond, and their wives. Serendipity strikes. They are looking for a location in Greece for their next project, she is bilingual, has local knowledge, and a young fresh outlook that the old guys appreciate. But it still comes a surprise when ten months later, back in Greece, Calista is invited onto the movie making crew to interpret while filming there.

One thing leads to another over that summer and as the film moves on to Paris and Munich, so does Calista.

While that period forms the bulk of the novel, it is narrated in retrospect by Calista, twenty years later, as her twin daughters reach the age she was then, and as they too are embarking (separately) on potentially life defining journeys.

It is a curious mix of biography, film directory, inter-generational by-play, and romcom (Calista meets a boy). But beneath it all is a sense of ending. By 1976 Wilder’s career is winding down, the Greek film a last hurrah. His skills, what he does best, are no longer fashionable, no longer in demand. Twenty years later, Calista’s job as a mother, a role she defines herself by, is similarly coming to an end or at least a sea change.

It is tender, slight, maybe subtle, maybe a little self-indulgent in its love for the golden age of cinema. The writing is good enough, expect no less from Jonathan Coe, but give me his more grounded Middle England and Bournville any day.

The Duke’s Children – Anthony Trollope

The Duke of Omnium, ex-prime minister Plantagenet Palliser, finds himself suddenly a single parent when the Duchess Glencora dies unexpectedly. The role should not be that onerous, the children are adults, just about, albeit somewhat immature.

Eldest son (and heir), known as Lord Silverbridge, was kicked out of his Oxbridge college for some high jinks and has been enjoying life since – hunting, fishing, shooting, and clubbing – and now is into horseracing with its associated gambling. Daddy is not impressed and Silverbridge tries to turn over a new leaf (quit racing), seek a new purpose (a seat in parliament), and find a wife. In his sights for that honour is Lady Mabel Grex, attractive and of good aristocratic stock as approved by the duke. She is impoverished, but that is no bar to the heir of the Omnium fortune. She likes Silverbridge well enough but decides not to roll over at his first advances. She will have some fun, make him work for her hand.

The Palliser daughter, Lady Mary, has no such coquetry. She falls hook, line, and sinker for the poor but honourable gentleman, Frank Tregear. (Unbeknown to her, he is on the rebound from Mabel Grex, the parting being mutually agreed as both need to marry for money rather than love). As for the Duke of Omnium, honourable but poor doesn’t cut it with him. He forbids the marriage. Why can’t she find someone suitable like her brother has!

But when an American beauty, Isabel Boncassen, arrives on the society circuit, Silverbridge’s head is turned, he must have her for his wife. But he knows all too well how his father will react to a proposed marriage to the granddaughter of a New York dock worker. And what about the proposed alliance with the house of Grex?

It takes 500 pages to resolve the thorny issues of love, duty, class, and honour, but we get there in the end. The journey is pleasurable if you are not in any rush and able to enjoy the flowing prose and sly wit of Trollope. And accommodate his off-piste side stories of skulduggery in horseracing, politicking, and wagering.

This, the sixth and final of the Palliser (or political) novels, provides a tick for the Book-et List, completing the series that I began in 2012 with a (second) reading of Can You Forgive Her? Given that I previously read the six volume Barchester Chronicles series between 1997 and 2009, I consider myself well and truly Trollop-ed out for the foreseeable future.

The Memory Chalet – Tony Judt

Tony Judt, scholar, historian, essayist, became increasingly disabled by a motor neuron disorder that left him largely immobile, trapped in his own body. But his mind remained active and sharp as ever. To cope with the hours of uncomfortable and sleepless nights he ‘visited’ his past and composed essays that he could dictate during the daylight hours. This book is the result.

In equal parts memoir, critique, manifesto, and whimsey, he shares his experiences as a child of Jewish heritage in post-World War Two London; his youthful political enthusiasms; his academic career in England and the United States; and a late-blooming involvement in eastern Europe.

The essays are of easily digestible length but consider meaty issues – politics, education, religion, freedom of speech. They often meander enjoyably down asides and go off at interesting tangents of less moment. before returning to the main point and a pithy conclusion.

Insightful and commendably free from any hint of self-pity or resentment at his fate, the collection provides a vivid celebration of all aspects of life: the good and the bad; the beautiful and the ugly.

The Sleeper – Emily Barr

Lara is dissatisfied. The outward idyll of life in Cornwall, married to Sam, is a mask. She resents giving up her London life and career for a support role as wife and mother, especially now no babies have arrived and the IVF has failed again, leaving them unfulfilled and in debt. Her only local friend, acquaintance really, is Iris, in whom Lara recognises a similarly troubled soul.

When an opportunity arises for a job back in the city, she argues the case for taking a six-month contract to clear the debts. She can commute, getting the Sunday night sleeper from Truro to Paddington, sleep at her sister’s flat during the week, returning on the Friday night sleeper. Sam reluctantly agrees.

She falls into the routine, enduring her sister’s company midweek while revelling in the Friday night sleeper scene, enjoying gin and tonics with new friends Ellen and Guy. Then one week she does not arrive back in Truro, and the train is declared a crime scene when it gets to Penzance. Lara is missing, a victim or perpetrator. The police favour the latter, so it is up to Iris to find her and clear her name.

In the first third of the book Lara’s first-person narrative, up to her disappearance, is compulsive as her Jekyll and Hyde character emerges. Then the point of view switches to Iris and becomes less satisfying as she stumbles her way towards locating Lara. In the process the backstories of both women emerge, explaining their respective current issues. The helter-skelter finale ping-pongs between them to provide a tense climax.

It is a decent enough mystery thriller, the first part sufficiently intriguing to carry readers through some mediocre stuff to discover the resolution. The settings of Cornwall, London and somewhere else (no spoiler) seem authentic but of the characters, only Lara and to a lesser extent Iris, engage.

The Muse – Jessie Burton

London 1967, Odelle Bastien, five years since arriving from Trinidad with her degree, leaves her job at Dolcis shoe shop to start work as a typist at the Skelton Institute of Art. It is a glorified gallery and art dealership owned by the urbane Edmund Reede and managed by the formidable Marjorie Quick.

Quick takes Odelle under her wing, and Odelle finds the older woman intriguing, bordering on mysterious. Her curiosity intensifies when a young man brings in a painting inherited from his recently deceased mother. It is a striking work depicting a glorious Andalusian landscape behind, in the foreground, a girl holding in her hand a severed head. When Quick sees the painting, she is visibly shaken.

Cut to 1936, Andalusia, in a Spain on the brink of civil war, where the Schloss family of three arrive at a rundown quinta. Harold is an exiled Austrian Jewish art dealer; his English wife, Sarah, has money and issues; their nineteen-year-old daughter Olive has a decision to make. She has an offer of a place at a prestigious art school in London but is entranced by the local landscape and light. The Schlosses are met by Isaac and Teresa Robles, young half siblings looking for casual employment. Teresa becomes housekeeper and Isaac, an aspiring artist, is commissioned by Harold to paint a portrait of his wife and daughter.

The novel toggles chunkily between the timelines, the connection between them slowly and sinuously emerges. Never obvious, never forced, just perfectly done. Each setting has a fine sense of time and place. Each character has depth and nuance. The writing is easy on the eye, yet full of both wit and grit. In each timeline pace is slowly built up to twin exciting climaxes and a resolution uncertain to the end.

It is simply an exceedingly good read.

In the Blink of an Eye – Jo Callaghan

DCS Kat Frank returns to the Warwickshire Police after a career break covering the terminal illness and death of her husband. She’s ready to return but has promised 18-year-old son Cam that she will take on an executive level post away from the front-line dangers of the job.

The Chief Constable has just the role for her - a pilot scheme to assess the efficacy of using AI to assist officers in the field, initially looking at some cold missing persons cases. More specifically she will have on the team a prototype artificially intelligent detecting entity - AIDE Lock. It resides in a bulky bracelet round her wrist but, unnervingly, can emerge like a genie from a bottle to take the form of a humanoid hologram and join in conversations and interrogations. Kat completes her team with a male DI – Rayan Hassan – and a female DS – Debbie Browne.

Which case to prioritise? The question immediately pitches AIDE Lock’s objective algorithmic analysis against the colleagues’ subjective, experience-based, gut-feeling approach. It is a tension that lasts throughout.

The priority cases (they compromise on two) are subjected to review. Re-examining evidence and re-interviewing witnesses open new lines of investigation. Supercharged by AIDE Lock’s prodigious analytic capacity, progress is made rapidly. So rapidly that the cold cases soon become red hot, and Kat’s promise to stay clear of personal risk soon goes by the board.

As ever, personal lives are dipped into, prejudices are aired, mistakes are made and learned from, making for as good a detective novel as any. It is well written, and the AI twist is modern and timely. But not totally innovative, echoing (probably unconsciously) Isaac Asimov’s 1950s detective novels partnering a human and robot – Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. Not bad company rub shoulders with.