The Return – Roberto Bolano

Read as leg 7 (Chile) of the Bookpacking reading journey.

Although the author is Chilean by birth and upbringing, these short stories reflect his wider world view and experience, spanning the Americas, Europe and Russia.

Many take as their subject a portion of an individual’s life, retold second hand in a style almost verbatim.  As for the ‘heroes’ – they are anything but; criminals, gangsters, pimps, whores, porn stars and, worse of all, poets, all feature heavily.

The best for me was the title story in which a recently deceased narrator observes with understandable distaste the unpleasant fate of his corpse at the hands (thankfully only the hands) of a necrophiliac.

This collection is not for those who like a good tale with a punchy ending; most of the stories simply share a slice of the unusual before fading away without resolution, and so maybe reflect life rather than art.

The Gates – John Connolly

The hardback cover is striking and attractive – a blue, black, and amber rendition of the night sky, the suburban streets, silhouettes of figures (human and otherwise) and, in front of an indeterminate redness, a set of black wrought iron gates dangerously ajar.

For these are the gates of Hell and unseemly things are on the way out, summoned by a combination of Mrs Abernathy’s séance in the basement of 666 Crawley Avenue and an unexpected event at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

A small boy and his dog witness the former and soon become the main obstacles to the achievement of Hell on Earth.  Using courage, ingenuity, school friends with useful skills (cricket and a knowledge of black hole physics) and a helpful demon with a grudge, the battle is waged.

The premise and prose style indicate a target readership of young adult, but what age?  The hero is about eleven but the humour is dark and the footnotes introduce serious science.

The perils of choosing a book by the cover became evident - loved its artwork but felt a few decades old for the text.

Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

Vanity Fair is Thackeray’s name for the milieu in which the polite society of the early nineteenth century mill around, show off, seek amusement, manoeuvre and score points.

Becky Sharp should not really be part of it, convention decrees that her lack of pedigree and means condemn her to serve the great and the good rather than join in their games.  But she is young, attractive, accomplished, witty and quite without scruples when it comes to social climbing.

Amelia Sedley, equally young, equally attractive if not so vivacious, has better pedigree and more means, at least initially.  But while Becky schemes for her own benefit, Amelia puts others first.  As Becky sees and exploits weakness, Amelia is blind to faults and is indiscriminately loyal.

The story of the two women, and the men they attract for good or ill, meanders over 600 pages.  For the modern reader too many of these pages are choked with Thackeray’s asides gently satirising his time.  In the rest the tale develops at a steady pace, widening to embrace the ups and downs of two moneyed families, the Osbornes and the Crawleys, whose scions (George and Rawden) have a major impact on the heroines.

Country estates, London town, the Battle of Waterloo, and the spas of Europe all feature over the twenty year or so span of the book before a climax of sorts enables the reader to exit the fair with good grace and a sense of both achievement and relief.