Manhattan Beach – Jennifer Egan

In pre-World War II New York young Anna Kerrigan accompanies her father, Eddie, to a rendezvous on Manhattan Beach with Dexter Styles. It is around these three characters that the novel unfolds over a decade or so.

It is mainly Anna who takes centre stage later, during the war years, by which time Eddie Kerrigan is long gone and she finds herself moving in circles that bring her back into anonymous contact with the Dexter Styles. He, she now realises, is heavily involved in racketeering, which throws new light on her father’s disappearance.

But meanwhile there is a war to be won and Anna, bored by the clerical work assigned her in the naval dockyard, wants to join the trainee divers she sees from her office window. Her battle for acceptance in such an exclusively male role, her ambiguous relationship with Dexter Styles, and the mystery of her father’s absence are weaved together in a context rich with period detail.

The plotline and modern historical setting both engage and there are sufficient twists, turns and peril to maintain interest to the end. The heroine is vulnerable but determined and her outcome matters; the fates of the two men are harder to care about.

The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton

Walter Moody arrives in the Hokitika gold fields of New Zealand after a rough crossing on William Carver’s boat. He checks into the Crown Hotel where he inadvertently gate-crashes a gathering of twelve men. Despite their diversity, he senses a joint enterprise and slowly, with his gentle probing, it emerges.

It involves, inevitably, gold, but also opium, fraud, a whore, and secrets galore. That gathering and the participants’ narratives take up four hundred pages and the first half of the book. The days that follow bring a suspicious death, an unexplained disappearance, and an unravelling of hidden truths as the story moves forward with flashes back to fill in gaps.

It is complex and following the disparate dozen’s movements, motives and machinations is challenging particularly as there are another dozen or so substantial, if subsidiary, characters to get to grips with. There is a cast list to help with remembering who’s who, but keeping track of what, why, when and how is left up to the reader.

The pace of the book shifts up a gear in the second half, with more and shorter chapters; and accelerates so that by the end the chapter headings are almost as long as the text introduced. The prose is rich and measured, evoking the mid nineteenth century setting.

It is a big book (over 800 pages) that demands a big commitment to keep on top of, but probably rewards proportionately. Personally, I drifted a bit and so was only moderately impressed.

Review of 2019 Reading Year

Another good year’s reading with 26 books read and reviewed with a decent proportion (60%) by ‘new to me’ authors.  Six titles via the reading group added random variety if variable quality, though two choices do make the best-of list. Female authors were underrepresented this year – must do better next. As for the ‘bookpacking’ reading journey, we crossed to Africa where I found the writing more to my taste than in Latin America, with one book making the list.

My nine best reads of the year are as follows. (Full review month in brackets.)

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid – Bill Bryson: Hilarious recollections and inciteful reflections on his life and times as a young boy in Des Moines, USA. (March)

Touching the Void – Joe Simpson: Literally incredible but true story of one mountaineer’s moral dilemma and another’s gripping refusal to perish in the pitiless Peruvian Andes. (March)

Beartown – Fredrik Backman: About so much more than a junior ice-hockey team in a left behind Scandinavian town, where rounded characters grapple with ethical issues and conflicted loyalties. (April)

By Night the Mountain Burns – Juan Thomas Avila Laurel: Unusual and memorable narration of a boy’s experiences on a small island off the coast of Africa, written in a style that has rhythms and repetitions that evoke the oral tradition of story-telling. (April)

The Wrong Boy – Willy Russell: The story of two journeys, one from Failsworth to Grimsby and one from boyhood to adolescence, related by the traveller with laugh out loud incidents in the former and more moving episodes in the latter. (June)

Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally: A novel that tells the story of the German industrialist who deflected, deceived and defied the state to keep his Jewish workforce out of the Nazi death camps; unemotionally told but still fascinating, horrifying and uplifting. (July)

Ironopolis – Glen James Brown: Six potent narratives over four decades of life in a struggling Teesside community that interlock, overlap and conflict in the search for truths. (August)

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things – Jon McGregor: A curiously but effectively constructed story of a day on a street that is unremarkable until something happens to stun the residents. (August)

The Wicked Boy – Kate Summerscale: A Victorian true crime is forensically examined in its social context, but it is the after-story that packs a punch; brilliantly researched and written. (September)