Toast – Nigel Slater

Nigel Slater has written about cooking and eating for many years but here he looks back at the food and drink he grew up with to lure the reader into a nostalgic account of the tastes he enjoyed or endured as a child of the fifties and sixties – such as tinned ham, Instant Whip and sherbet fountains.

This alone would be entertaining, particularly if like me you are of that generation. But Slater uses his remembrance of food past as a framework to support his account of growing up through at first oblique, then more direct, references to his parents, siblings and other adults he encounters, all seen through the perspicacity of youth but interpreted with the wisdom of experience.

The connection between food and feeling is well established, and the subtitle of the book – the story of a boy’s hunger – surely relates to an emotional rather than nutritional shortfall in his upbringing. Not that he is angry or bitter, more regretful in hindsight of opportunities missed to give and receive love surely felt but rarely shown.

The writing is good with entertaining turns of phrase and brutal honesty in parts. A nice feature of the writing is the way the language matures subtly as the narrator moves through adolescence, making it seem more contemporaneously written than it actually is.

It’s a fine book, the description of the foodstuffs brought back memories I could taste and his childhood memories are both painful and funny (Adrian Mole-like) and the two strands are bound together without artifice to give an unusual and rewarding read.

The Adversary – Michael Walters

Read as part W of the “Along the Library Shelf” reading journey

Chosen because

This one leapt off the shelf due to its mix of a familiar genre (crime) in an unfamiliar and intriguing setting (Mongolia).

The Review

With press reports that the Ulan Baatar police are failing to take seriously a missing persons case, Doripalam, Head of Serious Crimes Team, steps in to add some high-profile policing. A good job too (although a little late) as when he arrives to interview the mother of the missing teenage boy he finds only her brutally murdered body in her ransacked ger (a Mongolian tented dwelling).

It’s almost a welcome distraction from a recently collapsed trial at which a notorious but untouchable crime boss, Muunokhoi, walked free when some prosecution evidence was exposed as faked.

Tunjin is the culpable detective, immediately suspended, but his life is more at risk than his career as Muunokhoi is not the forgiving and forgetting type; so Tunjin’s off on the run.

Investigating the whole mess is Nergui, ex-head of Serious Crimes and now upstairs in the Justice Ministry. His exact brief is unclear but his agenda is less so – he and Muunokhoi have history, and this is personal.

The story unfolds as a three-hander with Nergui, Doripalam and Tunjin working in loose concert via politics, policing and personal enterprise against an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful opponent, who for the first time appears uncharacteristically to be panicking. Someone has something he fears could expose him – is it to do with the missing boy or something the attractive female judge, Sarangarel Radnaa, knows from a previous life?

The action is pretty relentless, switching between the three viewpoints and taking us from the high society and mean streets of UB out to the nomadic settlements of the limitless steppes. The body count rises as the forces of good and evil converge for a final climactic showdown.

There are some thoughtful interludes; Nergui and Doripalam care about their country and provide some insights into modern day Mongolia, with the previous Soviet and current decadent Western capitalist influences both grafted onto bedrock of tradition and culture suited to neither.

Read another?

Nergui and Doripalam make a good team; this is their second outing and I will certainly look out for “The Shadow Walker”.

The Old Ways – Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane takes us walking across a variety of landscapes (even seascapes) following some ancient ways, which for him are windows on the past with the personal history of all who use them trodden into the fabric of the route.

He also makes a close connection between walking and thinking, with the rhythm of the steps providing a stimulus for the mind to explore the inner self as the body treads new or familiar pathways.

More food for thought comes from people he shares part of his walks with, who too find meaning in meandering; and though most are living he also walks with the dead, reviewing the works of earlier writers who he feels offer insights into the paths he follows, the places he passes and the truths he seeks. Prime among these is war poet Edward Thomas, and a short poignant sketch of his final months is slipped in.

All these strands are layered on top of, or below, the physical landscapes described with an appreciative and knowing eye, where character, not beauty, is most valued.

The prose is both spare and poetic, in places mystical, in others prosaic, but always sumptuously readable. It may sound a bit of an oddity but it does work, and in it I found reassuringly complex reasons why I find such enjoyment in such a seemingly simple activity as walking.

The Honey Guide – Richard Crompton

Part of the ‘Into and out of Africa’ reading journey.

Mollel is a Nairobi policeman, ex CID but now busted down to Traffic. He’s a Maasai and when a Maasai girl’s mutilated body is found in Uhuru Park his insider knowledge gets him in on the case.

The trail seems to lead to some high profile figures, and as this is December 2007 with a presidential election just days away, politics threatens to interfere with his pursuit of the murderer. And with politics in Kenya a violent sectarian business, his chief of police wants his men keeping order at the polls not stirring up more trouble.

Against the background of mounting tribal tension (mainly Kikuyu against Luo with the Maasai one of several minority players) Mollel ignores orders to desist and doggedly follows the evidence, on the way uncovering lies and corruption that seem endemic in the Kenyan capital. And of course, being a cop, he has his personal problems, struggling to come to terms with the recent death of his wife and taking on sole responsibility for a young son he can’t connect with emotionally.

The story is fast paced, action-packed and full of twists and turns, uncertain to the end. The setting feels authentic and Crompton slips in some insights into post-colonial East Africa and the Kenyan national psyche, where harmonious personal relations can all too easily be swept aside by tribal affiliations and mutual suspicion based on past misdeeds.

An enjoyable read and for crime aficionados a refreshing change from regional British sleuths or Nordic noir.

The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hester Prynne is with child, but has been without visible husband for too long to account for her condition, and in seventeenth century puritan New England this is not just embarrassing, it is a heinous sin.

Worse, she will not disclose the father so has to face the ignominy alone and her penance includes the wearing of bright red A (for adulteress?) on her clothing – the scarlet letter.

At the point of her denouncement her long lost husband turns up but decides to keep stum about their relationship, and swears Hester to secrecy with the threat of revealing the identity of father of her child, which he has cleverly deduced.

Time passes. Hester gains some acceptance in society and daughter Pearl thrives in a wild and woolly way. But the male members of the triangle decline; one into a guilt-induced despair and the other into a self-consuming obsession of revenge served ice cold.

This American classic is a slow burner, so slow at the beginning that it is a wonder it ignites at all, with the ‘Custom House’ introductory irrelevant and not very interesting. Once the story proper starts there is power, created by the ponderous, repetitive, overblown prose, and a growing, not tension, but pressure. This builds like a boil on the back of an adolescent’s neck, and similarly you know the outcome will be messy and painful but bring eventual relief.

I’m glad I can now say I’ve read it, but my recommendation is only embark on it if you seek similar satisfaction - and skip that introductory.