Harvest – Jim Crace

It is harvest time in the village – no name, location or period is given, but it feels like medieval England – and the tight knit isolated community are due a day off to celebrate ‘gleaning day’ when they can pick up the leftover grains for their personal rather than communal use.

But the villagers wake to see two plumes of smoke rising. One is dark, as produced by new cut green wood, signalling the arrival inside the boundary of strangers, whose roughly made hut and smoking hearth gives them squatter’s rights to stay but does not guarantee a welcome. The second plume though is paler, produced by old dry timber, which draws them to the Master's house where the hay barn and stables are ablaze.

Conclusions are jumped to and the newcomers are confronted, condemned and have punishment meted out; the two men are put in the stocks for a week while their female companion (wife, daughter, sister?) has her lustrous locks shorn.

To add to the unaccustomed turbulence, the Master’s position as landowner is under threat; now a widower, his title through marriage is disputed by a cousin with a bloodline claim. The latter has arrived with new agricultural ideas that need more sheep than men on the land.

The next seven days sees some lives lost and all lives irrevocably changed; a concentrated narrative allegorising the longer term decline of the rural workforce.

That narrative is provided by Walter Thirsk, a newcomer himself many years previous so still somewhat of an outsider. His delivery is spare but lyrical; his measured words rooted in the village – the land itself and the people – drawing the reader into the village microcosm, enclosed but never claustrophobic.

This is every bit as good as the author’s acclaimed “Quarantine”, possibly better with a stronger plot and a more familiar (to me) landscape and period.

Casino Royale – Ian Fleming

Having not read a James Bond thriller for about forty years I picked this one as part of my 2015 reading challenge, to tick off the ‘published in the year of your birth’ box.

So it is 62 years old and was Fleming’s first novel. To be honest both of these are evident. The prose is clunky, the dialogue strained, the structure unbalanced and the attitudes dated.

The plot is simple but still hard to credit. The top Russian agent in France, Monsieur Le Chiffre, has been borrowing Leningrad funds, supplied to support French communist trade unions, for personal investments; these have gone pear-shaped so he’s heading for disaster unless he can generate some cash quick.

His cunning plan is to win big at the high-roller card games at the Casino Royale. MI6’s equally implausible response is to send in James Bond, not to kill him but to beat him at cards – 007 licenced to bet – and so deprive him of his winnings and seal his fate with his Russian paymasters.

After introducing the secret agent, his world, and his martini, the first half of the book is devoted to Bond first playing roulette against the house (to warm up his gambler’s instinct and increase his stake money) then baccarat against Le Chiffre, who has ‘bought’ the bank. It reads rather like a useful primer on the two games, until the stakes rise and with them the tension.

The aftermath of the game is more typical 007 action – damsel in distress, car chase, violence, mayhem and teeth-gritting resilience from Bond.

Damsel (Vesper Lynd) rescued (surely no spoiler that), James extracts his due and it his attitude to her throughout that is hard to take in these enlightened times, but sadly is probably accurate for then.

So it is a quick easy read; uncomfortably violent and sexist in places but good to tick off the original Bond book, and that box in the reading challenge.

The State of Africa – Martin Meredith

Part of the ‘Into and out of Africa’ reading journey, this ambitious single volume (albeit 700 page) history covers events in Africa since its emergence from colonial rule in the 1950’s.

While each chapter forms a self-contained account of a state or region over one of its significant periods, they build up (roughly chronologically) to form a continuous narrative for the continent.

From the narrative, themes emerge: the successful efforts to achieve self-rule; the emergence in power of the ‘Big Men’ (often those who had led the fight for freedom); the same Big Men’s slide into corruption, the feathering of nests, and in some cases the near bankruptcy of the country as immense natural resources were plundered for personal gain. Tribal strife, religious conflict and the conduct of the cold war by proxy also contributed to the disorder and violence. These all exacerbated the effects of natural perils such as poverty, drought, famine and AIDS.

Unsurprisingly it is a bleak picture and Meredith pulls no punches apportioning blame; but he backs up his views with compelling evidence and mind-boggling statistics. Key events are related in fascinating detail and black & white photos are provided of the main protagonists, yet the broad sweep is never lost.

It may have been an ambitious project but it succeeds magnificently.

The Banks of Certain Rivers – Jon Harrison

Neil Kazenzakis’s life is back in equilibrium. It has taken a few years for him and his son Chris to recover from the shock of losing their respective wife and mother. Wendy is not dead, nor missing, but is in a vegetative state following an accident, lying unresponsive in a long term care facility.

Neil teaches high school where Chris is in his final year and considering college options. Neil runs; Chris is keen on basketball; both like to sail on Lake Michigan adjacent to their house. They get on well but Neil has found a new love – Lauren – about whom he feels some guilt and so he is keeping it a secret, especially from Chris. He knows he should tell him soon – but why rock the boat just yet?

To extend the metaphor, the boat gets rocked for him: relations with Lauren take an unexpected turn; and his intervention to break up a fight on campus gets misrepresented with potentially serious repercussions. If he loses his job he loses his health insurance that is funding Wendy’s care. Under these pressures even the father son bond begins to crack.

In classic style the present day events are interspersed with Neil’s memories – courtship, marriage, family life, the accident and the aftermath. And while the first half of the book is fairly bland fair-weather stuff, the second half is stormy weather with drama and tension.

Apart from the engaging storyline the book has plenty to say about secrets and lies, trust and betrayal, mistakes and forgiveness, and fathers and sons, providing a decent read for 99p on kindle.