This Sporting Life – David Storey

 Set and written in 1960, the sport is Rugby League and the life (or a couple of years of it) is that of second row forward, Arthur Machin.

The novel opens on Christmas Eve in the middle of a match, just as Arthur takes a shoulder to the jaw and comes to with a couple of teeth missing. That is more inconvenient than anything as there is a party due that night at Chairman’s fancy mansion. But strings are pulled, and a dentist found; after all Arthur Machin is one of the stars of the team.

Events on the field then take a back seat for the rest of the book, which concentrates on Arthur’s back story – his recruitment to the club  - and his relationships with his teammates, his landlady, and the club owners and committee men. Arthur narrates throughout in his northern no-nonsense working class style.

The book provides an interesting snapshot of its time and place, though its relevance to the modern world is limited. It does deliver an insight into the dawn of the age of celebrity as Arthur, a big fish in a small pond, is tolerated, feted, and provided with favours; so long as he performs on the pitch.

Death Deserved – Jorn Lier Horst & Thomas Enger

 Norway’s number one female distance runner, Sonja Nordstrom, has gone missing on the day her explosive autobiography is published. Is it a stunt or a meltdown? Emma Ramm, young on-line blogger on celebrity antics, goes to doorstep her. There is no answer, but the door is unlocked; inside it is empty but there are signs of a struggle. She does the right thing and calls the police. 

Alexander Blix arrives to take charge of the case. Emma and Blix converse. To him she is a witness in a potential abduction; to her he is a police source in the story she will file. But it is more than that for Blix, they have a shared history that she is oblivious to, but he knows all too well.

That is why he keeps her in the loop, enabling her to post exclusives to her editor’s delight and Blix’s boss’s dismay. It is not all one way. Emma’s celebrity knowledge and contacts prove useful, as another high-profile disappearance is uncovered, and new ones occur. Then bodies start to turn up.

It is soon clear there is a full-on serial killer on the loose, and both Blix and Emma are on the trail. A side story, Blix’s daughter on a reality TV show, gives Blix more to think about; could the contestants, or the winner, become potential targets?

The pace is fast and the balance between police/journalistic investigation and Blix/Emma personal issues is about right. The joint authorship – Horst is ex-police and Enger is ex-journalist – is no doubt reflected in the Blix/Emma dual lead, but it is seamless. And a word for the translator, as the English text is flawless.

It is a suitably dark Scandi-noir thriller, with a late reveal and a resounding climax.

Ingenious Pain – Andrew Miller

 The book opens in Devon in 1772 with the brutal and clumsy autopsy of a man, the participating doctors curious to find the secret of his unique ‘talent’. From then, the chronology is sliced and diced, but essentially the novel narrates the short life and interesting times of the man on the slab, James Dyer.

His conception, on a frozen pond in 1739, is brief and ungentle, with his mother compliant, but ignorant of the identity of the father. She is already married, and James’ strangeness, a cuckoo in the nest, is apparent early on. He does not cry, and neither does he speak. Only when he falls out of a tree and breaks his leg, does someone cotton on that he feels no pain.

That opens career opportunities that take in fairground quackery, a pampered curio in a gentleman’s collection, naval enlistment and, finally, medicine. James Dyer turns out to be very good at medieval surgery, for it is so much easier to concentrate and keep a steady hand with no empathy to the un-anesthetised patients’ pain.

But there is a downside. If you cannot feel pain, what is your experience of pleasure? And if something changes, what would it be like to feel, as an adult, pain for the first time? And would all those old wounds, many voluntarily accepted for show, now demand their agonies be felt?

There is an authentic period feel to the prose that richly describes landscapes, characters, and events in the story. It is an interesting romp through eighteenth century life that would make a good read even without Dyer’s unusual physiology. The reader is drawn in, feels the pain that James Dyer doesn’t; then feels it double when he does.