Death at the Sign of the Rook – Kate Atkinson

Jackson Brodie, private investigator, has a new case. Immediately following the death in Ilkley of 96-year-old Dorothy Padgett, a Renaissance painting that hung on her bedroom wall has gone missing. As has her capable carer of six months, Melanie Hope. Dorothy’s offsprings, twins Ian and Hazel, want this missing and potentially valuable portion of their inheritance back. Jackson has misgivings about Ian and Hazel – why not call the police, why wasn’t it insured – but a case is a case and he is onto it.

Melanie Hope is a dead end, but researching other recent art thefts turns up a couple with a similar MO, including one in Yorkshire. The removal of a Turner landscape from its frame at the Burton Makepeace estate occurred two years previous. In the frame for the theft was new housekeeper Sophie Greenway, not seen since.

Now, as it happens, Jackson used to know someone in the Yorkshire force, and he still has her number. DC Reggie Chase takes the call with mixed feelings. She likes Brodie, shares his passion for justice, but abhors his approach and disregard of rules and due process for such things as providing an evidential trail.

Inevitably, as she worked on the Turner theft, she is drawn into working in concert with the maverick Brodie. Jackson barrels into Burton Makepeace where a range of characters – Lady Melton and her dysfunctional dynasty, a vicar who has lost his faith, and an ex-soldier who has lost his leg – await to confuse, confound, and entertain.

Expect plot twists, black humour, death, destruction, and a dramatic dénouement enhanced by the arrival at Burton Makepeace of a blizzard, a troop of murder mystery players, and an escaped convict, armed and dangerous.

How does this latest compare with the previous Jackson Brodie books? The man himself is up to scratch, and it is great to meet Reggie Chase again. The plot holds together and minor characters have the usual depth and appeal, but that frantic ending teeters on the brink of farce.

However, Kate Atkinson has literary credit in the bank with me, so that minor point is a tiny bit of rough to take with an awful lot of smooth.

Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson

This long-overdue ‘booket-list’ read is Bill Bryson’s 1995 farewell to the UK before moving back to the USA. After a two-decade sojourn in Britain, during which he married and started a family, he picks an eclectic mix of places to visit. Using mainly public transport and low-budget accommodation he zig-zags north from Dover to John O’Groats before returning to his home in the Yorkshire Dales.

En route he exercises his wit and erudition in recounting his travels, the places he goes and the people he meets. Corporatisation of the town centres, decline of resorts, illogical transport connections, and rude people all get a withering tongue-lashing. But he also waxes lyrical on the delightful eccentricities, the charm, and beauty that he finds in the country that, he finally admits, he likes very, very much.

As always with Bryson it is funny, with laugh out loud lines, but also insightful and interesting.

Ripeness – Sarah Moss

Edith (73) lives alone on the west coast of Ireland. Alone but not lonely. She has friends, like Gunter (with whom she has benefits) and Meabh (with whom she swims and drinks coffee). Gunter is an incomer like her, but Meabh is local born and bred. It’s a good life, settled in the wild, windy and wet landscape.

When Meabh confides in her that an unknown, unsuspected, illegitimate half-brother has tracked her down and wants to visit from the US and connect with his past, learn about his birth mother, it brings to Edith’s mind another illegitimate baby parted from its mother over fifty years previously.

Seventeen-year-old Edith, had her plan for a gap year in Europe (a place awaiting at Oxford) amended to take in a trip to Lake Como where her elder (by some years) sister, Lydia, is holed up to have her baby away from prying eyes. Edith, armed only with A-level Italian and experience of birthing lambs on the family hill farm in Derbyshire, rolls up her sleeves and pitches in.

Lydia is a ballerina in a top company; the pregnancy is an inconvenient interruption in her career; the baby, when it comes, is to be shipped off immediately through a convent network to a “good home”.

Edith’s two narratives, half a century apart, are related in Moss’s unfussy prose that beautifully captures the distinctive landscapes of the two locations. The character of Edith, in youth and experience is finely drawn and provides for a thought-provoking and elegiac read.

May Contain Nuts – John O’Farrell

Alice and David Chaplin, and all their friends, know what is best for their children – a good education, in a good school, where good children are pushed to excel, complemented outside school by good extra-curricular activities such as ballet, music, French conversation, museums and theatre. It’s a bubble, a comfortable middle-class bubble. But it is about to burst for the Chaplins.

Their daughter, Molly, is due to leave her private prep school, Spencer House, and start secondary education. The ‘only’ place to go is the exclusive, fee-paying, Chelsea College. But it has high standards to maintain, and an entrance exam needs to be passed. Now, Molly is bright and intelligent and has, in common with all her friends, a private tutor to boost performance, but she has a ‘problem’ with exams. She does poorly in a mock test and continues to flunk practice papers at home. With her whole future on the line (according to Alice), and Battersea Comp beckoning, drastic measures are needed.

Alice’s plan is a recipe for disaster, and O’Farrell charts the unfolding chaos with characteristic humour, all the while taking mocking swipes at the helicopter parenting of the middle class.

It all works very well, treading the fine overlap between the farcical and the credible. And, being O’Farrell, the moral message comes through by the end to provide a funny and feel-good read.

The Women of Troy – Pat Barker

The war is won. Troy has fallen, been sacked and burnt. Every man, boy, and foetus (just to be on the safe side) killed. The women, grieving wives, mothers, and orphans, are divvied up among the victors.

Helen is taken back by Menelaus, a surprise to many of the Greeks who blame her for all the death and destruction, but there again, she remains a stunner and able to charm her way through life (and death). Andromache, widow of Trojan hero Hector, is taken by Pyrrhus, teenage son of dead Achilles, and incompetent slayer of old King Priam. Cassandra, daughter of Priam, virgin priestess raped in the temple during the battle, is picked by Agamemnon – a choice that is just asking for trouble.

These women of Troy join long-term captive Briseis who, carrying Achilles’ child, has been married off to Alcimus. This acquired respectability gives Briseis privileges in the camp which she uses to keep up morale and mitigate the treatment of the captive women.

Though the war is over, the Greeks remain camped between the ruined city and the sea, which has become impassable due to persistent adverse winds. The Gods are clearly displeased, but who is to blame? Pyrrhus who won’t allow Priam to be buried? Menelaus for taking back Helen? Or Agamemnon for marrying Cassandra despite having a wife back home?

Pat Barker relates the fate of the Trojan women with candour. They may be in the same boat but that doesn’t mean they have to like each other. Rivalries and jealousies have to be managed to survive, and Briseis needs her wits about her as the wind blows, tempers shorten, and a sacrifice has to be made.

Though this second book of the trilogy lacks the bloody intensity of the first, it bubbles along compulsively enough with subplots emerging, some resolved, other left to play out in volume three, which is nestling on the bookshelf ready to go.

Precipice – Robert Harris

In the summer of 1914 as Europe stands on the precipice of war, Herbert Henry Asquith, the last (as it turns out) Liberal Prime Minister, wrestles with the international situation that faces the United Kingdom. Only one thing helps him to clear his mind, think things through, and determine a way forward: or rather one person. Not his political aides and allies, nor his long-standing wife and family, but his twenty-six-year-old ‘special friend’ Miss Venetia Stanley.

They write to each other daily, sometimes two or three times a day (that’s what you call a postal service!). He takes her on chauffeur-driven rides enabling secluded talks in the back of his official limousine, and on romantic walks in parks and country lanes. And during the walking and the talking he discusses the confidential affairs of state on his mind. And in the letters, he shares classified information and top-secret telegrams.

Now the Stanleys are establishment, well connected, and though the ‘special friendship’ is noted in their close circles, the extent and exact nature ae veiled in discretion. Until, that is, some discarded documents come to the attention of MI5, and Sergeant Paul Deemer is tasked with investigating their source.

Crafted from the scarcely believable actual letters from Asquith to Venetia (the replies are imagined by Harris) the spellbinding narrative moves through a year of personal and political drama. It is not thrill-a-minute, more like watching a slow-motion train crash. You know it won’t end well but don’t know exactly when and how it will come off the rails.

Full of period detail, with bit parts for the likes of Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, and Lord Kitchener, it retains interest throughout. Harris is a good storyteller and balances the threads of the narrative – the Asquith & Venetia affair, the Paul Deemer investigation, and the outbreak of the First World War – in masterful fashion.

Unsheltered – Barbara Kingsolver

Willa’s rambling house on Plum Street is falling down, slowly but inexorably. It is not her fault. The property, inherited from an aunt and pressed into service at a time of her family’s financial stress, seemed to offer an opportunity. Now it seems to be more of a threat.

The family likewise is a hotchpotch of unused potential. The magazine that Willa edited has gone bust; her academic husband, has had to take a low paid lecturer post locally; her wayward daughter works a few hours at a community café; and her invalid father-in-law needs full time care but is contemptuous of the state welfare that could help the family cope. And now her son, emerging from a promising but unremunerated internship in the city, has been left with sole responsibility for his months-old baby.

One hundred and fifty years previous, the same plot on Plum Street is occupied by Thatcher Greenwood, a science teacher recently married to a young wife who came with dependents – widowed mother and young sister – and this house put up by her father. It has only been built a few years, part of the Vineland community developed (and now run as a fiefdom) by a Captain Landis, but already there are issues with the structure for Thatcher to deal with. A more pressing concern is job security. His contract renewal is in the hands of the headteacher, who is a Darwin-denier. Thatcher’s scientific integrity is under pressure but is bolstered when he discovers his next-door neighbour is a respected amateur biologist and regular correspondent of the Origin of Species author.

Lots happen in the two, time sundered households. Characters and relationships develop with a pleasing richness. Both settings exude authenticity and Kingsolver seamlessly slips in some persuasive, liberal-leaning socio-political points of view. Overarchingly, do the crumbling houses serve as a metaphor for the materialism of their times? Is the effort to shore up the edifice worth the candle, or is it better to let it fall and move on?

Can Willa and Thatcher come to embrace the concept that unsheltered at least you can see the sky, you can let the daylight in?

An interesting, engaging and thought-provoking read, highly recommended.

The Patient Assassin – Anita Anand

On 13 April 1919, in Amritsar in the Punjab, British soldiers under the personal command of Brigadier General Reginald (Rex) Dyer, entered the Jallianwala Bagh, a seven-acre former walled garden that had become a dusty recreation ground and public meeting space. It was crowded that day. The usual gatherings to socialise and partake of the street vendor food were swollen due to a festival at the nearby Golden Temple, and by those come to hear an address promoting peaceful protest against British rule.

Political tension was high. The First World War was in the balance, and Indian troops were fighting on the front. Political gatherings had been forbidden, though the prohibition had been sparsely proclaimed. The soldiers did not order the crowd to disperse. They simply opened fire on Dyer’s orders, discharging 1,650 rounds of rifle ammunition in ten minutes of carnage before withdrawing, leaving five to six hundred dead and maybe three times as many wounded.

Eighteen-year-old Udham Singh was in Amritsar that day to do some business for a relative. He had been in the Bagh that morning but had slipped away to do the deal. When he heard the shots ring out, he returned to find his friends dead or dying. He swore revenge on the British Raj, as personified by Rex Dyer and his civilian chief, Lieutenant Governor Sir Michael O’Dwyer.

Udham Singh was a low caste orphan with no education or resources, and it took him twenty years, and many false starts, to get himself into a position to carry out his vengeance (though by then one of his targets had already died). He got the other one and willingly paid the price. This is no-spoiler, it is history and is revealed in chapter one - though personally being ignorant of the full story, I would have preferred that reveal to have been held back to the end.

Anita Anand, whose grandfather in similar fashion narrowly escaped the massacre, guides the reader through the history of Indian resistance and suppressed rebellion interweaving the personal stories of Udham Singh, Rex Dyer, and Sir Michael O’Dwyer with the geopolitics spanning the two world wars.

It is a well-written, interesting, disturbing, and fascinating account of a shameful colonial episode, not wide enough known. I recommend you read it.

His Bloody Project – Graeme Macrae Burnet

The novel is presented as ‘Documents relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae’ dated 1869. The case is one of murder. The documents are: first, some statements of witnesses to the crime; second, the perpetrator’s own extensive written account of events; third, medical reports on the victims; fourth, an extract from the memoir of the prison service doctor, a self-professed expert in criminal anthropology; and finally, a compilation of newspaper reports on the trial.

The brief witness statements tell of a violent murder in the Highland village of Culdie, committed by seventeen-year-old crofter Roderick Macrae. Quickly apprehended, Roddy uses his time in gaol awaiting trial to pen at length his version of how events unfolded and led him down the path of his bloody project. The medical reports deal quickly with the post-mortem examinations, and at more length with the murderer’s state of mind. This is his only defence – temporary insanity - and the trial reports show how that goes.

The format works very well. The prose while reflecting 19^th century dialect and phraseology, is never difficult to read and moves at a modern-day pace. Rural highland life is vividly portrayed, and the complex character of Roddy Macrae emerges gradually through his narrative. But does his account tell the truth? Does it accord with the evidence?

It is an engaging, engrossing even, read; and though there is no dispute whodunnit, the whys and wherefores maintain interest to the end. An unusual, clever, and moving piece of fiction that reads as anything but.

The Silence of the Girls – Pat Barker

Troy has not yet fallen. But one of its satellite cities, Lyrnessus, has with predictable consequences. The women are taken as booty, divvied up among the conquering heroes, who have slaughtered their fathers, brothers, and male children in front of their eyes. The high-born, young, and beautiful go to the chiefs, the rest are left to the mercies of the rank and file.

Briseis, an attractive nineteen-year-old princess, is ‘awarded’ to Achilles in recognition of his prowess in battle. Chryseis, the fifteen-tear-old daughter of a priest of Apollo, is taken by Agamemnon, the king of kings. Others – lets name them, Uza, Hecamede, Iphis, Tecmessa – end up with the likes of Odysseus, Nestor, Patroclus, and Ajax.

It is Briseis who carries the narrative forward. She is used, no more than that, by Achilles, who reserves any emotional attachment for his close friend, Patroclus. It is only the latter who makes Briseis’ new life tolerable by treating her as a person rather than as a possession.

Life in camp is vividly portrayed - battles, feasts, rivalries, funeral games. All great fun until the rats come, carrying plague. Turns out that kidnapping the daughter of a priest of Apollo was not a great idea. Agamemnon has to make amends, return Chryseis to her father. He demands Briseis as a replacement. Achilles rages, complies, sulks, and withdraws from the fight. Disaster! The siege falters. And it is all the fault of Briseis. As she says, it’s like blaming the bone for a dogfight.

The focus on the life of the women behind the battle lines is insightful. Their choices – endurance, acceptance, embracement – in respect of their captors / clients / partners, is subtly explored. Even so, there is plenty of battle noise, blood, gore, death, and burials to keep it in context. And there is a moving climax, despite leaving things open enough to lead into the sequel.

Pat Barker is a fine writer and here gives a memorable voice to at least one of the girls previously silent. Roll on book two!

Zoo Quest to Guyana – David Attenborough

A topical, given the great man’s recent centenary, choice from the reading group, but at the same time a historic curiosity first published in 1956. In that decade, the Zoo Quest books (and TV series) covered expeditions to both film and capture animals from the wilds of Africa, Asia, and South America. This particular jaunt was to Guyana (though then called British Guiana), and this version of the book is in an abridgement contained in a 2017 compilation under the title, Adventures of a Young Naturalist.

The introduction places the Zoo Quests in their historic context as well as giving background to how a young TV producer with an unused zoology degree got his start in natural history broadcasting. And we know where that led.

As for the expedition, what comes through is its off the cuff nature. Get a plane here, hitch a ride on a passing boat there, rock up at a native village and bunk down in a spare hut. Catch a caiman (small alligator) with bare hands and stuff it into a sack; knock up a cage from an old packing case for an anteater; haul a manatee out of the creek and sling it onto the back of a truck. All done by a crew of three – Attenborough, a cameraman, and a seconded zookeeper.

Their adventures are told succinctly, with boyish enthusiasm and an easy charm that has become his trademark over the years. But my historic curiosity satisfied, I passed on the other two quests in the volume, to Indonesia and Paraguay.

The Forty Rules of Love – Elif Shafak

In 2008, in Northampton, Massachusetts, Ella Rubenstein, forty-year-old wife of David, has returned to work after a long lay off raising her three children. It is a part-time job, a reader for a literary agency, and the novel she has been sent to review is titled Sweet Blasphemy, by A Z Zahara.

She begins to read. It is set in thirteenth century Asia Minor, and concerns a young dervish called Shams of Tabriz and his quest to find a soulmate with whom he can share his belief that love transcends all religion.

Love is currently a sore topic for Ella. Her husband, who she thinks she loves, is a serial philanderer; and her eldest, though still young, daughter is threatening to wed her new boyfriend on the scanty basis of being in love.

The book toggles between Ella’s twenty-first century self-questioning and Shams’ thirteenth century pilgrimage of hope. The latter gets more airtime and paints a vivid picture of the time,  location, and lives led by a representative cast – warrior, zealot, drunk, student, beggar, harlot – that Shams encounters on his wanderings. When he meets Rumi, a respected poet and teacher, a connection is made and a fast friendship formed. This does not please some of Rumi’s family and followers. But Shams meets distrust, envy, enmity, and hatred with love. He has forty rules with which to disarm his persecutors, but will that be enough to save his skin?

Meanwhile, in 2008, Ella is entranced by the novel and is driven to contact the author. She is seduced by the concept of love trumps all and seeks a meeting with Zahara. How will that end?

The two parallel tales, love echoing down the centuries, command attention to the end. For me the forty rules intrude a little and were a bit preachy, but nevertheless this is an interesting read, expanding my knowledge to include dervishes, Sufism, and the real historical characters of Rumi and Shams of Tabriz.

Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years – Sue Townsend

It is 2007, Adrian Mole has turned forty and is living at The Old Pigsty in Mangold Parva, Leicestershire with his second wife, Daisy, and daughter, Gracie. His mother and father, Pauline and George, live next door. His son by his first marriage, Glenn, is fighting in Afghanistan.

Adrian’s low-paid employment is assisting in Mr Carlton-Hayes second-hand bookshop, but his quest for literary success continues. He is writing a play, “Plague!” for the local am-dram Mangold Players which requires a cast of sixty humans supported by several animals, mainly domestic.

Other familiar characters drop in: old schoolfriend Nigel (now blind and gay); sister, Rosie, who plans to go on Jeremy Kyle to test  her paternity; half-brother, Brett, on the scrounge since his latest speculation crashed and burned; and, of course, Adrian’s first love, Dr Pandora Braithwaite MP.

On top of reporting how these, and more, impinge on his daily life, Adrian develops prostate trouble, and shares with black humour the trials of his diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.

The observational humour is as funny as ever as Sue Townsend juggles the storylines with skill and practised mastery. The diary format makes for an easy page-turning read, the temptation to push on one more day is hard to resist.

After a gap of twenty years since reading The Cappuccino Years, the characters fell easily back into place. Though read as part of my Book-et List, I discover the series is still incomplete having missed The Weapons of Mass Destruction! So, that is one checked off the list, and a new one put on.

Sunday at the Pool in Kigali – Gil Courtemanch

Bernard Valcourt is a Canadian, Quebecois to be precise, who has landed up in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, ostensibly to set up a national TV station. One of the drivers for the project is the urgent need to inform the population how to protect themselves and others from the AIDS epidemic sweeping the country. But the Government do not want to broadcast bad news, publicise their failings, so the job has stalled.

So Valcourt spends his day writing articles for foreign journals, but worldwide interest is minimal, not only in AIDS but also the growing tension and violence between the Hutu and Tutsi people who share the country in a powder keg mix. The Tutsi have post-colonial position and wealth, but the Hutu outnumber them greatly. There is history between them, and history will out.

But on a Sunday in Kigali, sat around the pool at the once plush Mille-Collines hotel, the great and the good congregate in well-guarded luxury. Mainly white – UN officials, economic advisors, bankers, ex-pat Belgians, diplomats who have drawn the short straw – but also those natives who hold government posts or contracts.

However, even in this civilized company, tension bubbles as high-up Hutus abuse any Tutsi staff with impunity. Among the staff is Gentille, a Hutu by birth and identity card but a Tutsi by her crossbred attractive appearance. Valcourt, decades her senior, is smitten. Gentille reciprocates, but is it love or an exit strategy, wonders Valcourt.

What follows is a heady mix of romance and terrorism, tenderness and torture, where sex is a murder weapon and mutilation a political statement. Valcourt, protected by his skin and journalist pass sees it all unfold. The country is physically beautiful and beguiling, but hate, corruption, and history lead the people tear each other apart, and soon there are more rivers of blood than water.

Told with restraint and resigned fatalism, this is a story all too real that should be read, even if it needs a strong stomach.

The New World – Winston S Churchill

This is the second volume of Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, published in 1956. It covers the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries so spans the Tudor and Stewart dynasties including the Civil War and the interregnum of Oliver Cromwell.

The ‘New World’ discoveries of the East Indies and the Americas, including the colonisation of the eastern seaboard of what becomes the USA, get due attention, but the real new world is closer to home with the makeover of European politics. The consequences of the emergence of the Protestant religion and its adoption by Henry VIII echoes down the decades providing the big divide in England, Britain, and Europe. For Churchill, this is politics not religion, and he describes the power struggles with insight and candour.

He explains how the various divides in society (and we are talking peers, landowners, gentry, clergy, and increasingly the merchant classes) develop from Protestant and Catholic, Royalist and Parliamentary, into the party politics (Whigs and Tories) that we still inherit, in one form or another, today.

The prose is a touch verbose to modern eyes, but that is his style, and his voice (if you know it) comes through every sentence. It is a comprehensive work as regards how the country was ruled and/or governed but rarely digs deep into the lot of the common people.

But taken on its own terms of reference, it is an informative and interesting read.

Deadline – Steph McGovern

Rose Steedman is live on air. It is her job, roving reporter for a top TV channel, today interviewing the Chancellor of the Exchequer at a secure location in the North of England. As ever, she is wired up to the studio but suddenly the voice in her ear is not that of the director. It is a stranger, who tells her, chillingly, he has her wife and son, and she must do exactly what he says to keep them from harm.

The narrative spins back a day to introduce the OB team – Jonesy on camera, Zoya producing, and Sandy the engineer – and show how they work together, how the broadcast should go. Then, as it works back to the present, it spins back again. This time to five years earlier. when, amongst other things: Rose had a stalker; Zoya had an issue with a radical cousin; and a hitherto unmentioned headteacher is trying to get a local school out of special measures.

It is events at the school that dominate the next hundred pages, so they must have a connection to the hi-jack, if only to provide a third possible motive (along with the stalker and the terrorist cousin). And it all comes out in a tense climax, though a lengthy epilogue is needed to clear thing up completely.

As to be expected from TV journalist Steph McGovern, the outside broadcast elements ooze authenticity and convey the excitement and tension involved in live reporting. The antics and dialogue of teenage boys is less comfortable, and the plot, while ingenious, relies rather heavily on coincidence and opportunism. The parcelling out of the narrative to ten different characters could be considered quickfire (good) or staccato (bad) but either way keeps the pages turning rapidly.

At the end of the day, it is just another indifferent celebrity novel-writing effort. Don’t give up the day job, Steph.

The Shock of the Fall – Nathan Filer

This is Matt Holmes’ story, as far as it goes as he’s only eighteen or so, told in his own words, in his own way.

It is clear from the beginning that he has a mental health condition. Its nature, origin, development, and effects on him and those around him emerge as he narrates in a non-linear way, significant events of his last ten years.

The first of those, at age eight, happens when on holiday a coastal caravan park with his mother, father, and elder brother, Simon. Simon has Down’s Syndrome and by the end of the holiday is dead. Exactly how is not immediately revealed, but it is clear that Matt feels responsible. Is this the source of his problems? Or were they already present, dormant, biding their time to shine?

It goes on from there, jumping back and forth on Matt’s adolescent slide into erratic behaviour, isolation, dependency, therapy, care, and medication. All told from Matt’s point of view, sometimes calm and dispassionate, sometimes angrily and even violently.

The novel is a valiant attempt to put the reader in the shoes, or head, of a sufferer of mental illness. As Matt is self-aware, articulate, and creative in his writing, the account is eminently readable. And the hook of discovering how Simon died keeps interest alive to the end, along with the hope that Matt finds an inner peace.

Troy – Stephen Fry

You think you know the story, maybe from Homer’s Iliad at school, or Brad Pitt’s exploits in the 2004 film. You think you know the main players – Helen, Achilles, Odysseus, Hector, Paris. But exactly who did what to whom and why?

Here, Stephen Fry takes you through “the greatest story ever told” with clarity and wit. In his hands (or words) the names are fleshed out into characters and events make as much sense as mythology allows.

The Greeks: Menelaus, the wronged husband who calls in the pledges of support when wife, Helen, is carried off to Troy; Agamemnon, his brother, king of kings, noble but rather dim; Odysseus, the trickster, charming, resourceful, but self-serving; Achilles, bold, big-headed, and invincible (apart from that unprotected heel). Then the Trojans: King Priam, aged and fretting over his city and his sons; Hector, the stately, upright, honourable warrior; Paris, the pampered, entitled waster, gifted Helen as a bribe by Aphrodite to sway his judgement of the beauty contest between her, Hera and Athena.

Let battle commence, ten years of it, on the plains of Ilium. On both sides, heroic deeds and heroic deaths; sulkings and fallings out; squabbles over tribute, booty, and concubines. A stalemate until Odysseus reveals his cunning plan – the old wooden horse trick – and despite Cassandra’s warnings, the Trojans fatally fail to beware Greeks bearing gifts.

It is a great read. Fry’s scholarship is worn lightly and though the sly asides are fun, he does not shy away from the brutalities that intrude. He gives the women their due, as far as possible given the sources, and exposes the failings of the mighty, be they men or gods.

Mythos, Heroes, Troy, all read, next stop Odyssey (via Pat Barker’s trilogy giving voice to the Women of Troy).

MaddAddam – Margaret Atwood

This final book of the eponymous trilogy begins where both the previous two Oryx and Crake (reviewed July 21) and The Year of the Flood (reviewed June 23) left off and helpfully provides a precis of what has gone before.

For those not familiar with the series, the important thing to know is that we are in a post-apocalyptic time when few humans survive. Among them are: the remnants of God’s Gardeners, a non-violent resistance group that prepared for and survived the pandemic; the Crakers, a new breed of humanoids genetically engineered by Crake to remove aggressive tendencies, gentle by nature, naïve, but sexually promiscuous; the MaddAddamites, ex-colleagues of Crake who through prior knowledge and ingenuity survived the cull of humanity; and a group of Painballers, violent criminals released on licence to fight each other to the death for the entertainment of the masses, still around due to luck and cockroach-like toughness.

The Gardeners, MaddAddamites, and Crakers have joined forces and created a settlement, living hand to mouth on subsistence farming and widespread scavenging. But their meagre resources (and women) are coveted and threatened by the heavily armed Painballers.

The narrative is taken forward by Toby. She is an ex-Gardener and a key member of the settlement due to her wisdom, experience, and rifle. Her equivalent in the MaddAddamites is Zeb. He is tough and uncompromising. Toby is attracted to him but there are younger, more attractive women available in the group.

And there is work to be done integrating the Crakers into the society. They revere Jimmy the Snowman, a MaddAddamite who led them out of their protective environment, but now he is sick and they turn to Toby for guidance in the brave new world. It is a burden she can do without but shoulders necessarily, complaining only to Zeb.

Add in the Painballers, who aren’t going away, and the main plotlines are complete – survival, romance, creation myth, and a fight to the death.

Atwood juggles these themes stylishly, subtly, and exceptionally well. The strange world becomes familiar; there is investment in the characters; the crises are worried over; the right outcome is desired but feared for.

A fitting end to the trilogy.

Prompted to Kill – Frank Demain

Four short cases for Detective Inspector Elspeth Sanderson and her team, as within four seemingly harmless communities, deaths occur in suspicious circumstances.

A member of a creative writing group expires when an allergy is exploited; a death at a snooker club exposes strife among the committee; a holiday in the Hebrides becomes that of a busman when a local clergyman meets his maker early; then a fresh body on the golf course interferes with DS Susan Charlton’s game.

The murderers may be amateur, but they are inventive in their means and secretive in their motives. However, Sanderson is the consummate professional and cracks the cases.

Clever plotting and sound characterisation make for a good pacy read.