Too Much Happiness – Alice Munro

In this collection most of the ten stories portray women in a variety of familial situations – as wives and widows, as mothers and daughters, and as mistresses and divorcees – in a wide range of social contexts.

The tales are delivered in a measured, thoughtful prose that gently probes into the lives, thoughts and motivations of the protagonists, often gradually revealing past events that cast shadows over current lives.

While most stories eschew the traditional twist in the tail, and some fail to provide a resolution (perhaps it is old-fashioned to expect it), they all have an unpredictability that maintains interest throughout.

It was engaging but I was a little disappointed not to be wowed by holder of the 2013 Nobel Prize for literature, but that may say more about my tastes than her writing.

Last Man Down – Richard Picciotto

Richard ‘Pitch’ Picciotto was about to start a rare 9 to 5 shift as Commander of Battalion 11 of the Fire Department of New York on the fateful day of 11 September  2001, when the first plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. The resultant fire is not on his patch but he and his men are raring to go and help, and when the second plane hits the north tower he just gets in his fire chief’s car and heads on over to the disaster.

Amidst the understandable chaos at the WTC he collects a group of like-minded firemen and starts up one of the north tower staircases to aid the rescue of civilians and fight the fire.

Thirty-five floors up the mission changes when the unthinkable happens. They hear the deafening collapse of the adjacent south tower and it is now about getting back down and out before the north tower follows suit and brings down the seventy plus storeys above onto their heads.

The orderly retreat, picking up the lame and infirm civilian stragglers en route, gets only so far before, inevitably, the north tower goes and plunges Pitch and his men into dust filled hell-holes ‘fortunately’ preserved among the twisted metal and fractured concrete blocks. It’s dark and radio contact is non-existent, then sporadic, as he first waits for rescue then decides to look for an escape route.

The first-hand account is, has to be, gripping, and reading it 12 years after the event the scale of the physical damage is maybe easier to take in than it was immediately after the event when the sense of the human tragedy was overpowering. It is a very personal account that also reflects on the nature of the firefighter’s job - the danger, rewards and camaraderie – and its effect on the family.

Although writing with Daniel Paisner, the words that come out of the page are clearly Picciotto’s, in a no-nonsense, tell it how it is, style. It doesn’t give the complete story of 9/11 (he does not concern himself with the politics or the thousands of civilians killed on the upper floors whose bodies he does not even see in the wreckage) just the experiences that day of one fireman who survived against the odds, unlike the 343 others listed at the start of the book who did not.

Review of 2013

2013 was a successful year for Bibliodyssey with a blog posted every week. From the 48 titles reviewed the following are picked out as books of my year and are recommended (full review in bracketed month).

General Fiction:

When Will There Be Good News - Kate Atkinson (Aug)

Black Swan Green - David Mitchell (Sep)

Pure - Andrew Miller (Jul)

Care of Wooden Floors - Will Wiles (Jul)

Books for serious readers:

Headlong - Michael Frayn (Mar)

Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Sep)

The Gargoyle - Andrew Davidson (May)

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (Oct)

Plus a top quality trilogy:

The Blackhouse (Mar); The Lewis Man (Oct); The Chessmen (Dec) - Peter May

Best sport book:

Seabiscuit - Laura Hillenbrand (Jan)

Nonfiction:

The Scramble for Africa - Thomas Pakenham (Dec)

The Chessmen – Peter May

In this final book of the Lewis trilogy ex-DI Fin Macleod stumbles over another historic crime scene, but this one is connected to his personal, rather than the island’s past.

Again the device of relating past and current events in parallel is used to good effect as the connected narratives unfold. We learn a bit more of Fin’s youth, particularly his college and university days and circle of friends there, who he needs to track down to quiz about the mystery. But its solution may have dire implications for their present lives.

Fin’s investigations take him into the rain and wind swept moors and mountains, lovingly described, while his introspections continue to confront his personal issues and relationships.

The writing is as tight and compulsive as the first two books (The Blackhouse & The Lewis Man), but the historic context grips less – the chessmen are peripheral and the other back story is less revealing of Hebrides culture. May was wise to keep it to a trilogy; the impact of landscape and lifestyle loses some impact with familiarity and the Isle of Lewis was in danger of rivalling Midsomer as a murder hotspot.

Despite these minor reservations, The Chessmen is well worth reading in its own right and a must to complete the trilogy, enabling the reader, along with Fin, to achieve some sort of closure.

The Big Ask – Shane Maloney

The tone of the book is set right way by the author in his dedication “to Christine, Wally and May – they know where I live” and his disclaimer that includes “there is no such place as Melbourne. The Australian Labour Party exists only in the imagination of its members”. His hero Murray Whelan then takes up the cudgels of wit relating a tale with a deft balance of action, suspense and humour.

Whelan is political aide (AKA fixer & spin doctor) for the Melbourne minister for transport, which pitches him into the tough world of road hauliers and their bosses. Australian state politics and union relations is murky business that soon spills over into crime and corruption, for which Whelan is only partially suited.

As the thickening plot drags him deeper into the doo-doo he talks a good game, but his combat skills reflect his career choice, and instead he has to rely on his well-honed aptitude for scheming to pursue personal and professional survival.

It’s the one-liners that lift the book above the norm for the genre. Whelan could be one of Raymond Chandler's or Dasheill Hammett's PIs, having the same dry depreciating delivery, albeit with an antipodean twang, whether describing an adversary – “eyes set like raisins in a stale fruit cake” – or his own increasingly tenuous situation – “so far out on a limb I could’ve got a job as a ring-tailed possum”.

The ‘film noir’ content is handled lightly to produce a well plotted, enjoyable, quick read that would provide superior airline or train journey fare.

The Scramble for Africa – Thomas Pakenham

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

In the decades prior to the 1870s the only European interest in and knowledge of the African continent was some coastal areas and the banks of a few navigable rivers, with contact limited to minimal trade (once that in slaves was outlawed) and staging posts on the way to India and the East.

Then David Livingstone, emerging from years in the interior, reported that although the Europeans weren’t taking slaves, the Arabs were, and slavery within the continent was rife. In his view Africa needed three things – Christianity, commerce and civilization – and many in positions of influence agreed with at least one of those.

As the missionaries and explorers heeded his call and pushed inland, European traders followed uncovering new potential, and as the value of their business grew so did their demands for governments back home to protect their interests.

Treaties and alliances proliferated; soldiers and guns followed to enforce them; spheres of influence developed; and once one power claimed territory as their own the others followed suit in order not to miss out. And the undignified, unwarranted, scramble unfolded to the bitter end of an almost total carve-up of the continent.

The above is of course a vast over-simplification of fifty years of tumultuous upheaval across a vast area, and even Pakenham’s 700 pages do not claim to be the full story. But his account comprehensively builds up the big picture from a myriad of detailed incidents that bring the human element into the tortuous march of history, and say much about the motives and methods of those involved.

The trials and tribulations of the explorers, the missionaries, the natives, the traders and the soldiers are recounted alongside the strategic aims and machinations of the politicians and the lobbyists in the capitals of England, France, Germany, Italy and, more sinisterly, in the court of Leopold II, King of the Belgians.

I am not qualified to comment on the historical accuracy or interpretations put forward, but as a general reader I found the book excellent; clearly written, informative, interesting, at times fascinating, with perhaps the biggest achievement being able to focus on one theatre of operations at a time while linking it to the wider continental, European and global context.

The Good Lawyer – Thomas Benignio

We are sometime in the 1980’s and Nick Maninno is a young lawyer starting out at the bottom defending prospective felons for the Legal Aid Society in the South Bronx. He’s good, but his growing reputation includes success with “sicko sex cases” with the latest not guilty verdict leaving a villain still on the streets, the victim suicidal and Maninno with his head in his hands.

His new batch of cases includes more promising, if high profile, material – a school aide accused of molesting three boys, and a janitor arrested for a series of rapes and murders. Maninno is convinced of the innocence of both and sets to work.

 he legalese flows thick and fast and Nick’s personal life gives him some potential conflicts of interest to deal with: his girlfriend, as well as being old-money rich and beautiful, is an assistant district attorney; and his Uncle Rocco is big in the New York mafia.

The plot becomes complex with interconnection between cases and even links to Uncle Rocco’s shady past. The cast list resembles a Dickens novel with lawyers, judges, clerks, policemen, witnesses, gangsters, crime reporters and even a mysterious stunning blonde. Their coming and going enables Benignio to mess with the head of the reader who doesn’t know which of these will prove significant later down the line as the plot twists and turns.

It’s a fast-paced page-turner and, with Maninno straying from the courtroom into vigilante territory, there is action as well as argument. Credibility is stretched at times (as is standard in the genre) despite the book being ‘inspired by a true story’.

It made for a fine thriller but I would have enjoyed it more if I had known more, or cared less about trying to follow, the intricacies of the US criminal justice system.