The Wicked Boy – Kate Summerscale

The boy in this Victorian true-crime story is thirteen year old Robert Coombes. For over a week in July 1895, with his father away at sea, he and his younger brother, Nathaniel, maintained the fiction that their mother was away visiting relatives. But as they pawned family valuables, visited the test match at Lords cricket ground, and played cards with a simple-minded family friend the smell from the upstairs bedroom was getting worse and worse.

Kate Summerscale takes the reader steadily through the fateful week and then through the discovery and investigation of the murder (for such it is), and the trial and punishment of the perpetrator, combining a forensic approach to the detail of the case with a rich contextual analysis of the social history of the period in London’s East End.

The title should maybe have a question mark appended as Summerscale weighs the evidence on the boy’s actions – wicked by nature or by the circumstances of his upbringing and environment. And the story continues well after 1895 and far beyond London as surprising new evidence comes to light on Robert Coombes’ later life.

The writing sucks in the reader, hungry for detail and resolution yet happy enough to be taken off at interesting tangents that never outstay their welcome. A fascinating and enthralling read that engenders wonder at Kate Summerscale’s depth of research, so lightly worn.

The Visible World – Mark Slouka

This novel, and it does purport to be a novel, is in three sections: ‘Memoir’, ‘Intermezzo’ and ‘Novel’.

In the memoir the narrator tells episodically of his childhood growing up in 1950’s America, the son of Czech parents. The comings and goings of other émigrés, the stories told, the chat overheard, and secrets eavesdropped indicate a family history of drama, romance, tragedy and an aftermath that still echoes down the years into his own life.

In the intermezzo he travels to Prague to investigate wartime events. The details of Czech history, the facts, are in the national record to be uncovered, but unravelling the part in them played by his parents defies his efforts.

Not to worry, the novel section re-imagines it all anyway. In Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1942 there is the palm-sweatingly tense drama of the resistance struggle; romance, bitter-sweet enough to tug the heartstrings; tragedy, inevitable but in an unexpected way and all the worse for that; and an aftermath, articulated with more difficulty but still thought-provoking.

It is reasonably well written, particularly the third, novel, section that in truth could stand alone.  Is the preceding memoir Slouka’s own? The dedication references his parents ‘who lived the years and half the story’ but the standard disclaimer says it is all fiction.

Two Brothers – Ben Elton

Two boys are born on the same night in the same hospital in Berlin in 1920. One is the only surviving twin of Frieda Stengal; the other is an instant orphan, his single mother, estranged from her family, dying in childbirth. Could, would, Frieda - after all she was expecting to go home with two babies - give the orphan a home?  She and husband Wolfgang agree and it is all done above board, paperwork completed and lodged officially. What could go wrong?

Only one thing – Frieda and Wolfgang are Jewish while the cuckoo in the nest is pure Aryan; and as the Nazis come to power in the following decade and unveil their hateful credo, trouble brews for the Stengal family.

Into their teens the boys are unaware that they are not twins. Yes, they are different; one thoughtful and bookish, the other wilful and looking for action, but that’s just personality isn’t it? They also have much in common – a determination to fight back against the Nazi oppression and, more personally, a shared obsessive love for the same rich Jewish girl and a shared indifference for an adoring poor Aryan one.  Never mind love triangle, this is a love tetrahedron.

It all plays out over the decades. The Jews are dead men walking; the Aryan boy could be given up and saved, but that means him giving up a culture, parents, a brother and the girl.

The main strand is the straight chronological account of the Stengal family up to and including the Second World War. Interspersed is the narrative of one of the brothers (which one?) in 1956 London, who has received first word in ten years from one of the girls (which one?).

It is a rattling good yarn (though it takes inspiration from Elton’s own family history), well plotted and well researched, which gives an unsettling account of drip fed anti-Semitism in pre-war Germany while presenting individual Jewish resistance in a more positive light than the norm. Some of the dialogue rings a tad modern for the era, but that may be unconventional rather than inaccurate.

It is long at 500+ pages, but reads a good deal shorter being both informative and entertaining.

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things – Jon McGregor

The scene is set – a summer day in a suburban street in any town; the cast is as varied as to be expected. The old coping with their age; the middle-aged caring for their assets, painting the house, washing the car; young married couples snatching time while the kids play out, or play up; students killing time while they pack up to move on.

All of them watching each other with mild curiosity, observing superficial comings and goings without realising what lies beneath, things held inside, things not spoken to friends, partners and parents, never mind neighbours. It is just a day, unremarkable until late afternoon when something happens to stun the residents and send them all out onto the street in alarm.

One resident we get to know better. The day on the street is interspersed with her life in the few years afterwards. And that too is riddled with things not said; by her and to her.

It is a device that draws the reader in, generating an oscillating desire to get back to the street or to the girl’s story. The secrets of both are slowly and skilfully revealed. Signs are there, but can be misread.

Ironopolis – Glen James Brown

The book consists of six narratives spanning five decades of life in a struggling Teesside community.  It is struggling with poverty, poor housing, declining industry, unemployment, crime and anti-social behaviour. At least that is the external face; within the community are some decent folk making the best they can day to day with vibrancy and undue optimism.

In addition to location other threads link the narratives: common characters (at various stages of their lives), legendary events (seen from multiple perspectives), even a mythical creature that haunts the subterranean waterways and misty banks of the Tees (and the imagination of the locals).  The threads weave into a beguiling tapestry that may, or may not, reveal hidden truths.

Though the nature of truths and facts is a theme too; whose truth, whose facts?  The unreliability of memory and the existence of an ever-evolving local folklore underlie each engrossing tale, each told with a different, convincing yet articulate, voice that makes for effortless reading.

The only problem is the compulsion to keep reading and the conflicting desire to never reach the end.

Leonard and Hungry Paul – Ronan Hession

Leonard and Hungry Paul both lead lives that for their thirty-odd years have had little impact on the wider world.  For Leonard that is accidental whereas for Hungry Paul it is more of a policy decision.  Both, if not self-sufficient, are happy just interacting with their own immediate family and each other.

But their steady state universe is changing.  Leonard’s ménage a deux with his long-widowed mother, which is all he has known, has ended with her sudden death.  Paul also lives at home with his parents but his sister, Grace, is about to get married and she worries about the family she will leave behind; particularly her brother who she sees as both adrift personally and a drag on their parents.

Leonard has a job writing content for children’s encyclopaedias; Paul does casual work as a relief postman.  Both enjoy a relaxing evening with a board game, over which matters of the day are discussed.

Stuff happens; small stuff in global terms but big for the boys.  A girl shows interest; a competition is entered; voluntary work is undertaken; Grace’s wedding looms.

It is gentle fare.  Situations are well-observed and characters and relationships well-portrayed.  There is a bit of humour and plenty of quirky ideas in the protagonist’s easy conversations; but the closest to peril is the possibility of mild embarrassment.

So what is learned by the end of the book?  The quiet life has merit, particularly in this helter-skelter world; and nice inoffensive characters can still be interesting enough to carry a novel.

Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally

Oskar Schindler is a bit of an enigma and remains so even after this biography in the form of a novel.  As Keneally says, such a medium seems suited to tell the story of such an elusive and ambiguous character.

The facts at least, are known – how a German businessman, to all appearances one of many looking to maximise their war profits on the back of military contracts and interned Jewish labour, contrived to keep safe over a thousand workers first in his factory in Krakow before then transporting them wholesale to a new location in Czechoslovakia as the Russian army crossed into Poland.

The motivation is more difficult to fathom.  Readers are left to draw their own conclusions from the narrative pieced together from information gleaned from the survivors and their personal recollections and testimonies.  It is clear that Schindler is no saint; he was a womaniser who liked the good life and knew how to grease the palms of the powerful.  But what drove him to use his charm, money and influence to save the lives of strangers rather than exploit them to enhance his fortune?  Was it a dislike of the Nazi mind-set and its thuggish proponents or an anti-establishment streak in his entrepreneurial soul that drove him to undermine, frustrate and ultimately defy the powers that be?

Keneally provides the evidence – clearly and largely unemotionally - leaving the verdict to the reader.

Fascinating, tragic and uplifting by turns, the book provides a rare microcosmic insight into the darkest times in modern European history.