My Name is Leon – Kit de Waal

When we first meet Leon he is in hospital, but he is fine; he is there as his mother has just given birth to his half-brother, Jake. Leon is a sturdy nine-year-old, self-reliant, as he needs to be, as neither his nor Jake’s father is around, and his mum Carole is a liability.

She cannot cope and eventually Leon and Jake end up in care with foster-lady Maureen. All goes well for six months or so, then a permanent placement is found for Jake – he is a baby and, unlike Leon, white, which makes him easier to rehome. The separation from his baby brother devastates Leon and he hatches a plan to reunite the family.

That will not be easy with Jake elsewhere in London and Carol institutionalised in Bristol, so Leon starts accumulating the things he will need – a map, baby stuff, and money filched from unguarded handbags – in an increasingly heavy rucksack.

After another enforced change in fostering, Leon discovers a local allotment and befriends a couple of plot holders, at last male role models of a sort, though neither are ideal. Their potting sheds provide another source for Leon’s pilfering.

Leon chooses a bad moment to make his move. There is trouble on the streets with protests over the death of a black man at police hands. It is scary out there for a ten-year-old, even if he has got a gun in his rucksack!

It is all told from Leon’s viewpoint, which maintains a tight focus, possibly at the expense of variety in voice and tone.

Middle England – Jonathan Coe

The book opens with Benjamin Trotter returning to his home in the Midlands after his mother’s funeral. He has his father with him, and, as the evening progresses, they are joined by a succession of close friends and relatives who turn up uninvited, concerned at his quiet departure from the wake. That is in 2010, and the cast assembled form the core of characters that will take the reader through the events of the ensuing decade with all its challenges.

They are a diverse bunch, though a couple were at grammar school with Benjamin - an owner of a garden centre who gives a businessman’s perspective and a newspaper columnist who provides an insight into the political machine. From the family is Benjamin’s sister, Lois who is a university librarian, and her daughter, Sophie.

Sophie brings the younger generation into the picture. Her best friend, Sohan, is gay and of immigrant stock. Sophie, herself, in a reaction against her previous relationships with liberal metropolitan academic types, starts one with a working guy in Birmingham. His mother is far to the right and employs a Polish cleaner. Throwing in a couple more friends from Benjamin’s schooldays, Charlie Chappell, the children’s entertainer, and Jennifer Hawkins, Ben’s first failed attempt at coupling, provides additional scope for comedy.

The interplay between this panoply of characters and the significant events of the decade – the London Olympics, the US presidential election, the EU referendum, three general elections, and Brexit - paints a broad but vivid picture of Middle England in the 2010s. Each viewpoint is given respect, placed in real life context, with mouthpieces that articulate the debates of the day: immigration v racism; political correctness v equality of opportunity; and taking back control v cultural isolation. The destructive nature of the arguments takes its toll, but is there some hope for reconciliation at a personal level?

Difficult as the task is, the book successfully and entertainingly achieves its aims of reflecting life in middle England in a turbulent decade.

The Birthday Boys – Beryl Bainbridge

In June 1910 Captain Scott’s latest expedition sets off from Cardiff on the Terra Nova.

Its destination is Antarctica, its purpose to be the first to reach the South Pole. The book consists five sequential narratives, one each from the five men destined to make the final push for the pole.

First off is petty Officer ‘Taff’ Evans with his account of a wild send-off at Cardiff. A month later in July 1911 ‘Uncle Bill’ Wilson tells of a hazardous expedition en route, undertaken to collect specimens from the remote South Trinidad Island. A gap of nine months ensues before Scott himself, ‘the owner’, takes up the story of the error-strewn landfall on Antarctica (by now March 1911) and establishing bases. A fourth voice, that of Lieutenant ‘Birdie’ Bowers, describes a risky midwinter sortie in July 1911 to collect penguin eggs. Finally, ominously dated March 1912, ‘Titus’ Oates relates the final, fateful, journey alongside the four previous narrators whom by now we know well.

In fabricating these voices and linking them together, Beryl Bainbridge presents a most human account of their endeavour. The conflicts, disagreements and resentments are presented alongside the respect, camaraderie, loyalty and love. Heroic failure is made understandable if not sensible.

Is it bravery, patriotism or thirst for adventure or knowledge that drives their quest, or some compulsion to test themselves to the limit, inexplicable to most people? Whatever, it makes for gripping reading as each episode raises the stakes and shortens the odds on survival. Even the celebrations in Cardiff put Taff Evans at risk, of his job if not his life.

A clever idea very well executed.

The Hunting Party – Lucy Foley

This is a classic murder mystery with an added twist as not only is the identity of the murderer kept from the reader until the end, but also that of the victim.

The set-up is a group of nine young, well-heeled members of the metropolitan elite who book a remote highland hunting lodge to see in the new year in splendid, champagne fuelled isolation. They are not completely alone, there is a few staff and another party of two elsewhere on the estate.

Now to the form and plot, which complement each other cleverly. There are four female narrators (three guests and the manager) and another point of view over the shoulder of the male gamekeeper. They pass the baton to and fro to tell the story, but in two timelines. One starts on the discovery of the body on the second day of the new year, the other flashes back three days earlier to the day before New Year’s Eve when the party arrived.

Both strands move steadily forward, alternating to build up to twin climaxes of revealing the crime and unmasking the perpetrator.

It all works very well. The split timeline is effective, and the sliced narration provides a varied perspective on current events and private insights into long simmering hidden passions, resentments and most importantly, motives (of both guests and hosts).

And, of course, it snows to increase the isolation, ramp up the tension and provide a stark backdrop to the unfolding drama.

Manhattan Beach – Jennifer Egan

In pre-World War II New York young Anna Kerrigan accompanies her father, Eddie, to a rendezvous on Manhattan Beach with Dexter Styles. It is around these three characters that the novel unfolds over a decade or so.

It is mainly Anna who takes centre stage later, during the war years, by which time Eddie Kerrigan is long gone and she finds herself moving in circles that bring her back into anonymous contact with the Dexter Styles. He, she now realises, is heavily involved in racketeering, which throws new light on her father’s disappearance.

But meanwhile there is a war to be won and Anna, bored by the clerical work assigned her in the naval dockyard, wants to join the trainee divers she sees from her office window. Her battle for acceptance in such an exclusively male role, her ambiguous relationship with Dexter Styles, and the mystery of her father’s absence are weaved together in a context rich with period detail.

The plotline and modern historical setting both engage and there are sufficient twists, turns and peril to maintain interest to the end. The heroine is vulnerable but determined and her outcome matters; the fates of the two men are harder to care about.

The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton

Walter Moody arrives in the Hokitika gold fields of New Zealand after a rough crossing on William Carver’s boat. He checks into the Crown Hotel where he inadvertently gate-crashes a gathering of twelve men. Despite their diversity, he senses a joint enterprise and slowly, with his gentle probing, it emerges.

It involves, inevitably, gold, but also opium, fraud, a whore, and secrets galore. That gathering and the participants’ narratives take up four hundred pages and the first half of the book. The days that follow bring a suspicious death, an unexplained disappearance, and an unravelling of hidden truths as the story moves forward with flashes back to fill in gaps.

It is complex and following the disparate dozen’s movements, motives and machinations is challenging particularly as there are another dozen or so substantial, if subsidiary, characters to get to grips with. There is a cast list to help with remembering who’s who, but keeping track of what, why, when and how is left up to the reader.

The pace of the book shifts up a gear in the second half, with more and shorter chapters; and accelerates so that by the end the chapter headings are almost as long as the text introduced. The prose is rich and measured, evoking the mid nineteenth century setting.

It is a big book (over 800 pages) that demands a big commitment to keep on top of, but probably rewards proportionately. Personally, I drifted a bit and so was only moderately impressed.

Review of 2019 Reading Year

Another good year’s reading with 26 books read and reviewed with a decent proportion (60%) by ‘new to me’ authors.  Six titles via the reading group added random variety if variable quality, though two choices do make the best-of list. Female authors were underrepresented this year – must do better next. As for the ‘bookpacking’ reading journey, we crossed to Africa where I found the writing more to my taste than in Latin America, with one book making the list.

My nine best reads of the year are as follows. (Full review month in brackets.)

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid – Bill Bryson: Hilarious recollections and inciteful reflections on his life and times as a young boy in Des Moines, USA. (March)

Touching the Void – Joe Simpson: Literally incredible but true story of one mountaineer’s moral dilemma and another’s gripping refusal to perish in the pitiless Peruvian Andes. (March)

Beartown – Fredrik Backman: About so much more than a junior ice-hockey team in a left behind Scandinavian town, where rounded characters grapple with ethical issues and conflicted loyalties. (April)

By Night the Mountain Burns – Juan Thomas Avila Laurel: Unusual and memorable narration of a boy’s experiences on a small island off the coast of Africa, written in a style that has rhythms and repetitions that evoke the oral tradition of story-telling. (April)

The Wrong Boy – Willy Russell: The story of two journeys, one from Failsworth to Grimsby and one from boyhood to adolescence, related by the traveller with laugh out loud incidents in the former and more moving episodes in the latter. (June)

Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally: A novel that tells the story of the German industrialist who deflected, deceived and defied the state to keep his Jewish workforce out of the Nazi death camps; unemotionally told but still fascinating, horrifying and uplifting. (July)

Ironopolis – Glen James Brown: Six potent narratives over four decades of life in a struggling Teesside community that interlock, overlap and conflict in the search for truths. (August)

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things – Jon McGregor: A curiously but effectively constructed story of a day on a street that is unremarkable until something happens to stun the residents. (August)

The Wicked Boy – Kate Summerscale: A Victorian true crime is forensically examined in its social context, but it is the after-story that packs a punch; brilliantly researched and written. (September)