Mayflies – Andrew O’Hagan

The summer of 1986, James is eighteen, between school and university and unencumbered by parents having responded to their separation by ‘divorcing’ them from his life. Instead, he dips into his friend Tully’s family life. Tully’s ambition is shaped by his father – he wants to be nothing like him, crushed by Thatcherism and still sulking.

Where Tully leads, others follow, and this summer that will be to Manchester for a music festival celebrating ten years since the Sex Pistols played the Free Trade Hall. Friends - Tibbs, Limbo, and Hogg - come on board and soon the five of them are heading south on the bus from industrial Ayrshire to sample the delights that 1980’s Manchester holds for those into their music: The International, Piccadilly Records, The Hacienda, and the GMex Festival.

It is an innocently hedonistic weekend of music, drinking, drugs, and women (if not sex). I was in Manchester in the 80’s, but a decade too old for that scene, which means for me the references to groups, songs, and drugs are obscure and frankly interchangeable. Not that it matters, you still get the drift – youth at one of its magic moments, ending sat on the roof of the YMCA with the city spread out below.

From that night the book skips thirty years. The boys have gone their separate ways but remain in contact, so it is no surprise for James to get a phone call from Tully. The shock comes with the news that his friend is seriously ill and needs to ask a favour.

The book is a perceptive portrayal of male friendship at both ends of adulthood. It is full of contrasts: the feelings of invulnerability in youth and mortality in age; the love of life and the poignancy of realising its limits; the joy of friendship and the pain of letting it go that sometimes requires selflessness.

The first half is written with great joie de vivre; the second half with heart-wringing sensitivity. All well worth the emotional investment.

The Shining – Stephen King

The first tick off the Booket List.

Jack Torrance is down on his luck, at least he thinks so, having lost his teaching job in New England due to an unfortunate incident with a student. Of course, if he could just finish writing his play, all would be fine, but now he has writer’s block too. It’s not all bad, he has a wife, Wendy, who is attractive but recently distant, and a son, Danny, whom he loves ferociously but with whom he sometimes gets frustrated.

Truth is, Jack’s drinking (now paused) and anger issues are the problems, as Wendy and Danny (oddly perceptive for a five-year-old) know all too well.

But there is a solution. Jack’s ex drinking buddy has pulled a few strings to get him a job on the other side of the country – off-season caretaker at the Overlook Hotel. The hotel is high up in the Colorado Rockies, snowed in and inaccessible in winter, so it closes down from October to April, but needs someone to maintain the heating and keep an eye on things. The bar is cleared of stock (and therefore temptation) and there will be plenty of free time to finish that damned play, so it is perfect. Wendy and Danny are not so sure, but accept that what is best for Jack, is best for them too.

As soon as Danny arrives his heightened perception goes into overdrive. Dark deeds have occurred in the Overlook’s seventy year history. Stains remain, invisible to most but indelible to Danny, who has the ‘shining’. Among the departing staff is Dick Hallorann, the chef, who recognises Danny’s psychic awareness and shares it to a lesser degree. He warns Danny off certain rooms and areas of the grounds, telling him to ‘shout’ if he needs help. He will be in Florida but will hear anyway.

Alone at the Overlook Jack, Wendy, and Danny settle, along with the snow that cuts them off completely. Jack finds the basement full of archives and delves into the hotel’s history; he finds himself drawn to and even into its past. Things go bump in the night, and worse. Danny sees more horrors, Jack fears for his sanity, and Wendy fears for their lives. Will Danny’s ‘shout’ for help be heard in Florida? If it is, could Hallorann get to him in time?

It is a classic for a reason. King is the consummate story-teller who creates real and complex characters and puts them through hell for our entertainment. In his hands the tension ratchets up degree by degree, the unbelievable becomes all too credible, and pages turn fast and furious.

The Booket List

Not a review but the name of a new reading journey.

The next birthday being of biblical significance concentrates the mind on unfinished business, in this case unfinished reading. Hence the new reading journey, the Booket List, to be started at once to give it a chance to finish. That means an overlap with the dawdling Bookpacking journey, which is not a problem as both are virtual and can co-exist.

Unlike the other reading journeys, which encouraged new reading experiences, the Booket List will tread some familiar paths, pushing some to their natural conclusion. Trilogies, longer series, and some full works will be completed. Books whose fame demands that they should have been read by now will get their opportunity. An initial fifteen, in no particular order are:

The Mirror and the Light – Hilary Mantel; completing the Wolf Hall trilogy.

Testament of Friendship – Vera Brittain; companion to Testaments of Youth and Experience.

The Labyrinth of the Spirits – Carlos Ruiz Zafon; completing the Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet.

Exit Music – Ian Rankin; the seventeenth and final novel, seeing DI John Rebus into retirement.

The Duke’s Children – Anthony Trollope; the sixth and final volume of the Palliser novels.

Barnaby Rudge – Charles Dickens; the only unread long work of the master storyteller.

Last Things – C P Snow; outstanding from the Strangers and Brothers series, avidly read in the 1970s.

The Shining – Stephen King; one I never got round to, and a film avoided for that reason.

Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier; have seen this film, but the book is on the shelf.

Emma – Jane Austen; the last of the big four unread (but would still leave Persuasion and Northanger Abbey).

Notes From a Small Island – Bill Bryson; been holding out for a hardback copy but will go paperback if necessary.

Dubliners – James Joyce; been reading it for ten years but still not halfway through!

Emotionally Weird – Kate Atkinson; an early work to catch up on, having read the rest.

Adrian Mole, the Prostrate Years – Sue Townsend; never got round to this last diary.

MaddAddam – Margaret Atwood; concluding part of the trilogy of the same name.

Becoming Inspector Chen – Qiu Xialong

The bookpacking journey visits China, where Chief Inspector Chen of the Shanghai Police is in retrospective mood. He has been told his state medical insurance no longer covers the nursing home fees for his mother. She needs care but instead of moving in with her son, she insists on returning to her own tiny apartment. That puts Chen in the cramped attic bedroom of his childhood, prompting a night interrupted by dreams that both echo his life and reflect his current insecurities. He worries that the cancelled insurance is a first sign of political disfavour.

As he wakes from successive dreams, he recalls key incidents in his education and career that led to his appointment in the police service and his rapid promotion to inspector. This was despite his ‘black’ family background due to his father, a Confucian scholar, being labelled and persecuted as a bourgeois intellectual and class enemy during the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

The incidents illustrate that Chen’s talent for investigation started early but had to be combined with carefully treading the minefield of political correctness, that correctness forever changing over the decades as the Party continually reformed and reset the rules.

The criminal detection element takes second place to the historical context in this, the eleventh book of the Inspector Chen series, though one early case provides a meaty chunk in the middle. The Shanghai setting, particularly the Red Dust Lane community, is atmospheric and the impact of unfolding politics on such individuals is interesting enough to sustain attention over the two hundred pages.

A reader more familiar with the series may get more from this delve into the character’s development than I did. Am I tempted to pick up an earlier volume, more representative of the series? Maybe, but not any time soon.

Bright – Duanwad Pimwana

The book-packing journey visits Thailand, and a working class tenement community.

Kampol Changsamran, five years old, lives with his mother, father, and baby brother in Mrs Tangjan’s collection of rented tenement houses. It is a close-knit, urban, working class community where folk rub along together and support each other. That is just as well as when Kampol’s parents split up and go their separate ways, vacating their house, Kampol gets left behind.

Someone invites him in for tea, someone else beds him down for the night, all expect that he will be picked up soon. But no, and he soon falls into a peripatetic existence as a community responsibility. Through him, we get to know the local characters: Chong, the grocer; Tia, the fisherman; Bangkerd, the mortician; Dong, the bicycle repairman and drunk; and schoolfriends Jua, Oan, and Samdej.

Episode by episode, the everyday lives of the community are revealed through Kampol’s eyes. Sometimes he is centre stage in events, getting up to mischief or into trouble; other times he is observing the adults, often misinterpreting events hard to comprehend through by young mind.

There is no harm in Kampol, so we cheer his little wins and feel his occasional pain. The portrayal of life in working class Thailand is interesting and has an authentic feel. The reading is easy, but it is not lightweight, as Kampol’s insecurity is always a worry.

The name Kampol means Bright, hence the title, and in a potentially dark situation, he shines as best he can.

Ella Minnow Pea – Mark Dunn

The eponymous Miss Minnow Pea lives with her family on Nollop, a self-governing island off the coast of South Carolina (though do not expect to find it in the atlas). It does not need much governing, as the residents are law-abiding and settled in their somewhat conservative ways. Over the years the leadership has fostered a devotion to the arts, particularly the written word, and an aversion to modern technology. There is not even a telephone system, the islanders communicate by the exchange of letters and an efficient postal system.

In the circumstances it is no wonder the nation reveres their only famous son, Nevin Nollop, creator of the celebrated pangram (a phrase utilising all the letters of the alphabet) ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’. As well as re-naming the island after him, they also raised a statue in his likeness on which his famous phrase is proudly spelt out in individual letter tiles.

All well and good, but when a tile falls, the letter Z, the ruling council meets in emergency session and concludes that it is a message from the high and mighty Nollop, and that message is that Z is no longer part of their alphabet. It should no longer be written, read, or spoken. Draconian penalties are put in place for offenders. It is zero tolerance; or would be if only a Z was available!

The community adapts, some better than others. Then the Q falls, followed by the J and K. When more ubiquitous letters follow, things get serious.

The story is told, appropriately, in epistolary form with letters criss-crossing the island, notes to family pinned on fridge doors, and edicts from on high issued by the council. These, of course get progressively harder to compose as the available alphabet shrinks, testing the inventive linguistic skills of the Nollopians to the limit. There is one way out – if a shorter pangram can be found, the god-like status of Nevin Nollop can be refuted, and life can return to normal. It is a challenge Ella, and a few other rebels, are willing to take up.

The simple but devastating premiss provides ample opportunity for absurd comedy, political allegory, and witty use of language. Mark Dunn takes it to the limit, creating a great little masterpiece.

Killing the Shadows – Val McDermid

This is a serial killer novel to end serial killer novels.

Dr Fiona Cameron is an academic psychologist who is consulted from time to time by the Metropolitan Police to profile serial killers. But her last assignment did not end well when her advice was rejected, meaning the wrong man was put on trial and subsequently acquitted, leaving the real serial killer on the loose. Recriminations all round, but Detective Superintendent Steve Preston, a long time friend of Fiona, unjustly bears the brunt of the blame.

Dr Cameron remains in demand, though. There is a serial killer plying his trade in Spain and Fiona is persuaded to fly in to help the Spanish police. Her live-in boyfriend, Kit Martin, goes along for the trip. He is a writer, of crime novels, including one featuring a serial killer.

That occupation is not good news, as the mutilated body of a crime writer has just been found in Edinburgh. Then another is discovered in Ireland, and it begins to look like there is yet another serial killer (that makes three) on the loose, this one targeting authors who write novels featuring serial killers.

Fiona’s offer to help (fuelled by concern that Kit may be next on the list) falls on deaf ears. When a third death is confirmed, and Kit goes missing, she takes matters into her own hands. She has sussed that the killer mirrors the MO used by the murderer in each author’s book, and that sends her off to the Scottish Highlands on a rescue mission.

The book takes a while to get going (the sojourn to Spain seems an irrelevance) but once the Kit hits the fan, the pace picks up and accelerates to a tense climax. However, for me the characters did not convince, the relationship between Fiona and Kit too lovey-dovey, not to mention strange given that Fiona’s motivation for her career is the murder of her sister at the hands of a killer, the like of whom her boyfriend arguably glamourises in his work. A sub-plot involving Superintendent’s Preston’s love life also stretches credibility.

A bit of a pot-boiler, engaging enough if you don’t think too much about it.