Review of 2022 Reading Year

The return to normality after the worst effects of the pandemic resulted in a slight decrease in reading levels with 34 books read in the year. Again the majority (62%) were by ‘new to me’ authors. The gender balance tipped this year with a 60:40 preference for male authors, and the males dominate the best reads list by 6 to 2. The reading group was back on providing 7 titles (including 2 best reads) and the ‘bookpacking’ reading journey progressed through Asia in 5 books (though none of these get a place at the top table).

My eight best books of the year are: (Month of full review in brackets.)

 

Ella Minnow Pea – Mark Dunn: Clever, funny, and cautionary tale told in epistolatory form of how dogmatism can develop into totalitarianism, even in a small island with an educated and literate populace. (Jan)

 

The Shining – Stephen King: Rightly considered a classic of the horror genre, the storytelling skill of King making the unthinkable all too credible. (Feb)

 

American Dirt – Jeanine Cummins: Frenetic, tension-ridden ride through Mexico as a woman and her young son join the tragic flow of those fleeing crime, terror, and injustice to seek sanctuary in the US. (May)

 

The Rotters Club – Jonathan Coe: Ben Trotter’s life unfolds from adolescence to adulthood in 1970s suburban Birmingham, full of iconic references, humour, and pathos. (Jun)

 

The Miniaturist – Jessie Burton: Atmospheric and engrossing novel set in 17^th century Amsterdam about a young woman’s introduction (as wife) into an older merchant’s claustrophobic household. (Jul)

 

Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari: A masterly and very readable account of human history with some original insights and thought-provoking ideas. (Aug)

 

There’s Only Two David Beckhams – John O’Farrell: Written years earlier but set at the 2022 Qatar world cup, a humour packed novel about football and parenthood, winning and doing the right thing, and the choices to be made between them. (Sep)

The Farther Corner – Harry Pearson: The author revisits the northeast football scene at all levels, the result as funny as the original Far Corner but underscored by a layer of personal reflection. (Sep)

Maigret and the Madwoman – Georges Simenon

When a little old lady turns up at the police headquarters at the Quai D’Orfevres demanding to see the famous Inspector Maigret (actually Chief Superintendent Maigret) she is fobbed off to a minion. She is sure that someone is searching her flat while she is out, and sometimes she feels she is being followed. Has she seen anyone? No. Is any property missing? Again, no.

Inspector Lapointe reports to Maigret that there is nothing to report; the woman is a bit eccentric, that’s all. But a day later, as he leaves the office, Maigret is accosted in person. He gives the lady five minutes and promises to call round to her apartment as soon as he has the time. Before he finds the time, the call comes in. The madwoman has been found dead in her home.

There are not many clues, but Maigret pieces together the old lady’s life and goes ferreting in the hope his nose for criminality will turn up something.

The Maigret stories are concise little gems. Characters are swiftly but comprehensively drawn, and the police procedure does the job. The motivations and behaviours of the perpetrators are key drivers of the story rather than plot intricacies. Unlike more contemporary sleuths, Maigret has no tortured past or current demons to deal with. He goes home for lunch with his wife, or pops into a bistro for a glass of wine and a smoke of his pipe while he ruminates on the case.

The Paris setting is persuasive, and the mid-century vibe is now period. Maigret has to use a shopkeeper’s phone to contact HQ, he browbeats reluctant witnesses, and happily harasses suspects. It all flows very well to a satisfactory conclusion, albeit with a moral dilemma for the Chief to resolve.

Snow – Orhan Pamuk

The book-packing journey makes its exit from Asia via this novel set in Turkey.

A poet, Ka, has made the two day journey from Istanbul to the far flung eastern city of Kars, close to the Armenian border. The final leg of the journey, by bus, is along roads made perilous by heavy snow. The bus gets through just before the roads are closed by drifts. The forecast is for more snow; Kars will be isolated for days.

Why has Ka made the journey? He tells everyone he is here to write about the rash of suicides by young girls in the city. Some say they are due to civil authorities banning the wearing of headscarves to college – a lightning conductor for the ever-present tensions between western liberal ideas and traditional religious orthodoxy. But there is another reason. Kars is the home of a couple of friends from university days in Istanbul – the beautiful Ipek and her husband who, Ka has learned, are now separated.

Once in Kars, things get complicated. As Ka moves around the snow filled streets, meeting the movers and shakers, it is clear that power struggles abound within and between the civil, security, religious, and political players. Thrown into the heady mix is a recently arrived theatre group whose lead actor/manager has his own agenda.

Ka ricochets from meeting to meeting, sometimes as a pawn, sometimes as agitator. He has deep thoughts and discussions on the true nature of religious faith, on what constitutes love, and of course on the headscarf issue. And the snow keeps falling.

Ka examines his faith, falls in love, gets involved in politics, and is stimulated to write a collection of poems based on a snowflake’s structure. A coup of sorts is staged, people get hurt, killed. It keeps snowing.

The prose is wordy, the setting is oppressing and atmospheric. Along with the Byzantine motivations and machinations of the characters, this makes for a Kafkaesque reading experience, for good or bad according to taste.

Notes from a Big Country – Bill Bryson

In 1996, American journalist Bill Bryson, after a couple of decades living in England, returned to live in the United States. His stay in the UK had culminated in the publication of his ‘Notes from a Small Island’ giving his pithy outsider’s view of how the British live their lives. Back in the USA he turned his attention, freshened by his absence, to his homeland and countrymen, reporting back to the UK in the form of a weekly column for the Mail on Sunday magazine.

The format dictates that the pieces are short; Bryson’s talent ensures the quality is top notch. The subjects range far and wide – air travel, commercials, rules and red tape, shopping, and holidays, to name but a few. Each provides a mixture of humour, indignation, and wonderment at the nonsense so often encountered.

Twenty-five years on, remarkably the pieces don’t seem dated. Many observations still apply and remain relevant. When they don’t, they merely provide interest as a slice of social history or nostalgia, and remain well worth the read.

Slow Horses – Mick Herron

Slow Horses is the disparaging and possibly unfair term that the favoured secret service operatives have given the less favoured agents located at Slough House. Not that that is the building’s real name, just another disparaging term applied to reflect the dead-end nature of the careers of those placed there, due to cockups, errors of judgement, personality defects, and malicious rivalry. The service hope that the misfits will resign saving the cost and embarrassment of sacking them.

River Cartwright is at Slough House following a monumental cockup during a training assessment, which he thinks, but cannot prove, was engineered by a rival. No doubt the other inhabitants have similar cases to plead, but only deaf ears to appeal to. They spend their days on routine, low priority, and seemingly meaningless tasks, sifting obscure data dumps or, in River’s case, sifting rubbish from a journalist’s bin.

Then an opportunity arises. Labyrinthine service politics means deputy head of service, ‘Lady Diana’ Taverner, needs some work doing off the record, and reckons Slough House can be relied on to do it to the required level of incompetence. However she has made a misjudgement; the Slow Horses shake off their torpor and rediscover a thirst for action.

The plot is the plot, too convoluted to precis here, but the strength of the book is in the half dozen or so Slow Horse characters and their back stories, and how they develop from a disparate, distrustful bunch of individuals (who each think the others deserve to be at Slough House) into a workable team.

It is the first of a series, so resolution is partial, leaving scope for further books to continue the ebb and flow of office politics and its effect on the fate of River Cartwright and his colleagues (who now are at least on speaking terms). And as the style is pleasing, if a little edgy, requiring the reader to pick up subtle hints, there is much to recommend delving into further episodes.

Letters to my Husband – Stephanie Butland

Elizabeth’s letters are her way of dealing with the tragedy of her husband Mike’s recent death. Despite the support she gets from Mike’s friends Blake and Andy, his mother Patricia, and her sister Mel, who has flown in from Australia, it is only in the letters that she lets her grief flow.

Mike was a policeman and off duty when he plunged into Butler’s Pond to save eighteen-year-old Kate Micklethwaite. He saved her life but lost his own. Kate recovers slowly, frustratingly for Elizabeth and Blake (a police colleague), who both want to know how the accident occurred, for emotional and professional reasons, respectively. Kate’s parents, Rufus and Richenda, are protective of their daughter; they are grateful for Mike’s actions in saving her life but regard Elizabeth and Blake’s badgering for details as harmful to her mental recovery.

There is tension between and within the camps as the novel unfolds in three timelines, punctuated by Elizabeth’s heartfelt letters. There is Now, as events develop in a not unexpected way; there is Then, which relates how Mike and Elizabeth fell in love, married and came to terms with childlessness; and there is Between which slowly reveals what only Kate knows but isn’t saying.

It is a nice construction, and well executed. The eight characters (nine with Mike, deceased) are well drawn in the main, though Blake and Andy tend to merge (becoming Blandy, according to my Reading Group). The moral choices and actions each adopt are recognisable and entirely reasonable. Though it takes a little too long to address the questions that the reader has asked early, the answers are satisfying enough.

Grief, marriage, childlessness, sisterhood, parenting, each get a good airing. So not just a page turning story but an emotional workout too.

Hag-Seed – Margaret Atwood

The story opens in 2013 at a production of The Tempest by the Fletcher Correctional Players, the culmination of the latest course run at the prison by the English teacher, Mr Duke. It then rewinds thirteen years to when Mr Duke, then known as Felix Phillips, was the renowned lead actor and artistic director of the prestigious Makeshiweg Festival.

Felix is on a professional high, set to deliver a ground-breaking production of The Tempest, a project he has thrown himself into following personal tragedy – the death of his wife in childbirth and within three years the loss of his daughter (Miranda, naturally) to meningitis. This will be a tribute to them. However, the show is pulled, and he is ousted from his job by his more-than-able lieutenant, Tony Price, who takes over, usurps even, the role.

Felix, bereft of purpose, drifts away, goes off-grid, eventually re-inventing himself as Mr Duke. He gets a job in the education service at the local prison, establishing an acting class, which is surprisingly successful. So successful that the new Minister for Culture, one Tony Price, is coming to visit. An opportunity for revenge! thinks Felix.

The clever parallels to Shakespeare’s Tempest are deftly worked, while the play within the play gives scope for exploration of its themes (and their linkage to Felix). There is more, much more than can be outlined here, to admire and enjoy in this re-telling of the Bard’s play, written as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project.