The Siege of Krishnapur – JG Farrell

It is the start of 1857 and at Krishnapur, a two day ride from Calcutta, the English Raj are preserving their societal customs as best they can under foreign skies and a punishing climate. The poetry society is in session. Mr Hopkins, the top man, who bears the title of Collector, is reviewing his eclectic collection of items of art, science, and technology, some recently brought back from his visit to the Great Exhibition in London.

In Calcutta, the bright young things - epitomised by Lieutenant Harry Dunstable, his sister Louise, and newly arrived from Britain, George Fleury and his sister Miriam, who is already a widow – are at play with dances, outings, and picnics. But soon they decamp to Krishnapur where Harry and Louise’s father is resident doctor. On arrival they meet the pretty but disgraced and deserted Lucy Hughes, whom they befriend despite her tainted reputation.

It is not the best time to be in Krishnapur. There is unrest in the Indian army, mutiny is threatened. The Collector decides to strengthen the residency’s defences. Just in time, as the sepoys attack in force. The defences hold for now, but the siege begins.

Under the growing pressure what will happen? Will standards of civilised behaviour hold up? Will the Collector and his minimal forces be up to the task of defending the residency? Will the two doctors, Dunstable and McNab resolve their professional differences and work together to patch wounds and combat dysentery? Will the spiritual leads, Reverend Hampton and Father O’Hara keep the faith, despite their God’s seeming indifference to their plight and the atheistic jibes from magistrate Tom Willoughby? Will George’s and Harry’s romantic interests, and indeed the charms of the young ladies, survive the rigours of the siege? All is eventually revealed.

The pace of the novel and style of prose neatly mirror that of events, beginning rather stiff and formal, becoming languid during the siege, and then frenetic during the chaotic (and surprisingly funny) climax.

Despite its 1973 Booker prizewinning credentials (rarely a good sign), a really good read that, though slow to grip, increasingly entertains as it progresses.

 

Offshore – Penelope Fitzgerald

This offshore community is only a gangplank from dry land, on Thames barges permanently moored on the tidal reaches of that river in the heart of London. It is the sixties but these folk are neither swinging nor fashionable, though some may stretch to Bohemian.

There is an artist, Sam Willis, aboard Dreadnought, a vessel he needs to sell while it still floats. There is Maurice, aboard the conveniently renamed Maurice, who makes a living from picking up men from the shoreline pubs and from providing a repository for dodgy, probably stolen, goods. Aboard Grace is Nenna James, estranged from her husband and so effectively a single parent of her two daughters. Respectability is represented by retired company director Woodie Woodrow who takes pride in keeping his Rochester shipshape, and by Richard and Laura Blake, on Lord Jim, default leaders of the mooring.

Over the course of a few days, we share the small dramas of their lives as they fret about not only their own problems but also that of their neighbours, whom they are quick to help or at least comfort. The slowly sinking Dreadnought, the vulnerability of Maurice, the marital problems of Nenna, are all symptoms of the social decline of the floating community.

Immune from the general gloom, Nenna’s daughters, 11-year-old Martha and 6-year-old Tilda, have known little else and are as at home on the river as the rats that are kept at bay by the greased mooring ropes. They radiate freshness and hope.

At under two hundred pages, the book gives a taste of life on the river, a glimpse into a community rarely featured but here portrayed in realistic, if affectionate, style.

Katalin Street – Magda Szabo

The book-packing journey reaches Eastern Europe in the shape of Hungary.

Specifically at Katalin Street, Budapest, to follow the lives of three families who live in adjacent houses there. The properties are substantial with views out onto the Danube, and the residents are solidly middle class.

Mr Elekes is a headteacher with a wife and two daughters, Iren and Blanka. Next door but one are widower Major Biro, live-in housekeeper Mrs Temes, and the major’s son Balent, who is a little older than the girls. In the middle house, newly arrived, are Mr Held, a dentist, with his wife and daughter, Henriette, the youngest of the children. The Helds are Jewish, and this is 1934 …

After an extended preface that meanders enigmatically through time and space, the narrative unfolds in half a dozen chronological snapshots from 1934 to 1968. Some are told in the first person by Iren. The others are narrated in the third person from Henriette’s point of view that unnervingly persists beyond her early death in the upheavals of 1944.

For Budapest, the upheavals continue into the post war communist state and the false dawn of 1956. Such events form an unintrusive context to the story, the emphasis being on how they affect the residents of Katalin Street.

The spare prose quickly draws the reader into (mainly) the children’s lives – as children initially then as they grow older into adulthood. Throughout, the relationships among them – based on love, rivalry, jealousy, loyalty, and guilt – are particularly well drawn. There is enough forward shadowing to intrigue, and plenty of dramatic incidents to excite, before an end that is not so much a resolution as a coming to rest.

Once into the narrative, the book becomes an engrossing read.

Rubbernecker – Belinda Bauer

It starts when Sam Galen skids on an icy road in South Wales and sends his car over a precipice. Among the other motorists delayed by the accident is Sarah Fort, who is driving her son, Patrick, to a university interview in Cardiff. As their car halts at the scene, Patrick gets out to look over the abyss to the smoking car below. Is the driver dead, he asks the police, who give him and the other rubberneckers short shrift.

But Patrick is interested in death. When he was only seven, his father died in a car accident. And with Patrick on the autism spectrum, interested means obsessed.

But back to Sam Galen. He survives the crash but ends up in the coma ward at Cardiff. There, one of the nurses is Tracy Evans, not so much an angel of mercy as a mercenary angel on the look out for a rich husband, not necessarily her own.

The three storylines pan out. Sam’s is in the first person, a nerve-wracking account of an active mind in an unresponsive body. He sees things, bad things, but cannot report them. Tracy, who maybe should have noticed Sam’s attempts to communicate, has her focus elsewhere – on romantic novels, the boxes of chocolates from grateful relatives, and on the potentially widowed husbands.

Patrick too ends up in hospital, hoping that a course in the dissecting room will answer his questions about death and what comes after. He even manages to overcome his distaste of company to mix, if not socialise, with his fellow medical students and flat mates.

The book whizzes along with pithy prose and OMG inducing twists and turns. Incidents require police involvement, and a new character, DS Emrys Williams emerges and begins to knit together the plot strands. It all leads to a fine conclusion (for some if not all).

An excellent read; bring on more Belinda Bauer!

Origins – Lewis Dartnell

The aim of this book is to explore the linkage between the geology of Earth and human development and history. In the terms of the subtitle, how the Earth made us.

Starting from the formation of the planet and its structure, of which the drifting continents are the key feature, it swiftly homes in on what geological factors led to the emergence of homo sapiens as the dominant species.

Further chapters explain how climatic change affected early population spread; how wind patterns and ocean currents follow on from geological factors and how the discovery of them enabled Europeans to shift the axis of trade from overland routes such as the silk road to naval routes to overseas empires;  how science and technology has found and utilised the laid down rocks and minerals to drive development and draw on a bank of stored energy freeing mankind (for good or ill) from the previous constraints of sun-powered agriculture.

Well argued, informative and thought provoking.

Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir

Earth is in danger. The sun is dimming, losing energy faster than it should. The consequences are unthinkable. Forget global warming, the world will freeze to death.

Scientists of the world unite and find the reason. A strange life form, christened astrophage, is absorbing the sun’s energy and using it to migrate to Venus in order to breed and return in bigger numbers to start the cycle again. Good to find out, but how to fix the problem? A straw to grasp is that though the phenomenon is observable in most nearby stars, there is one that bucks the trend: Tau Ceti.

Dr Ryland Grace, who gave up a potentially brilliant academic career in science to teach high school, somehow gets head hunted into the Project Hail Mary team – so named as the hopes of the planet rest on a long hopeful shot, namely a thirteen year space flight to Tau Ceti to find out its secret. It is a suicide mission for the four crew, who must survive an induced coma, tended by robotic nursing for most of the trip, then send their findings back to Earth, using what fuel is left to power four tiny spacecrafts. Job done, the astronauts get to choose how to die.

Fortunately for Grace, he is not an astronaut, but as the novel opens with him waking up on-board, some last minute change must have occurred that his coma-fogged brain cannot fathom. From there the book twin tracks the ongoing mission with the back story.

Both breeze along from one scientific discovery, through setbacks, to the next problem only science can solve. It is a bit far-fetched, and when the Hail Mary gets to Tau Ceti, credibility is stretched to, or beyond, breaking point.

This is The Martian supercharged to beyond reason, just about worth pursuing to get to a tense conclusion, which is in doubt to the end.

The Reindeer Hunters – Lars Mytting

 This, the second book of trilogy, takes up the story twenty-two years after the end of The Bell in the Lake. Kai Schweigaard is still the pastor at Butengen in rural Norway, and still tends the grave of Astrid Hekne, who died in Dresden giving birth to twin boys. Kai brought her body home for burial and her one surviving son, Jehans, home to his mother’s family.

Head of the family, Osvald Hekne, has kept Jehans at arm’s length, but Kai Schweigaard has compensated by nurturing the boy at least up to adolescence at which point Jehans went rogue. He now spends most of his days fishing and hunting with an old rifle.

Now, up in the hills, he shoots a fine buck reindeer, but the kill is disputed by another hunter. He is a well-heeled English gentleman, Victor Harrison, and the two men strike up an immediate mutual liking, they even speak each other’s language – Victor had a Norwegian nanny, and Jehans was schooled in English by Kai. Without animosity the two reindeer hunters examine the corpse to discover it was a simultaneous hit. They agree to share the spoils, Jehans taking a cash settlement, just enough to buy a better rifle.

A year later and Jehans and Victor bump into each other again in the hunting grounds. When Victor is injured, Jehans takes him back to Butengen to recover at the pastor’s house. When Kai sees Victor, it is like déjà vu. He is the double of Jehan’s deceased father.

As Jehans’ and Victor’s stories develop separately, their potential true relationship seeps into their, and Kai’s consciousness. Is it possible that Astrid secretly gave away the second twin, and he has now, unknowingly, found his way back to Butengen? Kai believes it without understanding how. Victor is in denial, unwilling to disown his English heritage and family pile. Jehans is just happy to have a soulmate.

In parallel, Kai continues to search for the legendary, long-lost Hekne weave – a seventeenth century tapestry that is reputed to foretell events. All this against a backdrop of World War I that affects Victor and the subsequent flu epidemic that threatens Jehans and his family.

It is as beautifully written as its predecessor and builds to a tense and satisfying climax. We get a hint of who will carry the tale forward into the concluding (yet to be published) volume. I cannot wait.