Harvest – Jim Crace

It is harvest time in the village – no name, location or period is given, but it feels like medieval England – and the tight knit isolated community are due a day off to celebrate ‘gleaning day’ when they can pick up the leftover grains for their personal rather than communal use.

But the villagers wake to see two plumes of smoke rising. One is dark, as produced by new cut green wood, signalling the arrival inside the boundary of strangers, whose roughly made hut and smoking hearth gives them squatter’s rights to stay but does not guarantee a welcome. The second plume though is paler, produced by old dry timber, which draws them to the Master's house where the hay barn and stables are ablaze.

Conclusions are jumped to and the newcomers are confronted, condemned and have punishment meted out; the two men are put in the stocks for a week while their female companion (wife, daughter, sister?) has her lustrous locks shorn.

To add to the unaccustomed turbulence, the Master’s position as landowner is under threat; now a widower, his title through marriage is disputed by a cousin with a bloodline claim. The latter has arrived with new agricultural ideas that need more sheep than men on the land.

The next seven days sees some lives lost and all lives irrevocably changed; a concentrated narrative allegorising the longer term decline of the rural workforce.

That narrative is provided by Walter Thirsk, a newcomer himself many years previous so still somewhat of an outsider. His delivery is spare but lyrical; his measured words rooted in the village – the land itself and the people – drawing the reader into the village microcosm, enclosed but never claustrophobic.

This is every bit as good as the author’s acclaimed “Quarantine”, possibly better with a stronger plot and a more familiar (to me) landscape and period.

Casino Royale – Ian Fleming

Having not read a James Bond thriller for about forty years I picked this one as part of my 2015 reading challenge, to tick off the ‘published in the year of your birth’ box.

So it is 62 years old and was Fleming’s first novel. To be honest both of these are evident. The prose is clunky, the dialogue strained, the structure unbalanced and the attitudes dated.

The plot is simple but still hard to credit. The top Russian agent in France, Monsieur Le Chiffre, has been borrowing Leningrad funds, supplied to support French communist trade unions, for personal investments; these have gone pear-shaped so he’s heading for disaster unless he can generate some cash quick.

His cunning plan is to win big at the high-roller card games at the Casino Royale. MI6’s equally implausible response is to send in James Bond, not to kill him but to beat him at cards – 007 licenced to bet – and so deprive him of his winnings and seal his fate with his Russian paymasters.

After introducing the secret agent, his world, and his martini, the first half of the book is devoted to Bond first playing roulette against the house (to warm up his gambler’s instinct and increase his stake money) then baccarat against Le Chiffre, who has ‘bought’ the bank. It reads rather like a useful primer on the two games, until the stakes rise and with them the tension.

The aftermath of the game is more typical 007 action – damsel in distress, car chase, violence, mayhem and teeth-gritting resilience from Bond.

Damsel (Vesper Lynd) rescued (surely no spoiler that), James extracts his due and it his attitude to her throughout that is hard to take in these enlightened times, but sadly is probably accurate for then.

So it is a quick easy read; uncomfortably violent and sexist in places but good to tick off the original Bond book, and that box in the reading challenge.

The State of Africa – Martin Meredith

Part of the ‘Into and out of Africa’ reading journey, this ambitious single volume (albeit 700 page) history covers events in Africa since its emergence from colonial rule in the 1950’s.

While each chapter forms a self-contained account of a state or region over one of its significant periods, they build up (roughly chronologically) to form a continuous narrative for the continent.

From the narrative, themes emerge: the successful efforts to achieve self-rule; the emergence in power of the ‘Big Men’ (often those who had led the fight for freedom); the same Big Men’s slide into corruption, the feathering of nests, and in some cases the near bankruptcy of the country as immense natural resources were plundered for personal gain. Tribal strife, religious conflict and the conduct of the cold war by proxy also contributed to the disorder and violence. These all exacerbated the effects of natural perils such as poverty, drought, famine and AIDS.

Unsurprisingly it is a bleak picture and Meredith pulls no punches apportioning blame; but he backs up his views with compelling evidence and mind-boggling statistics. Key events are related in fascinating detail and black & white photos are provided of the main protagonists, yet the broad sweep is never lost.

It may have been an ambitious project but it succeeds magnificently.

The Banks of Certain Rivers – Jon Harrison

Neil Kazenzakis’s life is back in equilibrium. It has taken a few years for him and his son Chris to recover from the shock of losing their respective wife and mother. Wendy is not dead, nor missing, but is in a vegetative state following an accident, lying unresponsive in a long term care facility.

Neil teaches high school where Chris is in his final year and considering college options. Neil runs; Chris is keen on basketball; both like to sail on Lake Michigan adjacent to their house. They get on well but Neil has found a new love – Lauren – about whom he feels some guilt and so he is keeping it a secret, especially from Chris. He knows he should tell him soon – but why rock the boat just yet?

To extend the metaphor, the boat gets rocked for him: relations with Lauren take an unexpected turn; and his intervention to break up a fight on campus gets misrepresented with potentially serious repercussions. If he loses his job he loses his health insurance that is funding Wendy’s care. Under these pressures even the father son bond begins to crack.

In classic style the present day events are interspersed with Neil’s memories – courtship, marriage, family life, the accident and the aftermath. And while the first half of the book is fairly bland fair-weather stuff, the second half is stormy weather with drama and tension.

Apart from the engaging storyline the book has plenty to say about secrets and lies, trust and betrayal, mistakes and forgiveness, and fathers and sons, providing a decent read for 99p on kindle.

The Red House – Mark Haddon

The Red House, tucked away in the Welsh border hills, is a holiday cottage where a week’s vacation without TV, internet or mobile phone reception can seem a long time.

For this week the visitors are the families of semi-detached siblings Angela and Richard, who have only been in each other’s company for one afternoon in the last fifteen years - at their mother’s recent funeral.

Angela brings husband Dominic, teenagers Alex and Daisy, and eight year-old

Benjy; Richard brings second wife Luisa and step-daughter Melissa, sixteen going on twenty-one. They all bring their secrets and hang-ups, destined to spill out in the struggle between good intentions and bad behaviour. By the end of the week things – relationships, attitudes, even lives - have been changed if not resolved.

Haddon speaks for all eight characters, giving a multi-faceted account of the week. It works well, giving each a distinctive and authentic voice; in particular he captures the adolescent psyche convincingly (not surprising from the author of ‘A Curious Incident …’). The only discordant notes are the occasional flights of fancy he indulges in when setting a scene.

Solar – Ian McEwan

Michael Beard, physicist, a Nobel Prize winner twenty years ago for his ‘Beard Einstein Conflation’, has carved himself a comfortable career lending (more accurately hiring) his name and reputation to academic institutions and research projects in the UK and abroad.

As the book opens in 2000 his latest sinecure is Head of the National Renewable Energy Centre where he turns up a couple of times a week to see and be seen by the researchers. A throwaway line of his has sent them down a blind alley of domestic wind turbine development, but one researcher, Tom Aldous, has a better idea – improving solar – which he badgers Beard to take a look at (in vain).

Beard has other priorities. A serial womaniser on his fifth marriage he finds himself for the first time on the receiving end of infidelity. When he returns home from an incident packed sojourn in the Arctic Circle, events conspire to produce a farcical situation with a potentially serious outcome, but he uses his sharp wits to turn it into an opportunity to move on in both his personal and professional life.

The book fast-forwards to 2005 to get an update on both these. He’s left the Centre under a bit of a cloud but is working with commercial partners making great strides in solar power. Romantically he is in a new relationship which he thinks is nearing its sell by date until Melissa drops a bombshell.

Another five year jump to 2010 and, on the eve of the public launch of the new technology in the heart of New Mexico, some of Beard’s chickens hatched in 2000 and 2005 are coming home to roost. Can his nimble footwork carry the day or will he crash and burn?

The use of three snapshot periods enables McEwan to tell the story while lingering over some well-constructed comic set pieces. Beard – clever but a bit pompous, overweight, aging but still a charismatic presence – is a fine butt for the humour.

The author’s prose is a precise and flowing as ever, the scientific context is handled lightly and confidently (who knows how plausibly), and the unfamiliar humour sits comfortably within, producing an entertaining and enjoyable read.

Heart Shaped Box – Joe Hill

Judas Coyne, heavy metal rock star, past his prime and sole surviving member of his self-destructing band, now lives in comfortable seclusion on his ranch with his latest Goth rock-chick, Georgia, and his two German shepherd dogs, Angus & Ben.

At his ranch Judas has assembled a private collection of macabre items, so when his PA Danny spots a ghost for sale on an internet auction site, Judas just hits the ‘buy now for $1,000’ button to seal the deal and enhance the collection. The ghost is purported to be that of Craddock McDermot, deceased spiritualist stepfather of the vendor, and what arrives in a heart shaped box is his favourite suit to which his spirit is expected to be attached.

And it is, but the initial curiosity value soon turns to unease, discomfort, fear and dread as the ghost not only materialises but shows he can still use his powers of hypnotic persuasion to manipulate the living to do his will.

Danny does a runner but Georgia hangs on in. It is not her real name; Judas re-christens his procession of trophy girlfriends after the states he picks them up in. Her predecessor was Florida who when dumped and sent back home killed herself. Thinking back Judas recalls that she had a step-daddy, and the penny drops that he has been targeted for revenge from beyond the grave.

Judas, Georgia and the dogs (who seem to offer some protection) go on the run which turns into the road trip from (or rather to) hell, during which there is death and destruction, slashing and shooting, blood and gore, as they follow a high risk strategy to end their nightmare.

I am no connoisseur of the horror genre but this seemed good to me with convincing descriptions of the unearthly and the terror produced; the action only pausing briefly to take a breath before taking the next ramp up in the spiral of fear.