Moby Dick – Herman Melville

You think you know the story – Captain Ahab and the great white whale – but unless you have completed the full 650 page voyage you probably don’t.

While the hunt for Moby Dick drives the story, on its harpoon spike is hung a treatise on all things to do with whales and whaling: history, mythology and literature; boats, tools and techniques for chasing, catching and killing; the anatomy and economics of dismemberment; and the make-up of the men who do it all - as individuals and as a crew.

Narrated by an old hand (the iconic “call me” Ishmael) the level of detail is obsessive and fascinating. After 100 pages the Pequod hasn’t yet left the port of Nantucket; it is 600 pages before the eponymous fish (sorry, mammal) is sighted. In the meantime, as other whales are chased, caught and slaughtered, we get to know the crew like old shipmates, best summed up in Melville’s own unsurpassable words:

On Ahab – “intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge” (Moby Dick of course having previously snapped his leg off); on his officers’ qualities – “mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and pervading mediocrity in Flask; on the crew – “chiefly made up of mongrel renegades and castaways and cannibals.”

The above gives a flavour of the language: almost biblical, at least Homeric, in its epic moments; Shakespearian in its soliloquies; and always darkly compelling.

Many themes can be read into the tale, and may theories have been expounded on it, but I just read it, and enjoyed it, at face value - an engrossing seafaring epic, a tale of obsession and revenge, and a manual on hunting the biggest game of all.

Three Beds in Manhattan – Georges Simenon

Francois Combe, an actor of repute in his native France, is in New York licking his wounds after his actress wife dumped him for her younger leading man. Bitter, haunted and unable to sleep, he cruises the bars of Manhattan in the early hours.

In one he meets Kay, not young, not pretty, but alluring in a damaged kind of way. They talk; they drink; they walk; they connect; and eventually stumble into the down at heel Ivy Hotel for a night of mutual comfort.

Come the dawn (late afternoon actually) Francois can’t let go, and Kay is content to start all over again with another night on the town. After all she has nowhere to go having been kicked out of her borrowed room.

Kay’s past is chequered and as details emerge of her previous liaisons – marital (she’s divorced), pick-ups (like him), and platonic (as if) – they torture Francois with a mixture of unreasonable jealousy and a desperate need to possess.

A fragile trust develops as she moves into his apartment; and he accompanies her to her old flat to regain some personal effects. However events conspire to part them. It should be temporary but, as both can see reasons to cut and run, who can tell?

Simenon of course wrote the Maigret stories, and a host of other top-notch crime thrillers, and although the setting and premise is different, the style and craft is familiar. The prose is admirably concise, New York is as atmospheric as Paris, and the lead characters are complex and credible (for 1950s New York).

The result is interesting and very readable, but I prefer his whodunits (or as is often the case with Simenon, the whydunits).

The Rehearsal – Eleanor Catton

The novel has at its centre a bit of a sex scandal at the Abbey Grange high school, though it is glimpsed only through the murky reportage of some of its pupils in their weekly saxophone lessons, then through a drama put on by students at a local, but prestigious, stage school.

The saxophone teacher, up in her attic studio, encourages her girls to open up to her and reveal the secrets they withhold from their mothers, so what they say of the ‘abused’ girl is music to her ears. The pretext is for them to use their emotions and experiences to inject soul and feeling into their playing; the suspicion is that it is her only window on the sensual world.

Meanwhile in parallel, young would-be actor Stanley auditions and gets a place at the drama institute, only to be exposed to equally unorthodox teaching. He too is prompted to reveal and use private and personal experiences to enhance his art. When his class have to devise an end of year production, the school affair is picked as the central theme.

Eventually the two strands come together with potentially disastrous consequences, but though the plot drives the book forward it is the teacher–pupil interaction that grips.

The teachers, significantly known only by their titles (the saxophone teacher, the head of acting, the head of movement, etc.) are, or try to be, manipulative; but is this for their own gratification or for the benefit of the learners? The pupils mainly recognise the attempt but face the same dilemma – is it for their improvement or are they just being used for a vicarious reliving of a long gone youth.

The concept of performance is central to the way the story is told. Time shifts uncertainly; real life events morph into staged performances as, for example, the saxophone teacher projects scenes from her own past onto the intimate conversations with her pupils. This sounds more complex than it reads, because it is done seamlessly well.

This unusual novel (Catton’s first - her second won the 2013 Man Booker prize) is compelling and thought-provoking. The easily flowing prose and the slow reveals keep the pages turning to the end, and the mind turning even after that.

Saints and Sinners – Edna O’Brien

In these eleven stories Edna O’Brien presents not so much distinct saints and sinners but rather the more complex combination of good and bad in most folk. The tales, though varied, can be considered for review purposes roughly in three groups.

First, inevitably, there are those that deal with love between women and men in its several guises: doomed from the start in Black Flowers; lost and regretted in Manhattan Medley; unrequited in Send My Roots Rain; and betrayed in Cassandra. Narrated by women, the language is lyrical and the mood melancholic.

Lighter are a couple of wry observational pieces. In Sinners a landlady takes a dim view of the morals of her latest paying guests, and in Green Georgette a young girl accompanies her mother to tea at the house of a lady of high social standing.

Men do take centre stage in two biographical sketches of working men. Shovel Kings gives an insight to the trials of an Irish labourer in London; Inner Cowboy follows a naive would-be wide boy in Ireland. In both their faults and foibles are balanced by their good nature. But in Plunder the men come out less well as a young girl gives a harrowing account of the invasion by soldiers of her country, her home and her body. In these stories the prose is more gritty and the mood both lighter and darker.

As to be expected from a writer of her reputation, the stories are well written, put together with skill of such a light touch as to be unobtrusive. They are about relationships, emotions and mood, and can be admired as such.

My own taste is for a little more to actually happen: some dilemma or other to torture the protagonists, or some ironic twist to leave me thinking.

Raven Black – Ann Cleeves

Ravenswick, on the Shetlands, is a small community of just four dwellings, a little way out of Lerwick, but far enough to be isolated. And those that live there are about to have their lives hit by tragedy and heartache.

There is Magnus Tait, a strange old man living alone on the hillside, long viewed with suspicion since the disappearance of a young girl some eight years previous. In the school house is teacher Margaret Henry, her husband Alex and teenage daughter Sally. Another teenager, Catherine Ross, lives next door with her widowed father. In the other cottage is single mum Fran Hunter with her little girl, Cassie.

When a strangled body is found in the snow at Ravenswick the local Detective Inspector James Perez tries to keep an open mind on the new crime, while everyone else is pointing the finger at Magnus Tait.

The unfolding story is told from multiple viewpoints, effective in developing the characters and done cleverly enough to unravel the mystery slowly and teasingly. Atmosphere is added in the shape of the icy Shetland winter and the build up to the fiery Viking festival of Up Helly Aa.

The balance of plot, location and character is a real strength of the book, so that even after the culprit is revealed in a tense and twisted climax the reader is left with a desire to find out how the other players’ lives continue.

So the sequel, ‘White Nights’ becomes a must-read.

Men at Arms – Terry Pratchett

There are changes afoot in the Ankh-Morpork Night Watch. Captain Vimes is getting married and retiring and the troop has been swollen by new recruits. However due to the implementation of an ethnic diversity / equal opportunities policy they are a bit of a mixed bunch - Cuddy is a dwarf, Detritus is a troll and, most outlandish of all, Angua is a woman (albeit with an unconventional problem once a month).

Death is not uncommon in Ankh-Morpork; the Assassins’ Guild sees to that. But a rash of unexplained demises offends Corporal Carrot’s moral compass and he is determined to get to the bottom of things.

Carrot’s innocence and decency has novelty value in the city, eliciting cooperation from unlikely sources, and despite his lowly rank he emerges as the natural leader in Captain Vimes’ preoccupied, pre-nuptial, absence. He turns out to be a capable detective too, working out the complexities of the whodunit where most of the citizens have ‘dun’ something untoward.

But it is not all plain sailing. Clowns, civil unrest, a weapon of mass destruction, and a small but talkative dog all intervene, giving Pratchett plenty of opportunity for his trademark satirical comments (Discworld being only slightly distorted version of our own) before climactic events give the new Watch a chance to prove its worth.

This second book in the Night Watch trilogy pleasingly develops the characters from book one, and has a stronger plot while retaining the same level of wit and humour. Which all bodes well for volume three.

Go Set a Watchman – Harper Lee

Jean Louise Finch, the child narrator of the author’s iconic “To Kill a Mockingbird” returns in this companion piece, recently published but written and set in the 1950s.

Here Jean Louise is in her mid-twenties, working in New York, but back to visit her family in Maycomb, Alabama.

Much has changed in the sixteen years since the trial and acquittal of Tom Robinson. A world war abroad and, at home a civil rights movement that threatens the southern whites’ way of life, while promising more than it can really deliver to the negro population.

Jean Louise is discomforted by the resistance she sees to what she considers progress; more shocking is the discovery that her father, Atticus, and her on-off local boyfriend, Henry, are both attending meetings of the Citizens Council. This self-appointed group discuss tactics to frustrate the diktats of the Federal Government and the pressure of the NAACP (never expanded in the book to its full - National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People).

The book develops into two strands. Jean Louise’s reminiscences fill in gaps from her childhood and adolescence (when she went by the nickname of Scout), and these work well evoking the voice familiar from Mockingbird.

Meanwhile in real time she rails against her father and family; her politics and their pragmatics have no common ground and she is bewildered and disorientated by Atticus’ failure to live up to her expectations. This strand is less appealing, the adult voice lacking both the charm and clarity of youth (such is growing up).

The political arguments are of historic interest now, but the timeless issue is the changing relationship between a daughter and her father, as her childhood hero appears to have clay feet. But appearances can be deceptive.

Watchman (the conscience is the watchman of the soul) was never going to rival Mockingbird, but it still makes for an interesting read.