By Night the Mountain Burns – Juan Thomas Avila Laurel

Read as leg 8 (Equatorial Guinea) of the Bookpacking reading journey as it makes landfall in Africa.  Or not quite; as this book is set on a remote Atlantic Ocean island off the continent’s west coast.

It is a story told of a boy’s experiences growing up there.  And told is the key word as it is reads as a monologue from skilled storyteller with the rhythms and repetitions that give that style its distinctiveness.

What happens matters less than how it is told and the various events within the narrative intertwine and are frequently, if temporarily, abandoned whenever a tangential happening or thought interrupts the storyteller’s mind to distract him.  But he returns to them all eventually and loose ends are tied up by the end.

The culture of the Atlantic Ocean island and its inhabitants suffuse the narrative giving a richness that draws the reader in.  There are no chapters and precious few breaks in the text, but that matters not as the narrator’s voice is beguiling.  He is in the room with you and to walk away almost seems impolite.

A different and memorable reading experience.

Beartown – Fredrik Backman

Beartown: a Scandinavian town slowly dying in the northern forest, its industry in decline and the glory days of its ice hockey A-team well past.  The one bright spot is the youth team, spearheaded by a rare talent, backed by teammates willing to put their bodies on the line, coached by an ex-player with an unquenchable thirst to win, supported by intimidating fans, and financed by the few local businessmen still making money.

Then there is general manager, Peter Andersson; another ex-player who made good, getting into the NHL in Canada before injury and a personal tragedy brought him back to take charge of the club he loves.  He has to respond to all those competing interests; keep the lid on the pressure cooker; balance current needs with past loyalties and future prospects.  Quite a task, but he is not the only one with such choices.

The book starts slowly; there is no need to rush in Beartown, unless you have your skates on.  So we meet a large cast of characters, but it is done at a steady pace and with such skill as to enable easy assimilation.  Each has distinctiveness and depth.  We come to understand the players and their roles on and off the ice; the coaches, parents, friends and teachers who, push them on or pull them back; the movers and shakers in the boardroom with their manoeuvring and plotting; and others on the fringes, resentful at their exclusion from, or dismissive of the folly of, the town’s obsession.

But these undercurrents are suddenly brought to the surface when a shocking incident polarises opinion.  Compromise and accommodation goes out of the window as sides are taken and violence threatens to spread from the rink to the streets and the forest.

It is atmospheric and absorbing, told mainly with the immediacy of the present tense with the odd flashback and occasional foreboding future reference.  By the end the reader knows Beartown as well as anyone living there, and cares just as much as anyone about the fate of the town and the prospects of its residents.

Day of the Accident – Nuala Ellwood

When Maggie Allen comes out of her coma, ten weeks after the day of the accident, her memory is hazy.  Two things she learns quickly: her child is dead and buried and her husband has cleared off leaving her homeless, penniless and at the mercy of the welfare state.

That is not a good place to be when in a fragile mental state and there are lots of tears amid feelings of loss, guilt and recriminations.  She knows she is in some way responsible for Elspeth’s death but the chain of events leading to it has more links missing than in place.

Her condition is all the more frightening for her as it brings back to mind an earlier period of mental ill-health that followed an incident in her youth.  Is that connected to the accident somehow?  This is a novel, so probably yes; but how?

The twin mysteries unravel slowly with a third added for good measure by the periodic insertion of letters written from a daughter to her mother, neither named.  Are they real or imagined; genuine or a fabrication; who are they from and to?

Maggie’s frustrations at her inability to remember or even function effectively in her new circumstances are vividly portrayed, but possibly overly so.  The unsympathetic reader may say, just get a grip, woman.  This means when events unfold and clues lead to a dramatic conclusion, Maggie’s transformation from quivering wreck to clear-thinking heroine is remarkable.

Nevertheless the plotting is clever with the obligatory twists and turns and the ending, though not entirely convincing, works well enough.

Touching the Void – Joe Simpson

A constant reminder is needed when reading this book that it is non-fiction as otherwise the tale would consistently fail the ‘as if’ test.

For mountaineers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates the attraction of the 21,000 ft. Siula Grand peak in the Peruvian Andes was its isolation and the consequent knowledge that there they could rely only on each other.  No-one waiting in an Alpine village down the hill, no mountain rescue poised to help, at their camp only a hiker they had picked up in Lima, along for the walk not the climb; and of course in 1985 no mobile phones.

After some acclimatisation and reconnaissance climbs Joe and Simon set off for the unclimbed west face of the mountain.  The ascent is full of challenges – snow, wind, altitude, ice, rockfalls, difficult terrain – but nothing unexpected, nothing unprepared for.  It is the descent that goes wrong, terribly wrong.

Joe has a fall, is badly injured and Simon’s efforts to get him down are truly heroic.  But bad goes to worse and when you are being pulled out of a melting snow seat by the crippled man you are roped to, and he is hanging over a yawning crevasse 150 feet below you, what do you do?

The moral dilemma is central to the book; its resolution and outcome is astonishing.  Time and again the author’s name on the cover has to be checked as the odds of his survival lengthen, page by page, from unlikely to impossible.

There are climbing terms used but there is no need to be a climber to appreciate the writing.  The emotions are raw but the prose is polished; and even if it were otherwise the resilience of the man would deserve a reading.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid – Bill Bryson

The Thunderbolt Kid, of course, is Bryson himself, the young boy living in Des Moines, Ohio during the 1950’s.  And life and times is what we get with recollections of his early life growing up in the Midwest and reflections on the social trends and national events of that formative period in the USA.

The recollections are often funny, laugh out loud funny, helped by childlike exaggeration that fits the voice and tone of the memoirs.  And the reflections are insightful ranging across race relations, nuclear armament, consumerism and communism to name but a few.

Why the Thunderbolt Kid?  That is his alter-ego after joining the ranks of the superheroes that populated the comic books of the day.  His superpower – that of blasting those adults, and there were many (teachers, neighbours, shopkeepers, cinema managers), that he found frustrating, obstructive or unpleasant, into oblivion.

Bryson at his brilliant best.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest – Stieg Larsson

This is the third book in Larsson’s Millennium trilogy and picks up exactly where volume two ended, which is just as well as “Played with Fire” left a lot of loose ends not to mention badly damaged bodies.

There is less mayhem here, more intrigue as several agencies try to unravel the mystery that is Lisbeth Salander.  A couple of police forces, two factions within the Swedish state security organisation, a corrupt psychologist and of course Millennium magazine’s Mikael Blomkvist after a good story, are variously trying to get her locked up, shut up, eliminated or rescued from herself. Meanwhile Salander lies in hospital under guard with only her lawyer allowed to visit; not that that stops the hacker extraordinary from getting involved remotely once she gets illicit access to the internet.

It gets complicated.  But at least the timeline is simple and events race along so it reads less than the 750 pages.  In truth it could lose two hundred pages if Larsson cut down on the spurious detail, particularly geographic; those familiar with Stockholm may find the street level information interesting, but those not can either ignore it or spend time with the maps provided.  There is also a side story concerning Blomkvist’s lover Erika Berger that could be omitted without any loss.

As usual, Blomkvist gets his end away and runs rings round everyone, but Lisbeth Salander remains the star turn in a typically violent finale.

And finale it will be for me.  Although the series has been continued after Stieg Larsson’s death by David Lagercrantz I have had my fill thank you very much.

Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood

After a long career, painter Elaine Risley is back in Toronto where a gallery is mounting a retrospective of her work.  Her return prompts memories of her childhood and youth spent in the city.  With unconventional parents and a brilliant older brother her upbringing left her ill-prepared for the schoolyard, neither able to form friendships with the other girls nor deal with their spite and cruelties.

It seems she’s been dealing with it ever since – in her art and in her relationships with the men in her life, which both seem to attract the opprobrium of other women.

As the past and present intertwine a personal and vivid picture of life in post-war and baby-boom Canada emerges, illuminated both by the clarity of youth and the wisdom, or is it world-weary cynicism, of age.

Even filtered through Elaine Risley’s off-kilter narration, Margaret Atwood’s prose flows beautifully, and as ever her articulation of the human condition hits the mark.