Manhattan Beach – Jennifer Egan

In pre-World War II New York young Anna Kerrigan accompanies her father, Eddie, to a rendezvous on Manhattan Beach with Dexter Styles. It is around these three characters that the novel unfolds over a decade or so.

It is mainly Anna who takes centre stage later, during the war years, by which time Eddie Kerrigan is long gone and she finds herself moving in circles that bring her back into anonymous contact with the Dexter Styles. He, she now realises, is heavily involved in racketeering, which throws new light on her father’s disappearance.

But meanwhile there is a war to be won and Anna, bored by the clerical work assigned her in the naval dockyard, wants to join the trainee divers she sees from her office window. Her battle for acceptance in such an exclusively male role, her ambiguous relationship with Dexter Styles, and the mystery of her father’s absence are weaved together in a context rich with period detail.

The plotline and modern historical setting both engage and there are sufficient twists, turns and peril to maintain interest to the end. The heroine is vulnerable but determined and her outcome matters; the fates of the two men are harder to care about.

The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton

Walter Moody arrives in the Hokitika gold fields of New Zealand after a rough crossing on William Carver’s boat. He checks into the Crown Hotel where he inadvertently gate-crashes a gathering of twelve men. Despite their diversity, he senses a joint enterprise and slowly, with his gentle probing, it emerges.

It involves, inevitably, gold, but also opium, fraud, a whore, and secrets galore. That gathering and the participants’ narratives take up four hundred pages and the first half of the book. The days that follow bring a suspicious death, an unexplained disappearance, and an unravelling of hidden truths as the story moves forward with flashes back to fill in gaps.

It is complex and following the disparate dozen’s movements, motives and machinations is challenging particularly as there are another dozen or so substantial, if subsidiary, characters to get to grips with. There is a cast list to help with remembering who’s who, but keeping track of what, why, when and how is left up to the reader.

The pace of the book shifts up a gear in the second half, with more and shorter chapters; and accelerates so that by the end the chapter headings are almost as long as the text introduced. The prose is rich and measured, evoking the mid nineteenth century setting.

It is a big book (over 800 pages) that demands a big commitment to keep on top of, but probably rewards proportionately. Personally, I drifted a bit and so was only moderately impressed.

Review of 2019 Reading Year

Another good year’s reading with 26 books read and reviewed with a decent proportion (60%) by ‘new to me’ authors.  Six titles via the reading group added random variety if variable quality, though two choices do make the best-of list. Female authors were underrepresented this year – must do better next. As for the ‘bookpacking’ reading journey, we crossed to Africa where I found the writing more to my taste than in Latin America, with one book making the list.

My nine best reads of the year are as follows. (Full review month in brackets.)

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid – Bill Bryson: Hilarious recollections and inciteful reflections on his life and times as a young boy in Des Moines, USA. (March)

Touching the Void – Joe Simpson: Literally incredible but true story of one mountaineer’s moral dilemma and another’s gripping refusal to perish in the pitiless Peruvian Andes. (March)

Beartown – Fredrik Backman: About so much more than a junior ice-hockey team in a left behind Scandinavian town, where rounded characters grapple with ethical issues and conflicted loyalties. (April)

By Night the Mountain Burns – Juan Thomas Avila Laurel: Unusual and memorable narration of a boy’s experiences on a small island off the coast of Africa, written in a style that has rhythms and repetitions that evoke the oral tradition of story-telling. (April)

The Wrong Boy – Willy Russell: The story of two journeys, one from Failsworth to Grimsby and one from boyhood to adolescence, related by the traveller with laugh out loud incidents in the former and more moving episodes in the latter. (June)

Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally: A novel that tells the story of the German industrialist who deflected, deceived and defied the state to keep his Jewish workforce out of the Nazi death camps; unemotionally told but still fascinating, horrifying and uplifting. (July)

Ironopolis – Glen James Brown: Six potent narratives over four decades of life in a struggling Teesside community that interlock, overlap and conflict in the search for truths. (August)

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things – Jon McGregor: A curiously but effectively constructed story of a day on a street that is unremarkable until something happens to stun the residents. (August)

The Wicked Boy – Kate Summerscale: A Victorian true crime is forensically examined in its social context, but it is the after-story that packs a punch; brilliantly researched and written. (September)

Slipless in Settle – Harry Pearson

Sports columnist Harry Pearson turns his attention to cricket, eschewing the so called first-class test and county game for the grit of the northern leagues.

He decides to visit a representative sample of the hundreds of games that take place every weekend as local teams battle out limited-over matches in the towns and villages of Lancashire, Yorkshire and the counties further north.

These are nominally amateur leagues in which one professional (sometimes two) are allowed per club; and with decent money on offer, at least historically, top test players from round the world have graced the challenging wickets and partisan atmosphere at the likes of Ashington, Blackrod, Bacup, Stockton and Settle.

Each of Pearson’s trips trigger an avalanche of comic observation, cricketing nostalgia and pithy comment on the way things were and the way things are. Players past, and all the greats played up here - Learie Constantine, Gary Sobers, Wilfred Rhodes, Basil D’Oliviera to name but a few – are lovingly recalled along with their sometimes questionable character traits and their epic feats etched into club record books.

Each game visited gets a mention too, with credit (or otherwise) given to the current crop of players, supporters behind the scenes, and spectators.

Funny and hugely entertaining, particularly for those for whom the cricketing names and places resonate.

The Edible Woman – Margaret Atwood

It is the 1970s in Canada and Marian MacAlpin is a modern city girl living the bachelorette life and in the first part of the novel she shares that life and her thoughts through a first person narrative.

Her job with a market research company is satisfying enough while hardly stretching her recently graduated status and she rubs along in a shambolic symbiotic fashion with flat-mate Ainsley, united by a common enemy in the shape of the woman downstairs, their landlady. And there is a boyfriend, handsome and soon to be well-heeled lawyer, Peter. All is fine, normal; maybe, when she thinks about it, even boring. Maybe Marian needs a change, but one is coming as Peter stumbles into a proposal that Marian readily accepts.

A change occurs in the second part of the novel. Marian seems to cede, willingly, much of her autonomy to Peter. Much but not all. Within her, unconscious seeds of resistance sprout. Her body begins to reject certain types of food, increasingly and inconveniently narrowing her choice of diet. And her mind dwells on a strange young man she first meets during a survey, then repeatedly bumps into. And her story is now told in in the third person.

The tension between the conventional trajectory of her normal life and the subliminal intervention of her mind and body is played out in typical Atwood style (though this is a very early work). How will it end? In a short part three, but whether told in first or third person could hold the key.

What could have been a standard story of conflicted relationships becomes in Atwood’s hands a memorable, slightly off-kilter, fine piece of writing.

The Riders – Tim Winton

Fred Scully, wife, Jennifer, and young daughter, Billie have left a settled life in Perth, Australia to tour Europe. Jennifer has given up a well-paid job in order to give rein to her creative urge to be a writer, poet, painter or something equally artistic. Scully accommodates her, taking on casual labouring jobs to put food on the table. Then on a whim they (or she) decide to buy a rundown bothy they stumble over in rural Ireland. It is a wreck and while the girls return to Australia to sell up and settle affairs, Scully knuckles down to making the uninhabitable habitable.

That is where chapter one kicks in as Scully spends weeks in the cold wet wilderness working and living hard with only the local postie for company. It’s done by mid-December, but when Scully waits at Shannon Airport arrivals only Billie, an ‘unaccompanied child’ turns up on the connecting flight from London. No explanation from the airline and Billie goes mute on the subject.

Scully is at a loss. Where is Jennifer? Why has she jumped ship? Through choice or necessity?

To find her and get an explanation or at least closure, Scully sets off to check out their few contacts in Europe – Greece, Paris, Amsterdam – dragging Billie along with him. There are adventures and misadventures; and some hidden truths emerge. Questions are asked though mainly Scully asking himself did he really know his wife at all.

The trip around Europe, necessarily on a tight budget, is uncomfortable and hectic; and the writing brings that out in breathless style. There is also a couple of mystical episodes that have allegorical significance (and provide the title).

Does Scully track down his missing missus or find any answers? It is a page turner to the end to find out.

Chernobyl – Serhii Plokhy

The whole disaster of 26 March 1986, the build-up, the flare-up, the clean-up and the cover-up, is brought into focus in this ‘History of a Tragedy’.

It starts with the ill-planned and poorly conducted test shutdown and moves swiftly onto the desperate but futile efforts to quell the unquellable runaway reactor. That is followed by the failure to recognise or admit to the scale of the escaping radiation, with the safety of the population a mnor consideration compared with the need to maintain the fiction that the Soviet nuclear power stations are safe and protect the reputations of politicians, engineers and scientists involved. When that becomes clearly problematic, the scapegoating begins, and blame is apportioned where politically convenient. But in vain, the disaster and its effects are too big to cover up indefinitely and Plokhy is convinced it plays a big part in the eventual break up of the Soviet Union.

These components are all explored in forensic detail, and detail is the word; this is no sensationalist overview. The reader is provided with the frightening science of radioactivity and the oppressive politics of the soviet state where jobs and party position go side by side in an unhealthy mix. It inevitably involves some heavy reading, not so much the science as the politics, with unfamiliar Russian names populating unfathomable national, regional and local regimes that operate at the Party, government and industry level, all having a finger in every pie.

Plokhy does his best and brings out the broad themes effectively, and while he gives a balanced account he does not sit on the fence as to where he feels the faults lie. So, it makes for an authoritative, interesting, informative account, as digestible as such an account could be. But best not read it within fifty kilometres of a nuclear power station, unless you live there, in which case read it soon.