The Sleeping and the Dead – Ann Cleeves

 It has been a warm summer in Cranford, a small town in the north east of England, where DI Peter Porteous has transferred in the hope of a quieter life. But as the water level in the lake drops, a weighted body is discovered. It has been there a while, years, but the post-mortem and missing person records eventually identify the victim (for it is murder) as Michael Grey, a young man who disappeared shortly after completing his A levels in 1972.

But Michael Grey is a bit of a mystery. He arrived in Cranford only a couple of years before his demise and was fostered by a local elderly couple, now deceased. There are school records to be had, there is an old teacher who remembers him, and a few of the school cohort can be traced living locally. A little further afield, living in a coastal town, is his then girlfriend, Hannah Meek. She is recently separated, living with her teenage daughter, and works as a librarian at the local prison. That makes for a stressful life at home and work, so Porteous’s questioning just adds another level of aggravation.

The story unfolds as Porteous investigates in his quiet unfussy way, and Hannah gently unravels. Tension ramps up towards the end as disparate side stories cleverly coalesce to provide a satisfactory ending to a devious plot.

And the plot is the main thing; the characters never quite grip the imagination, which is possibly why Peter Porteous never made it to the serial book status of other Cleeves stalwarts like Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez. But it is still a diverting enough early (2001) work by one of the leading detective fiction writers around.

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

 Evangelical Baptist minister Nathan Price has a new mission, talking the word of Christ to the dark continent. What the Reverend Price decides, his family have to lump as God’s will, so wife, Orleanna, and four daughters have no option but to up sticks and leave their comfortable home in the southern United States for a primitive shack in the interior of the Belgian Congo.

But it is 1959, and white colonial rule enables the family to maintain a veneer of civilisation and relative wealth with a dollar stipend coming in and an established link with Leopoldville via a maverick South African airman.

It is still a culture shock, but more humorous than worrying, until the Belgians pull out and grant a chaotic independence to the natives. Most whites flee the country, but Nathan is determined to fulfil his (now unpaid) mission. The family remain and the consequences for Orleanna and the girls are profound.

The narrative is delivered in real time by the four girls, passing the baton chapter by chapter. This gives a pleasing variety of styles in line with their diverse personalities. Eldest Rachel (15) is the frustrated prom queen who bemoans most the lack of hair products, her language peppered with delightful malapropisms. Leah and Adah (14) are twins, but only in the sense of sharing their birthday. Leah is strong willed and confident, willing to follow her father into the good fight and well able to cope with jungle life. Adah, damaged in the womb, limps along in her wake, selectively mute but articulate in her dark atheistic thoughts. Ruth May is barely more than a toddler but adds her child’s eye view of events. Orleanna’s contribution is a retrospective introduction to each section of the book, bitter with hindsight and outrage.

The book delivers on so many levels – strangers in a strange land; familial relationships that are authentically complex; the impact of local and global politics at the individual level – with prose that uses words to great effect, witty, wise, angry and moving.

Read as part of the African leg of the book-packing journey, the book wears its six hundred pages lightly, each of them a gem to read.

Fludd – Hilary Mantel

Published in 1989, this is an early novel by the ‘Wolf Hall’ author, and is refreshingly compact at under two hundred pages.

Set contemporaneously in and around a Roman Catholic church at Fetherhoughton, a small fictitious town in the north of England, it tells of events that start when the Bishop visits the incumbent, Father Angwin.

Father Angwin is, let’s say, traditional in his approach to faith. He knows his parishioners and how they like their religion – unchanging and uncomplicated. The Bishop thinks some modernisation would not go amiss, starting with the removal of the numerous statues that litter the church and represent long gone ideas of idolatry. He also promises to send a curate to help out in the ministry – someone young, keen and moving with the times.

Later that month, on a wet autumn evening, Fludd arrives at the presbytery. Father Angwin fears the worst, but Fludd’s influence on proceedings, and on the female coterie of the church and adjacent convent, is not so much threatening as unsettling. Events unwind, spiral even, and by the end (after the Fludd?) the community at Fetherhoughton is much changed.

The grim up north atmosphere is well done, and the characters are artfully drawn. The gentle humour is balanced by an underlying feeling of impending, wrath of God, doom. In the struggle of light against dark, which side is the Almighty on? And which side is Fludd on?

The Word is Murder – Anthony Horowitz

 Anthony Horowitz is not only the author of this novel; he is also a character in it –narrating the tale.

When consulting detective, Daniel Hawthorne, wants someone to write a book about his latest case, he contacts renowned novelist, Anthony Horowitz, with whom he has worked previously, advising on scripts for a TV series. Horowitz is unsure; he is busy with scripts for Foyle’s War and a Tin Tin film but is unable to resist the lure of writing about ‘true crime’ and its detection.

And the crime is tantalising enough. A woman walks into a funeral parlour and arranges her own funeral, supposedly well in advance, but within hours she has been murdered. Hawthorne is called in to assist and Horowitz accompanies him, taking notes on the investigation while trying to get inside the head of his main ‘character’ and understand his methods.

It is not a harmonious partnership. Horowitz makes unwelcome attempts to involve himself in solving the crime; and Hawthorne’s suggested improvements to Horowitz’s drafts are received with similar ill grace. With red herrings and blind alleys, the plot twists and turns, taking in old scores and newly formed enmities. It moves at a fast pace, and whenever Horowitz tries to find respite in his day job, he is interrupted and summoned to a new interview.

It works well enough with Horowitz a literate Watson to Hawthorne’s infuriating Holmes. The name-dropping insight into Horowitz’s work provides added interest and at least seems authentic.

Enjoyable as an off-key whodunnit with a clever ending.

Sweet Sorrow – David Nicholls

 As Charlie Lewis and his fiancée, Niamh, plan their wedding and review the guest list, Niamh asks why none of Charlie’s old school friends have been invited, “particularly that Shakespeare girl”.

That sends Charlie’s mind back to 1997 and his last week at school and the summer that followed it. He was at a low ebb at home (parents splitting up), at school (exams bombed out), and with his friends (blanked since an unfortunate incident with a pool ball). Off on a solitary bike ride he comes across a girl from the other side (the posh side) of the tracks. He is instantly attracted to Frances Fisher, and to improve his chances with her he reluctantly gets involved in a holiday scheme production of Romeo and Juliet.

Few authors do adolescent love, angst, and humour as well as David Nicholls. The opening chapter alone – the leavers’ disco on the final afternoon of school – is funny enough to warrant a ‘do not read in public’ warning. But it is not laughter all the way, there are serious issues involved. There is also sufficient attention given to the play to provide some interesting insights into the text.

Charlie and Fran’s romance blossoms, but must end, he’s marrying Niamh after all. However, twenty years on, a reunion of the Full Fathom Five theatre cooperative has been arranged…

The Prime Minister – Anthony Trollope

Sometime in the mid nineteenth century, duty calls for the Duke of Omnium, formerly Plantagenet Palliser MP, ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer. Parliament is balanced and no-one can muster enough support in The Commons to form a government. But government must go on, and the inoffensive Duke of Omnium, now in The Lords, is persuaded to lead a coalition, manned (and they are all men) by those prepared to put the national interest first, while of course landing plum jobs.

The Duke may be uneasy in his new role, but his wife, Lady Glencora, is in her element. They are a fabulously rich couple, and Lady Glen is determined that their time in the spotlight will be memorable, for lavish hospitality if nothing else. That creates marital tension with the Duke who likes a quiet life and sees his elevation as purely temporary.

Speaking of marital tension, disconnected from the high life, Emily Wharton, daughter of a well-off solicitor, rejects her long-time suitor and falls for a handsome chancer, Ferdinand Lopez. Her father objects, the name alone hits alarm bells. Despite Lopez being English, of good manners, reputably well connected, and comfortably off, Mr Wharton objects. He maintains Lopez cannot be considered an English Gentleman (unlike his rejected rival) and labels him in terms that now would be considered racist. However, the daughter gets her way, marries in haste, and inevitably repents at leisure.

The link between the two storylines is tenuous  - Lopez and his old rival for Emily both stand for the parliamentary seat at Silverbridge, in the Duke of Omnium’s domain, and Lady glen gets her interfering fingers involved – but each strand makes for a good novel of human relations, told by a master of that art.

It is a long and leisurely read, good for a chapter a night in bed before lights out; and at that rate it took the best part of three months to complete.

The Wych Elm – Tana French

 Toby Hennessy always considered himself lucky, growing up in affluent Dublin, in a stable middle class family, attending a good school, graduating university, and landing a decent first job as media manager for a small but cool gallery. He has a girlfriend he loves and mates who are always up for a pint.

Though he is an only child, his father is one of four brothers, and two of them also have a single child, so Toby has two cousins of like age and circumstance. The three cousins, more like siblings, spent many childhood summers together at their paternal grandparents’ home, the old and rambling Ivy House. This is nowadays occupied solely by the fourth, unmarried, brother, Hugo. And in the grounds of the Ivy House stands and old wych elm.

What happens over the next five hundred pages cannot be satisfactorily summarised without multiple spoilers, as the plot slowly warms, thickens, boils over, subsides and has the mess wiped off the cooker, but not without leaving stubborn traces that cannot be erased. Suffice to say, Toby’s good luck seems to be running out.

In addition to the satisfyingly rich plot, the dynamics of Toby’s relationships with his cousins, mates and girlfriend are picked apart, mainly by Toby who is the narrator throughout. Though not a reliable one, due to an early bump on the head that leads him (and the reader) to often doubt his memories. Other perspectives are provided as his cousins relate their versions of the past; but how reliable are those?

There is a violent robbery, and later a body turns up, so the police intrude too. Their questions only prompt Toby to ask harder ones of himself, and his cousins, about events of a decade previously, at the Ivy House, in the shadow of the wych elm.

It is a gloriously intensive novel that keeps on giving, in a style reminiscent of the novels of Donna Tartt.