Playing Nice – JP Delaney

The set-up is a nightmare scenario. Pete Riley has got back from depositing two-year-old Theo at nursery when two strangers knock on his door. One introduces himself as Miles Lambert, the other is a private detective, and they have news for him.  The boy he just dropped off is not Pete’s son, but Miles’s, and here is the DNA test to prove it.

Shocked Pete’s first thought is that partner Maddie had played away, but no. It seems two premature babies were mixed up at the intensive care unit, the error coming to light after recent genetic tests on the other boy, David. It is now clear that Miles is Theo’s father, and Pete’s son is David.

The one crumb of comfort is that Miles and Lucy seem a nice couple, eager to discuss and agree a way forward – do we swap, do we keep, do we share? But appearances can be deceptive. As the narrative is carried forward by Pete and Maddie it is interspersed with extracts from court papers that indicate any resolution is anything but amicable.

The direction of travel is worryingly clear from clues that pepper the narratives, as each innocent action (and some engineered situations) are noted, documented, and misinterpreted in the court papers. It is excruciating and all too plausible. The characters of Pete, Maddie, Miles, and Lucy are developed and laid bare for scrutiny; none are saints, but some flaws are more forgivable than others.

The story races along, driven by the need for resolution, but what would constitute a satisfactory ending for all involved, especially the kids? That we get one of sorts, is a relief after being put through such an emotional wringer.

Recommended, but not to parents of children under three with no confirmatory DNA evidence to hand.

Exit – Belinda Bauer

Exit exists to ease the passing of those with terminal illness who do not want to linger until it takes its natural course. Actually, it more speeds up than eases the passing, by making available a cylinder of nitrous oxide (undetectable after death) with a tube and breathing mask attached. These are already in place when the volunteer sitters, the Exiteers, arrive to provide company in the final moments and to clear away the suicidal evidence.

That it is all legal does not mean it can be done openly. There are the feelings of the relatives to protect, and the insurance pay-outs to preserve, so it is all done in the clients’ homes with no witnesses. Discretion is the watchword, and the Exiteers are careful to maintain anonymity even among themselves by the use of false names.

But when ‘John’ (real name Felix) is paired in an assignment in Bideford with young rookie ‘Amanda’, disaster strikes. First, an instinctive intervention by Amanda means they have overstepped the legal mark. That is manageable, thinks Felix, no harm done, except, second, it is the wrong person they have helped into oblivion. Third, it appears, someone has spotted them entering the premises and a police car is approaching, siren blaring.

Felix, law-abiding for all his seventy-five years, is prepared to accept responsibility, even if it means jail. But not just yet, he needs to make arrangements for his dog, make sure Amanda is not implicated, and warn his handler, so he does a runner. It takes time to put his affairs in order, during which it begins to dawn on him that some things don’t add up. He needs to investigate, then he can present the police with a full confession and clear explanation.

Meanwhile the police are now investigating an unexplained death and are on Felix’s track. Will they get to him before he gets to the truth?

It is a fine mixture of black humour and pathos – Felix’s motivation for becoming an Exiteer is his own grief at losing loved ones. Plotting and characterisation are convincing enough but expect more cosy crime than Devon noir.

Exciting Times – Naoise Dolan

The book-packing journey reaches Asia, touching down in Hong Kong in the form of a girl called Ava.

Unhappy in Dublin, Ava has decided to try elsewhere. On completing her finals, she blows her savings on a flight to Hong Kong and a month’s rent on a room. She gets a low-paid job as a TEFL teacher, imparting the mysteries of the English language to schoolchildren. It pays the rent but covers precious little else.

She meets Julian in a bar. His job as a banker funds a spacious apartment and an expensive lifestyle, which Ava has no qualms about freeloading into. The relationship develops, but it is complicated. Not even Ava and Julian are sure what it is. They jog along.

When Julian is posted back to Europe for a few months, Ava stays in his apartment. She makes friends with Edith, full name Edith Zhang Mei Lang, a Hong Kong local but schooled in England and a Cambridge graduate. Not even her pay can match Hong Kong rents, so she lives at home with her family. That means she can enjoy living the high life in the city bars and clubs, as can Ava, who still has access to Julian’s credit card. They have fun. The relationship develops, but it is complicated. Not even Ava and Edith are sure what it is. They jog along.

With Julian due back to the island, Ava must examine her attachments to her two friends, while taking account of economic realities. Does she have to pick one and ditch one, or can she somehow manage the situation?

Ava’s narration is quirky, maybe it is the Irish accent coming out or just her off-kilter way of expressing herself. It is peppered with references to social media; Ava uses draft texts and Instagram posts to articulate her thoughts but deletes rather than sends them. The Hong Kong location seems more incidental than intrinsic to the story, so there is no real sense of place.

The book is probably not aimed at my demographic, so I found it interesting rather than engaging, providing an insight, bewildering rather than empathetic, into how relationships are managed in that generation.

The Uncommon Reader – Alan Bennett

 Bennett makes what he can from the curious premiss of the Queen stumbling over the travelling library van in the grounds of Buckingham Palace and, out of politeness, borrowing a random book. Out of good manners she returns it a week later having read very little of it.

The queen is not a big reader, but again feels obliged to pick up a new title. This one is more to her taste, and she borrows another the next week, and a couple more the week after. So it develops. And it seems that the Queen’s new-found love of reading has consequences for those around her. Books are foisted on relatives, flunkeys, advisors, even the Prime Minister and visiting dignitaries.

It allows Bennett to have great fun airing (presumably) his opinions on books and writers while disparaging the great and the good for their literary shortcomings.

Using such an exalted lead character is an interesting departure from his usual viewpoint that delights in normality and the significance of the everyday experience. Or maybe not, even the Queen has a routine of sorts, a private life of sorts, and like everyone else, a desire once in a while to lose herself in a book.

Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood

Snowman, the last human alive on the planet (as far as he knows), spends most of his time contemplating Oryx and Crake. One was a lover, the other a friend. The genesis of their endangered species pseudonyms is the ‘Extictathon’ computer game monitored by MaddAddam, a shady on-line community populated by a brilliant elite.

Crake, in real life, is, or was, a gene-manipulating genius, responsible for both the pandemic that killed off the world population and the super-vaccine that enabled Snowman’s survival. The pandemic was unintentional; saving Snowman was an act of both friendship and necessity – Crake needed someone he could trust to look after his experimental project that produced a new species of human with undesirable qualities removed from their genetic make-up. They are known as the crakers.

While the crakers revere Crake as the creator, they love Oryx, who was their minder, mentor, and mother figure until she was wiped out by Crake’s pandemic. Now only Snowman remains for them, a poor sort of holy ghost of the trinity, channelling made up messages. He whiles away his time overseeing the crakers, his charges; cursing Crake, his friend; and missing Oryx, his lover.

The narrative slowly unfolds the history of Snowman, Crake, and Oryx in parallel with Snowman’s trials and tribulation in the post-apocalyptic world. Told at the individual rather than the global level, the decline and fall of western-led civilisation convinces. Incidental detail on life and death in a pandemic is all too familiar in Covid-19 times.

It is an engaging, if bleak, story where the main hook is ‘how did it get to here?’. The answer comes in trademark Atwood style with dry wit and caustic swipes at current societal trends.

There are two more books in the MaddAddam trilogy; watch this space.

The Quarry – Iain Banks

Kit, eighteen years old and at the high functioning end of the Asperger’s spectrum, lives with his dad, Guy, in an old and deteriorating house on the edge of a northern moor. The large garden backs onto a quarry. A palpable sense of ending haunts the place. Guy is dying, and the house is under sentence too, going through compulsory purchase, destined to be consumed by the expanding quarry.

Arriving for a long weekend are Guy’s old college friends. They all studied at the local university, film and media undergraduates, and shared accommodation at this same house. They are here to say goodbye, relive old times, and incidentally to track down an old video they made twenty years ago that is at least embarrassing and at worst career threatening.

Current careers in law, media, computing, and care reflect journeys taken and movements in political outlook. But some things never change, the drugs and drink are back on the table. Under their influence, old rivalries and recriminations are aired.

Kit, the narrator, looks on with interest as aspects of his father’s life, before fatherhood, are revealed. He would like one thing in particular to be revealed – the identity of his mother. One of the visitors may know something; it could even be one of the three women.

From the chequered past with its secret film, the bitterness of the present situation of Guy’s illness, and the uncertainty of Kit’s parentless future, Banks weaves a well-crafted portrait of changing relationships full of sharp dialogue and touching emotion.

 

The Last Thing to Burn – Will Dean

Jane (her name is not Jane) lives on a farm in the east of England. The farm belongs to Lenn, her husband (he is not her husband) and it stretches across the flat fenland to a far horizon. She would leave if she could; if her ankle had not been smashed and wrongly reset, if the consequences for her sister would not be so disastrous.

Thanh Dao (her real name) was trafficked to the UK from Vietnam and is held captive on the farm by Lenn who through violent coercion and psychological control extracts wifely duties – domestic and sexual - from her. One by one, Thanh Dao’s meagre possessions are burned in the Rayburn stove as punishment for transgressions, loosening her grip on her identity, pushing ever closer to becoming Jane.

Will Dean paints a horrific picture as he introduces these domestic arrangements on the farm. The contrast between Thanh Dao and Lenn’s perspectives is chilling. It is impossible not to share Thanh Dao’s suffering and hopelessness. But not quite hopeless. She grasps at straws, we root for her, even as they slip from her grasp. And when things cannot get worse, things get worse.

The narrative, carried by Thanh Dao, is riveting and while the spotlight is unrelentingly shone on modern slavery, the characters, even the despicable Lenn, are nuanced. Tension builds to a fine climax, the last thing that could be burnt is unthinkable, but not impossible.