Excellent Women by Barbra Pym

I was surprised by Barbara Pym. She writes in the style of EF Benson or PG Wodehouse almost, or perhaps even Jane Austen, presenting carefully observed social satire with fine wit. But it’s different, and far more believable, and for goodness sake, it’s feminist in its sentiments! The protagonist Mildred is half in love with vicar and then falls half in love with an anthropologist called Everard, but this isn’t a love story. It’s a story about finding one’s place in the world and the value of common sense when surrounded by really pretty silly people. He writing is surprising, funny and charming and I’ll be reading a lot more of it!

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

While the blurb on the jacket describes this as ‘a literary masterpiece’ I do beg to differ. It’s a huge read, at about 900 pages, and I did find myself skipping some of the gory murderous detail, especially in the bit where the gang members are fighting in Afghanistan. But I’m ahead of myself… The book is purportedly a memoir of an escaped Australian convict’s ten years or so hiding out in Bombay. It’s a terrific insight into the lives of slum dwellers and the gangsters in the city, though word now has it that the whole thing is wildly exaggerated and in many instances completely fabricated. We’ll never know. Roberts, known locally as Lin, moves into the slum and starts up a first aid practice. The story of this part of his life is entertaining and often endearing. However he later joins up with a gang of principalled gangsters, well semi-principalled anyway in that they don’t deal in drugs or pornography or women, and the story becomes quite bogged down in details of the gang members (whose names and characters I regularly confused, right through to the last pages of the book), the leader’s philosophical discussions, the various wars they fight and so forth. They even head off to Afghanistan to have a go at the Russians there with devastating results. The truth about who has been manipulating whom comes out at the end and is a gift for conspiracy theorists. In terms of literary merit, well, there are a lot of words and probably far too many of them. He waxes lyrical a little too much for my liking. The value of the book is in the story, which overall is a good yarn, though the ease with which he accepts the abominations that these gangs perpetrate on one another is truly shocking. If it all happened that way. In summary I think thriller readers would like this book for its story and pace. But I really didn’t like Lin and I won’t be buying the sequel.

Bream Gives me Hiccups by Jesse Eisenberg

I got this book on recommendation from Gleebooks and I was disappointed. It’s a collection of short stories, if you can call them that, snippets and conversations all trying to be painfully witty and clever and postmodern. It’s a quick and relatively easy read if you can put up with it. I ploughed through, skipping great wads of it towards the end. This guy is an actor (played Zuckerberg in the film about Facebook) and script/screen writer and you can tell, as there is nothing literary about his style. His content is self indulgent teenaged conversations, between therapy sessions of which he seems inordinately proud. The first section, the bit about the bream, is vaguely entertaining as it charts the progress of a kid whose mother is in payback mode to the father who has abandoned her, and so takes him to restaurants because Dad has said he’ll pay for anything the kids does. But its smart-arsed and irritating overall.

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

I’m not a huge fan of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novels. This one is more of the same, a young couple eking out survival in their car who are lured into a model city where the organizers have people working month about in society and in prison to kick start the economy again. In typical Atwood fashion – remember The Handmaid’s Tale – all is not what it seems. Sadly this one is pretty ridiculous and not at all shocking because of that. Go back to something you do well, Margaret.

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love was a self-indulgent bit of fluff. In this book, she’s more disciplined and makes a good attempt at building a terrific character, Alma, a botanist who rivals Charles Darwin in developing a theory of evolution. However I do wish the editor had been a bit harsher with the blue pencil – far too long, far too wordy and lots of extraneous waffle.

The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks

This is the surprising, shocking, incredible story of King David. Historical fiction at its best, really. Not having had a religious education, and not being Jewish more to the point I think, I knew nothing about David except for the Goliath story and an awareness of passing references to the City of David. I was also aware that the Old Testament stories are bloody and violent. So I wasn’t quite prepared for the scope and action of this story, which strikes me as rather like a biblical version of Game of Thrones with its murder and incest, homosexuality, rape, wars and mysticism. As always Geraldine Brooks has done her homework, even if the sources are limited secondaries. She tells the story of David’s life with welcome embroideries, from the time he is a shunned child sent to mind the goats through his rise on the battlefield to power to his failings and ultimate punishment. The word of ‘the Name’ runs right through the story, lending some terrific mysticism to the story. This isn’t March, though. It’s a great rollicking yarn, without the subtlety of March or the insight into its tortured protagonist. All the same, it’s a gripping read and not to be missed.

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

I’m now officially hooked on Elena Ferrante. This is the second of the four novels charting the lives of Lina (My Brilliant Friend) and Lenu, the girls from Naples whose lives take such different paths yet whose friendships remains intact. In this novel Lenu continues on to university in Pisa, struggling to accommodate the two very different cultures she finds herself living in. The emotion in these books, the suffering, the sense of loss and loss of hope, the glimmers of a possible future for Lenu, are gut wrenching but marvelous. Onto the next in the series.