All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

You wonder whether there can be yet another perspective on either of the world wars but yes, Anthony Doerr has done it. This book involves one of those backwards/forwards structures, where you move between the experiences of the two main protagonists and one more minor character, and backwards and forwards in time as well. Yet it’s not confusing. It tells the story of WWII from the point of view of a young and sensitive German boy, Werner, who is picked out of an orphanage because of his genius for radio technology and sent off to a Hitler Youth school to prepare for war. It follows him to St Malo and charts his failure to stand up against what he knows is inhumane in the face of the fanatics behind the Nazi war machine until his redemption, which you know has to be coming, in the end. It must have been something countless Germans had to deal with as the war progressed. And it’s a question I’ve long been interested in – what would I do in the face of relentless propaganda and the danger of resisting authority. Would I buckle or be brave? The other protagonist is a blind French girl Marie Laure, daughter of a museum locksmith, who flees Paris with her father carrying one of the museum’s greatest treasures, a blue diamond. The diamond and the quest of the third protagonist, a Nazi sergeant major, to obtain it provide another form of conflict and suspense in the book, though I think the internal conflict suffered by Werner is far more interesting. The language in this book is exquisite. Doerr not only tells a good story but he also expresses it in the most beautiful figurative language, so lovely that I found myself stopping to read passages over again.

Victoria the Queen by Julia Baird

What a marathon effort! This enormous book, though, is extremely readable. Julia Baird is a journalist, not a literary fiction writer, so her analysis of Victoria’s life is fluent, exceptionally well researched and couched in very accessible language. Despite its five hundred odd pages, I had no trouble coming back to this book over and over again, always surprised at how engaging it was. It’s full of gossipy details, a little bit of speculation, and lots and lots of explanations about the politics and personalities of the time. It’s a fascinating, five star read.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

People, unspecified because I can’t remember who but nevertheless people I must respect because I listened to them, raved about this book. In fact they recommended the whole trilogy. So I was nearly going to buy it but got it from the library, just in case it wasn’t worth the investment. It WASN’T! Poorly written, blatantly derivative – at times I didn’t know whether I was in The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe or Harry Potter or The Hobbit and he even has a bloody QUESTING BEAST straight from TJ White’s Once and Future King in there – and just plain tedious. I ploughed on and on through this book, skimming great chunks of it, just to see it through. But really I don’t know why I bothered. It’s clearly aimed at the adolescent market, with all its clumsy attempts at sexual allusion and doing drugs and getting drunk and the difficulties with relationships between this group of schoolies. Maybe Grossman thought he was channeling Donna Tartt? Anyway, he’s making a fortune because it obviously appeals to someone. Just not me.

Light and Shadow: Memoirs of a Spy’s Son by Mark Colvin

What an interesting life Mark Colvin led. There’s a little about his father but no real detail, probably unsurprisingly when you think about it. The rest of the book details his travel and reporting on various places around the world. It was interesting reading about Moscow in the seventies and about political crises in other parts of the world that I remember from the time. The depth of course is not there, because of lack of space, but from time to time Colvin in extremely prescient in his comments – for example when he talked about the potential for a power vacuum should Saddam Hussein fall, which is of course what happened and we all know what filled it.

The Pigeon Tunnel by John Le Carre

My second book about spies in a couple of months – must be something going on. This one was a fascinating collection of memoirs and family snippets covering Le Carre’s career as a spy and later as a novelist. I absolutely lapped it up. It was full of veiled detail about spies he knew and diplomats he met and worked with, as well as a lot of detail about the workings of the post WWII government in Germany, which remained full of Nazis who had changed their spots. He talks at length about his conman father, who sounds like a combination of a complete bastard and an utter charmer, the sort of personality they make movies about. It’s not written in chapters but in sections, some as short as a few lines and others continuing over twenty or more pages, so it’s ideal to pick up and put down. Neither is it chronological, which also makes it accessible for the haphazard reader. And of course his writing is superb. I now want to go back and reread all his fiction!

Medieval Europe by Chris Wickham

Well there won’t be much from me for the next few months as I plough through about eight books that form the compulsory pre-reading for my Cambridge course in Medieval Studies later this year. I’ve always been attracted to the medieval period, but knew nothing much about it. While this book by academic Chris Wickham is not on that list, it was in fact the impetus for me to enrol in the course in the first place. It is an utterly fascinating study of the entire medieval period, sweeping across Europe and into Byzantium from the beginning of the period and the fall of the Roman empire, through to the end, which Wickham believes is marked by the Reformation in the 1500s. It’s incredibly dense and very soon I found I needed a pencil for underlining key points, and then that of course developed into a full summary of each chapter. Its focus is primarily political, because that is what people are, political animals. And tied in with that is the ownership of land and the resources that brings contrasted against the practice of taxation. How a society handles its money it seems, is the most important thing of all! It certainly drives political and social development and the differences between his examples are sometimes astonishing. Threaded through all this is the other player, the church. I knew all this but I didn’t, I really didn’t. It’s been one eureka moment after the next for me as I’ve ploughed through this tome. It’s a serious undertaking, like studying something properly, to read this book but it is utterly wonderful.

The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

What a truly awful book. It’s a combination of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Cormack McCarthy’s The Road, but without the brilliance. It’s a sort of dystopian novel, though the setting is contemporary, about women who have been shamed by the media as sluts – women who have slept with the whole football team, who’ve been caught having affairs with politicians and so forth. Other people in their lives – friends, brothers, other women – somehow have the power to have them disappeared by a group called Hardings. There are shades of the forced lobotomies of the early 20th century, of the corporate run detention centres of the present, of the systematic abuses of children in care. But it’s such a miserable, depressing, gloomy read. Some women cave in, other women find strength, lots of women go mad. I can see this writer is a fire and brimstone feminist, and good on her for that, but the book is just so bloody depressing. And again, so mundanely written. And it just goes on and on. Emma, who lent it to me, told me not to bother returning it.