A Perfectly Good Man by Patrick Gale

This book represents the unpacking of a character, Father Barnaby Johnson. It begins as he witnesses the suicide of one of his parishioners, and helps him through the process with a prayer. Father Barnaby is a good man, but flawed, and struggling like all human beings. He is married to Dorothy aka Dot, and he has two children, Jim aka Phuc and Carrie. This family has to deal with all the things that other families deal with, but there is a sort of delicacy and compassion in the way Gale writes about the issues. Patrick Gale is great on story and inventive in his retelling: the book is a collection of chapters written from the point of view of different characters and at different ages. Gradually, ever so gradually, the story unfolds as it does in real life, with revelations making sense of things you had discovered earlier and changing their meanings.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

This is an interestingly constructed book. Years ago my father made me read EM Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, which outlined half a dozen plot styles and proposed that all novels fall into one of the categories. There is nothing new, according to Forster. The most intriguing plot style for me was the one used in Thornton wilder’s Bridge Over San Luis Rey, which described a single incident (the bridge collapsing) and the impact that event had on the lives of people on the bridge. Let the Great World Spin uses the same technique: a tightrope walker strings a line between the two World Trade Centre buildings (it really happened) and walks across. Various people see it and the event is woven into their lives. Eventually they all seem to intersect one way or another. It’s quite a fascinating take on the plot style, though it takes all novel to get there. Enjoyable, nicely written, interesting characters.

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

Like the last book I read, We Are Water, this book has another ‘bad’ mother as its central character. But it is much more than that. It tells the story of a young Indian woman who marries a Maoist in India, only to lose him to the revolution. She is left pregnant and vulnerable when his brother steps in to marry her. They go to America to work and raise the child. The rest of the book is about the broken relationships in this small family and about the influence that the dead first brother has over their lives. Jhumpa Lahiri is a very sensitive writer, who uses the language beautifully. The story line is fairly sparse – these people simply live their lives – but that story is well told and her descriptions of Rhode Island in particular are exquisite.

We Are Water by Wally Lamb

Wally Lamb’s books seem to focus on people with emotional problems. This one is about an artist, Annie Oh, and her ex husband Orion, and her kids, most of whom are pretty disturbed. The story centres around Annie’s impending marriage to her new partner, this time a woman called Viveca. It’s told through the eyes of several people, including some who aren’t even members of the family. It’s a book about secrets and how holding on to them can corrupt and pervert your life. And of course Annie’s secrets have done just that, with some quite devastating consequences for the people around her. It all unravels as the wedding plans move forward. This is a huge book but pretty readable – sometimes a bit too wordy for me and I did find myself skipping over pages where all that dialogue and description and soul searching became a bit unnecessary. Still, I liked this book and it made a good read.

The Circle by Dave Eggers

This is a self indulgent sort of book, miles too long, held together by a shallow but compelling story. It’s about Mae, a young graduate, who joins The Circle and rises to become their star employee. It details the way this organization, which merges Facebook and Google and Microsoft and all the other information gathering/social networking/programming/internet payment sites and groups that exist, stitches up a global monopoly of information. It’s Eggers’ pitch at 1984 really and you can see he’s had a wonderful time creating all sorts of information gathering and tracking possibilities, such as embedding chips in children to keep them safe, and using the power of the network to track down criminals on the run in under fifteen minutes. The funny thing is that all the programs seem appealing on the surface: politically correct and beneficial to society BUT underneath it all they remove people’s privacy so that in the end there are no private moments in their lives at all. The writing is typical Eggers, running off at the mouth, way way too long, but it flows. The development of the totalitarian state where information is everything, something which used to belong to the realms of scifi, now appears frighteningly close.

Harvest by Jim Crace

I’m not really convinced by this book, which was a Booker prize nominee I think. It’s very poetic but there is a lot of book to deal with not much story. It’s set in the times when the Enclosure Acts were occurring, and deals with a village that has been farming its owner’s land forever. A new owner arrives with plans for reorganizing and resettlement. At the same time, three strangers arrive to settle on the edge of the village and a series of crimes against the owner’s property occur. These three changes in the status quo combine to destroy the village. There is one person left who tells the tale. Mmmm, not sure really.

One Summer America 1927 by Bill Bryson

I read half this book. It is written in an easy entertaining style, as is always the case with the talented Mr Bryson, but halfway through I thought, I’m really, REALLY not interested in the subject matter. So what happened in 1927? Well, Charles Lindbergh made his famous non stop flight across the Atlantic. And the genius baseball player Babe Ruth came to prominence. Anybody who is remotely interested in either of those events will love this book. I’m not and I didn’t.