Review: The Naked Trader's Guide to Spread Betting: How to make money from shares in up or down markets

The Naked Trader's Guide to Spread Betting: How to make money from shares in up or down markets by Robbie Burns
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is a bit thin, padded out with anecdotes and appendices. Much of it is obvious, a lot of it is available elsewhere and it can be quite repetitive. But some of the tips are useful and I found some tips and tricks that could improve my CFD trading or help me if I went into spread betting itself.

It doesn't do itself any favours by using the standard self-help book layout, beloved of snake-oil salesmen and charlatans, and employing the desperate exclamation mark in a pathetic effort to be likeable. And those jokey asides are exceptionally tiresome. One of them is funny. The other 200 aren't.

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Review: Time of My Life

Time of My Life by Alan Ayckbourn
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Ayckbourn going through the motions: a few standard tricks (fractured time sequences), a few stock Ayckbourn characters, some fun dialogue and good opportunities for actors whatever their abilities. There are some very good quips and lines, and some scenes (usually with the waiter) where a bit of hamming for laughs is thoroughly justified, but no deep insight into the human condition.

Not all Ayckbourn plays date badly, but this one is fraying a bit. The northern family made good is a 70s throwback: the businessman, the fearsome matriarch and the two browbeaten sons; while the mistaken identity scene between Adam, Maureen and the waiter is straight out of a 70s sitcom.

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Review: Salt

Salt by Fiona Peek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Two couples, four dinner parties: Nick is a journalist who does carpentry on the side – not to make ends meet but bring the ends at least within sight of each other – while his wife Rachel is a former musician whose income from giving lessons don't bring those ends much closer together. Her multiple miscarriages and Nick's glacial progress on his novel symbolise the couple's failure to achieve and conceive.

Nick's old university friend Amy and her husband Simon are everthing Nick and Rachel aren't: they have children and jobs, with Simon's work in the law ensuring they are never short of money. But their friendship is unshakable – until Amy and Simon use an unexpected and un-needed inheritance to bail their friends out and gratitude slowly turns to resentment.

Fiona Peek's debut play is funny, sharply observed and often poignant. It's also the most difficult script I've ever had to learn. Every movement has to be precise, while there are several lines that change the subject completely, such as offers of food or drink or Simon interrupting a discussion of Amy and Nick's university years with an anecdote about a compensation case. Every play has some of these logical jumps, but Salt has far more than most.

And then there's the eating and drinking. Amid all the quick-fire dialogue, all the characters have to prepare food, eat it, share it, open bottles, recharge glasses, drink and open more bottles. Not only must you make sure your glass or plate is empty, you even have to make sure the bottle is empty when it's your cue to get another. And of course, you've got to make sure your mouth is empty when it's your turn to speak, though sometimes you have to speak with a mouthful of food and do it so everyone in the theatre can hear you (NICK: "You're just a bitter, pre-menopausal old hag who's … God this is fantastic"]. And this isn't just one difficult scene; it's the whole play. And spare a thought for the backstage crew who have to prepare the food.

Get it right and you'll have a cracking night's entertainment (I hope we will: at the time of writing we've got a week till first night). But don't under-estimate the amount of work required.

It also has the odd flaw: Nick's short speech about Rachel and the baby in the final scene makes no sense at all in the context of what has gone before:

"At last I've got them home. [Where from? Hospital maybe?]. The same rush all over again [Again? What rush? From where to where?]. The second coming [What was the first?]. Took him to Kew yesterday. First family outing [So did this baby spend its first three months in hospital? If so, would you really take him to Kew straight off and then leave him with friends the next night?]".

It reads like a reference to something that was cut from an earlier draft.

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Review: By Blood Divided

By Blood Divided by James Heneage
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It would be unfair to call this bubblegum literature, but it's not literary fiction either. It deserves four stars because I rattled through it in five days and enjoyed the experience. What more could you want? It succeeds at what it tries to do and lacks the pretension to be anything more than it is, which is an adventure story set in history.

Heneage stays true to the events surrounding the fall of Constantinople in 1453, while deftly mixing historical characters and fictional ones. Mehmet and Minotto come out much worse than their historical selves, but the need for villains makes this forgivable.

Some of the dialogue is a bit clunky at times, with characters explaining to each other things that they already know, and on these occasions it's faintly reminiscent of the dreadful Mongoliad. But it's not enough to spoil the enjoyment.

Maps are provided, which many readers will find invaluable, but the character list has a major flaw in the the death dates are given for historical figures. That's a big spoiler, given that one of them is a central character who only dies in the penultimate chapter.

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Review: A Short History of Nearly Everything

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Why would you hire a travel writer to pen a science book? Because he's Bill Bryson and you could put his name on the phone book and it would sell shedloads. Otherwise this book has little to recommend it. Sure, he writes with his customary engaging joviality, but as he says himself in the introduction, there are plenty of proper scientists writing engaging and interesting books for the layman, so quite why he felt the need to write his own book to counter the dull texts of his 1960s schooldays escapes me.

This negative impression isn't helped by finding a huge, glaring error in just the second paragraph:

"Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on this ‘i’ can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, rather more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years."

That's more like five million days. It takes a couple of minutes with a calculator to work that one out, but neither Bryson nor his editor could be bothered. To quote from the Acknowledgements:

"Goodness knows how many other inky embarrassments may lurk in these pages yet, but it is thanks to Dr Tattersall and all of those whom I about to mention that there aren't many hundreds more."

At this point Bryson should have realised that he'd written a book whose only value would be to his own pension pot and his publisher's bottom line. I can understand him being reluctant to jettison three years of work, but considering he'd made a similar horlicks with Mother Tongue a few years earlier – on a subject where he might more reasonably claim to be qualified – one wonders why he started the book in the first place.

Sure, you can read it for the easy, witty writing, but it's distracting when you know you can't trust any of the facts. It's still the first chapter and we have: "with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea … Pluto would be … about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway". Even if it's a petit pois and I'm not wearing my glasses, I can still see Pluto on that scale.

If the errors are so obvious to me (and my degree is in Medieval History), what hope is there when it comes to the more technical science? Maybe things improve, but after barely an hour of reading I'm ready to give up.

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Review: An Utterly Impartial History Of Britain. Or 2000 Years Of Upper Class Idiots In Charge

An Utterly Impartial History Of Britain. Or 2000 Years Of Upper Class Idiots In Charge by John O'Farrell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Don't let the cover fool you. This isn't a satire. It's actually a history of Britain written by a comic writer, not a historian. So that explains why the history is peppered with mildly humorous quips while happily trotting out factoids and long-discredited assumptions. It's too long for the casual reader, too shallow for the enthusiast, too inaccurate for a textbook and not funny enough for a satire.

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Review: The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal

The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal by Axel Honneth
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I did a bit of research, so I can say with some certainty that this book isn't a satire or a parody. Axel Honneth is a senior philosophy professor and he is seriously trying to guide the theory of socialism out of the blind alley where it was led by the misguided assumptions of its 19th Century founders and their unquestioning 20th Century acolytes.

To put it in layman's terms, which Prof Honneth most certainly hasn't, the problem is that early socialists were fixated on the economic sphere and the proletariat's revolutionary reaction to it in the context of the nation state. Infuriatingly, the nation state has become diluted (Brexit notwithstanding), the proletariat has failed to adopt a revolutionary consciousness and become diluted as the economy becomes post-industrial, while capitalism has refused to collapse under its own contradictions. One of the best things about the book is how Honneth objectively picks apart the muddled and circular thinking of dogmatic socialists in a politically neutral way.

The solution, which Honneth finally gets round to after lengthy discussion of the philosophical roots of the the movement, is for society to be controlled democratically, with its various elements (not just the industrial proletariat) co-operating through ill-defined communication structures, based on the recognition of common needs rather than individual wants. For this to happen, the present power structures must be dismantled by means unspecified, while stronger personalities within the new order must restrain themselves from building a new power structure for their own selfish benefit.

As Honneth concludes, in the very last sentence of the book:

Only if all members of society can satisfy the needs they share with all others – physical and emotional intimacy, economic independence and political self-determination – by relying on the sympathy and support of their partners in interaction will our society have become social in the full sense of the term.

With such a naïve vision, it's little surprise that Honneth's book is a fundamental contradiction of itself. Socialism at its heart is a society run by the masses, for the masses. Yet Honneth's writing style shows that he is wedded to the idea of socialism as the preserve of an intellectual elite. The language of the book – and this cannot simply be the whim of his translator – makes every effort to be obscure and even intimidating.

For instance, on page 55 he states: "With a bit of goodwill, we could say that the first socialists understood…" Only he doesn't say that. He says: "With a bit of hermeneutic goodwill…" This isn't a one-off. At every opportunity, Honneth uses words designed to intimidate and exclude. The message is clear: his socialism is the preserve of an intellectual elite. You need a degree in politics. A degree in English won't do: I know because I've got one, and I can barely understand it.

Situations are frequently "immanent" (a word used almost exclusively by left-wing intellectuals). The word "normative" appears on almost every page (I'm not exaggerating). Social structure has to be "concretized". The existence of resistance movements is "apodictically presupposed". The operating segments of society make up not just a whole, but a "superordinate whole", while their interests are not just intertwined but "intersubjectively intertwined". If his argument is ever in danger of making its point clearly, Honneth invariably inserts a mysterious, convoluted, polysyllabic and usually unnecessary word or phrase to throw the reader off the scent.

As for the proletariat – y'know, the ones who are supposed to not only benefit but actually be in charge – the clear message is that socialism isn't for you. It's ours. Leave it to your betters. You could call Honneth's vision a kind of aristocratic socialism. He recognises that socialism has lost its way, but the destination remains the same: the movement must continue the long march up its own backside.

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Review: Familiar

Familiar by J. Robert Lennon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If Robert Lennon looks more bald than in his earlier PR shots, it's probably through tearing his hair out reading reviews like many of those here, decrying that he has failed to create a linear narrative that comes to a clear conclusion. "But what happens in the end?" they fume. To ask the question is to miss the point. (Besides, Lennon does provide an ending – at least a possible one – on the penultimate page. But it's all in brackets and isn't the final word, so presumably that's not good enough. I'd question whether he even needs to give his readers that much.)

In Familiar, Elisa slips into an alternative reality where everything is the same but slightly different: her son Sam has failed to emerge from his brother's malignant shadow, she and husband Derek aren't having affairs (a creepy therapist is now the interloper), her job has changed and a woman she despised is now her best friend. Oh, and her son Silas hasn't spent the last ten years dead.

The title, of course, is a play on words, because the sci-fi plot is a device to tackle the real issue in Elisa's life: how to make sense of her spectacularly dysfunctional family. Her existential crisis exists in both universes, only in a different form. One is drawn to the conclusion that the answer to the question 'where did I go wrong?' is that it doesn't matter. What was wrong was always you. If you didn't make this cock-up you'd have made a different one. You might have taken a different route you took to your personal disaster and hurt different people along the way, but the result is the same. Silas's survives at the cost of Sam's psychological collapse.

Lennon could point his detractors to something Silas says in one of his posts to a gaming newsgroup, "Designers are stuck on the notion of story. Life is inherently nonsensical. Drawing strands of meaning together is for idiots."

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Build Your Reputation, neglect your job

Build Your Reputation: Grow Your Personal Brand for Career and Business Success by Rob Brown
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bear in mind that most books like this are written by people with enough vision, insight and intelligence to have forged careers that enabled them to get their books published. If you’re stuck in a dead-end job, the chances are that you’re just not capable of these things, so the value of the advice is limited.

This is a book of two halves: the first is utter tosh; by the time I’d finished reading it I had already crafted an excoriating review, so I was a little disappointed that the second half showed a marked improvement.

It starts inauspiciously: “This playbook will propel you quickly to the top of your tree.” Such an implausible claim immediately puts the reader on guard. And what on earth is a ‘playbook’? Brown never uses the simple word ‘book’, so this distinction is clearly important to him. Oxford Dictionaries Online defines a playbook as: “NOUN, North American: A book containing a sports team's strategies and plays, especially in American football.”

My limited understanding of American Football is that the ‘plays’ are carefully structured manoeuvres lasting a few seconds at most. I can’t think of anything less appropriate as a metaphor for building a long-term reputation. And by rooting his imagery in a sport only played in his own country, he comes across as insular and parochial.

So we can ignore Chapter 1. Chapter 2 covers what a reputation actually is, and is so obvious that it can also be skipped. Chapter 3 describes what a career is, which again is glaringly obvious. It also contains the statement: “That’s why need a ticket to the game,” which is a terrible mistake in any book but especially one concerned with reputation. Attention to detail is important. Later on he urges you to look for “uniqueness in your core competences. That means any ‘me too’ comparisons that make you indistinguishable from your rivals”. If this drivel means anything, then it means the opposite of what the author wants to say.

Having accurately described the different kinds of fulfilment, Brown then states: “However you define the prize, only a few can lay their hands on it … Few people ever attain the power and satisfaction of a work-life dictated by their own choices and ambitions.” This is clearly nonsense. The world is full of people enjoying fulfilling careers. Believe it or not, it is possible to be satisfied without becoming a CEO and having your own private helicopter.

After a lot of exhorting and explaining the obvious, a fifth of the way through we get the first piece of practical advice. It’s not original. It’s the title of another book. But even that isn’t original. It’s a quote from comedian Steve Martin: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” Got that? Great. Go out and do it. Just in case it never occurred to you that being good at your job might be the path to advancement.

Nearly a third of the way through the book, we’re still evaluating, looking for a starting point. If you’re going to improve your reputation, you need to find out what that reputation is now. Fair point. How do you go about that? Brown’s solution is simple: ask people. Just like Lieutenant Scheisskopf in Catch-22, asking his cadets if he’s doing anything wrong:

“I won’t punish you,” Lieutenant Scheisskopf swore.
“He says he won’t punish me,” said Clevinger.
“He’ll castrate you,” said Yossarian.
“I swear I won’t punish you,” said Lieutenant Scheisskopf. “I’ll be grateful to the man who tells me the truth.”
“He’ll hate you,” said Yossarian. “To his dying day he’ll hate you.”

But let’s say you’re a poor unfortunate cursed with colleagues who tell him the truth. You now know your Unique Value Proposition. How do you turn value into reputation? Brown has a clever strategy: “Communicate it.”

And that’s the real problem with the first half of this book. It doesn’t really go beyond saying, “Be brilliant and make sure people know about it,” without giving much practical advice.

But part two has a lot of practical advice – perhaps too much. To do everything the author says you should do isn’t just a full-time job; you’d have to hire staff. For instance, one of his “small, achievable goals” is to make ten phone calls before 10am, three days a week.

All this might build your reputation up, but it could be a reputation as a badgering, needy annoyance, while your colleagues only see someone who is transparently searching for their next job while neglecting their current one.

But Brown is right when he says that you need a plan and you need to be disciplined. Some of the strategies are unrealistic for anyone who isn’t already successful, but if you have the clarity of thought and the discipline to carry your plans out, then part two of this book could be a real help. If you’re a bit of a failure but are motivated to do something about it, you’ll probably still be a failure, but you’ll fail better.

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Review: Indiscretion

Indiscretion by Charles Dubow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Indiscretion, probably consciously, has an air of The Great Gatsby about it as an ingenue, Claire, finds herself captivated by a golden couple, Harry and Maddy, living a life of etiolated prosperity in the Hamptons near New York with their young son. The captivation is reciprocated and Claire's emotional dependence grows into an obsession with Harry that sets them all on the road to tragedy. The story is told by the seemingly impassive family friend Walter, whose love for Maddy has been unrequited for decades.

In terms of narrative structure and writing style, the book is a delight. Dubow writes with a light, literary touch that raises Indiscretion well above pulp romance. It's a serious novel that is easy and enjoyable to read. Sometimes the fascination is with working out the apparently neutral Walter, whose reliability as a narrator becomes more doubtful as the book progresses. Five stars is justified, even if there are undoubted flaws.

The most serious flaw, and for me the only serious flaw, is that there isn't quite enough depth of character. Claire's, Harry's and Maddy's emotions are real enough, but their psyches aren't well enough developed to provide a bedrock for their emotions, which can leave readers wondering why they should care about them. That wasn't enough to spoil it for me, but I can understand why others disagree.

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Review: Stage Blood

Stage Blood by Michael Blakemore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Michael Blakemore's account of his five years at the National Theatre is funny, gripping, brilliantly written, superbly structured and just possibly true. Of course, everybody's truth is different and Peter Hall gives a quite different account, but Blakemore is highly skilled in making his own version seem plausible. His account is also valuable for its insights into the skill of directing, into theatre management and the tumultuous reign of Hall's predecessor, Laurence Olivier.

Review: Barbara the Slut and Other People

Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This debut collection is essentially comedy of the banal. It's not bad, but it does seem to have been written by someone who's taken a writing class and has learned that stories don't need a structure or an ending. That's true, but in their absence something else needs to fill the gap. Also, the title and some of the publicity imply that this is a work of erotica, which it most certainly isn't.

There's a clue in the title "and other people", not "and other stories". These are vignettes: moments from people's lives. That would work better if the characterisation was deeper: if nothing is going to happen in terms of story, then something needs to happen in terms of character. Mostly it doesn't, or, when it does, the characters aren't deep enough for the reader to care.

In Desert Hearts, one of the more entertaining pieces, a law graduate gets a job in a sex shop (the reference to Jane Rule tells you it's a lesbian sex shop). All the gay clichés are there as this straight woman tries to pass off as gay, while her over-working boyfriend becomes increasingly distant. The story is moving inexorably towards a conclusion and Holmes knows it, so, to adhere to the diktat of Great Literature that 'nothing must happen', she simply kills the story, bluntly and implausibly.

The story that starts least promisingly is probably the best: My Humans, in which a couple's relationship is told through the eyes of their rescue dog. The simplicity of the dog's understanding allows the pathos of humans' feelings to come through; pathos that is absent from the characters in the other stories because Holmes doesn't dare show deep emotion. By focusing on the dog, she allows the humanity to shine through.

As an aside, these stories are strangely anachronistic for a collection published in 2015. Almost all the references, cultural and technological, seem to be from the 1990s: VHS, audio tape, Backstreet Boys.

On this evidence, Holmes is a writer of potential but perhaps she needs to emerge from the shadow of her tutors, who are numerously and profusely thanked in the acknowledgements (which appear prominently at the front of the book, not the back). At the moment, her work reads a little too much like exercises for a creative writing class.

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Review: Deutschland

Deutschland by Martin Wagner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Deutschland is a short book, detailing a few days in summer for one family. Richard, Suzannah's American second husband, is wrestling with an unspecified guilt. Kate, Suzannah's daughter, is on holiday in Germany with her new lover, Steve, where she challenges him to do something that will test their relationship. Kate's nephews and niece, Tony, Jeff and Sam, spend their days concocting elaborate and dangerous dares. The common theme of pushing the boundaries of what is right holds the narratives together.

The strands of the three stories only really come together at the end, before which the motives of the players are nebulous. Regrettably, the writing and characterisation aren't compelling enough to hold the reader's attention while we wait for the point of the novel to be revealed. The reveal at the end isn't forceful enough to make the exercise worthwhile.

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A book tells more than one story

For best results, this should be printed and read on paper, or preferably vellum…

Books are a pain. You usually need a bag to carry them and even then a heavy hardback is hard to handle on the train, especially when you don’t have a seat. That partly explains why I’m only a quarter of the way through that 700-page hardback one of my kids gave me a couple of birthdays ago. If you’re going on holiday, you have to lug several heavy tomes with you. And don’t get me started on reading in bed (yes, I know there are other recreations at bedtime, but let’s keep this decent). Your thumbs get tired (reading, I mean); you have to angle the book towards the light; in winter your arm gets cold – then you wake up with the book on the floor, the pages bent and your place lost because the bookmark is still somewhere in the folds of the duvet. Yes, books are a right pain. 

And yet…

The above-mentioned offspring is in hospital this week for a major operation, so I’m there lending support. Another patient on the ward mentioned downloading 19 books onto an e-reader in preparation, but I only had room for four. 

One of those books is ‘Kidnapped’ by Robert Louis Stevenson: one of those books you find on the bookshelf and question why you've never read it before. Something about the opening pages intrigued me, so I took a picture:


This is why, for all their antidiluvian inconveniences, I have a fondness for books. 

If you look at the picture, you’ll notice a few things. First, this a thumb-numbing hardback. Second, it’s old, published in 1926 to be exact. Also, it came from a publisher in Akron, Ohio, complete with American spellings – in the frontspiece Uncle Ebenezer is leaning out of the “first-story window”. Most interesting of all for me, a young girl has written her name and address in the front: 

Rosemary D Moorhouse,
“Durocina”, Field End Lane,
Holmbridge, Nr Huddersfield. 

I can tell she’s young because her writing later became firmer, more ornate and assured. I know this because that girl’s handwriting adorned all my school permissions and sicknotes. That girl was my mother.

Her own mother, my Nan Mabel, had moved her children to Yorkshire after the bombing got too bad in Carshalton, just south of London. She named the house Durocina after the Roman name for Dorchester in Oxfordshire, where she was brought up. The house still bears that name today.

Why would a girl of around eight be reading a a US edition of an old Scottish classic in Yorkshire in the early 1940s? I don’t know, but Americans had been donating books to English libraries since the end of the First World War, and maybe that gesture of solidarity continued into the dark days of the Second. My mother’s family certainly had no relatives in the US.

Mum (right) with her mother and brother outside their Yorkshire cottage

I don’t know how Mum read about David Balfour’s adventures in ‘Kidnapped’. Perhaps she was huddled up in bed, defying the blackout with a clandestine candle (whose flame would have been a far greater risk to her health than the Luftwaffe), enjoying the gift of an American stranger she would never know and who would never know how his or her gift was appreciated.

And now, eight years after her death, I’m sitting in a hospital waiting room. Her grandchild is in the operating theatre while I'm reading the same words she read, my older fingers touching the same paper her fingers touched seventy years ago, perhaps hoping her light wouldn’t be mistaken by a passing Heinkel for Liverpool docks or the Huddersfield Conservative & Unionist Club.

And this is what I get from a physical book. It has life, it has history, it tells a story and yet it’s also its own story. Download that onto your Kindle if you can.

Review: Diana Ross: A Biography

Diana Ross: A Biography by J. Randy Taraborrelli
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It doesn't take long to divine Taraborrelli's opinion of himself in this book: it begins with a quote from Miss Ross herself telling him how he knows her better than any biographer. Yes, the first words of the biography are about him, not her. And this reviewer found this writer's constant references to "this writer" (rather than simply "I" or "me") to be tiresome and pompously self-serving.

Now, having written two previous biographies of the Motown superstar, he's returning to squeeze the last bit of milk from his cash cow.

To be fair, despite being an unashamed fan, Taraborrelli is even-handed. It's long been alleged that Ross is an uncompromising, career-focused manipulator and, despite his obvious love for her as an artist, he's quite happy to show her in this unflattering light. He even colludes with the consensus that Ross was miscast in The Wiz when a one-eyed fan might have presented it as a triumph. This is by no means a hagiography. Its failings lie elsewhere.

The book is over-long and excessively detailed, with the accumulation of facts valued far above writing style. Taraborrelli is meticulous at the expense of readability and his prose is workmanlike and uninspired, as if he's desperate to collate every scrap of source material rather than tell a story. And yet the opposite is true when it comes to the photos. Nearly all of them are PR shots taken from the glory years 1966-68, giving a frustratingly incomplete picture.

In the end we don't learn much about Ross that we didn't already know. We just know it in more detail. A lot, lot more detail.

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Review: Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart by Ellis Peters
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Crime writing has come a long way since this sub-Agatha Christie fare was considered worthy of anyone's attention. It fits the stereotype of something homely, set in a Middle England familiar to the little old lady who sits in a cottage knocking out whodunnits peopled by her friends and neighbours.

It's not just the characters and settings that are familiar to the point of cliché. The writing is as cardboard as the characters: the plot plods along, nudged by pedestrian prose that artlessly explains what's going on with drab matter-of-factness. How do we know what the characters are thinking? Peters writes, "He was thinking that… etc." How do we know what the characters are feeling? Peters writes, "She felt that… etc."

Peters has no ear for dialogue either. Even in Middle England, conversations do not consist of half-page explanations in perfectly composed, if lifeless prose in which all relevant facts are explained with forensic clarity.

And the plot? It's interesting that we're half-way through before we find out for sure that anyone has actually died. If we had been dealing with interesting characters and psychological manoeuvrings, then it would have been a fascinating novelistic device. But Peters doesn't deal in deep characterisation or psychology.

I was waiting for the plot twist – maybe (view spoiler)[Lucien and Edward were lovers (hide spoiler)] – but it turns out that (view spoiler)[Audrey was Lucien's mother (hide spoiler)] after all, which is what most readers would have suspected all along.

Meanwhile reality is crudely twisted out of recognition to suit the needs of the plot. The whole story is set in a country house where a folk music conference is going on. The most popular singer vanishes early on. Later, a body is found in the grounds, which presumably are soon swarming with police, forensic scientists and an ambulance to remove the body, all of whom must have driven up the drive in front of the house. Yet absolutely nobody notices. Add to that some deeply implausible police procedures, and we're left with a thoroughly unsatisfying, if mercifully short, crime novel.

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Review: The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music, 1972-1993

The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music, 1972-1993 by Nick Kent
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Of course I remember Nick Kent. In the sense that I remember all those self-declared savants of the my youth: Paul Morley, Lester Bangs, Charles Shaar Murray, Paul du Noyer, Julie Burchill and of course Nick Kent. But I seldom remember which was which except Gary Bushell (because he was occasionally funny but more usually a complete tool) and Geoff Barton (because he alone championed my then-beloved heavy metal and wrote the highly misleading sleeve notes to my first Deep Purple album, which destroyed his credibility for me the moment I found out).

And what I realise now about Nick Kent is that he's not that good a writer. Not terrible, but largely unremarkable. As a young journalist he sat at the knee of the genius Lester Bangs, but all he seems to have learned was how to write at great length. These stories are almost novella-length, padded out with lengthy quotes but largely devoid of sparkling writing, apart from the occasional flourish. The word that springs to mind is 'workmanlike'. We have long narratives but little insight or poetic imagery to bring the music to life; nor much sympathy for the subjects under discussion.

So these tales are moderately interesting if you care about the subjects (though his cursory treatment of a then-disturbed Roky Erickson is frustratingly shallow and unsympathetic). He wants to tell stories, but he never shows much enthusiasm for his subject, which makes the exercise generally disappointing.

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Review: The Weight of Silence

The Weight of Silence by Heather Gudenkauf
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

At first I thought this was a crime novel, but there's no serious crime (a bit of scene-setting historical domestic violence doesn't count).

Then I thought it was a mystery novel, but there's no mystery: the missing girls give first-hand accounts of their ordeal throughout.

Then I thought it was a psychological thriller, but the characters are such flat stereotypes that anything as subtle as psychology is beyond them – except the obvious bad guy, Griff, but he's the only major character who doesn't get the first-person treatment, presumably because he's the bad guy and the author doesn't want the readers sympathising with him (maybe she should read Nabokov).

The multiple narrator idea is good (maybe she has been reading Audrey Niffenegger, but it's not much use when the characters – implausibly, given the terrifying events that are unfolding – spend most of their time musing about the past. Gudenkauf isn't a skilled enough writer to balance so many characters: they all talk and think in the same way, and eventually they merge into one. This isn't helped by the simplistic characterisation: people are good or bad.

Add to that the pedestrian narration, artless description and flat dialogue, and we have a thoroughly unexceptional book. By that logic, one star seems harsh, as it's not terrible – undemanding sun-lounge readers can flip through it and find it mildly diverting – but at no point does it transcend mediocrity. It shows a depressing lack of ambition on the author's part.

(This was the other book I rescued from the bin at the Village Hall, along with Genesis by Karin Slaughter. Their failings are oddly similar. Maybe the phantom book dumper had more taste than I gave them credit for.)

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Review: Genesis

Genesis by Karin Slaughter
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I found this in a bin at the village hall. Seeing books in the bin offends me, so I rescued it. Anyway, I like a bit of Rankin, so why not try another crime writer?

The best I can say is it's alright, but it's not really a crime novel. It's soap opera with a bit of crime in the background as a device to connect a group of characters who seem to be the author's main preoccupation. Slaughter seems obsessed with the minutiae of her characters' lives, and the story very much takes a back seat. A third of the way through the novel we've found out almost nothing about the crime or the investigation, but we know the characters inside out without ever finding out why we're supposed to care.

Slaughter is very mush of the 'show-don't-tell' school of novel writing, where everything is explained instead of coming out through the storytelling. She lacks James Patterson's clunky dialogue, but her plotting is much more rambling.

Perhaps that's why I found it a very feminine novel. Male crime writers tend to like taut thrillers rather than the rambling, over-written, easy-reading on offer here. Men like five-minute showers; women like to luxuriate in the bath for an hour. If that generalisation holds good, then this is very much a feminine novel.

It's is anything but taut. The first nine pages consist of the thoughts of a woman whose only purpose in the novel is to be the one who finds the first victim. She sits in a car, looking out of the window and thinks through her entire life story, including the life stories of her family, in a way that absolutely nobody does in real life (any more than they look in the mirror and mentally describe their appearance: that much-loved staple of poor writers who don't know how else to describe their characters. It's a perfect example of the chapter in How Not to Write a Novel called "What color am I?"). Again and again, characters sit back and think about their lives while the story takes a back seat. This gets quite tiresome.

By the time I had read the first third of the book, I still had little idea about the criminal (except that (s)he is implausibly sadistic) because the author was so obsessed with the characters' back stories that the novel still hadn't got going. And that was the point where I gave up.

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Review: At Swim-Two-Birds

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



As James Joyce lay dying and reading At Swim-Two-Birds, he must have felt his heritage was in good hands. Things didn't quite work out for Flann O'Brien, whose literary output dwindled after his second novel, [b:The Third Policeman|27208|The Third Policeman|Flann O'Brien|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1343027425s/27208.jpg|3359269], was rejected (and only hailed as a classic after its posthumous publication).

At Swim-Two-Birds is surreal, nonsensical and at times infuriating. It's also hilarious, imaginative and beautiful. It weaves Joycean journeys around Dublin with invented Gaelic myths, some nonsense philosophy and a bizarre plot wherein the characters of a novel rebel against the author. During the struggle, their ally, the semi-mythological Pooka, magically dispatches the author, Trellis, through his bedroom window and floats down to join him on the pavement, observing:

To forsake your warm bed … without the protection of your heavy great-coat of Galway frieze, that was an oversight and one which might well be visited with penalties pulmonary in character. To inquire as to the gravity of your sore fall, would that be inopportune?

You black bastard, said Trellis.

The character of your colloquy is not harmonious, rejoined the Pooka, and makes for barriers between the classes.

It makes for a baffling yet appealing read, which is all the more enjoyable if read purely for the joy of the words. If you put the book down feeling you have understood it, then you haven't understood it at all.



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