august-september 2020 books…

The Last Days Of The Bus Club (Chris Stewart): This is the fourth book of Stewart’s I’ve read - of his life since buying a remote, hillside peasant farm (“on the wrong side of the river”) in Andalucia 20 year something years ago - so you won’t be surprised to hear that I rather like them! Trying to scrape a living during this period has clearly been fraught with difficulties. In order to get by, they’ve found themselves resorting various schemes and mini-enterprises (including sheep-shearing and, of course, writing) and his books essentially provide an account of their ongoing journey. Rather like the “A Year In Provence” book that I’ve recently re-read, it’s the various local characters who provide a wealth of the book’s charm. The “Bus Club” from the title relates to this final year of their daughter’s schooling, when Stewart and two of his Spanish neighbours used to gather together to meet the school bus… and generally ‘put the world to right’ (as you do!). It’s a very special, hopeful account about living simply - a funny, endearing, observant appreciation of life. My perfect lockdown book.

The Princess Bride (William Goldman): This is our next StorySmith bookgroup book (we decided on something of a ‘humorous theme’). To be honest, I hadn’t really come across Goldman before; I hadn’t appreciated, for example, that he was the screenwriter for the ‘Butch Cassidy’ film (I also hadn’t seen the 1987 ‘Princess Bride’ film). He died in 2018, aged 87. The book can probably be described as an action-packed fairy tale (with romance and revenge thrown into the mix). As a boy, William Goldman claims (but remember, this is fiction!), he loved to hear his father read the S. Morgenstern ‘classic’ (pure invention, of course), The Princess Bride. But as a grown-up he ‘discovered’ that the boring parts were left out of his Dad's recitation, and only the ‘good parts’ reached his ears… so here Goldman ‘reconstructs’ the book as a ‘good parts version’ along similar lines. I won’t even begin to try and summarise the plot… I’ll just acknowledge that, yes, it’s fast-moving, clever and full of intrigue, humour, love and revenge and an enjoyable, easy read (definitely a welcome change from pandemics and governmental incompetence!). However, I certainly didn’t love the book (unlike the numerous Goodread reviewers I’ve just noted online!). Goldman was much too full of himself for my liking and ended up finding his mocking asides/explanations/observations increasingly irritating! As ever, it’ll be interesting to discover what the rest of the bookgroup think.
All The Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr): I thought this was a wonderful, remarkable novel. It’s set in Germany and France before and during the German occupation of France. Marie-Laure is a little blind, motherless, French girl. She is six years old when the novel begins in Paris in 1934, where she lives with her father, a locksmith and keeper of the keys at the Natural History Museum. Werner Pfennig is an orphan in a German mining town, near Essen. He is a tiny boy of seven with a gift for science (and a fascination for radios in particular). Marie-Laure's father is also the creator of ingenious puzzles and delightful miniatures – of the streets and houses of Paris, for instance. The miniatures teach Marie-Laure, using her fingers as eyes, how to navigate the city. Ultimately she survives the destruction and desolation of the Occupation through the books she can read in braille. Werner's talent brings him to the attention of the Nazis, and he is sent to a national school that trains an elite group of Hitler Youth for the Third Reich. Marie-Laure and her father escape Paris in 1940, and take refuge in Saint‑Malo. Werner's genius is put to work tracking radio transmissions across Russia and Central Europe, until he is sent to Saint-Malo, where Marie‑Laure's great‑uncle uses his radio transmitter on behalf of the Resistance. Their paths ultimately collide… but I’ll avoid spoilers, so will leave it there! It’s a book about the morality and brutality of war; about coming-of-age; about endurance and the human spirit. It’s hauntingly beautiful and, once I’d got into it, I just couldn’t put it down. Wonderfully-written. Remarkable.

Ancestral Vices (Tom Sharpe): I first read this nearly 40 years ago. I used it as another ‘easy-reading-during-difficult-times’ book… on the basis that Sharpe always used to make me smile. Actually, unlike the ‘The Wilt Alternative’ book I re-read back in May, I found this one a little tired and predictable (yes, very funny in places… but also, for me, just too ridiculous and excessive). It felt a bit like a cross between “Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em”, “Fawlty Towers” and Miss Marple!! The words on the book jacket summarise matters: “left-wing academics, right-wing capitalists, true blue country gentry, workers, peasants, police and lawyers”. Entertaining, but also excruciatingly farcical (in a bad way). I don’t think I’ll be re-reading any of my other Tom Sharpe books in a hurry.

The Sacred Art Of Stealing (Christopher Brookmyre): I read ‘Ugly One Morning’ (another of Brookmyre’s books) quite recently and, at the time, had commented that I hadn’t altogether been convinced by the plot – which I thought it was a ‘little contrived’. As a result, one of my friends suggested that I should ‘give this one a go’… and so I did… and it was well worth it! So, this is a novel about Dadaist bank robbers and choreographed dancing gunmen in Glasgow’s Buchanan Street (I kid you not!) and a female detective who, in the words of one reviewer, is a ‘connoisseur of crooks’. It took me a little time to get into the book (60 pages of the 400 plus) but, once in, I couldn’t put it down. The plot is intriguing, ridiculous and yet utterly convincing. Very clever, humorous, biting social satire and irreverent. I loved it.