26 Books

I got Jill Mansell’s Perfect Timing free with some magazine years ago and it remains one of my favourite uplifting books. Like Jilly Cooper, Mansell excels at capturing people, and makes implausible scenarios seem totally likely.

Take a Chance on Me

Jill Mansell
Headline Review 2010, Paperback, 416 pages, £7.99

Take A Chance On Me is really enjoyable for about three chapters and then dips down into autopilot. Mansell makes an engaging male character (saddled with the hideous lothario name of Johnny LaVenture), makes him warm and witty and generally nice, and then makes him hop around until our heroine deigns to fall into his arms. I know this is always going to happen and it’s not rocket science, but it helps if the story along the way makes its fantasy vaguely realistic, and this may as well be actual Mamma Mia! instead, in which case God help us all.

Reading Angela Carter’s lovely descriptions of south London earlier this year had made me realise how little I read about contemporary London, and this really fitted the bill nicely.

Shop Girl Diaries (Salt Modern Lives)

Emily Benet
Salt Publishing 2009, Paperback, 256 pages, £9.99

Hurray for Twitter: I found out about this book, set in a shop close to where I live, through the @Se1 account. Even though it’s square-shaped. For some reason this really grinds my gears. I like books to be book-shaped, otherwise I feel like I’m reading an accordion or a copy of Meg and Mog. Also, I worry about dropping it in the bath.

Hands up – I absolutely judged this book by its cover. I was hoping Jacqueline Winspear would be some soupy-eyed matron from the 1930s a la Agatha Christie, and deliver me a nice, unchallenging 30s-set murder mystery. The cover’s pastel pink for crying out loud.

Among the Mad

Jacqueline Winspear
John Murray 2010, Paperback, 352 pages, £7.99

Anyway, it turns out the Kent-born Winspear is no such thing: she writes today, but now lives in California, where I hope she will soon develop soupy-eyes and a matronly attitude. And while Maisie Dodds is indeed set in the 1930s, it’s not fluffy and there’s very little 30s slang.

The latest instalment of Charlaine Harris’s chatty, witty and hugely enjoyable Sookie Sackhouse novels comes with a clonking great fib on its front cover.

Dead in the Family

Charlaine Harris
Gollancz 2010, Hardcover, 320 pages, £14.99

Having spawned the just as enjoyable hit TV series, True Blood, the TV cast adorn the book’s cover despite, in this universe, one of them being dead and another not existing.

But no matter. What will matter is fans of the series launching into this one which would be a colossal mistake given this is number 10: Sookie’s story is miles ahead from the TV series, featuring fairies, werepanthers and others supernatural beasties that haven’t so much as shown up on the box yet.
So while fans of the show should head for the earlier novels (not to worry, they’re so crack-like you’ll rocket through them in a week), Dead in The Family is absolute bliss for established Sookie nuts.

This is a relief more than anything. Harris is a brilliant writer, but ten books is ten books and I was gnawing my nails with worry that, by now, she might have been hit by burnout and expectation (Janet Evanovich’s wonderful Stephanie Plum novels stopped being wonderful around book 10 and yet – grimace – they keep coming).

Pony books get a terrible press. They summon up thoughts of pink-faced young gels in breeches smacking crops against their boots and “winning through” to win umpteen rosettes in implausibly competitive country shows.

Well, Thelwell’s certainly full of these caricatures, and the frankly terrifying Saddle Club series from the 90s scared any competitive edge out of my horse-mad tween self, but pony books from the 40s through to the 60s are wonderful, which was why it was so nice to find a couple hanging around my parents’ house.

As a child, Pink Pony was one of my favourites, up there with St Clare’s and Malory Towers as a totem of a childhood that was far removed from my own suburban London life. Half-French October (brilliant name) spies a beautiful strawberry roan foal in a field one day. Her parents have promised her a horse of her own and she talks them into letting her own it and break her in herself. Bearing, in mind she’s barely 12 when this pony appears, what 12-year-old do you know who could a) commit do that sort of challenge and b) what parents now would let her? Let alone having a pony in the first place, bloody expensive things that they are.

Like John Scaggs’ Crime Fiction, which I read last year, this is an academic overview of the crime fiction genre. While I was disappointed with Scaggs’ book – I felt I had already read too widely to appreciate it – I enjoyed this one a little more, mostly because each chapter is given over to a different specialist.

The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

Martin Priestman (Editor)
Cambridge University Press 2003, Paperback, 308 pages, £19.99

I found the first two chapters, dealing with early crime fiction, particularly interesting. Ian A Bell’s chapter on 18th Century crime writing explains how early works didn’t seek to provide reassurance to the reader and largely omit any kind of detective figure. That’s followed by a chapter on sensationalist fiction by Lyn Pickett, who offers some good insights into the relationship between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature during this formative period.

Jeannette Walls’ memoir is the story of a childhood spent moving from town to town and hovel to hovel, propelled along an increasingly unhinged adventure by her father and hero, Rex.

Dreamer, drinker, and erstwhile architect of the titular house of sand, Rex Walls has charisma to burn. That he does so, to the ground, is written in the stars from the outset. Just how he does it and who he takes down with him are what make this memoir so readable.

The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls
Scribner Book Compan 2006, Paperback, 288 pages, £10.71

Although Susan Sontag and Annie Leibovtiz were famously romantically involved towards the end of the former’s life, the essays in this collection were written before the pair met, which leaves the fascinating question of how intimacy with one of the world’s most famous practitioners of the art modulated Sontag’s views, if at all.

On Photography (Penguin Modern Classics)

Susan Sontag
Penguin Classics 2008, Paperback, 224 pages, £9.99

As they are, Sontag veers between the wilfully obfuscated prose that academics love and the statement of complete banalities presented as riveting insight.

This is a remarkable and profoundly sad book. It is set in Italy during Word War II and focuses on the struggles of ordinary people to survive among the rubble, violence and poverty.

History

William Riviere (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 2002, Paperback, 768 pages, £14.99

Ida Mancuso is half-Jewish and lives in Rome. As the Axis powers become aware that they are losing the war, so the violence against their racial enemies accelerates. In one remarkable scene, Ida runs through the now deserted ghetto, drawn there as we feel compelled to touch a plate we have been told is hot, and ends up at the railway station, just as the final train is being dispatched to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and as the train leaves, one of the deportees hands her a fragment of a note to his family which she carries around with her wherever she goes thereafter.

Carter is a delicious writer. I’ve only read two of her novels, six years apart, and I’m tempted to keep that distance so I don’t just guzzle down the rest and make myself sick. As it is, the first – the batty and beautiful Nights At The Circus – makes a theatrical diptych with this, Carter’s last novel, a bawdy, Bardish chronicle of a showbiz family tree which has the unnerving feeling of Ballet Shoes narrated by Barbara Windsor.

Wise Children (Vintage Classics)

Angela Carter
Vintage Classics 1998, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

It’s narrated by Dora Chance, an ageing Brixtonite whose life since 12 has been spent furiously dancing up cash with her identical twin, Nora, and who has taken on the mantle of chronicling the sprawling history of the Hazard family, a cross between the Oliviers, Redgraves and Jaggers. The illegitimate children of legendary Shakespearean actor Sir Melchior Hazard (a ham of the highest order), the Chance sisters are born on the wrong side of the bedspread and the tracks. In a big hurrah for south of the river, they live in Brixton, in a bubble of glamour and grind with their adoptive Grandma – a naturist alcoholic whose iron-jawed nature has much in common with Giles’ indestructible Grandma. I love south London, and as it barely gets a footnote in most novels beyond “This is where crime happens”, this made me empathise with the Chances even more.