26 Books

Adam Kindred, in London for a job interview, runs into a scientist in a restaurant. The man leaves behind some papers and Kindred, finding a phone number among the documents, calls and offers to return them. He arrives at the man’s flat to find him dying from a stab wound. Hearing the killer elsewhere in the flat, Kindred flees, only later realising that he is now the prime suspect.

So begins Boyd’s thriller which weaves together climatology, pharmaceutical testing, religious cults and the seedy underworld and sets them in a contemporary London that feels wonderfully authentic.

Cormac McCarthy is one of those writers whose work I have long looked forward to diving into, but have held back for some reason or other. (In this case, because I want to read the body of work as a whole, preferably on some hazy sun-filled holiday.)

I read The Road last year and found it harrowing: McCarthy writes sparingly but brutally and some of the book’s bleakest scenes almost too much to bear. I approached No Country for Old Men with some caution, or at least, I paced myself lest things become too dark once more.

I haven’t read any Toby Litt before, though I’ve meant to. He has been working his way through the alphabet with his book titles, starting with the short story collection Adventures in Capitalism and reaching K with his latest, King Death.

It’s another literary thriller, something that has become an accidental theme of my reading this year. King Death opens with a couple, Kumiko and Skelton, who are on an early morning train into London when they see a human heart, apparently thrown from their train, land on the roof of Borough Market. At the next stop, Kumiko rushes to investigate and Skelton reluctantly follows.

I read several books that I would describe as ‘literary thrillers’ this summer, purely by coincidence. There was Costello’s Big If, Beauman’s Boxer Beetle, one by Toby Litt that I’ve yet to review and this, by Dan Chaon. Of the four, this was easily the best. In fact it’s one of the best books I’ve read all year.

Chaon – pronouced Shawn – tracks three pairs of characters across an America where few people are who they appear to be and identities are shed and assumed with alarming ease and frequency. And Chaon picks some great locations for his story to unfold, among them an abandoned motel, a forgotten magic shop, an Arctic ice station and a cabin in the woods.

A couple of months ago I took author Ned Beauman to task for some pompous, though possibly satirical, remarks about writers who use Twitter. Beauman’s mother, Nicola, runs Persephone Books, and I suggested on Twitter, rather sarcastically, that his might have helped 25-year-old Ned get his book deal. Ned got in touch, offering to send a copy of the book to prove that he had got his deal on merit.

I’ve no idea whether Beauman’s mother and her contacts helped him get a deal. For all I know, Ned submitted his manuscript anonymously and nobody involved knew who they were signing. What I can say is that his debut novel is perfectly decent. It’s flawed but not bad.

I’d read so many good things about this novel – in the press and from otherwise respectable people on Twitter – that I thought I’d give it a try. Unfortunately this Swedish murder mystery is terrible. It’s badly written, it’s poorly structured and, worse than either of those, it’s dull.

Larsson was a left-wing journalist who originally set out to write a series of ten murder mysteries. He died after completing just three. The parallels with Sjowall and Wahloo are obvious but while the Martin Beck series relishes the banality of police work and yet remains compelling, Larsson’s debut is sensationalist and action-packed but thoroughly boring. Where Sjowall and Wahloo are playful and subtle, Larsson is po-faced and blunt.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (TGWTDT) has three sections. In the first, Mikael Blomkvist, a principled, crusading financial reporter at Millennium magazine, is disgraced when he loses a libel action to a wealthy industrialist, Hans-Erik Wennerstrom.

In the second section Blomkvist is approached by Henrik Vanger, another wealthy industrialist whose grand-niece, Harriet, disappeared 40 years earlier. Vanger, convinced Harriet was murdered, asks Blomkvist to solve the mystery, under the guise of writing a biography of the Vanger family.

In the final section, Blomkvist gets his revenge on Wennerstrom and saves Millennium magazine for another sequel. Throughout all this Blomkvist is aided by Lisbeth Salander, a dysfunctional punk and hacker who gives the book its title. Salander is anti-social and lives life on the margins but, like seemingly every other woman in the novel is unable to resist the lure of the middle-aged and charmless Blomkvist.

There aren’t many plot holes but the structure is slack and the book could easily lose 100 pages or more without consequence.

The first section of the book is quite promising, despite Larsson’s clumsy labouring of the point that violence against women is a bad thing. That’s hardly the most penetrating observation but nevertheless Larsson begins each chapter with some worthy statistics. One, claiming that 18 per cent of Swedish women have at some time been threatened by a man is followed later by news that 46 per cent of Swedish women have been subjected to violence by a man. Both alarming stats, to be sure, but how is it possible for more women to be actually assaulted than threatened?

The middle section is like a different novel, and a really, really bad one. Larsson piles one serial killer thriller cliche onto another as Blomkvist investigates Harriet’s disappearance.

[Skip the next paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers...]

He uncovers a serial killer guided by the Book of Leviticus who trains his son to be a serial killer too. While the father is a slavering maniac, the son becomes one of those ice-cold evil genius serial killers who has a torture room in his basement and disposes of his victims at sea to ensure they’ll never be found.

While this sort of thing might cause Thomas Harris to wake up stuck to the sheets, to me it just sounds laughably daft. If it was mooted as an ITV weeknight thriller, even Robson Greene would consider it beneath him.

Moreover, this kind of schlock writing gives the impression that Larsson’s message about violence against women is there simply to lend legitimacy to the very silly plot. First, in the real world most women are abused by husbands, boyfriends, fathers and brothers rather than by cackling serial killers. Second, the victims in this book are all anonymous and interchangeable. The empathy created by Sjowall and Wahloo in Roseanna or by Bolano in 2666 is entirely missing here.

It’s a woefully shallow piece of work. Larsson’s dialogue is wooden and his characters are underdeveloped. Only Salander is fully realised and, to me at least, she seems like a cartoon or video game character who has wound up in a novel by mistake. Her presence just makes the story more implausible.

In that context, Larsson’s constant parade of statistics begins to make sense. He doesn’t have the skill as a novelist to make his point through the story so he needs stats to do it for him instead.

There is some truly awful writing in places too. In one scene Salander’s mother watches “sadly and anxiously” as her daughter leaves. Larsson ends the scene with the wretched: “It was as if she had a premonition of some approaching disaster.”

Overall though, Larsson is simply lazy. The third and final section of the book is mostly just a list of events recounted in emails. It feels like the writer just can’t wait to get finished.

I can’t say I blame him. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is terrible; the worst book I’ve read all year.

Benjamin Black is the pen name of Booker Prize winning novelist John Banville. What’s slightly odd about this is that the disguise is made plain by being highlighted on the front cover. Banville says that the reason for this is that he wanted to write genre fiction, but didn’t want his literary readers to be disappointed when they realised that the books were not literary ones.

Fair enough, I suppose, only Banville wants not only to have his cake, but to eat it too. He claims that there is no such thing as genre fiction, and that the only worthwhile distinction to make in literature is between good writing and bad writing. If this is true, then there’s no need to write under a pen name, and readers shouldn’t feel aggrieved to find that they’re reading a thriller.

The real problem is that Banville’s claim that there is no such thing as genre fiction is let down by the fact that The Lemur is a cliché from start to finish. Thankfully it’s a short book.

It’s a theme of my reading at the moment that all of a book’s characters are unsympathetic, and The Lemur is no exception. It’s set in New York, among the financial elite. John Glass, erstwhile world-famous journalist for the ‘Sunday Times of London’ is afraid of heights, but sits in his office way up in his father-in-law’s skyscraper preparing to write the old man’s authorised biography. And here comes the cliché: he’s afraid of heights, but really he’s out of his depth.

He hires an investigator to help him probe his father-in-law’s past, but almost immediately the investigator turns up dead. We’re treated to Banville’s riff on the New York police precinct, and the hard boiled cop in search of coffee, then to Glass’s unhappy affair with a local artist, to his even less happy marriage and to his strained relationship with his hawkish, ex-CIA father-in-law Bill Mulholland who is now some kind of Bill Gates figure (Banville tries to deflect this comparison by having ‘Big Bill’ say that he’s bigger than any other philanthropist, Bill and Melinda Gates included).

Despite being set in New York, there’s very little sense of place, the real place rather than the celluloid view of it we’re used to seeing in the cinema. The Lemur is a deeply disappointing book. Let’s hope that Banville’s forthcoming The Infinities marks a return to the form of his brilliant Booker winning The Sea.

‘Write about what you know’ is the advice routinely given to first-time novelists and that’s what John Niven has done here. Like his protagonist, Steven Stelfox, Niven was an A&R man during the Britpop years and draws on his experience to for this satire of music industry shallowness, cynicism and greed.

The story follows Stelfox through 1997 as he visits Cannes, Miami and Glastonbury on his quest for a hit record. Unfortunately all he has to work with are a Spice Girls-clone girlband and a drum ‘n’ bass artist called Rage, a thinly-disguised Goldie.

To underline how nasty the music business is Niven makes Stelfox racist, sexist, homophobic and misanthropic in the extreme. His interest in music is purely financial – he has a drugs and prostitute habit to support, after all – and, lacking critical judgment, he has to rely on guesswork if he’s to find a hit. Oh, and halfway through the book he turns, somewhat unconvincingly, into a psychopathic murderer.

It’s like South Park meets American Psycho without the wit or intellect of either. Stelfox is barely even a two-dimensional character and the best Niven can do to take us inside his head is to say it’s like a TV control room with a series of screens showing ultra-violence and hardcore porn. It’s desperately unimaginative. Niven might argue that Stelfox is two-dimensional and desperately unimaginative, which may be true but it’s still the author’s job to make him interesting and he’s failed utterly here.

Worse is the fact that Niven has nothing to say. The music industry is shallow and cynical? Anyone who’s tuned in to an episode of X Factor could tell you that. Otherwise, all Niven has to offer are the observations that traffic in London is often bad and all the pretty women seem to come out in sunny weather. In comparison, Nick Hornby is a giant of cultural analysis.

In Niven’s defence he can craft very funny insults, which gives Stelfox’s opinions some humourous zing. But it feels overdone and palls after 100 pages or so.

You can find better things to do with your time.

Budai, a linguist on his way to a conference in Helsinki, arrives by accident in a strange city whose residents speak a language that is both unfamiliar and incomprehensible. Unable even to find his way back to the airport, he tries to make sense of the city and its language before he runs out of money and is evicted from his hotel.

Budai’s best hope is Epepe, the hotel lift operator who is the only person patient enough to attempt to communicate with him. The language remains impenetrable despite her efforts but the pair form a relationship of sorts.

Written in Hungary in 1970 but published in English only last year, Karinthy’s novel is frequently described as Kafka-esque. For me, the resemblance is superficial, though I’m hardly a Kafka expert. In the little Kafka I’ve read, there’s a sense of persecution, as if the world itself is somehow working against the protagonist. That’s absent here. Karinthy’s city, an over-crowded, faceless metropolis, is simply indifferent to Budai.

This creates a different dynamic. In Kafka, one feels that the more the protagonist struggles, the tighter the ties around him become. In Metropole, one feels that Budai might be able to escape his trap if only he can figure out how. The problem is that he has nothing at all to go on. His various plans, ranging from buying a map to getting himself arrested, come to nothing.

Things take a strange turn towards the end when Budai finds himself caught in some kind of armed insurrection. It’s an odd sequence and one that makes me wonder whether the novel is really about language, as it seems to be to a contemporary Western reader. Was Karinthy drawing a parallel between Hungary’s communist regime and this city where violence erupts out of an inability to communicate? I don’t know enough about Hungary or Karinthy to be able to say.

In these days of the internet, GPS and mobile phones, Metropole is less plausible than it would have seemed in 1970 but it remains an intriguing novel.

William Gibson’s been on an interesting voyage from science fiction to thrillers, while keeping the same tone and subject matter. The world’s been catching up to him, and now it seems to have overtaken.

Spook Country feels like a period piece. It was set in the exact present when it came out, full of details about various products, notably iPods and televisions. Now that both of those have gone ahead a generation or two it’s receding into the past.

It’s a thriller. A very good one. It’s well paced and stylishly written. Gibson really can write exceptionally well.

There are three main story strands. Hollis Henry, who used to be in a bad but now writes about art and technology, is looking at a new genre of sculpture. Locative virtual figures are fixed in space using GPS and hacked-open grids from Wifi, mobile phones and shop security systems.

There we have the second strand, Hubertus Bigend, head of the Blue Ant advertising agency who has created a fictional magazine for Henry to write for and wants to use the locative artists for commercial purposes. Art, media, advertising and technology blend together under Bigend’s patronage. He’s a great big Belgian metaphor for creativity and the modern world. In the hands of lesser writers he’d be unbearable but Gibson makes me want to read about him, for which I’m thankful.

Then we have Tito, an information courier who works for his uncle’s shady Chinese (or Cuban or something) criminal organisation. He’s being investigated by Brown, who’s keeping Milgrim prisoner to translate the volapuk (text messaging mixed with Cyrillic characters) codes they use.

As Gibson’s a modern sort of a guy he doesn’t feel the need to tie everything together as defined at the beginning of the book but there’s progression and unexpected twists and turns. It’s satisfying to read if a little less demanding than I’d like. I’m not sure what it is, I just seemed to whizz through it without touching the sides as much as I have with previous Gibson novels.

It’s a good read, witty and fantastically well observed. The cyberspace future that he predicted long ago has arrived and moved into the real world, and he’s moving with it.