Atkinson inverted

I've just finished Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me. I haven't enough time to write a review for the forgotten Friday slot, so I'll just share one observation. Earlier in the week I reviewed Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, a story I felt was pretty verbose, with a lot of show at the expense of tell, and which could have lost a hundred pages and the story be unaffected. Thompson's writing is almost the complete opposite - all show and little tell and as tight as a drum. Here's how he sets the scene:

Our standards of conduct aren't the same, say, as they are in the east or middle-west. Out here you say yes ma'am and no ma'am to anything with skirts on; anything white, that is. Out here, if you catch a man with his pants down, you apologize ... even if you have to arrest him afterwards. Out here you're a man, a man and a gentleman, or you aren't anything. And God help you if you're not.

I don't know about you, but I have a pretty good idea about this place and its social norms. Five sentences then straight back into the dialogue and action. Great stuff.

Review of Orchid Blue by Eoin McNamee (Faber, 2010)

January 1961 and Pearl Gamble never makes it home from a dance at the local Orange Hall in Newry, Northern Ireland. The next morning she is found beaten, stabbed and strangled. The focus of the police investigation immediate hones in on local man Robert McGladdery, even though Pearl left the dance with another man, and returned to her neighbourhood with four others. McGladdery is a local wide boy, a natty dresser having returned from cosmopolitan London, who has a ready smile and quick humour, but somewhat of an outsider because of his illegitimate upbringing. He had been drinking most of the day before the dance, and seemed to be attracted to Pearl, taking three dances with her. Inspector Eddie McCrink has also returned from London and he is immediately uncomfortable with the investigation. It seems the local team have decided McGladdery is guilty and they’re prepared to make the evidence fit their case. And the town seems determined that he will hang for the crime. As do the authorities – the Attorney General and also the trial judge, Lord Justice Curran, who lost his own nineteen year old daughter to murder nine years previously and who has his eye on promotion to Privy Counsel.

The synopsis above sounds like a pretty good premise for a story. As I detailed earlier in the week, this is not straight fiction however. Rather it is a fictionalised version of the real Gamble/McGladdery case. Ultimately McGladdery was found guilty of Gamble’s death and he was the last person hung in Northern Ireland in 1961. McNamee then is exploring some troubling elements of the case through a fictional lens. The problem for the reader is that it’s not at all clear which elements are based on fact, which elements of the case are being challenged, and which bits are entirely fictional and imagined. Somewhat disconcertingly, large portions of the story are written in the style of a true crime book, with a dispassionate, distant and timeless voice, although in a much more sophisticated prose than in most true crime. For me, this style had the effect of leaving me outside the story, instead of being immersed in it. As a result, I struggled through a good portion of the book, though I did begin to feel more hooked in in the last third. Overall, I found this quite a difficult book to get into and I found the read quite disconcerting for the reasons above. Nevertheless, the case is an interesting one.

Review of Case Histories by Kate Atkinson (Black Swan, 2004)

1970 and Olivia and her older sister, Amelia, camp out on the lawn of their parent's house in Cambridge. The next morning Olivia has disappeared into thin air. 1994 and teenage Laura is stabbed to death for no apparent reason in the offices of her father’s law firm whilst temping for him. 1979 and young teenage mother, Michelle, snaps and plants an axe into her husband’s head when he wakes the baby. Three separate crimes linked by seemingly little more than the fact that they have surfaced in Jackson Brodie’s life at the same time. Brodie is a former police inspector turned private eye. On the death of their father, Amelia and her sister, Julia, discover Olivia’s toy in his desk and want Brodie to find out what happened to the young girl. Overweight father, Theo, can’t shake his obsession with Laura’s slaying and wants her killer found. Shirley wants to track down her niece, who was taken into care when her mother was jailed. And along with his wife running off with another man, taking his daughter with her, Brodie has his own case histories to contend with – the death of his sister, snatched, raped and dumped into the canal on her way home from the bus stop and the fate of his brother. Dealing with other people’s cases is proven a burden, especially when somebody seems to be trying to kill him.

Case Histories is a rich and layered book. The various case histories swirl around and entwine with each other through the central figure of Jackson Brodie. The prose is excellent and the characterization well developed. Brodie, in particular, is a complex and appealing investigator, with his own foibles and faults, but a decent sense of right. Atkinson’s style is to provide an enormous amount of back story and descriptive narrative, some of which ploughs the same ground repeatedly. With respect to personal taste it’s not my preferred mode of storytelling – I favour more tell and less show, and the prose to be much tighter. For my money, a hundred pages could be edited from the book and the story itself would be little affected. I have the same feeling when I read Tana French. That said, I appreciate that this is a style issue and Atkinson does this form of storytelling very well. This raises the problem of whether to judge the book on its merits or my enjoyment. If on its merits, and if this is your kind of thing, then it’s probably a 4.5 star book, but based on my taste it’s a 3.5. Interestingly, I’ve warmed to the book post-read, as the various layers and intersections condense with reflection, but at the time of reading I found the overly long and repetitive description tiresome. Overall, an enjoyable, but overly long, story with an interesting central character.

Post seasonal splurge

A nice box from Amazon turned up this morning with 8 books for the TBR pile. There are 4 more on their way. This will take the pile up to the 25ish mark - the highest it's been for a long time. On last year's reading about 3 months worth, so I'm feeling secure that I'm not going to run out of any quality reading material any time soon. I usually try and keep the pile between 5 and 12 and I aim to read all my purchases. If it gets down to five I usually get jittery. Anyway, here's some of the reviews you can expect over the next 3 to 6 months.

Rewriting history? True crime meets crime fiction

I’m about two thirds of the way through Eoin McNamee’s Orchid Blue. I’ve been struggling with it a bit. The voice is kind of strange, telling the story in a somewhat detached manner from a variety of viewpoints that leaves the reader (well this reader in any case) outside the story, instead of being immersed in it. This isn’t helped by knowing from the start the final outcome or the timing which flits around the case, even moving up to the present day through an unknown narrator’s voice. The thing that I’m trying to make my mind up about, however, is the fictionalisation of a real world event. Robery McGladdery was convicted of murdering Pearl Gamble and was the last man hanged in Northern Ireland in 1961. It’s not at all clear to me as a reader how much of the story is fiction, speculation and fact, and whether the story is underpinned by research and new evidence unearthed by McNamee. His version of events seems to run counter to the story as told in official accounts and Cold Blooded Murder by Patrick Greg in which McGladdery is clearly identified as the murderer, a verdict that McNamee throws into serious doubt.

Neither true crime nor pure fiction, I am left wondering the extent to which fiction should rewrite recent history, whilst providing no documentary evidence to justify or back-up such a playing with history? And I’m not sure where the boundaries are here. I don’t really have a problem, for example, with Philip Kerr dropping real life people from history into his stories (where it is clear he is using them in an entirely fictional capacity), or fictional characters being dropped into real life events when the history of the event is little altered. McNamee seems to be doing neither however – it is a fictional rewriting of an historical event. It’s neither true crime nor fiction. I’m going to think about this a little more, but if anyone has any views on the lines between history and fiction I’d be interested to hear them.

Lazy Sunday Service

This week flew by as work kicked back in at a hundred miles an hour. A slow reading week and a slow writing week. Admin, politics and nonsense seemed to be the order of the day. I hope that's not a sign of the year to come. January is certainly looking that way.

My posts this week:
My blogs of the year
Best reads of 2010
All 2010 reviews
This has to be the year of job creation
Where are we at with house and land prices?
Around the world in 365 days
Dead of missing forever?
Review of Peeler by Kevin McCarthy

Review of Peeler by Kevin McCarthy (Mercier Press, 2010)

It’s November 1920 in West Cork and Acting Sergeant Sean O’Keefe of the Royal Irish Constabulary is caught between the forces of the Crown and the IRA. O’Keefe was away fighting in the First World War when the 1916 rising took place and as an Irishman in the RIC he is charged with keeping the peace and suppressing the activities of those who want an independent Ireland, making him the enemy of his fellow countrymen. His police station has been turned into a fortified barracks and everywhere he goes he’s accompanied by British soldiers for protection. It’s a difficult state of affairs and the murder of a young woman, her mutilated body left in a field, a sign around her neck denouncing her as a traitor, is not going to make his life any easier. Very few people are prepared to talk to peelers for fear of retribution. O’Keefe’s superiors want the killer caught, but only if it serves their interests, and Dublin Castle sends their own detective to help. The IRA, understanding the potential propaganda if the killer is revealed to be from their ranks, are also on the trail. Dogged in his pursuit of truth and justice, O’Keefe tries to negotiate a path between Crown and Rebels in order to catch his killer.

There is much to like about Peeler. It’s well researched, with a great deal of attention to historical accuracy and recreating the social and political landscape of County Cork in 1920, and it’s well written with a decent plot and good characterization. Sean O’Keefe, in particular, is a well drawn and complex character caught as he is between two worlds. Indeed, I hope McCarthy has another O’Keefe book in the works as he’s somebody I’d like to spend a bit more time discovering. Another strength of the story is that it doesn't fall into the trap of a simplistic rendering of the Irish war of independence, instead providing a multifaceted and nuanced portrayal of the complex web of professional, familial and community loyalties and obligations. To my taste, the book though is a little too rich in historical detail – my preference is to front the story and let the context come through telling, as with Philip Kerr or Alan Furst, rather than to explicitly provide a lot of contextual scaffolding through extended description. This would have also had the benefit of slimming the book by removing or trimming some passages that had little to do with the plot directly. I would have also preferred a bit more balance in the O’Keefe and Farrell (the IRA man) threads. That said, this is a very good and entertaining read and if you like historical crime fiction then this comes recommended.