Big Sky

by Kate Atkinson

Not much to write about with this one.

It is the latest in Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series, and I was hard pressed to remember enough about the detective and his personal life (which does impinge on the story) from reading some, though not all, of the earlier novels in the series.

I don’t think that detective fiction is Atkinson’s best genre, and so far I have read nothing by this author that even begins to compare with Life after Life or A God in Ruins.  The book is set on the north-eastern coast of England, in the towns of Whitby and Scarborough and the surrounding area.  An end-of-pier show with a drag act and rather dated comedy act form a part of the scenery (and characters).  The setting is bleak, and the story bleaker.

I was interested enough to read to the end of the book, but very ready to pass it on to a charity shop as soon as I’d finished it.

I think I will steer clear of Atkinson’s novels for a while.  There are other books I want to read more.

Resistance

by Owen Sheers

How can I not have review this when I read it?  It’s a book I feel inclined to recommend to my book group, and it was certainly a good read at the time (whichever time that was… I think I read it after I Saw a Man, though it was written several years earlier).

The book was recommended to me by the owner/manager at my nearest independent bookshop, Alison’s of Tewkesbury, a few years ago.  He is also an avid poetry reader, so it was not surprising that he knew Owen Sheers’ work.  I bought the paperback without hesitation, and read it some time later.

The story is set in the borderlands between England and Wales in the Brecon Beacons – the same Black Hills that feature in one of my favourite Bruce Chatwin books, On the Black Hill.  The local community, isolated and self-contained, finds itself playing host to a small band of German soldiers, part of an occupying force after the imagined German invasion of Britain in 1944.

The book is a thriller, an exploration of human nature, and at the same time a lyrical exposition of a landscape and community in an area that I too have learned to love.

Not sure when I read this, but I am posting in July 2021 and – maybe – I will read it again, before recommending it to my book group.

Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War

by Max Hastings

My brother Mark gave me this book in paperback two years ago, having bought himself the hardback copy.  I find long books (in this case 700+ pages plus photographs) a bit hard to manipulate in physical form, so I recently decided to download the audiobook, referring to the paperback only for maps, photos and the glossary.

Hastings is an engaging writer whose detailed research, perceptive analysis and interpretation of the people and events he describes have kept me involved.  The story narrated here happened almost entirely in my lifetime: I was born in 1956, some ten years after Giap and Ho began to fight for an independent Vietnam, and I came of age around the time that the US withdrew its last troops and diplomats from Saigon.  The US / Vietnamese war was the backdrop to the US youth culture of the early 1970s in which, as a British teenager, I was immersed.  So I was motivated to learn more.

I’m not sure I can say much more about the book itself – and to write more about Vietnam, I can hardly do better than refer anyone who reads this ‘review’ to Hastings’ book.  The praise for this work is richly deserved, in my view.

__________________

I listened to the rest of this book and finally finished the audiobook in early August 2021.  The sections about people and politics interested me more than the narrative of military tactics or types and sizes of weapons used – although the discussion about the development of the M-16 automatic rifle and its advantages vs defects as compared to the Kalashnikov was fascinating and terrifying.

This is a gruesomely compelling topic, well told and expertly narrated.

The Virgin Suicides

by Jeffrey Eugenides

I picked up this book at a book sale or charity shop.  I’d already read another of Eugenides’ books, Middlesex, which I enjoyed at the time although it is not at all memorable to me.

The Virgin Suicides sounds, from its title, as though it must be either titillating or a bit morbid.  In fact it is neither.  It is essentially a coming-of-age story, told by a narrator who identifies himself as one of a group of teenage boys in a neighbourhood somewhere in the state of Michigan.  The town is unspecified, but the references to the lake and the fish-flies of midsummer place it in this area.  The boys live in a middle-class suburban community with the usual assortment of characters, carefully observed by the boys.  Their main focus of attention, however, is the Lisbon household.  Mr Lisbon is known to the local teenagers as a teacher at their high school.  His five daughters are kept under close control by their parents – mainly, so it appears, by their mother.

The thing that doesn’t quite ring true for me, as a female, is the fact that there appear to be no other young girls in the neighbourhood apart from the Lisbons.  Perhaps this is a way for the author to emphasise the centrality of these particular girls to the adolescent male fantasies of their neighbours.  These girls are unattainable, hence eminently desirable.

At its core, this is a very sad story, but there is so much humour in the book that you don’t feel sad or even particularly shocked at the suicides of all five sisters.  What is much more shocking, to me at least, is the community’s failure to offer real and effective support to the clearly troubled Lisbon family after the death of the first (youngest) daughter, Cecilia.  That the boys fail to make friends with the girls is understandable.  That the responsible adults in the community – neighbours, school, social services – do not appear to get to the bottom of the family’s problems is deeply shocking to me.  I think that underneath a darkly humorous story, there is a stark social message.

I’d like to see the movie, but unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be available to stream in the UK – at least, it isn’t on any of the free streaming platforms at the present time.