"YOU" ~ It Had Its Moments

You by Joanna Briscoe

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Sat Jul 28 09:06:41 BST 2012
    I need a little bit of intrigue in a book to give me the energy to read through the following acres of prose. Unless the prose itself has such entrancing properties that I can wallow in it at any and any point, I invariably I need bribing. I'm a fish who's too lazy to swim any distance unless somebody's dangling a worm on a hook to pull me through, and the first little worm was the snippet that a school-girl has a raving crush on the English master, whilst her mother  carries on her first lesbian affair with the English master's wife. What a delightful set of ingredients, I thought. With those items loaded into my trolley it wouldn't matter too much at the checkout which plot I selected from the range dangling on their hooks for to select. If plots were sweets, Maltesers would guarantee a thoroughly enjoyable read.

     However, I noticed that the Publisher was Blooms bury and they are a firm with whom I feel that (despite the fact that they do the Harry Potter series and are consequently swimming in far too much money) you can hardly go wrong. My prayer that Maltesers would be the dangle-plot for Ms Briscoe to adopt were swept aside as I looked for something more obscure. I needed a sweet I quite enjoyed as a child but wasn't really sure about. Something like marzipan which I convinced myself I would love once I'd become a proper grown-up. Newberry Fruits sprang to mind. They were a sugar-crusted jelly in lime, orange and lemon and they had a liquid centre which gushed all over your tongue when you bit into them. For some reason I fancy I'd plumped for those. Or had they been pre-selected for me?

     I slogged and groaned over this book, wading heavily through the chick-litty e-pages, which stayed drearily parochial at their best or navel gazing at their worst, not that I have anything against deep contemplation. But you are, I feel, to come to an inner peace, love and understanding when you do that.

     It dragged on and on. I kept looking for something else to do, something tantalizing to read, and managed to get myself thinking, madly, that if I left it alone for a bit it would somehow have magically have read itself on a bit further. The Siren whispers advised me to dump it as there was plenty else for me to enjoy. But I don't do that, and at the time I firmly believed that 'proper readers' simply didn't do it. Nonetheless, by the time I’d reached the halfway mark I was as teed-off as ever and sorely tempted to dump it as 'failed to finish'. When a book does that with me it's in serious trouble.

     It perked up quite a bit at the 60% mark and I sailed through the batch of pages, deciding that I was quite enjoying it really, and that it had reached the 'all forgiven' point, as long as it kept up the pace and didn't slacken its hold. Something more needed to be dangled on the hook now, and I demanded a diet of shrimps followed on by succulent high fat low cholesterol Dublin Bay Prawns.

Unfortunately there was no tasty diet. In true seventies style I found I was munching my way through a slice of wholemeal mung-bean pie, and all I really got was he ocular equivalent of jaw ache. As the story dragged its fuggy hash fog, I began to care little what or who Cecilia’s mystery baby was and by the end of the novel, despite the occasional description which held me captivated, I found that I simply couldn’t care less.


View all my reviews

Our Gay Son

Tue 03 Jul 2012 17:43:26 BST>
I spent a day feeling stunned after the completion of The Assassin's Apprentice, followed by a day of shivers as I underwent withdrawal symptoms because the story had come to an end. The following day I pointed my quivering finger at The Royal Assassin and pressed "Buy Now" followed by "View Downloading Items" and as the cyberdrug infused its way into my system, the shaking stopped, my head cleared, and I was able to carry on with normal conversations and think about my next meal. After that, I left-clicked and selected "Remove from Device", fancying it was one of the notes I used to write to Father Christmas scrawled on tissue paper sucked up the chimney flue and making its way to the Cloud.

I felt unable to handle the events held in that shiny new volume today. I needed an interlude, a little break, a light visual to fill a corner of my hungry mind, but only a corner of it as I needed to increase my capacity for handling tension and pain before moving on to volume two.

17:43:50

Just over 50% of the way through. I'm finding it so honest, frank and open and I have rarely nodded and underlined as much as I have in this Kindle book. It surprises me. It delights me, and by that I mean it has my undivided attention. By 'delight' I don't mean enjoyment in the normal sense of the word, but I go with it. I suffer with the author's pain of what he must have undergone when his youngest son, whose life hung by a thread when he was very young, came out to his parents as gay.

Exactly why I am enjoying so much I find much harder to understand. I am not a Christian struggling with my sexual orientation and I haven't jettisoned Christianity because of its stance on homosexuality. I jettisoned most of it at about the age of twelve when I attended a Billy Graham meeting which our school took some pupils to see. I went through curiosity, because I wanted to see angels appearing, or Pentecostal flames lighting upon the heads of the ones who were called. I tried, oh Lord how hard I tried to go along with what Billy was saying and to believe whatever he was saying, and when he got that glazed but somewhat sweaty look upon his face and asked for true believers to "Come Forward", I asked to be pushed up to the front, not because I had felt anything, but I because I wanted to see what would happen next.

What happened next looked very promising to me: dapper smart young men in crisp suits circulated amongst our select gathering and asked us, individually whether we believed in Jesus Christ and accepted him as our 'Savior'? I was very tempted to believe in Billy's pitch, especially if it meant moving a world with such pretty young men, but true to what my Dad had told me — not to fall for anything without checking it out a bit more first — I replied that I wasn't really able to 'believe' on the results of listening to one preacher. (Privately I saw Billy Graham more as a show doll with plenty of make-up on his face, and little if anything beneath that). One of the cute little men then opened his Bible and said, "Perhaps you'd like to read what The Bible says about unbelievers, John?" and there it all was, held out for me to read. Hot fiery nasty stuff which would happen to me if I didn't believe in the Bible. If there was any prefabricated self-contrived bubble about this meeting which I'd made up before attending, it had now burst, pretty young men and all. I suddenly found the entire affair highly amusing, and I couldn't stop myself from smirking. With words like "My God is much bigger than all that" I turned my back on Christianity, and to this day I have never really turned back.

Until Now. This little book, this painful writing out of the author's deep hurt and anguish, has caused me to think again. A little. The author spent 40 years of his life serving as an evangelical Christian, with many years spent in Africa, and there is no doubt that he was thoroughly sincere and that he achieved a lot of good, working as a missionary during that period in Uganda.

The pain started when the author's good wife got her contractions early and was rushed to hospital. She gave birth to twins, one of whom died and the remaining child, a little boy, was premature, his life held in the balance. So he was much cherished.  It was in his late teens, flanked by his heterosexual and highly supportive brother and sister, that he came out to his parents as gay, which was, understandably, a tremendous shock to his parents.

Finished!

At the conclusion of this short book I could not but be struck by the resonant similarities yet very marked differences in our two spiritual 'journeys', —as everyone seems to be calling their life stories these days— : The similarities were days spent in the tropics, but the author had a far worse time of it than me, as he witnessed more beatings and deaths than me as well as undergoing a severe bout of malaria. Mr Robert-John spent years as an evangelical spirit-led Christian who perhaps included hell fire threats in his eagerness to make conversions along with possible episodes of homophobia, made in the conviction (as he saw it) that homosexuals were an abomination in the eyes of God. Strangely enough, I had also decided by the time I reached puberty that I too was an abomination under the Christian ethic, but this belief had nothing to do with sex, as I didn't know at the time what the Christian stance on homosexuality was. I just remember believing that I was chaff because I was an unbeliever, or simply not good enough for Heaven. By the age of nine I had decided that because I didn't believe in the way The Bible wanted me to, I was chaff [Insert pic] . I was the useless husk that surrounds the good grain, and The Bible told me that I was going to be burned in the fire†.  I decided that there had to be a use for chaff. If it was no use to The Bible and its adherents then perhaps there was another religion which found a good use for chaff.

Paper and straw dolls came to mind, but I was sure that cleverer minds than mine would have more ingenious ideas.*
Years later I grew into the way of Hindoo-ism learning to forge a pathway through to Yoga and the East, and it wasn't long before I discovered the health benefits of bran. I then found a much bigger God than the bigoted bipolar trucculent brat of the Old Testament. He was unbelievably great, so great that he didn't live in some far off inaccessible corner, so hard to reach that so far the only two persons have made the trip: Jesus Christ and The Virgin Mary. He was so great that you couldn't even limit him to being inscribed with a name. Yet this bigger God was closer than we can imagine, 'closer to you than your jugular vein', to echo the Qu'rân (50:16).

My early truancy from the Christian Faith led me to the pathless path and I was often bruised and scratched by the thorns I encountered along the way. The author of this book was far more secure in the tenure of his faith. Yet the world in which he lived and moved and had his being was uprooted when his son came to him and his wife on Boxing Day 2005 and announced that he was gay. Prayers and therapy were not tried because the son had no intention of going along with all this evangelicism. The young man was flanked by his fully supportive heterosexual sister and brother when he came out to his parents, so Mum and Dad found themselves rather isolated.

SURPRISING OUTCOMES
I was surprised to learn that the outcome of the author's journey was that he became a reluctant atheist. I wasn't disappointed. I have no problem with atheism whatsoever and I find it an excellent position to start. Sometimes I wish I could be one myself, but I'd only feel more able to do that when I find someone who's able to explain to me what they mean by atheist and what they mean by God. And when I find a few definitions which match up.

The other surprise, to say it again, was that I found myself enjoying the book as much as I did. I was after all just taking a break from the spell which had been cast upon me by volume I of The Farseer Trilogy and I wanted to read something on the small side, but different in subject and mood. Certainly I didn't expect to get quite as deeply sucked into the author's cathartic story.

~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~
*In my maturer years, I learned that chaff can be turned into bricks for fuel; it can make a wonderful insulating material. Furthermore my doctor prescribes me little sealed sachets of chaff (ispaghula husk to mix with water and take after my meals. It keeps me nice and regular and I feel fighting fit. I just *knew* that chaff was a valuable commodity indeed).

† Matthew 3:12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will thoroughly cleanse his threshing floor. He will gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire

Our Gay Son ~ I Was Gripped

Our Gay Son: A Christian Father's Search for Truth by David Robert-John

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



  Tue 03 Jul 2012 17:43:26 BST>
I spent a day feeling stunned after the completion of The Assassin's Apprentice, followed by a day of shivers as I underwent withdrawal symptoms because the story had come to an end. The following day I pointed my quivering finger at The Royal Assassin and pressed "Buy Now" followed by "View Downloading Items" and as the cyberdrug infused its way into my system, the shaking stopped, my head cleared, and I was able to carry on with normal conversations and think about my next meal. After that, I left-clicked and selected "Remove from Device", fancying it was one of the notes I used to write to Father Christmas scrawled on tissue paper sucked up the chimney flue and making its way to the Cloud.


I felt unable to handle the events held in that shiny new volume today. I needed an interlude, a little break, a light visual to fill a corner of my hungry mind, but only a corner of it as I needed to increase my capacity for handling tension and pain before moving on to volume two.


17:43:50


Just over 50% of the way through. I'm finding it so honest, frank and open and I have rarely nodded and underlined as much as I have in this Kindle book. It surprises me. It delights me, and by that I mean it has my undivided attention. By 'delight' I don't mean enjoyment in the normal sense of the word, but I go with it. I suffer with the author's pain of what he must have undergone when his youngest son, whose life hung by a thread when he was very young, came out to his parents as gay.


Exactly why I am enjoying so much I find much harder to understand. I am not a Christian struggling with my sexual orientation and I haven't jettisoned Christianity because of its stance on homosexuality. I jettisoned most of it at about the age of twelve when I attended a Billy Graham meeting which our school took some pupils to see. I went through curiosity, because I wanted to see angels appearing, or Pentecostal flames lighting upon the heads of the ones who were called. I tried, oh Lord how hard I tried to go along with what Billy was saying and to believe whatever he was saying, and when he got that glazed but somewhat sweaty look upon his face and asked for true believers to "Come Forward", I asked to be pushed up to the front, not because I had felt anything, but I because I wanted to see what would happen next.


What happened next looked very promising to me: dapper smart young men in crisp suits circulated amongst our select gathering and asked us, individually whether we believed in Jesus Christ and accepted him as our 'Savior'? I was very tempted to believe in Billy's pitch, especially if it meant moving a world with such pretty young men, but true to what my Dad had told me — not to fall for anything without checking it out a bit more first — I replied that I wasn't really able to 'believe' on the results of listening to one preacher. (Privately I saw Billy Graham more as a show doll with plenty of make-up on his face, and little if anything beneath that). One of the cute little men then opened his Bible and said, "Perhaps you'd like to read what The Bible says about unbelievers, John?" and there it all was, held out for me to read. Hot fiery nasty stuff which would happen to me if I didn't believe in the Bible. If there was any prefabricated self-contrived bubble about this meeting which I'd made up before attending, it had now burst, pretty young men and all. I suddenly found the entire affair highly amusing, and I couldn't stop myself from smirking. With words like "My God is much bigger than all that" I turned my back on Christianity, and to this day I have never really turned back.


Until Now. This little book, this painful writing out of the author's deep hurt and anguish, has caused me to think again. A little. The author spent 40 years of his life serving as an evangelical Christian, with many years spent in Africa, and there is no doubt that he was thoroughly sincere and that he achieved a lot of good, working as a missionary during that period in Uganda.


The pain started when the author's good wife got her contractions early and was rushed to hospital. She gave birth to twins, one of whom died and the remaining child, a little boy, was premature, his life held in the balance. So he was much cherished.  It was in his late teens, flanked by his heterosexual and highly supportive brother and sister, that he came out to his parents as gay, which was, understandably, a tremendous shock to his parents.



  Finished!


At the conclusion of this short book I could not but be struck by the resonant similarities yet very marked differences in our two spiritual 'journeys', —as everyone seems to be calling their life stories these days— : The similarities were days spent in the tropics, but the author had a far worse time of it than me, as he witnessed more beatings and deaths than me as well as undergoing a severe bout of malaria. Mr Robert-John spent years as an evangelical spirit-led Christian who perhaps included hell fire threats in his eagerness to make conversions along with possible episodes of homophobia, made in the conviction (as he saw it) that homosexuals were an abomination in the eyes of God. Strangely enough, I had also decided by the time I reached puberty that I too was an abomination under the Christian ethic, but this belief had nothing to do with sex, as I didn't know at the time what the Christian stance on homosexuality was. I just remember believing that I was chaff because I was an unbeliever, or simply not good enough for Heaven. By the age of nine I had decided that because I didn't believe in the way The Bible wanted me to, I was chaff [Insert pic]. I was the useless husk that surrounds the good grain, and The Bible told me that I was going to be burned in the fire†.  I decided that there had to be a use for chaff. If it was no use to The Bible and its adherents then perhaps there was another religion which found a good use for chaff. Paper and straw dolls came to mind, but I was sure that cleverer minds than mine would have more ingenious ideas.*


Years later I grew into the way of Hindoo-ism learning to forge a pathway through to Yoga and the East, and it wasn't long before I discovered the health benefits of bran. I then found a much bigger God than the bigoted bipolar trucculent brat of the Old Testament. He was unbelievably great, so great that he didn't live in some far off inaccessible corner, so hard to reach that so far the only two persons have made the trip: Jesus Christ and The Virgin Mary. He was so great that you couldn't even limit him to being inscribed with a name. Yet this bigger God was closer than we can imagine, 'closer to you than your jugular vein', to echo the Qu'rân (50:16).


My early truancy from the Christian Faith led me to the pathless path and I was often bruised and scratched by the thorns I encountered along the way. The author of this book was far more secure in the tenure of his faith. Yet the world in which he lived and moved and had his being was uprooted when his son came to him and his wife on Boxing Day 2005 and announced that he was gay. Prayers and therapy were not tried because the son had no intention of going along with all this evangelicism. The young man was flanked by his fully supportive heterosexual sister and brother when he came out to his parents, so Mum and Dad found themselves rather isolated.



  SURPRISING OUTCOMES
I was surprised to learn that the outcome of the author's journey was that he became a reluctant atheist. I wasn't disappointed. I have no problem with atheism whatsoever and I find it an excellent position to start. Sometimes I wish I could be one myself, but I'd only feel more able to do that when I find someone who's able to explain to me what they mean by atheist and what they mean by God. And when I find a few definitions which match up.


The other surprise, to say it again, was that I found myself enjoying the book as much as I did. I was after all just taking a break from the spell which had been cast upon me by volume I of The Farseer Trilogy and I wanted to read something on the small side, but different in subject and mood. Certainly I didn't expect to get quite as deeply sucked into the author's cathartic story.


~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~
*In my maturer years, I learned that chaff can be turned into bricks for fuel; it can make a wonderful insulating material. Furthermore my doctor prescribes me little sealed sachets of chaff (ispaghula husk to mix with water and take after my meals. It keeps me nice and regular and I feel fighting fit. I just *knew* that chaff was a valuable commodity indeed).


† Matthew 3:12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will thoroughly cleanse his threshing floor. He will gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire





View all my reviews

Mr Oliver, Will You Offer Some More?

I know that people think they know what you're doing, Mr Jamie Oliver, and I'm pretty sure that you think think you know it too, but I'm not sure that you've ever sat to one side to think about what you're doing with food and what you feed into the minds of people who follow you. Yesterday morning I saw you with a knob of celeriac in your hand. I believe you were making some kind of salad with it. You said (words to the effect) that it was too much bother to peel it finely, so you took a sharp knife to cut the skin off in slices, in the process leaving convex lenses of celeriac flesh lying on your work bench, all neatly coated with skin.

As a child, Mr Oliver, I can remember my mother opening the pedal bin to inspect the potato, apple and carrot peelings. Nothing was usually said, but if she found more than two or three  slitherets of vegetable flesh adhering to the skin, she would summon the scullery maid, and I have only a brief memory of one girl who made the same mistake twice. A shame, because she had such a lovely character.

We were brought up  to be very conscious of food waste, the value of food, and the efforts which people make to bring it to our table. Mr Oliver and his ilk however, seem to trivialise it, belittling the food which brings them light and life, thereby turning the entire subject into a comedy. He likes to whack it, bung it, wham it, sling it and then 'drizzle' oils and dressings over his creations. He draws twirls, twists and shapes it upon his plate and presents it more as a picture than a plate of honest tucker to fill you up and send you on your way.

Whether you want to hear it or not, he effuses about all the spices and flavours intermingling in his marinades, whereas in my day the judgment of the food was left to us. We were plate-fed dishes of food which we could spoon or fork into our mouths as we wished, at our own rate. As we ate our meal, cook would not also indoctrinate us with vacuous notions about what was going on within the dish before we ourselves had a chance to decide what we thought of the meal, and whether we wanted to know more. Satisfied silence gave her all the comfort she required.

Which would you rather have? To be presented with a dainty little picture on a plate and fed a lecture about what you might discover if you ate it, or given the meal to enjoy at your own rate, while cook stepped back to see if you were enjoying it? Supposing the eater were to show delight and end up asking you what had gone into it, and how you prepared it? Did you make the soup this morning, or did you do it the previous evening and left it all gel together in the fridge overnight? Did you fry the spices first and then grind them, or perhaps you ground them briefly before crushing them  between stones before frying? Perhaps you put them in a muslin cloth and twisted them like washing from a boiler tub, squeezing out the juices between the pores of the cloth? And if you did that, what did you do with the remaining pithy pulp?

    Mr Jamie and his kith and kin are young, too young perhaps, to remember hardship, scarcity and need. Yet as surely as the sun will rise upon the morrow morn, so also will those hard times visit us again. I wonder if Mr Oliver, with his slapdash sling-it, bung-it, whack it attitude, has made plans for those times, if not for his own sake, at least for the sake of others whom he feeds.

Who Vadis, Mr Rathbone?

Inherited Danger by Brian Rathbone

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I keep on thinking that there must be different ways to write a review Of late I've  been reading a slew of books, then taking a ½ day breather before moving onto the next one. Reading interests me much more than the chore of writing about what I've read and besides, I think a book's spell lasts better if you don't keep on about it too much. You want to bask and submit yourself without communicating it all. So I've been reading the first volume of trilogies, and then leaving them well alone. After a while I'll recap on what I've read before asking myself what I thought about it all in retrospect, and whether I want to read further.

One such first volume was The Call of the Herald by Brian Rathbone.

After The Call of The Herald had been finished I thought well yes, It's OKay. The question for me, of course, is will it stay in mind? And that is something which only time can tell. Sometimes you really enjoy a volume "at the time", but in retrospect it can go flat. Sometimes it does well in holding itself together as time progresses, and sometimes is grows and grows, until the ineluctable force pulls you back to itself again.

The Call of the Herald didn't do that for me, but I did enjoy the character of Catrin, the dirty grubby farm-girl who got herself into trouble with the Mr Bumble of a teacher; a nasty boy makes trouble, and Catrin is blamed and expelled from school where she ends up getting herself into even more bother. Plastered in horse-shit, things are never Catrin's fault, but she always gets the blame. However her foot may always be planted in the squish of the barn yard, but her spirit connects with the stars when she finds that the presence of comets triggers magnificent powers within her being, slapping down injustice and righting wrongs.

  

In Inherited Danger, the story continues. It's taken new twists and turns and our fondness for most of the characters in the first volume usually deepens. One thing however which annoys me in Rathbone (or indeed any writer) is when a negative factor occurs at the beginning of a sentence and the problem is all wrapped up by the time it's reached the full stop. "He didn't appear happy about her outbursts, but he supported her nonetheless." is a good example of this. After all, at this stage we are used to wildcat Catrin's explosive bursts of temper, and we're used to the presence of moderating Benjin too. It could have been reworked a whole load better, I feel. Faux pas-ey things like "You're eyes are better than mine" show a sloppiness and lack of care, and I had the distinct feeling that the author was concentrating too much on the feedback from his audience and being wowed by people "liking" stuff than in attending to the material he was writing.

   

This, I feel, is the fork in the road for Mr Rathbone. To the left is the road which follows the fans, and to the right is the desire to devote himself to the characters in the story, and to let the narrative breathe through the pores of his skin. I feel the author has strolled a few yards into the left way and is being looked after well there. He's fed and rested and he has good company. On the other path the terrain is bleaker and full of loneliness if he selects the right-hand path, where the number of fickle fans has thinned out. This is where the ones remaining assess the situation, as they watch the writing mature and it's in this group that the author may have future supporters. The mettle of the readers is tested here, and the author needs to try to avoid sentences where a problem is introduced at the beginning and ended with the full stop. He also needs to develop some of his characters a little more before he throws them away, but I think and hope he can do it.

    Having read volumes I and II for free, I'm very happy to go to pay for the third because I want to find out what happens through the actions of our heroine  Catrin and I could easily fall in love with the newly-named spirit called Prios; whether her impulses land her back in horse manure she grew up shovelling, or if the same dung will be used to make enough bio-gas to mount her on her steed and gallop with authority into the fray remains to be seen.

NB: Under the old system, this book might have acquired four stars. Under the new it's three, and it's just about clambered up to that position. The reason for this is that it's been cast into shadow by another book, in the same genre which whispered its way onto my reading device, which towers like a colossus over my life. The more I enter its world, the more two-dimensional the present one seems to be. The Dawning of Power series needs to look to its laurels.

View all my reviews

My First Dip into Dame Stella

Rip Tide by Stella Rimington

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

74% of the way through.

It’s a thriller.

It’s crisply and reasonably well-written, if not brilliant. However, the main thing is that it’s holding my interest. It’s held me most of the way, but it did go slightly soggy at about the 60% mark. However, if this were a cake, the middle would be ever-so-slightly soft. It had faint memories of being allowed to scrape one’s finger round the inside of Mum’s mixing bowl before the placed the cake in the oven. In the days when it was OK to do that, even though you were dutifully told not to do it because it might give you worms. Things never were the same after Edwina Currie told us we were no longer allowed to enjoy eating our soft-boiled eggs.

At three quarters of the way through, Miss Rimington’s cake is packed with interest, soft fruit on the inside, yet the almonds are baked to perfection.

If this story were a real cake, or even a good meal, I’d be thinking that I could happily go on doing this for ever, so it’s 5-stars up to here, for no particular reason which is usually the best reason I can give for enjoying anything. Unfortunately though, novels like cakes and tuck-in meals can leave you with the feeling that you never want it to darken your doorstep again.

I’d been putting off the reading of this because I have always felt that Ms Rimington is far too big for her boots, but I now feel that her boots may have grown. Her cake has the contrasts in it which I like. Sweet and sour, savoury and mellow, and it manages to achieve this without adding to much fat, so it’s great for my figure too. By this I mean the tensions between Liz Carlyle and the MI6 man Geoffrey Fane, whom I could quite happily floor even when I’m in a good mood. The Muslim—Western tensions work well for me too because there’s also a good dollop of affection, love and admiration.

It’s time to stop now, and read the book to the end now that I’ve taken my breather. After finishing it I’ll look back to see if my thoughts are still the same. Ms Rimington’s four stars are assured. I wonder whether she can hold on to her five?

24/05/12   06:18:10 AM

     It’s finished. Certainly it was very exciting, and it held my interest pretty well. It only went slightly gooey in the centre and I was nowhere near in any danger of getting bogged down (For example, I’ve been stuck somewhere in the middle of Wilkie Collins’ The Black Robe for far longer than I care to remember.) For sure this is not Victorian Stodge where people worry themselves sick purportedly over the issue of conversion to Roman Catholicism. Certainly I feel I’ve become re-attached to reading a good thriller.

     I can’t stand straggly loose ends to a story, and for sure Ms Rimington has done a good job of tidying up the narrative with string, knots and ribbons, and that for me is where I slightly whinge the other way. It’s all a bit too neat and tidy, parcelled up and packed away and somehow I really can’t buy such a pretty ending when the plot involves al-Qaeda.

About 80% through any novel I begin to feel sad that the world in which I’d made my home is coming to an end. It’s here that I begin to cast my eye around to see what’s going to be next.  I’ve picked on one of those books which gives a warning that if I read it it will change my life forever. I could say the same thing about reaching the end of any day.

But to return to Rip Tide: yes, it’s certainly enjoyable, even if a bit tidy and prissy. It didn’t quite live up to to my expectations, but there again, most books don’t. It’s OK, and I’d always be ready to dive into another of Liz Carlyle’s adventures.

View all my reviews

Thrilling Creepiness

The Revelations by Alex Preston

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Thrilling Creepiness

I am not at all comfortable in the company of fundamentalist Christians, but I like to feel I’ve built up a degrees of tolerance over my many decades of exposure. Yet Cults and small extreme groups of religious bigots can easily drive me right to the edge of sanity. Small groups of controlling individuals give me the creeps, and the main characters in this book are just that: Smug, self-satisfied, hypocritical jerks who preach the wonderful help they’re giving children in Africa with their front side. Meanwhile their backsides are sucking up to powerful bankers and  business city gents who are spreading out into America whilst developing a brand name with which to market themselves. Backing the hypocrites whose monetarist and profit-driven policies generate the poverty they set out to ‘heal’.

Every time I’ve read a novel, up to now, I’ve found a character to identify with, but in this story I found it almost impossible to like any of the characters; and yet right through to the last lap I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

So without further ado, let’s head into the questionnaire:

 

  Before & During
 

Did it linger or stay in Mind?

            — Yes. I woke up at 3.30 a.m. Wondering what was going to happen next.

Dreaming About It?

            — Probably, because of my previous answer.

"Got-to-Get-Backness"?

            — Yes of course. What a Question.

Did it Tweak Deep Past Memories?

            — Yes. Powerful memories surfaced of Billy Graham’s pretty little well-dressed young men threatening me with Hell-Fire. Bible passages underlined in red ink. All at the tender age of 12.

Didn't-want-it-to-End-ability?

            — I wanted it to end in the sense I wanted to see this Cult collapse.

Glad you read it?

            — Definitely. I had a whale of a time with it.

Did it go "soggy" in the middle?

            — Only to the extent of being a French Omelette. The centre didn’t dribble.

Would I want to read another one of his?

            — Definitely.

If it was eBook, was it it well formatted? Were there chapter divisions?

            — Yes. It was all very good. All in all, I was thoroughly enjoying myself, convinced that we were up for a 5-star job.

 

  After
 

Oh dear. And now for the Dreaded Ending and for the general after-taste left in my mouth by the story.

Credibility:

Very credible; highly and frighteningly readable at first, and intriguing too. And there were some really nice turns of phrase. I was so impatient  to find out how it would end. Yet the ending was terribly, terribly crass. I could hardly believe that after the story and the build-up, such a hum-drum ending would be pulled in. OK, the story itself wasn’t entirely believable. I see that now, but within the parameters of relative belief I’d put up some scaffolding which I was getting used to, and I quite liked clambering around between its poles. It wasn’t tailor-made for my mental architecture, but it wasn’t a bad fit either.

    Yet what happened with The Police? They were sniffing along the trail left by mobile phone messages nicely and it was just a matter of time before the thing reached the only conclusion it could logically reach, but that didn’t matter for me, because I was intrigued to see how the author was going to handle it. The story is, as far as I’m aware, set in the United Kingdom, and we know that The Police are having to make cuts. But we don’t expect that the serge of their uniforms is going wear so thin  that it’s not just fraying, but you can see strands of wool beginning to untwirl in your hands.  Oh dear! I never thought I’d see the day when I could reach out and poke a hole in the fabric of my childhood fantasies.

    And the dog? Oh no. The dog called Darwin was dumped and left for the team of characters to manage. It was passed from place to place and hand to hand. The characters remembered to put it out for a poo and wee, but if in a town no mention was made of doggie bags or bins; nobody had any dog food so it was just thrown slices of ham, or whatever it was the  characters were eating, apparently quite content with whatever it was given. Incredibly, Darwin never suffered from the runs or constipation. That’s two books I’ve read this week, each with a token dog whose behaviour was in danger of causing the tale completely to unravel.

    If a book’s standing is in the balance, a dog can make or break a story, or rather cause the scales to come down either way, but I don’t think that can be said to have happened here. After a splendid start and page-turning middle the main characters — never stronger than card-board cut-outs in the first place — thinned down from grove- to tissue-paper thin, becoming so transparent it was empty space.

View all my reviews