I tend to underestimate how much time and effort goes into travel, though it's definitely worth it in the end. It's not only the time spent travelling: the week before you go is full of preparations, and the week after you return full of tasks you've put off while you were away, plus you have to readjust to everyday life. All of which is a roundabout excuse for me not having blogged for nearly a month.
Not feeling very analytical, I've decided to simply do a book version of the handy "films I saw in-flight" blogs one and two I resorted to in 2018. My travels didn't take me very far this time, so there were no in-flight films, but I did get some reading done. These novels passed the travel test of providing entertainment on airports, planes, trains, hotel rooms and even one or two buses – though some with more distinction than others.
Oxford Blood by Antonia Fraser I got this classic whodunnit from the Eighties for my birthday as 1) it takes place in the atmospheric surroundings of Oxford colleges 2) it's written by Fraser, a popular historian and thus a tried-and-tested author. As it turns out, it's more concerned with the English upper-crust than academic Oxford, but I didn't mind this, as I'm always up for stately-home-based intrigues.
Fraser writes elegantly if a little distantly; I never felt I got under the skin of her glamorous TV journalist sleuth Jemima Shore. However, the remoteness had its advantages. Fraser keeping her distance to her heroine meant that Jemima didn't come across as too annoyingly opinionated, which could otherwise easily have been the case. It is sometimes hard to know the level of irony in the narrative's statements, though, or how much Jemima really cares for people close to her.
The Last Word by Elly Griffiths Griffiths is an example of an author who can sometimes make her opinions a little too plain through her characters – always allowing for the possibility that the opinions in question might just be the character's and not the author's. Having said that, I've found all the Griffiths novels I've read to be absolute page turners. I gobbled up this one, which features a likeable group of amateur sleuths last seen in the equally good The Post-Script Murders and, to a lesser extent, Detective Harbinder Kaur.
Kaur has been the police presence in all the novels I've read so far by Griffiths, and I find her a little too chippy, though her very crankiness does make her less of a box-ticking exercise (she's a Sikh and a lesbian). As other characters apart from Kaur were also quite chippy in her latest outing Bleeding Heart Yard, I enjoyed that novel the least of the ones in the Kaur series. Therefore, I was happy with the amateur sleuth trio once again taking centre stage. Old-age pensioner Edwin, Amazonian Ukrainian carer and entrepreneur Natalka and her ex-monk boyfriend Benedict tend to be less judgemental than Kaur, if also a little more gullible. I also very much enjoy the theme of writers and writing which runs through most of the Kaur mysteries; this one takes place partly at a suitably creepy writers' retreat.
Last Tango in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce I bought this one locally because I was in Wales and had dim recollections of quite liking the first instalment in the series. Of the novels I read, this was the one that didn't quite live up to my expectations, though it saw me through a two-hour train journey and an equally long flight quite nicely.
As a pastiche of quip-filled PI yarns à la Raymond Chandler, set in an outlandish alternative-reality version of Wales where loose women wear stovepipe hats and gangster druids are in a turf war with Meals-on-Wheels matrons, Last Tango sounds like a comic read in the same inventive vein as Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels. But though there were many neat conceits in Last Tango and a few quips, it wasn't as funny as I'd thought it would be. Sometimes I didn't know if it was going for all-out seriousness or merely parodying philosophical passages in Chandler and others, but I believe it was mostly the former. The novel had a slightly melancholy air in spite of the absurdities going on which, if you're a true Chandler fan, you may see as a plus. I was expecting more high-jinks, though.
