Ballet Shoes: The first "shoe" book, and the best (probably)

What to do when a book post is due, but you go through your self-indulgence reads much faster than your slightly more ambitious ones? Try to write about the self-indulgence reads, of course – not that that's necessarily easy, especially when it's a classic like Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes (yes, her name is spelled like that: Kathleen in You've Got Mail got it right).

Recently, I tore through Streatfeild books like a maniac, starting with a reread of the Gemma books (sadly out of print) and then moving on to other old favourites. Ballet Shoes was the book that started it all, and the reason a number of Streatfeild books were reissued with shoe-related names like Theatre Shoes (originally Curtain Up), Skating Shoes (aka White Boots) and my favourite marketing tour de force, Travelling Shoes (for Apple Bough). As far as I can make out, this ploy started during Streatfeild's life time, so she must have approved, though I can imagine her being quite sardonic about it.

Anyway, it only makes sense to profit from the goodwill of Ballet Shoes. It is a classic for a reason, and sets the tone for many of Streatfeild's subsequent books that deal with similar themes and, to some extent, characters. Nana in Ballet Shoes is pretty much the same character as Hannah in Curtain Up/Theatre Shoes and Nana in White Boots/Skating Shoes, though they are supposed to be different women, and as late as in the Gemma books Lydia Robinson's single-mindedness when it comes to her dancing is reminiscent of Posy Fossil's.

Ballet Shoes, then, is very much the place to start if you want to try Streatfeild. Rereading it as an adult, I'm gripped by it in the same way as when I first read it (or rather, had it read to me) as a child. Or perhaps not precisely in the same way: you dive into a fictional world more whole-heartedly as a kid, while your adult self can't help being a little more analytical. Not necessarily more critical, mind you, but instead of just accepting the magic you nod and think "that was pretty well thought-out".

When I was a child, the lives of the three adopted Fossil girls with their different talents seemed like sheer wish-fulfilment. What I notice as an adult is that these kids work hard. There's precious little leisure in their lives even before they start earning money, at the age of twelve. The genteel poverty also hits home a little more forcefully. As a child, I was apt to groan "what, again?" when new audition frocks were needed; it didn't seem so many chapters ago that Pauline got a new one and everyone had to be ingenious in order to drum up the money. What I'd plain forgotten was that all of poor Petrova's birthday money is spent on those new frocks – and she doesn't even like stage work.

Dare I say it, the three girls seem to work quite a bit harder than their guardian Sylvia aka Garnie who, though very sweet, is rather a passive character. Yes, she runs a boarding house, but she is helped by a cook and maid and (the unpaid) Nana. As for any decision-making, it's up to Nana and the incredibly helpful boarders. I understand better now why Sylvia feels guilty about accepting the girls' money, and why she was saddled with a chest complaint in the TV adaptation of Ballet Shoes, in order to make her more in need of looking after.

Luckily Pauline and Posy Fossil take to acting and dancing respectively and consequently don't mind the hard work. The arrangement is toughest for engine-obsessed Petrova, who doesn't enjoy her time at The Children's Academy for Dancing and Stage Training run by Madame Fidolia one bit. Here, the old childhood magic holds, though, because I still think Madame Fidolia's Academy sounds absolutely wonderful and can't really pity someone for "having" to go there. 

Both in Ballet Shoes and in Curtain Up, the conceit that the child protagonists "have" to enlist at the Academy in order to make money grates a little. Yes, in both cases, two-thirds of the enlisted children soon feel at home, but they're not allowed to join simply because they want to go on the stage. It riled me as a stage-struck child and it riles me still. (I may get back to Curtain Up in the future; I think I could fill half a blog post with ranting about how the clearly talented and imaginative Mark gives up stage life for nonsensical reasons, encouraged by his sister who should know better.)

Is Ballet Shoes Streatfeild's best book? That's debatable: after all, it is her debut book, and in later books her trademark humour and Streatfeildisms are more in evidence (candidly revealing what the characters actually think rather than what they're supposed to think). White Boots is in many ways a more complex story, what with all the intricate plots the grown-up characters think of in order to keep the friendship of Lalla and Harriet intact. However, you can't beat Ballet Shoes when it comes to the atmosphere and set-up: whether in the Academy or in the Fossils' ramshackle home, this is a fictional world you want to spend lots of time in.                    

Apologies to Nora Roberts

A good while back (in 2017, which is a horrifying nine years ago) I was pretty harsh on Nora Roberts, on the basis on The Next Always which I tried to read and then gave up on. I owe her an apology, because since then I've enjoyed plenty of her novels – but as audiobooks, not as paperbacks.

Roberts is a good example of the differences between an audiobook and a paper novel. Things you like listening to would not necessarily thrill you as reading matter, and vice versa. The typical Nora Roberts novel is, in my view, ideal for the audiobook medium. I had an especially good time with her latest Lost Bride trilogy: Inheritance, The Mirror and The Seven Rings. The plot in brief: Sonya, a feisty web designer who's just thrown out her cheating fiancé and quit her job, inherits a lovely Maine mansion from an unknown uncle. It is full of friendly ghosts, plus one hostile one. Sonya has to figure out how to break a curse in order to help the friendly ghosts to move on, as clues are conveniently drip-fed to her.

Plot-wise, the whole story could easily be condensed into one volume. But as an audiobook listener, I appreciated the hanging-out-with-characters scenes which annoyed me in The Next Always. I wallowed in the cosiness of it all while I did my chores and Sonya, her best friend Cleo and their respective love interests cooked and ate good food, went for outings, acquired charming pets, interacted with the friendly ghosts (that was my favourite part) and were successful at their jobs. 

Would all this have bored me had I read it? Possibly. The Lost Bride trilogy did not try to interest me in the minutiae of renovating a hotel or helping a kid in the bathroom, so I think I would have liked it more than The Next Always even on paper. What I am sure of is that I got more enjoyment from the trilogy as listening matter than I would have got in book form.

When I read, I like the story to have some momentum and not get too stuck in one particular place, however appealing that place may be. In an audiobook, on the other hand, I don't mind dwelling for a little longer than necessary story-wise in a pleasant fictional world. So the attractive settings and friendly banter of Roberts's novels work very well. The sex scenes are a bit of a trial for me, as I don't much care for the Rugged Hero type that Roberts's heroines fancy, but that's a minor quibble.

Conversely, there are gripping reads that work less well as audiobooks. If a novel has a huge cast of characters, for instance, it's a disadvantage for an audiobook as you can't just flip back the pages to remind yourself who X was, then easily find where you were again. If an author has a certain style you're particularly partial to, it can fly by you too easily while you're distracted by making the bed or cleaning the kitchen. For this reason, I only occasionally listen to my downloaded audiobook version of A Tale of Two Cities, although it is very nicely read by Martin Jarvis. It would be interesting to find out if P.G. Wodehouse works in the audiobook medium or not: I suspect not, but I could be wrong.

So, sorry, Nora, for not finding the best way to enjoy your novels sooner. If I can find something equally feel-good in paper form as Blue Dahlia (the Roberts novel I'm currently listening to) to get me through January, I'll be very lucky.

Very light reading indeed – Regency and meta romances

Sometimes, all you have the energy for is a good, light-hearted romance, preferably without those awkward "I'm serious, me" sections where the heroine Learns About Herself or has to get over some family drama of the decidedly-not-fun-kind. But where to find a romance that is not too embarrassing? I no longer automatically reach for the latest Sophie Kinsella, as she seems to be leaning a bit too much into lesson-learning nowadays. Emily Henry is a find, but she can hardly be expected to turn out more than one book per year. So what else does the genre have to offer?

After a newspaper article recommended Sophie Irwin's A Lady's Guide to Fortune-Hunting, I bought it but was unconvinced by the first couple of paragraphs. Luckily, I gave the novel another try this year, and found that it improved considerably after the first chapter or so. This is classic Regency romance fare: you may not be too surprised by how things turn out, but it's highly enjoyable all the same, and not too anachronistic-seeming. I've stumbled on some shockers in this genre, which were essentially just modern chick-lit in fancy dress, but this feels if not genuinely 19th-century, at least genuinely Georgette Heyerish. 

Also, it's uncommonly clean for a modern romance novel, which is a plus in my book. Honestly, there are only so many sex scenes using "of him" and "of her" phrases ("the scent of him", "the wondrous touch of her") and featuring supernaturally patient guys I can take. More power to Irwin for sparing us them. Her second book A Lady's Guide to Scandal is just as good, even a touch better when it comes to the plotting (at one time, I was genuinely unsure of where the story was going), but the obvious play for the Bridgerton audience bothered me a little.

Elsewhere, Emily Henry seems to have started a new trend: the meta romance. I hesitated before buying Katie Holt's Not in My Book as the plot seemed uncomfortably close to the one in Henry's Beach Read. But though it features a(n aspiring) romance writer and a broody love interest who's into literary fiction and who criticises her in creative writing classes, it's sufficiently its own thing not to feel like a rip-off. The heroine is cute, the hero bearable and "enemies to lovers" a very solid trope. 

I can't help it, I tend to enjoy romances about writing romances – and more often than not I prefer the book-related stuff to the romantic scenes, which was also the case here. Yes, there are sex scenes this time around, with the patient-guy factor very much in evidence, but I'll say this for Holt: when it comes to these scenes, she manages them better than Emily Henry, though Henry has the edge in other respects. Ideal for travelling.

The meta romance sub-genre has its pitfalls, though. Even though I had a good enough time with Cristina Wolf's How to Write a Rom-Com, I had expected more from the premise – jaded publishing assistant sent to a small town to gather ideas for a romance writer, though she really doesn't enjoy small-town romances – than I got. Pointing out that something is a trope doesn't make it less of  a trope in your own story if you don't put a different spin on it. Here, the heroine succumbs to the charms of the small town and the small-town hunk way too easily, plus there's a Liar Revealed story baked in, and that's not a favourite plot-line of mine. But hey, I read the novel. I'm by no means tired of meta romances yet. 

On a roll with books, until...

Judging from my latest blog posts, one would have thought that I'd not done much reading lately. In fact, I was doing pretty well with my reading until not so long ago – I've just been too lazy to blog about it. I finally read books which I actually owned instead of just buying new ones, got in some ambitious reads and finished books I had previously discarded after only having read a few pages. For a while, I was feeling pretty smug, and then the inevitable happened: I got stuck.

The problem is not when you don't get any further with one book, but when they pile up. My first mistake was when I vaingloriously decided that it was finally time to read Sketches by Boz from cover to cover. It's the only major work by Dickens I've only read a fraction of, and that simply wouldn't do. Not for the first time, though, I soon came to a halt, and not by any means because the book is bad or un-Dickensian. There are a lot of humorous descriptions to make one chuckle. The problem is that because of the genre, the sketches are mostly just that: descriptions, with little dialogue or story. With Dickens, I want human drama, preferably with a lot of cutting lines by villains and suchlike. I can stand descriptive parts of his novels because they're so brilliantly written and often funny, but without a plot to hook me I find even the wittiest tableau of a London street hard going.

All right, then, so maybe I could postpone Sketches by Boz a bit longer and read it more piecemeal. But there were other substantial books I could try. I looked forward to Kept by D.J. Taylor, clearly as Neo-Victorian as they come. It was a bit hefty – which is only natural when you want to emulate the Victorian novel – so maybe not ideal to lug to work for my lunch break. My plan was this: at home, I would read Kept, and at work I would dip into The New Penguin Book of American Short Stories. Ambitious, yes, but I could take it: just look at how easily I got into Wuthering Heights a couple of months ago!

You can guess what happened next. I never knew Yanks could be such a downcast lot. Nothing wrong with the writing, it was just so depressing. After four short stories, I started on the Nathaniel Hawthorne one, stopped after about a page with a disgruntled "OK, so she's totally a witch" and set this volume aside as well.

As for Kept, it's annoyingly well-written, which means I have no excuse to give up on it until after a mandatory hundred pages. But the plot lines so far just don't interest me. The art of poaching wild birds' eggs? Some ghastly madwoman locked up somewhere? I need to persevere, but what did I find when I last tried? A lengthy description of a London street!

What conclusions can be drawn? Nothing most readers don't already know: that it's darned hard to find a reading strategy which allows you to virtuously work your way through the piles of books you've bought without getting stuck somewhere. When I was younger, I tried the tactic of alternating between Ambitious Book Projects and self-indulgence reads, but that put too much pressure on the latter and involved far too many ABPs for my liking. 

This time around, I went into a regular self-indulgence bonanza. I re-read the last three Thursday Next novels (I've had my doubts about some of Jasper Fforde's latest novels, but the Thursday Next ones really are brilliant); devoured, for the first time since childhood, an old Swedish translation of Betty Cavanna's A Touch of Magic, a delicious example of having your cake and eating it when it comes to historical fiction (you're invited to tut-tut over the frivolous Shippen girls while at the same time revelling in the drama of balls and suitors); and finally tucked into a Young Adult novel irresistibly called Do You Ship It? I wasn't sure at first, but yes, I did.

Will all this self-indulgence reading give me strength to start up with slightly heavier stuff again?  I've started on The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden, but the jury's still out. Pros: if I know Arden, there will be folklore elements and possibly a villain in the works. Cons: death, disaster and World War One.

Neo-Victorian or just set in Victorian times?

Once again, a thorough analysis of why Dungeons and Dragons – Honor Among Thieves is so entertaining proves too challenging (look, just take it from me, it's a fun film). So once again I resort to books, more specifically two historical novels I've recently finished, both coincidentally set in Victorian England.

Or not so coincidentally, perhaps. It's no secret I'm a sucker for this time period as a fictional setting. As some sort of hook on which to hang my reflections, I'll try to look at whether these two novels are "neo-Victorian" or not.

I only became aware of the term neo-Victorian fairly recently, after having unknowingly been a fan of it for years. Definitions I've randomly come across while googling are "contemporary fiction that employs Victorian settings and/or styles to self-reflexively invoke the Victorian era for the present" and "creative narrative works set in the Victorian period, but written, interpreted or reproduced by more contemporary artists". So, a few of my favourite things, in other words. 

If I understand the term correctly, though, it doesn't merely refer to contemporary fictional works set in the Victorian era. It implies a fascination for and engagement with "real" Victorian fiction. James Benmore's Dodger trilogy and Fingersmith by Sarah Waters are clearly neo-Victorian. I've also heard novels like The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield being described as neo-Victorian, in spite of not being set in the period, simply because of their Victorian vibe.

So can a historical novel be set in Victorian England and yet not be neo-Victorian? I'd say yes – and I'd also claim that The Other Side of Mrs Wood by Lucy Barker is a pretty good example. It's set in 1870s London and features a famous medium, Mrs Wood, who is afraid her act is getting stale and as a means to staying relevant takes on a young, pretty protegée. Eventually, though, the girl turns out to be a rival rather than a help.

I liked the novel for its fascinating dive into the world of mediums and its new approach to why anyone half-decent would attempt such work knowing she's a fraud. Mrs Wood is well aware that she doesn't really commune with spirits, but she sees her job as consoling the grief-stricken – a sort of bereavement counselling – with some harmless tricks thrown in to keep the punters happy (and the cash flowing). She firmly draws the line at "full-spirit manifestations" which she considers too exploitative. The new girl has no such scruples. It's a point of view, though more than a little doubtful – can it ever be OK to pretend you're talking to a dear friend's dead twin brother in order to comfort him? And what if you're found out?

On the down side, I thought the book took a little too much time on each storybeat and was too generous with detailed descriptions when I just wanted it to get on with the story. Personally, I'd also have liked some genuine spookiness. The mediums in Mrs Wood never get anywhere close to having a real ghostly encounter. I prefer medium stories with a hint of the supernatural, a "what-if-there's-something-in-it-after-all" element. But that's just me.

The reason I wouldn't call the The Other Side of Mrs Wood neo-Victorian is that there are no references to the classic Victorian novel, and it mainly appears to be set in the 1870s because that's when people were crazy about mediums. The Secrets of Hartwood Hall by Katie Lumsden is another matter. The author sets out her stall right away in her bio: "Katie Lumsden read Jane Eyre at the age of thirteen and never looked back." Neo-Victorianism is afoot.

The novel delivers on its promise: there are clear echoes of Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the plot. The characters themselves are fond of (to them) contemporary literature and read novels by Dickens and others, often when it's thematically relevant. But of course it's not the same story as Jane Eyre. Its heroine, Margaret Lennox, may be a governess, but she has other ideas of what constitutes happiness than Jane.

Lumsden, like Barker, pulls off getting the reader engaged in her protagonist. Margaret is likeable (most of the time) and her affection for Louis, the boy she's teaching, is especially touching. I found Hartwood Hall a very pleasant read and downright page-turning as it neared its climax. The conclusion, though, was a little disappointing, with the "neo" in neo-Victorian coming to the forefront. You could see contemporary preoccupations shining through even earlier. The villains of the tale are Oppressive Husbands and Margaret's love interest is a gentle gardener, younger than her and socially beneath her, an anti-Rochester if you will. He's sweet and all, but I caught myself thinking rebelliously: "Does he have to be such a beta male"?

The novel's twists, while not being exactly what I thought they would be, felt less like "wow, what a rug pull" and more like "OK, so we're doing this". What with the implied praise of "found family" (not that the term is used outright) at the end, I found the modern pieties a little trying, even if they're by no means objectionable in themselves. No matter. I had a good time, and I'll look out for Lumsden's (hopefully also neo-Victorian) next novel.

Novels that passed the travel test

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.

Jazzy Paris and not so jazzy married life

Sometimes, when you don't get a hundred percent into a novel, it's only fair to proclaim: "It's not you, it's me". Why on earth would someone without a solid interest in the home life of Ernest Hemingway (in this case me) read a book on Hemingway's first wife?

My excuse is a weak one: I was drawn to the title. I found Paula McLain's novel The Paris Wife, published as far back as 2011, in a well-stocked bookstore, remembered vaguely that it was well thought of, and bought it. The blurb promised that the setting would be "glamorous Jazz Age Paris", and that sounded exciting. It would also, I reasoned, be a way to learn a little more about an author I haven't read, though I really should have done. Although there's no language barrier to speak of, I'm scandalously ignorant about American classics. It will be remedied at some point, at least in Hemingway's case (and when it happens I'll be able to get at least one Nobel Prize-winner blog post out of it).

Is it a disadvantage to be pig-ignorant about Hemingway when you read this novel? At first I thought so, and felt slightly guilty for attempting it. It's not that I don't get why it was favourably received. McLain fights the corner of her protagonist, Hadley Richardson, very commendably and is good at showing, not telling. 

We're shown, not told, that Hadley is no victim but quite tough. She survives a bleak upbringing with some self-worth still intact; she can knock back liquor with the best (and worst) of them; she enjoys the bullfights her husband's obsessed with and isn't the least bit squeamish; she's physically strong and can even cross the Alps wearing the wrong kind of shoes. We're shown, not told, of Hemingway's faults, which aren't very endearing (but then he's very young at this time): he's spectacularly ungrateful to his benefactors and feels easily threatened, as when he scowls over a less-macho friend's fleeting success at amateur bull-fighting. Lastly, we're shown, not told, how the ménages-à-trois Hadley and Hemingway are surrounded with – which aren't very happy if scrutinised, especially not for the women – warp Hemingway's perception of what he can get away with while still hanging on to the wife he loves.

So why didn't I get fully into the first half and a bit of this novel? I think it was because it sometimes felt like a corrective narrative of something, and I didn't know anything about the story it was correcting. Also, though we do get to meet well-known Jazz-Age Paris dwellers, the focus – as I should have predicted – was on Hadley's and her Ernest's married life. It's convincingly described, but sometimes made me think about Goofy's novel about a man "who went around looking ordinary all day". Not because Hadley herself seems ordinary compared to her famous husband – another pitfall avoided by McLain – but because their domestic life feels rather mundane a large part of the time. This is, of course, less of a problem if you go into the story with a keen interest in all things Hemingway.

Once we finally get to the love triangle foreshadowed at the beginning of the novel, however, my pig-ignorance turned out to be a boon. Although Hadley warns the reader in the prologue: "This isn't a detective story – not hardly", I enjoyed trying to predict which Paris siren would be the one to make a serious play for Hemingway and threaten what appears to be a rock-solid marriage. If you already know a lot about Hemingway's life, then this part of the story doesn't become a mystery, which would have taken a lot of the fun out of it for me.

If you're a Hemingway fan, I think you'd like this novel in its entirety, not least because it throws some light on a wife who actually seems to have been the perfect match for him. If, like me, you know next to nothing about him, it's still a good read. Just don't expect too much razzle dazzle out of Paris.

The perfect beach read (or very nearly)

After being so harsh on Doctor Who last time, I'm in the mood to "say something nice", as Missy would put it. Perhaps confirming that an acclaimed romance author is, indeed, very good (in my view, that is) would be a good idea, even if it doesn't make for a startlingly original post?

Finding the ideal summer holiday read is always tricky. A summer or so ago, I read and very much enjoyed Emily Henry's Book Lovers. Nevertheless, I didn't immediately follow it up with Beach Read from the same author, which I bought upon finishing Book Lovers. If there was something I minded in Book Lovers, it was that quite a lot of time was spent on the heroine's coming to terms with the death of her mother, and the effect this had on the relationship between her and her sister. It was by no means badly done, but it's not the kind of storyline you expect to feature prominently in a feel-good romance. 

When Beach Read started with the heroine, January, remembering the day her mother got her cancer diagnosis, I thought "here we go again". The mum makes it, but when the book starts January's father has died of a stroke. At his funeral, his former mistress showed up and handed January the key to a beach house which her dad has left her. Now, several months later, January – a romance author with writer's block and a cash-flow problem – is forced to visit the beach house and clear it out for a sale while she tries to regain some inspiration.

It's not the most cheery start to a light-hearted read, but this summer I persevered through the first depressing pages, and the novel soon goes into the feel-good mode one is led to expect from the way it's marketed. January's neighbour turns out to be Gus, her old crush from college and a literary author who she always thought despised her writing. Soon the old enemies-to-friends, friends-to-lovers plot is on its way. I really enjoyed the central conceit that the two authors agree to switch genres – January will try to write something more literary, while Gus tries a romance – and the book-related plotting and discussions that ensue.

It made me reflect on how subjective appreciation of a novel's plot lines can be. I imagine an editor with romance as her speciality would encourage an author like Henry to concentrate on the romance, by no means stint on the length of sex scenes, and play down the bookish parts. An editor would also probably not have any problems with the dead dad storyline as it places January where she needs to be and provides a motive for her sudden doubts of romance and happy endings (her parents' marriage has always seemed like the ur-romance for her).

For my part I loved the bookish parts, found the sex scenes (there are only two of them, but they do go on for a while) tedious, and could have done without the dead dad plot altogether. Though, yes, the pay-off is touching (I'm glad I wasn't actually at the beach when I read it as I snivelled quite a lot), it is something of a foregone conclusion. So there you go. Much depends on personal preferences. What I can say is that Henry's prose style is enjoyable, funny and – unlike that of many authors of up-beat romances – it doesn't make you feel as if your brain is shrinking while you read it.

I found it interesting how January and Gus choose to interpret what a "literary novel" and a "romance" is. It mostly seems to be a question of subject matter for them, and a pessimistic vs optimistic outlook. To me, the difference between a literary and popular work is mostly a question of the importance of language. Ideally, a good literary novel should have an excellent style and a strong plot and characters. However, for a literary author, literary style tends to come before plot (if character is neglected as well, I for one will give up). It should be more difficult for Gus than for January to churn out text, as every sentence has to sing. 

January's "literary" novel sounds interesting and like something I would like to read, but it's more what I'd call middle-brow than high-brow. As for Gus, in not changing the setting of his novel, I'd argue that he misses the brief completely. The setting for a romance is important, and a potentially suicidal cult is... well... not it. Surprisingly, though, the scenes where Gus and January research the cult plot line are fascinating.

So, yes, as you've gathered, I'm really into the "book plot". It was the same in Book Lovers where the heroine – with the help of her love interest – ended up having to edit a novel where the hard-as-nails protagonist clearly seemed based on herself (a plot line that could have been give more space in my view). I've started Henry's Happy Place now and am liking it, though I miss the bookishness. But hey, that's just me.

So, this is urban fantasy... hm.

Neil Gaiman is an author I've always felt ought to be right up my alley. A writer revered by geeks, with a sense of humour, who's written for Doctor Who – what's not to like? What's more, I'm a fan of his Who contributions. That is, "The Doctor's Wife" is a great deal better than "Nightmare in Silver", which (I agree with everyone else here) got the Cybermen wrong. Nevertheless, the latter episode has highlights too, such as an atmospheric setting, a surprisingly loyal punishment platoon and the character Porridge, whose story of how a whole galaxy was blown up just to halt the Cybermen's invasion has stuck in my mind: all those lives lost, and the person he pities most is the poor blighter who had to push the button.

Maybe, though, my appreciation of the great Gaiman has been marred by the expectation that he should be right up my alley. When a TV series he's involved in doesn't hook me right away, I'm more disappointed than if the same script had been written by some random, unknown fantasy writer. Consequently, I make fewer allowances, and give up more easily, maybe a bit too easily. I haven't seen more than two episodes of Good Omens, though I'm continually telling myself I will watch the rest some day. As for The Sandman, I gave up after four episodes and will probably not watch the rest as, unlike Good Omens, it was Very Serious throughout (also, the Sandman himself is annoying). In both TV series, Gaiman mines Christian lore with an insouciance that makes me fidget – especially when things get brimstone-related – and (a related source of discomfort, this), he can go very dark at times.

My track record with Gaiman's books is better. I read and enjoyed his Norse Mythology (why "Norse" though, this Swede has to ask?), which actually taught me a lot, and me a Scandinavian. And now, lately, I've read Neverwhere, which is where the urban fantasy comes in. I did get properly into it, eventually. But it took a while.

Now, don't get me wrong. Getting through the first part of the novel was not a hardship. Gaiman is a very good writer, and as a reader you feel you're in safe hands. His sense of humour shines through, even when things are serious; thankfully, there's none of the dourness of The Sandman about Neverwhere. Nevertheless, through a large part of the book I felt more attracted to the idea of a secret realm hidden under the streets of London than Gaiman's description of it.

The hero of the novel, Richard Mayhew, has his world turned upside down when he helps an injured girl called Door (to all appearances a down-and-out) and misses an important dinner with his fiancée and her boss in the process. His fiancée dumps him, but that is the least of his problems. Suddenly, without knowing why, he loses his foothold on reality, and he realises he has to find Door again if he is to have any chance of getting his life back. With a bit of luck, he manages to make his way into London Below – where Door comes from –, locate her and join her and her small band of associates in a quest to find out who killed her family.

Sounds exciting, right? Especially as in London Below, many London landmarks and underground stations have a more literal meaning, which is fun not only for Londoners but for enthusiastic London tourists like me. There is, for instance, a real Earl's Court, and an order of Black Friars plays an important part in the proceedings. The problem for me is that London Below, though a place of adventure, is also decidedly down-at-heel. Its inhabitants may be familiar with strange and magical things, but square meals and nice clothes are in short supply.

In Gaiman's Introduction, he talks about two goals he had with Neverwhere. He wanted "to write a book that would do for adults what the books I had loved when younger, books like Alice in Wonderland, or the Narnia books, or The Wizard of Oz, did for me as a kid." But he also wanted to "talk about the people who fall through the cracks". Now, it's a bit tricky to pull off both these goals at once. There's a limit to how Narnia-like a magic realm that's also a metaphor for homelessness can get. 

For the first half of the book, I actually thought that Gaiman managed his worthy talking-about-the dispossessed-goal better than the getting-away-to-a-magic-land goal. The description of how Richard helplessly watches as his old life disintegrates, while nobody pays any attention to him, was a clever way of showing what slipping through the cracks might feel like. But as for the magic wardrobe feeling, classic fantasy realms like Wonderland and Narnia – though filled with their own problems and danger – are actually places you would like to visit (albeit perhaps not for long). They are also distinctly separate from the everyday. I couldn't help thinking of the Epic Rap Battle on YouTube between George R.R. Martin and J.R.R. Tolkien where the latter points out: "News flash: the genre's called fantasy. It's meant to be unrealistic, you myopic manatee!"

For all that, Gaiman's style is captivating, his characters are colourful and the world building is impressive; it's amazing it was all done for a single book (and a TV series, admittedly). I was sufficiently swept away by the story to savour the "what?! Nooo" moments, and by the end I wanted Richard to stay put with Door. Mind you, more because I shipped them than because I suddenly found London Below entrancing. If urban fantasy is always this gritty, I might be better off sticking to the fairy-tale-based kind, for the most part at least. Mind you, if there's ever a sequel to Neverwhere, I'll read it.

Historical novels not set in Tudor or Victorian times

Although I've read quite a respectable number of books lately (if not nearly as many as I've bought), blogging about them is another matter. I confess that unless there is some book-related theme I'm burning to comment on, writing about geeky stuff is considerably easier. However, I realise that a book-themed blog post is well overdue.

Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for book-blogging says something about the novels I've been reading. They've been good, sure, but they haven't made an overwhelming impression on me. I haven't discovered a new favourite author, but I've had a good time. Take The Clockwork Girl by Anna Mazzola, a historical novel set in Paris in the 1750s. Once in a while, I like to read historical novels set in times and places I am less familiar with. For one thing, it's exciting not to know beforehand how things pan out, and you learn something new, even if you have to take anything you pick up from a historical novel with a pinch of salt. The 1750s is a period of French history I don't know much about, so I was interested in the setting from the start.

The plot concerns Madeleine, the scarred daughter of a brothel keeper, who is tasked with spying on a clockmaker called Reinhart and his household. He is considered for a position at court, but there are rumours about unnatural experiments, and the question is if he's quite safe to be let near the royal presence. Madeleine is reluctant to become a police spy, but the reward she is promised could help her and her beloved nephew escape life at the brothel. She becomes the maid of Reinhart's daughter Veronique, and the novel is told alternately from the points of view of Madeleine and Veronique, sometimes with a section told from the point of view of Jeanne (Madame de Pompadour, no less) thrown in.

It's an intriguing story, where the setup reminded me a little of Fingersmith without the lesbian romance – Veronique isn't quite as innocent as she seems. Although the novel focuses a great deal on female solidarity, the mystery that kept me hooked concerned Reinhart. I was happy to be kept guessing about him. Does he have sinister intentions or is he just a committed scientist? Does he care about his daughter or not? It's a well-spun yarn, and clearly well-researched. There's a lot of local colour – a little too much for my taste – and the descriptions are filtered through the characters' consciousness, which always adds interest.

The characters seemed less authentic than the settings to me, though. I frequently felt the presence of 21th-century tut-tutting. Wasn't it awful that there was such a divide between rich and poor? And that women's lives were so limited? And then there was slavery too! (Reinhart's footman Joseph is a former slave, the "former" very much depending on the goodwill of his master.) The female protagonists felt less like 18th-century women than modern women stuck in 18th-century lives and hating it. Even Madame de Pompadour, who's at the top of the tree, is full of gloom.

It's hard to justify why the protagonists' lamentations irritated me so much. Of course the poor resented the rich in the 18th century, and gifted women must often have wondered why they were prohibited from earning their own bread. Many people found slavery appalling, because it was appalling. Only, I think 18th-century people approached these questions from a different angle, and if they expressed similar sentiments to modern ones they did so in a different way. I would have enjoyed the novel more if it had either dialled down the commentary or made more of an effort to make it feel genuinely 18th-century.

Kate Atkinson wisely stays away from social commentary in Shrines of Gaiety, a novel set in London in 1926 which focuses on hard-bitten nightclub owner Nellie Coker and her large family. I wasn't a great fan of Atkinson's One Good Turn, which is the only other novel I've read by her, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the glamorous if potentially dangerous nightclub settings and the expert juggling of several plot threads and characters. There's no downright moralising, mercifully, more wry commenting which reminded me of Fay Weldon's "Love and Inheritance" trilogy.

The ending, though it could have been more tragic, still feels a little downbeat, and it is somehow typical that the author leaves an open ending for one potential romance (which leads me to assume that everything went swimmingly, as I suspect that Atkinson wouldn't have held back from telling us if it all went to pot). But all in all, I liked Shrines of Gaiety. If the Coker family saga had been further expanded upon, it would have made for a good costume drama series of, say, ten episodes. I mean that as praise, though I'm not sure it's the kind of praise Kate Atkinson would appreciate.

Harris on the rise of the machines

It's high time for a book-themed post – only, unsurprisingly, it won't be about a Nobel Prize winner. It is safe to say that the Nobel Prize Project is languishing somewhat. I gave up on A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez after only 40 pages (why I lasted the course with Vargas Llosa and not García Márquez I really would not want to speculate). With Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, I'm doing somewhat better – I've made it 150 pages in, and am just interested enough to keep reading. But it's going slowly, and I find myself starting and finishing far lighter fare in parallel to plodding through Zhivago.

One of the books I had no problem finishing while leaving Zhivago aside was The Fear Index by Robert Harris. This was how badly I wanted a gripping read; although I had made up my mind not to try this Harris offering, I ended up reading it anyway, while inwardly steeling myself.  When I saw on the blurb that the main character was a hedge fund manager, Alex Hoffmann, who is suddenly targeted by an unknown enemy set on pushing his fear buttons, I imagined I knew what kind of story I was in for. I thought Alex would be an arrogant city slicker and the main aim of the novel would be to Teach Him A Lesson. 

Luckily, this enjoyable thriller wasn't the cautionary tale for the rich I had feared it would be. True, it is a bit sniffy about wealth-creation, but the main target is not supposedly greedy individuals (as in, more adept at making money than you or me or Harris), but the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. Alex is not some smooth city type, but rather a socially awkward scientist who's perfecting an algorithm designed to make better market choices than any traders of flesh and blood. It's his business partner Hugo's job to do the smooth-talking while Alex can go on working with his algorithm – only, sometimes he has to show himself and make a suitably brainboxy impression. It's on a day like this, when he's set to present a new and improved algorithm to a bunch of hard-nosed clients, that his life starts spiralling out of control.

Now, generally I'm favourably inclined towards technological advances, especially if they make my life more comfortable. But I'm not above indulging in some mild technophobia if need be – it's preferable to wealth-bashing, anyhow. It was a bit alarming, I must confess, to learn that algorithm-based market trading is apparently A Thing. Hugo complains at one point that the fund's office is full not of tough traders with balls of steel, but of nerdy boffins with dandruff in their hair. For my part, I always imagined market traders to be of the steel-balled, human kind. I've been impatient with the lemming-like tendencies of financial markets to drop and keep dropping at the slightest hint of alarm. Why are city boys so jittery, I've asked myself – can't they exercise some restraint and common sense? If a lot of financial decisions are indeed made by computers following a pre-programmed pattern, it would explain a lot; common sense is hard to program.

Having said that, this is not by any means a realistic thriller, nor is it meant to be. It reminded me of Harris's earlier book Archangel in that it starts off from a premise you can get on board with and then takes it to such lengths that you end up shaking your head in disbelief. All the same, the notion that the same kind of AI that comes up with suggestions for further viewing on your streaming service might one day decide on how your savings are invested is chilling enough to build a paranoia-feeding thriller on. In a way, I'm glad it went over the top, because it has the calming effect of reminding you that this is all fiction. Whatever happens financial-algorithm-wise in the real world, it will never turn out like this. Surely?

The prize-winning prose of Alice Munro

The second read of my Nobel Prize-winning Author Project was a bit of a cheat. After all, my aim with the project is supposedly to discover new authors whom I would normally consider too fancy for me. Nevertheless, I selected Who Do You Think You Are? by Alice Munro, although I had already read her short story collection Too Much Happiness. Munro was a pretty safe bet, in other words, because I already knew that I enjoy her writing. Sort of.

My experiences with Too Much Happiness were mixed. It started out with the short story "Dimensions" which I really liked but which gave me a false impression of what a typical Munro short story would look like. The main character in "Dimensions" is living on autopilot after a terrible tragedy, but is brought back to life as it were by a dramatic, cathartic event. I expected more in the same vein, but cathartic events proved few and far between in the other stories. Near-misses, occasions that could have been momentous but don't quite come off, are more Munro's thing, and the prevailing tone is one of mild regret. Disappointed, I put the book aside for a long while when I reached the story "Face". A boy with a birthmark and a father who hates him – could it get more depressing?

When I gave the book another chance it turned out that the story, although not exactly cheerful, wasn't as depressing as I'd thought. It struck me then that although life could often have turned out better for Munro's characters, it could also have turned out a great deal worse. Sometimes something truly horrific happens, as in the chillingly convincing "Child's Play", but mostly pitch-dark tragedies like the one in "Dimensions" are absent, which makes it easier to do without the subsequent uplift.

When I stopped expecting the dramatic highs and lows of "Dimensions", I started to appreciate what can really make Munro a joy to read: the clear, precise, prose. I'm usually the barbaric kind of reader who pays more attention to character and plot than language. If I have a preference when it comes to the prose of "literary" fiction, it tends towards the flowery rather than the refined (think Dickens and Balzac). And yet Munro's style, apparently simple but full of astute observation and flowing easily along without long knotty sentences, won me over. I read the end of Who Do You Think You Are? during a plane journey, when I usually don't have the patience to focus on anything more demanding than chick-lit, and it went really well – I also found myself more relaxed than when I'm bound up in the stress-inducing problems of chick-lit heroines.

Who Do You Think You Are? is described by its blurb to be a "collection of stories" which "reads like a novel". My first reaction to this was: "Well, that's because it is". The interlinked stories follow the same protagonist, Rose, chronologically, highlighting some events first during her girlhood, then in adult life. It's hard not to think of the stories as novel chapters. They do seem to build off each other, and characters such as Rose and her stepmother Flo aren't reintroduced in every story, which makes me wonder how well they would function as independent short stories out of their context. But maybe we are told just enough about the characters in each particular story to follow what happens within its framework. In any case, it's far preferable to read the stories as a collection: you get a much clearer picture of Rose and the people closest to her.

Who Do You Think You Are? has the secondary title "Stories of Flo and Rose", and Rose's relationship to Flo proves to be the most important in the book. It's an odd one: they are close, and mean a lot to each other, and yet Rose never thinks of Flo as her mother, in spite of Flo marrying her father and taking over the care of her when Rose was still a baby. Flo is rarely referred to as a stepmother either, and when it happens it's mostly when Rose explains the nature of their relationship to an outsider. To Rose, Flo is just Flo. She makes a good job of raising Rose generally, but her complaints also lead to Rose's father beating his daughter up for the first time – something which then becomes a regular occurrence, until he dies when Rose is still a teenager. Another source of tension, though not as much as one could have expected, is that Flo clings to a way of life that Rose is desperate to get away from.

This collection was originally called The Beggar Maid after another of its stories, then renamed Who Do You Think You Are? after the last short story which takes place in West Hanratty, where Rose grew up in a slummy neighbourhood. I can't help thinking The Beggar Maid is a punchier title; after all, the double meaning of Who Do You Think You Are? has been explored in a well-known TV programme with the same title where famous people have a look at their family history (though Munro's collection probably predates it). Still, as the short story "The Beggar Maid" describes how a wealthy young man, Patrick, falls in love with Rose and what it leads to, this title does shift the focus away from Flo and West Hanratty, and Rose's relationships to various men prove less central to her than that to her stepmother. She has a few typically Munro-ian near-misses man-wise, but by this time I took it philosophically, and true enough, when Rose catches up with the same men later it proves that maybe they were not all that. Only once did I feel a bit sad when a relationship ended prematurely, on account of something that could easily just have been a misunderstanding.

Rose isn't always likeable, but she is believable, and Who Do You Think You Are? is well worth reading – though less because of Rose or even the colourful Flo than the beautiful way it's written. Vargas Llosa had other qualities, but I didn't admire his prose style much (maybe something was lost in translation); at my sceptical early stage of reading The Feast of the Goat, when I came to a particularly clumsy piece of exposition, I thought uncharitably: "I can't believe he won the Nobel Prize". No such thoughts come to mind when you read Munro. She deserved that prize.

Portrait of a dictator as an old man

I have this ambition to read at least a couple of novels by Nobel Prize-winning authors this year, not least because I suspect them to prove blog-worthy. So it's a little contradictory of me that I haven't been that keen on blogging about my first Nobel Prize-related read of the year, The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa (which I read in an English translation). It's partly because I didn't care for it as a whole, but also because I realised – too late – that the subject matter is somewhat sensitive, seeing as Vargas Llosa wrote about an oppressive regime from not that long ago, which many people must still have memories of. However, perhaps it's best not to overthink it. Parts of the novel did leave an impression, so I might as well go ahead and write about it, hoping I don't tread on too many toes in the process.

For some reason, Vargas Llosa (who's from Peru) hit on the idea of writing a book about the end of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. Or, more specifically, the end of Rafael Trujillo himself, who was shot in 1961 after thirty-odd years of ruling the country (officially or unofficially). The novel has three main plot strands: one follows a fictional character, Urania Cabral, daughter of a loyal Trujillista politician (also fictional), who returns to her home country in the Nineties for the first time since she left it at the age of fourteen after a nasty experience involving Trujillo. Urania feels the need to confront her father, even though he's suffered a major stroke and is more dead than alive. Plot strand number two follows Trujillo during the last day of his life more than thirty years earlier. Plot strand number three concerns his assassins, as they sit waiting for his car that same evening, debating whether he's going to show up at all. Most chapters are told from one of these three viewpoints, though some other characters join the mix towards the end of the novel. For instance, we get a chapter told from the point of view of Trujillo's successor Joaquín Balaguer, the puppet president who gains real power once his Chief is gone and uses it to steer the country towards democracy (but who nevertheless comes across as something of a slippery customer).

At first, I was frankly bored and irritated by the novel, fervently wishing that I'd tried Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter instead. All three plot strands seemed mostly an excuse for exposition. The unfortunate Urania has read obsessively about the Trujillo regime as a (not very effective) way of coping with her trauma, which is mighty convenient for an author who wants to show off what he knows. Also, the "Trujillo bad" message conveyed wasn't exactly mind-blowing. Wow, a modern dictator behaves in a modern-dictatory manner? Whatever next, dog bites man?

After some time, though, the Trujillo part of the story started to become more interesting. It made me sit up when, in the interactions with his goons, he didn't come out of it altogether badly. Modern dictators are often portrayed as either monstrous or pathetic (sometimes both), which can make us who are fortunate enough to live in democracies feel rather insufferably smug. We can tell ourselves there's no way we'd ever buy what these freaks and losers were selling. Vargas Llosa doesn't go down this easy path. His version of Trujillo is not without good points. He's disciplined, hard-working, intelligent and convinced that what he's doing is the best thing for his country. Even his enemies give him credit for appreciating talent in others. It's not hard to imagine how this man rose to power and kept it for more than three decades. At the same time, you understand why even some of his closest associates want to get rid of him (perhaps especially his closest associates – though generous with money, he's not the world's greatest boss). Even Vargas Llosa's focus on Trujillo's problems with his failing prostate doesn't come across as merely sneering. It's there to tie in with the Urania part of the story, but the prostate problems also serve as a symbol for old age, the one enemy the old bruiser is unable to fight against.

The conspirator part of the story also picks up as soon as they literally get into gear, ready to carry out their assassination plans, and things start to go pear-shaped from the word go. Here, it's the events rather than the characterisation that fascinate. The conspirators are an amiable enough bunch, if a little interchangeable. (There's an awful lot of name-dropping here and elsewhere – I must confess to only getting a reasonably clear idea of the role of one in ten characters mentioned throughout the novel. Why was that guy Fifí in the plot again?) Vargas Llosa does them something of a disservice by focusing on their personal reasons for wanting to kill Trujillo, when a little more patriotic fervour wouldn't have gone amiss. In the end, though, the tale of the conspiracy is engaging mainly because of how badly it's going. The assassins may succeed in killing Trujillo, but they are endearingly rubbish at plotting generally. When a high-ranking ally lets them down, they have no plan B and no exit strategy. They've not even considered how or with whom they could hide if things turned dangerous, which was always a strong possibility. I groaned when one of them confided that he'd purchased a strychnine pill to commit suicide with if the worst came to the worst. You don't commit suicide with strychnine! It's a horrible death. What, did the regime ban Agatha Christie books or something?

The Urania part of the story, though, never quite gelled with me. True, the event that triggered her trauma, which she recounts to her aunt and cousins when she's accused of being ungrateful to her father, is pretty horrific. Nevertheless, I'm afraid I thought she was a poorly written character and I couldn't feel much for her. In some scenes, as when at first she tries to avoid upsetting her relations, she becomes more human, but before long she's back in Scarred Victim mode. Quite often she acts as a plot contrivance to impart information to the readers – telling her relatives the gist of her past experiences would have been quite enough, but as we readers need to know the gruesome details, she recounts it all. When she doubts that she's done the right thing afterwards, she cheers herself up by remembering the fate of Trujillo's Chief of Intelligence Johnny Abbes. Vargas Llosa clearly wants us to know he got his comeuppance in the end, but as said comeuppance came with collateral damage, it's in somewhat poor taste for Urania – and, I must say, Vargas Llosa – to gloat over it. More importantly, Urania has no reason to think about Abbes at all.

One more problem with the Urania story, which wouldn't have mattered in another kind of novel, is that she's a fictional character. If the whole novel had been mainly about fictional characters, with the historical characters serving as a backdrop, the tale of Urania's woes would have worked better, as an illustration of the sort of thing that could happen to you during Trujillo's reign. But sandwiched between characters with real counterparts and events that really did happen, the fictional elements feel awkward. The real Trujillo may have been a beast to some poor real-life fourteen-year-old, but he can't be accused of being a beast to Urania (or her father, for that matter), because they didn't exist. And if we are supposed to view Trujillo in The Feast of the Goat as merely a fictional character, then what was the object of the exercise?

In the end, however, I was impressed with parts of the novel, and I don't completely regret choosing it over Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Vargas Llosa's instincts as a novelist prevent it from becoming merely a political pamphlet, and the message that at least I was left with – that dictatorships are generally a terrible idea, even when the person in charge doesn't appear to be a total nutcase – is not a bad one.

The strangely sideways-told story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

I had been warned (by a Stevenson fan) that Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is not, in fact, very good. All the same, I was curious: it's usually interesting to read the original of something that has been adapted and retold countless times. A good compromise seemed to be to try an audiobook version of the story, read by Martin Jarvis, no less. I did enjoy it – it's not very long, a comparatively easy listen, and has a Victorian-novel atmosphere which I was ready for after having read (and listened) to a row of modern, not very demanding books. But it's certainly no Treasure Island, and I would probably have been sorely disappointed if I'd started off expecting a masterpiece.

One of the problems with the novella is that by now, everyone knows the twist. It's quite hard to imagine what effect the story would have if you didn't know that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are one and the same person. After all, it's set up as a mystery: why is the reputable doctor protecting such an unsavoury young man, even going as far as to make a will in his favour? The story's first readers must have experienced a rug-pull which modern readers miss: it's not that easy to figure out what's going on if you don't already know. Yes, there are clues, but there are also a number of things pointing against Jekyll and Hyde being the same person. How come, for instance, that the doctor is a fairly large, middle-aged man, while Hyde is younger and smaller? A mysterious elixir could account for hairy hands, a villainous countenance etc. but not that, one would have thought. These things are explained at the end, though, and as twists go, Hyde being the "bad" side of Jekyll is quite a good one. Shame that, to us, it's not a twist at all.

Another problem is the curious way the story is told. I quite liked the way it started with two side characters on a walk, one telling the other of an encounter with Hyde: the sideways way into a story feels very Victorian. But then the book continues in the same vein, as we see the events largely through the eyes of Jekyll's lawyer Mr Utterson. Not until the end do we get Jekyll's side of the story. As, again, the mystery Utterson tries to figure out is no mystery to us, this feels oddly unbalanced. Various adaptations and retellings mostly focus on Jekyll, but in the original we don't learn that much about him. There isn't even a romance in danger because of the whole personality-splitting, something most Jekyll/Hyde-inspired stories manage to work in somehow. What's more, we don't learn much about Hyde either (more on this in a bit).

When it comes to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson faces what one could call the Tolkien conundrum: if you invent a concept that proves so popular it's aped over and over again, it's easy for people to forget how original your ideas were to start with. It's a bit unfair to state that more could be done with the Jekyll and Hyde idea when it was Stevenson who invented Jekyll and Hyde. There are some intriguing wrinkles to the story, too: for instance, the explanation of the youth and stature of Hyde is that Jekyll's evil side isn't very well developed, so it looks smaller and younger than Jekyll as a whole. I found it noteworthy that the tale of Jekyll and Hyde isn't about a man split into one good and one bad side; instead, Jekyll is still a "compound" of good and bad, like he always was, whereas Hyde is only bad. This means Jekyll as himself is still quite capable of doing bad things. His whole motivation for creating Hyde isn't particularly admirable: apparently, he uses him mainly as a get-out-of-jail-free card, a way to live out impulses he's ashamed of. Another interesting detail is the reason given as to why people take against Hyde right away: as human beings are a mixture of good and evil, they feel the instinctive wrongness of someone who's just evil.

But how evil is Hyde? Perhaps, if Stevenson's story is a bit underwhelming, it's partly because we don't really see Hyde doing that many terrible things. Yes, he commits a brutal murder – mostly, it seems, out of impatience with a passer-by he doesn't want to be bothered with. We also hear about him unfeelingly trampling a child underfoot (the child recovers). But these are more the actions of a boorish delinquent than a creature of pure evil. We don't see him taking delight in other people's misery. As for what he gets up to when Jekyll releases him for recreational purposes, one supposes it's mostly a question of indulging vices such as drinking and womanising, which isn't that awful. (How does Hyde manage to pull, though, if people find him so instinctively repulsive? Surely even prostitutes would try to give him a wide berth.) I came away from the story wishing I got to know more about the titular characters: but then, there are plenty of other writers who have been only to happy to expand on them.

The birth of Cosmo (as we know it): Is this really modern feminism talking?

It's been a while since I've seen Cosmopolitan in the news stands, but I remember eyeing the covers of it when I was younger and, time and time again, deciding not to buy it. Buying a woman's magazine was an act of pure self-indulgence (and still is), which would have made it natural for me to go for the most garish and unashamedly shallow of the bunch. But some particularly lurid headline would always put me off. The magazine made sex seem like a competitive sport, and the sultry glamour pusses on the cover signalled that awkward bookish girls weren't exactly Cosmopolitan's target readership. In short, I was never a Cosmo girl.

With this background, I felt torn when reading the novel Park Avenue Summer by Renée Rosen. Its focus point is the transformation of Cosmopolitan in the Sixties, from failing if respected magazine to what it still is today, at the hands of its new editor Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl. The events are seen from the point of view of a fictional character, Alice Weiss, who becomes Helen's secretary and is very loyal to her. In a novel, it's often a good wheeze to view a significant character from the sidelines like this – novels told directly from the point of view of some fascinating figure we want to know more about, even a great villain, tend to disappoint. The trick works well here too – Alice is sympathetic to Helen but doesn't always agree with her and can see her flaws. Nevertheless, we are clearly meant to root for Helen and wish her success in her endeavour.

Which is where my feeling torn comes in. On the one hand, Helen Gurley Brown did turn Cosmopolitan around from a newspaper about to fold any day to a success story. On the other, she turned a middlebrow magazine with a good reputation (which actually sounds like the kind of publication I wouldn't mind buying now and again) into a sex-obsessed rag.

As with the TV mini-series The English Game, Park Avenue Summer got me thinking about the advantages and drawbacks of a "based on actual events" drama. Julian Fellowes and his co-writers tried to frame the events described in The English Game as the triumph of the underdog – so it was a little embarrassing for them when the working-class heroes of the tale decided to switch teams because of the better pay. Rosen frames Park Avenue Summer as a tale of female empowerment, but as with Fellowes and Co., the real events don't quite gel with the narrative. On the upside, the grit in the fictional machinery makes the story told less predictable and in many ways more interesting. The downside is you're less inclined to be led where the author wants you to go. 

Helen Gurley Brown is a fascinating character, in many ways resembling an eccentric teacher: quirky, strong-willed and convinced she is fighting not just for herself but for "her girls" (the expected new readership of Cosmo). Seeing as she is based on a real person, she is allowed to do things that a fictional counterpart probably wouldn't, such as burst into tears (secretly) when she has been attacked and use feminine cooing as a way to get ahead. It's also intriguing to see that as early as 1965, when the sexual revolution hadn't even properly got underway, she apparently turned Cosmopolitan to exactly the kind of magazine I saw in the news stands as a young girl a couple of decades later. She certainly had a vision, whether you agree with it or not, and plenty of personality – and personality is what I have been wanting to see in female characters of modern fiction.

At the same time, I did find it hard to root for her, as she dismisses any too-ambitious content as "dull" and "boring", not even seeing fit to use it as filler in an issue of the magazine she's already giving up on, cutting out short stories by Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe and instead accepting things like an article about crash diets which reads "like a child wrote it". She pushes for sexy, sultry cover girls, as she thinks women will buy the magazine in order to learn how to become more like them. And her ideas for magazine features are often cringeworthy. At one time, an internal memo from Helen to female staff asking them to share how they like their "bosoms" to be fondled during foreplay is leaked to a rival magazine which makes fun of it. Helen is furious about the betrayal and realises how bad it looks – but if you don't want your rivals to slate you for writing bosom memos, don't write bosom memos! It was all going to be a part of a feature anyway, so the reaction would have come then if not sooner – though one of the bigwigs of Hearst (owner of Cosmo) points out that they would never have greenlighted such an article. In fact, I couldn't fault the Hearst bigwigs at all for being sceptical of Helen's approach.

Alice, the fictional heroine, is pleasant enough and acts as a good foil to her boss, and parts of her story were really affecting. It is a more streamlined story than the one based on real events, though, especially where her love life is concerned. If anything surprised me about it, it's that Erik Masterson, a guy at the office (hostile to Helen) with whom she has a fling and who is clearly Mr Wrong, accepts being pushed around by her as much as he does. Their affair is supposed to be no-strings, yet she forbids him to see other women, and he accepts (though if he really keeps his promise in this regard is open for question). But is that really what's meant by no-strings? We're supposed to wonder why Alice sticks it out with Erik for so long, but I was kind of wondering why he sticks it out too.

Park Avenue Summer is what I hoped it would be when I impulse-bought it: a light read set in a glamorous work environment in New York. But as to the Cosmopolitan make-over, I remain unconvinced that it was really such a great win for the sisterhood. There was obviously a readership for the new Cosmo, and the magazine was going to fold anyway, so it feels perfectly OK that things panned out the way they did. But when it comes to the magazine's content, I can't help thinking of a song from Mean Girls: The Musical where daft hot chick Karen praises Halloween because then she can change her look and disguise herself "as someone else who isn't me but is still hot". "I can be who I want to be and se-e-e-e-xy" is the refrain. This, Karen claims, is "modern feminism talking".

I also come to think of a scene from the TV adaptation of Judith Krantz's I'll Take Manhattan. Judith Krantz actually wrote for Cosmopolitan, which adds interest (Nora Ephron was another Helen Gurley Brown hire, so yes, she had some good writers at her disposal at least). In I'll Take Manhattan, Krantz's heroine Maxi bemoans the state of the women's magazine market: the magazines are a depressing read, always extolling their readers to change in order to become slimmer, prettier etc. In contrast, Maxi aims to make her magazine one that makes women feel good about themselves the way they are.

I can't know for certain, but I have a feeling that Cosmopolitan under Helen Gurley Brown was not a magazine that made women feel good about themselves, unless they were already confident and attractive. The Cosmo girl could be who she wanted to be – as long as she was sexy.                        

Am I not geeky enough for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - or too geeky?

One thing audiobooks can be good for is when you want to try out those famous books you've always thought you ought to read but haven't really felt like buying. I know that this function should be filled by library books, but I'm not a very tidy reader (and often read while I'm eating) and library books make me nervous. Audiobooks could be the answer.

True, I still haven't put this pretty theory into practice that much, but one I-really-ought-to-read-this book, or rather set of books, I have started listening to: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The title usually refers to a series of sci-fi novels chronicling the adventures of hapless human Arthur Dent after Earth is blown up in book one (which is the one actually called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). I've suspected that this book series ought to be up my alley for quite some time. Douglas Adams worked as a script editor on Doctor Who back in the Classic era and penned some adventures himself, and the Hitchhiker's Guide books sounded like a cross between Doctor Who and P.G. Wodehouse - geeky concepts meet witty comedy. Some of my favourite things, then.

So, by now I've listened to the two first novels in the series, and started on number three and - well. It's not that they're not entertaining. They're funny and an easy listen. But I confess I feel a little disappointed. Seeing as this is the Great Text of Geekdom, I expected more.

Perhaps great expectations are part of the problem. Way back, I read a Donald Duck comic, clearly modelled on Adams's books, where Donald had to hitch through the galaxy. He ended up on all sorts of colourful alien worlds, and I remember finding the story a delight. This was the kind of thing I thought the originals would explore too. But a goodish stretch into book one, Arthur hasn't come farther than a spaceship comparatively close to Earth (or where Earth used to be before the spaceship blew it up). Then he is saved from certain death by another spaceship. Lastly, he ends up on a planet where other planets are manufactured, and that's the only alien civilisation he properly gets to in the first book. One of these manufactured worlds was Earth, which turns out to have been a vast computer controlled by interdimensional beings (undercover as white mice) trying to find out the right question to ask concerning life, the Universe and everything (they already know the answer - 42).

Whether The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is for you depends, I'd say, on your reaction to the previous sentence. If you think "what absolute drivel", Hitchhiker's Guide is not for you. If you think "wow, that sounds really inventive and funny", it definitely is. I'm somewhere inbetween. Most of the scenarios Adams dreams up, while enjoyably outlandish, seem to exist mainly as the set-up for jokes. The encounter with alien worlds doesn't create any real sense of wonder. They're mostly there so the author can gently - or sometimes not-so-gently - make fun of phenomena familiar to us Earthlings. A lot of the satire could have worked equally well if the stories were set in a London suburb. 

This is where being too geeky comes in. A few years ago I'd never even heard of "world building", and as I'm not generally one for local colour in books - stop describing smelly slums or magnificent vistas of nature and get on with the story! - I didn't think it meant a lot to me. But I'm actually missing the "world building" component, which is usually an important part of sci-fi, in the Hitchhiker's Guide books. I was expecting them to seek out new life and new civilisations in true Star Trek style (only funnier), but there hasn't been much of that so far.

Let's face it, though - the main reason I'm not as sucked into the Hitchhiker's Guide saga as I thought I would be is probably that I'm not geeky enough. When you don't find jokes as funny as is clearly intended, you usually don't imagine your sense of humour to be at fault, but rather the jokes. Leastways, that's how it is for me. Some of Adams's skits don't land for me at all. The whole subplot (in the second novel) where a third of a planet's population with "useless" jobs are suckered into leaving their home, and then make a very poor show of colonising another world, I found vaguely insulting. With that kind of outlook, where does Adams suppose authors fit in? The more utilitarian the society, the higher the suspicion tends to be towards the Arts - a society without hairdressers could easily also be one without storytellers.

Mostly, however, I do find the jokes funny, but think that they are hammered home too incessantly. There are a lot of conversations were someone says something quirky, and then someone else (usually Arthur) indignantly asks "What do you mean [repeats quirky phrase]?" It sometimes takes ages for Arthur's friend Ford Prefect, an alien in disguise who saves him when Earth is doomed, to get a point across to the dense Arthur, which becomes wearying. I find myself longing for Ford to explain clearly from the beginning and for Arthur simply to accept the mind-bending concepts thrown at him. There are also a lot of whimsical asides about how certain things were invented, the thoughts of a sperm whale accidentally  created in space etc. Meanwhile the plot meanders and the characters, while amiable, aren't really fleshed out. The flamboyant Zaphod Beeblebrox (I'm relying on IMDB's spelling here) is the only one who can be called colourful.

But almost all of my gripes could boil down to me not being on the right geeky wavelength. Probably, I should stop complaining about plotlessness and embrace the quirkiness and the whimsy. That I'm not quite able to do that (while, as I said, having a good enough time with these audiobooks) may be proof that, Doctor Who and Star Wars interests notwithstanding, I'm really a square.    

Which wouldn't come as a surprise to Adams. In the Hitchhiker's Guide universe I, as someone working (broadly speaking) within the civil service, most closely resemble the unspeakable Vogons - mean-spirited, venal creatures who write absolutely appalling poetry. And I'm fine with that.                         

Who cares about the post-apocalypse? Gimme a love triangle

I very nearly didn't read The Second Sleep by Robert Harris at all. Once I started, I nearly gave up at the 100-page mark, but decided to continue for just a bit longer. And it's a good thing I did, because it's thereabouts this book turns into a really good read with the Harris trademarks of gripping writing and colourful side characters (the hero is seldom the main attraction in Harris books).

Seeing as I've mostly had good experiences with Harris's novels, with the odd exception - I hugely enjoyed the Cicero trilogy Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator, was gripped by An Officer and a Spy and had a good time with The Ghost, Conclave and Archangel, though the latter was pretty silly - one could wonder why I was so reluctant to try The Second Sleep. The answer is mainly its genre, or sub-genre rather: the Post-Apocalyptic Tale. Novels (and films/TV series) of this type usually contain two of my least favourite things in fiction: extreme bleakness and moralising. Readable though Harris is, he hasn't been above lecturing in the past, so I had grave misgivings.

The Post-Apocalyptic Tale usually sets out to do two things: one, to show you how dark the future could be if we're unlucky, and two, to tell you in a cautionary-tale-way how the world could risk ending up in that state. There are PATs that are more interested in how human beings act in times of extreme crisis and how far we are prepared to go for survival, but although that's better than pontificating about how The Evil Of Mankind will lead us to dire straits, it's still not really my kind of thing. As for causes for the catastrophe, it's usually greed, or hubris (i.e. scientists getting carried away), or a combination of both. Mad scientists come up with, say, grade A Artificial Intelligence, unscrupulous (of course) corporations find unethical ways to market it, and wham: it's the rise of the machines. Oh, and sometimes we get an anti-war message worked in somewhere.

The Second Sleep does put a somewhat different spin on the PAT from the start. The beginning of the novel reads as if it's set in the Middle Ages, with maybe a puzzling early-modern touch or two. Christopher Fairfax, the hero, is a cleric sent out to the middle of nowhere by his bishop in order to conduct the funeral service for a reclusive parish priest who has died in what appears to be a tragic accident. At the dead priest's house, Fairfax finds proof of the "heresy" of diving too deep into the past. Father Lacy turns out to have been an "antiquarian". Only, the artefacts he uncovered - including an iPhone - are clearly from our age.

Look, I'm sorry if this is a spoiler, but the revelation takes place on page 29, so it's not that much of a rug pull. Besides, you will probably already have heard (if not, you have now) that the novel isn't an ordinary Medieval Mystery. I didn't find the conceit that fascinating - why would the post-apocalyptic world take on a Medieval pattern when most of the knowledge of the "real" Middle Ages has been lost for centuries? - but it does enable Harris to write an almost-historical novel without having to bother about involuntary anachronisms. Still, the problem remained that I wasn't too fussed about finding out what had happened to our modern world. Props to Harris for not setting the book in a too-bleak future; after a long period of misery, things settled down, and people are poor but they get by. However, the mystery set up - how did we get from iPhones to this? - looked all too much like the excuse for a lecture on our modern ways.

The thing about Harris's novels, though, is that it's seldom the grand solution to a mystery that makes them enjoyable: the end revelations are often something of an anti-climax. It's the hero's journey towards finding answers that is thrilling, especially if he meets interesting characters along the way. In this instance, the Quest for the Truth proves to be a bigger MacGuffin than ever. What makes the plot pick up pace is instead Fairfax getting mixed up with the local gentry - well, sort of. While digging for clues about Father Lacy's death, he becomes friendly with the widowed and attractive Lady Durston who, while appearing very genteel, is actually a woman of modest background who has married into rank and (comparative, but diminishing) wealth. She is now reluctantly contemplating another marriage, to rough self-made man Captain Hancock who is a most insistent suitor. When Fairfax shows up as a third wheel, Hancock is none to pleased. Fairfax, on the other hand, though he's meant to be celibate (he's already had a hard time keeping his distance from the parsonage housekeeper's pretty niece), can't help thinking Hancock a very poor match for Lady Durston.

It's this love triangle that kept me interested, not the speculations about what happened to the "ancients" (us). What's more, when Lady Durston and Fairfax are obliged to confide in Hancock, he becomes a surprising ally, as he's all too eager to find out the secrets of the "ancients" and has zero problem with the "heresy" angle. From this moment on, the novel takes on the Captain's own energy and canters along at a cracking pace.

So though the beginning was slow and the novel felt like it fizzled out at the end, the middle was good enough to make it a pleasant read overall. Post-Apocalyptic Wisdom-wise, though... I don't know. Harris makes some neat points about how much of our modern-day stuff isn't built to last - one reason the Church got such an edge in his post-apocalyptic world was that the stone churches stood firm and became a refuge while modern office towers crumbled. The whole depiction of the Church, however, makes it hard to take Harris's vision of a possible future seriously. Why would it revert to its Medieval form with some early-modern add-ons? Why suddenly strive to be a power factor, and re-impose celibacy on its clergymen? It's not a very likely scenario. There are other movements in our modern-day society that I would have thought would be more obvious candidates to be depicted as enemies of progress and technology. I could easily imagine them being interested in keeping the kind of society Harris describes undeveloped for, as they believe, the greater good of mankind. But I guess wily bishops make more interesting villains.

Pleasant audiobook distractions

Ugh - while I had a run of benevolent posts at the end of 2019, I suspect 2020 will be the year when I complain a lot and will actually have to move into contentious territory, though I really don't wanna. Not yet, though. Let's have a nice, unprovocative theme for this week's post. Like, erm, audiobooks?

I've never really been into audiobooks until the last months, because I always preferred actually reading the books, and I still do. Belatedly, though, I've discovered the perfect use for an audiobook: as a means of taking your mind off the fact that you're doing something mind-numbingly boring. Earlier, I've tried music as a boredom-reliever, and in some situations - like simple working tasks that still require some attention - it's still the best remedy. But when it comes to, say, domestic chores, music leaves too much room in my brain to reflect on how dull the chore in question is and how much I would rather be doing something else. If I'm very lucky and find an audiobook I really enjoy, on the other hand, the opportunity to listen to it partly makes up for the dreariness of doing the washing, packing my lunch, unpacking supermarket bags or cleaning the kitchen. The first audiobook I tried - River Road  - helped me get through a four-hour train journey when the novel I'd brought failed to thrill.

The service I use is Audible, which has its advantages and disadvantages. The selection of books on offer is outstanding, but it's pretty pricey. I thought that the monthly subscription would give me access to the audiobooks on offer for free, but no such luck. You get a couple of free ones at the start, then one free book per month, but that's it: the rest you have to buy, and they're not cheap. I'll think I'll stick with it, though: I can work the app now, and it's nice to have so much to choose from. Here are some of the audios I've found so far:

River Road by Carol Goodman: Carol Goodman is the perfect autumn read, and most enjoyable in traditional book form. The settings, which are often academic and/or connected to creative writing, like a school teaching the Fine Arts or a writers' colony, have a high cosiness factor, and Goodman's use of myths and folklore appeals greatly to my inner librarian. On the down side, her heroines - often pretty opinionated - can annoy me, and the payoff of a nicely set up story is not always satisfying. The earliest books - The Lake Of Dead Languages and The Seduction Of Water - had wonderful atmosphere, and I loved the fairy-tale theme in The Seduction Of Water. But there are really no prizes for guessing who the main villain is in either of these novels. Later novels like The Other Mother and The Night Visitors are less easily guessable, but also less cosy and less full of "gosh, I know this myth/fairy-tale - aren't I learned" moments.

River Road was a novel I didn't get hold of in book form, so I was glad to find the audio version. It's in between the early, bookish but a bit predictable Goodman novels and the grittier later ones. Though not Goodman's best, it still has an enjoyable atmosphere - the protagonist Nan teaches creative writing at a college, which is the kind of job you have if you're a Goodman heroine - and as she has had some hard knocks in her life, like losing her small daughter in a car accident (why are writers so obsessed with kids who die or go missing?), I may actually have appreciated this story more as an easily digestible audiobook than if I'd pored over the pages of the actual novel.

Blythewood, also by Carol Goodman: This teen fantasy story was a disappointment. I'd have thought someone well-read like Goodman would be able to come up with a fantasy world enriched by classic myths and fairy-tales, but this was pretty generic stuff. The teenage heroine's love interest is a beautiful boy with wings, and the main villain is a creature of smoke and shadows - nothing particularly new there, and the magic school setup feels pretty done by now. I don't think I'll bother with the sequel; swooning over winged, misunderstood male beauties just isn't my thing.

Evil Under The Sun by Agatha Christie: One way to make sure you don't lose the thread of an audiobook's narrative is to listen to a book you've already read. This was read with relish by David Suchet, who did all the voices, not just Poirot's. If you stick with it through the somewhat slow start - Mrs Gardiner's monologues can be a bit much in this format - this is good fun, ideal for sorting and archiving documents to.

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie: What, again? Well, this was one of the freebies on offer at the start of my subscription, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to familiarise myself with the play as opposed to the book. It wasn't made clear, though, how close this adaptation actually was to the play, and apart from some obvious liberties taken with the source material - the Darling household scenes are set during the Blitz; Tiger Lily leads a gang of "Lost Girls", so not for the first time in the history of Peter Pan adaptations her poor tribe is shafted and written out of the story altogether; Hook flirts outrageously with the devoted Smee - the story follows the one in Peter and Wendy very closely indeed. I'm not sure I'm much the wiser. It was a nice, light-hearted listen, though. Rupert Everett's Hook is the campest pirate who ever yo-ho-hoed on the seven seas, which is something of a pity - even the Disney version is a wonder of dignity and menace in comparison - but he draws the odd chuckle. Adeel Akhtar is sweet as Smee (the polar opposite of his Thénardier) and the kids are convincing.

The Two Destinies by Wilkie Collins: OK, I'm not going to lie: about one hour in, this story is still rather soporific, even if it is read by the admirable Sam West. I'm a huge fan of Collins, but he can be long-winded in his explanations, and perhaps he's not ideal audiobook material. Anyway, I couldn't resist getting nine hours listening time as my free book of the month (a Christie would only have offered six hours). It remains to be seen if my greed has deceived me - nine hours are no good if I'm to give up after three. But sometimes Collins is a late starter, so there's still hope.