- Flowers for His Funeral by Ann Granger (Headline) - In the seventh of the Mitchell and Markby Costwold whodunnits, we encounter rural mansions, village pubs, unfriendly locals, hidden shelters in the woods, and crumbling masonry. When Markby runs into his ex-wife Rachel at the Chelsea Flower Show, he would not believe that her present husband, Alex, would wind up dead moments later, and yet when that happens, he and Meredith (Mitchell) head to Rachel's village to help find the killer, convinced the cause of death was not simply a heart attack. Malefis Abbey, where Rachel lives, is a picture-book murder house, "Its Gothic windows and fantastic chimneys all looking odder than ever among the surrounding trees, suggesting a secret and sinister castle in a fairy-tale." There are some woeful stereotypes as the streetwise Londoners have to deal with the cunning country folk, and suspects are on the list merely because of their foreign nature - "Forgiveness was not much in the tradition of the Middle East. Vengeance was." I'm still not sure what the relationship is between the two main sleuths - friends with benefits? - but the author is at pains to point out how solid, sensible Meredith is completely at odds with flighty, demanding Rachel.
- Question 7 by Richard Flanagan (Penguin) - Chekov's Question 7 is a short story incorporating misdirection as a parody of children's mental arithmetic puzzles: "Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?" Flanagan uses the concept of this non-sequitur to write about his past, his father, nuclear fusion, the affair between H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, science fiction, Tasmanian tigers, half-life, extinction, ur-texts, Hiroshima, near death experiences, and other chain reactions. There is a lot to consider, and some of it feels like the unedited ramblings of a man who has won many literary prizes. Some of the aphorisms feel like homilies - "The past is always most clearly seen by those who never saw it"; "Experience is but a moment. Making sense of that moment is a life"; "Sometimes we discover that we live in the dreams and nightmares of others and we dream anew." He strings these together in a way which initially seems profound but may equally not be. Trent Dalton and Tim Winton write in the same manner of short apparently punchy sentences - it is the way of the male Australian literati, but it leaves me largely unmoved.
- Everything's Fine by Cecilia Rabess (Picador) - The theme of this story might be to question whether opposities can be together if they do indeed attract in the first place. Josh is preppy, Conservative (with a large C) and white; Jess is from an entirely different background, motivated by morals rather than money, and the only black person in their economics class at their Ivy League college. They have a whirlwind and tempestuous relationship which matures over a length of time (reminiscent of David Nicholls' One Day in that regard) but the cracks appear when Jess is forced to admit to her friends that her boyfriend is a Republican and Josh doesn't understand why she might be upset that he owns a MAGA hat with all its connotations of "racism, hatred and systemic inequality". There's a lot of lecturing as the politics are personal, and Jess tries to ignore the signs - "Everything's fine". She knows her father would be horrified to learn about her boyfriend's ideals, and Josh tells her, "It's better to be happy than right." Is it? Or is it true that "Love conquers all, except geography, and history, and contemporary sociopolitical reality"?
- Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Matthew by Shehan Karunatilaka (Penguin Books) - From the Booker-Prize-winning author (The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida) comes a book he wrote ten years earlier, which has since been republished in the light of this acclaim. The sort of shaggy dog story follows retired sportswriter and cricketing tragic, W.G., as he attempts to track down his hero, spin bowler Predeep S. Matthew. W.G. believes Matthew, international representative for Sri Lanka, was the greatest cricketer ever to walk the earth, but his name has been largely erased from the records due to high-profile personality clashes and disciplinary actions. Now that W.G. knows he is dying, he wants to uncover the bowler's story and publish it in a book as his final magnum opus. Alongside the cricket (and there is a lot of it with pen and ink drawings of different ball deliveries) is his personal relationships, with his long-suffering wife, estranged son and ragtag mob of besties. The setting in Sri Lanka is fascinating geographically and politically as the country is torn apart by civil war and the pronunciation of a word can get you killed, and when the novel moves to New Zealand for its denoument, it is no less vibrant. There is much to admire, even if cricket is not your thing, as the tale is deliberately obtuse. After all, a Chinaman is not just a rare bowling action designed to deceive the batter, it is also a term meaning gullibility in Sri Lankan dialect. How much to be swept up in the narrative is entirely up to the reader.
- The Long Night by Christian White (Affirm Press) - A young woman is kidnapped and taken to a cabin in the woods. A mother paints her trauma onto canvases - the pictures are pretentious and her explanatons of them even more so - and displays her art in galleries when her world is rocked by the abduction of her daughter. The novel mines every trope of the horror film (cabin in the woods; person in back seat of the
car; lightning flashes; well on property; trap for young women; trying to
remain silent and still while being crawled on by insects), of which Em is entirely aware,
having watched them all and enjoying them dispassionately.“I
don’t like being scared, exactly – I like being scared on my own terms.
Something about the fear makes me feel safe and in control, like I can hold the
monsters at arm’s length.”Once again, women are victims of male aggression, but they also save themselves and each other which may go some way to redressing the balance. "They're both breaking down: both bruised and mud-streaked and drenched. The night has peeled them back to the bone, like so much hanging tree bark."It is very well constructed with alternating
chapters which get shorter, each one finishing on a cliff-hanger, and a clear
timeline as sections are divided into hour stamps: 7pm; 10pm; Midnight; 2am;
4am; Dawn, which plays into the long night of the title. However, White has
done this seemingly concurrent narrative that turns out not to be thing before
in The Wife and the Widow, so the ‘twist’ is not a surprise.
