wot i red on my hols by alan robson (talus carpi)

The Limp in the Ankle Matches the Limp in the Wrist

I Am Princess X is a curious little book. On balance I think I liked it, but it’s hard to tell…

As the story begins, we meet Libby and May, two young schoolgirls who quickly become best friends. Together they create a series of stories about Princess X. The princess slays dragons and kills bad guys. She’s the best, really heroic! To begin with at least, the princess is just a beautifully envisioned bit of wish fulfilment for the girls. Soon Libby and May become completely obsessed with her and they fill box after box after box with the tales of her adventures. May writes the stories and Libby draws the pictures.

But then tragedy strikes. Libby and her mother are driving across a bridge one rainy night. The car goes over the side and both Libby and her mother die. May, of course, is heartbroken. The years pass slowly by. May never forgets her best friend. But then one day when May is sixteen years old, she finds a sticker advertising the adventures of Princess X. Suddenly she starts to see the Princess everywhere – not only are there stickers, there are patches to sew on your jacket or fix to your backpack. Graffiti extolling the virtues of Princess X are scrawled on the walls and a hugely successful webcomic is taking the internet by storm.

Does this resurrection of Princess X mean that Libby is still alive?

Of course it does.

May embarks on a quest to find her best friend and to discover just why Libby vanished from the world all those years ago. The solution to that mystery proves to be very dark indeed.

This is a YA novel and all it does is tell a story. There isn’t any great depth to it. If it’s about anything at all under the surface it’s about the enduring power of friendship – but that’s not a bad theme when all is said and done.

The basic plot of Louise Welsh’s novel To the Dogs is really rather straightforward. Jim Brennan has a high powered job at a university. His son Elliot, a selfish and really rather stupid young man, has fallen afoul of some powerful drug dealers and he owes them far more money than he will ever be able to repay. This debt gives the gangs a lot of leverage over both Elliot and Jim. Their demands threaten his family, his students, and his own reputation.

If that is all there was to the novel it would be just another pot boiler. But there’s a lot more going on underneath the surface than the simple plot outline might suggest.

Jim himself is a fascinating character. He was born in a Glasgow slum. His father and his grandfather were both criminals, hard men with no conscience who spent much of their life in prison. This background has made Jim hard inside and as a result he understands the drug dealers, perhaps better than they understand themselves. This understanding gives him an edge when it comes to responding to their threats, and while he cannot eliminate the danger, he does manage to contain it.

Despite his background, Jim has not inherited his family’s proclivities. As a child he always preferred to lose himself in a book rather than live in his father’s world, much to his father’s disgust. Through a process of hard study combined with a little bit of luck he has had a first class education, as a result of which he has been able to leave his father’s world far behind. He has made a success of his life, at least in so far as society defines success (though his father would not agree with that definition).

I understand this perfectly. My background is not Jim’s. My family had no criminal connections whatsoever. They were all just solidly working class people who knew their place and who had the usual working class suspicion of education and a wariness about the problems involved in bettering yourself. Nevertheless, just like Jim, I managed to get a good education in spite of that attitude. I was the only member of my family who ever went to university and, again just as with Jim, my degree was my passport out of the class I was born into. It opened doors that would otherwise have remained closed to me. Without it I would have faced a lifetime of dead end jobs and a narrow range of lifestyle experiences. Just like my dad and my grandad. And, for all I know, like my great-grandad.

The story’s perfect delineation of the working of the British class system is one of the many delights exhibited by this novel. People who have grown up in more egalitarian societies often find the British class system puzzling and perhaps even unbelievable. I freely admit, that it is hard to understand. You really have to grow up with it to fully appreciate its subtleties. I know my place is the whole of the law, and that law applies even when you leave the system behind, because the system never leaves you behind. Maybe the realism of this novel will help to clarify some of the class system’s darker implications.

Jim’s university has a close relationship with China. and they have a campus in Beijing. Jim spends a significant amount of time commuting between the two countries. One of his Beijing students turns out to be a bit of a dissident and the Chinese government has "disappeared" him. A significant plot thread concerns Jim’s attempts to find out what has happened to his student and, if possible, to reinstate the young man. This does not go well for either of them. Jim’s background has given him the ability to understand the direct threats made against him by the drug dealers and he still has the contacts that allow him to ameliorate, to an extent, the  threat they represent. But he has neither the political background and expertise nor the contacts necessary to make any real difference for his Chinese student. Jim finds the contrast between the two situations very frustrating and he is appalled by the way he is forced to back down with no means of redress open to him. He realises just how lucky he has been to be able to respond directly to the local threat despite his powerlessness against the (greater) international threat. The correspondences between the two situations are thought-provoking.

Meanwhile Jim’s academic career is presenting him with new pressures. He is a strong candidate to take over the newly vacated position of department head and he has a presence on several powerful committees with, potentially at least, large budgets to dispose of on various university projects. The sources of those funds are politically controversial and consequently, in order to mollify the opposition, Jim has to juggle a lot of placatory balls at once. He can’t afford to drop any of them. Doing so would leave him dangerously exposed and correspondingly weak.

This is a dark and gritty novel that pulls no punches. The lines between good and bad, between pragmatism and self-interest and between idealism and realism all become very blurred indeed. And the closer you examine them the more out of focus they become. Nobody is truly good and nobody is truly bad – even the nastiest and most violently despicable characters have understandable motives that are easy to sympathise with even if they can’t be agreed with. How do you resolve a paradox like that? I’m not sure you can. But somehow Louise Walsh draws all these disparate threads together into a thoroughly satisfying novel that succeeds on every level.

The Excitements by C. J. Wray is a very witty and very clever novel. The Williamson sisters, Josephine and Penny, are in their late nineties but they are still hale and hearty and eager for adventures (which they always refer to as excitements). Their nephew Archie dotes on them and they, in their turn, dote on him. Archie knows that his aunts are veterans of the second world war and he knows that they did their bit. But he does not know their full story and he is quite unaware of the very significant role that they played in the covert secret war that took place behind the overt conflict. Josephine,was an intelligence operative who drew many of the maps used to plan the D-Day landings. Penny was a spy trained in hand-to-combat, who risked her life fighting with the resistance in France. Both sisters have been invited to come to Paris where they will be presented with the Légion d’Honneur as a reward for their part in liberating France. Archie is thrilled to be accompanying them to the ceremony.

But Archie is quite unaware of what is really going on behind the scenes. The sisters have a secret agenda and they are determined to use the trip to settle some old scores and avenge the deaths of some old friends. This will involve them in a daring jewel heist following which they will learn that even they were not completely aware of the full story that lay behind their mission…

The seemingly simple but in practice quite complex story is told to us piecemeal with the details of the sisters’ lives revealed to us through the mechanism of many flashbacks which gradually fill in the foreground details. These flashbacks do not appear in chronological order and therefore they are, on occasion, somewhat confusing. Many of them depend on knowledge that we do not yet have in order to understand their full meaning. But if you stick with it, all the disparate bits and pieces really do fall into place and the tale is revealed to be rather grim and dark, which is quite a contrast to the pleasantries and fluffiness of the present day surface narrative that opens the story.

The novel is stuffed full of beautifully presented bits of business many of which turn out to be far more important than they seem at first glance to be. For example we learn that the sisters were trained to use morse code as part of their secret work and even today they talk to each other by tapping out morse messages with their fingers on to any convenient surface. They find this useful to enliven boring social occasions. It allows them to insult their fellow guests with impunity. When Archie was young they taught him morse code (Josephine would tap the word ‘moron’ on his forehead whenever he made a mistake) and as a result he now enjoys eavesdropping on the sisters’ indiscretions. Sometimes he takes part in them, much to the sisters’ delight.

This is amusing when first we learn of it, but it later proves to be quite vital at the climax of the story. And this kind of thing happens again and again throughout the story. I am actually quite overawed at how well seemingly minor asides turn into very important plot points as the story progresses. C. J. Wray has written a beautifully plotted and complex novel and never once loses control of it.  It’s a tour de force.

I’m not completely sure what to make of For Reasons Unknown, the first of a series of novels about DCI Matilda Darke by Michael Wood. I think it’s very good indeed, but I might be wrong.

As the story opens, we meet DCI Matilda Darke who has just returned to work as head of a Murder Investigation Team after a nine month absence during which she tried to recover from a work disaster and a family tragedy, both of which have left her broken. As a gentle introduction to her return to the force she is asked investigate a cold case.

When he was only eleven years old Jonathan Harkness witnessed the double murder of his parents. The trauma was such that he was rendered mute for eighteen months and even when he "recovered" he still blocked out much of what had happened. That was twenty years ago and the case still remains unsolved. As part of a cold case review, Matilda is asked to reopen it and see what, if any, progress she can make with it. The obvious place to start is with Jonathan himself…

Quite apart from the cold case investigation (which soon morphs into a hot case when a body is discovered that has links to the old Harkness murder), Matilda also finds herself involved in ongoing office politics. When she went on leave she had been head of the Murder Investigation Team. Another detective, Ben Hales, was put in temporary charge of the unit while she was away, but now that Matilda is back he is faced with the prospect of demotion, a prospect that he does not relish. He believes that Matilda was directly responsible for the cock up that was a contributing factor to her leave of absence. It gave the team as a whole (and Matilda in particular) a lot of very bad publicity which all of them are still struggling to deal with. He is convinced that if Matilda takes over the running of the unit again it will lead to a fresh round of bad publicity. Even though he is clearly motivated by self interest, he is not alone in having that feeling. And he is not completely wrong – even Matilda worries about it.

The story is a complex one at every level, at least to begin with, though the final resolution of the Harkness murder shows that the surface story was actually rather simple after all – it was only the window dressing hung all around it that made it look complicated. But that’s not the point. This isn’t an Agatha Christie story where we follow clues and then gather everyone together in the library to unmask a murderer. The book is not really about finding out who killed the Harkness family or why the killer did it. The book is actually a multi-person character study, an analysis of how Matilda copes (or fails to cope) with the pressures she is facing, speculation on the gradual disintegration of Ben Hales mental health as he becomes more and more isolated by Matilda’s return, and the fluctuating loyalties (and otherwise) of both the members of Matilda’s team and of her superior officers. The resolutions of these conflicts (which remain only partially resolved by the end of the novel) is what makes the story succeed or fail. On balance I think it succeeds, but as I said at the start, I may be wrong.

Either way, it’s an interesting literary experiment.

The Secret Library by Oliver Tearle is rather badly titled. It contains no secrets and very few libraries. Actually it is a quick, gleeful and anecdotal gallop through thirty centuries of literary history. All the world’s well known writers from Homer to William Gibson have their place in the sun, but where the book really shines is in the way that it discusses odd facts, and highlights the importance of many more obscure authors and long forgotten books that were very influential in their times but which have slowly faded away from the mainstream history of literature.

The book is divided into nine chapters each of which covers a broad period of history from the classical world, through the middle ages and on into the renaissance, the enlightenment, the age of romanticism, the victorian age and concludes with a discussion of the modern world. Each chapter begins with a very brief historical discussion of the period in question before diving into the books that it produced.

I am very impressed by both the scope of this little book and the amazing amount of research that Oliver Tearle has carried out in order to put it together. The Secret Library is stuffed full of fascinating facts. For example:

• The oldest surviving joke in the world reads as follows: One of a set of twins dies. A fool on meeting the surviving twin asks, ‘Was it you or your brother who died?’  That "joke" dates from about 400BC and it was published in an anonymous booklet called Philogelos.


• Pythagoras was a renowned teacher and a well respected thinker. His books have been hugely influential on the development of mathematics and philosophy but he himself was more than a little bit eccentric – he instructed his students never to urinate in the direction of the sun and he forbade them from having children with women who wore gold jewellery. Furthermore he believed that both human beings and beans derived from the same stock and that beans could therefore contain the souls of the dead. Consequently neither he nor his students ever ate beans because that would be cannibalism. (Actually I already knew about the bean thing, but all the other stuff was new to me).


• Samuel Pepys was a famous diarist who chronicled the effects of the plague and the great fire of London. But did you know that he buried a parmesan cheese in his garden to protect it from the flames when the great fire got a bit too close to his house for comfort?


• These days Edgar Allen Poe is famous for his creepy tales of gothic horror, but during his lifetime his best selling book was a non-fiction treatise about snails.


• Lew Wallace was the author of Ben Hur, one of the great Christian novels of the nineteenth century. However he himself was not a Christian.


• Charles Dickens had a successful career giving public readings from his books. When he was on tour, he would drink two tablespoons of rum flavoured with fresh cream for his  breakfast and drink a pint of champagne for his dinner. He didn’t eat or drink any lunch. Just before he went on stage he would drink a raw egg beaten into a tumbler of sherry. All of this may perhaps explain why he died at the comparatively young age of 58.


• Marcel Proust, author of the seven volume Remembrance of Things Past (in my opinion probably the world’s most boring book) smoked opium cigarettes to alleviate his asthma. He once met James Joyce, the author of Ulysses (also a candidate for the position of the world’s most boring book). During their conversation they each admitted that neither of them had read the other’s book.


• That most useful and indispensable tome the A-Z of London contains a number of deliberate errors so that plagiarists can be identified and prosecuted.


• The very first person to order a book online from Amazon was an Australian software engineer called John Wainright.

The Secret Library is an absolute treasure trove of delight for anyone who loves books and who enjoys learning miscellaneous facts about them and their authors