Midnight Riot - Ben Aaronovitch

A slightly strange selection this.  I'm not really a big fan of fantasy, science fiction or magic and wizards.  I do like police procedurals with a twist though and this was both in the bargain bin and looked a decent size for a novel. No doorstop this.

Overall, my main problem was that it could have been several excellent books.  The basic nuts and bolts detective story was absolutely fine.  The characters and location worked well and the story zipped along nicely.  For me though, the fantastical elements didn't sit so well.  Our hero seems to take to magic and involve himself in the whole world rather quickly and easily.  The youth of today are supposed to be extremely cynical, yet our man just goes along with it all.

I liked the characters of  Mother and Father Thames and their relations based on the lost rivers.  I quite liked the Covent Garden locations too, good descriptions of the area rather than a lazy generic London setting. The pace was pretty dizzying, with something happening on every page.  Aaronovitch knows a thing or too about plotting and some of the pretty grim things happen to people are excitedly described.

After I finished reading, I did a little research and discovered that I have the US mass-market edition aimed fairly and squarely at the fantasy and sci-fi crowd.  The cover also sparked controversy apparently, mainly due to the hue of the figure pictured.  UK readers got a completely different title - Rivers of London - and a cover more firmly aimed at the Booker/Orange prize crowd.  The UK version would sit well alongside something like 'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell', whereas the edition I have would be better up against 'Zombie Slashers From Hell'.

Did I judge the book by its cover? Yes.  Was that fair? No.  I think if I had picked up the British edition, I might have taken it a bit more seriously as a piece of work.  I plan to pick up the second in the series soon and will approach it with that in mind.

My overall view was that there was too much in there.  Trying to do a classic police caper mixed with history, magic, social comment and humour in  a couple of hundred pages is a tough call.  In an ideal world I would love to see a writer as talented as Aaronovitch create two separate strands, one in the 'real' world and the other in the 'magical' alternative reality.  They would appeal to both the two competing markets and to those that can devour both.

I don't think this first book quite worked, but I will be persevering to see how the characters develop and where the stories go.

Just finished writing this and I came across this article; http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/19/crime-fiction-clash-of-genres . Interesting stuff.

Page One - Taipei 101

Not long ago the Page One bookshop in the Taipei 101 shopping centre was listed in their directory as an 'anchor tenant'.  It was one of the bulwarks that the place was built on and, even better for a native English speaker, roughly half the stock is in English.

Originally it was a vast place that you could perambulate at leisure going almost full circle before finding yourself at the cash desk.  For a while, all seemed well.  The shop even spawned a smaller, more crowded, offspring in a lavish new Sogo Department Store at Zhongxiao Fuxing.  

Since those days, however, there has been something of a decline in fortunes.  Maybe the rot started to set in when Eslite opened their vast store just a few blocks away. Maybe the market for book sales, particularly English ones, in Taiwan just isn't what it was.

The Sogo branch came and went, but then something more sinister occurred.  The 101 store lost half of its size, like a relative suddenly stricken with a wasting disease. That was bad enough, but it seems that another indignity has befallen her.

The fourth floor of the shopping mall, once a place of restaurants and coffee shops with access to the entrance to the 'Observatory' on the higher floors of the tower.  When first built, and the tallest building in the world, Taipei 101 was a curiosity mainly for Taiwanese and the relatively few Western tourists that go to Taiwan.

Everything has changed now and relaxations in the rules on Chinese tourists mean that it is now one of the 'must-see' stops on a whistle-stop tour of Taipei.  Tens of thousands a year now sandwich in a ride up the tower alongside a trip to the National Palace Museum and the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall.  

To the owners of the 101 shopping mall, this is truly manna from the mainland.  The restaurants and coffee shops have gone and the fourth floor has been remodelled to add even more eyewateringly expensive designer outlets with extravagant goods and prices. The fifth floor, where a seemingly never-ending queue of Chinese are patiently waiting to herded into the lifts to the eighty-ninth, has been transformed into an electronics boutique that looks as if it has been bodily lifted from Hong Kong airport. Tellingly the prices are in RMB and JPY before TWD, they know their customers.

So what about that relatively veritable (by Taiwan standards anyway), Page One?  She is still there, but the already shrunken shop is accessed through what looks like a fire escape.  The few pictures on the wall of a slightly drab corridor do little to disguise that is what it is.  The shop itself is still spotless and carries an eclectic range of English books (probably the best in Taiwan), but is a shadow of what it used to be.

I wonder if it is time to bow to the inevitable and relocate?  The Chinese have won here, their spending power was always going to outbid the bibliophiles.  Where would be good though?  It needs to be somewhere that both expats and tourists can find easily and being an interesting enough location to attract the local customers who would still be their bread and butter.  Perhaps somewhere near Taipei Main Station which been gradually improving since the HSR arrived and will get even better when the airport MRT kicks in.  

Page One has a different 'feel' to it from the Taiwanese bookstores and it would be a shame if that was lost.  Many people have predicted the end of the high street bookseller in Europe and North America thanks to the power of the internet.  

Bookshops are incredibly popular in Taiwan, not least because it is culturally acceptable to pluck a tome from a shelf, drop down to the floor and sit there all day reading it.  That doesn't stack up financially of course, but bookstores don't seem to be closing down at the rate they are in, say, the UK.

Visiting today was like going to see an old friend who, despite going through hard times, was still making a great effort.  I hope the effort is worth it and that Page One don't disappear from Taiwan altogether.

Freedom - Jonathan Franzen

Sometimes the very act of acquiring a book lowers your expectations.  This was a work that I had heard all about when it was first published, but not one that I had been particularly aiming (or not aiming) to read.

So, there I was, pushing my trolley through the throng in the newer of the two soulless sheds that Costco operate in Kaohsiung.  I came across their book section and decided a quick perusal was in order.  I'd struck lucky in the other branch some time ago when it offered up a hardback copy of one of the more readable Arkady Renko novels.

So, there it was, extremely cheap and very tempting.  It went into the grossly oversized trolley alongside some plastic cheese and a few other necessaries.  I mention all this as background, I very much did not read the book with any sort of anticipation.

The first worry comes on the cover. 'Author of 'The Corrections'' is emblazoned across it almost as big as the actual title.  This just in case you thought it was another Jonathan Franzen who had taken up his pen. I liked 'The Corrections' and it left me feeling considerably more charitable towards American fiction than I had been before I picked it up.  A friend of mine says it is the best book ever written. He's wrong, but not by that much.  It's a significant work and a challenging one to follow.  The cover simply draws attention to this.

I began reading and my trepidation-meter started to flicker.  You have a huge hit with a book about an outwardly normal yet internally dysfunctional American family and follow it up with, erm, pretty much the same.  Luckily the quality of the writing, the situations conjured up and the characters created soon had me deep into this as a work that stands on its own merits.  

Some of the details, particularly with regard to Walter's preoccupations and the environmental causes left me a little cold and waiting for that part of the story arc to develop.  Overall it felt like a film that the director had cut to two hours and couldn't bear to pare down further.  My personal opinion is that this was a ninety minute film with padding.  That said, I think that pretty much all fiction is too long these days.  Bring back the 180 page paperback!

One problem with knowing that you plan to review a book is that all the way through you keep checking in with yourself to see what you are thinking.  Until the final third, or even later, my thinking was this;  a good effort, characters that inspire interest, some locations and sequences brilliant, others just average.

Then something happens.  A something that takes you from being a mere observer of events and draws you in to the heart of the action. The whole sequence is expertly written in less than half of one of the 706 pages, yet it changed my view of the book completely.  I hadn't seen it coming or the consequences that it would have and it really made reading the preceding hundreds of pages worthwhile.

Often there is one tiny error that I notice in something that niggles with me. In this otherwise excellent book, I spotted a reference to 'Lena' Lovich. That may well be how it is pronounced, but the record sleeves always said 'Lene'.  If that's all I've got to complain about though, it can't be half bad!  The musical references, which could have felt hackneyed or levered in to the text by a less deft hand, were nicely done.  The names of the real bands and artists fitting snuggly with the narrative rather than jarring.

What was shaping up to be a decent read really upped the stakes in the final stages.  I would say that the moral is that if  you are as good at writing books about dysfunctional American families as this, it would be our loss where you not to produce more.  I can't see Franzen veering off into 'Game of Thrones' territory any time soon and that is no bad thing.

Trips to Costco are normally made with some trepidation. If they provide anything of this calibre in the future, I might even start looking forward to visiting that particular manifestation of hell on earth.

The Ambassador's Wife - Jake Needham

The Kindle is a device I am still trying to master.  I'm still not quite sure what it is 'for'. It hasn't replaced my music or audio CDs in the way that an iPod initially and smartphone more recently have.  It hasn't dampened my desire for the written word on paper or my love of browsing in real bookshops.  I do, however, quite like the idea of the thing and carry it around with me everywhere.

Then I had a thought, perhaps the 'big thing' was that the Kindle was going to introduce me to stuff that I wouldn't normally read.  With that in mind I headed to the 'bestsellers' section on the Amazon in search of something that was both free and aroused my interest.

I spotted this and was intrigued. A 'tec thriller about Singapore policeman Inspector Samuel Tay, it sounded promising and it was free, so met my criteria exactly.  While I was reading it, I has no idea whether Jake Needham was a paper-published writer or one of this new crop of authors who have circumvented the publishing business and gone straight onto the Kindle store.

What I got was a decently plotted, excellently paced story with some very, very clunky characters.  Our 'hero', the middle-aged, slightly tubby, overly cynical, heavy smoker is somehow irresistible to younger members of the opposite sex.  So far, so pulp novel and there are worse ones out there than this. Attempts to flesh out his character by listing the books he likes reading felt more like an attempt by the author to hoist a flag of literary pretension.  My feeling was he was trying to say 'yes, I know I'm knocking out this populist rubbish, but I read proper stuff too!'.

The ongoing riff about Marlboro Red got a little trying too, especially when the action suddenly jumped to Thailand.  The Singapore setting had seemed a little forced and the Thailand section came across much more smoothly, something that was explained when I looked up the author later.  There is often one thing in a book that grates with me and lives with me long after.  In this it was our 'hero' being relieved to find that the coffee shop/cafe that he was in at 10am or so sold cigarettes.  Two things - if he was such a nicotine addict, why on earth didn't he pick up a carton of 200 at the airport? And, even more importantly, the last time I went to Thailand the place was awash with 24-hour convenience stores, 7-11 and the like, getting a tobacco fix is not difficult in Asia!

I won't dwell on the plot too much, it was pretty generic 'thriller-by-numbers' stuff and yet I have read far, far worse examples of the genre.  One thing that I didn't get, and had hoped for from the blurb, was to learn much about Singapore.  As I mention, it seems that the author is much more familiar with Thailand and I think it would have been a bolder statement to set the whole book in Singapore.

It's difficult to criticise a book that was free and I have to admit that it fits that most heinous of literary descriptions, a 'page-turner'.  It's far from being a classic even in its own crowded genre, but it's also far from being a complete dud.

Would I read another Inspector Samuel Tay book? Possibly.  Would I buy a Samuel Tay book? Possibly not. This was, therefore, an interesting exercise in Kindle usage and book shopping thereon.

It turns out that Jake Needham is a 'real' author - more information here http://jakeneedham.com/books/ .

The nuts and bolts behind the writing should have taught me that, I might be tempted to try some of his other output although this didn't quite do it for me.

A Long Way To Shiloh - Lionel Davidson

I have to admit that although this is a slim volume, it was a struggle to finish it.  The main reason to keep going was the pleasant surprise I experienced when 'The Rose of Tibet' kicked into gear about two thirds of the way through.  No such luck here I'm afraid.  An uninteresting protagonist gets into various scrapes in Israel.  It had great potential but sadly failed to live up to it. The action is ratcheted up, but ultimately I found I really didn't care whether he lived or died.

A measure of how little satisfaction I got from this is that the only lasting memory I will take from it is that 'our man' had a job at the then fictional University of Bedfordshire.  I fear that the academic credentials of the current version of that institution are on a par with the literary credentials of this forgettable effort from Davidson.