The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared - Jonas Jonasson

Given that I had no real idea what to expect other than the title and half-heard review, this came as something of a surprise.  A tale of two journeys juxtaposed, one in the present-ish day in Northern Europe featuring titular centenarian and a motley crew of associates, the other telling the story of the preceding century through the travels of our protagonist.

The pace never dropped, and although after finishing the book I think that some of the contrivances involving the bodies are unlikely at best, it kept me going right to the conclusion.  Interesting to pick this up straight after Ken Follett's book featuring much of the same period and indeed some of the exact same historical events. Jonasson drops in this real events and real people and adds a touch of humour to the situation, something the somewhat portentous Follett does not.

On many occasions this is simply a comic novel, the prose sparkles on the page and there are laugh-out-load moments.  The way that our hero is meant to have shaped various key moments in world history is amusing in itself, but masterfully pulled off.     Woody Allen's film 'Zelig' covers some of the same ground, a misfit being there at crucial moments and this owes a little to that.

There can't be many books published (in English at least) in 2012 to feature both Chiang Kai-Shek and to an even greater extent his wife Soong May-Ling.  Those sections amused me greatly, Jonasson seems to have picked up on her supposedly haughty and aloof personality and sets about describing her with admirable gusto.

It would spoil large sections of the book to describe the other real people involved or indeed the strange group that envelopes our very old man.

Unexpected? Certainly.

Delightful? Quite possibly.

Recommended? Most definitely.

New Year reading

Lots of things to get through in the next month or so;

'Ban This Filth!' -  The highlights of the Mary Whitehouse archive at the University of Essex, sounds bizarre, fascinating and interesting all at the same time.

'Seasons in the Sun' - Dominic Sandbrook.  A bit of a Jekyll and Hyde character is Sandbrook. He's a genial talking head on BBC4, a competent enough social historian in book form and a bile-spewing right-wing Jeremiah in 'what if' pieces for the Daily Mail.  I liked the previous installment of the series and if he has managed to compartmentalise his personas, this could be great.

'Russia' - Martin Sixsmith.  I heard some of the Radio 4 version, so look forward to being informed and entertained while learning more about Russian history.

I've been rummaging through the virtual bargain bin on Amazon as well, so;

'Winter in Madrid' - CJ Samson.  Post Spanish Civil War intrigue from the man better known for his Tudor 'Shardlake' mysteries.

'The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared' - Jonas Jonasson.   This got very mixed reviews from raved about to reviled, so worth a punt.

Winter of the World - Ken Follett

I've read for more books by Ken Follett than I should really admit to.  The phrase 'guilty pleasure' is thrown around too much and it isn't quite the reason I read them.  The main reason is that sometimes you fancy reading something that will envelop and involve you without challenging you too much.  That, in essence, is what the 'bestseller' or 'blockbuster' novel is about.  Follett produces great doorsteps of novels encompassing a vast legion of characters.  He doesn't always pull it off, but it's a safe bet that he will provide a more satisfactory read than some American airport 'author' who write by the yard.

I read the first of this trilogy 'Fall of Giants' when it came out and thought it definitely fitted into the list of better-class Follett.  It zipped along for its size and although the research into the First World War felt a little shoehorned in, it was a decent read.

Here, we are on shakier ground.  The biggest problem is, of course, the setting. There are so many good,bad or indifferent works of fiction about the Second World War that any new one is almost setting itself up to fail.   Perhaps the sections of the book that work best are the sequences set during the Spanish Civil War and immediately prior to the Japanese attack.

And so, we have with typical Follett panache a palette of characters so vast that recourse to the handy dramatis personnae at the beginning is advised.  People are born, get married and separate, skullduggery is around the corner on every page. Death abounds (as it surely must given the times) and politics, race and religion should meld together with these real events to create a heady stew that excites and enthralls as it entertains.

It should, but somehow doesn't. The young son of the feisty protagonist of the previous book is nowhere near as interesting as his mother, despite being given some of the key experiences. A huge problem with a book like this set in times that we are over familiar with from a variety of media is that we all know that story.  When the action moves to Pearl Harbor, we know what is going to happen.  Once a sequence begins about creating a megabomb (curiously referred to as 'nuclear' rather than 'atomic' which would have been the current terminology?), we know what that is leading to. 

Therefore, the skill in this kind of work is to seamlessly mix the fictional characters into the real events to give them a more raw and emotional impact.  Ken Follett writes well and has managed this with more distant events, with 'Pillars of the Earth' for example.  I don't think this quite held my attention through my interest in the characters in the way it should, which was disappointing.

Back at the start of his career, Follett came up with a much shorter, nastier and better book about the Second World War, 'The Key to Rebecca',  I recommend reading that instead. I will be back for the third installment of this trilogy, but for the reasons mentioned at the beginning of this review rather than any real expectation to be enthralled.

The Berlin Wall - Frederick Taylor

I've had my eye on this for a while, it looked just the thing to sketch in my knowledge of the post-Airlift period in Berlin and take me up to the events in 1989 that I remember so vividly.  It did everything I wanted, Taylor's steady hand and light touch rattled through events at an enthralling pace.

The book explained the workings of some things that I partly knew but didn't quite understand - how the West Berlin U-Bahn managed to go through East Berlin.  There were things that were completely new to me - particularly the gruesome-sounding (walled) leaders compound in the countryside.  

Overall here was a clear description of an 'ordinary terror' that happened within my own memory. A city walled in like an anchorite, with limited access to the means to survive. The idea was, one supposes, that Berlin would become too costly or too unimportant for the West to maintain, leading to the eventual victory of the East.  That didn't happen of course, so we were left with a cruel and fascinating stalemate for twenty eight long years.

The Berlin Wall will become a footnote in history, one of the oddities that teachers will regale the students of the future with.  If those students of the future have a desire to learn more about this bizarre and deadly construction, they could do far worse than reading this meticulously researched volume with useful maps and a set of photos that offer more than the usual stock images. 

The Casual Vacancy

I promised to write something about JK Rowling's adult effort, so here we go.  

Put simply, I just didn't get it. This book as the archetypal 'Curate's egg', some sections were beautifully while some (the excruciating sex scenes for example) were sub-sixth form twaddle.

The main thing I didn't get though was the actual setup, the machinery that (supposedly) drove the plot. The 'Parish Council' for example seemed to have more in common with a town or borough authority than the purely parochial parish setups in most villages. Even more confusingly the 'local councillor' would have fitted the role of patrician MP equally well, if not better.

Another thing that grated was the underlying suggestion that poor people live in grinding misery alongside their grinding poverty. In my experience, they have as much fun - possibly more - than the perpetually hassled middle class who are the real miseries. To be fair, Rowling doesn't let them have much fun either.

We'll gloss over large parts of the book being set in a secondary school with teenage protagonists. Some of the younger characters rang true and others really didn't.  Looking at the adults, having a grossly fat shopkeeper worked to an extent, but a deerstalker?  Perhaps how peculiar it would look was exactly what she was after?  I just wanted to know whether the flaps were left up or down, something which I believe the narrative didn't relate.

It's a long, long book and it dragged in many places.  The thin plot strands weren't enough to carry this relatively large coterie of characters really.  And what characters they were, the self-obsessed wife-beating criminal from the print works. The muesli-knitting sandal-wearing terrible single parent from That London.  The drug-addled prostitute from the estate who for some reason has a mother who didn't go 'bad' and is fairly saintly until she is killed by the Indian doctor.  They came across as mere ciphers or loose cliches rather than true 'characters'. Oh, and the daughter of the Indian doctor is an unhappy teenager who self-harms, what were the chances of that?

I have read many, many worse books than this and is a testament to there being something of interest there that I finished it.  On many occasions I have given up a short way into this sort of thing.  That's why it is interesting to look at why this is such a dud (which undoubtedly it is).  A first question is how to categorise the book.  It flits from genre to genre lightly, never really making its mark anywhere.  This is no cosy 'Aga saga', it certainly isn't 'chick-lit'.  The racier content shows that it is definitely aimed at an adult audience and it times it seems to flirt close to being polemic, prose flecked with rage with regard to rural drug treatment centres and poverty.

Parts of the plot held up surprisingly well, particularly the reemergence of the stolen computer at crucial point late on.  Conversely the sections on the various people 'hacking' the Parish Council messageboard felt like they were written by someone that could barely write an email, they clunked enormously.

There also seems to be an attempt to hark back to earlier periods of fiction.  The works of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell came to mind at moments and the myriad detail of council business give rise to thoughts of the ecclesiastical machinations of Trollope.  The overwritten chapters and overall bulk of the thing reminded me of why sometimes I can't bear some of the weightier tomes from Charles Dickens.

So, all things considered, how could that have been a better read?  A simple way would have been to realise that there is humour in even the bleakest of situations and that it doesn't half help a plot move along.  Alternatively, if you are going to create a cast of grotesques, then forget humour and go for all out scabrous comedy.  About half way through I found myself wishing Tom Sharpe had been let loose on this crowd.  That would have quite a read.

The casual vacancy? The missed opportunity more like.