Best Man by Chris Delyani

More LGTBQ+ than the slash fic I often read. This is a serious, often bittersweet romantic novel from the point of view of Frank, a man who has never got over a romantic attachment for a friend and Julio, who is Frank's housemate since he divorced. Poor Frank is in a rather woeful state, locking himself up in his house avoiding Julio, so he is thrown into confusion when Jonathan turns up in his life again planning a wedding to his evil boyfriend Marcus who utterly hates Frank. Julio on the other hand is busy crushing on Marcus at his yoga classes unaware that Marcus is engaged. As a favour for Frank, Julio pretends to be his boyfriend to Jonathan and Marcus. 

I liked the characters in this book and the way that the plot kept me guessing, I thought that the first person narrative worked well in the way that the characters were not necessarily what Frank and Julio thought they were. They are all very human and every one of them does things that they are ashamed of (or should be ashamed of!). I loved the way that Frank and Julio grew as people. This is not an explicit book, but I didn't feel like it needed it, this is a beautifully told story. 

The Murder of The Romanovs by Andrew Cook

A history book that uses recently released sources to lay conspiracy theories about the survival of the Romanov family to rest. This is obviously well researched with a full bibliography of sources at the back, and is filled with a surprising number of illustrations for a short book. Cook goes into a great deal of detail about the last few months of the family.

However, I did have reservations about the book. Whilst there is a bibliography of sources divided into themes, I found it strange that there were no proper footnotes or endnotes. Whilst I don't always read all the footnotes, I suppose I find it reassuring to know exactly where the historian has found their information and to tell what angle they are taking with it. Also, I thought this lacked analysis. Most of the book was taken up with the description of what had happened, a small chapter at the end described what was in the newly released documents, then the rest was taken up with the original sources. I felt like I might as well just read the sources direct. The lack of analysis made the history somewhat dry and overall I found this quite an odd book.

Region 6 by Ian James Krender

Reading alternative history books, a genre I enjoy, the most important thing is to create a believable set up. I think Krender's set up is believable and he creates a vivid dystopian alternative timeline where the Nazis have won the war and have turned 1980s Britain into Region 6, an entirely Nazi controlled outpost where the populace are controlled with water additives to affect behaviour and the people who are not affiliated with the occupiers live and work in dreadful conditions. The story follows Thomas, who is one of the people who lives in a slum and works in a TV factory, and Stephen who has wealthy parents who gift him Nazi party membership for his birthday. Stephen has a good education, living parents and a good life but both men are struggling with forbidden homosexuality. When Thomas becomes involved in a resistance organisation, Stephen is sent to investigate him and the two men form a relationship.

This is not a particularly detailed depiction of their relationship and there are no sex scenes as such. I thought the characters well drawn and their motives well thought out. Thomas in particular is a character who is a bit rough around the edges and seems believable. I liked the way that the resistance fighters were depicted, and it made me think about how we consider terrorists. The plot is good too, although I think the end seemed a little rushed. Overall though I thought this was a very promising novel and I would read more by the author.

The Trouble with Goodreads and a Review of the Passing Tribute

I recently completed an ARC of this on #Pigeonhole 
It was rather a departure for them and not as well received as many of the books on there which I thought was rather disappointing. A few of the readers complained it was “too wordy” and not for them, so gave it up quickly, which is fair enough. However, what I thought was highly unfair was the subsequent one star reviews on Goodreads, particularly by people who didn't even finish it.

The book currently has an average review of two stars. One of the reviewers has complained that the author should basically be resigned to any level of criticism after he reported her review for spoilers. This must be the ultimate punch in the gut after she's had the opportunity to read his book for free. I can't say that I would feel comfortable doing that even if I disliked the book. I'll write an honest review wherever I can but I have to acknowledge the effort someone has put into it. Maybe if it was poorly edited or factually incorrect or problematic maybe you would be justified, but not on the basis that it was too hard for you to read!

Sorry guys, that's the way it is.

Anyway, on to the review. Yes, this is not a casual read. The author has experimented with the postmodern idea of avoiding 'the tyranny of plot’, comparing this to the work of Virginia Woolf. There are overarching themes and things that happened, but they are not linked together, this is to give a more naturalistic feel to the story. A series of impressions to give a feeling of what is happening. It particularly suits the settings of post war England and Vienna with the themes of desolation and rebuilding. It's an incredibly lyrical, poetic story which does use some words considered archaic or obscure, but I think it's justified. This is a story about two brothers, one living in England, the other in Vienna.

I thought the parts of the story set in Vienna worked better, particularly due to the character of Millie, who works as some light relief in what could have become rather a heavy story. In contrast, I found Richard's parts a bit more difficult due to his relationship with Helene who is enigmatic to the point that I didn't feel like I could get to grips with either her character or their relationship. I feel like I may have read it a bit too quickly and that maybe Pigeonhole didn't really work as a platform for it. This is the kind of book to savour the language, to re-read and to go back to previous parts to link it all together in your mind. It's not really a page turner, but can anybody really say that postmodern novels are? However, the fear of people giving poor reviews should never put an author off experimenting, else we would all still be reading the proto novels of people like Richardson and Defoe or confining ourselves to the same type of books time and time again.I hope that the poor reviews don't put people off reading it.

Nelly Dean by Alison Case

Billed as a return to Wuthering Heights, Nelly Dean is the story of WH from the point of view of the servant who partially narrated the story. In it, Nelly has written her story down addressed to Mr Lockwood without sending it.

I think the most important thing about this is whether it adds to the story of WH, and out of the #backstairs books I’ve read, I think this one adds the most to the story. Nelly is a fully imagined character who sheds a great deal of light on Mr Earnshaw and particularly on Hareton who she has a really close, motherly relationship with. She also has a relationship with Hindley and sheds light on the way that he degenerates due to alcohol. The book doesn't go into a great detail about Heathcliffe and Cathy's relationship, but I don't think it needs to. However, it brings in all the themes of the moors, doomed love and the supernatural in anyway.

Aside from the WH characters, the author also brings Bodkin, the son of the family doctor who is a friend and advisor to Nelly. He brings in a welcome outside perspective to a story that can seem insular with its settings of the home and the Moor. The story can be heartbreaking at times, especially when Nelly is seperated from Hareton but her relationship with Bodkin often lightens the book without taking away the tragedy of the situation

A selection of books on a similar theme

The Five by Hallie Rubenhold

Reclaiming the Victims of Jack The Ripper

The Grave of the final victim

https://castbox.fm/vb/133741532 The Guardian podcast on Why we have forgotten Jack the Ripper’s Victims.

This book is a very timely exploration of the way that we view victims of these terrible crimes. In it, Hallie uses a quotation from 2008 for the trial of the Suffolk Strangler where the judge told the jury to disregard the lifestyles of the women he murdered as he felt that the jury may be influenced by their jobs as sex workers. This is a great point as we are still in a society where victims of crime such a rape are judged for their appearances.

She explores the lives of these women in a very accessible way, showing that although  it is widely believed (and indeed almost romanticised as such) that they were not all prostitutes and that we are doing them a disservice to believe the myths and focus on the murderer. Victorian society made it impossible for a woman to survive without men and any perceived transgression led to a woman being branded as ‘fallen’. All of these women had in one way or another suffered ill luck through their circumstances and suffered complete degradation as a result. This is a story of workhouses, doss houses, tramping the street, being cast out by your family and just trying desperately to survive. Alcohol was a major factor in two of the stories, the women were addicted to it as it was cheaper than food, numbed the pain and made them feel warm.

Rubenhold is a brilliant storyteller who brings the women to life so that you almost feel like you know them. She has also obviously done a great deal of difficult research, having to disregard biased and incomplete evidence.

I have been fascinated by the debate on twitter that she has begun about the way that Jack the Ripper is taught in schools as a way to draw teenagers into the history of Victorian slums and the business of the museums and tours where people seem to revel in the murders. It’s shocking some of the brutal and gory teaching materials she has found (work out the price of a prostitute, draw the dead victim etc.). She does not include anything about the murderer and not much about the murders, just where they took place and what the victims were carrying at the time. If you are looking for a book where the author provides any speculation about who the Ripper was or what happened when he murdered the victims this is not it, what it is is a meticulously researched biography of women who are traditionally overlooked.

The Burning House by Neil Spring

Delighted to find this Neil Spring novel on Netgalley, having enjoyed The Watchers and Ghost Hunters. Spring writes a good variety of fiction related to the unexplained and even better, he's from South Wales 😉.

I didn't realise until the end that he had taken the story of the real Boleskin House and weaved the story around it. Boleskin sounds an absolutely fascinating place, owned by Alestair Crowley and Jimmy Page and reputedly incredibly haunted and the site of some odd rituals and occurrences. Spring explains in a footnote that a mysterious fire did really happen, do unfortunately you can't exactly visit the real place.

Boleskin house after the fire. 

The story is a fantastic mix of the paranormal and a psychological thriller. Clara is working as an estate agent trying to escape her tragic past by living in a small Scottish village on the edge of Loch Ness. In the course of her job she accidentally kills a man which is witnessed by a stranger, a man who had an unusual interest in the creepy dilapidated Boleskin house and is extremely into mind control and the rituals Crowley performed at the site.

The plot is skillfully woven around three main characters, and is gripping enough that I didn't want to put it down. Clara is a great character, and I thought that Spring did a good job with the mysterious stranger and Karl, Clara's abusive ex. The descriptions of Boleskin house are also very good. I would be interested to find out more about Crowley's philosophy, the philosophy of Thelema. The fantastically named Oswald Catternach believes that this philosophy entitles him to do whatever he wants, no matter how unethical. This is a shocking, sometimes gruesome but very well researched book and I highly recommend it.

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley (some spoilers)

Wonderfully appropriate cover image

First, a word about the edition.  I’ve been reading the 2003 Penguin edition edited by Douglas Brooks-Davies and not been that keen. His introduction and notes are peppered with numerous spoilers and he has a tendency to over-analyse everything. If I was studying the book properly or re-reading it I would be really happy with it, but as it is a book that should be read without that much knowledge of the plot, I was disappointed with the heavy-handed editing. Having read the Colm Toibin introduction (available here on the NYRB Classics website), I think I’d prefer that edition. 

Leaving the edition aside, I really liked this book.  Hartley uses lyrical, evocative prose which perfectly captures the voice of young Leo and gives a sense of the period. I could see the resemblance between Hartley’s narrative style and Proust’s, but it wasn’t quite as difficult to read – paragraphs are shorter and are interspersed with dialogue. 

The plot is quite simple, but builds tension well. It begins with Leo remembering the summer of 1900 spent at Brandham Hall with a school friend. Leo innocently agrees to pass love letters between Marian (the school friend’s sister) and Ted (a local farmer) not realising why he is doing it or the implications that it will have for the family and for himself. 

The book works because of the way it is narrated in the first person with Leo gradually discovering what he is doing. He is an incredibly naïve character who is teased by the family because of it, and several humourous incidents in the novel occur due to his misunderstanding or interpreting something too literally. He lives with his widowed mother with whom he has a close relationship and is a rather sensitive child, who believes that he can affect circumstances with magic. With a lack of male guidance at home and feeling an outsider due to the fact that he is from a lower class than his friend Marcus, he is attracted to Marian, to Lord Trimingham (Hugh) and to Ted in turn.  

His relationship with Ted is peculiar; there is a suggestion that he is sexually attracted in the way that he admires Ted’s body and particularly in a deleted scene where Ted gives him a swimming lesson.  But this is a book which is about sexual awakening, Hartley uses belladonna as a symbolic device suggesting the ‘poisonous’ sexual undercurrents, alongside the imagery of the zodiac signs of the Virgin and the Water-Carrier and the changes in temerature.  Although it isn’t as explicit, the passage describing the swimming scene where Leo first observes Ted reminded me of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, there is a similar overlap between the natural world and sexuality, and like Mellors, Ted is unashamed of his body and sexuality:

His clothes were lying at his side; he hadn’t bothered to seek the shelter of the rushes. Nor did he now. Believing himself to be unseen by the other bathers, he gave himself up to being alone with his body.

The first person narrative leaves the relationship between Ted and Marian open to interpretation.  Marian can be read as a rather selfish, cold character who intends to use Leo from the moment he arrives at Brandham Hall, and is using Ted as a bit of fun before she marries Hugh, or as a rather mixed-up woman who is about to be forced into a marriage with a man she doesn’t love for the sake of the propriety of marrying within her own class and living at Brandham Hall who has an intense relationship with a local farmer. By the end, many years later, it is clear that she is still deceiving herself about the relationship with Ted, having intended to carry it on even when she was married.  Hartley apparently intended the reader to disapprove of the relationship, particularly of Ted apparently seducing Marian, but despite Leo’s suspicion that he is being used by both parties, there is something nice about the character of Ted, he is probably the most likable character in the book as the upper class characters can be rather cold and distant. 

The ending, before the epilogue is devastating. Although I knew what was going to happen, it was still a surprise. It is done in such a quick way.  People have criticised the prologue and the epilogue as a framing devices, in some ways the epilogue could be seen as somehow ‘softening’ the impact of the end of the story, but in other ways this is a book about the past and its effect particularly on Leo, but also on other characters in the novel, both the events of the novel and the significance of the wars the characters have participated in. The prologue and the epilogue show that Leo has rejected relationships completely. Perhaps this is because of his latent homosexuality, but there is a sense that after his nervous collapse, Leo not only finds it difficult to form romantic relationships, but also finds it difficult to trust anyone. 

Overall, it's one of those books that stays with you, and having thought about it since finishing the book I find myself realising more about the book. It will quite likely become a re-read in the future.