The Hundred-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson. Reviewed by Robert Hill

The Hundred-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson.  Reviewed by Robert Hill


On the day of his 100th birthday Alan Karlsson climbs out of the ground floor window of his room in an old people's home and so begins a journey which takes him on a n adventure involving gangsters, Hell's Angels and chasing Police. As readers we are taken on a tour of Alan's life from a rural and illiterate childhood in to meetings with President Truman, Chou En Lai, the Manhattan Project and a series of coincidental influences and involvement in the great events of the 20th Century.

 
Part adventure, part historical and always comic in its satire this novel is a true delight to read and one that is hard to put down. 'One more chapter' being a frequent refrain in the mind of this reader as the desire to continue as the omniscient companion on Alan's journey became one that was as compelling as it is fantastic

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Jonasson's sparing use of dialogue impresses and his style of narration allows for a flow to a story which the reader never feels alienated from. One doesn't need to be a scholar of history to understand the import of the encounters and events in which the main character finds himself entwined and influencing and the author's descriptions of these moments are often hilarious.

 
A novel which celebrates the absurdity of the human condition and one which shows how people can come together in the strangest of circumstances despite not being obvious travel companions this is one book where a recommendation is easy to make.

 

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

Reviewed by R.L.Hill

What struck me about this novel is how skillfully Banks presnts us with a cold, calculated and somewhat ingenius child killer and killer of children with whom we can have sympathy for.

Frank Cauldhame, and I don't think his names resemblance to Caulfield is a coincedence, lives with his father on an island on a large sandspit in the Firth, joined to the town of Nairn by a single road.  An island of sand dunes, barns and beaches which, in any other story, could be the location of a Ransomesque group of kids and their adventures.  Frank's own mapping and naming of his world gives testament to events in which he has been an agent; Bomb Circle and Snake Park allude to two of his murders.  The Rabbit Grounds and Muddy Creek being landmarks where animal torturing occurs. Yet Frank's friendship with Jamie, a dwarf from the town, and his (Frank's) understanding of his criminally insane brother Eric's breakdown allow us an insight into Frank's own place in a dysfunctional home life. 

Written from a first person perspective Banks is effective in taking us along inside Frank's thought processes and leads the reader along a path where deviance appears as the norm and where madness and insanity can be judged by degrees. Frank is a Hauden Caulfield for our times and the book is a well judged story of the right pace and length.

On a final note, the eponymous wasp factory in the story is as fascinating as it is metaphorical.  I found myself re-reading the description of it several times in order to understand its workings and meaning.

I recommend this book to anyone from teen to centurion.

Meltdown by Ben Elton

Meltdown by Ben Elton

As he often seems to do so well Elton has pulled off the trick of catching the zeitgeist with this tale of greed, hubris and amorality.

Centred around a group of six university housemates known as the radish club, Meltdown deals with their respective and intertwining lives as they forge post-university careers in New Labour politics, banking, city trading, architecture and lifestyle consumerism. 

The story follows them as the good times roll and leads inevitably to the period we now find ourselves in of financial meltdown, credit crunch, sub-prime lending, MP's expenses, 2nd home flipping, Bernard Madoff and insider trading.

What Elton does well in this story is to make the characters responsive to the times they are living in.  This allows for an understanding and empathy with each one of them as we recognise their failings and foibles as being very human and very contemporary.  Self-righteous discussions on schooling, wealth creation, the commodification of everything from homes to art to wine and even gilt edged tickets to the Live 8 gig help the reader to place these people in a Cool Britannia to Northern Rock bail out time frame.

The book is well paced and deeply satirical but with a message that despite the blind greed that may have appeared to be the norm prior to the financial crash there are those who can become better people out of it.  A case in point being Jimmy and Monica having to withdraw their son from a private school and panicking over the thought of him getting knifed and dealing in crack as they prepare to take him to the least favoured state primary in the borough.  As Jimmy says to Monica, they both attended state schools and fared OK.

I did, however, find the discussions on childcare, nannies and private versus state education rather too similar to the conversations of John O'Farrel's characters in his book 'May Contain Nuts'.  Moreover Jimmy and Monica's way of dealing with their straitened circumstances was sometimes a little too good to be true and though it made for them as sympathetic characters I couldn't help feeling that Ben Elton was a little too generous to them. 

The other main characters in the book, the radish club members and their respective spouses, move this story on without ever becoming superfluous to it and help bring this modern day contemporary morality tale to a believable conclusion.

Reviewed by Robert Hill

Eye Of The Red Tsar by Sam Eastland

Eye Of The Red Tsar by Sam Eastland
Reviewed by Robert Hill

'He was condemned to the gulag, now Stalin needs him back.'

This strap line from the front cover of this book should have been a warning of how dire the experience of reading this was going to be.

Essentially this story revolves around a former Tsarist agent Pekkala, once so close to the Romanovs and the only man Nicholas II could really trust, and the murder of the Romanovs in Ekatierinburg in 1917.

Captured and tortured by the Bolsheviks and unable to tell them the whereabouts of the Romanov fortune he is sent to a Siberian gulag and left to rot.  However, our hero, known by his super scary spy name 'The Emerald Eye' is made of sterner stuff and manages to survive his torture and captivity.

Found, 13 years later,  by a young political commissar Kirov, 'the Emerald Eye' is summoned from the gulag with the offer of total freedom if he cooperates in the investigation of the murder of the royal family, an investigation ordered by Stalin himself.  A Stalin that Pekkala was tortured and interrogated by on his original capture.

Added to this mix is Pekkala's brother Anton, a former Cheka agent who had been a guard on the house where the Romanovs were executed and who, surprise, surprise, has unresolved family issues with Pekkala.

Without having a thesaurus to hand it is hard for me to come up with all the synonyms that exist for the adjective 'contrived' but however many that exist can be applied to this poorly written and predictable story.

Told in the present and in flashback in alternate chapters a change in graphology is used to present the action occuring from the past.  Presumably this change being just one of many literary devices employed to further insult the intelligence of the reader just in case the change to the past tense isn't enough to show us where we are.

Pekkala seems to make a marvellous physical and psychological recovery from the horrors endured in his incarceration with a shave being the only therapy he requires to shake off the years of isolation, 40 degree summers, minus 40 degree winters, inadequate food, no dentistry or medical help and hard physical labour.
Eastland does allude to the psychological adjustment of a return from the gulag  when Pekkalla eats a proper meal for the first time (Kirov turns out to be a former trainee chef) and when a nun grasps his hand which is his first female contact in 13 years.  Unfortunately, Eastland skips over this in order to carry on with the pace of this mass of coincidences and cliche.

A love interest is of course present in this story, Ilya, a former teacher in the Romanov court whom we meet in the italicised flashback chapters, a women from the early 1900s but who seems to have seen the film 'Show Me The Money' as she manages to paraphrase Rene Zeilwegger's famous line from that movie. Pekkala, with the intention of proposing to her, rows Ilya blindfolded to an island in the middle of a Petrograd Lake where he has set up an elaborate and romantic meal, on revealing to Ilya what he has done she utters the rather anachronistic phrase 'you had me at the creaking of the oars.'

I will leave this review with a short paragraph from the book that actually made me burst out laughing whilst sitting on a bus, an example of prose so bad that the comedian Stuart Lee would have the same field day with it as he had when he deconstructed the paucity of quality of Dan Brown's prose in his (Lee's) stand-up act.  This extract speaks far more eloquently than I in terms of how bad Eye Of The Tsar really is.

'The child waved back, then giggled and ran behind the house.  In that moment some half-formed menace spread like wings behind his eyes, as if that child was not really a child.  As if something were trying to warn him in a language empty of words.'

Robert Hill


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The Quiet American By Graham Greene (Reviewed by R.L Hill)

Set in Saigon in early 1950s French Indo-China, Greene analyses the post-war decline of European imperialism, the rise of anti-colonial insurgency and the Cold War chess games that are played out in this era of Asian decolonisation.  Published in 1955, this story precedes, predicts and uncannily forebodes the involvement of the USA in South East Asia that was to eventually become the Vietnam war.

Pyle, the Quiet American of the title, arrives in Saigon with naive, pre-conceived and romantic notions of promoting US style capitalist democracy in the region by channeling funds to a 'Third Force', represented by the renegade General The.  Via his cover as part of the US Legation's medical mission Pyle attempts to strengthen the hand of a group that is neither the crumbling French imperial government or the purportedly Communist Vietminh. 

Fowler, an embittered and cynical English journalist is in situ as the foreign correspondent of a London newspaper covering the insurgency. Estranged from his wife, who won't grant him a divorce, and dreading the loneliness that would come with a home posting Fowler uses opium and battlefield journalism as both escape from and connection to the reality of his life.

Though these men seemingly have nothing in common they find themselves linked by a sometimes inexplicable friendship and more so for their love of the same Vietnamese girl, Phuong.  The lives of all three intertwine as the novel unfolds with the tug of love (or possession) of Phuong acting as an analogy for the struggle to win the heart and mind of Vietnam itself.

This book should be required reading for any White House, Department of State or Department of Defense staffer in the US administration who may have ideas or delusions of nation building and the exporting of democracy to so-called developing or failing states.

In a little under 200 pages Greene explores the shared European and US mindsets of paternalism, what can only be described as institutional racism and self-serving ideas of superiority.   Greene also cleverly juxtaposes and contrasts the Cold War and decolonisation era differences of the European need to hang on to past imperial glories and US desire to shape a global future in its own image.

Strikingly, Greene manages to explore this palimpsest of political perspectives in a novel that is essentially an old fashioned story of love, desire, need, conflict and betrayal.

Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene

 Written by arguably the best author to have never won a Booker, Greene's story of two unlikely travelling companions is a fascinating read.

Set in post Franco Spain the travels of the eponymous Monsignor and his Communist, ex-Mayor sidekick serve as backdrop to a discourse between the heroes of this tale.  A discourse that draws on the writings of Marx and Lenin on one hand and the teachings of the Catholic church on the other.  A discourse that allows both men to build and strengthen a friendship built on mutual respect of intelligence, integrity and deed.

In addition to the philosophical discussion that runs throughout the book Greene draws parallels with Cervantes' epic story of the Knight Errant and his companion; so much so that the Mayor is nicknamed Sancho, the priest's battered old Seat car is named Rocinante, his ecclesiastical vestements become his armour, his books of Catholic academe are his books of chivalry.

Humour runs through this story as the friends find themselves in a number of adventures and scenarios that test their beliefs, their friendship, their respective mettles and serve to cast the men as outsiders in the eyes of the civil and church authorities.  A night hiding from the Guardia Civil in the refuge of a brothel, a run in with an armed bank robber, causing a riot during  a rural  town's feast day procession, a kidnapping sanctioned by a Bishop, a case of mistaken identity and the priest's first ever visit to a cinema where the title of the film 'A Maiden's Prayer' is a little misleading for this man of the cloth.

Greene keeps the pace of the story lively and eventful with discussions of moral, social and political philosophy always accompanied by much consumption of the wines of the regions they pass through.  Great questions of social justice, the nature of corruption, hypocrisy and power juxtaposes with a story that is part 'road', part 'buddy' and part 'parable'. 

Oh, and there's a great description of the English in there that had me giggling.

Reviewed by Robert Hill

The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens

The story revolves around a Jewish family, living in the east end of London.  The family consists of its patriarch, a widower and retired Rabbi, the unmarried eldest daughter Bella, the married 'out' and therefore ostracised and estranged Esther and only son Norman, the brilliant but drug addicted lawyer.

The dysfunctionality of this family is revealed by its responses to the sectioning of Norman due to drug related delusions and hallucinations and his father's subsequent heart condition.

Scenes  played out in the family home, the family business ( a grocer's shop) and a mental hospital both in the present and in retrospect show both the strength and weaknesses of the codes that this family lives by and falls short of.

The novel contains some comical moments based on the premise of the Rabbi's naivety and other wordlyness.  In particular his inadvertent visit to a prostitute and his use of Yiddish.

The scenes in the hospital have real moments of humour and pathos as well as providing further comment and insight into the nature of both normality and deviance; a theme which runs throughout the book.

A well paced story with interesting characters; the remembered dead wife and Mother, an Aunt and staff and patients in the hospital all bring colour to the tale.

The book is an interesting study of the stretching, breaking and mending of the threads that link family members and though it has a dramatic climax it doesn't have any real resolution.  This I found rather frustrating.