Material Witness

Last Light in paperback: Peak Oil in the spotlight

About a year ago I confidently predicted that Alex Scarrow's second novel Last Light would be the blockbuster of the summer and suggested, somewhat bossily looking back, that "you should read it".

But, really, you should.  And with Orion Books today publishing the paperback version of the novel, it will be a good deal more accessible.

Even last year, Last Light seemed the right book at exactly the right moment. it deals with the aftermath of a major geo-political upheaval caused by revolution in Saudi Arabia and a sudden and irreversible unravelling of the world's oil supply system. The aftermath, as imagined by Scarrow, is somewhat terrifying. The free flow of oil supports life on the planet: underpinning the distribution of power, food, water and life's other essentials. Without it, the UK descends into sudden, violent anarchy and our cosy, civilised world quickly disappears.

Last year it could have been argued that the scenario was somewhat far-fetched - although it is not an argument I would have mounted with any great conviction. But those were the heady days of petrol being sold at a mere 85p per litre at the pump, rather than the 125p it is at now as we stare down the barrel of an entirely imaginable 150p. And more maybe.

At the heart of Scarrow's book is the premise of Peak Oil, the phrase that describes the moment when global oil production reaches its height before declining, as demand, fuelled (if you'll pardon the pun) by the runaway economies of India, China and the like.

Right now, it feels very much like the world is on the edge: politically and economically. If the governor of the Bank of England is predicting "a bumpy road" you know damned well what he means is "unmade, pot-hole ridden, dirt track in the jungle with bandits around every corner". It might have started with some over-enthusiastic lending in the US, but right now the problems are being exacerbated  by the rising price of food and, you've guessed it, oil.

Where could this lead? Who knows? To a quick recovery with any luck, but perhaps to a version of Last Light.

This is a terrific book. Pacy, well-written, thought-provoking, very scary. A damned good thriller.

At the risk of ruining my reputation - not much to risk, I admit - I would again urge you to get a copy of this book. You won't regret it.

As for me, I was excited today  by two things. Firstly, Orion is using Material Witness quotes in some of its marketing for the book!! Which is the sort of recognition I never expected. And secondly I received a proof of Alex's new book, October Skies. Happy (if a little scary) days.

Competition: Win a US advance reader copy of The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo

While European readers have been buying copies of the late Stieg Larsson's highly acclaimed debut novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in their millions, US enthusiasts have had to be patient. But their wait is almost over.

Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House, will publish the book in September of this year. But one lucky reader can have a copy early. Material Witness has one copy of the advance reader of the book free to give away to a US-based reader.

All you have to do is send your answer to the question below to material.witness@yahoo.com by midnight ET Friday May 16.  A winner will be chosen at random from the correct answers on Tuesday May 20.

Question: What is the name of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Stieg Larsson's novel?

Best of luck.

My sincere thanks to Sarah Robinson of Alfred A. Knopf, both for my copy of the book and the competition copy.

REVIEW: Gallows Lane by Brian McGilloway

The development of crime series follows many patterns. Some burn brightly on debut, too brightly perhaps, and then fizzle out quickly. In others it takes the writer as many as half a dozen books or so to find the right place in the universe for their characters when the series can take on the mantle of greatness - Robert Crais' Elvis Cole novels spring to mind.

Others ride a rollercoast of quality as the author struggles to maintain excellence over the course of a dozen books. A few, Donna Leon among then, manage to pull of this most difficult feat and sustain brilliance over the course of a decade or more.

It remains to be seen exactly which category Brian McGilloway's Benedict Devlin series will fall into, but what I do know after two books, Gallows Lane and the debut Borderlands, is that he has made an extraordinarily strong start.

I read one (very positive) review of Gallows Lane that suggested these books would benefit from the inclusion of a map of the Donegal North/Republic border area, and I would heartily agree. The geography of this cross-jurisdictional area is critical and all the flitting back and forth can get a little confusing.

But while readers may struggle to locate that arbitrary line on a map that has been so critical to British and Irish politics over the last 80 years, they will have no such trouble in imagining the lands it divides. McGilloway's prose paints vivid, atmospheric pictures of this dark green land that hides its secrets and its ancient tensions, as well as the modern phenomenon of social exclusion.

While the Donegal border between North and South is not quite the wild terrorist-ridden frontier of South Armagh, so brilliantly brought to life in Toby Harnden's Bandit Country, it is still a place which offers ample opportunities for criminals to slip back and forth evading the forces of law and order, be they represented by Benedict Devlin, McGilloway's Garda Inspector or Jim Hendry, Devlin's counterpart across the border with the Police Service of Northern Ireland. It is also still a place where the IRA exists, either as a keeper of secrets or as an extra-legal keeper of the "peace". And certainly as a protector of its own residual interest in a case.

The IRA is only a peripheral minor player in Gallows Lane, but the story provides a chilling reminder of how powerful and dangerous that organisation can be, even if it is no longer actively engaged in terrorism.

Instead the crime here is rather more of the close-to-home variety - robbery and murder - and Devlin finds himself knee deep in both, as first a young woman is abducted from a night club and killed in a building site, and then a man returning to the South after a period at Her Majesty's pleasure in the North is found crucified in the garden of a wealthy man, close to where an IRA arms cache has just been found. Assisted by Ireland's equivalent of the FBI Devlin begins to suspect that the two cases might be linked by a long forgotten armed robbery north of the border.

As Devlin deals with this major rural crime wave he is also put under more pressure by the news that his boss, who suffered family tragedy in the previous novel, Borderlands, is retiring and giving himself the opportunity to apply for a Superintendent's promotion.

As the body count piles up, and with it the stress and the sleepless nights, Devlin's health begins to fail him and he finds himself questioning his judgment as takes uncharacteristic risks and makes dangerous errors.

Devlin's fallibility is one of the charms of McGilloway's work. He is not the gifted maverick who crosses the line to get his man (although he does break the rules). Nor is the cliched departmental alcoholic struggling to hold his life together. Instead he is a good man with two children, working hard for his family and doing his best to find justice for those that who cannot earn it for themselves.

He is a far more rounded, human character than often found in detective fiction: sensitive, vulnerable, stubborn, brave and committed. And Gallows Lane is all the better for it.

And McGilloway is a fine novelist, an expert builder of solid, credible plots who keeps a strong command of twist and turn in what at times is a complex, muddied trail.

But more than that he is a very gifted writer, poetic in his tone and turn of phrase, artistic, like a watercolour painter, with his descriptive powers.

It is seductive, compelling combination: impeccable characterisation, beautiful writing and a first class narrative. Borderlands is a terrific book, Gallows Lane an even stronger sequel.

As I wrote earlier, it is too soon to know just how the series will develop, but if I were a betting man, I would be quite happy to take a chance that we will see a lot more of McGilloway and Devlin.

Kraków in the spring; as British as...

Found in the foreword to the "Kraków in Your Pocket" guidebook available in good hotels in the charming Polish city now:

"If you think you've outwitted the rest of the world by visiting Kraków in April and May then think again. Those looking for Robinson Crusoe moments of solitude should look elsewhere, there are times when Kraków feels as British as being buggered at boarding school; if you're here at the weekend then your lingering memory isn't unlikely to be of lairy English berks puking in gutters and leering at bar girls. Indeed, Saturdays in the City are a bit of an irritant, but fortunately you'll find the rest of the time time there's more to Kraków than Sky Sports and angry looking looking blokes pushing their way into kebab queues."

Makes you proud, doesn't it? Our chief export in 2008: angry looking blokes pushing their way into kebab queues. What was it Wellington said about his men? "I don't know what they do to the enemy, but by God they frighten me".

May merry for James Bond fans

May is Bond-month here at Material Witness, as it is likely to be in large pockets of the publishing and book-selling industry.

The cause of all the excitement is the imminent publication of Devil May Care (May 28), the new Bond James novel written by Sebastian Faulks, in honour of the the Ian Fleming Centenary, which marks the 100th anniversary of the writer's birth.

I can't quite remember the last time I was this intrigued and excited by the publication of a single book and so by way of limbering up for the event, I have been in Bond-training, reading Fleming's work to give myself the standard against which to benchmark Faulks' efforts.

Earlier this week I finished Live and Let Die, the second of Fleming's novels, published in 1954, and what a book it is. Judged in some quarters the best of the Bond catalogue, Live and Let Die follows Bond's pursuit of Mr Big, a Haitian-American gangster with a penchant for voodoo, laundering 17th treasure trove for the Russians.

The book opens in New York, tracks Bond down to Florida and then on to Jamaica where he faces a final reckoning with Mr Big. This was, I think, one of the first Bond films I ever watched, and consequently remains one of my favourites, not least because of the presence of Solitaire (pictured), the mind-reading female love interest played by Jane Seymour.

What struck me again about this book (only the second Fleming original I have read, the other being Casino Royale) is just how different Fleming's Bond is from the Bond of the big screen. In the books Bond bleeds and suffers (emotionally and physically) and the life he leads is portrayed as something far more dark and dangerous than the great game played by Connery, Moore, Brosnan and the other Bonds (until Daniel Craig's reappraisal of the character in Casino Royale in 2006.)

The books also have a very distinctive style. While the action is explosive and the themes grand, Fleming writes sparely, wasting few words, and with the clipped tone of the aristocrat. this style contributes greatly to the enjoyment of the books and it will be fascinating to see how Faulks approaches his task. I will note here that this a brave move for a writer, to step into legendary shoes. I have always liked Faulks' work although I believe the very high quality has trailed off somewhat since the brilliance of Birdsong, The Girl at the Lion D'Or and The Fatal Englishman.

One question raised by Live and Let Die is: What the hell did I do with my youth? I cannot now understand why it is that I didn't read the full Ian Fleming James Bond series when I was a teenager. And while it is hugely enjoyable to be able to catch up with this now and to have more or less this whole body of work to be discovered, I can't help but feel it would have lit the literary flame in me had I come across all this then, rather than wasting my time reading Jeffrey Archer (the shame of it) and Jack Higgins.

But there is more for Bond fans than just a new book out. Penguin is also set to reissue the series in new hardback formats featuring highly attractive artwork.

Also on May 28, the paperback version of the fourth book in the Young Bond series, Hurricane Gold, will be published.

These books are highly recommended. I started out with them by listening to a CD in a car when trying to entertain my six-year-old soon on a long journey. These are aimed at kids, yes, but adults will enjoy them as well (my wife and I both did). For Bond fans they offer a window on the making of a super spy. Higson has very skilfully pieced together a past that puts Bond on a path to his future career as a Double 0 agent. The pscyhology of the adult is fashioned in his youth and Higson's careful research also ensures that the older Bond is reflected in the schoolboy.

These books are coming to the end of a five book cycle later this year with the publication of By Royal Command, which sees the young James leaving Eton. Higson has talked publicly about a possible second series tracing Bond's post-school and Second World War adventures, but with more adult themes which will lift the series away from its current youthful audience.

But that is a long way off yet. In the meantime we have the May excitement to come, and I'll be keeping in touch with various events as well as publishing reviews of Hurricane Gold and Devil May Care.

REVIEW: Cry for Help by Steve Mosby

If Steve Mosby had a motto, it might be "Making You Think". His last novel, The 50/50 Killer, he set readers the agonising conundrum of exactly how they would react if they were forced to make the choice between their own life and that of their partner.

In Cry For Help, a book that confirms Mosby's status as a crime writer of great ability and originality, he changes tack slightly, exploring the idea of the responsibility we have for the health, welfare and happiness of friends, colleagues and family.

It's a very modern question. We live in an increasingly mobile, fragmented and, many would say, selfish society. Rather than living in communities, as we might have done 50 years ago, with families on the doorsteps and knowing a great many of our neighbours, life in this decade is more likely to be characterised by us living in isolation from family and unknown to those around us.

In recent years we've probably become even more detached, eschewing even telephone conversations in favour of briefer, less personal forms of communication: text, email, IM, even Facebook.

And so you might have heard from your best friend five or six times this week and feel you know what they're up to. That they're OK. But you probably haven't spoken to them. So while you assume all is well, if you think about it clearly, they may not. Someone may have that phone, access to that e-mail account.

This is the situation confronting Detective Sam Currie, who investigates the deaths of women who have been left to die of thirst alone, while their friends have been reassured they are OK using texts and emails.

And as Currie's investigation develops, revealing the existence of particularly cruel, manipulative and sadistic killer, the theme of responsibility abounds. Both Currie, and the book's second central character, Dave Ellis, a journalist and magician linked to one of the missing girls, are haunted by events in their past, moments when they might have done more to help someone important in their life. Ellis is driven not to repeat earlier mistakes and consequently is dragged into the killer's deadly game when a vulernable former girlfriend appears to go missing.

Cry for Help is a multi-threaded book, following several different characters, one of them, Ellis, in the first person, others in the third. Handled badly, this could have been a distraction, but actually works to the benefit of a book, which spends so much time examining personal conscience as the decisions that Ellis is forced to make are life or death choices for others.

The story is clever, but not so clever it ever feels contrived, and the narrative well paced from a good set-up that traps the reader to a gripping and violent climax. And what is apparent throughout is the Mosby can really write. His characters are rounded, convincing and humanly flawed. His dialogue is right out of the top drawer. Characters in some books sound as if their speech has been written with the moment in mind where they are being spoken on a set in Hollywood by Bruce Willis or Matt Damon. Not so here. The characters sound and behave like real people. And that might sound simple, but if it was then more people would be able to do it.

Cry for Help is a first rate thriller, compelling and thought-provoking. While it is a dark book, occupying some of the less hospitable corners of the human psyche, it's not quite the twisted fairy tale / horror story that The 50/50 Killer is, and should prove more mainstream than that book, because as good is as it was, it didn't earn Mosby the audience he deserved.

Here's hoping Cry for Help does. 

Cry for Help will be published by Orion Books in May.

REVIEW: The Girl of His Dreams by Donna Leon

Life can be a pretty complicated business for a liberal. How would one take, for example, as Donna Leon does, the plight of eastern European gypsies, driven from the lands of their birth by oppressive regimes, denied their traditional way of life by the imposition of modern norms and forced into little more than holding camps on the ugly edges of industrial cities?

Hated by their new neighbours, they find themselves all but unemployable.  They turn instead to activities either on the very fringes of legality - "used car sales" - or those that cross every legal boundary there is, and most moral and ethical ones beside: sending their children into the city to burgle homes and pick pockets.

For many this presents a crisis of conscience: sympathy for the plight of the gypsies, disgust at their behaviour, but then the quandary at the core of the liberal dilemma: do they behave like this because they have no choice, because our society has forced them into a corner, or is it because they have chosen to behave in this way?

This is a struggle that Ispettore Vianello, Commissario Guido Brunetti's partner, grapples with in The Girl of His Dreams, the 17th book in a series that has managed to sustain the very highest quality.

Brunetti and Vianello are thrown into the world of the gypsies, or Rom, when they fish the body of a pretty young girl out of a canal one rainy morning. They quickly establish that the girl was almost certainly burgling a nearby house of a middle class couple. The question to be answered is: how did she end up in the canal?

And here the moral maze becomes that little bit more labyrinthine: it is a question that the wider Questura, in the form of the preening, social-climbing Vice-Questore Patta, simply does not want answered. A gypsy girl, a burglar to boot, has died; very sad, but really, she only had herself to blame... And it was an accident, surely? And, of course, nobody wants to embarrass the burgled couple, particularly when it transpires that their daughter is dating the wayward son of the Interior Minister.

Those familiar with Donna Leon's work will recognise the distinctive Italian pattern here: the police, the government and the other arms of state protect and serve, but they do not do so equally. Money and connections buy these services. If you have neither, you may as well not exist.

That means that, as they often do, Brunetti and Vianello are forced to undertake an investigation that their superiors have ordered them to wind up, and so consequently they have little expectation that they will be able to deliver justice for the victim.

There is no doubt that over the years, Donna Leon has become increasingly disenchanted with Italian politics and society. The barometer for this is the conversation around the Brunetti dining table - a place of rich, sumptuous feasts - and the chats between Vianello and Brunetti as they catch the vaparetto from one crime scene to the next.

And there is now little more than utter contempt for authority in the form of politicians and senior officers and a sense of resignation about the situation. And in the absence of leadership with integrity, the Brunettis brings up their children to know right from wrong and behave as responsible citizens with a strong strain of social conscience. And Vianello and Brunetti investigate every crime with the rigour it deserves, irrespective of who the victim is or the social standing of the suspect.

These are beautiful, beautiful books. The grace of Donna Leon's writing matches the elegance and splendour of its location. Vianello, Brunetti and his wife Paola, are likable, well-adjusted humane people, living in a rotten, corrupt society and doing what they can every day to improve it.

And this book, The Girl of His Dreams, is as good as any of the previous 16, and perhaps it is the best. The ending is as moving as anything I can recall reading anywhere. The book will make you smile, laugh and shake your head. It will make you angry and unable to believe that in a modern European democracy (if that description actually fits Italy, and I doubt it does) the affairs of state could be carried out in such a corrupt fashion.

And finally, it might make you shed a tear or two, as it did me.

REVIEW: Hell's Fire by Chris Simms

Never judge a book by its back cover. For a couple of years now, Chris Simms' Manchester-based police procedurals have been dropping on the doormat with some regularity. For two years I had ignored them.

Something put me off, and I'm not quite sure what. Perhaps it was Manchester itself. A City I don't really know, feel no affinity for and was in no great hurry to familiarise myself with. For whatever reason, Simms' books joined the to read pile, but never quite made it to the top.

All of which is a great pity, because I could have discovered Chris Simms two years ago, and I would not now be playing catch up with his back catalogue.

And of course what I already knew was that given great writing and a strong plot, location doesn't necessarily matter one bit whether it's Manchester, Moscow or Manila. And so it is with Hell's Fire, a cracking procedural exploring some of the darker fringes of society where the ethically-challenged and greedy prey on the weak, needy and lonely.

Hell's Fire focuses on DI Jon Spicer's investigation into a series of church torchings which take a turn for the worse when a burnt corpse is found in the ruins. Satanic symbols found at the scene lead the Major Incident Team into an investigation which narrows down on a thriving occult scene around Manchester, and most notably a vampiric rock band and a "college" offering courses in sprituality and alternative religious systems.

The book spends a long time dwelling on religious issues. Spicer, a non-believer brought up in a strict religious household, finds himself refereeing an ongoing dispute between his devout mother and his tearaway younger sister who has joined a religion focused on human alignment with the natural world, and who is wrapped up in affairs at the dodgy college. And as the story progresses the dark secret of Spicer's sister's alienation from the church emerges to further complicate matters for the detective.

At the same time the attacks on the churches bring friction between established religion and its alternatives before new killings raise the stakes for all involved, and it becomes increasingly unclear which set is killing in homage to their own belief systems.

What works brilliantly here is the portrayal of the problems that come with uncompromising conviction allied to a willingness to follow beliefs with action, action that might be called terrorism in another context.

Simms has a gift for writing people that allows him to manage this process. Spicer is everyman, a father and a husband with money worries and family problems like the rest of us. His sister is at once idealistic and angry, independent and desperately in need of society. Perhaps it is no coincidence that only Rick Saville, Spicer's gay partner, seems assured and at ease with himself.

And then beyond the characterisation, or perhaps through it, there is a great story: dark and compelling, and one that keeps the reader guessing right up to a gruesome but satisfying finale.

Simms is very good, and I only wish I had discovered that two years ago.

La Dolce Vita according to Donna Leon; Audio shorts; Russell Brand

"Because they were in a hurry, they decided not to have pasta and settled for a single dish of shrimp with vegetables and coriander. They shared a bottle of Gottardi pinot noir, turned down dessert, and finished with coffee."

Who could this be other than Guido Brunetti and Lorenzo Vianello? In the midst of what might be a murder investigation, and "in a hurry", there is time for lunch. Not a full lunch, granted, no pasta after all, but a decent-sounding lunch with a bottle of wine. How happy we would all be to make do with the Italian equivalent of the sandwich at the desk!

This is part of what makes Donna Leon's books so special: the very Mediterranean pace of life, and the appreciation of the finer things in life, and the well-adjusted likable detectives.

The Child of his Dreams, the new Brunetti novel, is wonderful. Review soon.

Audio shorts

Last week I praised the joys of the audio book, and this week, with quite a bit of travel behind me, went through a couple more.

Generally speaking I like my audio books unabridged, even if this means that the listening to them can go on for quite a while as many books run to more than a dozen hours and it's not always easy to find that kind of time.

So thanks to Chloe Healy at Macmillan for introducing me to the pleasures of the audio short: books abridged down to two or three hours. This week I tried H is for Homicide, by Sue Grafton, and Minette Walters' The Breaker.

The beauty of these is that they can be digested in a couple of car sittings, a round trip to Heathrow, for example, and give the listener a full story in a condensed time.

Sue Grafton's novels, generally pretty short anyway, are perfect for this sort of treatment. I got my first introduction to the Alphabet series via audio, an unabridged reading of J is for Judgment by Lorelei King. And so her's is the voice I hear in my head when I read Kinsey Milhone, and it was nice to hear her again reading H, with her sing-song upbeat voice that capture's Kinsey's sassy charm. H is one of the more distinctive books - Kinsey goes undercover in pursuit of insurance scammers - and it didn't seem to suffer much in the truncation.

Minette Walters I have never read for some reason, although I know plenty of people who have and who like her books, and so the CD book, read beautifully by Kevin Whateley of Lewis fame. It's a fascinating story, sordid sex and jjealous amongst the Dorset sailing set, which begins when the naked body of a young mother is washed up on an isoldated shoreline.

Walters' characters are rounded, real people, including her policemen and in particular the salt-of-the-earth PC Nick Ingram. And it is somewhat shocking in its exposure of what goes on ín seemingly normal households behind closed doors. I thoroughly enjoyed it and will look out for more of her work.

Russell Brand brightens up the sporting morning

There is so much sports' writing out there in the newspapers each morning that there is very little scope for originality any more. That is why I paricularly enjoy Russell Brand's idiosyncratic view of the sporting life each Saturday morning in the Guardian. He is surprisingly insightful, utterly original and always funny. But this morning, during an exposition on how football managers' lives are so difficult and the circumstance impacting their job security to fickle he surpassed himself.

Writing about how self-styled special one Jose Mourinho made Chelsea "palatable", even to West Ham fans like Brand, he came up with the following analogy:

"Figuratively the scenario is reminiscent of a girl I once dated who had an atrocious personality (cruel, racist, joyless) but a really nice arse. She was like her own arse's irritating best mate - I had to tolerate her to get to the arse. The arse in its spellbinding beauty made her many flaws tolerable - she later revealed she'd only gone out with me because she liked my cat so don't feel too sorry for her."

Strange but brilliant.

The art of audio: more than mere reading

Harry Flashman, Rugby School bully, hero of Jalalabad and comic creation of utter genius, has a most distinctive voice. You can hear him inside your head when reading the late George Macdonald Fraser's marvellous books.

He is haughty, mischievous, full of bravado, patronising and proud, terrified and self-obsessed. But he is also the consummate raconteur, recalling the high jinks of bygone ages: adventures experienced, horrible deaths averted, women conquered and great statesmen and kings toadied to. Flashy is a compex character when writing his memoirs, his great confessional, moving from the wistful reminiscences of loves won and lost, to the terror of torture and worse and through to the admissions that his glorious career was not all it might have seemed. He is thoughtful, reflective and humble in his dotage; conceited, bumptious and duplicitous in his youth.

It would be easy to play him as the ebullient, roistering toff. But it requires more range than that, something I may not have fully appreciated until listening to Rupert Penry-Jones, the celebrated star of Spooks who makes more women swoon even than Flashy did in his day, reading Royal Flash, one of the most engaging books of the series.

When you read the book of course, you can hear Flashman in your head as you want to hear it him and it is, of course, perfect - a communion between reader and writer. And that, of course, makes it dashed difficult for someone else to trump. So it has to be just so.

And Penry-Jones is spot on. There's a passage late in Royal Flash, where our anti-hero is making good his escape from Strackenz, that sums up not just Flashman, but perhaps the greatness of Macdonald Fraser as a comic novelist: "I take some pride in the fact that while thrones were toppling and governments were melting away overnight, I was heading home with a set of crown jewels. There's a moral there, I think, if only I could work out what it was."

There it all is, in just three lines: the essence of Flashman. Perhaps even the essence of Britain's relationship with our European neighbours: "Look them all, the stupid Jonny Foreigners playing their mad games. Still we've done OK, and we can watch the whole thing from the comfort of island sofas and laugh at the lot of them, if a little uncomfortably because we don't really understand what's going on or at what point it's going to bite us on the arse."

OK, so that's a stretch, of course. But the point is that it is a brilliant line, and it needs to be delivered equally brilliantly, and Penry-Jones gets it just right. There's a hint of a smile in his voice, a moment of smugness which drifts into a pensive finale, before moving swiftly on.

At it's best, the audio book is not just a reading, it's a one man stage show, capturing the drama and pathos of the book in tone and timing and expression.

Stephen Fry has done it with Harry Potter, to the extent, I'm sure that many many readers coming across the new books may see the faces of Daniel Radcliffe or Michael Gambon in their mind's eye, but they hear Fry.

I recently finished another audio book, this one the unabridged version of Next, Michael Crichton's genetic thriller. It's an extraordinary book, really, one part incomprehensible science journal, one part political polemic, one part thriller, cobbled together using newspaper reports, congressional speeches and more conventional narrative.

It's two most memorable characters are a four year transgenic chimpanzee-human cross called Dave, who disperses bullies threatening his human brother by hurling his own shit at them, and an African grey parrot named Gerard with full facility for speech, including extraordinary powers of mimicry and no little mathematical ability.

I don't know for sure, that if I had started reading it, I would have finished it. Bits of it are pretty dense and it was a struggle at times to see where the whole thing was heading and why.

But I didn't have to. I had the Audible audio version, read magnificenty by Dylan Baker, a hugely talented but under-rated actor. Baker's interpretation of Next and its extraordinary characters held the whole thing together for me, and in the end made it a hugely compelling exercise, one I was delighted to have read in the end.

The advent of the iPod, not to mention complementary technologies such as the iTrip player, have made audio books a lot more accessible (previously some of the Harry Potter books required dozens of CDs or 26 tapes, far too many to carry very far).

Time jogging, in the car or the air means a lot more time to listen and it is fantastic that such high quality art is available out there.