Material Witness

REVIEW: Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

December 27, 14.50pm 

There is a tendency, in the modern media, towards length; an adherence the principle that bigger is better. This is evident in the world of the big screen where too few movies are now concluded before their second hour is up. It is rare too, that I find a book these days that couldn't use a second, more extensive, application of the editor's knife.

And that is, partly at least, why Sharp Objects, the debut novel from Gillian Flynn, is such a triumph. Not a word in this modern family-horror-story novel is wasted as Flynn draws her reader through the mostly tightly-woven of plots to an extraordinary conclusion.

Television is perhaps the sole medium not obsessed with engorgement. Most content is still served up in 30 and 60 minute packages, which are relatively short time periods for setting up a story, telling it and then bringing it to a satisfying conclusion. In recent years American writers in particular have been very adept at using every one of the seconds available to them to produce first class story-telling and entertainment. As the television critic for Entertainment Weekly, Gillian Flynn has had a privileged front row seat of both best and worst practice in the small screen media, and on the evidence of Sharp Objects, she has learned those lessons well.

Sharp Objects begins when Camille Preaker, a reporter on a third string Chicago newspaper, is sent back to her home town in rural Missouri to report on what appears to be a serial killer story following the murder of one young girl and the disappearance of a second. As both outsider and one time prominent resident of the town (the prettiest girl from the  richest family) Camille is the perfect guide through small town neuroses and secrets laid horribly bare by two violent crimes.

She uncovers the broken dreams (and marriages) of her former classmates; the havoc wrought by her half sister Amma who leads a Heathers-esque clique of the beautiful and bad.  More than that , she reacquaints herself with the claustrophobia of life in a small town as well as the suffocating presence of her domineering southern matron mother.

In the meantime, Flynn maintains a gripping murder mystery which twists ever closer to Camille's childhood home.

It is scarcely believable that this is the work of a first novellist, so accomplished is it in every facet of the writing. Characterisation, dialogue, context, backdrop and story-telling are all first class. Sharp Objects, which is published in the UK (by Weidenfeld and Nicholson) on January 3rd,  marks out Gillian Flynn as a fearsome new talent in the crime fiction genre. I am as sure that this book will be a huge success as I have been of any debut novel I have ever come across, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

REVIEW: Hide by Lisa Gardner

December 21, 11.26am

To this point, Lisa Gardner has registered only as one of my panic railway station buys. On that occasion I bought The Killing Hour last year. It was a clever novel, with an ingenious, if somewhat dark premise - that a killer kidnapped pairs of women, murdering one and leaving clues as to the whereabouts of the engdandered second on the corpse. It was fine. Nothing special, but a fair way to pass the time.

I don't suppose I'd given the writer much more thought until a proof of her next novel - Hide, which is due  for publication in early 2007 - dropped onto the doormat just as I was putting down Imperium.

I was hooked roughly 45 second after opening it, and finished it roughly 36 hours later, with only  necessary distractions such as work and, to a lesser degree, sleep.

Within Hide is another clever premise - clearly a Gardner trait - two decades ago a family on the run, driven by an over-protective father for reasons that are not revealed. Now the daughter, disturbed but functional, is back in the City (Boston) where it all began  and where she reads of her own death  in a newspaper.

Her "corpse" is one of six young females found in wet mummified conditions in a hole in the ground on the estate of the City's now closed mental hospital. The young woman, Annabelle Granger, calls the police  and instantly becomes immersed in an investigation that spans 20 years and draws together another of creepy strands including a previous case of a young girl kept underground as a sex slave, the deranged scion of a grand Boston family as well as a policeman, Bobby Dodge (a Gardner regular apparently) with his own demons to exorcise.

On at least half a dozen occasions during the book, I thought I had it all figured out, only to discover that Lisa Gardner is far too clever a writer to allow a dim reader like myself a glimpse into the final pages at an early stage. So many twists, so very deftly handled are a measure of her skill as a storyteller, and that appears to be her greatest gift. Hide rattles along at a very satisfying pace, taking to pause to catch up with history when necessary, racing away with the present-day plot when appropriate.   

The background was chosen carefully and painted skilfully also. There is something inherently disturbing about mental institutions, and Ms Gardner very cleverly constructs a haunting worse-case-scenario in hers.  Similarly, there is something so everyday about the suburban lifestyle from which one of the victims is hoisted away that it will send a shiver down the spine of every parent who reads it (just as it did mine).

My first brush with Gardner left me a little cold, but the overwhelming feeling with this one was "chilling".

For modern war on terror, read ancient war on pirates

December 18, 13.57pm

I was struck last week, when reading Robert Harris's Imperium, by the way in which much of the Roman justice system has been handed down to the modern legal arena, but what is true of law is equally true of politics.

As I slid quietly towards sleep just as Cicero, Harris's protagonist was climbing the greasy pole from aedile to praetor, I suddenly found myself reading a convincing description of the behind-the-scenes debates, jutsificatons and discussions that led US into a near-unilateral "war on terror".

But this was 68BC, not 9/11, and a cast list including Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar rather than George W Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

But while the names and places may have been changed to protect the guilty, the events were remarkably similar. Instead the destruction of the Twin Towers, we have an attack on the Roman fleet at Ostia by pirates who destroyed a dozen or more triremes and kidnapped a handful of officials.

The effect on the Roman Republic - then an extraordinarily sophisticated democracy - was extraordinary. Politicians hell bent on furthering their own positions whipped the local populace into a  hysterical fear, and while they were worrying who or what was creeping up the Tiber to sack their homes, they happily handed parts of their precious democracy to one man Pompey, thus opening the door to a process that would ultimately result in Caesarean Empire.

The manner in which the fear of the poeple and the power of the mob was manipulated for political ends is chillingly told and echoes down the generations to the Patriot Act, phone-tapping and the hideous war in Iraq.

Unsurprisingly, this has been a theme developed elsewhere, not least by Robert Harris himself, in an  excellent opinion piece in the New York Times, in which the writer explains how fear and patriotism can be a politician's most potent weapons:

"By the oldest trick in the political book — the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as “soft” or even “traitorous” — powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned."

Odds and Sods: Gillian Flynn, Christopher G Moore, Imperium

December 15

Christmas arrived 10 days early today in the form of Sharp Objects, the debut novel of Gillian Flynn, courtesy of the good folk at Weidenfeld. I was first alerted to this book a month or two ago, and have been really looking forward to it.

Put simply, it looks an absolute ripper, and even reading the synopsis was enough to make me feel somewhat uncomfortable and claustrophobic, and it is now resting right at the top of my  "to read" list.

Hopefully arriving soon also is the latest novel by Christopher G Moore, an ex-pat Canadian now living in Thailand. I'd not come across his novels until he got in touch after reading an earlier post here about some of the linguistic oddities of Peter Robinson, the ex-pat Brit living in Canada writing a series set in Yorkshire.

As an ex-pat himself of 20 years standing Mr Moore said he was very aware of the dangers of losing touch with language and made a strong effort to keep in touch with his roots.

As a result of an exchange of e-mails, he's sending a copy of The Risk of Infidelity Index,  the ninth novel in his Vincent Calvino private eye series, and I'm looking forward to seeing it. I've not read much crime fiction set in Asia , so a  touch  of Bangkok noir should be just the job for broadening my horizons.

FINALLY, I'm getting quickly through Robert Harris's Imperium, a political novel set in ancient Rome. Although I am finding some of the story-telling aspects somewhat grating - it is written as a memoir of a slave of Cicero - it is genuinely fascinating, offering some  brilliant insights into the political and legal structures of ancient Rome.

What is extraordinary about much of it is how sophisticated a justice and political system they engineered, an edifice unmatched in Europe for hundreds of years after the fall of the Empire, and just how much of it has become the foundation of the current system in the UK . Although it may have been riddled with corruption - an Italian thing, I guess - it remains a system and a people to marvel at. What have the Romans ever done for us? Asked Monty Python. Just about everything is the answer, and continues to be true.

My answer to the question, "if you could travel back in time to just one place, where would it be?" has always been ancient Rome, and this illuminating novel has confirmed that view.

The Ipswich Murders

December 13, 11.40am

One of the side effects of reading a lot of crime fiction is the potential for it to leave one anaesthetised to the horrors of the crimes being described. Regrettably this spills over all too easily into "real" life and crime and it has become relatively straightforward - for me at least - to whip through reports without spending too much time thinking about the victims.

But when coverage of an event becomes blanket, leading every bulletin, occupying every front page, we are brought face to face with the full horror of what a violent crime means for a victim, a family, even an entire community - in this case Ipswich.

It is all but impossible to read or watch any of it, without straying into uncomfortable territory thinking about just how terrifying and lonely it must be in such a gruesome scenario. The other thing that has struck me over the last couple of days in particular, is just how desperate and difficult lives must be for women still prepared to work the streets of Ipswich under such circumstances. I am now waiting for the media to turn its attention on how society can help to ensure that, wherever possible, women are not forced into the street life, and where impossible, to keep them safe.

But it is also very difficult not to think of these murders in the context of crime fiction.

"It's all very Rebus, isn't it?" my wife asked. And it is a little.

The speed at which events have unfolded in Suffolk, with five  victims in less than a fortnight,  gives this awful story the pace of fiction. Every time I hear a report I wonder what the police are not revealing about the victims, whether this killer leaves his own mark in some way. There seems to be a lot we are not being informed about, and I hope that means there are plenty of leads and that no more lives are lost.

REVIEW: Piece of my Heart by Peter Robinson

December 8, 8.11am

As a general rule, I'm not a massive fan of novels that proceed along dual timelines where history is entwined with the present.

As it is a  general rule, however, there are plenty of exceptions. Novels with a sharp historical focus are usually exempt, and Kate Mosse's Labyrinth, one of my favourite novels of 2005, is a big exception. But crime novels often work less well, so it was a pleasant surprise (if not a big one given the consistent excellence of Peter Robinson's Alan Banks novels) that Piece of My Heart, worked on every level.

Piece of my Heart - the 16th Banks book, not the 17th as I have reported elsewhere - slips back and forth between the late Swinging Sixties and present day as two murders, linked apparently by little than a tangential connection with the '60s sex, drug and rock 'n' roll hippy scene.

In the late summer of '69, Detective Inspector Stanley Chadwick is investigating the murder of a   young hippy/music groupie at an open air festival that can probably only be described as Yorkshire's answer to Woodstock (although it is big enough for Led Zeppelin to be playing while Linda Lofthouse is stabbed during a walk in the woods).

Back in the new millennium, Banks, after a rough summer in which he has lost both his house to a fire and his brother (see Playing with Fire and A Strange Affair), is looking into the murder of a young journalist in a holiday cottage in the Dales.

The characterisation of, and contrast between, the two detectives is fascinating and helps to account for some of the success of the twin timeline book, one of whom, Chadwick, is bewildered by the chnaging mores of the 1960s, while Banks, is to some extent a product of those liberalising times.

Chadwick is an archetypal straight-laced, straight-backed, by-the-rules, no-nonsense, post-War copper. A man made by and haunted by the war. He disapproves of young colleagues whose hair touches their collars just as much as he does the hippies in their communes smoking joints.

Banks, by contrast, is a more relaxed bend-the-rules-to-nail-the-villains type. A DCI likely to worry his subordinates by his flouting of the PACE regulations. At the same time, however, we also discover that whatever their professional differences and their starkly contrasting outlooks on life, there are shared values and concerns, not least when their family lives come to touch on the storyline.

What they have in common is that they are excellent detectives, great exponents of the pre-DNA technology art of detection. And in due course their investigations converge around the activities of a 1960s band and their followers. The flaw that often exposes the twin timeline genre is that the flitting back and forth between the two all too regularly kills off any momentum in the story-telling.

Robinson never allows that to happen here, moving both stories on with great skill, emphasising the 1969 angle to great effect early in the book while letting Banks gradually take over in the second half, where for big fans of the series there are interesting developments in the team around not Banks - not least a new Chief Super following the loss to dry-walling retirement of Banks' long-term boss and mentor Gristhorpe.

This is a terrific addition to the series. Robinson, who is clearly a keen enthusiast for the 1960s music scene has a lot of fun with that area of the plot, creating in loving detail the Hippy communes of that era and the drug-fuelled music scene. And it is a great procedural, with a cracking plot that keeps the reader guessing until (somewhere near) the end.

Here's to you Mr Robinson. Keep them coming.

No Sh*t, Sherlock!

December 7, 09.17am

A couple of stories on the television news yesterday afternoon grabbed my attention and in their honour I have decided to set up my own award system, the No Shit, Sherlocks (NSS) to reward investigative excellence in the pursuit of the bleeding obvious.

The inaugural award is to go to officers of the Metropolitcan Police, who announced yesterday that the death of Russian exile spy Alexander Litvinenko was murder. You don't say.

A close runner-up, and denied the award because it was not exactly an investigation, merely a sort of inquiry, was the US bipartisan Iraq Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker, which was charged with looking into possible alternative strategies for Iraq.

The finest minds in American politics went off for several months, and reported back the conclusion that, "there is a risk of a slide towards chaos in Iraq". I haven't had a chance to read the full report, and I'm not entirely sure I want to, because I'm terrified of what their definition of actual chaos really is, if the bloodbath and mayhem in Iraq right now doesn't cover it off.

Perhaps they foresee an apocalyptic vision of fire-breathing dragons sweeping over the desert destroying all before them, or the Mongol hordes raining down death as they invade from the north.

I'm sorry. I know that there is nothing funny about this situation in Iraq. It is a desperate time for the Iraqi people who have already suffered much. But, while this report may be a step in the right direction in terms of jolting the dipshit in the White House back to some version of political reality, in other ways it falls desperately short of the "adequate" mark, and looks to me like an exercise in political semantics.

The office party affair

December 6, 09.28am

Every so often I get to witness a small scene that instantly strikes me as the sort of incident that would provide excellent ballast and background for a crime novel. it might be a snippet of conversation on a bus, the occasional flat out slanging match between partners or lovers or perhaps a lunatic driving manoeuvre on the motorway. By and large, I think, if you keep your eyes open people are doing more than enough fascinating things to keep you interested.

Last night, however, a delicious, intriguing vignette played itself out in front of me in a pub in Shepherd's Market  in Mayfair that felt as if it might be the basis for an entire book, never mind an incidental episode.

I met a contact for a couple of beers, a corporate comms guy at a big company, and he spent the first 20 minutes on the phone sorting out some sort of problem, leaving me to find a temporary distraction.

It came in the form of a couple canoodling at a corner table a few yards away from where we stood. There a be-suited man of about 40 was fawning over a woman roughly 10 years his junior who was wearing a very short skirt. Couples snogging in public inside is a relative rarity so they attracted immediate attention, but what really piqued interest among onlookers was the fact that at first the woman did not seem nearly as interested as the man, who had very clearly had a few sherbets. Even my friend on the phone was distracted enough to see.

This may sound somewhat voyeuristic, and I guess it probably was. Everybody in our half of the pub was watching them - even my friend on the phone - as the scene had that same compelling quality that causes people to rubber-neck on the motorway. But what really interested me was that, I suspect, married couples rarely indulge in that sort of behaviour publicly, and so I got to looking for wedding rings, and sure enough my suspicions were confirmed in that the bloke was wearing one and the woman wasn't.

And from there, as my friend concluded his call, I began to construct the scenario of the crime story:
The pub was busy, full of Mayfair suits relaxing after a tough day running their hedge funds and Range Rover blondes preparing for a tough evening at Annabelle's.  it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an ideal space for conducting a furtive affair, but the man's drunkenness overcame his natural caution while the woman needed to get past little more than her own embarrassment at such public and provocative displays of affection.

And across the other side of the bar, a young man arrived to order a round of drinks for a vocal group of friends who had just announced their entry into the pub with a burst of laughter and liud braying voices. The man, ordering his drinks, noticed the couple tucked away in the corner of the pub and viewed them with the same interest as everyone else. But because the necking couple's faces were joined at the lips and the back of the woman's head obscured the face of the man, he saw an anonymous couple going at in a pub. Unusual and interssting but no more.

Only when he was loudly told that he had come back from the bar with one pint of Adnam's too few did he see the couple more clearly. And this time he very plainly recognised the man as his bosses' husband...

But that is where the novel ends. It starts with a London detective called to the Chelsea home of a wealthy but anonymous London financier and his less wealthy but somewhat more prominent lawyer wife, where the body of said financier lays dead at the threshold to his townhouse, apparently stabbed to death by an armed robber trying to gain forced access to the riches he believes lie within.
At first sight it appears the man is the latest in a long line of wealthy people attacked on their own doorsteps by opportunist armed burglars attempting to force entry, and Inspector Knacker of the Yard, under pressure from an angry press scaring the life out of its well-heeled readers, begins his investigation working on that assumption...

Not brilliant perhaps. Not even moderate, probably, but perhaps it does show that for all us budding crime writers, there is inspiration everywhere, if only we get the time to look and find it.

   
   

Fed up with the freebies

December 5, 13.46pm

A rant, I'm afraid.

On my way home through London in the evening  I am offered roughly a dozen opportunities to take a free evening newspaper - London Lite or the Londonpaper, both of which have been launched this year as part of a continued trend towards newsprint being handed out for nothing. (There are two morning titles, Metro and City AM, also).

I turn them all down with an increasing degree of annoyance caused in part by the fact that the army of distributors employed to handle this task is a severe obstacle to the flow of commuters that London's narrow pavements struggle to cope with anyway.

And I turn them down for two main reasons:  firstly they are rubbish, full of celebrity/entertainment non-news and secondly they represent a serious threat to the future of quality print journalism, which I believe is an essential component of a healthy democracy.

There is an element of journalistic ego working in here also. I find it difficult to believe that there are media owners out there prepared to "give away" journalism. It undermines the output of the profession throughout.

Never mind James Bond, bring on Vesper Lynd

December 4, 16.36pm

At the risk of inviting the sort of withering put down aimed in Pierce Brosnan's direction by Judi Dench at the beginning of Goldeneye - "You are a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. A relic of the Cold War" - I would just like to ask: Has ever a Bond girl looked quite as wonderful as Vesper Lynd walking up to the poker table in Casino Royale. Eva Green, take a bow, you have shot to the top of my list of favourite Bond girls, behind Carey Lowell, Talisa Soto and Lois Chiles.

Daniel Craig will have to make at least one more Bond film before he can qualify as favourite Bond, but I thought Casino Royale a stunning start, a tour de force. Much has been made of the vulnerability and sensitivity of this new, bleeding Bond, but I'm not sure that that is not a total misreading of the character.

I thought he oozed menace and violence from every pore; a pathological killer hiding behind a licence to kill and a charming smile. The perfect Cold War spy seeking a role in a post-Cold War age. And for that reason the affair with Vesper Lynd did not quite ring true, although frankly you'd have to be clinically dead not to think twice about giving it all up for Ms Green.

As to the film iself, like Fleming's book, I thought it masked the lack of plot very well. I have some sympathy for those who have come out of it proclaiming they had no idea what was going on. It wasn't very clear and the plot was not well defined. (Who was the sinister Mr White, for example?)

But in some ways that actually lends some authenticity to the film. Espionage, I suspect, is a mucky, confusing business where loose ends are rarely tidied up to the satisfaction of all, and the suggestion of a shadowy, dangerous organisation pulling macabre strings the world over is one that should fill us all with horror, bearing in mind some of the events we have experienced in our cities in recent years. 

Casino Royale  was somewhat like that.  Violent,  threatening and uncomfortable. But unlike the real thing, hugely enjoyable.  The Bond franchise is good for a few more years.