Innocent Traitor: Alison Weir

I seem to be having a bit of a Tudor moment, what with CJ Sampson's Matthew Shardlake and all.  I started Innocent Traitor comparing it unfavourably with Sampson's work.  But I found it in due course a real page-turner.  The truly horrifying history of Jane Grey, the nine-days Queen is told through the eyes of many of the people involved in her life.  Their individual voices are hard to distinguish one from the other, but their different views of aspects of the same tale make for interesting reading.  There's Jane herself, quiet, studious but strong-minded, her loyal loving nurse, her dreadfully inhumane mother and the political entourage surrounding her.  The characters are believable, and the story is a true one.  

Alison Weir, an historian, has clearly enjoyed the opportunity, new to her, of fictionalising her account, putting words and thoughts into her characters' mouths and heads that can have no basis in hard historical fact.  But she is so conversant with the period and the characters about whom she writes that the feel of the book is likely to be an accurate refection of this particularly unsavoury episode in English history.  A very good if uncomfortable read.

The Secret Scripture: Sebastian Barry

A wonderful book.  Roseanne McNulty, 100 years old, is a long-term patient of Roscommon Mental Hospital. She's Doctor Grene's patient.  Secretly, she starts to record her memories, shifting, uncertain, lyrically expressed.  Doctor Grene, whose own life is difficult, has access to a different version of her life story, and she does not confide her own to him.  Hers was a life lived against a background of civil war and religious intolerance, of poverty, and the mental illness of her mother.  Though many of her memories are bleak, Roseanne herself is warm, often funny, always sympathetic.  Dr. Grene's losses and hurts are woven into the narrative, and at the end, his history, and that of Roseanne are interlinked in a most surprising way.  This is a beautifully written and tragic novel about damaged but utterly sympathetic characters.

The American Boy: Andrew Taylor

This book reads as a 19th century novel of the kind that Wilkie Collins could have written: its language and tone are largely authentic, and like many books of the period, there is a large cast of characters from all walks of life.  Thomas Shield, a schoolmaster with a troubled past is the narrator, and he introduces us to the wealthy Frants and Carswells, whose lives he becomes intimately involved with.  There's the young Edgar Allan Poe too, though I'm not sure how important his part really is, despite his presence in the book's title.  Murder and skullduggery take place both in London's Dickensian streets, and in rural Gloucestershire .  The fast-paced action and the short chapters make the book an atmospheric page-turner, and while it's not a great book, it's a very good read.

Trick or Treatment?: Simon Singh & Edzard Ernst

A fascinating book.  I've often felt I would like to be more drawn to the treatments of alternative and complementary therapists.  I've had a few experiences over the years but  few of them have been really positive.  

This account, written by experts on both sides of the fence, is the well-researched and thoroughly readable story of the development of mainstream medical science and of some of the main alternative therapies.  The book gives a clear and fascinating account of the history of medication in particular and of the rigorous testing now required for any new drug, and contrasts it with the lack of rigour to which many alternative theapies have been exposed.  Its conclusions are shocking.  I shan't ever choose homeopathy or acupuncture again any time in the future.

Loitering with intent:Muriel Spark

Fleur Talbot is an impecunious novelist who takes a job working for upper class pompous twit Sir Quentin Oliver, who founded the Autobiographical Association to encourage its members to record their memoirs. Fleur's job was to revise and spice up these otherwise dull recollections.

Life begins to imitate art as members of the association begin to act out events already recorded in Fleur's as yet unpublished manuscript Warrender Chase, and the skull-duggery and derring-do that fairly races through the pages is quite reminiscent of a '50's farce.  In fact the 1950s are well-painted, as are the characters, from the deliciously loopy Lady Edwina, Quentin's mother, to the many and varied men in Fleur's life.  

This is a crisply written book, with a plot that fairly zips along.  It's something of a period piece, which I enjoyed, but was happy enough to finish and set aside in favour of some plainer fare.

Plainsong: Kent Haruf

This book remained unread on my bookshelf for months, because, I think, of its dismal cover: I have a proof copy.  What a mistake.  This beautifully written, spare, stark book takes as its theme the loosely intermingled lives of various abandoned souls who live in the imagined town of Holt, Colorado.  

There's teenage Victoria, pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend;  Tom Guthrie, who wife has retreated into deep depression, leaving him with his solemn and perforce self-sufficient young boys, Ike and Bobby; the elderly McPheron brothers, orphaned young, who take Victoria in; infirm Iva Stearn, to whom the young boys deliver the local paper.  Thse isolated people display dignity and stoicism in their difficulties, and struggle towards some sense of connection and community.  

Holt seems a pretty bleak town, and the landscape that surrounds it too.  Haruf's descriptions are always understated, always telling.  His characters maintain their privacy, whilst allowing us to care about the ultimately optimistic conclusion of the book.  It's a book that lingers in the memory.  Read it

The Cellist of Sarajevo: Steven Galloway

The siege of Sarajevo lasted some four years.  Steven Galloway invites us to experience it for 3 weeks, through the lives of Kenan, a young man whose life seems to revolve round the hugely difficult and dangerous task of getting water for his family: of Dragan, an older man whose family have fled to Italy, and who works, when work is there, in a bakery: and of Arrow, a young female sniper, who kills only soldiers, not her fellow-citizens.  Theirs is a life of drudgery, deprivation and extreme and daily danger.  

Like everyone in the city who experiences it, they find the cello player who plays, despite the risks, every day for 22 days to commemorate the 22 lives lost as they queued for bread becomes a compelling presence in their existences. I found the book compelling too, a stripped down narrative that invites a comparison between the formerly civilised and cultured city of Sarajevo, and the squalid frightening place it had become, with little food, transport, comforts or amenities of any kind.  There is no plot as such.  The unremitting sameness of the struggle to stay alive and to defend the much-loved city is the story.  A good book. A thought-provoking book.