MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Scotland We Love to Read! Wed, 14 May 2014 13:06:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3 THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF SCONES by Alexander McCall Smith /2011/the-unbearable-lightness-of-scones-by-alexander-mccall-smith/ /2011/the-unbearable-lightness-of-scones-by-alexander-mccall-smith/#comments Fri, 01 Apr 2011 13:32:04 +0000 /?p=17110 Book Quote:

“I’m settling down at last. And what a way to settle: money, flat, Porsche, sexy-looking woman who thinks I’m the best thing ever—and who can blame her? All on a plate. All there before me for the taking. And I have taken it.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Guy Savage (APR 1, 2011)

We read for many reasons, but one of the biggest reasons frequently cited is that books offer an “escape.” How true that is, and books, of course, offer a variety of escapes. There’s the thrill of adventure and romance, and the infinite worlds of science fiction. But there’s another escape too–an escape into a simpler, cozier world in which, if the truth is told, the lives of some fictional characters seem enviable.

And this brings me to Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street series. Smith, the author of the phenomenally successful series: The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency was inspired to write a series of tales set in his native Scotland following a trip to San Francisco and a discussion with author Armistead Maupin about his novel, Tales of the City. Upon returning to Scotland, Smith began writing 44 Scotland Street which appeared in serial form in The Scotsman. Writing approximately 1000 words a day, Smith’s Scotland Street series developed and blossomed with 44 Scotland Street, followed by Espresso Tales, Love Over Scotland, The World According to Bertie and now the fifth novel in the series: The Unbearable Lightness of Scones. In the Scotland Street series, we are introduced to a group of people whose lives are intertwined in a number of ways. These delightful novels possess both a comfortable and comforting old-fashioned feel, a certain coziness, and while the novels occasionally border on the twee, for the most part, reading about these characters is sheer delight. As we follow the trials and tribulations of the various characters, we become increasingly involved with the fictional dramas and traumas–never anything too bleak or dreadful, and always handled with a wonderful sense of humor and a profound generosity towards the human condition.

Here are some of the characters from The Unbearable Lightness of Scones:

There’s ex-school-teacher Elspeth and gallery owner Matthew whose fancy wedding and expensive reception is followed by a honeymoon to Australia.

There’s Bertie, a six-year-old boy whose domineering, politically-correct, frustrated mother suffocates the boy with Italian lessons, Yoga, and psychotherapy. Meanwhile Bertie is plagued by the unwanted attentions of his classmate Olive. Bertie’s goal in life is to be a boy scout—much to the horror of his mother:

“You see, Bertie, the problem is that these organizations appeal to a very primitive urge in boys. They make them want to pretend to be little hunters. They make them want to join together and exclude other people. They make them want to get dressed up in ridiculous uniforms, like Fascisti. That’s why Mummy thinks they’re a bad idea.”

Then there’s the “persistent narcissist” Bruce Anderson who’s engaged to the wealthy heiress Julia Donald. Bruce discovers his first wrinkle in the course of the story, but he’s destined for bigger shocks than that. Bruce, by the way, is one of my favorite characters. Here’s Bruce watching his girlfriend:

“But all of this material comfort was topped by having Julia herself. In the earlier days of their relationship, Bruce wondered how he would possibly be able to bear her vacuousness and her simpering. He had gritted his teeth when she called him Brucie, and when she insisted on sharing the shower with him. Of course, she’s mad about me, he told himself. That was understandable—women just were. But I wish she’d give me a bit more room. You can’t have somebody stroking you all the time, as if you were a domestic cat.”

What’s so nice about the novel is that there’s a wide range of characters. For example, on the other end of the economic spectrum there’s artist Angus and his dog, Cyril, Big Lou, owner of the Morning After coffee bar and her Jacobite plasterer boyfriend Robbie, and burly, shady ex-con, Lard O’Connor.

The chapters move back and forth in-between characters and points-of-view, blending storylines as the book develops. In many ways, The Unbearable Lightness of Scones reminds me of the Cranford tales by Elizabeth Gaskell. There are similarities: a small Victorian village in which a major drama erupts involving a lost cow, and in Edinburgh, skullduggery occurs over the high treachery of a missing blue Spode tea-cup.

The Scotland Street books are delightfully reassuring, and it’s no wonder that Alexander McCall Smith’s novels are so phenomenally successful. The Unbearable Lightness of Scones is recommended for those who enjoy the coziness of reading about the small, safe details of characters’ lives. There are no civil wars here, no terrorism. Most of our lives are spent on the petty details and the mundane moments, and so it is in The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, but here daily life is also laced with laugh-out loud humor and a very welcome whimsy.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 57 readers
PUBLISHER: Anchor; 1 edition (January 12, 2010)
REVIEWER: Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Alexander McCall Smith
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Lots!  Read reviews of

Bibliography:

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series:

44 Scotland Street

Portuguese Irregular Verbs Series:

Isabel Dalhousie Mystery:

Children’s Books:

Other:

  • The Criminal Law of Botswana
  • Changing People: The Law and Ethics of Behavior Modification (1994)
  • Health Resources and the Law (1994)
  • Forensic Aspects of Sleep (1997)

Movies from books:

]]> /2011/the-unbearable-lightness-of-scones-by-alexander-mccall-smith/feed/ 0 STILL MIDNIGHT by Denise Mina /2010/still-midnight-by-denise-mina/ /2010/still-midnight-by-denise-mina/#comments Mon, 05 Jul 2010 23:20:03 +0000 /?p=10497 Book Quote:

“Years ago, a well-meaning training officer had told her never to question a superior’s decision, forget fair, just do the job ignore the politics and don’t take it home.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (JUL 5, 2010)

Scottish crime novel Still Midnight from author Denise Mina explores the levels of prejudice which taint the investigation of a non-textbook kidnapping case. When Glasgow based detective Alex Morrow first arrives at the home of some hard-working Ugandan immigrants to investigate the crime, it looks as though the crooks hit the wrong house. The kidnappers snatched elderly shopkeeper Aamir Anwar from his family and left demanding two million pounds, saying this was “fucking payback. For Afghanistan.”

Morrow immediately senses some irregularities about the crime. Three generations of the Anwars live squashed into a modest home, and the Anwars’ neighbourhood dingy shop–the sole source of their income–is a hardly a big-moneymaker. On top of this, the kidnappers are amateurs, accidentally shooting one of the Anwars during the crime. Unfortunately, Morrow isn’t in charge of the case; she’s insultingly placed under the unimaginative supervision of D.S. Grant Bannerman.

The kidnapping becomes even more complicated as the ransom is repeated along with the usual threats. Morrow has instinctive feelings about the case, but she’s shut out of decisions and assigned to trivial tasks by Bannerman. Morrow battles prejudice from her fellow detectives even as she witnesses prejudice against the Anwar family. Although the Anwars are hard-working people, what has happened to their children? Billal is a traditional Muslim, but youngest son Omar is a budding capitalist. And then there’s the Anwar daughter, Aleesha, a beauty who flouts Muslim standards and seems fully adapted as a Glaswegian. The kidnapping raises some intriguing questions: do the Anwars have terrorist connections? Where would a family like the Anwars get two million pounds? Do the kidnappers know something about the family’s source of wealth that is vital to the investigation?

As a fan of Scottish crime fiction, I was interested to try Denise Mina’s novel. Still Midnight is at its strongest when creating scenes between the bungling crooks: Eddie, Pat and Malkie. Eddie, who’s reeling from multiple blows to his personal life and to his damaged ego, overcompensates by acting like some third rate James Bond. Pat, Eddie’s best (only) friend is involved in the kidnapping mainly to rescue Eddie when the situation demands it. Junkie Malkie could credibly be described as the most intelligent and rational of the three. These men make pathetic criminals and could even be vaguely amusing, but the fact they are armed alters the picture dramatically. Instead of just being bungling losers, weapons turn them into unpredictable, dangerous, and edgy kidnappers.

The scenes which involve Aamir Anwar and his kidnappers emphasize the victim’s terror and the crooks’ incompetence. Aamir is treated with a range of violence by the three kidnappers, and it’s clear that this will end badly. He’s taken to a squalid house pending payment of the ransom. The home is so filthy, that it even makes the junkie queasy:

“The kitchen looked even worse in the weak morning light. The window above the sink was broken, a triangle of glass missing from the bottom corner, the rest of it documenting every splash of dirty water that had ever hit it, a thick layer of gray dots emanating from behind the mixer tap. Beyond the lace of dirt the very tip of the Lexus’s silver bonnet shone in the sun.

The wall of bin bags blocking the passage to the back door were not just leaking sticky mess on the floor, the ones on the bottom were stuck in a pool of white.”

The three crooks react to the filth with a range of disgust. For Pat, a trip to the living room reveals: “There’s a shit with mold on it in there.” I loved that line for its spontaneity.

On the other hand there’s a line about Morrow as she sits in her car: “Her bum was numb.” I wasn’t impressed with that sentence. And it’s in the treatment of Morrow that the book is its weakest.

While there were a few details about Morrow’s professional and private life, this character remains fuzzy, and lacks a strong fictional presence. This makes Morrow an uninteresting subject. The personalities of some fictional detectives leap off the pages (and their personal lives are at least as interesting as the crimes under investigation), but Morrow was poorly defined. Perhaps Still Midnight isn’t Mina’s best. I’d read glowing reviews of this author’s other novels, and while Still Midnight came to life when the story focuses on the criminals, the tale stagnates and was only mediocre when it came to the police work.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 55 readers
PUBLISHER: Reagan Arthur Books; 1 edition (March 22, 2010)
REVIEWER: reviewer
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Denise Mina
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Maureen O’Donnell series:

Paddy Meehan Series:

Alex Morrow:

Standalone:

  • Sanctum (U.K.) (2002) / Deception (in U.S.) (2004)

Graphic Novels:

]]> /2010/still-midnight-by-denise-mina/feed/ 0 WHAT BECOMES by A.L. Kennedy /2010/what-becomes-by-a-l-kennedy/ /2010/what-becomes-by-a-l-kennedy/#comments Thu, 08 Apr 2010 02:15:37 +0000 /?p=8759 Book Quote:

“This is the general rule–people seek their happiness.  Even if they’re masochistic, when they find their perfect pain, it should make them happy.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (APR 7, 2010)

What do we fear? Being lost to others? Becoming invisible to our loved ones? Relentless anger? Dashed spoiled hopes? Living a meaningless brief existence? How about nameless nasty pickup sex? Going to the dentist? Violence at the hands of one you love? Yes. That and more. If writing were therapy–and some say it is–A.L. Kennedy would be both patient and therapist, subject and practitioner. Or put another way, consider exposing your darkest thoughts, your most troublesome concerns to the light for all to see and pick over. And in doing this, you not just expose them, you render them with a power and an art to make them irresistible, like gaping at a horrible car wreck.

There is, for instance, the couple walking down the street in the story, “Marriage.”  “So they won’t have a giggle. They won’t be companions. They won’t chat. They will just walk, trudge on. She will trash their afternoon.” The wife is walking in front of the hapless husband–”She likes making him study her back.” She picks up the pace, and he shrugs at strangers as he tries to keep up. “My wife–you have to love her, eh? She’s temperamental, you might say. A bit overbred. Still, we weather the storms. Oh, indeed we do. Both of us. Here we are Weathering.” He puts his hands into his pockets and pleasures in the bespoke flannel-lined coat he is wearing. It is a small pleasure against such odds. “While she scurries on ahead, he feels the coat clap at his shins, its weight pressing and cuddling around him. Serious weather shows it off to advantage, naturally.” Then the husband’s thoughts turn to the bedroom and the sex of the previous night: “…expecting her to be alive for him–but she turned away, she turned her back.” Then the anger coming on in a rush in him, “Oh, in the end, she let him–eventually she let him–lying like meat and he’s being allowed–his own wife. So he stopped.” And then:

“He hit her.
“Just once.
“The noise of it.
“Fantastic.
“Like a shot.”

And there are chilling little epiphanies. In “The Story of My Life” a dental patient is not anesthetized properly. “I can’t see to hit him, I can’t fight him off and he’s digging and drilling, drilling and digging and the extraction takes forty-five minutes.” She looks. “There’s blood in his hair. It’s mine.”

Or the less violent, beautifully rendered “Confectioner’s Gold.” A couple sit in a diner, the man weeps, the waitress approaches. “‘Are you…’ The waitress steadies and adjusts, ‘Happy with your meal?” The man, Tom, “feels he should be explanatory and adds, ‘We lost…’ and then can’t begin to say what.” It is as simple as that: We lost….It is heartbreaking. It is like that, this book. Sudden unexpected violence, fears stemming from recessed corners, sadness–it’s all there and at times it seems unrelenting.

I confess to backing off the pace of reading What Becomes. Like a potential character in the book, I started to pain over it, grew weary of the weight of this small tome. Why, I wondered? Why do this to me, your reader? Why punish me so–and with such agility? Kennedy gives me a clue on her web page: “Does this mean I’m trying to beat the reader up, or I think life’s all pointless and people are shit?” She continues:

Clearly not. If it was all pointless I wouldn’t bother doing something as tiring as writing and if I thought people were shit I wouldn’t write for them. I’m trying to tell you the best stories I can and to take you to places that are new to you. Hollywood endings, blandness and sugar-coating are all things I find tedious and insulting and so I won’t try and offer them to anyone else or build them in my own head. If the nature of reality sometimes leaves you feeling mugged, my work may sometimes be company for you.

There is a sprinkling of relief to be found in these pages, a wry humor that occasionally breaks through. Like all dear things, its scarcity makes it more valuable. There is the man in Vanish for instance who is trying to give away a theater ticket now that his girlfriend has broken up with him. But who wants a single ticket, and a seat next to a stranger at that? “People had acted as if he were offering them a snake–which would always sound rude, now that he thought about it, rude more than poisonous–Hi, would you like my snake? I have this snake. Free snake. Free to a good home. Tired old snake seeks any deargodplease home that it can get.”

I was surprised to find on Kennedy’s web page that she is also a stand-up comic. It seemed incongruous with the personality I thought I detected in the prose. But the joke was on me. “Wouldn’t you rather see how far you can go into nowhere that has ever existed,” she writes, “…and then try to get total strangers to follow you?” Ha! That’s a good one.

What Becomes could, I think, be read as an exercise in Aristotelian catharsis. But in the classic sense catharsis is a cure, the result of an underlying problem revealed. These stories offer us little in the way of revelation. In that sense they feel completely modern. The worry over such modern methods, however, is that of being gratuitous. I did not feel that here. I never had a sense that I was being herded into a pen for sake of the herding alone. There is a quiet element to the voice in these stories that, despite frequently rising in anger or striking out, instills in the reader a degree of trust. That is a remarkable trick, when wading through such mucky waters. There is yet another clue found in a Kennedy interview that lends credence to this idea. When asked why fiction matters, she replies: “Fiction allows you to enter the mind, body and maybe even soul of someone other than yourself. It takes you away from self and into another in a deep and remarkable and penetrating way – this can give you a remarkably unsociopathic understanding of other people’s reality, irreplaceability and complexity. You also have the company of another voice – that can be a huge support in hard times.”

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 4 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf (April 6, 2010)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: We should have reviewed A.L. Kennedy before now… but she’s in good company of our recently reviewed authors:

Also, check out:

Bibliography:

Non-Fiction:

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