Natural Flights of the Human Mind by Clare Morrall

I cannot believe how much I enjoyed this early book by Clare Morrall, or how long it took me to get around to reading it. I was particularly impressed by her last novel, The Roundabout Man and I had always planned to read her earlier work. Natural Flights, similarly deals with oddball, damaged characters - in this case, the premier oddball is Peter Straker who lives in a disused lighthouse. Straker is so burdened by guilt he never talks to anyone, believing he has caused the deaths of 78 people around twenty-five years ago.
    In fact Straker was damaged before that happened, coping with a family where he was overshadowed by his much smarter brother and terrifying father. Now something of a hermit, he shuns all human interaction until he meets Doody (aka Imogen), who has inherited a run-down cottage in the Devon village nearby.
    The first thing you learn about Doody is that she doesn't mess about with the niceties of polite conversation. She starts yelling at Straker when she's up a ladder examining her decrepit roof, and loosing her temper, becomes entangled in weeds. Straker finds himself making a strange sound he doesn't recognise at first - it turns out to be laughter - and slowly the two develop a peculiar friendship.
    Doody is also damaged - her childhood marked by tragedy and a serious lack of love, on top of which her husband walked out on her, also twenty-five years ago. Since then she's eked out a living as a school caretaker. The cottage gives Doody a chance at independence, while she gives Straker a chance to interact with another person. Both have been quite abandoned by their mothers, though Doody maintains a somewhat heckling relationship with her successful younger brother.
    These are such unusual, difficult, yet oddly likeable characters, and as a reader Morrall really puts you through the ringer, as you hold out a faint hope for what might happen to them in the future. How can Straker even have a future when his past is such a burden? And running through his mind are constant conversations with the dead - he knows who they are because he has done his research at the library and collected newspaper articles. The only way he can keep his sanity is by counting - steps, minutes, intakes of breath - and all the while avoiding the number 78.
    The story builds towards a climax as the twenty-fifth anniversary of the accident that took those 78 lives rolls around, a showdown involving a vintage plane and a busload of angry, grieving and determined relatives.
    For such a grim scenario, Natural Flights is wonderfully readable, charming and at times even humorous. Morrall manages a clever balancing act between the potentially leaden themes of loss, guilt and family dysfunction and wryly observed, quirky characters to produce a plot that slowly builds tension and drama towards a surprising and satisfying ending.
 

Reckless by William Nicholson

Many books I read take a bit of an effort to get into; you decide to allow them say fifty pages, and if they don't grab you by then, you put them aside. William Nicholson's novel, Reckless, had me hooked from page one. The novel recaptures the military and political stand-off over the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Scenes include Kruschev and John Kennedy and British Chief of Defence, 'Dickie' Mountbatten.
    The build up of tension is subtly done and the viewpoints flick from character to character - it would be easy to get lost, but Nicholson handles the whole thing deftly, keeping a lot of balls in the air and imagining the period so well. He does this through his three main characters.
    Rupert Blundell is an advisor to Mountbatten, has been since the war, before which he was studying philosophy. He's very shy with women, even his outgoing colleague, Joyce, and has decided love and marriage are not for him. His philosophy gets in the way it seems - for how can any person really know the heart of another?
    Rupert is forty-four when he meets Mary, whose lovely, open and desperately sad face attracts his attention while walking across St James's Park. A second meeting in the same spot leads him to rescue her from a kind of imprisonment at a convent. As a child she'd been the recipient of several visions, during which Christ called to her and said a great wind would bring about the world's end. It was the time of the bombing of Hiroshima and now with the Cuban missile crisis, the end of the world is a distinct possibility.
    Rupert brings Mary to his friends, Hugo and Harriet, who have a young daughter. Harriet is often unwell, and Mary proves to be a godsend. The role of nanny/home help was supposed to fall to Pamela, the step-daughter of Hugo's business partner. Eighteen-year-old Pamela has begged to be allowed to live in London, and staying at Hugo's is a kind of compromise.
    Pamela has envisaged for herself a romantic life involving a grand love affair, and dazzling the world with her gorgeousness.  She meets Stephen Ward at a very artistic cafe and he invites Pamela and her friends to a risqué nightclub. All at once Pamela is thrown into the hedonistic world of the idle rich, among them key players in what will erupt as the Profumo Affair. She learns, as one character points out, that society is full of 'lonely people looking for love and bored people looking for fun'.
    Reckless gives a very vivid picture of a time when the world seemed on the precipice of disaster. Nicholson has done his homework and recreated scenes based on actual events and real people. But it is also very much the story of Rupert, Mary and Pamela, who are all immensely sympathetic. A number of the characters from Reckless appear in Nicholson's earlier book, the acclaimed Motherland, and have links to characters in The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life and All the Hopeful Lovers. I haven't read any of these as yet, but if they are anything like Reckless, they are sure to be full of warmth, wisdom and sharp observation and I have a wonderful treat in store.

A Cold Treachery by Charles Todd

Charles Todd's Inspector Rutledge mystery novels are currently my go-to series for a diverting read when nothing much else catches my eye. I always enjoy the winning combination of smart plotting, a tortured but appealing protagonist (and his ghostly sidekick) plus an atmospheric setting. The period of Britain post World War One also gives these novels an edge.
    In A Cold Treachery, Rutledge is sent to the town of Urskdale in the Lake District, where five family members, including two babies, have been shot dead, while a ten-year-old boy has run off into the snow. A large search party has gathered to hunt for young Josh Elcott, who is also on the list of suspects. But could a ten-year-old boy really murder his family?
    It's a long cold journey in the snow, and it's nighttime - terribly easy to veer off the road - so it's lucky that Rutledge spots a carriage that has crashed, its horse distinctly dead. Rutledge rescues the wounded young woman inside and takes her to the nearest farmhouse. But why did she bring a gun with her and hide it under her carriage seat?
    The terrain is rocky and dangerous to the uninitiated, so when Rutledge arrives in Urskdale, he leaves finding the boy to the townspeople, while he talks to witnesses about the family involved in the tragedy. Soon several motives arise.
    The Elcotts were a happy family, but Grace Elcott was previously married in London with two young children. The war office declared her husband a war casualty and believing herself to be a widow she remarried. When her first husband surprisingly returned from a German POW camp, she was already pregnant with twins. Hugh Robinson has done the honourable thing - he and his former wife have become estranged, after all, but his relationship with the family remained cordial.
    Gerald Elcott was also away at war, and his farm managed in the interim by his brother, Paul, whose attempts to run a pub in the village have never turned a profit. It seems possible he was jealous of his happily married brother, and would have liked the farm for himself. Rutledge's rescued damsel turns out to be none other than Janet, Grace Elcott's sister and she seems prepared to stitch up Paul Elcott for the murders. But could she have had a reason to kill the family herself?
    It seems every character, including Rutledge's dipsomaniac landlady and her furtive husband has a secret. And while Rutledge ponders why any of them would go so far as murdering a family, drinking endless cups of tea, young Josh is still missing and likely dead from the cold. This gives the plot a bit of momentum while our determined police inspector is stymied by a dearth of clues and takes a while to make a breakthrough. The locals are a taciturn bunch and don't want him tramping about by himself in case he ends up needing rescuing himself.
   A Cold Treachery is a classic whodunnit with plenty of troubled and quirky characters and a wonderfully realised setting. The cosy interior of the kitchen at Rutledge's guesthouse, the wild and rocky hills dotted with sheep, and the bleakly wintry lake are all vividly brought to the page as events build to a final showdown. Rutledge finally brings the killer to justice just when he is about to be replaced by a rival from Scotland Yard, and we all breathe a sigh of relief.

Mrs Sinclair's Suitcase

I seem to have come inadvertently upon another novel with a bookshop setting, this time with a theme that looks at love and loss, and buried family secrets. It begins when Roberta discovers a long forgotten letter among her grandmother's things - her father is dying and has been sorting out everything he wants Roberta to have.

    The letter is from her grandfather, a Polish fighter pilot during World War Two, and explains that despite his love for Roberta's grandmother, he cannot forgive what she has done to a child and its mother. But the date on the letter is after he had supposedly died during the war.

    Roberta works in a bookshop selling old and new books, run by the scruffily handsome and slightly posh owner, Philip. She's used to coming across letters and cards in old books, as well as moving messages on flyleaves, pondering about the people who sent them and the context of what they'd written.

    Her grandfather's letter sets her off on a voyage of discovery, but it is a long time before she can bear to ask the only people who can tell her what happened - her frail father, and her extremely elderly grandmother who lives in a home.

    Meanwhile the plot switches back and forth to 1940, and the English countryside near an airfield, where pilots are training up for the Battle of Britain. Among them are a group of Polish airmen who have escaped Europe but want to fly for the Allies. When one of them crashes in a field, Dorothy is first on the scene. She has recently lost her baby and in grief shows no regard for her own safety, and is injured when the plane goes up in flames.
    Dorothy has grown apart from her husband, now somewhere overseas in the army and he hasn't been in touch since enlisting. So she has no qualms about beginning a mild flirtation with the Polish airmen's squadron leader,  Jan Pietrykowski. The decisions she makes through the book are those of a desperate woman suffering grief from numerous miscarriages and more recently a birth that is stillborn. Jan manages to break through her grief and reserve with his simple courtesies.  
    Louise Walters has written a warmly moving novel that looks a the lives of two women and how their feelings about love and family affect the decisions they make. For Dorothy, chance events throw her a way to grasp what she most desires but at what cost? Roberta is more inclined to drift on, settling for a less-than-satisfactory relationship, too hurt by the past to imagine a better life.
    I enjoyed this novel enormously and found it hard to put down. Walters is a first-time novelist but also a poet and this is obvious in her care for language which along with her sympathetic characters lifts the story well above the ordinary.

The Collected Works of A J Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

If you adore reading, a novel set in a bookshop has instant appeal. If you like good, literary fiction, you will warm to the curmudgeonly owner of Island Books, the A J Fikry of the title.
    A.J. has lost his wife in a tragic car accident, and while she was happy to stock popular titles, talk to book reps and hold author events, A.J. is too much of a purist for all that. So he does't like postmodernism, post-apocalyptic settings, post-mortem narrators or magic realism; or for that matter children's books, especially ones about orphans, young adult fiction or anything with vampires. He explains all this and more when he is being mean to Amelia, the book rep who will later play a major part in his life.
    Obviously, A.J. is doomed not to prosper, even if the tourists that arrive on Alice Island every summer frequently boost sales. But he isn't too worried as he has a copy of a rare edition by Edgar Allen Poe as his insurance policy.  About the same time that a desperate mother leaves her baby in the bookshop, with a note asking A.J. to take care of her, his Poe rare edition is stolen. These catalysts drive A.J. to cut back on his drinking and interact more with the outside world.
    There is a bunch of interesting characters in this book for him to interact with. There's Officer Lambiase, the divorced police chief who used to read nothing but Jeffery Deaver, and starts a book group called Chief's Choice - it's mostly police procedurals read by other cops. A.J.'s friend, Daniel, is a womanising novelist who has never written a best seller since his first break-through novel. He's married to Ismay, A.J.'s sister-in-law, who teaches drama at the high school. She's tough on the outside but a softy on the inside, and quietly makes sure A.J. is OK. The little girl, Maya, is bookishly quirky, rather like you'd expect A.J.'s natural daughter would be.
    This novel could be saccharine, but is far too witty and smart, and with enough ups and downs and reversals of fortune to keep you interested. Each chapter begins with A.J.'s notes to Maya about a particular piece of literature he values in one way or another - another nice little extra for bibliophiles. Roald Dahl, gets a look in as well as American greats such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Flannery O'Connor, while there are a few obscure enough to have you searching Wikipedia.
    The Collected Works of A.J. Fikry is a short, Sunday afternoonish sort of novel, but it has a lot of heart and is a good reminder about the pleasure and sustenance to be found in books, and friends as well, of course. Though for some of us, they may be the same thing.

From a Distance by Rafaella Barker

From a Distance concerns three main characters over two periods of time. I was enthralled by Michael, just off the ship that brought him home from the war, the second world war that is, thin and damaged. He doesn't want to go home to Norfolk, even though he has parents and a fiancée waiting for him. He just hangs around Southampton smoking and feeling sorry for himself and all the mates as well as his brother who won't be coming home. Finally he jumps on a train and finds himself in Penzance.
    I was desperate to discover what he does next, but all at once we're in present day Norfolk, in Luisa's kitchen where she's making ice cream and worrying about her nineteen year old daughter who has gone to India. What Luisa has to do with Michael will have to wait, for suddenly here we are with Kit, who has inherited from his mother a lighthouse in the same Norfolk town where Luisa lives. Kit's from Cornwall so there's sure to be a connection with Michael there, and the lighthouse mystery gives the story a bit of oomph.
    But there's such a lot of Luisa, an effusive mother and wife of Italian descent which automatically makes her gorgeous. Ice cream runs in her blood - her father ran a fleet of ice cream trucks - and Luisa experiments with unusual flavours involving herbs and rose essence. You can tell she's artistic. Kit makes a hit with Luisa's family, including husband, Tom, her children and Tom's sister, Dora. He's such a likeable guy, and the lighthouse gets everyone talking. But maybe there's just too much of a spark between Kit and Luisa!
    The story slowly gets back to Michael, who for me was far more interesting. He becomes friendly with several artists who are a breath of fresh air after the war, especially Felicity, a fabric designer who turns out to be the love of his life. How can he ever go home?
    The theme of promises made as men went off to war and the dilemma faced when they returned (can you ever go back to where you left off, or is best to start again?) hovers in the background, begging to be dealt with more fully. There's a lot of description of how designs come together, their patterns, textures and colour, and Cornwall sparkles by the sea. Ice cream also gets a fair amount of attention in the same way. There is such a lot of detail to imagine that the characters become a bit shadowy.
    I would have liked to know a bit more about Michael's demons and the girl he left behind. He is saved by Felicity, who in my mind tended to merge into another Luisia - both artistic, free sprits and both do their hair the same way.  Perhaps this is a hymn to Cornwall and also Norfolk, which has a lovely summery feel and loads of village hospitality.
    And I guess that adds to the charm. But the theme of how relationships are upset by the upheaval of war, or post-war trauma, to say nothing of how secrets from the past affect the later generations, could have been fleshed out much more in this book. This obvious omission makes From a Distance flounder from a lack of narrative drive and therefore something of a disappointment.

Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

Rose Lloyd has plenty to feel aggrieved about not long into Elizabeth Buchan's novel Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman. Nathan, her husband, dumps her after twenty-five years of marriage and she loses her job - both vacancies filled by her assistant, Minty.
    She's worked with Minty for several years, compiling the book review pages for a newspaper and Rose regards Minty as a friend, sharing secrets about her relationships with family and even her old-flame, Hal, a glamorous adventure travel writer. (This reminded me of an episode from 'Black Books', which was slightly off-putting.)
    Minty has used snippets from these conversations with Rose in the early days of her relationship with Nathan to argue that Rose doesn't really appreciate her husband and has never forgotten her first love, Hal. Minty is also twenty years younger than Nathan and knows what she's about in the bedroom. How could Nathan resist?
    And Rose is such a sweetie, with brains to boot. She achieved a First at Oxford, but put her career on hold while raising her children, does all the cooking and creates a spectacular garden. She drops meals into the housebound elderly gent next door and talks about the buses with him - the great love of his life. Really if anyone has been under-appreciated, it's Rose.
    So I was quite prepared for scenes of rage-induced vengeance, shredded suits, emptied bank accounts, public shaming - the works. I wasn't sure I was going to enjoy this, but it certainly seemed as if Nathan had it coming. I couldn't make up my mind if it would be a good thing because it would reduce Rose to the level of the Mintys of this world and it is obvious she is so much better than that.
    A chance encounter with Hal offers yet another avenue for potential revenge, but Hal gave Rose an impossible choice all those years ago, leaving her in South America, broken hearted and ill. Poor Rose, so smart but so bad at choosing men. Thank heavens one of her best friends is a savvy Parisienne, who takes her in hand and encourages her to tart herself up a bit. Maybe glamour and success are the best revenge of all.
    There are sub-plots involving Rose's grown-up children and their relationships, and Rose is always there with a shoulder to cry on, as you would expect. Rose also worries about her widowed mother who finds the marriage break-up a terrible shock.  There's even a bit about politics and the ethics of how the media treat figures in the public eye.
   The book makes a decent fist of standing up for middle-aged women who care for others when all around them it seems people are out for themselves. The narration is all from Rose's point of view and perhaps this makes the story drag a little as she is never allowed to be as outrageous as the other characters. Joanna Trollope (the queen of this genre) creates a much livelier style through multiple viewpoints and her unerring ear for dialogue.
   Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman is a very readable book but published in 2002, it is beginning to show its age. Nevertheless I shall be interested to try one of Elizabeth Buchan's more recent titles to see how it compares.