Tragedy at the farm

Rainbow’s End
By James M Cain

Reading this punchy novel is a little like spectator sport. The reader spends 200 pages watching trashy, working-class Americans fighting over a bag of money (and the aspirations of what to do with it). It’s like a crass ‘social experiment’ documentary screened on Channel 4. But Cain’s achievement is that while the people in this novel are entirely fictional, their portrayal is infinitely more accurate than that of any reality TV participant.

Cain expertly captures the spirit of his characters: a young man, aspirant yet nailed to his lot; his mother, a self-righteous, dysfunctional wench; and the air stewardess who literally drops into their lives, a Machiavellian glamour puss with a strategy. Plus sundry, well-drawn cast members: the weasely lawyer, the hick cousin and the wise and moral aunt. All you need is a bag of money thrown in and you can see how the shit hits the fan.

Cain’s skill is in setting up a plot that the reader stupidly thinks is relatively straightforward. Clearly, everything will be solved, I thought – having no idea how wondrously complex and dynamic the twisted plot would become.

The pages of Rainbow’s End are rich with punchy, bitchy dialogue. Between these lines – and this is Cain’s class – the author treats to almost universal insights: the desire to leave behind our lives and start anew, the promise of the future, and how this is dampened by the curse of the past. Rainbow’s End may be an American thriller, but there’s definitely something of the Greek tragedy about it.

Don’t read if you’re blue

Love in a Blue Time
By Hanif Kureishi

In this collection of short stories, Kureishi deconstructs instances of love and hate with skilful tenacity. Although it sometimes takes him a little longer than other short story writers to reveal the true nature of his characters, once he has done so the story that unfolds is often full of enjoyment for the reader. I particularly liked his regular character (although it takes different forms) of the loser, the unemployed waster who leeches off his friends and is what some would describe as a menace, others a genius. Kureishi is particularly good at humanising this kind of individual – and it works well in this collection.

We follow the adventures of adulterers seeking revenge, an amateur pornographer and his models, a couple with an alarmingly severe moth infestation which causes the disintegration of their marriage and their soft furnishings, and a drug abuser persistently abandoned by her supposed loved ones. These are just a handful of examples to demonstrate the richness and diversity of this collection’s cast. Every one of them could be any one of us, Kureishi seems to say, because we’ve all got problems. Most of these can be distilled to problems of love and hate. Far from being polar opposites or two sides of the same coin, love and hate are much more closely entwined – a fact that this collection exposes dramatically. That is an affecting sentiment.

Too Small

Goldilocks
By Ed McBain

In a small, Floridian town, a doctor arrives home late from a poker game to find that his second wife and their two young daughters have been brutally savaged to death by a maniac with a kitchen knife. There is no obvious suspect. At first the case is just another headache for the doctor’s lawyer, Hope, whose marriage is disintegrating. But soon Hope is drawn into an intricate web of lies, all with different motives. Some lies are simply to deceive, others to protect and some are to incite. It is Hope, not the slow police officers, who delves into the intimacies of several families to uncover the truth, finding a truly tragic story embedded in his small town.

Goldilocks is not the sum of its parts. McBain can do much better. Hope meanders along haphazardly funding clues and, curiously, keeping them from the police officers out of an odd sense of duty to his client – never realising that he could be implemented in the crime because of this. The tale does have its twists – which I enjoyed – but it never really changes direction. It feels very linear, like a long suburban avenue that in this novel McBain hopes will be a decent substitute for New York’s mean streets. Even the inclusion of wise-cracking New York escapee (whose name has to be Frank) is conceited and urbane. I couldn’t help feeling like I – and McBain – wanted to be back in New York tracking down real killers and drug dealers, not nutters guilty of murderous but small-fry family disputes.

McBain’s talent shines through in a number of sequences, though. His gift for writing punchy dialogue in police interrogation scenes elevates this novel above a pulp paperback. Still, I longed for intelligent cops dissecting gangs and playing big-time dealers off one another; I got wife swap gone wrong.

Epic Implications

The City and the Stars
by Arthur C Clarke

It took me some time to get into this story. I assumed it was your typical futuristic-utopia-with-one-disgruntled-resident tale. But once I understood Clarke’s world it took me to a whole new level and I was hooked. I could have happily forgotten the ‘real world’ and got lost in Clarke’s imagination.

This crafty novel is set in the distant future – about one billion years from now. Miraculously, humans are (sort of) still around. In a way, they’re flourishing – in a truly civilised city so advanced that residents can summon food, furniture and scenarios at will from the so-called Central Computer. The only negative is that the city is so self-contained it is in fact shut off from the rest of the world, said to be a barren, deathly desert, possibly at risk from the enigmatic Invaders who almost killed off the human race.

And Alvin isn’t happy. Like anyone who has ever looked up at the stars from his hometown, Alvin thinks that there must be more – and he sets out to break all the rules of his society to find it.

This could have been a simple allegory about how you don’t know what you don’t know. But not in such an expert’s hands; Clarke turns this story into a complex, philosophical exploration of identity, fear and discovery. And, naturally, he does it with an unsurpassed wonder. There’s plenty of gadgetry in this to woo any sci-fi fan: whooshing doors, silent but powerful transport and worryingly sentient robots. Clark uses all this to characterise the world of the novel and its inhabitants. Only a handful of times are there passages of unnecessary technical titillation. (And Clarke would probably be able to convince me that these are necessary.)

But most of the time we stay focused on the story: the first half is all exposition and exploration; then it becomes a fascinating debate – the exploration now is into ethics and existentialism. Throughout there is a real feeling of movement, of seeing the stars and actually reaching them. Clarke masterfully describes what that journey involves, how it changes the explorer and the society he left behind.

This really is a very wonderful story, a tale with epic implications. Not least because I feel myself reading a lot more sci-fi.

A Faulks in the Road

Devil May Care
By Sebastian Faulks (writing as Ian Fleming)

Up until recently, James Bond could have gone one of two ways. The novels describing his adventures were outdated and the films that had built on his legend were staid. It appeared that Bond could either wither away from our cultural consciousness or continue parodying himself on celluloid.

Actually, said many, there is a third way.

The masterminds behind Bond’s estate re-empowered the franchise with an excellent new cinematic direction and hired one of Britain’s best novelists to reinstall Bond on the page.
Bringing him back to the literary arena was a major test for Bond. I have read only two Fleming books, which I positively disliked. But I could look past Fleming/Bond’s racism, I could let his sexism go, I could even swallow his imperial arrogance – if only the novels were well written. Instead, they are dull fantasies with no brain and a lot of cliché. Had it not been for those early Sean Connery movies, Bond would have rightfully been forgotten. But he survived the end of empire and the British cultural revolution (testament to his adaptability, I’ll give him that).

And so we find him now in the hands of one of the most enchanting and exciting writers in Britain today. Faulks came as a surprise to many – but actually he was an obvious choice, having written about spies, foreign locations, historical settings and even diplomats incredibly well. Bond was a logical step. I wouldn’t be surprised if Seb had had a secret crack at 007 in the privacy of his study (so to speak). That was not to say it was easy. But Faulks has pulled it off, with the wizardry of one of Bond’s gadgets and the charm of the man himself.

Devil pulls Bond out of sabbatical to investigate a mega rich, mega eccentric Russian who is growing a lot of poppies not just because he likes red (no surprise there). Somehow uncharacteristically (more Marlowe than Bond), he is also drawn into searching for a beautiful woman’s kidnapped twin sister. Naturally, both cases are connected: the search leads Bond into the heart of Britain’s current cold war enemy Iran, plus Faulks’ familiar France and, somewhat inevitably, Russia.

Faulks accomplishment is extraordinary: he successfully blends Fleming’s Bond with a 21st-century mentality (this sounds difficult but the transformation is seamless: for example, his sexism is stripped out of his sexuality, fortunately leaving him no less Bond). Plus the final twist could never have been in Fleming but actually sits perfectly in Bond’s world – Fleming missed a trick.

Still, Faulks is true to his own voice: crisp sentences, instantly deep character insights and passionate dialogue – all again fit perfectly in Bond’s world. A page-turner, a romp and a remarkable achievement.