Hello St Marks

Elliot Perlman is an Australian writer and barrister who has won the Miles Franklin Award, so that's a strong start. 'Maybe the Horse Will Talk' is fabulous; very clever, witty, dry and wry and moving. Stephen Maserov is a teacher turned reluctant lawyer at heartless mega-firm Freely Savage Carter Blanche (and that's the genius of this book in a nutshell). Stephen is a very kind man "absolutely terrified of losing a job he absolutely hates". The company is a nest of vipers; a stronghold of toxic, entitled masculinity and casual discrimination and sexual assault, brilliantly wrought by Perlman. Can Stephen save his marriage and pay the mortgage without selling his soul?  'Pulphead' by John Jeremiah Sullivan came via the Street Library; thank you, Library Gods. Sullivan is an essayist and journalist who's written for all the big magazines (NYT Magazine, Harpers, Paris Review). 'Pulphead' is a collection of his longer essays about popular cult...

Be warned, this is not my brightest hour. You've heard of the Bridgertons? Netflix's most successful series, ever? I'd quietly read the first book in Julia Quinn's series last year, so—prompted by the outrageous success of the series—moved onto the second book, 'The Viscount Who Loved Me'. Oh my, it's just as silly as it sounds, but the silliness conceals a dark theme of power and submission played out in an escalating series of sexual assaults. That's not what Quinn calls it, of course. They get married in the end (spoiler, sorry), so all's well that ends well, but I was weirded out by it.  So then to Josh Malerman's 'Bird Box', another book later adapted for screen. I love an apocalypse story, and this one is solid. The world is overrun with creatures that turn you violently suicidal if you look at them. Four years on, Malory is raising twins behind shuttered windows, with blindfolds on, trained as babies to wake up without opening thei...

I did skip through a couple of chapters in this one; but in my defense, it was dull. Which was surprising, because journalist Nicolle LaPorte's account of the recent Varsity Blues college admissions scandal, 'Guilty Admissions: The Bribes, Favors and Phonies Behind the College Cheating Scandal', should have been fascinating. A story about uber-rich Californians paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to get their privileged kids into tier one colleges should have been an entertaining train wreck, or at least a nuanced reflection on entitlement. But it fell flat; there was no drama to the nonchalance with which parents paid up and later pretended not to know their 'donations' were illegal bribes, or that presenting their unexceptional kids as sporting superstars to gain 'side door' entry into Yale was a bit dodgy. I was struck by one parent who said she had no idea the payments were bribes because she'd been signing whalloping great big donation...

"The best Barclay so far..." said Stephen King on the cover. Starting from a very low base, I gather, having now read Linwood Barclay's 'Trust Your Eyes'. "Barclay is such an old pro you feel he can write these terrific thrillers standing on his head," said the [snarky] Daily Mail. In 'Trust Your Eyes', autistic Thomas spots a murder on Whirl360 (a Google Street View equivalent) and his nice brother humours him with a half-hearted investigation, and so on until the inevitable kidnapping and car chases. The Street Library delivers as many regrettable distractions as it does wonders.

"If you read only one American novel this year make sure that it is this one", says Sunday Express . I call foul on that one. Harlan Coben's 'The Final Detail' is a competent paperback about a vigilante sports agent, his sociopathic, deadly gorgeous best mate and the death of a New York Yankees pitcher; the tone is 21st century hard boiled detective bromance. To the point: "Sometimes the good guys break the rules because they know better". Lordy.

I think both of these turned up in my Street Library, which is why Kindle is not getting much of my business these days. Frances Liardet's 'We Must be Brave' was lovely, literary fiction about a lost girl and a wounded young woman. Beautifully crafted and set largely in my favourite era for fiction—England during WWII—so I allowed the weepy bits.  'A Crooked Tree' by Una Mannion was more of a challenge. When people behave badly in a novel set in 1942 I can forgive them, but when brainless teenagers and their damaged parents do dangerous, daft things in contemporary Pennsylvania I want to throw things at them. The premise is brilliant and compelling: overstretched widowed mother of five leaves 12 year old Ellen by the side of the road in a fit of pique, and it doesn't go well. I couldn't put the damn book down; my frustrated fury at the behaviour of this pack of well-meaning, self-destructive idiot kids was overcome by my need to see how it all played out. 

How could I forget 'Leave the World Behind' by Rumaan Alam (via Audible)? What a corker it was, prompting many a dinner table and school run conversation about the end of the world. A nice white family staying in a swanky AirBnb is interrupted by a nice Black couple who say it's their house, and something had gone awry in the city. Wealthy Black people? So it's a scam, right? Or hysteria? Or the end of the world for real? And so it goes. Fabulous. 

I've given up reading as many books as I finished in the past fortnight or so. Finished 'Bluebird' by Malcolm Knox. Honestly, I could have killed bloody Malcolm Knox for his wretched cast of loser beach bum layabouts, but I forgave him for his writing, and for the cheeky device of recasting Sydney as 'Ocean City'. So very good, and those bloody losers were brilliantly observed.  Jennifer Haigh's 'Mrs Kimble' dumped me with another wretched man I did not want to spend time with—the eponymous Mr Kimble, the rotter. But was it "beautiful, devastating and complex" as the Chicago Tribune declared? It was.  Dean Koontz is usually reliable but failed me with 'Your Heart Belongs to Me', a truly stupid book about—lordy—a man stalked by the twin sister of his transplanted heart, or some such rot. Definitely not "a terrifying thriller" per the cover line. One star, Mr Koontz. 

My mate Wayne recommended Tana French's 'The Searcher' to me, and so—thanks Wayne—it was fabulous, as promised. It came on the heels of Cate Kennedy's 'The World Beneath', both notable for brilliantly realised voices of people unfamiliar to me but which felt entirely authentic. French's protagonist is a retired Chicago cop seeking peace in a tiny Irish country village; instead of a caricature, French gives us an intelligent, worldly man weighing the risks of probing too deeply into the tightly-knit community he's joined. Kennedy's cast includes a maddening, hippyish single mum, deluded photographer dad and emo 15 year old daughter. I don't know anyone like these people, but the brilliant writing and characterisation took me right there, up close. 

A few embarrassing admissions today. Yes, I re-read Lee Child's '61 Hours'. Again. The perverse advantage of rarely remembering a plot is being able to re-discover books like lightly recalled acquaintances: ah yes, how lovely, hello again. It's the 14th Jack Reacher novel by order of publication, somewhere in the middle of the almost 30 of them in the series, and—yes again—I've read them all.   Just finished is Helen Simpson's 'The Summer Before the War'; the war being WWI. This is a tricky piece of publishing marketing sleight of hand, because the cover is a perky, hand-illustrated, cutesy job, promising English country garden witticisms and light romance. Inside the cover is quite a dense, surprisingly complex and really quite dark account of English village life in the first years of the war. Sold a motsa, apparently.  Also read (via Audible) an utterly daft thriller 'Elevator Pitch' by bestselling hack Linwood Barclay, which asks what would h...