Books I Read In November

Fiction
'Clockwork Angel' by Cassandra Clare
Having read this book and given how little satisfaction I have received from much I have read this year, I have begun thinking I should simply read Young Adult steampunk/fantasy books. I had not connected this book with the Mortal Instruments series also by Clare, of which I have seen the movie, 'The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones' (2013) and this has many similar tropes, but set in 1878 London rather than contemporary USA. There is a secret organisation fighting the manifestation of demons in our world and having an ambivalent relationship with various vampires, werewolves and other supernaturals. There are eldritch and steampunk weapons and some combine both elements. It focuses on Tessa Gray, an orphan from the USA with the ability to slip into the form of another person, a skill highly valued by many of working in this demi-monde of London.

Though there are standard elements of kidnap, treachery, the poverty and dark streets of Victorian London and some very large battles, Clare handles it very well and you are really swept along by the narrative. While there is a plethora of tropes present, I also think her character building is pretty good and this really helps. As a mature reader, the honesty of Tessa's feelings, particularly towards potential love interests, plus her struggling to determine her identity, does come over in a very teenage way. However, this is largely counter-balanced by the politics of the underworld and the twists in the plot which lift it above other books in this kind of category. I am not certain if I would rush out and buy the two other books in this Infernal Devices series, but would be tempted to pick them up if they appeared in a charity shop.

'Potsdam Station' by David Downing
This is the fourth book in the Station series and jumps from 1941 in the predecessor, 'Stettin Station' (2009) to the closing days of the Second World War in 1945. One of my complaints bout the previous books in the series is that the main character John Russell, a British-born American journalist based in Berlin, spends a lot of time simply travelling around. This shows off Downing's knowledge of Berlin and some other cities at the time, but really deadens the action rather than heighten it. This book takes that to the extreme. The point of view jumps between Russell, brought back to Berlin by Soviet authorities to find German atomic secrets, his girlfriend Effi Koenen who he left behind in 1941 and has become involved in smuggling Jews out of Germany and his teenaged German son, Paul, who has been conscripted into an artillery unit on the Eastern Front but is steadily driven back to Berlin. At times, the jump between the different points of view is abrupt and it can take some sentences to realise which character is being focused upon especially when they are all in different parts of Berlin.

Very little happens. The spy element is killed off very quickly and so you are left simply watching these three people wandering around ruined Berlin largely trying to stay alive. Russell tries to find the other two as well as people he knew four years earlier. There are points of tension especially when Effi is arrested as a Jew, but as in the previous novels, Downing is poor at communicating real jeopardy and I see this is something other reviewers have criticised him for. Ultimately this is really just an erratic guided tour of Berlin in the last days of the war. If you find that detail interesting then you might engage with this book, but otherwise it lacks the necessary elements even of a family wartime story let alone the (spy) thriller aspects which I once believed this series was supposed to be about.

'The Water Room' by Christopher Fowler
Despite what it says on the cover of my copy of this novel, it is in fact the second book in the Bryant and May series and the plot follows on from elements featured in the first, 'Full Dark House' (2004) which I read last month: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/10/books-i-listened-toread-in-october.html  The fact they were published in the same year may have led to some confusion. Initially I felt happier with this novel than its predecessor. It is set in the 2000s in a part of North London in a typically odd street left over from the chopping and changing down the decades. As you expect from Fowler there is a peculiar murder, an elderly Asian woman has been drowned in river water in her own home. It is followed by a number of murders which increasingly seem to be linked to the four ancient elements and to the various rivers of London which have been covered over down the centuries but still exist. The truncated close gives a set number of suspects and Fowler is good at developing these characters well.

We get more on Bryant and May, the octogenarian detectives, their assorted colleagues and eccentric helpers. The motive for the murder and a range of secrets is played out well, being both exotic but also credible. The prime problem is, especially after about the halfway point is that the book becomes slack. As with Downing, there is simply far too much going from place to place. Adding in the viewpoints of the two detectives' colleagues adds bulk without increasing tension. As a result by the resolution, which is interested, you are simply glad it is over. I have commented how these days with editing even by publishing houses, being less common some authors are allowed to simply drone on in quite a repetitive way and I feel Fowler has been allowed to do this. This novel could have shed 100 pages (it had 429 pages in the edition I read) and have been better for it. I have hope for the series because of Fowler's character development and detail on London. Do I ask too much in expecting my thrillers whether crime or spy to have tension and pace in them? Perhaps in the 21st Century where size for the sake of size in a novel seems more important that such elements, I am.

Non-Fiction
'The Old Country' by Jack Hargreaves
This book followed the success of 'Out of Town' (1987) which I read last month: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/10/books-i-listened-toread-in-october.html and was similarly Jack Hargreaves outlining lost crafts and behaviours from rural England with quite a lot of reference to his own life. A lot of this book is about fish and angling techniques and even some of the ones he mentions as being contemporary in the late 1980s, have become obsolete due to new materials. He also speaks about wild birds, which of course have become rarer still with the loss of so many in the UK and odd things such as appreciation of time, accents and various travelling traders such as wool packers. It is a light easy read with some jarring moments when the conservatism of an old man breaks through with politically incorrect statements on race, though he is more sympathetic to Roma than many of his generation would be and in turn very dismissive of New Age Travellers. This is a good resource book if you want to set stories in rural England in the 19th and 20th centuries and draws your attention to facts that you might have overlooked or never realised. It is very much an old man telling you stories by the fire and as such I can understand why it is still in print, though sold at garden centres rather than in bookshops.