Books I Read In November

 Fiction

'Pariah' by David Jackson

Though set in the early 2010s, this crime novel about a New York detective of Irish heritage, Callum Doyle really feels like the hardboiled fiction of the 1930s and 1940s, especially that sense of existential threat; alienation and indeed isolation whether in the rural or urban space. When two of the police officers working with Doyle are murdered, his precinct is both eager to catch the killer but also increasingly suspicious of the detective, especially as his female police partner at a previous precinct was also killed in a raid gone wrong. It soon becomes apparent that the murderer is looking to isolate Doyle from colleagues and even family, making it too dangerous for anyone even criminals to be in contact with him. At times there are clichéd phrases, but the novel is fast paced and there are some great scenes in which Doyle escapes what his antagonist has woven around him. If you have run out of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler novels or want that tone but in a contemporary setting, then this novel does the job well and I can understand the acclaim it has received. Occasionally it does feel like a first novel, but overall Jackson rises above his lack of experience and I imagine the subsequent books in the series will be more polished.

'Piranesi' by Susanna Clarke

Two years after Clarke's debut novel, 'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2022/02/books-i-read-in-february.html she was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and while a second book came out in 2006, she was unable to produce anything else until 2019 and this novel was published the following year. While it is much shorter than her debut, this book has the same almost matter-of-fact magic realism about it. The main character is called Piranesi by another and inhabits a vast building with multiple chambers filled with statues and ornate architecture. Parts of it are crumbing and there are often floods caused by various tides coming into the lower chambers. The story is told through Piranesi's journal and he details more of his environment and the remains of others he finds coming into it. Initially only one of these is alive but as the novel progresses, the character and we learn more about the situation, what the vast house is and how he came to be there. If I say much more I will spoil the story which does a great job of unfolding the details bit by bit and showing that it is magic realist rather than fantasy as it might appear (as it did to me) at the outset. The novel reminded me of early work by Christopher Fowler and novels by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (more of which below). The tighter focus of this novel means Clarke's skill in conjuring up fascinating places and intriguing people is put to great effect. I hope that she publishes more.

'The Angel's Game' by Carlos Ruiz Zafón 

This is the second book in Ruiz Zafón's tetralogy but is a prequel to 'The Shadow of the Wind' (2001) which I read last month: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/10/books-i-readlistened-to-in-october.html It is again set in Barcelona but this time in the 1920s with an epilogue in 1945. Some of the same characters appear, though younger. The story is very similar to the first book in that it has a very Gothic tone with the protagonist, David Martín, a journalist and subsequently a novelist. There are more scenes in run-down grand houses and backstreets of Barcelona, corrupt police, unrequited love and a visit to the the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. 'The Shadow of the Wind' was a kind of literary detective story with Gothic overtones. This novel centres on a Faustian pact that Martín makes with an elusive, probably supernatural French publisher and the disruption it causes to his life. However, there is also the uncovering of a complex crime focused on the grand house the author buys with profits from a series of Gothic novels, the City of the Damned sequence. As the novel comes closer to the conclusion this becomes clearer as a crime story, with that hardboiled feel, indeed reminding me a little of the movie 'Chinatown' (1974) and the pace steps up into an all-action finale with car crashes and a fight in cable car.

I almost feel that my reading this month unintentionally has been in the same vein. This novel has the kind of fated doom that characterised hardboiled novels and movies but also has aspects of the unearthly, sitting alongside the mundane which characterises magic realism. The trouble for me was that I read this too soon after 'The Shadow of the Wind' whereas originally they were published 7 years apart. Thus, I had had my fill of bleak young men and angelic young women in the shadowy decay of Barcelona. This book was some 69 pages shorter (441 as opposed to 510 in my editions) but still felt rather too long and it would have had more impact if crisper. I am certainly not rushing out to buy the remaining two books in the series but may come to them in some years' time.

Non-Fiction

'The Chancellors' by Edmund Dell

Edmund Dell was someone I used to run into quite a bit in London in the 1990s up to his death in 1999. He had served in various under-secretary of state roles in the late 1960s before becoming Minister of State for Trade and then Employment to 1970. In 1974 he was Paymaster General and then Trade Secretary until 1978. In this book, published in 1996, he reviews the 17 Chancellors of the Exchequer, the British finance ministers, 1945-90.

What is astounding, perhaps unsettling, about this book is that, throughout, Dell makes no attempt as a historian to be objective. He savages every Chancellor on a range of bases for what he sees as sustained incompetence, arrogance, naivety and simply being wrong about almost everything in how the economy was unfolding. It seems a surprise that he was ever a Labour MP let alone in a Labour government. His economic outlook as revealed through his commentary is that in some way Britain needed to shirk off any international role, that defence should have been reduced to a minimum and that it should have had a much smaller state, with very little social welfare or health service. It is a Little Englander attitude in extreme. Saying this, while Dell favours the market, he does not sit with the free marketeers of the Thatcher years seeing them as tinkering too much and deluded in their belief in monetarism or what they thought was monetarism.

Reviews quoted on the book speaking of it being 'severe' (David Butler) and 'merciless' (Peter Hennessy) are accurate. While it can be argued that the criticism is warranted, Dell goes far outside what is taken as the usual historical approach. Many of his comments, even the captions under the photos of all the different chancellors are snide, touching on the juvenile. He occasionally yields a little for Dennis Healey and Nigel Lawson, but generally this book is filled with attack after attack on the men it focuses upon, sometimes descending well away from academic analysis.

Dell did not come across in this way when met in person and it seems apparent he had bottled up a lot of vitriol that he felt compelled to shoot out in this book. I am surprised the editors let him get away with this, especially the stuff which would be embarrassing reading in an 'A' Level essay. I suppose his standing, as seems to be the case with some established historians, made him immune from being edited.

The book does explain the complexities of the first 45 post-war years of the British economy clearly and it has a value in that. However, never have I read a history book which is effectively a personal rant against a string of people. If anything this should have rather appeared as an autobiography rather than masquerading as a genuine history book.