August 2011 books

OK. So I'm late with August's books. I'm sorry about this, but I was in NZ touring that wonderful country in a campervan. It's the only way. Luxury it ain't, but the freedom to stop and look at things makes up for it.

To start with Non-fiction. David Miles's The Tribes of Britain is a superb book that is especially good on prehistory, Roman and Anglo-Saxon/Norman Britain. It makes you stop and think quite hard. I suppose I ought to include Lonely Planet's guide to New Zealand. Well-thumbed and dripping with scraps of paper collected as we went round the country. And an excellent book of road maps. Can't get anywhere without either of the latter.

So now for Historical Fiction. Philippa Gregory's The White Queen is yet another excellent exploration of the place of women in English society; how a woman from a non-noble background became Edward IV's queen. She has explored the place of women in Tudor England and is now focussing on the preceding century. CJ Samon's Heartstone continues the career of his hunchback lawyer with his side kick, Barak, and friend, moorish physician, Guy. Susanna Gregory wrote A Murder on London Bridge in which events take place in London during the Restoration. In Edward Marston's The King's Evil has two religious opponents solving yet more murders. To jump to the Twentieth Century, CJ Sansom's A Winter in Madrid is focussed on the Spanish Civil War (1936 - 1939)and makes the reader think about the intentions of some of the major participants on both sides.

I'm not quite sure where to place Lee Langley's Butterfly's Shadow. The author has continued the story of the opera Madame Butterfly. If you remember the heroine commits suicide at the end of the opera. In this book, a friend manages to rescue her before she dies. She continues to live in Nagasaki and becomes a successful business woman. The child that Pinkerton took away with him when he returned to America grows up not knowing about her until after his father's death when his stepmother tells him about Butterfly, with whom she has been in secret correspondence for all these years. The child is in the US Army during World War II and, because he is fluent in Japanese, is seconded as a translator to Tokyo. On a day off he goes to Nagasaki to see if he can find his mother. Her good friend takes him to his mother's house and shows him round. When he asks about her, the friend shows him a shadow on a wall and says that is all that survives of her from the A-Bomb blast. His stepmother is greatly distressed when he decides not to return to America because he has met a Chinese-American girl, also a translator, is now a property owner as his mother's heir and hates the Americans because of the way they treated the USA-resident Japanese during the war.

Another twentieth century historical fiction is Simon Montefiore's Sashenka which follows the fate of a family from the Russian Revolution into the modern post-communist era. While Sashenka and her husband were executed by the KGB, their two children survived and, at the end of the book, are finally put in contact with each other. It's a brilliant book which draws heavily on historical evidence.

I only read a couple of normal fiction - if there is such a thing. Emma Donogue's Room. Is a staggering book about how a mother and her five year old son create a world of their own while living in the cellar of a house. She was trapped by a man who keeps her in pretty dismal conditions. In the end she and her son are rescued, but the psychologists are completely flummoxed by the world the child describes. He has no knowledge of the world outside the basement and is confused by what exists outside it. Andrew O'Hagan's Be Near Me is the story of a Roman Catholic priest in a deprived area who tries to understand the problems of the young people in his parish. Unfortunately he gets rather too close to them and, in the end is accused of abusing them in his innocence. And he is an innocent. And then, last of all, comes Scarlett Thomas's Our Tragic Universe. And Lynne Andrew's romance From this day forth.

The last books are a murder-mystery and two medical sci-fi novels. The murder mystery Sandra Brennan's Lot's return to Salem centres on a series of murders that have taken place in an area used for a huge motorbike rally. But it's not the bikers who dominate the novel who are the killers. The ending is much more surprising than that. I read two Thomas Hoover novels this month: Syndrome and Life Blood. He does like his future extensions of current medical ideas. The novels are great fun to read.

And, while I read no poetry on my travels, I did read Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya.