Books Read in 2018

 Below is a list of books I managed to finish reading in 2018.

1. The Shrimp & the Anemone (LP Hartley)
2. The Train (Georges Simenon)
3. The Next Best Thing (Anita Brookner)
4. The Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead)
5. The Infatuations (Javier Marias)
6. Sing Unburied Sing (Jesmyn Ward)
7. The Song of Achilles (Madeline Miller)
8. For Two Thousand Years (Mihail Sebastian)
9. Hospital Babylon (Emogen Edward Jones)
10. Mendelssohn is on the Roof (Jiri Weil)
11. Lucky Jim (reread) (Kingslay Amis)
12. Unity (Michael Arditti)
13. Party (Elizabeth Day)
14. It Can’t Happen Here (Sinclair Lewis)
15. His Bloody Project (Graeme Macrae)
16. The Mandibles (Lionel Shriver)
17. The Bell Jar (Re-read) (Sylvia Plath)
18. In the Café of Lost Youth (Patrick Modanio)
19. A Strangeness in My Mind (Orhan Pamuk)
20. The End of Eddy (Edouard Louis)
21. Birdcage Walk (Helen Dunmore)
22. Bright Precious Days (Jay McINerney)
23. Tell Tale (Jeffrey Archer)
24. Swing time (Zadie Smith)
25. Breaking Cover (Stella Rimmington)
26. Adrian Mole and the Prostate Years (Sue Townsend)
27. Love and Fame (Susie Boyt)
28. 4321 (Paul Auster)
29. Frankenstein (Mary Shelly)

 Non-Fiction

1. For Who(m) the Bell Tolls (David Marsh)
2. Horrible Words (Rebecca Gowers)
3. I Maybot (John Crace)
4. I Partridge (Steve Coogan)
5. Life in Question (Jeremy Paxman)
6. A year in Provence (Peter Myale)
7. When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Calanithi)

A dishearteningly low number of 36 books in the year, way below my target of a book a week. But I guess these things are relative. A colleague was telling me the other day about her new year’s resolutions (without the slightest interest on my part; I had not initiated this conversation). There was the usual list of improving fitness and joining a gym (which, I suspected, were her resolutions every year—this woman on a treadmill is like a hamster on a wheel; peddling furiously but going nowhere, weight is still piling on), and I was about to think of an excuse to bring this boring exchange to a swift end, when she mentioned, “And I am going to read lots more books this year.” “How many?” I asked. “Eight, at least,” she said.

The year started on a disappointing note. I began reading King of Pain, which was on my Kindle for many years, described as a dark, sharp and funny novel, '2012’s most enjoyable read', according to a bloke called Neil Genzlinger who wrote in the New York Times about it. I can’t now remember why I did not or could not finish the novel. I must not have found it all that sharp or funny. I remember halting reading the book and making a mental note to return to it sometime later in the year, but never did. Maybe I shall give it another go this year.

This is another thing about the books I read in 2018. As I went through the list of books I read, I was astonished to learn that I had read Zadie Smith’s Swing Time. I have no memory of reading this book. I therefore read some of the reviews on the Internet to see whether that would jog up my memory. Nope. And this is, according to Taiye Selasi, the author of Ghana Must Go (another novel I have been meaning to read but have not got around to do it yet), Smith’s finest novel. Should I read it again? On reflection, perhaps not. If the novel failed to leave any trace on my mind, there is no point in reading it again. I do like Zadie Smith, though. I shall wait for her sixth novel, which, Selasi might conclude, is even better than the fifth, and therefore the finest.

2018 ended, too, on a boring note. I had to read Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. This book was chosen by the book club of which I am a member. 2018, a member of the book club informed us, trembling with excitement, was the two hundredth’s anniversary of the first publication of this “iconic novel”. “We must read it,” he ordered. Either people did not have the courage to disagree with him or they were as excited as he was about the two hundredth’s anniversary. At just over 160 pages, Frankenstein is not an overlong book; but that did not make it any easier for me. It was painful, toiling through the stodgy prose of Mary Shelly, which sucked the life out of the story which was neither believable nor particularly interesting. OK, we are prepared to suspend our belief when we decide that we want to read a story about a monster, but some attempts at developing the plot would not have gone amiss. Everyone in the novel, be it Frankenstein, or the English dude who writes letters to his sister telling her this story, or even the monster, speaks in the same manner and style: wordy and long-winded. Nothing that happens is not met with a commentary that goes on for several paragraphs. This novel epitomised for me everything I dislike about the nineteenth century novels. Tedious does not even come close to describe it. The only discovery I made (not having watched any of the Hollywood films), is that Frankenstein is not the name of the monster but of his creator.

I re-read Lucky Jim and The Bell Jar, two books chosen by the book club.

I had read Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis’s debut novel, years ago, and remember enjoying it thoroughly. Reading it second time round, after many years, was still enjoyable; but the novel seemed a bit dated, and some of the set-pieces in the novel, such as when Jim, in a drunken haze, damages the guest room in his mentor’s house and, upon waking up the next day, ineptly tries to cover the misdemeanour (of which he has little recollection), goes on just a tad too long and ceases to be funny. Luck Jim, I decided, after my second reading of it, is an excellent novel; but not the novel I would recommend you should start with if you have not read any of Kingsley Amis’s novels. I would suggest Jakes’ Thing or Stanley and his Women, Biographer’s Moustache or One Fat Englishman. All of these novels are funnier and more biting satires than Lucky Jim, I think. Read these novels first. Then read Lucky Jim.

The Bell Jar is the only novel written by the American poetess Sylvia Plath, who killed herself in less than a month of the publication of the novel which was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. It is an autobiographical novel which describes a period in the life of a young woman, who experiences a breakdown of some kind and keeps on harming herself or making attempts on her life. She gets admitted to asylums where she is given the electric treatment. The electric treatment does not work the first time but does the second time. It is an absorbing tale in the same way watching live coverage of a car crash is absorbing: you are appalled but can’t shift your gaze away from the screen. The title, ‘Bell Jar’ is apt in conveying the sense of feeling of claustrophobia and being trapped experienced by the narrator. It must be excruciating to be trapped in the troubling thoughts inside your head, from which there is no respite.

Unity was the first novel I read of the British novelist Michael Arditti. The prose of Unity is elegant and assured. Arditti cleverly mixes historical facts with fictional events in the novel in which life characters mingle with fictional characters. Unity was a pleasure to read. I think, I shall read more novels of this novelist.

Occasionally you read a novel, which, when you finish it, you are glad you read. The Underground Railroad, the American author Colson Whitehead’s novel, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for fiction (as also the 2016 National Book Award for fiction) was one such novel. It is an extremely well-researched novel. It is Whitehead’s skill that he does not parade the breadth and depth of the research that must have gone into writing the novel. Thrilling, as Barak Obama described it.

Lionel Shriver was another author whom I read for the first time in 2018. The Mandibles, first published in 2016, is set in near future—America between 2029 to 2047. The novel tells the story of its eponymous family, four generations of it. The novel is slightly slow to take off, but, once it does, absorbs you utterly. Shriver has a great feel for the human foibles and pretentions, which she throws into relief with great relish. The Mandibles is a biting satire and has many comic scenes (maybe I was imagining it, but I thought Shriver's prose style and the wry asides which appear regularly in the novel, were similar to the style of Barbara Kingsolver), but ultimately it is a sombre commentary on how quickly values and behaviours disintegrate when money disappears.

Anita Brookner is a favourite writer. Not the easiest of writers to read, but I have never found her novels to be anything less than superb. The protagonist of The Next Big Thing, a 73-year old German émigré called Julius Herz, is in many ways, like the protagonists of many other Brookner novels. He is intelligent, a recluse, and has a special talent for torturing himself with analysis and re-analysis and, when he is finished with it, some more analysis, of everything. Like most of Brookner’s novels, The Next Big Thing proceeds at a glacial pace and nothing much happens. That is, in my view, the beauty of it. Brookner’s novels, like a good whiskey, are not to be gulped down in a hurry. You must savour them slowly.

I decided to read It Can’t Happen Here, the 1930s novel of Sinclair Lewis (the first American author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature), because a year or so ago it was promoted in many bookshops in the UK as the novel that predicted Donald Trump. Many years ago, I’d read Babbit, one of Sinclair’s most famous novels, and although I don’t now remember much of it, I remember liking it. I can imagine why those who are opposed to the Trump Presidency would see the echoes of what they think is currently going on in America (not good) in the protagonist of It Can’t Happen Here, Burzelius (Buzz) Windrip, a populist politician who becomes America’s president on the backdrop of the Great Depression in the 1930s. But there, really, is no comparison, I think, between the America depicted in Sinclair’s novel and the twenty-first century America under Trump. Sinclair’s language is direct and straightforward, and he does not much care for crafting exquisite sentences (I thought). He is more interested in the message he is giving; and he gives it with the force of an HK-27 Cyclops. The novel is satirical at times, but later turns into a direct (and not wholly convincing) description of the struggle between the liberal values and tyrannical dictatorship, which, whatever you might think of Trump and America, isn’t America of today.

Another Nobel prize winner I read in 2018 was Patrick Modanio. His short novel, In the Café of Lost Youth (title of the novel taken from a quote by the French philosopher and Marxist theorist Guy Debord) is in four parts, each part narrated by a different narrator. Each has known a young woman called Louki, who has mysteriously disappeared. This is a strange and atmospheric novel, melancholic in its tone, which depicts the Bohemian world of the 1950’s Paris (the period of the novel is not clarified, but I thought the novel was set in the 1950s)—languid, but also brooding and slightly sinister—extremely well.

Orhan Pamuk was the third Nobel Laureate I read in 2018. His 734-page novel, A Strangeness in My Mind, is not a novel, it would be fair to point out, that can be read in one sitting. It is an absorbing family saga, but it is also a loving chronicle of a city. I have never been to Istanbul; however, after reading A Strangeness in My Mind, it seems like a magical city.

Paul Auster’s enigmatically titled, 4 3 2 1, is, at more than thousand pages, requires even more concentration and stamina than does A strangeness in My Mind. 4 3 2 1 is the reason why I could not meet my target of fifty novels in 2018. It took me more than two months to read just this novel. What makes 4 3 2 1 a memorable read is Auster’s assured, plush, sumptuous prose (notwithstanding occasional drifts into overlong sentences, Philip Roth-style, which go on for a page at a time); his humane approach and the gentle humour. This gigantic and ambitious bildungsroman is also a commentary on an important epoch in the twentieth century America

Another novel which is suffused with an undercurrent of menace is Helen Dunmore’s last novel, Birdcage Walk. Set in Bristol, it tells the story of Lizzie Fawkes, the daughter of a radical advocate of women’s right, and who is married to a property developer. The period of the novel is French revolution, but the story takes place in Bristol. Lizzie’s step-father, Augusts is a passionate advocate of the Republican cause and is in support of the revolution. Lizzie in the meanwhile is trapped in a marriage that has hit turbulent waters because of the financial difficulties faced by her husband that are tangentially affected by the French revolution.  Birdcage Walk strikes a few false notes (in particular, the unconvincing prelude), and is probably not Dunmore’s best, but it still is a very good read.

Finally, Graeme Macrae’s His Bloody Project, which was apparently long-listed for the Man-Booker Prize a few years ago, was an unexpected and absolute joy. It is a blackly funny and fiendishly witty tale of a murder in the Scottish Highlands in the nineteenth century. Belter of a book.

Two of my favourite writers, Philip Roth and VS Naipaul, died in 2018. I consider Naipaul to be the greatest writer in English of his generation. I have been meaning to re-read all the novels of Naipaul for a while. I wanted to read at least a novel each of these giants of literature in 2018 but did not somehow get around to do it. Maybe this year.

As always, the non-fiction books I read were fewer than the fiction; but I liked all of them.

Below is a list of my top fiction books of 2018

1. The Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead)
2. The Train (Georges Simenon)
3. Mendelssohn is on the Roof (Jiri Weil)
4. The Bell Jar (Re-read) (Sylvia Plath)
5. His Bloody Project (Graeme Macrae)
6. The Shrimp & the Anemone (LP Hartley)
7. The Mandibles (Lionel Shriver)
8. Lucky Jim (reread) (Kingslay Amis)
9. Unity (Michael Arditti)
10. 4321 (Paul Auster)

Book of the Month: The Hindi Bindi Club (Monica Pradhan)

A frequent mistake many in the West make about distant countries like India is that they represent homogenous cultures. In Britain, for example, many natives wouldn’t have a clue as to whether a brown skinned person is from India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. It is another matter that the aforementioned three countries used to be one country until sixty years ago, and ruled by the British for almost two hundred years. Undivided India was partitioned into the Hindu majority India and Muslim majority Pakistan in 1947, when the British rule came to an end; later, Pakistan, following a war between India and Pakistan, in 1971, was divided into Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The partition of India forms one of the strands of Monica Pradhan’s 2007 debut (and, to my knowledge, only) novel, the suggestively titled The Hindi-Bindi Club.

I first noticed The Hindi-Bindi Club two years after it was published, prominently displayed in the about-to-go-bust Border’s Book store. There was a glowing blurb from the Observer which described the novel as a ‘cracking . . . and charming tale.’ On the back-cover was a summary of the noel which purported to tell the stories of two generations of Indian women, living in America. That sounded a bit like Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck club. Having recently read The Joy Luck Club (which I had liked) I made a mental note to read The Hindi-Bindi Club (I am always willing to read ‘cracking and charming tales’) one of these days, preferably after I had forgotten The Joy Luck Club. In due course I did forget The Joy Luck Club. But I forgot about The Hindi-Bindi Club, too. Until last week, when I spotted it in the second-hand book-shop I have taken to frequenting in the past few months. (The old man who runs the book-shop is knowledgeable and likes to chat, and his shop-assistant is not entirely unattractive.) It cost only a couple of quid and I bought it. I finished reading the novel in a couple of sittings, which—I have no hesitation in suggesting this—suggests that the novel is a very easy read.

The Hindi-Bindi Club runs a fine line between genre fiction (Chick Lit) and literary fiction that tells the story of the immigrant experience in America (Indian, this time round) and the associated issues (clash of cultures, values, and the balancing acts that the immigrant parents as well as their ‘American’ children have to make all the time etcetera.) I am inclining towards The Hindi-Bindi Club being a Chick Lit. Not that it bothers me. It has all the positive attributes that I have come to associate with chick Lit.

The Hindi-Bindi Club tells the stories of three Indian women, who become friends in America. The women come from very different parts of India; indeed one of them, Saroj Chawla, comes from Lahore, which is in current day Pakistan. Chawla’s Hindu family escapes to India during the partition, after losing all its wealth (and the lives of a few family members). While the family succeeds in India, Saroj continues to hanker (in her mind) after her idyllic childhood in Lahore, before she was violently uprooted. She has never had a sense of belonging, she says, in India. The other two women, Uma and Meenal, come from Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Bombay (now Mumbai) respectively. The three women’s sub-cultures, in India, have about as much commonality amongst them as the Brits have with the Portuguese Culture. (Going on a drunken rampage through the city centres on Friday nights is frowned upon in the Portuguese culture.) Yet the three women have become friends in America by dint of the following factors. (1) They all belong to the Indian Diaspora, which, when they first arrived in America, was small. (2) They live in the same area. (3) They are all housewives whose husbands hold down White-Collar jobs and, over the years, have become prosperous by hard work. Of the three Uma has shown herself to be a rebel by marrying a Phirangi (which, the novel informs you, is an Indian word for a white foreigner). Uma’s husband is an Irish American, and by marrying him she has incurred life-long enmity of her father who, back in Kolkata, refuses to forgive her for bringing on shame to the family, a grudge he takes to his death. (The Indians in the novel reveal interesting race prejudices; it would appear that Indians of certain generation heartily disapprove of Indians marrying whites. If an Indian does marry a non-Indian, it is a calamity. They couch their concerns in cultural terms and the difficulties in adjusting to living with someone from another culture, but, you can’t help feeling that, underneath it all, is the belief that only a ‘good Hindu spouse’ would do, and everyone else is inferior. Later in the novel, Meenal’s husband, who is a surgeon, cuts off their daughter—also a doctor and therefore, one would assume, more than capable of making up her own mind—completely when she marries a white Rock musician. When the daughter’s marriage fails because of husband’s infidelity, the father’s first response is ‘I told you so.’ I wonder how representative the views of some of the characters in this novel are of the real Indians. I once heard the author Louis de Bernieres say in a literary programme (I forget the context) that the only system more labyrinthine and convoluted than the British class system was the Indian caste system; so complex was the caste system that—Bernieres hazarded a guess—even the Indians probably did not understand it fully. Pradhan’s novel does not touch upon this subject at all, perhaps because Pradhan, a second generation Indian in America, does not understand it herself (if one follows Bernieres’s hypothesis).)

The three women—Meenal, Uma and  Saroj—are close friends, which means that their daughters, when they are growing up, are forced to spend extended periods in one another’s company, as their mothers host, along with other Indian women in the area, gatherings which the daughters label as the Hindi-Bindi Club. (Bindi, Pradhan helpfully informs us, is an Indian word for dot, which traditional Indian women wear on their foreheads. Hindi is a language, not to be mistaken for Hindu, which, we are told, is a ‘religion/way of life’.)

The three daughters—Kiran, Preity and Rani—are the younger generation of Indian women in the novel with their own narratives.

None of the women is lacking in drama in her life. Saroj, outwardly happily married to her husband—she has no intentions of leaving him—, who is no Don Juan (‘A few thrusts and the party is over’), is secretly having an affair with another Indian man, on whom she had had a crush as a teenager in India before her marriage, and who, conveniently, is also settled in America, making a fortune). Her husband, Sandeep, is a flirt and never loses an opportunity to flirt with Meenal in any function. Meenal has a secret crush on Patric McGuiness, Uma’s husband, and suspects that her surgeon husband, Yash, might have had flings with work-colleagues although she has no proof. The only secret-free marriage amongst these three, it would appear, is between Uma and the phirangi. Meenal, when the novel opens, is recovering from a double mastectomy following breast cancer. Meenal’s close brush with death has opened the doors of her minds to let in all manner of Eastern philosophies which she believes has brought her closer to God and made a better person. Uma might be happily married, but she has her own demons to conquer, such as her mother’s suicide when Uma was young. The dead mother, it turns out, was an amateur writer and has left behind her musings on life, in Bengali, in tablets, which are distributed amongst Uma’s five sisters. Uma’s plan is to make an anthology of her mother’s writings, but some of the sisters are reluctant to part with their inheritance.

Now to younger generation of Indian women. They are all married to white American men. Although the marriage of one, Meenal’s headstrong daughter, Kiran, has ended badly, the other two are happily married. One of them (I forget which one) is a rocket scientist (I mean an actual rocket scientist) but has discovered the inner artist in her. Another one suffers from clinical depression—it might be the rocket scientist who is clinically depressed; I really can’t be sure; there are so many dramatic things happening in the lives of these women that it is difficult to keep tracks. One other—probably Preity Chawla, Saroj’s daughter— used to be a secret bulimic in her younger years and, once, as a teenager, while in India on a holiday with her parents, had a crush on a Muslim boy before her mother came down more heavily on her than a Japanese sumo wrestling champion on his opponent. Now in her thirties, Preity is plagued with a desire to trace this boy, a desire that her alarmed mother warns her, would bring nothing but trouble. Kiran, the headstrong doctor, announces that she is not averse to the idea of a semi-arranged marriage, which sends her aunties from the Hindi-Bindi Club into a kind of frenzy American psychiatrists would have no hesitation in diagnosing as a manic episode, as per the DSM criteria. Names of all sorts of single / divorced Indian boys from ‘good families’ are suggested, but it does not work out as either Kiran does not like them, or they don’t connect with her. No marks for guessing that Kiran finally settles for another white American boy (cue for her father to throw an apoplectic fit), but there is a twist. This American man is living as a paying guest in Pune, India, where Kiran’s grandparents live, and is learning Marathi, the mother-tongue of Kiran’s family. What are the chances of that happening, eh?

As this saccharine-sweet novel comes to an end, Kiran is getting married in Pune, in the traditional Hindu ceremony in the morning and a Christian one in the evening; all the protagonists have sorted out their problems neatly (even Kiran’s father, under immense pressure from his family, gives his blessings, although it could have been more effusive than ‘It’s your life; do what you want’); and Kiran is dancing merrily into the sunset. It all ends happily.

Pradhan certainly knows how to weave a story; the prose flows easily, with sprinkling of witty observations and remarks at regular intervals, which bring a smile to your face.

There are a fair number of main characters (a total of six), most of them painted in broad brush strokes. It is not surprising that the character that lingers the longest in your mind when you finish the novel is Meenal, who is the least dramatic of the lot. Pradhan has obviously developed the character of Meenal with a lot of love and care. By comparison, there is a sense of incompleteness to other members of the Hindi-Bindi Club.

Pradhan introduces big themes in the novel, but therein also lies a problem. There are more big themes than the novel can justice to. The tragedy of partition of India might have been a subject for a novel in its own right; here it forms the background of one of the protagonists (who, incidentally, has other interesting things happening in her life) and you are left with the feeling that this strand has not been exploited to its full potential. The family tragedy lurking in Uma’s background, similarly, remains just one of many dramatic events in the novel and the author perhaps has missed a trick in not exploring it further. Uma’s search for her mother’s ‘tablets’ peters into nothing of significance, as if the author lost her interest in this strand of the novel.

The Hindi-Bindi Club is full of interesting titbits about Indian / Hindu customs. Indeed, at times, the novel reads almost like ‘Introduction to Indian Culture and Subcultures’, which suggests that the novel is aimed primarily at Western readers who, Pradhan must have a reason to believe (probably not without reason), are largely clueless about India and its culture. Most of the time it works; occasionally, though, it drags a bit, such as the overlong last section describing Kiran’s marriage to the Marathi-speaking American for Texas that includes half a page description (I kid you not) how a sari is worn. Apparently wearing a modern Indian sari is more than just draping a several feet long piece of cloth around your body; it is almost a science and requires a technique not easy to master; supreme hand control is essential, and if, like mine, spatial orientation is not your strong point, you are in serious trouble.

Pradhan probably also has an interest in Indian cuisine. At the end of each chapter are recipes of Indian dishes (with list of ingredients longer than M1), allegedly signature dishes of some or more of the characters in the novel. These recipes are not weaved into the narrative (for example, as in Anthony Capella’s Food of Love) and remain interesting add-ons. If you are not particularly interested in how to make a ‘chapaati’ or a stew of ‘Moong Daal’, you can skip the pages; you will miss nothing. (The recipes are delicious, though; I tried the Goan Shrimp Curry and it was yummy.)

The Hindi-Bindi Club is a novelistic version of a feel-good movie. It will not fail to cheer you up if you are feeling gloomy. On a rainy day, make yourself a hot cup of coco, wrap yourself in a cosy blanket (or a sari, if you are (a) competent and (b) a woman or identify yourself as one) and lose yourself in the world of Meenal, Saroj, Uma, Kiran, Preity, and Rani.

Book of the Month: Two Brothers (Ben Elton)

Call me snobbish but until recently I had not read any of Ben Elton’s novels, because Elton wasn’t literary enough for me. I changed my mind after I heard him in a live interview when he was promoting his fourteenth novel, Two Brothers. This was partly because the interviewer, a pompous sounding man, no doubt a lecturer in some provincial town, treated Elton throughout the interview with the kind of amusing condescension one reserves for a dullard in the family whose attempt at whatever he is doing is rather pathetic but nevertheless needs encouragement for no other reason than human kindness. Elton, on his part, gave back as much as he got (he even asked the interviewer at one stage how many novels he had written that were published). I liked that. I also liked that Elton gave the impression (with considerable success) of being supremely unconcerned about literary critics not taking him seriously. His novels sold by the millions (apparently) and that would do for him.

I decided to read Two Brothers. Partly because, having decided to read Ben Elton, I felt his fourteenth novel was as good a novel as any of his previous thirteen, but also because Elton said that it was his most personal novel, based on his family’s history. It might not have been a literary novel (Elton couldn’t give tuppence about it) but it was a novel with a serious theme, with Holocaust as its background.

Two Brothers, as the title implies is the story of two brothers. Two Jewish brothers, except that one of them is not Jewish, as he is adopted. The novel is however not just about the two brothers, Paulus and Otto; it is also about their parents Wolfgang and Frieda Stengel; Dagmar Fischer the rich Jewish girl both the brothers are in love with, and Silke Krause, their Aryan friend and a budding Communist,  the daughter of the Stengels’ friend who is secretly in love with Otto. The story unfolds against the backdrop to the novel is the Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, from the days of the Weimer republic to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. The novel traces the early happy years in the lives of the Stengel family—Wolfgang is a jazz musician while Frieda is training to be a doctor. The family survives the post First World War chaos in the 1920s before the family’s fortunes brighten a bit, only to sink again in the Great Depression and the rising anti-Semitism in Germany. The time of the novel is set in two time periods: the 1920s’ and 1930s’ Germany and the Britain in the 1950s where one of the brothers has been living following the Second World War. I shall not reveal which of the two brothers was adopted and which survived the war and the Holocaust, although I do not think Elton means it to be the secret; the identities are revealed long before the novel reaches its end. The surviving brother has been working in the British Foreign Office and, a decade after the war ended, has received a letter from East Germany from Dagmar, who—the reader is informed in the initial chapters—married the other brother before the outbreak of the war, expressing a wish to meet him. The brother who has anglicized his name to Michael is eager to meet Dagmar except that he is quite sure that the writer of the letter is not Dagmar—who, he is convinced, perished in the Holocaust— but a Stasi agent who has a very good knowledge of the Stengel family history. This is a trap to lure him. MI5 are of the same view and meet with Michael prior to his proposed travel to East Berlin. Michael has a shrewd guess as to who has written the letter, but he still is determined to travel to the city of his birth and meet the writer of the letter. This is not the only twist in the novel. Elton packs in more twists in the novel than on a winding country road in the South of France.

At almost 600 pages Two Brothers is a huge sprawling novel. Elton does know how to spin a yarn. The prose style is pacy, and at times gripping. A quick and easy read, which, despite the unpleasantness of the subject matter, amusing at times (without being irreverent). Elton paints his characters with a broad brush; he is not one for subtlety. Paulus is the calm and calculating one; he has a plan for everything, the sort of boy whom you can easily visualise sitting in Dragon’s Den asking searching questions to the would be entrepreneurs, calculating potential profits. Otto is the headstrong one, whose response to any conflict is an invitation to the other party to step aside and have a fight. Frieda, their mother, is nobleness personified. Most of the characters drawn are of only two shades. The character of Dagmar, who comes to play a pivotal role in the lives of the two brothers, on the other hand, has no depth. The heavy style of exposition becomes a tad clunky at times. The atmosphere of terror (for the Jews) unleashed by Hitler and the Nazis is described in a manner that has the force of tornado, with language that is at times florid. Perhaps Elton was of the view that the the nature of the atrocity perpetrated by the Nazis could only be conveyed adequately by prose that pulled no punches. The result, at times, is reiterating the obvious. Thus, in a chapter on the Night of Broken Glasses, after describing at some considerable length, using stark images, the violence unleashed against the Jews, Elton informs the readers that it was apocalyptic. Elton has done historical research for the novel, and is driven by the need to demonstrate it. The novel, at times, reads like a history lesson, as the invisible, omnipotent narrator feels the need to stop the flow of the fictional narrative and educate and remind the reader that Hitler was an evil man. It gets a tad jarring after a while. The dialogues are a curious mixture of clichés (“Only Jews could produce an Einstein”) and slang which is more British than German. The characters refer to each other as “mates” and use words like “wankers” to express contempt. Even allowing for the fact that this is an English version of what the fictional characters say in German, seeing as the period of the novel is Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, it seems a bit ersatz.

Two Brothers is a novel that is, for all its weaknesses, remarkable for the author’s sincerity. In the Afterword, Elton tells the reader the inspiration behind the novel. The reader learns that Elton is Jewish from his father’s side, and the family’s original, German Jewish name was Ehrenberg. Elton’s uncle, Gottfried Ehrenberg, after enlisting in the British army in 1943, changed the name to Geoffrey Elton; and Elton’s father, Ludwig, followed suit, and anglicized the name to Lewis Elton. Elton then goes on to inform that a cousin of his father and uncle, Heinz Ehrenberg, was an Aryan child who was adopted by his Jewish parents and went on to serve in the Wehrmacht. It turns out that some of fantastic sounding “set-pieces” in the novel have been taken from real life stories from Elton’s family. Thus, the end of the noble Frieda—she volunteers to accompany Jewish children being sent east when she is not required to go, and is gassed on arrival—theatrical as it may sound, is how Elton’s great aunt (grandmother’s sister) died.

Perhaps Elton could have written a family memoir instead of novel with unnecessary and unconvincing twists.

Book of the Month: Food of Love (Anthony Capella)

I remember reading somewhere that the film rights of Anthony Capella’s 2004 bestseller, The Food of Love, were bought by the Warner Brothers. I do not know whether the film was ever made.  This is not surprising. Capella’s debut novel has all the ingredients that are de rigueur for a feel good Hollywood flick which will fetch tidy earnings at the Box Office. For a start, the novel is based in Rome and other scenic parts of Italy. There is a romantic triangle involving two friends and a young woman. You probably do not need me to tell you what unfolds: the young woman falls for the wrong guy to begin with, thinking him to be a chef of great promise. His interest in her, on the other hand, lies strictly south of the border. Driven by the desire to explore the inside of her underclothes (and stick her photograph on the inside of his cupboard to join the multitudes evincing his past conquests), he plays along, enlisting help from his friend who, conveniently, is a chef of great promise—and we are talking Micheline standards here—and, equally conveniently, so that the plot gets nicely rolling, falls in love with the young woman himself. However, being a man of honour etcetera, he does not reveal his heart’s secret to the other two. After the obligatory misunderstandings, heartaches, travels through picturesque parts of Italy, and a lot of sex, it all ends well. That is as may be, you might say, but why should the Americans audience be interested in an Italian Mills and Boon romance? Because the young woman in the novel is American.

Laura Patterson is an American student, spending a year on Scholarship in Rome, studying art history. She is twenty-two and is ripe as a mango to be plucked and devoured. After all you can spend only so much time studying frescoes by Cavallini, however fine they are. Unfortunately, the poor girl is not having any luck; all of her Italian blind dates are hornier than rabbits on Viagra, and no sooner than the statutory dinner is over, instead of going on a stroll under the moonlit night and whisper sweet nothings into her ears, they want to examine her uvula with their tongue, and stop short of getting her into bed only because they are still living with their mothers. Laura has had enough of the Italian men and is giving serious consideration to going back to dating Americans when, following the advice of her Italian friend, she decides to go out on dates only with those men who can cook, the decision being based on the premise that a cook would be dextrous with his hands. Cue to enter the first male protagonist, Tommaso Massi, who is a waiter in a Micheline Star restaurant called Templi, owned and run by a humourless Scandinavian by the name of Alain Dufrais, who seems to have missed his true vocation, which would be—judging by the way he treats his kitchen staff (that includes Bruno, Tommasso’s best friend and the second male protagonist of this story) and the customers (who are frogmarched out of the restaurant if their voices rise a decibel above the approved threshold)—the dictatorship of a little African country. Tammasso has spotted Laura while she is speaking on the phone to her friend (getting tips in dating); and has decided on the spot, in the grand tradition of virile Italian men, to get her into bed. Tammasso meets Laura fortuitously—the first of many expeditious serendipitous moments that propel the story forward— in a food shop within a week and— it is a measure of Laura’s naivety or Tammasso’s ingenuity—manages to give her the impression that he can cook. Except that he can’t. Therefore, when Laura, who has noted him down—in front of the hanging carcasses of hares in the food shop—, as a character from a Michelangelo drawing, and is further impressed that he did not instinctively try to grab her breasts (which is what the poor girl has come to expect from the Italian men between the ages of six to death), calls him—he has given her mobile number, you see—to get guidance on how to cook the hare (which should have rightfully belonged to Alain Dufrais’s kitchen) Tammasso has foisted on her, he has no option but to seek urgent help from his best friend Bruno. Bruno loves cooking; he is passionate about cooking; he is as committed to cooking as KFC are to chickens. He is a quiet and barely articulate man—his confidence has never recovered from the taunting he received from the other boys at his school about his big nose— except when it comes to cooking, when he can hold forth a scholarly discourse that can only be understood with the provision of study notes. Bruno agrees to help his friend in his mission to enter Laura’s underwear. All he has to do is cook mouth-watering recipes, which Tammasso can pass off as his own. Bruno sticks to his side of the bargain and helps out his friend in a number of hackneyed and barely comic situations revolving around the theme of Tammasso having to cook his recipes ‘live’ either in his own flat or in the house of Laura’s Italian friend, which involves smuggling Bruno in and out of the family’s kitchen without anyone noticing. It should come as no surprise that very soon Laura’s photograph joins the many others in Tammasso’s cupboard. By this time Bruno has discovered that he has fallen in love with Laura, but cannot bring himself to tell this to his friend, partly because of the awkwardness it would create, but also because, you suspect, he is incapable of stringing more than three sentences when the subject is not how to make a perfect ‘Tozzetti’. Tammasso curiously, and in contrast to his time-tested practice—which has served him well in his impressive career as a seducer of unsuspecting women—of dumping Laura and moving on to his next conquest, is still carrying on with her. Could it be because some of Bruno’s recipes have had the effect of pushing Laura’s libido way beyond the Richter scale, and Tammasso’s Italian ego is wounded, as he struggles to satisfy her? Laura tries to set Bruno up with her roommate, Judith, another American, but it does not work out; Bruno is not interested; also, Judith’s dress sense which suggests that she is colour-blind, and her tendency to laugh like a hyena on acid scares him. Meanwhile, Drufais is becoming more tyrannical and dictatorial than Robert Mugabway, and begins to pick on Bruno, favouring a Frenchman instead, who uses every dirty trick in the book to destroy Bruno’s recipes, which, as we have learnt, are mouth-wateringly delicious.  Bruno and Tammasso leave Templi and, with the help of Laura’s friend’s father—he too has become a fan of Tammaso’s cooking, his libido surging up more than the FTSE 100 during the Bull market after tasting the delights of his three course meal, except that it was Bruno who cooked it—take on a run-down restaurant, the only plus point of which is a raven haired, full-breasted waitress called Marie, whose hipsters look as though they are not commodious enough for her curvaceous derrière. Since Tammasso inexplicably decides to continue seeing Laura, they have to carry on with the charade, which, frankly speaking, is getting a tad tiresome by this stage. The restaurant, Il Cucko, needless to say, becomes hugely popular. Realising that the story, at this stage, is in danger of becoming more schmaltzy and sugary than a sticky toffee pudding, Capella introduces a dramatic element (and about time too). Bruno kisses Laura; Laura catches Tammasso in flagrante delicto with another woman and dumps him; Laura also tells Tammasso that Bruno kissed her, probably to prove that both he and his friend are a couple of perverts, and begins seeing her history professor, an American called Kim Fellowes, who is so stuck up he actually speaks in Italian all the time; Tammasso and Bruno have a blazing row; Bruno leaves Rome, driving aimlessly to North, through a succession of hills and valleys, stopping only to exercise his mandibles over T-bone steaks cooked alla brace near Tuscany, or to smack his lips over minestrone con pesto (with basil and farinata), the staple street-food of Genoa, or to taste soupy risotto from roadside osterias. The gastronomic delights regrettably fail to sooth the pain of his loss, till he comes to a small hamlet called Le Marche where his van serendipitously breaks down. Here, Bruno first samples the delights of a stuffed whole suckling pig and, in due course, of the equally well stuffed daughter of the woman who agrees to have him as a paying guest, till his van is mended, which, as can only be expected in these remote hills of Italy, takes several weeks. These weeks are nevertheless long enough to convince Benedetta, the inn-keeper’s daughter, that Bruno might shag her brainless, but his heart belongs to an American, to whom, she is aghast to hear, he has never declared his love; into the bargain the American girl thinks he is a pervert. Another serendipitous incidence: Laura with her new beau turns up in Le Marche, where, over a meal, the stuck up professor makes an ass of himself after he gets an allergic reaction to a mushroom, the name of which is roughly translated into English as ‘shaggy inkcaps’. As the professor is threatening to call his lawyers (in English or Italian is not clarified), Bruno steps out of the kitchen, and heroically and gallantly takes the blame, and urges the professor to sue him and not the semi-literate villagers. After Laura and the professor have left the village, Benedetta, having had enough of Bruno, gives him the heave-ho as gently as possible, telling him that he has to tell Laura how he feels about her. So off Bruno goes in his rickety van and returns to Rome. Where he finds that his erstwhile friend Tommasso is shacked up with the curvaceous Marie, and has transformed ‘Il Cucko’ into a successful pizzeria; and he cannot find Laura’s whereabouts. Bruno goes back to work in the ‘Templi’, his tail, for all practical purposes, lodged firmly between his legs, feeling rather sorry for himself. However, in a twist redolent of a Hollywood movie—but wait! This novel might still be be made into a Hollywood film—involving yet more coincidences—coincidences are coming, now, so thick and fast, you are beginning to wonder whether they do not come in pairs—that is too tedious to explain, Tammasso, who, unbeknown to Bruno, really cares about him, smuggles himself as a waiter into ‘Templi’; Laura and the stuck-up professor end up dining, with an entourage of hangers on, in ‘Templi’ where the professor again makes an ass of himself by proposing to Laura in front of everyone and is politely but firmly rejected; Bruno ends up preparing the dream meal for Laura and, for a change, owning up to it; and Alain Drufais ends up with his French disciple in a cupboard where the two discover the joys of homosexual sex. As the novel ends, Laura is back in America; Bruno is still in Italy, but ready to embark on his maiden voyage across the ocean, waiting only for Laura to arrange the visa for him; and the two of them are exchanging e-mails with each other about—you have guessed it!—more Italian food recipes.

Anthony Capella is an aficionado of Italian food—he has devoted the best years of his life chomping his way through Italian food—and his exceptional knowledge of regional Italian food shows throughout the novel (Capella used to write for Sunday Times on Italian food and recommended restaurants in Naples and Rome). There is a hint of magic realism, too, around food and Capella effortlessly lifts it to the realm of fairy tale when he describes the invigorating effect of Bruno’s dishes on the libidos of those who eat it. Not a page goes by without Capella, via his gourmandising protagonist, waxing eloquent about some or the other Italian dish you have never heard of. He is kind enough in many cases to supply recipes, too, the only hitch being you are unlikely to get the ingredients that go on to make these foudroyant dishes in your local Tesco. If your knowledge of Italian food starts with American Hot Pepperoni Pizza and ends with Tiramisu, you are in for a surprise. If you are a carnivore, you are in for a treat: there isn’t a body part of various herbivorous animals—from eyeballs to urinary bladder to the outer membrane of transverse colon—that, if Capella is to be believed—can’t be baked, fried or casseroled. To Capella’s credit, for the most part, the gastronomic tuition blends well with the plot; it is only on a few occasions that you feel that Capella is getting carried away with his culinary enthusiasm and ephorizes: thus, when Bruno travels out of Rome and drives Northwards, supposedly heartbroken, what the reader remembers most of this journey which ends in the warm and ample bosom of Benedetta, is not his heartache, but the exotic dishes he has cooked or eaten along the way. The last few pages of the novel comprise nothing but recipes of even more colourful Italian dishes—from fried zucchini flowers to peppers stuffed with rabbit.

For a debut novel, The Food of Love, a reworking of a Cyrano de Bergerac story—Capella obliquely acknowledges the debt he owes to the seventeenth century French dramatist by giving Bruno a big schnozzle—, is written with a great deal of self-assurance. At times it feels almost as though the novel was written for the cinema (it is little wonder that its rights were sold so quickly), reading it is like watching a movie, which is as much down to the formulaic constructive format of the story as to the author’s deft touch in writing. The novel overwhelms you with its rummage of melodrama, humour (a tad on the cruder side at times), emotions, and sensuality—a heady mixture of food, spices, and romance. 

The Food of Love is a joyous, exuberant celebration of Italian food. You can savour it in bite-sized pieces or gobble it down in one hungry sitting; you are sure to enjoy it. I hope the Warner Brothers bring out the movie; I would love to watch it.

Book of the Month: Gillespie and I (Jane Harris)

Gillespie and I, Jane Harris’s second novel is set, like her first, in 19^th century Scotland.

The story of Gillespie and I is told in retrospect by an octogenarian English spinster, Harriet Baxter. The year is 1933 and Harriet, sitting in her flat in Bloomsbury, London, is writing down what she calls her memoir, although, to be precise, she is writing about a two-year period in her life, in the 1880s, when she lived in Glasgow and became very close to the family of an upcoming artist called Ned Gillespie. Harriet’s association with the Gillespies ended on a traumatic note for almost everyone concerned and for a while earned Harriet notoriety which she feels, even though more than forty years have elapsed, she did not deserve.

As the decade of 1880 is nearing its end Harriet is (by the standard of that age) is a thirty-six year old spinster of independent means. After the death of her aunt, Harriet has travelled to Glasgow with the intention of spending a few weeks in the city and visiting the International Empire exhibition. In Glasgow Harriet gets acquainted with the family of Ned Gillespie, one of whose painting is hanging in the exhibition. The initial meeting between Harriet and Ned’s family is by accident when Harriet saves the life of Ned’s mother, Elspeth, who tumbles while walking and, incredible as it may seem, is in danger of choking to death having swallowed her dentures! After this initial, fortuitous, meeting Harriet wastes no time in getting close to the Gillespie family and spends most of her waking hours in the first floor apartment of the Gillespies. Ned Gillespie’s is a lower middle class family. There is a grocery shop that is run by Ned’s younger brother, Kenneth. Ned, who had taken over the running of the shop after his father’s death, has ambitions to be an artist. He is spending increasingly more time in pursuit of his art. His younger sister, Mabel, having split up from her boyfriend, has returned to Glasgow. Ned lives with his wife Annie and two daughters, Sybil and Rose. Into this cosy, domestic and closely knit family enters Harriet. Writing her memoir forty years later, Harriet has no hesitation in acknowledging that Ned Gillespie was a genius but for the most part his family was a burden on him. Harriet, comfortably off herself, notices that the Gillespies, while not exactly impecunious, are still leading financially uncertain existence. Harriet does what she can to help the family. This involves commissioning her portrait (which Ned’s wife Annie, an amateur painter herself, paints), showering the family with small yet frequent gifts etcetera.  Despite this Harriet is left with the suspicion, as time passes, that her near-constant presence in the Gillespie household is not appreciated by Ned’s wife Annie; also detested are Harriet’s gifts to the family. Harriet’s suggestion that Ned, Annie and their children come to stay at a house she has rented a few miles out of Glasgow is rejected by both Ned and Annie. To add to the family’s stress, the behaviour of Ned and Annie’s elder daughter, Sybil, unexpectedly and inexplicably deteriorates. Once a well-behaved and placid girl, Sybil’s behaviour becomes unpredictable and antisocial. Obscene drawings appear on the wall of the kitchen; during the Hogmanay ceremony a number of guests become unwell after drinking punch and it is strongly suspected that Sybil added rat poison to the punch bowl. Elspeth and Annie fall out over how best to deal and “cure” Sybil’s bad behaviour. Harriet does not much like Sybil compared with the angelic Rose. Then Rose disappears. She and Sybil are playing in a public garden (not far from the house where Harriet rented a room when she first arrived in Glasgow and which she has kept even after she moved into hr rented house). Sybil, who comes back to the house on her own tells the story that she was given a penny by a thin woman—a stranger—whose face is covered with a veil to get something from a nearby shop; and by the time she returned to the garden both the woman and Rose had disappeared. An extensive search organized by the Glasgow police; however, despite numerous claims that a girl fitting Rose’s description was seen in the company of a man at different times in different parts of the city, Rose cannot be traced. The disappearance of Rose has a devastating effect on Ned’s family, in particular Sybil, whose behaviour deteriorates to the extent where she needs to be committed to the local asylum. After a few months of futile search the police close the case. Some more months pass and then a member of public discovers Rose’s decomposed body in a wood. Subsequent investigation by the police leads to the arrest of a German man and his Scottish wife. The couple admits to having abducted the girl but make a sensational claim: the couple was approached by Harriet Baxter to kidnap the girl. They did not know why Harriet wanted the girl abducted; however her instructions were clear: the girl was to be kidnapped for a day only and she should come to no harm. That Rose ends up dead is the result of a freak accident. Harriet is arrested along with the German and his wife and is tried in the crown court in Edinburgh. Writing her memoir forty years after the trial Harriet becomes increasingly convinced that the new maid working for her who calls herself Sarah, is none other than Sybil, Ned Gillepsie’s eldest daughter.

Gillespie and I is a gripping tale, told with panache. Jane Harris’s prose is lush, witty and with clever turns of phrase. At more than six hundred pages this is not exactly a short novel. That it does not drag at any stage is as much to do with the crackling plot—taut, unsettling and full of unexpected twists—as with Harris’s prose that hides as much as it reveals. The prose has a kind of lilting fluency which, imperceptibly, creates a momentum of its own.

The protagonist of the novel, Harriet Baxter, is, like Madame Mao, small but lethal. As she starts narrating her story the impression the reader forms is of an art-loving, essentially good hearted, if ever so slightly lonely, woman who goes out of her way to those whom she calls her friends. This initial impression soon gives way to an uneasy feeling, as Harriet’s presence in the Gillespie household borders on being intrusive and her proximity to Ned in particular becomes forced. For an intelligent woman Harriet can be very obtuse; she has the ability to not take hint and the talent to latch on to any ambiguities and distort the messages to suit her emotional needs. All of this conspires to make Harriet, as a narrator, about as reliable as Hermann Goering’s lawyer at the Nuremberg trials. As the novel nears its end—Harris has one final twist in store for the reader—the reader can’t make up his mind whether to pity or loathe Harriet. Hers is a lonely, pitiful life but not less baleful for that.

Gillespie and I is an adroit psychological study of obsession, manipulation, and deception—both of others and of self. It is a clever novel that expertly manoeuvres readers’ expectations, and is remarkable for what is unsaid and unsayable.

Book of the Month: Started Early, Took My Dog (Kate Atkinson)

Kate Atkinson burst on to the British Literary scene in the 1990s with her brilliantly insouciant tragic-comic debut novel, Behind the Scenes of the Museum, which won the Whitbread (now Costa) award. This was followed by Human Croquet and Emotionally Weird, both of which attracted critical reviews which were lukewarm at best, although the novels, especially Emotionally Weird, marked Atkinson as a writer who had a great feel for humour.

After these three full length novels which could be described as literary fiction (plus a collection of short stories) Atkinson changed tracks and switched over to genre fiction. She began writing detective novels. She has published, so far, four detective novels featuring the slightly damaged yet clever and honest and uber-cool detective (is there any other type?) Jackson Brodie.

These detective novels have sold well and, in 2011, the first two novels were made into a BBC drama in which Jason Isaacs (hugely talented but much underrated) played the detective.

The intriguingly titled Started Early, Took My Dog is the fourth novel featuring Jackson Brodie.

When one is writing a detective / crime thriller, one can opt for either the action or the psychological. An Example of action thriller would be The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Chandler’s intention in The Big Sleep is very clear from the outset. He is out to entertain. The plot of The Big Sleep is not very intricate but never leaves the fast lane—Chandler wheels in corpses with alarming regularity—and does not give the reader time to think. Chandler does not waste time in developing psychological profiles of his characters either; characters are useful to Chandler only to the extent that they serve some purpose in moving the plot further (either by getting murdered or telling Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s legendary detective, who might be the killer). Chandler’s prose is stylistic (and hugely enjoyable) and the whole thing is over in roughly 250 pages).

Started Early, Took My Dog is as far removed from The Big Sleep as Saturn is from Sun, although, like Chandler, Atkinson has her unique prose-style, liberally laced with humour. Atkinson takes great trouble in developing psychological profiles of the protagonists, which, by necessity, involve a raft of subsidiary characters which have no direct relevance to the plot of the novel but serve the function of elucidating for the reader the personality profiles of the protagonists. Also, since Started Early, Took My Dog—while a complete novel on its own—is fourth in a series of detective novels featuring Jackson Brodie, Atkinson probably feels obliged to bring in characters, which might have played a less peripheral role in the previous novels (I read Case Histories, the first novel in the series, many years ago, but can’t remember anything about it other than it was a moderately enjoyable read), so that the fans of her novels can have a sense of continuity. It also allows Atkinson to bring some or more of them back into playing a more prominent role in future Jackson Brodie novels, which, I am sure, will come out.

The result is a novel that is almost 500 pages—witty almost throughout, and entertaining in part.

The plot of Started Early, Took My Dog has several strands. At the heart of it is the murder of a prostitute named Carole Braithwaite, in Leeds UK,  in the 1970s. Carole is found in her flat three weeks after she was murdered. The first person to reach the scene of crime is a WPC named Tracy Waterhouse, who finds in the flat a four year old boy, presumably the dead prostitute’s son. The flat was locked from outside, which suggests to Tracy that whoever murdered Carole locked the flat from outside before leaving, probably in the full knowledge that there was a little boy in the flat. The boy is whisked away from the flat by the Social Services and a rookie social worker by the name of Linda Pallister is in charge of arranging foster care for him. There is a veil of secrecy surrounding all this and Tracy’s attempts to make inquiries—both with regard to the boy’s fate and the progress, if any, made in the investigation of Carole’s murder—fall on deaf ears. Carole’s murder has taken place at the beginning of what would turn out to be the reign of terror of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe (a real-life murderer, serving an indefinite life sentence—a bit of post-modern device used by Atkinson). Carole’s murder however remains unsolved; she is not considered to be one of the victims of the Yorkshire Ripper. Zoom forward several years and we are in the first decade of the twenty first century. Tracy Waterhouse is in her fifties; she has left the police force and now is in charge of a private security firm operating in a local mall. All the police officers—senior and junior—associated with Carole Braithwaite’s murder are either dead or retired—except one: Barry Crawford; and he is due to retire in two weeks. Then, while on her stroll in the mall Tracy notices a known prostitute called Kelly walking with a little girl, shouting abuses at the girl and generally mistreating her in full public view. Tracy, on an impulse, ‘buys’ the girl from the prostitute for 2000 pounds. This provides the second strand of the story. Tracy, having illegally gotten hold of the girl from the prostitute (who probably was not the mother of the child in the first place), begins planning her escape from Leeds, preferably England, and, towards that end, is not above using her contacts in the underworld to obtain fake passports and travel documents for her and the girl. In case you are wondering where Jackson Brodie fits into this, please be advised that he is hired by a New Zeeland woman named Hope MacMaster, who wants to trace her biological parents. Hope is English but immigrated to New Zeeland with her parents—the Winfields—at a very young age. All that Hope knows about her background is that the Winefields—who lived in Leeds—were her adoptive parents, and that her birth name was Nicola, which the parents changed to Hope when they adopted her. Jackson Brodie is tasked with the job of tracing, if possible, Hope’s biological family. Jackson Brodie arrives in Leeds and his first port of call is Linda Pallister, now nearing retirement, who is still in charge of adoption and foster care in the Social Services. Linda however proves very elusive and Brodie begins to suspect that she is going out of her way to avoid her. In a situation that is possible only in detective fiction Brodie manages to gain access to Pallister’s office and goes through her files; and discovers the name Carole Braithwaite written on the Winfield folder, along with a photograph of a young girl who he thinks could be Hope when she was a baby. Soon Brodie discovers three more things: (1) Tracy Waterhouse was present when Carole Braithwaite was found murdered (Tracy proves as elusive as Linda when he tries to arrange a meeting with her); (2) another man by the name of B. Jackson, calling himself a private detective, is also going about making inquiries; and (3) he (i.e. Jackson Brodie) is being followed, probably by the other Jackson. Tracy, in the meanwhile, does not take long to figure out that she herself is being followed by leather-jacket wearing thugs who will not hesitate from using violence. Then there is a bunch of retired police officers, more shifty than the people featuring in BBC documentaries with titles like ‘Fake Britain’, who, you are not surprised to learn, have direct or indirect connections with the Braithwaite murder. Finally, to add more spice to what is already turning to be a vindaloo, there is a dementing actress called Kitty, who is filming—you have guessed it—a detective serial in which Brodie’s second ex-wife, Julia, is also playing a role. The dementing Kitty is in the mall when the prostitute is mistreating the child (did I tell you that the prostitute, in due course, also snuffs it?). It all gets resolved in due course and leads up to the corruption at the heart of the police force.

If all of the above has given you the impression that Started Early, Took My Dog is a taut thriller with suspense leaking out of every page, you would be partially correct. There is, as must be evident, from the summery above, a lot of suspense, but the story has a meandering feel to it. What I like to see (or read) in a detective novel is the writer getting on with the various strands of the story at a brisk pace. What I don’t necessary want to read is pages of descriptions of the protagonist’s (Brodie) previous failed marriages, his difficult relationship with his teen-age daughter, his impoverished childhood etcetera. It does not add much to the story-line (which is essentially an old-fashioned detective / murder mystery) in a way that is meaningful. Having read only one previous novel in the series (and forgotten about it), it was impossible for me to link this with the plots of previous Jackson Brodie novels (if there was a link); neither do these descriptions offer any great insight into Brodie’s personality make-up (he spends much part of the novel being duped by one or the other person). I think this has happened because Started Early, Took My Dog is a detective novel with literary ambitions. Nothing wrong in that. Graham Greene and John Le Carre and  Len Deighton have done it with great success in the past. What is dissatisfying is the two have not gelled together neatly.

The alter on which a detective / crime novel will succeed or fail is the skill with which the mystery is resolved. For me a satisfactory detective novel is one in which there are no loose ends; the explanation of the events taking place is plausible; and when secret is revealed in the final pages, it is as if you have emerged from a mist. Unfortunately, Started Early, Took My Dog, fails this litmus test. The dénouement, when it comes, fails to give you the emerging-from-the-mist feeling. Atkinson ratchets up the tempo several fold towards the end, and the narrative, which, for the best part is trundling along at just about manageable pace is, in the last fifty odd pages, suddenly full of action and melodrama not out of place in a Bollywood pot-boiler. This gives the reader a bit of a jolt as, until then, it has the pretention of being an erudite, intelligent psychological thriller.

There are too many loose ends in the story-line that has holes big enough to drive a schooner through. For example, one of the two major strands of the novel, the kidnapping of the possibly-already-kidnapped girl by Tracy Waterhouse, has no evident link to the other strand of the story, the murder of Carole Braithwaite. It is as if there are two novels within the novel that are running a parallel course, and never converge. Tracy’s action (of stealing the girl) remains ultimately unfathomable. Despite reams of pages devoted to her actions, we are still left in the dark as to why the staid and solid Tracy decides to risk everything for a girl on whom her gaze happens to alight in the mall. (Most people, when they see a kid being mistreated in a public place by woman who seems to be off her heads on drugs, would phone the police, not ‘buy’ the kid. There is nothing in Tracy’s background and family situation that prepares the reader for this highly unusual step the former policewoman takes. The girl (four years old), in turn, begins her clandestine existence with Tracy, whom she has never met in life, without batting an eyelid.)

What saves the novel from being a total let-down is Atkinson’s prose which sparkles with smart and waggish observation. That does not quite make up, though, for the weak story. Six out of ten.