More like Thin Story - Thin Air by Michelle Paver

1935. There’s a mountain. It shall be climbed. For God and Empire, five plucky Englishmen will undertake to be the first heroic men to reach the top of the mountain which has claimed, oh gosh, many lives. They, alone, with all of their porters, will climb the mountain. They will be heroes. 

It probably didn’t help that I’ve not long since read Sarah Lotz’s The White Road, also a ghost story about a mountain climbing expedition (in that instance, Everest to Thin Air’s Kangchenjunga) and really loved it. I found it difficult not to compare the two books, especially as they cover much of the same ground and same ideas - as one would understandably expect for ghost stories about mountain climbing. Thin Air definitely came out wanting.

It takes a while to get going. Our narrator is Dr Stephen Pearce, younger brother (and very much the spare) to Kits, the driving force behind the expedition. As children, the brothers were obsessed with Bloody But Unbowed, Edmund Lyell’s account of his heroic failure to climb the mountain. Now they’re ready to succeed, hopefully with a lower body count than the Lyall expedition managed. 

Their expedition begins by calling in at the home of Charles Tennant, one of the survivors of the aforementioned expedition. Tennant has never spoken about what happened on the mountain and isn’t keen to now. Especially not to Stephen, who stumbles in on his private rooms to be given hints Lyell left much out of his account and that Tennant is terrified of the great hunk of rock he’s chosen to live out his life in the shadow of. Dun dun DUUUUUN. 

From there, we have the long trek to the base of the mountain. It serves to introduce our team, their dynamics, and the scale of the challenge ahead. There’s some attempts at foreshadowing the spooky stuff to come, but even when that does arrive spooky it is not.

Paver makes a stab at a 30’s setting. I was glad to see her include a degree of casual racism (because I think it’s important not to act like we white people weren’t all arseholes back then and still have much to learn today) but at the same time there felt to be a certain degree of pulling back - an effort to acknowledge without being too offensive. 

It’s a short book and shorter on period context. Although the style tends towards that of a Boys Own adventure, these characters didn’t strike me as existing in a 30’s way beyond their discussion that it’s unsporting to use oxygen cylinders to get the the peak and looking down on people for being German (although - would they?). The plucky middle-class voice of the narrator isn’t great and seriously weakens the descriptions of the “spooky” goings on.

There are also some odd mistakes which really should have been picked up by the editor, such as a reference to their base serving as GCHQ which is off because 1) it wasn’t called GCHQ until after WW2, and b) there’s not much encryption and intelligence gathering done at base camp. 

Finally, the grand “why” lacked any real horror. Again, it came down to the style of the writing for me - what should have been this grotesque reveal was just… meh. I didn’t feel much was done with it once it was revealed. It didn’t change anything.

I’ve tried to put my finger on why this didn’t work for me without spoilers or without going down the road of “the book should have been written this way”. I think it’s because I never felt as though there was an antagonist. In a ghost story, the antagonist can often be a setting: the haunted house which is trying to get the occupiers to leave or whatever, but Paver doesn’t do this. The fearsome mountain never feels like it’s anything but a mountain they’re climbing, for all that initial buildup. Pearce never feels as though he is being targeted. I didn’t feel there was anything deliberately working against them, which is vital for pretty much any story. Without an antagonist, there’s just a bunch of lads doing stuff.

I didn’t care for Thin Air. The writing was clunky, the story was pretty dull, and - having recently read another mountain climbing story - there wasn’t enough of other stuff to interest me. Read The White Road by Sarah Lotz instead.

2 stars.

I have nothing flippant to say here - The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

This book is great and you should read it.

Except maybe if you really hate YA, because this is certainly a YA book.

That said, Thomas is a clever writer who neatly cuts through the usual “YA protag is the center of the universe” with a single line of dialogue from her mother.

I felt conscious while reading it that YA success lies in appealing to white 30-something women like me, who - incidentally - watched the Fresh Prince and sang along to 90s music first time around, and it felt a little hamstrung as a result.

Even so, this book will hopefully be the gateway drug for those who weren’t yet ready for the truths of Dr Maya Angelou et al. Like I wasn’t the first time I read them. THUG has made me want to read something which wasn’t written for me.

It’s not racist towards white people.

No, really, that’s not a thing.

When Starr tells her boyfriend he can’t understand because he’s white, that’s not racism towards white people, that’s a 16 year-old not having the language to articulate in a moment of emotion that if you have not lived an experience, you are unlikely to have a full appreciation of what it means for the people who do. This is true.

The white-people/black-people conversation feels a bit shoehorned in.

I felt like Thomas missed a trick. The racism Starr is subjected to has given her blinkers about the ways other races navigate the white world. This doesn’t change and there feels a very obvious moment when it could.

But yes, it’s great.

4.5 stars

Eventually I will manage to work out what the title refers to - Lies Sleeping by Ben Aaronovitch

So we finally know who The Faceless Man is! Harumble!

It doesn’t make much difference! Hurumble…?

Okay, from here there will be spoilers for the previous book in the series, The Hanging Tree, in which the identity of The Faceless Man is revealed and it will really wreck your enjoyment of that one if you know from the start who it is. SPOILERS FOR THE HANGING TREE from here on out.

Not as bad as last time - The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch

I had been looking forwards to this book for a long time, with some reservations. Forward because Tyburn, London, and some actual movements towards resolution of the larger story arc. Reservations, because there's rarely a good reason for publication dates to shift, then shift again, then again.

This time we're back in London and The Lady Tyburn is ready to call that favour she's owed. A teenager is dead following a party in a pricey piece of London estate and Lady Ty's daughter was there at the time. It would be very nice if this whole thing could be made to go away, by, say, Peter Grant, but there's more to this than a poor choice in recreational activity, and it has the feeling of a razor against leather...

The Hanging Tree continues the distressing trend of Ben Aaronovitch's books: they're great, you read furiously and then - alas. The ending. This review is being written off the back of the pre-Lies Sleeping re-read and the ending is even weaker the second time around. There's great drama, a race to get there before <something> happens, and then! Turns out that's not a problem because of Weak And Curiously Convenient Reason; let normal Grant'n'Nightingale vs The Faceless Man service commence.

And that weak plotting is not restricted to the end. The very fact that Peter is called in to help smooth things over for Lady Ty's daughter is a pretty odd move for a lady who is very good at getting things done and likely has many better favours she can call in. It feels like a lazy move to get Peter to the right place to discover, gasp, that there are Falcon elements to this after all. To bring up more examples would be spoilers. Is Deus ex Fabula a thing? Because it is all over this book like a rash.

However, I'm still a sucker for these books. The writing has this great conversational style which I love, they're witty, they make a better stab at diversity than the usual White Male author bothers to.

As ever, nobody who starts at the wrong end of this series is going to be convinced, but I do enjoy them far more than my star ratings suggest I do.

3.5 stars

*starts making a list* - Where does it Hurt? by Max Pemberton

As you can probably guess from the title, this is one of those “Medical Professional writes about their job in an amusing fashion” books. I like these kinds of books but they can have difficulty standing out from one another, especially as even the terrific ones (like Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt) can’t manage to avoid the Junior-Doctor-Book Bingo Card. Happily, this one pretty much does.

This time round, Pemberton is attached to the Phoenix Outreach Project, dealing with the homeless, the drug addicted, and the octogenarian former prostitute.

Pemberton is a decent writer who has a nice line in fish-out-of-water humility going on. There’s a good variety of stories, interesting, funny and sad, if never quite as emotionally wrenching as the end of the Kay book mentioned above.

If you like this sort of thing, which I do, it’s well worth sticking Pemberton on your TBR pile - his first is the usual Junior Doctor in a hospital stuff, while his third is about his stint in Geriatrics. This one was great and I really quite enjoyed it.

4 stars

As you do - Round Ireland With a Fridge by Tony Hawks

The late 90’s was responsible for so much: New Labour, Cool Britannia, and the now forgotten non-fiction genre: white-male-comedian-undertakes-wacky-journey-because -they-lost-a-bet-while-trollied-and-writes-a-book-about-it. Dave Gorman (meeting people called Dave Gorman), Pete McCarthy (visiting pubs with his name on), Dave Gorman (meeting people who are singular on Google), Danny Wallace (saying yes to things), Dave Gorman (travelling across America avoiding The Man)... so many wacky, wacky journeys.

Tony Hawks (not to be confused with the pro-skateboarder), having recounted an amusing anecdote to his friends about seeing a man in Ireland attempting to hitchhike with a fridge, accepts a challenge to do the same. If he can get around the coast of the Republic, with a fridge, in a month, he will win the grand sum of £100. Less than the fridge he’s travelling with ends up costing him.

This is a bittersweet one for me. At the time of writing, I’m going to hit the first anniversary moving back to the UK having lived in the Republic since 2003. The Ireland I lived in was very different to Hawks 1996 version. Hawks book takes place in that short space of time when mobile phones were a thing for professional people but the internet hadn’t made the average home (well, not my home, anyway). Post Riverdance, but pre Celtic Tiger and Good Friday Agreement.

A travelogue this is not. This is the story of a wacky journey. While Hawks begins with a degree of engagement, visiting the King of Tory etc, the journey grows increasingly more concerned with recounting Hawks’ stagger from pub to bar to roadside and back again, until it’s just a case of making it back to Dublin. The Cork-Waterford stretch is a couple of hours he spends in a car. His time in Wexford Town (which he insists on referring to as Wexford, annoying me terribly) is mainly about his seduction of a lady.

There’s a lot of that - Tony attempting to chat up ladies and failing - and post #meToo it feels more than a little creeptacular. His continuing lamentations that a particular lady hadn’t called him don’t do much to improve matters.

I listened to the audiobook, read by Hawks himself, and he’s a terrific reader who makes a decent stab at the accents (if not the Irish regional variations), although he’s more occasionally-raise-a-smile funny rather than actual laughter funny. He’s pleasing.

These sorts of books always need to tread carefully with me. They’re so often written from the perspective of this everyman who just happens to be taking this wacky, wacky journey when, in reality, they have the financial backing of a book deal or a comedy tour from the get go. Hawks is open about the support he receives from the (late) Gerry Ryan and his morning radio show, but I suspect there would have been less support if it truly had been your everyman performing the stunt rather than a comedian with a decade strong career. Behind almost every viral internet sensation is a promotional algorithm which has been paid for. I like my wacky journeys with appropriate amounts of disclosure.

So, the first half was pretty good, but the whole thing got more and more repetitive as it went on. Although I find Tony Hawks very easy to listen to, I honestly can’t see myself replaying this or checking out his other work. I can’t recommend it as something funny, or interesting, but his voice is extremely soothing.

2 stars

Not what I wanted, but super readable - A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding by Jackie Copleton

[This book was provided to me free of charge by the publisher Cornerstone, assisted in this awesomeness by NetGalley. I thank them muchly.]

I'm usually leary of books set in countries the author is not from, especially countries like Japan which are so very different from western nations. However, Jackie Copleton's A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding comes with an extremely encouraging pedigree: it was on the Bailey's Prize long-list and Copleton is herself is a graduate of Cambridge and Glasgow, so I had high hopes of this one.

Amaterasu Takahashi survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Her daughter and grandson did not. For almost 40 years she's lived with the guilt of their deaths, until a man with a badly scarred face turns up on her American doorstep bearing a box of secrets. He claims to be Hideo, her grandson, rescued from the ash and debris, then raised by a man Ama would rather forget. To find the truth, she must revisit her memories of days long past, of before the war, and of her belief that everything she ever did was to protect her family.

I didn't care for this book. It's not a bad book, it just didn't offer what I look for. I wanted a book which felt authentic, which told a story I don't know from a perspective completely unfamiliar to me. ADoMU doesn't, not because the author is British, but because it's barely about Nagasaki and its aftermath. Instead its focus is the relationship between Ama and her daughter - Women's Fiction then, which is not always my thing.

Although it opens with this mystery - is the young man at the door truly the grandson Ama believed killed the day the bomb fell? - the question is inconsequential, a jumping off point for Ama's recollections, her diary entries and the papers she is given by the young man. ADoMU covers a lot of ground and consequentially its touches on its subjects are light where I would have preferred a hefty commitment to fewer of them, especially as they were the more interesting (and original) aspects.

If I'd been more caught up in the character, or the writing, I'd feel less short-changed, especially as this book goes down the lazy path so beloved by westerners writing about Japan. I was left very dissatisfied - Ama never feels like an 80-odd year-old Japanese woman.  There was no reflection or sense that she'd become a different person at 80-odd than she'd been on the day the bomb fell. The backdrops - of 30s Japan, of Japan at war - felt shallow, never quite coming alive; at one point the local festival of Shoro-Nagashi is described as being "unlike any other in Japan", but the description makes it sound like a variation of Obon. I want to know how it's different, why it's different, and what Ama thinks about it. When she moves to the US, how does it feel to lose this yearly conversation? What was Shoro-Nagashi like the year after the bomb?

There's also least one aspect felt as though it'd been written with Western attitudes in mind, rather than Japanese. I'm not accusing the book of errors (because I honestly wouldn't know), I was just thrown a bit by the suggestion that 16 is young for a relationship in a country where the legal age of consent is 13 (in certain circumstances). It was one of a few small details which contributed to a lack of immersion.

I think it's important to note there's an ongoing background discussion of white voices telling stories which belong to other cultures. This book left me with an overwhelming desire to read something about the legacy of the nuclear bombs by a Japanese writer but Google is bringing me little: everything I can find in English appears to be by western authors. They must exist, surely, but if they're getting translated I can't find them.

A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding is a good book, it just wasn't what I was looking for. I also hope the Bailey's nomination doesn't put potential readers off; this isn't one of those highbrow "hard" reads, it's an interesting one which must surely be a shoe-in for the Richard and Judy Bookclub. The important thing to note is that, despite my complaints, this is one super-readable book and you could do a lot worse when choosing something to fling in your suitcase this summer.

3.5 stars.