Book Review: Here Be Dragons by Stella Gibbons

Since first reading Westwood in 2011 (review here) I've been slowly reading the Gibbons novels I can get my hands on, savouring them in the way that I savour Frances Brody's Kate Shackleton mysteries. Both authors have the knack of distracting me from the real world and making me smile - albeit for different reasons. So when I added Here Be Dragons to my 'Women' challenge reading list this year it was inevitable that it would be one I'd make sure I read.

The novel tells the story of Nell Sely, a young woman who moves to Hampstead from Dorset following her father's lost of faith and resignation from his parish. Nell and her parents end up living in a house owned by her father's sister Lady Fairfax, a television personality, and she becomes entwined with her bohemian cousin John and his crowd. Nell's also aware she needs to start earning money to support her family and initially starts work as a secretary. However, she soon decides she'd rather be a waitress and finds she's rather good at it.

Here Be Dragons works, like other Gibbons novels, as a study of London life during the 1950s. Hampstead springs to life once more with vivid detail, particularly with the suggestions of urban change peppered throughout. One of the most interesting characters in that respect is the aristocratic Miss Lister who lives in a cottage at the bottom of Nell's garden and has an unexpected role to play in the plot.

The infatuation Nell has for John isn't something that I completely understand, due to him being a horrible character, but the act of infatuation is something infinitely relatable and it permeates the novel in various guises. Gibbons's representation of another troubled relationship in the form of Benedict and Gardis is interesting, demonstrating further the breaking down of barriers in the post-war world. However, for me the most intuitive aspects of the book came in the descriptions of the loss of Martin Sely's faith, which he cautiously comes to terms with during the novel and fashions a faith of his own. The exploration of his thoughts is one of the things that has lingered with me, along with the depictions of Hampstead and the depiction of some very unsettling relationships.

Here Be Dragons meanders a bit at times, with some characters feeling superfluous but generally making a point, and won't be to everyone's tastes but I thoroughly enjoyed it. My delight in reading a Gibbons novel apparently hasn't diminished.

This book was read as part of the 'Women' reading challenge, details here.

Book Review: The Telling Error by Sophie Hannah

This latest psychological thriller by Sophie Hannah deals with the murder of hated journalist Damon Blundy who has fashioned a career out of offending people. He's been tied up and killed with a knife - but there are no stab wounds - and 'HE IS NO LESS DEAD' is scrawled on the wall. It's a confusing case for the police, especially when so many people had a reason to want rid of Blundy. What does Nicki Clements have to do with the murder and why does she panic and do a U-turn to escape being stopped by the police at the scene? And what does her internet dating have to do with anything?

Sophie Hannah's books nearly always wrong foot me and this was no exception. There are so many strands, so many fascinatingly horrible characters, that I was rather disappointed I didn't get to learn more about them at the end of the novel. Human relationships are the core of psychological thrillers and The Telling Error certainly gives us copious representations of bad ones. For instance, the relationship Nicki has with her parents, brother and sister-in-law was something I found very interesting. Equally, two of the marriages at the heart of the book are quite creepy, though I won't spoil it by giving any details.

I did enjoy this book but it left me uneasy - I suppose that's the mark of a good one. The world of internet relationships and internet hate springs to life and gets very tangled. I also had to sit for a few minutes after finishing it to recount everything in my head and re-evaluate the novel from the new perspectives that been introduced in the final pages.

On the police side of things, DC Simon Waterhouse is as difficult as ever but the real 'mystery' this time is what's going on with his sister-in-law and colleague's affair. That's something I'll look forward to understanding in the next book hopefully. Oh, and I have to thank Hannah for making me laugh out loud with some of DI Proust's lines. I can never get enough of him and he lightened the book at some very opportune moments.

Book Review: Tell It To The Bees by Fiona Shaw

Tell It To The Bees is one of those novels you have to rush through because if you don't you'll have to put it down and that would be terrible. I picked it up for a little enjoyable reading before bed and had polished it off after five hours, barely moving for the duration and not even contemplating sleep.

On a basic level it is the story of Charlie Weekes who struggles through the break-up of his parents marriage and then the consequences of his mother's subsequent relationship with another woman. When you consider the novel's set in the 1950s that dimension of it suddenly becomes much more important and intriguing.

All too often a child's point of view (even with the distance of third-person) feels either too advanced for their age or much too childish. It's a great skill to speak as a ten year-old boy and have very few, if any, sticky moments. Charlie doesn't understand everything that goes on around him but nor is he a dim child waiting for instruction. His strange relationship with the bees of the title demonstrate his individuality but also that he craves that fundamental thing in life: a happy family.

Relationships are integral to this novel. Apart from Charlie's relationship with his devoted mother, Lydia, and uninterested and adulterous father, Robert, there is Lydia's growing attraction to the doctor, Jean Markham, and Lydia's difficult relationships with both her own family and her husband's. Each one is delicately painted but Shaw never shies away from enhancing detail. The love between Lydia and Jean is shown physically, as it should be considering the level of heterosexual description in there.

This book manages to show adult events through the eyes of a child quite vividly, though the novel is not completely from Charlie's point of view. Indeed, it is very much a shared novel and if Charlie's considered the main character then Lydia must run a very close second. All in all, this is a story about love and understanding. It may be a universal theme but Shaw brings fresh eyes to it.

This is definitely a book I'll be rereading as soon as possible.

Four Tips To Avoid Bad Writing

This weekend I read (and, miraculously, finished) a very bad book. I won't annoy the author by revealing the title but suffice to say it's not someone I'm going to be hurrying back to.

I persevered because I was determined to get to the end. It's easy to think that I wasted several hours of my life but I learned a few things along the way - how not to write, if you will.

1. Don't overuse the adjectives. The number of unnecessary words in this book, obviously just there to fill space, was perplexing. As amateur writers we're told (not advised, told) to cut these out as if they were infectious diseases. It puzzles me how so many survived into the final draft of this manuscript.

2. Don't swear for the fun of it. If I did a Ctrl+F on this manuscript I dread to think how many times the word 'bitch' would show up. I'm not an innocent babe by any stretch of the imagination but the simple fact is that a word loses significance after repetition. If that's the effect the author was going for then fair play to them but I'm not sure it was.

3. Don't have a twist visible from the off. Now this one could be my own foresight or, again, it could've been a deliberate ploy on the part of the author. Perhaps if we saw it coming and then were wrong-footed only to be right in the first place we wouldn't feel cheated? I don't know, but I wasn't keen on spotting from the very first chapter what the twist was three chapters from the end. Keep your reader guessing is my view. Yes, keep the story rooted in whatever reality you've created but don't bore them with inevitabilities.

4. Don't make your reader invest in a relationship that's going nowhere. Again, this one could've been my own fault. The book was part of a series which had established a strong relationship between two people. However, this particular novel introduced a third dimension, a woman a lot more interesting and absorbing than the dutiful wife. Long-term readers might've been happy to see the affair fail but the fact that so much energy was given over to it (while only an epilogue explained the reconciliation of the main couple) felt very out of place. I would suggest that if a relationship must fail please demonstrate it in more than the epilogue.

Good points about this book? The setting was particularly evocative, some of the minor characters are cleverly sketched with just enough detail, and the climax involves both emotion and action. Those points make it bearable.

However, I do get the feeling that I learned more about how not to write a novel from this author. That does irritate me but I guess we've all read a book like that at some point in the last two years!