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It would be quite easy, I think, to describe this novel in a way that sounds like a bad movie pitch: Galileo receives visitors from the future, who take him back (forward!) to their time in an attempt to stave off a threat to humanity itself! All of this is accurate, but makes the book sound gimmicky; it’s to Robinson’s great credit that Galileo’s Dream has far more gravitas than that.

Two narratives combine: one a fictionalised account of Galileo’s life and career (beginning with his work on the telescope), which is here punctuated by visits from a stranger who nudges Galileo’s researches along, and later transports him forward 1,400 years, where humanity has colonised Jupiter’s moons and is debating how best to approach an alien intelligence it has found there. Galileo, the stranger thinks, could help sway the different factions towards his preferred solution – but his motives run even deeper than that.

These two settings mesh together somewhat awkwardly, partly because the future society is depicted rather more vaguely; and partly because of a clash of styles – the 31^st-century sections are generally more novelistic, whilst those set in the 17^th century are typically written more in the manner of a historical biography. That said, all these choices are justified – Gailieo’s visits to the future are episodic in nature (during those times, he appears in Italy to have fainted, so those visits are also dreams of a sort to him); and Galileo’s Dream is framed as a particular kind of text, which accounts for its different modes of telling – and the combination does work well enough to be convincing.

Galileo’s Dream is a long, detailed novel; and some of its passages drag on too long (though it could be that I feel this because I didn’t know all that much about Galileo’s life). But there are also brilliant moments, and some of the best are also among the most dense with information. Robinson brings vividly to life the sheer amount of painstaking work that would have been involved (and that, I’m sure, still is involved) in scientific experimentation; the character traits that could go with it (Galileo is portrayed as well-meaning but difficult to get along with, and as not paying attention to the political landscape, which ultimately proves his undoing); but also the wonder of creating knowledge.

Another aspect of Galileo’s Dream is that (as I read it) Robinson seeks to reflect the novel’s scientific concepts in the narrative itself. So, for example, Galileo learns that changing the past could change the future; and then, each time he visits Rome, he feels that it’s a different place each time, because the political climate keeps changing. For me, the best example of this comes after Galileo is told of the myriad possible time streams that exist and that all pasts, presents and futures are tangled together; in a beautifully written passage, he then returns to his time and wonders what’s the point of doing anything.

I think this last area was where I missed out the most – I sense there’s quite a lot on which I didn’t pick up – and, since it’s so central, that naturally affects how much I took from Galileo’s Dream. I don’t think it’s an entirely successful work, but I am glad to have read it – it was my first Kim Stanley Robinson novel, and I intend to read more.

Read the review in full.

What’s particularly striking about the novel, looking back on it as a whole, is how quiet it is; it’s probably the quietest book I’ve read all year. Its tone is quiet, its theme is quietness – the things that aren’t said, and the possible consequences of not saying them. Wyld’s debut is a character study revolving around two men: one is Frank, who leaves his life in present-day Canberra to live in a remote shack his grandparents owned, and hopes that the past will stay where he left it. The second man is Leon, whom we follow from childhood: his father leaves home to fight in the Korean War, but struggles with life when he returns, so much so that he ends up fleeing. Leon’s mother goes in search of her husband, leaving the young man to cope on his own – and then Leon receives a letter of conscription for Vietnam. Leon, by the way, is Frank’s father.

Typing that last sentence almost feels like a spoiler, though there’s no real reason why it should. It’s not that Wyld is keeping the relationship secret to provide a surprise twist; rather, it’s that the story she tells never demands the connection be stated. The two narratives are kept separate, and there’s a gap between the young Leon and the father we glimpse in Frank’s tale (we can speculate on what drives Leon to become the man he is in the present, but we don’t have the full story). In effect, the central father-son relationship of the novel is hardly in the novel at all – the theme of silence between men (and between generations of men) is reflected at the broadest structural level.

That same theme is also there at the level of plot, as both protagonists have to deal with the consequences of things left unspoken. Frank doesn’t reveal much about himself to the people of his new town, which comes back to bite him before novel’s end; and Leon finds it hard to talk to his father when the latter returns from service – even after so long apart, silence around the dinner table seems more appropriate than facile questions that could never reveal the truth of what Leon’s father witnessed.

There’s silence, too, in the very language of the book. This is a novel in which sensations seem more prominent than actions. Wyld is a great writer of description; here, for example, is Leon after hearing that his father has been caught:

At school things caught at his hair and plucked at the back of his trousers. His pen moved slowly across the page, ink swelled into the paper. He felt himself trapped between the bone and flesh of his face, and he couldn’t move. Everyone else’s hands moved at impossible speed over their work, the noises of the classroom were high-pitched and speeded up, made no sense. He felt his own body, a sluggish weight, pale and thick, a rock with a wooden shell. With effort he stood up…he walked out of the classroom, away from the school, heavy enough that he might sink into the ground and suffocate, or else fall on the pavement and shatter into splinters.

After the Fire is full of such vivid imagery (of place as well as of feeling) that jumps out; but there are also highly significant points which come across as relatively subdued. For example, when we first learn that Frank beat his wife, it’s dropped in casually; one might even have to go back and re-read, just to check that’s what has been revealed. Character hints are dropped in subtly, suggesting that these are things the protagonist don’t know about themselves. Frank doesn’t know why he gets so aggressive, for example; nor does Leon understand what makes him want to photograph a boy he kills in Vietnam – and we don’t comprehend the minds of these characters, either. Though we see the novel through their eyes, there is still much they don’t (or can’t) tell us.

I don’t know whether I’d go so far as to call Frank and Leon antiheroes; but they’re not entirely sympathetic protagonists, either. What we have here, I think, is a portrait of two flawed men trying to cope with life’s challenges the best they can – which isn’t necessarily the best way there could be. After the Fire, a Still Small Voice tells a very real story; and, quiet though it may be, it’s a novel that resounds loudly.

Inside, a tall, pale man stood halfway down the hall, staring into a doorway. Beyond him, a dark room. A worn bed. White sheets dull in the shadow. Didn’t look like anyone had slept there in months. Dusty floor…

‘What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night’ (2009) by Michael Marshall Smith
‘The Safe Children’ (2009) by Tom Fletcher

Nightjar Press is a new venture by the writer Nicholas Royle, specialising in individually-bound short stories. They’ve launched with two titles, one by a well-known writer, the other by a newcomer. These are very handsome volumes they are — and, more importantly, the stories are also very good.

The well-known writer is Michael Marshall Smith, whose name is pretty much a guarantee of a good read, and ‘What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night’ is no exception. It’s narrated by a little girl named Maddy who hates the dark, so (she tells us) made a deal with her mummy that she could keep the light on all night, as long as she didn’t disturb her parents. But tonight, Maddy has woken up in darkness; what’s happened to her light?

The first thing to say about this story is that Smith gets Maddy’s voice pitch-perfect: with all the breathless sentences and repetitive structures, it feels as though this is a small child addressing us. And it’s the naiveté of Maddy’s viewpoint which is key to the success of the story. It becomes clear as the tale progresses that something strange is happening — and, all credit to Smith, it was something I didn’t see coming. But we get some idea of what’s going on, even though Maddy doesn’t; the gap between her knowledge and ours generates great poignancy. It was with something of a wry smile that I closed the book, having read Maddy’s final words: ‘Mummy and Daddy do not talk much any more, and this is why, if you wake up in the night, you should never ever get up out of bed.’ There’s a lot going on behind that sentence which I can’t reveal without spoiling the story — and I’d hate to deprive anyone of the superb reading experience I had with Smith’s tale.

Nightjar’s second launch title is the beautifully harsh ‘The Safe Children’ by a young new writer named Tom Fletcher. Set in western Cumbria, it follows James Thwaite as he travels to his new job as overnight security guard at a factory which makes… well, that’s a secret. The plot leads towards the revelation of the factory’s purposde, which is appropriately nasty — but that revelation isn’t enough, by itself, to make the story stand out.

All of the seats are ripped; all of the tables are black with cigarette burns. Somebody is playing music on some portable device and it sounds like an insect trapped behind glass. The train moves slowly. I just stare out at the sea. Some things haven’t changed at all.

It grew on lattices of minerals, laying its own skeleton and following with cellulose skin. Infrastructure strong and broad, growing and branching, it settled roots deep into the green fertile soil of the Sichuan basin. It drew nutrients and minerals frmo the soil and sun, and the water of the rancid Bing Jiang; sucking at pollutants as willingly as it ate the sunlight which filtered through twining sooty mist.

(‘Pocketful of Dharma’)

Click here to read the review in full.

One day, Claire has a surprise for Luke – she’s bought him a pet dog. This new friend starts to take Daniel’s place in Luke’s life, so much so that Daniel finds his very self disintegrating. In a bid for survival, Daniel tricks Luke into poisoning the dog with some of Claire’s medication. She, of course, doesn’t believe her son when he says that Daniel told him to do it, and takes Luke to see a psychiatrist. Soon after, Luke is able to restrain Daniel, eventually locking him away inside his head, for twelve whole years. But, when Luke is eighteen, Daniel re-emerges – with his own ideas of what Luke should do, who Luke should be.

In This Way I Was Saved is quite a difficult book to evaluate. How do you judge characterisation, for example, when you can’t even trust that the narrator is – well, is, full stop? Well, let’s see: DeLeeuw has created a chilling presence in Daniel, a narrator who’s just that bit too knowing, whose voice is that bit too articulate. Not to mention that his opinions are also pretty vile; Daniel has little patience for humans and their messy emotions: when Luke finds a girl in whose company he can relax and forget his cares, Daniel just takes the view that Luke is being insincere – and the situation Daniel then engineers is not a pleasant one. As a portrait of such a cold individual, the book is a great success.

Yet there’s ambiguity here, too, as it’s possible to read Daniel as being entirely a product of Luke’s delusion. This is a more difficult reading to make, because the narration naturally invites us to view Daniel as a separate entity; and I’m not sure that the novel sustains its ambiguity through to the end. But it’s fascinating to read a scene and see it happening in two different ways simultaneously; DeLeeuw interweaves the possibilities well. The reading of Daniel-as-delusion also deepens the book’s portrait of people and lives unravelling; it’s harrowing for characters and readers alike.

In This Way I Was Saved is not without its flaws. I feel a sense of distance in the progression of the plot – as though it’s happening rather than being made to happen – which I think arises because neither Luke nor Daniel is able to truly drive the story directly. Nevertheless, I am impressed with what DeLeeuw has done in his novel. It’s easy to assume, from the first few pages, that you know who Daniel is and what has happened. I read most of the book thinking, it can’t be that simple – and, happily, it’s not.

No more of that, though, for it’s the road to spoilers. To conclude: In This Way I Was Saved is an intriguing puzzle of a book which takes you into a mind that’s not a comfortable place to visit, but that visit is compelling all the same. Whose mind is it, though? There’s a question to ponder…

Though not a fictionalised account as such, Acts of Violence takes as its inspiration a real-life incident: the murder of Kitty Genovese, to which there were reportedly (the details have been contested), 38 eyewitnesses, none of whom did anything to help. Ryan David Jahn’s forst novel is a portrait of what such a situation might be like.

I use the word ‘portrait’ deliberately there, because I think it’s important to be clear what Acts of Violence is and is not. It’s not about the narrative, not in the usual way; it’s not a question of tension over whether Katrina lives or dies, and no mystery is solved. Rather, this is a snapshot of a few hours in the lives of  a number of people, with Katrina’s attack in the background (sometimes literally) of all.

Good characterisation is of course vital in a novel like this, but it’s even more so when the cast is so large (at least eight viewpoint characters). So it’s a pleasure to report that Jahn proves adept at drawing convincing characters in relatively few words. Here, for example, is Diane Myers, studying her reflection in the window while she ruminates on the passage of time:

Is her ghost happier than she is? Being disembodied but still conscious would have its advantages. Walls and locked doors could no longer stop you. No more back pain or neck aches. No more miscarriages with names.

Or Thomas Marlowe, an ex-soldier with thoughts of suicide:

He pulls the gun away from his head and sets it on the coffee table. He wonders who coffee table coffee table. He gets to his feet and walks into the hallway. He wonders who first called it a hallway. He wonders who first named anything. How did someone look at a dog and decide what to call it? It’s all so random. Everything is so goddam random.

This is not the only way in which Jahn is a skilled wordsmith. He builds tension efficiently when it’s needed; and not the cheap-thrills kind, but a more real tension. And, though naturally there is violence, and Jahn does not flinch from describing it, his treatment is sensitive, bringing home the brutality without tipping over into gratuitousness.

However, there are flaws in Acts of Violence, and I think they arise primarily because the parameters of the novel limit its possibilities. Perhaps inevitably, some of the story threads feel less well developed than others; for example, there’s one concerning a pair of wife-swapping couples where I feel the background could have done with being sketched in a little more.

Another problem is that Katrina’s murder doesn’t really feel like the linchpin of the novel, as it’s presumably intended to. In the case of the paramedic David White, who’s faced with the dilemma of being expected to save a patient he’d happily let die (the teacher who sexually abused him as a child), it’s clear to see how Katrina’s dying on his watch affects him. But, for most of the characters, if there are psychological repercussions from Katrina’s murder, we don’t really see them – the timeframe of the novel is too short for us to see them. This makes Acts of Violence less satisfying as a complete piece.

Yet there is much to like and admire here all the same. Jahn gives a good sense of the milieu beyond his immediate focus. I’m not in a position to know how far his depiction of the 1960s reflects reality; but I can well believe that, for example, an interracial couple would have faced the same prejudice and difficulties that Frank and Erin Riva do in the novel. I would hope that the unspeakably corrupt cop Alan Kees and his Captain are not representative of the police at that time; but I’d also hope that a group of witnesses to an attack wouldn’t stand idly by and let it happen. Perhaps the key question is not whether something is likely, but whether it is possible.

As the book’s title may suggest, Jahn also shows some of the many reasons – malevolent or benign, comprehensible or not – people may have for committing violent acts. I do have a sense that the novel doesn’t leave enough room to truly explore all the issues it raises; but, as a portrait – as a début – Acts of Violence is a fine piece of work.

As Ransom begins, Achilles’ friend and comrade-in-arms Petroclus has been killed by Hector, the son of King Priam of Troy. Achilles takes his revenge on Hector and, attempting to assuage his grief, parades the body repeatedly before the city of Troy. Seeing this display, Priam first interprets it as a sign that the gods are mocking him. But then a vision shows him another way that things could be, and Priam resolves to travel in disguise to Achilles, taking a cart full of treasure with which to ransom Hector’s body.

In his afterword, Malouf comments that ‘[Ransom]’s primary interest is in storytelling itself – why stories are told and why we need to hear them, how stories get changed in the telling’. I’m generally wary of author statements like this, because I prefer the text to speak for itself, and allow me to draw my own conclusions. And I find that the theme of storytelling is not what stands out the most in Ransom; yes, it’s mentioned, but I don’t see that it is really being explored to such an extent (of course, it may well just be that I’m missing out on the interplay between novel and Iliad).

What I take away the most from Ransom is the portrait of a world which is not my own. I haven’t the knowledge to judge how authentic is Malouf’s depiction of ancient times (and it’s a legendary version, anyway), but it’s convincing enough for me. This is a society to which the idea of things happening by chance is an alien concept, where everyone is bound to the stations given them by the gods, even a king: he must be seen to be a king, becoming more ‘object’ than individual – which is why Priam’s plan to disguise himself causes such controversy. It takes some effort to connect with this world that thinks so differently, and so it should – but the reward is a fully immersive tale.

Although Ransom never comes across as pastiche, Malouf’s prose does give it a legendary quality; it feels at one and the same time as if the novel is taking place in the ancient world as it might have been (incidentally, Ransom is an excellent example of how to integrate historical detail without drowning the narrative), and in a timeless ‘land of fable’. It’s a singular reading experience, which is worth a look.

(This review was first published on BookRabbit.com)

And the text itself makes good on that invitation; what strikes me most about The Manual of Detection is the way that Jedediah Berry has woven his fictional world together. The setting is an unnamed city in which a thousand noir stories have taken place, crimes solved by the behatted, cigar-chomping detectives of the Agency, the greatest of whom is Travis T. Sivart. Now Sivart has gone missing, and his clerk, Charles Unwin, has been promoted in his stead. Convinced that this is an error, Unwin goes upstairs to the office of Edward Lamech, Sivart’s ‘watcher’ and the author of the memo apparently granting this promotion — only to find Lamech’s dead body sitting behind the desk. Unwin sets out to find Sivart; and, of course, it all gets more complicated from there…

Berry’s creation is fascinating, and his novel transporting in the truest sense, in that it takes one out of the real world, and into a sideways reality that convinces as a functioning world within the covers of the book, even as one acknowledges that it couldn’t function if it actually existed. The Agency itself is a huge, sprawling organisation whose absurd bureaucracy is a delight to imagine: the different categories of staff are so segregated that there are underclerks in the archive  who don’t even know what a detective is. And consider the thoughts it engenders in Unwin as he makes his way to Lamech’s office:

Imagine the report he would have to write to explain his actions: the addenda and codicils, the footnotes, the footnotes to footnotes. The more Unwin fed that report, the greater would grow its demands, until stacks of paper massed into walls, corridors: a devouring labyrinth with Unwin at its center, spools of exhausted typewriter ribbon piled all around.

(Incidentally — or perhaps not — I think that quotation also demonstrates Berry’s considerable  flair for writing prose.)

The Manual of Detection is set in a world where detectives’ cases get pulpish nicknames like ‘The Oldest Murdered Man’ or ‘The Man Who Stole November Twelfth’, and sound equally outlandish in synopsis; where bizarre things happen, such as Charles Unwin encountering a man who is apparently relaying Unwin’s every move down the telephone, before the following exchange takes place:

“Were you speaking about me just then?” Unwin asked.

The man said into the receiver, “He wants to know if I was speaking about him just then.” He listened and nodded some more, then said to Unwin, “No, I wasn’t speaking about you.”

Yet all has a perfectly rational explanation — rational within the terms of the novel, anyway. There’s less fantastication than that comment might suggest, but a little goes a long way in this case. I’m being deliberately vague about the details, because so much of the joy of reading The Manual of Detection lies in the discovery of what happens. But I will say that the final third takes a different tack as the threads of story come together; and I feel it sits quite awkwardly with the rest (then again, I did struggle to follow the plot a bit at this point, so it could just be that).

Criticisms aside, though, what I’ll take away from The Manual of Detection is the singular experience of reading it, its distinctive feel and atmosphere — and I’ll be mightily intrigued to see what Jedediah Berry does next.

The rest of Ghosts and Lightning is told in first-person, in Denny’s Dublin vernacular. It does feel a little awkward, structurally, that the initial ‘frame’ is never returned to; but this is a minor gripe when set against the way thaat the narration brings Denny to life as a character. More than that, actually, I’d say it comes to symbolise Denny’s situation — unable to leave his old life behind, just as his accent will go with him wherever he goes.

Not that Denny’s going anywhere right now. ‘I’m runnin and gettin nowhere at the same time,’ he says. ‘I remember feelin, when I first left for Wales, that I was in control. And I feel anythin but in control now.’ He’s stuck: no job, no transport of his own, living in his mother’s old house with his sister Paula (who has let the place go to seed), estranged from his brothers (one of whom legally owns the house, and may threaten eviction), friends mixed up in drugs… The list goes on. Ghosts and Lightning is a chronicle of how Denny tries to navigate his way through all this.

If all that sounds like hard going, rest assured it is not. The use of vernacular gives the telling an energy that keeps one reading, and there are some nicely amusing scenes along the way (such as when Denny goes to buy a clapped-out old car from his brother, and it turns out to be full of chickens).

However, Byrne’s novel has a serious heart, and is especially concerned (I feel) with how we may try to deal with tragic events, like the death of a close relative. One of the themes that really stands out for me is that of using stories to give shape to life. In Denny’s rather desperate words: ‘Stories though, man. The way they work on yeh. They’re a kind o spell, aren’t they? Or a prayer, maybe, some o them. An article of faith. How the fuck else can yeh make sense o things, like? [...] There has to be meanin.’

But must there?  Ghosts and Lightning is (deliberately, I think) somewhat episodic in structure, its chapters feeling like a series of anecdotes; and it demonstrates how life’s uneven edges are usually smoothed off to create fiction. One sees this, too, in the way Bryne deploys supernatural and mythical concepts. Denny and other characters frequently refer to such things: most prominently, Paula thinks there’s a ghost haunting the house; but there’s also that last quotation above, and many other examples. Yet none of it turns out to be real, nor does it really feel as though Byrne wants us to entertain the possibility — rather, I see it as another manifestation of stories not working in the real world.

If there are problems with Ghosts and Lightning, I think they’re artefacts of the episodic structure to which I referred above. Maybe the plot is not as tight as one might wish, but that’s probably the point. And the structure sets up a particular rhythm of reading that (for me) lessens the impact of some of the shifts in tone (they become one small jolt among many).

However, these are easily ouwteighed by all the good things about the novel. I haven’t yet elaborated on Byrne’s sharp observation of charatcter. Take, for example, this description of two ‘old women obsessed with the clergy’, who attend a funeral: ‘two pious vultures, their eyes filled with gleeful sorrow.’ Or the comment about Denny’s brother’s wife, who insisted they erect a satellite dish because ’she didn’t want people assumin she hadn’t the money for cable TV.’

Places, too, are strikingly described, with Denny suggesting that Ireland has issues of its own to work through: ‘We’re a shoddy country ourselves too, full o guilt and doubt and hidden nastiness. It’s just that, given a possibly brief period o financial well-bein, we happen to scrub up well.’ Denny and his country might, then, be seen as being in analogous situations. During the course of Ghosts and Lightning, we see the difficulties that both have — and, by novel’s end, that there may be a way forward for both. It’s a realistically optimistic end to a fine first novel.

The central conceit of Finding Emmaus is the existence of ‘Empathy’, a suite of psychic abilities (including, but not limited to, that of experiencing the feelings of others) which have been mistaken over the centuries for mental illness. Two narratives alternate: the first is the life-story of Francis Nettleton, an early settler of Conneticut. Tragedy stalks Frank’s life as he discovers his Empathic abilities; but he resolves as an adult to learn all he can about Empathy, and compile a ‘guidebook’ to the subject (which text he calls The Lodestarre). The second narrative is set in the present day, and follows Katherine Spencer; a parapsychologist friend suggests that her ‘bipolar disorder’ (which hasn’t responded to treatment) may actually be Empathy, and Katherine embarks on a journey in search of Frank Nettleton’s old house, Emmaus – and the lost manuscript of The Lodestarre.

The biggest problem with the novel, I find, is a lack of true involvement at the deeper level of the prose. For example, there’s a scene depicting a powerful sermon – but the preacher’s charisma stays on the page. We hear a lot about what Empathy is, what it involves… but I can’t say that the prose evoked for me a sense of what it feels like. There are other examples, but I think these suffice to illustrate my point: generally speaking, the words don’t do enough to create the affect of what they describe. There are some places where Glasner’s prose does work well – an early passage where Katherine hears an intruder in her house builds tension nicely, for example; and the book’s closing sentences stir the emotions - but they are too much the exception rather than the rule.

Another issue with Finding Emmaus is an awkwardness of structure. The alternation of Frank’s and Katherine’s stories sets up a nice rhythm for the novel; but, after Katherine finds the Lodestarre manuscript, the book changes gear – relationships change, and the issue of mistreatment of those deemed mentally ill (which has been bubbling under throughout) comes strongly to the fore. But all this is done rather too quickly, in a way that seems artificial and draws too much attention to itself, lessening the impact of this section.

The title of the novel doesn’t just refer to Frank’s house; to Katherine, Emmaus represents ‘shelter from the storm’ – a place where she can feel safe as an Empath and perhaps, by book’s end, a bastion against the coming storm… But to continue down that path would be to move beyond the present volume. And there’s the rub because, going back to what I said earlier, the present volume feels too much like the prelude to the main event – which is fine for the next book in the series, but less so for this one. Yes, Finding Emmaus is a beginning; but I wish it were a better whole.

For the past week-and-a-bit, I’ve been at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, my first time going to such an event. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, and the rather tight separation between writers and audience (no real opportunities for interaction apart from Q&As at the end of each session, and signings afterwards) was a little disconcerting at first (I guess that’s the only practical way to run things with so many events and speakers). The Festival was quite celebrity-led (then again, isn’t contemporary publishing the same?); but, generally speaking, they were interesting celebrities, and there was plenty of other stuff going on. All in all, I had a good time, and went to a nicely varied programme of events.

I never had internet access while I was away, otherwise I’d have blogged about the Festival in more detail while I was there. Instead, I present the edited highlights, which are pretty long as it is…

Friday 9th

6.00 pm: My first event, listed in the festival brochure as ‘The Man Booker Winner’, who of course in the end was Hilary Mantel. 

I haven’t traditionally had much luck with Booker titles (of all the nominees, and one winner, that I’ve read, I can only truly say that I liked Animal’s People by Indra Sinha), but I certainly became interested in reading Wolf Hall after hearing Mantel read from it, and speak so enthusiastically.

7.30 pm: Leaving the Town Hall, I realise that I’ve just passed a fellow Huddersfielder, the poet Simon Armitage. He is today’s Guest Director (there’s one for each day of the Festival, who has programmed three events for that particular day).

Saturday 10th

11.30 am: I have the morning free, so I’ve been to look around town. As I’m going into the Town Hall, I think back to seeing Simon Armitage last night, and wonder if I could play a little game of ‘Guest Director bingo’, just to see how many of them I could spot over the ten days. At the precise moment I think this (and I swear I’m not making this up), I reliase that today’s Guest Director, Richard Eyre, has just walked past me. That makes up my mind: the challenge is on!

1.30 pm: Off to the Centaur pavilion (what a great pun) at the racecourse to see Michael Palin. He talks about his career in the 1980s, the period covered by the new volume of his diaries. Much as I like Palin’s work (he’s one of the few writers I’ll be seeing who I’ve actually read), I’m more familiar with his travel programmes than this part of his career, so it’s interesting to hear his behind-the-scenes tales of (mostly) the films he made at that time.

4.00 pm: Marcus Chown, the New Scientist’s cosmology consultant, talks about his latest book, which (says the brochure) ‘looks at what the everyday world tells us about the universe’. The discussion about science is interesting, but I don’t gain much sense of what the book is actually like.

6.30 pm: Readings and discussion from the novelists Diana Evans and Patrick Neate. The latter, I would say, is the better reader; but both books sound interesting, and so my ‘would like to read’ list grows a little longer.

8.45 pm: Quite interesting stuff from John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, the creators of QI. They can’t talk about their new book, because it’s not finished yet; nevertheless, their enthusiasm is infectious.

Sunday 11th

10.00 am: Am I cheating in my game of Guest Director bingo if the only time I see them is when I know I’m going to? Well, it’s my game, with my rules, so I decide that the answer is no. So, here is today’s Guest Director, Sandi Toksvig, interviewing the novelist Kate Mosse. Actually, it’s less of an interview than a chat between friends — and less informative (to me, as someone who has never read Mosse but thought about it) as a result.

12.00 pm: The first of several occasons when I miss out on an event to which I wanted to go. There were no tickets left for Harry Hill; disappointing, but never mind.

4.00 pm: Back to the vast (and full) auditorium of the Centaur, where Mark Lawson is interviewing Mitchell and Webb. I’ve never really watched them, but find them quite funny here; and the talk of how they work as a double act is interesting.

7.30: Time for something different — two hours of dynamic storytelling by the excellent Ben Haggarty. He weaves a wonderful tale that begins with his visting a freak show at a carnival in America, and ends on the moon, where he discovers the truth about his profession. I don’t know how often Haggarty tours, but if he comes anywhere near you, go and see him.

Monday 12th

10.00: A talk by David Elder about an anthology he has put together of writing about Cheltenham. This was one of the events I was less sure about, didn’t know quite what to expect, and ultimately I found it a bit dry. To be fair, I would probably have got more out of it if I were a Cheltonian.

Lunchtime: I’ve been wandering around, trying to find somwhere nice to have lunch, and end up going from one side of town to the other. It’s good for my game of Guest Director bingo, because at one point I pass a group of people which includes today’s Guest Director, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

4.00 pm: A conversation between P.D. James and Ruth Rendell. As with the Toksvig/Mosse event yesterday, these two are good friends; and, though the talk is interesting enough, I once again feel that the writers’ fans will have got more out of it than I did.

8.45 pm: I did want to see Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall now, but the event had sold out. Instead, I’m at the interview of another Channel 4 presenter, Kevin McCloud, who is talking about European architecture and the idea of the ‘Grand Tour’. He’s a marvellously entertaining speaker, even breaking into spontaneous impersonations of Brian Sewell and Prince Charles. I’m not particularly into architecture, but McCloud makes the subject interesting; and he’s not the only person who will do so this week — but that can wait for another instalment…

This is a strange feeling: there are many things about John Tagholm’s second novel that bug me, because they don’t work as well as I wish they did. Yet I stayed with Bad Marriage, and I think there is something about the whole that compensates for the weaknesses of the parts. I embark on this review without being able to articulate what that something is; perhaps by the end I’ll have a better idea.

Three strands of story run through the novel. In the first, Habiba Popals, a young British-born Pashtun woman, carries out an elaborate, Hustle-style theft of a painting from the National Gallery. The second strand deals with the investigation into the theft, spearheaded by DI Colin Tyler and the Gallery’s new head of security, Giacomo Baldini. The third explores Habiba’s past, notably her strained relationship with her late father, and the ramifications of the event that changed everything – the time when, four years previously, Habiba was assaulted by Sean Dunmore, a security guard at the National Gallery.

My first points of contention are certain aspects of the plot. I never really bought into the idea of Habiba single-handedly pulling off this elaborate con; I’m not sure whether anyone could do it without specific skills or experience, and I don’t see anything in Habiba’s background to suggest that she has such attributes. Neither was I convinced by the way that Baldini effectively takes over the investigation when he works with the police: I don’t know whether or not museum security staff have investigatory powers, but it just didn’t ring true for me.

Another problem I have with the investigation is that it doesn’t seem to uncover anything that has not already been revealed in the other plot strands, leading me to wonder whether it has any greater purpose that bringing Baldini into the story. Yet, despite all this, the way the three plot strands intertwine is like a dance; and, even if you can see what’s coming at times (and you can’t always), the experience of watching events unfold is an enjoyable one.

Tagholm’s characterisation is uneven, but can be quite effective nevertheless. The character whom I found to be most fully realised was actually Dunmore, a violent racist and misogynist with no redeeming features whatsoever; Tagholm portrays this character’s inner life vividly, and it is deeply unsettling to be inside Dunmore’s mind for any length of time. I find the author’s characterisation of Habiba to be less accomplished, however: we see her clash with her father and his more conservative outlook on life; we see her try to come to terms with her assault (the attack itself is never depicted); and we see her feelings of vulnerability harden into determined resolve – but I don’t think Tagholm succeeds in making us feel these at the same level as he does with Dunmore’s mentality. And I’m even less sure about Baldini’s character; I can’t shake the feeling that he’s just there as a device for moving the story on.

The prose of Bad Marriage is rough around the edges: I was particularly irritated by Tagholm’s occasional switching between viewpoint characters within the same scene (for example: we’re with Habiba when Dunmore first approaches her, then suddenly we have a couple of paragraphs of him leering, then we’re back to see through her eyes again), and the excessively rigid way he refers to some characters by their full names (for instance: there’s a scene of several pages where the author refers to Colin Tyler as either that or ‘the DI’, but not as ‘Tyler’ or anything else; this technique draws too much attention to the names, disrupting the flow of the writing). Yet, at the same time, the writing of Dunmore’s viewpoint works well, as I’ve already said; the passages which are there to thrill do exactly that; and I especially liked Tagholm’s evocation of the bustling National Gallery, with visitors who might be looking at the pictures, might be paying more attention to the audio tour, or might just be there because it’s a place to go.

The novel’s title refers to the concept of a marriage arranged in negative circumstances, something that happened twice in Habiba’s family history (including the marriage of her parents). There’s a suggestion that Dunmore’s assault on Habiba was itself a kind of ‘bad marriage’; and, by extension, a suggestion that Habiba’s response to the assault is also a way for her to work through her unfinished relationship with her father – or so I think.  If I’m right in identifying that connection, though, I don’t think it’s made as strongly as it ought to have been.

I’ve dwelt quite a lot on the negative in this review, but have I come any closer to pinning down the elusive quality I referred to at the beginning? Actually, I think it’s what I said about the plot threads coming together like a dance. Bad Marriage may not reach the heights to which it aspires; but it does what it does fully enough to maintain one’s interest to the very end.