Tunng is a subtle mix of folky music allied to complex arrangements of imaginative, insistent drumming and brilliant keyboards. Their previous album Good Arrows was whimsical and pleasurable; And then We Saw Land is a step forward, adding to the mix passionate, anthemic moments that seize the listener. Both of the band’s singers, Mike Lindsay and Becky Jacobs, offer the same soft Brit-folk voicings, but both evoke the lyrical words wonderfully. At first it sounds like something you heard around a campfire; only upon extended listening does it become clear that And then We Saw Land is very much a careful studio orchestration, one of brilliance. Several tracks are corkers: ‘Don’t Look Down or Back’, with its elegiac beginnings slowing down into a near stop then bursting into dramatic chorus; bouncy ‘Hustle’; the twangy, odd ‘The Roadside’; and the crunchy blippy syncopation of ‘Sashimi’.
And then We Saw Land is intelligent folk-oriented music with a post-rock slant. 3½ stars.
So this is it, the conclusion (for author Stieg Larsson can write no more) to the Millennium thriller trilogy that has enlisted slavering fans since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. At close to 600 pages pages, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is as meaty as the first two books. Once more it features Lisbeth Salander, the young super-hacker goth with a horrific past of abusing men, who received a bullet into the head at the end of the previous volume, and Mikael Blomkvist the flinty, personable investigative reporter. This time their goal is to keep Salander free from the clutches of the Swedish secret service.
As with the first two books, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest puzzles veteran thriller readers like me. I have no doubt that if an extravagantly wordy tale like this, with a plot so labyrinthine that I know people who draw massive wall charts to follow it, were to be submitted by a wannabe novelist to an American publishing house, it would be thrown out with the comment ‘cut, cut, cut’. After a skilfully orchestrated beginning, Larsson clogs the huge middle section with an endless array of minor characters, many of them barely sketched for the reader, interacting in complicated ways. Unlike the many Millennium fans I know, I found this section, like the middle of The Girl Who Played with Fire, maddeningly repetitive to the point of tedium. Fortunately Larsson’s fetish for descriptive details helps bind this section together. And then the final third kicks into gear, with Salander and Blomkvist at stage centre, and suddenly I could not put the doorstopper down. A pivotal courtroom scene is as good as any I have read in years. Larsson’s refusal to sentimentalise Salander’s moments of triumph after so long is a towering triumph.
I finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest understanding why fans love the series, and if you’re one such, no doubt you already have this volume. I still find myself wondering whether a talented editor might have pared the mid-book bloat and transformed a compulsive, readable thriller into a genre masterpiece. 3 stars.
Electronica and I have had a love/hate relationship, tilted more towards the latter, ever since I saw Tangerine Dream in concert in the 70s. I shun the vapidity of club music and therefore rarely buy electronic artists, but every few months I’m drawn to try my luck once more. I was told Radiohead cited Four Tet – the bank moniker of Kieran Hebden – as an influence, and I’d listened to an older release, so the rave reviews for this artist’s seventh album unlocked my wallet.
There Is Love in You is tinkly, syncopated, almost ambient music that could be found in a club lounge but is also more interesting than that. Like my heroes Tangerine Dream and Can, Four Tet builds up slowly varying tapestries of rhythm and melody. Tracks that I keep playing while working include the loping, eclectic drum-anchored ‘This Unfolds’; ‘Circling’, which does just that with a simple piano melody; ‘Plastic People’ which layers lovely snippets over a pleasing beat and quiet melody; and the treated female vocals holding up ‘Angel Echoes’.
Imaginative and sonically lovely. 3 stars.
Still Alice by debut American novelist Lisa Genova peers into the downward spiral of Alice, a Harvard psychology professor at the top of her profession, in the grip of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Few diseases frighten us more, for it has no cure and the inevitable creeping decline treats victim and loved ones with equal cruelty. Sticking to Alice’s perspective, the author begins with a telling example of forgetfulness and then artfully chronicles the slide and its impact on Alice’s boisterous, upper middle class family. Genova is particularly adept with the tricky parts at the end, by which time Alice recognizes no one. All the characters are alive on the page, so I was surprised by how little emotion the story aroused in me, yet I welcomed the eschewing of sentimentality.
For a story with a known dire end, the amazing aspect of Still Alice is that it never turns downbeat, never despairs. Alice’s spirit flails but remains strong, and this reader gained existential insight into one of the many paths towards our common end: death.
A skillful, compassionate novel. 3 stars.
Punk was the shout, the sneer (Johnny Rotten!), the rattling beat, the chorus. Punk is still all of those aspects, but I left it behind after a 70s love affair. Rarely does modern punk call to me, and if it does, the key has to be the melodic content. Melodic choruses drew me to the Soft Pack’s self-titled debut. Four blokes from California, their songs snap and kick, the lyrics cry rebel, and singer Matt Lamkin’s voice captures punk’s heyday. I wish they hadn’t needed to follow Green Day and include obligatory ballads but even these are listenable. Big tracks include the call-to-action, riffy ‘C’mon’; the fierce, chugging ‘Pull Out’; and the propulsive, soaring ‘Answer to Yourself’.
Modern, basic punk. 3 stars.
New Yorker Tim, a wealthy law firm partner, walks. Rather, his legs walk uncontrollably, sending Tim away from his work and his wife and daughter, walking nonstop until he collapses into narcoleptic sleep. Intelligent, proud, tough, he joins battle with his unheard-of affliction.
The Unnamed, by sophomore novelist Joshua Ferris, is Tim’s weird, undulating tale. Ferris is a fearsome talent, constantly surprising the reader with plot twists and startling, fresh scenes. Although the walking compulsion seems inexorable, the inner battle between it and Tim’s mind or soul or whatever you want to call it builds into an epic. Ferris captures perfectly the terrible toll exacted upon Tim’s wife and child. What elevates The Unnamed from a good book idea plus skilful execution is Ferris’s superb, poetic style. Standing slightly aside from his characters, he paints modern America in brilliant, fierce prose.
The passage of the walker of course illuminates the landscape. In this luminous, uncomfortable novel we see the modern industrial world in all its glory and sickness. Somehow I found myself reminded of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, somehow the world I lived in seemed apocalyptic, as if diseased and stark.
A standout novel in 2010, a reminder of why we read. 4 stars.
Out of the last financial boom, in the wake of the GFC, come the novelists’ judgements. Often novelists can penetrate deeper than the analysts and historians. Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic is a coruscating dig into the ascendancy of a fictional American bank of that name, told through the eyes of four intersecting characters: an emotionally void ex-GI running the bank, who builds a McMansion in an enclave of the inherited rich; a spirited, askew spinster teacher who challenges the banker’s construction; her brother, chairman of the Federal Reserve; and a callow teenager literally caught in the middle of the battle.
Haslett propels the narrative of Union Atlantic without an ounce of padding, piling on scene after magnificent scene set in downtown Boston or semi-rural Massachusetts. Each of the characters vibrates with life; the author accords each an equal seriousness and moral weight. The nuanced yet muscular style is one of the most compelling I’ve read this year. And somehow Ferris crowds into this regular-sized volume a panoply of modern thematic touchstones: the GFC, invasion of Iraq, the collapse under fraud of Barings and the Bush years.
America of the noughties under the novelistic microscope of a bold stylist. 4 stars.
Eric Maisel is a humble, brilliant writer on creativity, a guru (though he would argue against the very term) to the stumblers like me. Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions breaks no new ground but instead takes Maisel’s notions of ‘making meaning’ and living through creativity to prod us towards obsession. Not the destructive obsessions endlessly named and chronicled in memoirs but what he calls ‘productive obsessions’. By giving ourselves permission to drop everything for real work, rather than everyday nothingness, by then igniting a fire underneath us to obsess over a big goal, we achieve and we light up our lives. As always, Maisel’s writing is supple and melodic, and the message set out in accessible chapters is fully practical. Quotations from an Internet ‘obsession group’ run by the author add real-life examples. Fascinating sidebar historical examples, presumably sourced by co-author Ann Maisel, illustrate how weird and wonderful, and how inspiring, obsessions can be.
Brainstorm is a solid addition to Eric Maisel’s lifesaving body of work. 3 stars.
Anna Quindlen’s best novels, such as Black and Blue, burrow into violence and death. A writer who immerses her readers, she weaves a tapestry of characters into richly imagined lives and then . . . crunch, the horror of it all. So it is with Every Last One. Deftly Quindlen shoves the reader into the pell-mell world of Mary Beth Latham, a very modern upper middle class American mom: a job as a landscape designer; husband Glen, a busy ophthalmologist; forthright, rebellious seventeen-year-old daughter Ruby; younger, sporty achiever son Alex; and his moody, geeky twin brother Max. In the Ann Tyler mode of copious, vividly revealed detail, but with even more verve, Quindlen invites us into this bustling family and sets us up for tragedy, one transplanted intact from the lurid American tabloids. The terrible event seems to be withheld forever, so when it arrives it bludgeons. And then the real work of the novelist unfurls, portraying with insight Mary Beth’s existential struggles with the aftermath, a struggle made more poignant because she has a narrow view of the world.
Quindlen is a flawless stylist and Every Last One is an adrenaline rush of a read. No easy answers are rolled out, not one sappy cliche is employed. I’ll remember Mary Beth for a long time. 3½ stars.
Most forays by actors into music are not worth listening to, but the first album from She & Him – actress Zooey Deschanel teamed up with beguiling singer-songwriter M. Ward – was spirited and atmospheric. She & Him are back with Volume Two, with eleven original Deschanel songs and two covers. The sophomore release is as fresh and listenable as the debut. Deschanel’s voice is waifish candy in 60s style and the songs echo that ambience – throwaway but like a cool breeze. M. Ward adds clever arrangements and rootsy guitar and is a splendid backup vocalist. Highlights of Volume Two include the Nancy-Sinatra-like bubbly pop of ‘In the Sun’; the plaintive ‘Thieves’; and the bouncy ‘Over It Over Again’.
Perfect for a road trip with the windows open. 2½ stars.