Who would have thought the old-style puzzler mystery is still alive in the days of CSI and serial killers and jaundiced PIs? Freeze Frame by Peter May is just that. The fourth in a destined-for-long-life series featuring Enzo McLeod, a forensic analyst tackling cold cases from the files of a journalist, Freeze Frame is written in the civilized and clear old-fashioned style of Ellery Queen, ribbed with modern sexual frankness. In this outing, Enzo journeys to a small island off the coast of Brittany to tackle the two-decades-old murder of an entomologist. The victim left behind a cryptic message suggesting his still unaltered study contains clues, and when Enzo starts fossicking for clues, laid out like an Agatha Christie puzzler, violence emerges again. The author’s plotting and pace are first rate, and all the characters, major or bit part, leap from the page. If the unravelling of clues has an air of artificiality, well, that’s the nature of puzzler mysteries, and the climax, while not a complete surprise, is suitably startling. I read the entire book in one sitting, as all good puzzlers deserve.
An intriguing, enjoyable read. 3 stars.
Predators opens with a rush: battle-hardened men and women plummeting towards ground, desperately opening parachutes, snatched from separate lives across the globe. The underlying sci-fi concept – of warriors teleported to become the sport on an alien game reserve – is as old (and, I must say, as satisfying) as sci-fi itself. I haven’t seen the other instalments of what has become the ‘predator’ franchise, not even the original Arnie version, so I cannot compare, but this instalment is simultaneously banal and shallow, kinetic and exciting. Scenes of crap characterisation (Adrian Brody is formulaic as the head hero, Laurence Fishburne does a fine cameo, and the other actors are just passable), lame plotting, and ridiculous alien gore alternate with pell-mell action scenes (director Nimród Antal sure knows how to choreograph battles) evocative filming. In short Predators, is almost as bad as, but ultimately better than, the run-of-the-mill sci-fi thriller.
Not outstanding but a rousing refuge from D&M (‘deep and meaningful’). 2½ stars.
Beautiful Malice by debut novelist Rebecca James has arrived with an almighty marketing splash, one alas undeserved. Told in the first person and up close, it’s the tale of Katherine, a seventeen-year-old Sydney girl with a crippling secret, who is thrilled to be befriended by glamorous Alice. As the relationship builds, a dark undercurrent emerges and the plot wiggles about with the introduction of boyfriends and other friends. There is plenty to admire in the setup of Beautiful Malice and Katherine is a likeable if unsubtle protagonist.
But from the outset this novel under delivers. The storyline limps along, with the expected ‘plot twists’ either foreshadowed or diluted. The writing style is simple and naive, which is quite in line with our heroine and could, in the hands of artful author, have worked really well. Instead, the flat prose irked me to the point of frustration. There is little sense of location, much of the tale being told via clunky dialogue or slow-witted inner thoughts. To anyone who regularly reads the mystery genre, the underlying puzzle, the obligatory ‘shock horror twist’ and the climax are all ho-hum.
Perhaps there is a market for Beautiful Malice in what I imagine to be the Barbara Taylor Bradford segment but it won’t offer any competition to the better books of 2010. 1 star.
Edward Rogers is an oddly positioned singer-songwriter of a type only Britain can produce. On Sparkle Lane, his third album, he pens imaginative, well-arranged songs that straddle folk-rock, Kinks-style pop and Bowie-style glam. One minute the listener is channelling Mott the Hoople in the wonderful title track, the next brings rolling modern folk like the pointed ‘Land of the Free’. Rogers’ vocal style varies with the songs, which is interesting in an era when distinctive voices reign. The arrangements are energetic and Rogers’ lyrics, of Costello ilk, are delightful. Additional highlights include the gentle singalong ‘Little Angel’ and the reflective ‘Last of the Artful Dodgers’.
Distinctive, mildly oddball Brit singer-songwriter magic. 3 stars.
What a strange, unlovely book Siberian Education: Family, Honour, and Tattoos: An Extraordinary Underworld Life is. A memoir by Nicolai Lilin of his early and teen years, during the 1980s and 1990s, in a criminal community of displaced Siberians in Transnistria (a lawless semi nation within Moldova). There is much to find fascinating in the earnest depiction of a world possessing a weird moral compass. Violence occurs almost randomly, yet is codified in hatred of police and other gangs. Endless rituals, most of them seemingly nonsensical, prescribe daily life. Guns are revered alongside religious icons. Comradeship between gang members enriches life, yet most of life is fighting and prison. Everyone is brutal and homophobic. Lilin learns to be a tattooist and the most interesting section of the book describes how Siberian tattoos can be read like a book of a person’s life.
All of which suggests an intriguing read, especially for anyone interested in true crime or the nature of evil. Yet Siberian Education fails badly at all levels of narrative craft. It is bookended by two horrific sections describing post-teen life in the Russian army, killing people in Chechnya, a structure that offers no overarching tension. Sections read like shaggy dog stories, endlessly discursive. The only three abiding characters – the author, his simpleton friend and an elderly patriarch – remain cryptic. No moral lessons are learnt or even resisted – the world is described flatly, as if via a long interview. A longish, harrowing section on prison life is particularly difficult to even read. Lilin’s ‘tell it like it is’ prose is boring. Siberian Education ends up as a turgid, unpleasant slog.
Possibly valuable as a record of a bizarre and morally dysfunctional society, Siberian Education offers very little indeed to the general reader. 2 stars.
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.