This is my review of Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman.

I avoided this novel for a while, fearing it might be exploitative of the recent Damilola Taylor tragedy, another example of truth being more searing than fiction. I have now read it for a book group, with an eye to deciding where I stand on the controversy over its shortlisting for the Man Booker.

As far as I can tell, Stephen Kelman makes a good job of getting into the mind of Harrison Opoku an inquisitive, impressionable, well-intentioned but vulnerable eleven-year-old boy uprooted from Ghana and thrown into the life of a tough inner London suburb, complete with grafittied tower blocks, menacing teenage street gangs and comprehensives ineffectual in the face of dysfunctional youth culture.

Harrison is both shocked and fascinated by the police crime scene marking the fatal stabbing of a boy at his school. As clues about the identity of the killer begin to emerge, Harrison naively sets about playing the part of a juvenile detective, unaware of the fact that many people already know or suspect who the attacker is, but are too scared to say anything.

Harrison's take on the world is by turns both very funny and poignant. I enjoyed his sparky exchanges with his sister. His frequent forgivable misreadings of situations alternate with some astute observations of the grim urban world which is "the norm" for too many children. An innocent "clean slate", he is singing hymns in church one minute, hanging out with an alcoholic thief and longing to own his dangerous dog "Asbo" the next, never seeing the incongruity of this. As teenage gang members bully and goad him to prove himself prepared to break the law, we fear he will be sucked into their sick world of knives, guns and gratuitous violence, but a basic decency always seems to return him to a better path – we even see him maturing a little from his experiences as the book builds to a possibly unexpected but on reflection inevitable conclusion.

Like some other readers, I was quite irritated by the occasional but increasingly frequent appearance of the philosophising italics-using pigeon who seems invested with some kind of all-knowing spirit. The little pictures of signs, and double page spread of T-shirt slogans are a little too gimmicky.

A more serious reservation is that I am unsure how authentically Ghanaian Harrison's language is, and I agree that many of the other characters are caricatures, and there could have been more backstory about Harri's family, which could have been skilfully implied in his account of various scenes.

I do not mind that the story proceeds in a series of disjointed episodes, since overall they carry the story forward to a finale which leaves a few loose ends on which readers are left to speculate.

This often feels like a book for teenagers rather than adults. It would make a powerful tool for raising awareness through class discussion, although the frequent swearing would probably get it banned for this purpose. However, I am not convinced it has the quality of prose, or originality to deserve a Booker-type award.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Absolution by Patrick Flanery.

Set in post-apartheid South Africa, "Absolution" focuses on the celebrated but prickly novelist Clare Wald, who has permitted the little-known young Sam Leroux to interview her for a biography on the thin basis that "I've read your articles and don't think you're an imbecile".

Flanery succeeds in building up a sense of suspense and secrets to be revealed. Born to a liberal family, how did Clare manage to stay in South Africa and continue to write without falling foul of the authorities? For what sins does she crave absolution? She is clearly haunted both by the death of her sister Nora and the disappearance of her daughter Laura, for whose terrorist leanings she feels in some ways responsible. Does she recognise Sam, and what is his role in her past? What is Sam's ulterior motive in seeking her out? Why do these two find it hard to ask each other the questions which they need answered?

The story unfolds against a background of disappointing yet perhaps inevitable ongoing corruption and violence, with a vivid portrayal of the insecurity felt by whites in modern South Africa combined with a residual excessive privilege, the continual fear of robbery and elaborate security precautions which make them virtual prisoners in their luxurious homes.

The core of the book is an examination of the difficulty of knowing the truth about events, on both a personal and a political level, despite the work of the "Truth and Reconciliation Committee". This is due to people's differing perceptions of the same event, the gaps in memory caused by trauma, the desire to cover one's tracks, or to spare the feelings of others.

What other reviewers have seen as deep and impressive complexity appears to me to be unnecessary convolution. The use of four main parallel plot strands, combined with the device of describing the same event in different ways, makes for confusion at times. There is too much repetition of certain thoughts and memories, whilst details of some key events are left vague – perhaps this is intentional. Ironically, after leaving so much open to interpretation for so many pages, the end seems to spell out too prescriptively what the reader is supposed to think.

The important political and moral discussions between Clare and Sam often seem too wordy, earnest and stilted. I grew tired of Clare's endless tortured dreams and visitations from ghosts. Overall, there seems to be too much reporting or recalling of events, not enough acted out as scenes.

I agree with the reviewer who felt that this first novel has been written with literary awards in mind. The result is a little uneven with some striking, if studied, descriptions alternating with passages which seem slipshod and in need of further editing. I also agree that some of the philosophising about the nature of truth at the end is a little lame.

To conclude on a positive note, for an American to absorb and convey a sense of South Africa, the scenery, vegetation, lifestyle and atmosphere, seems quite an achievement.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of The Weekend by Prof Bernhard Schlink.

Christiane collects her brother Jorg from gaol where he has served more than twenty years for Baader-Meinhof-style terrorism in Germany. She takes him straight to a week-end in a rundown country mansion with an assortment of old friends. This seems such a bad idea as to be highly implausible, but it is of course a device to enable the author, a lawyer by profession, to explore all the moral arguments associated with terrorism designed to overthrow a corrupt capitalist system and related questions of guilt, how our views and the situations themselves change over time.

In what I found the most interesting chapters (35 and 36), group members discuss to what extent "the truth makes you free" or rather that "freedom makes things true" which means "there are as many truths as people freely living their lives" – but also the "life lies" which people need to be able to keep on living. I wondered if the theme would have worked better as a play, but this would have made it harder to show the characters' thoughts.

Schlink introduces quite a large cast of characters, so that I understand why another reviewer felt the need to note them down: Ulrich, who abandoned his youthful radical leanings to become a respectable and law-abiding dentist, Henner who came from a similar privileged background and flirted with revolutionary ideas before taking up journalism, Karin the female bishop who conceals from her husband the fact that she had an abortion in her "wild" youth and rather enjoys playing the part of a respected member of the community, and so on.

Although I found the ideas and plot potentially very interesting, I nearly gave up on the book at several points because of the clumsy style of writing which may have been due to the translation. Many conversations seem very artificial, a crude vehicle for presenting ideas. Likewise many of the recollections are a heavy-handed way of filling the reader in on past events. Some potentially dramatic scenes go off kilter, such as Ulrich's unbelievably crass interrogation of Jorg at dinner on the lines of, "What about your first murder?" A young girl's attempt to seduce Jorg (Chapter 8) is another example of a confusing and poorly written scene. Some of the descriptions are very clunky e.g. "The residents of the village who have work don't have it here".

Schlink seems to be producing novels fairly frequently, but I wonder if he should take a little more time to hone his work in order to do justice to his deep concern with issues of guilt and morality in modern Germany, now extended to broader post 9/11 global conflicts.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of The Soul Of Kindness (Virago Modern Classics) by Elizabeth Taylor.

Beautiful, indulged, emotionally immature with a childlike reluctance to face up to the grimmer realities of life, Flora does not prove for me to be the manipulative monster implied in the publisher's blurb, but her good intentions certainly cause other people grief, if not exactly leading to hell.

Each chapter in this well-crafted novel reads like a short story in its own right, providing sharply observed descriptions of the characters, their thoughts and relationships and the socially conventional, class-conscious, uptight world of Britain around 1960. Everyone except Flora knows a man is gay, but cannot discuss it. If a man has a drink with a lonely female neighbour it should be concealed as evidence of an affair.

The book is perhaps more interesting now than when it was written because it captures a lost world of dense London fogs, middle class women who do not work once married, and have live-in housekeepers in the basement, a safe, dull society on the brink of being shaken by the Swinging Sixties, fast food, pop culture, media manipulation and rampant commercialisation. Yet, some things have not changed, like the tatty sights and smells round an underground station, or a typical English seafront.

Perhaps Elizabeth Taylor is no longer widely read and known since her largely middle class characters seem rather snobbish and dated, there is no overt sex and violence and the drama is subtle and understated with a focus on the ordinary events of daily life. However, the power of her deceptively simple prose is very striking – a satirical Barbara Pym meets Dorothy Parker, by turns funny and moving.

She is also brilliant at creating in a few words a sense of place and nature and how they affect people's moods: starlings tearing up crocuses, gardens in the rain, the sadness of caged animals at the zoo.

It is intriguing to know that the intensely private Taylor may have been a person of hidden passions – respectably married to a businessman, her life said to be too uneventful to induce a friend to write her biography, she had communist sympathies, was a labour supporter and possibly intimate letters to a male friend were destroyed after her death.

I hope to read more of her work, but savour each novel as a model of how to write.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars