This is my review of And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini.

On the eve of a fateful journey, impoverished villager Baba Ayub tells his children the story of the “div”, the demonic giant of Afghan folklore who requires a father to hand over one of his children: the man is understandably traumatised until he grasps that as a consequence his boy has gained a much better existence. In succeeding chapters, the “life” of the novel imitates the “art” of the folktale.

This novel is like a series of short stories spanning six decades from 1952, located in Afghanistan, France, the United States and Greece, switching between the viewpoints of a succession of sometimes tenuously related characters: Afghans driven from their land, those who have prospered from the war, expatriates who fallen in love with the country. Although it is often interesting to see different perspectives on the same events, the digressive approach, large number of characters and extraneous detail tend to weaken the power of the narrative drive. There are many poignant moments, but I often felt that the author is telling me what to think rather than letting me analyse people’s behaviour and feelings for myself. The “voices” used are often too much those of an educated, middle-aged man – the author – rather than the characters in question: the chauffeur-factotum Nabi and Gholam the dispossessed teenager brought up in a refugee camp, are cases in point. As a qualified doctor, Hosseini may be less disturbed by maladies than the average reader, but the high incidence of illness and premature death amongst the characters, not least those in more privileged positions, is unduly depressing, miseries laden upon the misfortunes of Afghanistan. The unrelenting blows which strike even the most fortunate are offset by passages of extreme sentimentality which grated on me.

After the huge success of his first novel “The Kite Runner” and the searing account of the plight of Afghan women in “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, Khaled Hosseini’s third novel “And the Mountains Echoed” cannot fail to be a bestseller, but I found it somewhat disappointing. With his role to promote humanitarian assistance for Afghanistan, the author is well-placed to record interviews with a wide range of real people with various types of involvement in this war-torn land, and I would have found an account of these more rewarding than this rambling and sometimes mawkish novel, although it is clearly to many readers taste in various cultures.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota.

Randeep, Avtar and Tochi are all economic migrants from India, crammed with others into a small terraced house in Sheffield where they work illegally on a building site, paid far below the minimum wage by an unscrupulous gang-master. It took a while for the author to establish their backstories, but eventually I became engrossed in their individual lives, and the different chains of misfortune which led them to obtain falsely or infringe the terms of their visas.

This is a fascinating insight into Indian culture: the continued level of violent prejudice against untouchables like Tochi, even amongst British Indians; the lack of a social security system in India to support Randeep’s upper caste family when his father falls ill, aggravated by his mother’s view that it is socially beneath her to work; the complex network amongst British Indians in which illegal migrants are both exploited and assisted, not least the gurdwara or places of Sikh worship where desperate followers of the faith can often get temporary bed and food. Randeep’s British “visa bride” Narinder also makes us think about the role of women in segregated communities who are repressed by fathers and brothers, denied the chance to gain any qualifications or the right to work, for whom breaking free means bringing shame on parents they may love too much to hurt.

Despite being a powerful and gripping story, strengthened by what seems to be authentic knowledge, it is weakened by a clunky structure and often incongruous style. There are almost too many characters to grasp, although you could say this gives a Dickensian touch, too much mundane or minute detail which saps the narrative drive, although this may also help one to visualise the scene, except, of course, where there are too many distracting Hindi (?)/Sikh terms making the confused and irritated reader long for a glossary.

My main problem is with the frequent odd turns of phrase: “earplugs emerged from her neckline to noodle about her chest”, “the writing desk too narrow for the three large oval doilies it was dressed in”, the urban stretch of rivers with “just the odd fishermen thickly hidden”, “she repaired to the outside toilets” (archaic in context). I cannot decide whether the approach is a daring attempt at poetical language which sometimes works as in “the sunlight squandered itself across the world”, or the errors of someone for whom English is a second language. I agree with other reviewers who have called for sharper editing, excising the indulgent wordiness and digressions, but since I have often complained about the formulaic effect of creative writing classes, perhaps this apparently spontaneous torrent of page-turning, thought-provoking flawed talent comes as a breath of fresh air.

The final Chapter 14 ends abruptly, leaving questions unanswered as to exactly how the main characters arrive at the “almost happy ending " of the i-dotting epilogue, a bland anticlimax after the unrelenting blows of the main text, although bitter ironies still lie just below the surface.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Rough Music by Patrick Gale.

Why is forty-year-old, openly gay, successful bookshop owner Will considered by his “best friend” Harriet to need therapy sessions? We sense from the hook of the opening chapter that his glib talk of loving his parents and his “very, very happy” childhood masks some family trauma. This is gradually revealed to us in chapters which alternate between two time frames, the present and more than thirty years earlier, with most scenes set in blue house overlooking a Cornish beach which Will’s parents rented for a fateful holiday long ago when he was eight, and which his sister Poppy has hired again, inadvertently or perhaps not, as a fortieth birthday present, to which he agrees to take his now ageing parents for a break.

I enjoyed the wry humour of the innocent young Will, confusingly called Julian, being led astray, even to the extent of becoming an unwitting accomplice to serious crimes, by the misnamed “trusties”, old lags allowed to tend his prison governor father John’s gardens. Yet, despite some powerful dramatic moments – often coming with unexpected brutality out of the blue, the plot proves much less important than the characters.

In minutely-observed scenes Patrick Gale shows great insight as he takes us inside the heads of his three main characters: Julian/Will growing up as a sensitive little boy, trying to make sense of the adult world and his budding sense of being gay, seeking company in books; his musical, free-spirit of a mother Frances who has drifted into a restrictive marriage with a decent but uptight and hidebound man, and father John himself, who displays a more sympathetic personality beneath the surface, although unable to express the love he feels for his wife. His desire to “accumulate enough small, loving gestures to make something big enough for her to notice” is poignantly undermined by her development of early-onset Alzheimers – not a spoiler since this is clear from the beginning. Like mother, like son, Frances and Will share good intentions combined with a capacity to cause pain without meaning to.

The author has not extended his great skill in developing characters to the secondary roles played by, for instance, Harriet and Will’s gay lovers whom I did not find convincing. Also, the aftermath of the book’s dramatic climax seemed disjointed and underdeveloped, plus I found it hard to believe that such an observant and in some ways perceptive child as Will could apparently forget certain striking events from his childhood.

Overall, this is an absorbing, often moving tale with some astute comments on life and moments of comedy to ease the tragedy.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Signals of Distress by Jim Crace.

Original, imaginative and quirky, well-written with sharp irony and some striking descriptions – the storm of silvery pilchards making “the sea drenched in fish….as if the water had lost its liquidness and was turning to solder” – Jim Crace transports us to a remote Cornish fishing town in the winter of 1836.

The routine of life in Wherrytown is upset when “The Belle of Wilmington” with its American crew and unfortunate slave Otto shackled to the orlop deck runs aground on a sand bar, with much of its cargo washed ashore, including a herd of cattle which offer the locals the prospect of some illicit beef. This dramatic event coincides with the arrival of Aymer Smith: full of good intentions but pedantic, unworldly, socially inept with a gift only for causing trouble without meaning to and irritating everyone he meets. Aymer’s mission is to apologise in person to those dependent for their livelihoods on the collection of kelp from the beaches, who will suffer from his brother’s decision to switch from the use of kelp ash to sodium carbonate in the soap-making progress. Aymer is determined to compensate them – with bars of soap, coins, perhaps even a rash proposal of marriage.

This is a confined, prejudiced, harsh, every-man-for-himself world, typified by the ruthless local agent, wheeler-dealer Walter Howells. Yet in a varied cast of characters, some show flashes of kindness against the odds, and even Aymer eventually becomes an object of sympathy – a foolish yet essentially decent man.

The story may seem to meander along, at times too absorbed in minor detail, yet the author is forging a chain of cause and effect, working towards an end which, even if you guess it, is quite powerful and haunting. There is a vein of unremitting honesty, even visceral cruelty, a sense of fate, in Jim Crace’s writing which also gives it authenticity, and embeds an unusual tale in one’s memory.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of Borderlines by Michela Wrong.

In the effort to erase her shock and regret over an intense love affair which has ended in tragedy, Paula is persuaded by the charismatic Winston Peabody III to assist him in preparing the case to be heard at the Hague for the recently war-torn state of North Darrar in its boundary dispute with its larger, more influential neighbour Darrar. Is this work as ethical as it sounds, is North Darrar a cause worth defending, and how will Paula be affected by this assignment?

Michela Wrong’s experience as an award-winning journalist explains why this deeply serious and intelligent novel often reads more like scripts for Radio 4’s “From our own correspondent” than creative writing. She combines her understanding of damaging colonial legacies, the corrupting effect of power on new regimes, however idealistic they may have been at the outset, and the cynical manipulation by self-interested Western states, to create a “North Darrar” with a very convincing sense of place, brought to life with vivid descriptions of landscapes in the Eritrea on which this novel is based. There are many insights and powerful moments, such as her sense of being trapped when prevented by a soldier from taking her customary evening run out into the plains, or the rendezvous at the “Tank Graveyard”, “a chilling indictment of superpower policy” where a local man explains the “geology” of the place, “like a quarry…our warmongering history caught in the sedimentary layers” of different weaponry from the days of the old Darrar Empire, the Italian conquest and British occupation to the latest civil war, with even some downed Soviet MiGs buried in there.

I agree that this often reads like a tense legal thriller, and even when it slackens off into scenes of office and expatriate social life it rings true. A slight problem for me is that all the characters – mostly Africans – have the same very articulate but somewhat stilted “voice” which seems to be that of the author contriving opportunities to give us information. I realise that Paula is intended to be a driven, prickly individual but her motives, for the action which got her arrested, for instance, seem insufficiently developed. The weakest part for me is her relationship with the impossibly wealthy and well-connected American Jake Wentworth. Recalled in disjointed flashbacks, the descriptions of their physical love often appear quite corny and clichéd, even hollow since it is unclear whether there really was anything more than sexual attraction. Is one meant to feel that Jake was a selfish man, a symbol of casual Western dominance, who “couldn’t” leave his wife, was attracted to clever, high-achieving women but unable to cope with their success, wanting a mistress in a cosy hideaway where he could rely on seeking comfort on his terms? The last chapter may focus too much on “tying up loose ends” in Paula’s life, although its sense of anticlimax may again be part of the book’s realism.

Overall, this is worth reading, and very timely in this period of widespread civil war outside the “developed world” and massive refugee problems. It is well-structured, but one is constantly reminded that it is a novel by an analytical, facts-driven non-fiction writer, lacking that elusive spark of creative imagination.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler.

Retired social worker Abby with her eccentric streak and strong sense of justice and her husband Red, owner of a small construction company in Baltimore, have raised four children and now welcome their grandchildren to the fine family house built by Red’s father Junior Whitshank, poor boy made good from the Appalachians, or thereabouts, who coveted it so much that he persuaded his wealthy clients to sell it to him, perhaps using some dubious means to achieve this end.

The opening seems promising, as Abby and Red conduct a Pinterish conversation over how to deal with wayward son Denny’s latest unsettling action: a nocturnal phone call to announce that he is gay. My enthusiasm cooled when nothing comes of this, and each chapter seems like a separate short story, or sequence of anecdotes, laden down with often tedious domestic detail, about what appear, apart from the prickly, often absent drifter Denny, to be an unremarkable middle—class American family with, frankly, no real problems. The twee, folksy style also grated on me, with the overuse of brackets and “house that Jack built” repetition. This may of course be intentional, to chime with the Whitshanks ordinary Americanness. Despite the humour which sets Anne Tyler apart from other celebrated modern writers like Marilynne Robinson and Alice Munro, there was just not enough to hold my interest.

But then, mid-way through Chapter 3 in which the children feel obliged to rally round as Abby develops worrying memory lapses and Red, recovering from a heart attack, is deemed unable to cope with her, Anne Tyler hooks my interest by beginning to let slip a chain of unexpected twists to indicate that all is not as it seems. I even stopped being annoyed by the style, although I swear it sharpens up as the story belatedly takes off. We begin to see how, for all her good intentions, inviting needy and sadly often ghastly people to share family meals without consulting her long-suffering family, she has unwittingly damaged both the child that she loves the most, and the one she has insisted with apparent great generosity on helping. At last, I was able to appreciate the subtle observation of the characters who begin to become more distinct, the irony and moments of sadness beneath the comedy and the telling dialogues.

Anne Tyler takes a risk, which pays off, in giving us the essential story in Part 1, ending Chapter 8, as is often the case, on a note of pathos, only to go back in time to show how Abby met Red, when she was going out with his friend Dane, and how Junior came to marry Linnie Mae, who proves to be much more than the homely, downtrodden figure portrayed at the outset. The author even manages to make us feel a flash or two of sympathy for Junior. In beginning and ending with Denny, the story has a satisfying arc.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0701189517/ref=nosim?tag=nowordlimitco-21NaNA Spool of Blue Thread