This is my review of The Girl Who Fell From The Sky by Simon Mawer.

My expectations raised by the originality of "The Glass House", this novel proved a disappointment. The adventures of a British woman parachuted into occupied France to work for the Resistance offer the scope for a gripping drama, but it is as if the author has been forced to write for a deadline when he did not feel in the mood.

Why was I so soon and often bored by what should have been by turns exciting and moving? I think it was the lack of a clear evocation of time and place – I never really felt I was in Scotland, or rural France, or Paris during the war of the 1940s. Similarly the characters rarely came alive in my imagination as convincing people. The creation of tension and expression of real feeling are obscured rather than enhanced by a veil of would-be literary writing which stumbles quite often over clunky phrasing. Much of the dialogue is quite dull.

I found myself niggling over minor points, such as the repetition on page 57 (hardback) of "She shrugged the question away". Why did no editor pick this up? Plus the language used in conversation often sounded too modern.

Even when Marian at last gets to France, the narrative drive is too weak to maintain the necessary sense of tension. The potential drama is continually defused by her introspection. This is evident as early as the opening chapter, clearly intended to hook the reader, yet we find her mulling over things like her father's classical allusions which she likes to call illusions when she is about to make her first parachute jump into France! Her lack of motivation to work in Special Operations makes you wonder why on earth she was selected for the role. When a reason is supplied, it seems implausible, and is not sufficiently developed in the plot. Marian does not seem quite real, so I do not care as I should when she is in danger.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel.

Since every reader must surely know that Anne Boleyn fails to give Henry V111 a son, and loses her head, while Thomas Cromwell falls from grace, although not in the second part of a planned trilogy, everything hinges on Mantel's ability to breathe life into the characters and embroider the details.

She has entered so fully into the imagined minds of both Cromwell and Henry that she provides exceptionally vivid in-depth portrayals of these two main characters. She has to be able to see Cromwell's better side, and I sometimes feel she has grown to like him too much, this juvenile thug "made good", industrious, clever, manipulative, surprisingly good company, with a soft spot for orphan boys and vulnerable young women. Yet she never lets us forget his underlying ruthlessness, as when he has an almost fond memory of Bishop Fisher, only to recall how, when the man's head would not rot on its pole, Cromwell had it put in a sack and thrown in the Thames.

On page 208 (first hard cover edition) there is a wonderful psychological analysis of Henry who "grew up believing the whole world was his friend and everyone wanted him to be happy. So any pain, any delay, frustration or stroke of ill luck seems to him an anomaly, an outrage." His self-justification, pathetic desire to be "in the right" and to leave all the dirty work to others as regards replacing Anne with Jane Seymour are all too apparent.

Mantel has a good ear for comedy, so some of the dialogues, as when Jane Seymour is being trained by her relatives to enter rooms in a more queenly way, are very amusing.

"Bring up the Bodies" seems more successful than "Wolf Hall" since it is more tightly plotted. In both cases, the book improves as the narrative drive builds up to the dramatic climax, in this case Anne's execution.

Once I had tuned into Mantel's daringly distinctive style, I began to feel the writing is often brilliant, but there were times in the first half when I found her self-indulgently wordy. Significant characters and events tend to be introduced in such an oblique way that you may miss them. The confusing tendency to call Cromwell "he" is still evident, but was it some misguided editor who suggested substituting at times "he; he, Cromwell,"?

An interesting aspect is Cromwell's desire to make radical social reforms, as gaining in confidence he increasingly "runs the country" behind the scenes. The final part in which Henry turns on his faithful servant, only to regret it, will perhaps make a more moving read than anything that has preceded it.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey.

Employed as a conservator at a London museum with a world-famous collection of clocks and wind-up machines, blue-stocking Catherine is grief-stricken over the death of her work colleague and not-so-secret lover Matthew. Her manipulative line manager Eric tries to distract her with the task of reassembling what seems to be a mechanical duck, commissioned in the 1850s by the wealthy (when he is allowed access to the family money) Henry Brandling, who is convinced the "automaton" will aid the recovery of his sickly son. Catherine becomes totally absorbed in the handwritten journals kept by the eccentric Henry on his lengthy trip to Germany to obtain the duck.

The "Catherine chapters" held my attention from the outset. I liked the acerbic take on Barbara Pym "voice", and the very convincing and often moving portrayal of how Catherine is devastated by loss which Carey manages to convey alongside some very entertaining scenes.

The Henry chapters were a different matter. I accept that he may be bordering on insane, and encounters some even nuttier people, in particular the automaton-maker Sumper with his for me tedious accounts of the perhaps even more eccentric designer of such machines, Cruickshank. These chapters have a dreamlike quality, verging at times on nightmare, and Henry's account is often fragmented and lacking in context.

I would have been totally at sea without Google to explain the Victorian obsession with automata, and the various references to smoking monkeys and Vaucanson's "Digesting Duck" plus the Silver Swan on view at Bowes Museum, all of which clearly inspired this novel.

I think Carey is exploring the incongruity, for atheists and rationalists, of how grief is expressed through the chemical reactions of, say, shedding tears, while a cleverly made robotic machine may arouse fear and confusion with "its uncanny lifelike movements". An added twist is how machines, especially the combustion engine, have transformed our lives but may lead to our destruction by pollution – including this aspect as well may be over-ambitious.

Only the relative shortness of this book, Carey's status as a twice Man Booker Prize Winner, and my admiration for his recent "Parrot and Olivier in America" gave me the incentive to persevere. I agree that the ending proves rather abrupt, plus for me it includes a couple of implausible twists which I found hard to take.

I can see why some reviewers have found the novel pretentious. I'm inclined to think that Carey simply lets his imagination roam free, his fame relieving him of any need to kowtow to agents or editors. He makes no concessions to readers, leaving us to extract the brilliant writing and sharp insights from the at times confusing morass.

It was only on reflection after finishing the book that I decided the choice of ending is quite effective, and that overall it is worth reading.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Nightwoods by Charles Frazier.

After the phenomenal success of "Cold Mountain", the odyssey of a soldier's return from the American Civil War, it must be hard for Charles Frazier to achieve comparable success.

Although on a much smaller scale, "Nightwoods" is similar in showing Frazier's gift for spinning a yarn and displaying his deep knowledge of and love for the Appalachian wilderness combined with a sense of small town life in a rural backwater, portrayed with some sharp, witty dialogue and an ability to make unsavoury or even evil characters appear at times in some ways objects of sympathy.

It is sometime round 1960 when Gene Pitney was a rising popstar on the juke box. Luce is a tough young woman who is for some reason living in isolation from the town visible across the lake from the old lodge which she looks after for an old landowner called Stubblefield. Her hard but peaceful routine is disrupted by the appearance of "the stranger children", in fact the badly damaged young twins of her brutally murdered sister Lily. Luce's psychopathic brother -in-law Bud has a particular reason for tracking down these children. Meanwhile, following Stubblefield's death, his ne'er- do- well heir comes back to claim the inheritance. This is clearly the basis for a potentially tense thriller.

I was rapidly sucked in by not only the plot, but also the vivid, poetical descriptions of the mountainous wilderness of North Carolina, the sense of past history back even before the time of the Indians, the survival of a self-sufficient rural way of life, the neglected lodge – a vestige of the wealthy tourists from bygone days – and the inward-looking life of the small town enveloped in the backwoods with only tenuous road connections to the outside world.

Always a page turner, although some reviewers have found it slow at times, the story is never quite predictable since you know that Frazier is capable of including sudden acts of unexpected brutality and horror cheek by jowl with quite soft-centred or even sentimental passages.

Although I was a little disappointed by Frazier's handling of the plot from the point where Luce meets Bud face-to-face, since I thought that the potential drama often fell rather flat, this was offset by some unexpected twists, and I suspect that Frazier is really more interested in reflecting on the effects of "modern progress" and exploring the human psyche than he is in structuring a story. The final pages in practice prove quite tense.

Another slight reservation is that both Luce and Stubblefield Jnr. seem to undergo some rather rapid changes of attitude, but in a relatively short and spare novel perhaps we have to "take this as given" to leave space for Frazier's other ideas.

Highly recommended.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars