This is my review of Our Mutual Friend (Wordsworth Classics) by Charles Dickens.

What would I make of the first novel by Dickens that I have read for years? I was struck by how much it is Victorian soap-opera-cum-sitcom.

At times, I found almost unbearably irritating the hammy theatrical caricatures, the convoluted prose with catchphrases, the mawkish sentimentality over children particularly when sick, deformed or about to die, the patronising treatment of a plump, dimpled young heroine over-attached to her father, and the probably unintentional anti-semitism in that the Jew in this case is portrayed in a sympathetic light. These are all modern-day criticisms of an accepted Victorian style, yet I am sure that George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, the Bronte sisters, Thomas Hardy and even Wilkie Collins, were not quite so "over the top".

Beneath all this, there lies an intriguing main plot. John Harmon returns from years spent abroad to claim the inheritance left by his harsh and uncaring father. Reluctant to comply with the odd condition of the will that he must marry Bella Wilfer whom he has never met, he decides to "go missing for a while" to gauge what sort of person she is. Then, a body dragged from the river by Gaffer Hexam is identified as John Harmon's.

The main plot is enmeshed in a series of interconnecting sub-plots with different degrees of parody, likely to appeal to a variety of readers. I was most taken with the effete Eugene Wrayburn's attraction to a beautiful working class girl, much to his own surprise and that of his close friend Mortimer Lightwood. Eugene's rival in love, the similarly wonderfully named Bradley Headstone is an overintense schoolmaster, driven to madness by jealousy and frustration over Eugene's superior, mocking wit and contempt.

I found other threads laboured and tedious, such as the socially aspiring Veneerings with their "bran new" possessions and their endless dinners for suitable members of society, including Twemlow, invited so often because of his social connections that he is likened to one of the spare leaves in the dining table. I realise that this is part of Dickens' attacks on the snobbery and false values of the middle and upper classes. His ranting over the rigid workhouse system, which frightens away "the deserving poor" who prefer to die instead in proud destitution, hits home.

Dickens gives us vivid descriptions of how ordinary people lived in Victorian times, and may in fact have known more about this firsthand than some of the other famous contemporaries noted above.

He also produces striking evocations of the choking London fog and the unspoilt beauty of the countryside surrounding the city. The opening chapter conveys a strong sense of the sinister, Hexam finds a body in the Thames without this being spelt out specifically, "the ripples passing over…what he had in tow……were dreadfully like changes in expression on a sightless face". Dickens writes some profound studies of the shifting emotions of most of his main characters although some, like Mrs Wilfer, her daughter Lavvy and sidekick suitor George Sampson remain increasingly tedious pantomime parodies.

The changes in popular language are also fascinating: "shepherds both" meant inexperienced, "hipped" was depressed, "galvanic starts" were electric shocks, and so on.

Trollope parodied Dickens as "Mr. Popular Sentiment" and an anonymous critic found "Our Mutual Friend" to be "wild and fantastic, wanting in reality, and leading to a degree of confusion which is not compensated by any additional interest in the story…..the final explanation is a disappointment". Yet there is no denying Dickens' ability to appeal to a mass audience and become over time the best-known English novelist.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem.

In this Chandler-inspired tale, small-time crook Frank Minna selects a group of teenage orphans, "Motherless Brooklyn" to be his "men". When he is murdered some years later, one of these, Lionel Essrog, takes it upon himself to find the killer of the man who has become a father figure, and who empathised with his little understood Tourette's Syndrome which he nicknamed "Terminal Tugboating" – not knowing when some "verbal gambit was right at its limit" – even giving Lionel a book on Tourette's to help him to manage his condition.

What sets this book apart is the author's ability to enter into the mind of a person with Tourette's, and sustain this through more than three hundred pages of narration. I have no idea how accurate this is, but we come to accept Lionel's need to shout and play aloud with words continually to relieve his inner tension, his obsessive need to count things, to have everything in fives if that is his number of the moment, to touch people even if strangers, all of which makes him appear crazy, odd, an object of disgust, often insulted and underestimated even by those who should know him well, although we can see the tragedy of the intelligence and sensitivity trapped beneath all this.

This book is likely to divide opinion sharply. After I had adapted to Lionel's conversations peppered with gibberish wordplay – often with a rational thread to it – I found the writing original and often very funny with its wry New York humour, at times moving, insightful and poetical, creating a vivid picture of the character of Brooklyn and its residents – Italian makers of mouth-watering sandwiches; sinister old mobsters called Matricardi and Rockaforte, which Lionel transforms into wordplay as "Bricco and Stuckface"; beat cops who "dislodge clumps of teenagers" with a terse "Tell your story walking!" Yet at times, the prose seems too contrived, and Lionel unbearably irritating with his endless references to "ticcing" (having a nervous tic), although it is no doubt part of the author's intention to create understanding and sympathy for an apparently unappealing character.

About two-thirds in, I began to have concerns about the plot. Tension gives way to farce in scenes such as when Lionel is bundled into a car, only to note that his kidnappers all wear dark glasses with the price tags still attached, giving, him, of course, a desperate desire to touch them. I do not find Frank's brother Gerard a believable character. The arrival at the final denouement seems to me rather clunky and underwhelming, as if all the author's efforts have gone into writing brilliant and unusual prose, rather than plotting a satisfying detective thriller. After having worked so hard to keep up with Lionel's flights of verbal fancy, it is disappointing to have the plot explained with such pedestrian clarity at the end.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Other People’s Money by Justin Cartwright.

This is a recent addition to the current crop of novels on life after the banking crisis. When Sir Harry Trevelyan-Tubal is felled by a stroke, chairmanship of the traditional, upmarket, family-run private bank, Tubal & Co, passes to a new broom, his son Julian. Seduced by hedge fund managers and the lure of gambling on derivatives, Julian finds himself saddled with "chunks of mortgages on an alligator farm in a swamp, two thousand worthless homes in Mississippi … a shopping mall in a town flattened by a hurricane…" to give you a flavour of Cartwright's barbed wit. The only solution is to poach money from his family trust fund, to tide the bank over whilst a sensitive sale goes through to a stinking rich, status-conscious Coney-Islander-made-good American banker. Clearly, this is the basis for a sufficient disaster to whet your interest, although things may not turn out quite as expected. Certainly, it was enough to hook me after an initially slow start with a good deal of "telling" rather than "showing" the reader what to think.

Having read several of Cartwright's books, I would say that he is on form as regards some sharp, lively dialogues (with the drawback that sometimes you cannot work out who is speaking – see page 200 of the first hardback edition – where was the editor?), striking descriptions and thought-provoking observations. Although stereotypes without exception, his characters are well-developed. I liked little touches like the visionary producer Artair Macleod being reduced to putting on "The Wind in the Willows".

My main reservation about the book is its focus on the super-rich who will be comfortably off even in the worst case scenario. There is no hint of the real hardship that millions of innocent people have suffered as a result of the banks' irresponsibility.

So, the book cannot be more than the enjoyable, fairly lightweight satire, into which it settles after the climax of a potential crisis has been defused. Yes, Cartwright is making the sardonic point that "the rich are always with us" and the establishment will always look after its own, but liitle more than that – apart from the observation on our general lack of idealism: "Now, nobody thinks about reaping the benefits of freedom; instead they hope to win the lottery or become celebrities".

Cartwright likes to weave in references to another writer, in this case Flann O'Brien's "At Swim-Two-Birds" which plays on the idea of a story having many beginnings and ends, and many ways of telling it, or that "events take place one way, and we recount them the opposite way". Apart from the fact that these insights are fairly self-evident, I do not think "Other People's Money" illustrates these points in a particularly striking way.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt.

For months I avoided reading this tale of two contract-killer brothers since I imagined it would be gratuitously violent and suspected its Man Booker shortlisting was a gimmicky attempt to popularise the award. I was wrong to the extent that this is a well-written novel, an entertaining page-turner with an original and intriguing approach, a black comedy in its mix of wry humour and grim brutality.

Charlie and Eli, inappropriately surnamed "Sisters", a name which strikes fear in all those familiar with their reputation, are hired by the vicious "Commodore" to murder a gold prospector called Hermann Warm. Their journey from Oregon to San Francisco proves to be an 1850s Wild West Odyssey, in that they encounter a succession of strange characters and situations. In the course of this, the brothers' personalities and some explanations for their violent behaviour are gradually revealed.

Whereas Charlie is a psychopath, although his habit of losing himself in brandy suggests an uneasy conscience, the narrator Eli comes across as a more sympathetic character, often thoughtful and kind to others, except when a black mist of anger descends upon him, a condition often cynically manipulated by his more dominant brother. Despite their continual bickering, a strong bond binds these two.

The moral ambiguity in the novel made me uneasy, in that you may find yourself wanting the brothers to escape justice, despite the terrible crimes they have committed for money, and even liking Eli, although he is arguably guiltier than his brother because he has a clearer sense of right and wrong.

I was never quite clear how the brothers came to be so educated. Charlie comments on "the fortuitous energy" of California, to which Eli adds, "It was the thought that something as scenic as running water might offer you not only aesthetic solace but also golden riches". And this, from an otherwise boorish thug?

After the striking early chapters my interest waned in the second half, I think because the "climax" of the meeting with Warm proved a damp squib. I found some of the final scenes in California too implausible, and Warm's life history unengaging. I wondered at the end if the author had been uncertain how to finish the tale.

Overall, I understand why this book has been so successful, and it has more than a touch of the Coen brothers' work. It is not a "stunning" novel, say in the Cormac McCarthy league, but probably was never intended be so.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance) by Vasily Grossman.

This is one of the few "mind shifting" books I have read in that it may alter your perception of the meaning and value of life, and the nature of freedom – the right to live with one's own individual quirks. Inspired by Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and informed by Grossman's firsthand experiences on the Soviet front attempting to drive the Nazis back from Stalingrad, this modern masterpiece by the Jewish Ukrainian journalist deserves to be more widely known.

Initially banned despite the political "thaw" under Khrushchev, I believe because Grossman's parallels between the totalitarian nature of Nazism and Stalinism were too hard to take, we must be thankful that copies were smuggled out to be published in the west.

My praise stands despite my difficulty in "getting into" the work. This is partly due to the cast of more than 150 characters with either difficult to grasp or overly similar names (Krymov v. Krylov, etc.), which require frequent reference to the glossary at the back. Then, there is the continual shift from a German labour camp, to Stalingrad, to a family evacuated from Moscow to Kazan and so on, to encounter yet another group of people, but never being quite sure whether this is a "one-off experience" or whether they are minor or major players who will reappear a couple of hundred pages later. All that connects the various scenes is that the characters are in some way related or acquainted.

There is no single strong plot, just many descriptions in the "social realist" style. This is sometimes wooden, and the structure ramshackle, but all this is offset by some brilliant writing.

I suspect that each reader will be hooked eventually by a different event. In my case it was the account of the Russian officer casually risking German sniper fire to visit his men holed up in various bunkers. For others, it may be the Russian mother's grief to learn that her soldier son has died from his wounds, and her inability, despite remaining sane in every other respect, to accept that he is really dead.

The gifted but prickly physicist Viktor Shtrum, modelled on Grossman himself, comes nearest to being the central character. His agonised thoughts are subtly captured as he oscillates between criticism of the Stalinist regime, fear over being condemned for this, an irresistible desire for praise and recognition of his work, a sense of release when he dares to stand up to the political stooges or minders who run the show at his institute in exchange for material benefits, despite their own mediocrity as scientists, or his need to justify to himself his occasional human weakness under the pressure to conform.

There are powerful scenes of battle, although mostly it is a question of waiting to advance or surveying the aftermath. Grossman does not shrink from the most shocking and moving scenes, such as a woman and boy entering a death camp even to the point of perishing in the gas chamber. Yet this is written with such sensitivity that it reads like a memorial to those who suffered.

Despite all the grimness, there is a good deal of wry humour, with some witty dialogues and moments or high tension. Landscapes are often vividly described, such as the wild tulips on the steppes of the Kalmyck, near the Caspian Sea, which I found on "Google" with some other scenes which exactly illustrate Grossman's descriptions.

I plan to keep a copy of this book to read again later and cannot recommend "Life and Fate" too highly.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars