The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett

Touching tale of love, loss and magic - 4/5

Ann Patchett has constructed an enchanting and touching story in the tale of Sabine, the grieving assistant to, and widow of, Parsifal, a gay magician. As she struggles to recover from losing Parsifal, Sabine finds new meaning and zest for life in the family he kept hidden from her for more than twenty years.

Patchett succeeds in vividly evoking the two contrasting principal settings in the novel - busy, hot and sticky Los Angeles, and the insular, bleak, cold Nebraska town of Alliance. Patchett's characters are intriguing and well-realised. I particularly liked the depiction of Sabine's caring and committed, if somewhat overprotective, parents - the kind of people frequently seen in real life, but rarely considered worthy of committing to fiction. They take a minor role in the story but are, like all this novel's players, utterly convincing.

This book has a few imperfections. I didn't mind the dream sequences, in which Parsifal, and his lover, Phan, who has died of complications from AIDS, visit Sabine whilst she sleeps, but I can see why some readers might feel they are a little forced. And most readers will probably guess the secret (other than his still-living family) that Parsifal has long kept from Sabine. That Sabine spends so much of her life maintaining a love for a man whom she knows could never properly return her affection in the way that she craves may grate with some. The lesbian subplot may come a little out of leftfield but sometimes life is like that. Despite its flaws, this book is exceptionally readable, fulfilling and nothing less than a delight

Twenty Something: The Quarter-Life Crisis of Jack Lancaster by Iain Hollinghurst

Funny description of City working life, tries to get clever near the end, fails: 3/5

In the early stages, this is a very fun and enjoyable read. I am also twentysomething and working in the City (for my sins, etc etc) and Iain Hollingshead captures many aspects of the lifestyle very well - and to great comedic effect. In a few places during the first part of the book, I was chuckling to myself and laughing out loud. I was considering passing the book on to a friend at work who might also relate to the City office descriptions, but just as I thought this was going to be a 5-star book, it all seemed to go somewhat downhill. Somewhere along the way the book loses its spark and by the end I was cringing at the amateurish writing.

The prose style, inelegant though it is, had an appeal to it in the beginning, but once the book becomes less a diary of daily life and more a series of plot machinations and revelations, the writing is far less charming and sentence after sentence clunks along the page. There is also something of a plot twist near the end of the novel that necessitates an unconvincing change in tone, and is presumably done to give the book a weightiness it does not possess. It would have been better to stick to the schoolboy humour.

Speaking of which, there are also some frankly embarrassing prehistoric jokes that are dragged out here. By way of example: our hero, a few days into a new job, hangs up on a friend who has called him to make a prank call and seconds later, the phone rings again. In time-honoured, ancient sitcom fashion, our hero answers with abusive language directed to same friend, only to find that actually this time the call is from someone frighfully important and posh and a friend of his boss, to whom he has to grovel apologetically, etc etc. I mean, please. Didn’t they do that on Fawlty Towers when twentysomethings were in nappies? Another one is a female character saying “We’re having a duck” (to eat – I would have thought “We’re having duck” was the more usual way to put it, but of course that would ruin the “gag”) – and naturally, our protagonist mishears "duck” as something else. Hilarious. BRRRING BRRRING! "Hello, is that Iain Hollinghurst? Yes? Well the mostly dead cast of the Carry On films would like their jokes back."

I found it interesting that whilst the acknowledgements at the end of the book show the author thanking a friend who had advised him to remove "the" ill-judged sex scene, an edited description of carnal knowledge remains and managed to receive the "Bad Sex in Fiction Award" 2006 from Literary Review magazine (apparently mostly for a reference to “bulging trousers”. A column (tee hee! - Look what this book has done to my mind) I read by the author online said that the sex scene originally went on for another, I can only imagine excruciating, page, which is quite a horrid thought. The book really could have done with a stricter editor who would better control Hollingshead's obvious literary talents and ensure a sharper, more cohesive novel, with fewer unfunny and redundant excesses, which sadly litter the book from the midpoint onwards.

Having found the first part of the book highly entertaining and even looking forward to getting on the Tube in order to read more, I'll still be interested to see what this author does in the future, but sadly I can't recommend this one

The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox

Blaggards, scoundrels, bounders and cads; nowhere near as literary as it thinks it is: 2/5

This book starts so well, shows so much promise, and categorically fails to deliver. I was very much looking forward to settling down to a dark, twisted tale with a Victorian England backdrop, but what I got was a load of hokum.

It all starts promisingly enough. "The Meaning of Night" begins in a highly intriguing, albeit melodramatic, fashion. From the first line of his narrative, we know that our narrator (who uses several different names, but amongst them, the initials "EG" recur) is a killer; the protagonist murders a hapless soul in a dark alleyway in London and then goes to have his dinner. Why has he done that? (The murder, that is, not the dinner. Perhaps killing brings hunger on, I dunno, never killed anyone). I dived into this murky tale, like a Victorian into the dirty Thames (or something), eager to know more, but thereafter followed disappointment.

For the first third, the book is solid entertainment. The sections set in London are well done and we truly get a sense of a seamy, teeming metropolis in the nineteenth century. Our narrator is very much a part of this world he inhabits. EG has a day job for an outwardly respectable law firm but at night wanders dark streets and visits a prostitute (though she doesn't charge our dashing hero for her services. He must be oh so dashing, eh?).

This was all enjoyable stuff; perhaps the Uriah Heep-style neighbour is a little much and some readers will roll their eyes at the whore with a heart of gold, but I was having fun at this point.

But then the plot machinations begin in earnest and I found myself rolling my eyes a fair bit. EG, it turns out, has a mortal enemy, a veritable nemesis; he's a blaggard and a bounder to boot. Phoebus Rainsford Daunt, a poet (EG's dismissive derision regarding Daunt's literary "talents" and increasing incredulity at his foe's success are quite amusing), man-about-town and former schoolmate of our EG is the swine in question. P. Rainsford Daunt is the kind of chap who, had he lived a few years later, would no doubt have busied himself tying maidens to railway tracks and twirling his moustache, all the while perfecting his evil laugh. In this novel, he must connive and conspire to ruin EG's life. He makes his start by getting EG expelled from school for a crime that EG (gasp!) did not commit. What a rotter and no mistake. A pity that we never get any proper insight into this character at all, even though an entire section is ostensibly devoted to his early life. Daunt is a cardboard cut out, cut-and-paste villain. It is disappointing, when Cox has seemingly tried (albeit not entirely successfully) to give anti-hero EG shades of light and dark, that P. Rainsford Daunt is just a bad 'un, and that's it.

After Daunt makes his entrance, things start to go downhill. They career further downwards when EG gets a love interest (above and beyond the aforementioned lady of the night). When one of the book's secrets is revealed, connected with EG's background and why a certain family member has behaved in a certain way, the reader might feel, as I did, that we had expected more and that we had had a fair old setup for something of a throwaway reveal. At least, though, I didn't feel completely cheated, which is what happened as we approached the final section and I saw where Cox was going.

I have to give this book two stars (after early on, thinking it might be a four or five-star book; then as the tedium set in, thinking three) for the dreadful, predictable, hackneyed ending. After several hundred pages of build-up, it is a monumental letdown. The denouement is desperately disappointing; presumably supposed to be a "twist", although it seems to me that the majority of readers must surely have seen it coming a mile off and then checked themselves, hoping that the author was cleverer than we were giving him credit for and leading us down a blind alley, only to truly astonish us within the final pages. But no. I can't even think that it is an attempt at parody, either. I think this is Cox's genuine, intended big finish. I skipped over the last pages, very much annoyed at where Cox was taking us. What a blaggard, what a bounder, etc.

I don't like it when books underestimate their readership's intelligence, but this is what this novel does, in spades. EG behaves in an increasingly stupid manner for reasons that never even come close to being convincing and it is all for a contrived, predictable, silly ending. All of the hard work Cox does in this novel with his elegant language, the intriguing footnotes - all of that is squandered in the aforementioned hokum of where this book ends up. It is a real shame, because I wanted to love this. Early on, I thought it was going to be one of those great books that I could recommend to others, confident that they would not be disappointed; but I can't recommend this. I think a lot of people I know would be disappointed in it and sorry that they had squandered their time.

LATER EDIT: The edition of the book I have posted a picture of has, unlike my copy, a text along the top of the front cover that gives some of the key plot details away. Which is silly. I have a few books with blurbs that do that, ridiculous really.