I think this one was my record…didn’t finish it till 8 days after it was released. Usually it’s 1-2 days.
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I always swear after finishing an Ishiguro novel (apart from the brilliant, and tellingly short, The Remains of the Day) that it will be my last.
And so it was with Klara and the Sun.
The ideas are promising. His always are.
In fact there are probably enough ideas in this book to carry a series, and he really investigates none of them.
Instead we get stream of consciousness from yet another unreliable narrator, written in a very pretty way.
Very pretty, that is, until we get to the same damn scene that he puts in every book.
Obligation, confusion, misunderstanding, faux pas’s’s, rationalisations, all lumped in a great big heap.
In the Unconsoled that lasts for about 300 pages, but in Klara and the Sun it’s at least reasonably short. Even so, as soon as it very recognisably started I thought ‘not this ■■■■ again’ only to have it immediately confirmed that it was indeed this ■■■■ again.
And it’s weird, there are rare times he seems to have incredible insight into different characters, but in this book (where the three main characters are a mother, teenage daughter, and a female AI) his portrayals seem very wooden indeed.
No more.
Last one.
Probably.
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I really like Steven Carroll who wrote a great trilogy of coming of age novels based on the adolescence/early adulthood of Michael, who lives in Glenroy when it was an outer suburb in the 1960s. I’ve been less enamoured of his subsequent output. I’m just about to finish ‘The Lost Life’ which is a ‘what if my first love and I had stuck it out? ’ treatise set in mid- 1930s England. Was about to chuck it as it was relatively pedestrian when all of a sudden it clicked and lifted.
Just finished Christian White’s third book, Wild Place. Set down Frankston-way, there’s a forested area out the back of the houses where all sorts of mysterious Satanic-type things are rumoured to take place and where a young girl has gone missing in December 1989.
Well worth a read, but I preferred his debut novel, The Nowhere Child.
And just finished Tim Ayliffe’s fourth book, The Enemy Within, set in Sydney during the fire season in Sydney at the beginning of 2020. His character, John Bailey, is a journo who’s been around the world a lot, but as per usual, laid off by the main media outlets. It’s about threats from extreme right-wing nationalists and the AFP, and you set there thinking…yeah, could believe this.
Ayliffe is and has been a high-up at the ABC and used to produce the morning show. I’ll definitely have a squiz at his previous three books. Tony Jones (ex-Q&A) writes thrillers too, but his seem to be centred around Croatian right-wingers and the Ustasha.
It was said during WW2, that if there was something the SS and Gestapo were a touch squeamish about, the Ustasha would handle the murdering and tortures with a great deal of enjoyment.
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I’ve just finished listening to Len Deighton’s Game, Set and Match trilogy on Audible. I’d give them a solid 7, but no better. They’re very competently done, but just seem to lack any real spark that might elevate them to Excellent status. The main protagonist is Bernard Samson, who’s the classic not-quite-the-right-class, incredibly competent and smart, perpetually financially hard-up field agent, constantly thwarted and overlooked for promotion by the wealthy upper-class twits who automatically get the plum jobs. Honestly, one day I’d like to read something where the wealthy and privileged guy, preferably a Lord someone-or-other, is just for once the street-smart and unthinkingly courageous hero and the working class battlers are the dithering incompetents. It would make a nice change. Anyway, I really can’t get very enthused about Bernard Samson, or any of the other “wonderful characters” that are his friends: Werner, the boyhood friend who once saved his life; Tante Liesl, the ancient and once-beautiful Berlin lady who looked after him when his mother died; etc., etc. The 7 is generous really.
I read them in the 80’s. Can’t comment really. I do recall that I preferred some of his wartime stuff.
Read a fair bit of Deighton once I’d exhausted Le Carre’s output. Fair to good. Game Set and Match was pretty good. Think I read another trilogy of his too.
Enjoying Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly book. Loved Oscar and Lucinda. One of our best.
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Faith, Hope and Charity
Spy Hook, Spy Line and Spy Sinker
I preferred his earlier stuff like Goodbye, Mickey Mouse and Bomber, not to mention the 3 Harry Palmer books.
And he wrote the non-fiction books Blitzkrieg and Fighter.
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I’ve just finished Nothing but Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw
I can’t remember the last time I’ve read a book so heavily hyped that has been this bad. The prose is just awful and distracts from events in the story, the characters just argue and the dialogue is terrible. I struggle for positives with this one, I really do.
Deighton’s first books — the four (or five ?) Harry Palmer novels published in the 1960s — were outstanding. He set himself a very high bar there, one he never quite managed to surmount, even with Bomber.
He’s in his 90s now. I think he’s stopped writing.
I agree with you. His early novels were outstanding, and his his historic books were excellent as well. But the Bernard Samson books are really poor. He doesn’t seem to have put any real effort into them. The characters are clichés and the plots are absurdly implausible. Such a disappointment.
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Read a bit of Deighton in my time and honestly don’t remember much of it but when my better half was clearing out the book shelves after a recent painting episode the 2 trilogies Noonan mentioned got the flick but I managed to hang on to this. Can’t say I’ve read it but it’s one of my fav covers. Not sure they produce covers like this any more, but have to say the flowers are fetching.
PS Keep telling my better half rangas have always been hot but she won’t believe me.
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He also wrote French provincial cookbooks.
I remember getting one called Mamista in a hardcover from some book “club” in the 80s…you had to buy 1 or 2 a month.
Just finished The River Mouth, a debut novel set on the WA coast by Karen Herbert.
A synopsis said the murder exposed the racism in the town, and I’m going…what???
One of the characters turns out to be aboriginal but it’s mentioned once, and there’s no suggestion that her two kids, who are very prominent, have aboriginal blood.
A 15-year-old boy is shot at the river mouth, it’s unsolved but 10 years later a woman is found dead and her DNA is a match for skin found under the boy’s nail. The story jumps backward and forward from the days and weeks before the boy’s death and the present day, but you’re always told which timeframe it is.
Some holes and “where did that come from” but a reasonable debut. About a 6/10.
And I’m listening to the first novel by Emma Salisbury, The Fatal Cord, a gritty police procedural set in Salford, next to Manchester. It runs on two storylines…a family man is stabbed after a night out…and a young pregnant mother drowns her young son, then hangs herself. I will persist with this writer. The narrator is true to form with a strong Manc accent.
I’ve almost finished Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow.
I was pointed to it from an internet list of ‘funny sci-fi.’
It is not funny. At all.
I thought realised Disney Characters would be in it.
They are not.
It is, however, genuine sci-fi, and it is, as the title suggests, noir.
When it comes to noir, I feel like Charlie Brown.
It’s pretty formulaic, yet I’m surprised every time when the author pulls the football away and I end up on my ■■■■. Every single time. I must be a bit thick.
Anyway, the characters are good, and I think the scifi ideas are, too.
The death of death, the death of scarcity, the new economy in those circumstances, advances in artificial human physiology, memory downloads and uploads, cloning etc. etc. etc.
It’s a fully realised world and I found the ideas interesting without getting bogged down in (any at all ever) detail.
So, not funny, but still good.
It’s his debut novel (from 2003) and Ill be checking out his other work.
I read it from the Gutenberg Project because the library didn’t have it and I’ve spent too much on books lately.
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Onto another Australian writer now, S R White…well, the book’s based in a fictional part of Oz, near the conjunction of three states, which would make it seem like Riverland/Sunraysia/Lower Darling based on descriptions of geography…but the author gives thanks to people at Nottingham Trent Uni.
The book is Hermit, where a convenience store owner has been fatally stabbed during a break-in and the man captured has been completely off the grid for 15 years. The detective, Dana Russo, who has her own mental demons, is assigned to interrogate him before the time to do so elapses.
The author has another recent book, Prisoner, about a guy who’s released from prison, and dies shortly after.
Edit…former UK police officer now living in Queensland, so it must be near the Queensland/SA/NSW corner, based on the synopsis of Prisoner.
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I really enjoyed “Hermit”, although the library staffer I was chatting to said she hated it.
At a recent book sale I snaffled a book called “The Dirty South” thinking it was a Michael Connelly that had escaped my attention, but I didn’t look closely enough and the author is John Connolly. Read it anyway and I thought it was a high standard crime/thriller that is set in the 1990s in Arkansas and features a protagonist called Charlie Parker.
Although written recently, it is intended to be the back story about Parker about whom the author has written a series of many books. I’ll look out for others now. Has anybody else read them and have an opinion on their merits?
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Read an early John Connolly….didn’t like it at all…never tried since.
I gather it’s not a reference to the real “Bird” unless Jo Jones is the victim of a revenge crime and a bloodied cymbal is found at the end of his bed next to Jo’s severed head.
Is the protagonist white or a jazz fan or is it just a coincidence? Read somewhere that Connolly is a jazz nut but might have been the wrong Connolly.
I reckon you know the basis of my rant but I’ll add the article anyway.
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