The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, by Agatha Christie

I've had a really tough time this autumn (this year really) finding 

the motivation to read. My annual 'books read' total is almost half what it usually is...not that I set targets as such, but I do keep track of what I read and when, make notes and lists, and record any particularly impressive quotes or passages that I like. So whilst I don't keep records specifically to track how much I'm reading, it is easy to tell how much I've read. Maybe it's the horror show of 2016, the year that humanity irreconcilably pushed itself over the social PONR. Maybe it's because I got a puppy this time last year and now she's a big massive dog that demands dog-time, not book time. Maybe it's the books I'm reading. Maybe it's just one of those things.

However.
In an attempt to kick start the official festive season (any festive inclinations in November are really just pre-amble) and as a return to a tried and tested remedy for sluggish reading vibes, I turned to the queen of crime, the first lady of the drawing room mystery, the Mistress of Murder Agatha Christie. And it worked a treat.

Christie describes this book in the preface as a Christmas dinner of two main courses, two entrees and a sorbet, along with a glorious description of her childhood Christmases in an old, draughty country manor with a boiled turkey, a roast turkey, mince pies and plum pudding.

So the setting of the first main course, The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding is quite familiar; an old country manor house, two types of turkey, mince pies and plum pudding. I see what you did there AC. Only is M. Poirot enjoying these festivities, not the author. Poirot is dragged, as he often seems to be, to the countryside over the festive period, lured by the idea of central heating and all the mod-cons, to find some rubies stolen by a dastardly ladyfriend of an Eastern prince. Naturally, it is a matter of the utmost delicacy, and Poirot manages to kill two birds with one very large, very valuable red stone.There's a staged murder that takes a turn for the too-real that turns into a happy Christmas for everyone. Appearing originally in 1923 and then subsequently expanded, it's nice to see that almost 100 years ago, people still griped about Christmas not being what it used to be. Even in 1923, the concept of decorating a tree, having an excessive dinner and having the whole family round was seen as kitsch, old fashioned and somehow under threat from the relentless march of modernity. Our trees might look different, our food might be more lavish and a bit more additive-ridden, but our complaints about the cessation of tradition never seem to alter.

The other main course is The Mystery of the Spanish Chest, an old school body-in-the-chest while everyone has a party round it. It reminded me of Hitchcock's Rope, a massively underrated film that also has a big, boxy dead elephant in the room that nobody notices. It's a bit of a nod to Othello and has an interestingly small number of characters/suspects and a pleasingly convoluted, absurd series of motives. Not particularly festive though, if you don't count all the eating.

Then come the entrees, because maybe that's the order that post people eat in. The Under Dog,  a reasonably familiar lots of people living in a big house and one of them is killed deal where our M. Poirot has to look through all their bedrooms in the manner that he seems so thoroughly to enjoy, and Four and Twenty Blackbirds which seems to have been included purely because it is a food based mystery. But what is more festive than food?  Lastly, the sorbet; The Dream, a short, twisty tale with a mad Home Alone style booby trap, identity swapping and murder.

Yes they'e silly and daft and old fashioned and mostly variants on the same themes, but these short stories definitely did the job. I found myself *wanting* to pick this book up; I thought about it when I wasn't reading it; I sacked off boring crap like cleaning and ironing to have an hour with Poirot, careering round country houses and telling everyone why the could've been the murderer but weren't. Anyway. I've ordered the Mystery in White next, cos cosy crime is by bag at the moment and it's too early for A Christmas Carol.

Has anyone else had a really long book slump before?

What do you recommend to get over it? What are your go-to authors or books for re-invigoration?

Broadway Book Club Discussion of Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

So we only had one person at the meeting who actually managed to finish the book- even I didn’t make it to the end of this one- the first time in almost 5 years that I haven’t finished a Book Club title. 

Thanks to Ruth for filling in the plot gaps for the rest of us and Clive for listening to the audiobook and providing us with a handy guide to name pronunciation. Team effort!

So. We began with a discussion of the characters of Half of A Yellow Sun, most notably Richard, Ugwu, Kainene and Olanna. We concluded that as the reader we are offered the story mostly through Ugwu’s eyes, but felt that the author saw Olanna as the novel’s central figure. Olanna’s presentation was almost too good to be true; demure, intelligent, beautiful, kind and graceful- we felt we were supposed to be enthralled and captivated by her in the same way that Odenigbo and Ugwu (and more or less every other man in the book) are. However, we talked about how directionless she was, how she drifted through the narrative. She was incredibly well educated and privileged, convinced she was revolutionary and modern by refusing to marry her lover but ended up in a very feminine, wife/mother role anyway. She was incredibly conventional, but we felt that the author really felt that she wasn’t. Kainene on the other hand was a practical woman with a ruthless business head. Successful, independent- so obviously she had to be kind of ugly. It’s the sort of thing we’ve seen a million times before. Kainene emerged as the strongest character throughout the discussion. We talked about Richard, how he served little purpose and tried to adopt a Biafran identity, resolutely determined to be a Native African despite very little acceptance from the community around him. We felt kind of sorry for Richard and his endless writing- he really was quite pointless as a person- supported financially by his great Aunt, then his lover Kainene. And then there’s Ugwu. Creepy from the beginning, with his sexual fantasies about a girl that might be a relative, his weird voyeurism of his sister’s body…his listening at doors and silent fumbles with servant girls. I didn’t even *Get* to the bar-girl scene, but it sounds like his creepiness only intensified into actual war crimes. His treatment of women aside, Ugwu is an awful snob and a troublemaker among the other help, constantly playing the compound’s staff off against one another. Similarly Odenigbo, for all his high minded liberalism takes zero responsibility for his actions, his mother is awful, Olanna and Kainene’s parents are corrupt, classless and shallow, their friends are interchangeable suck-ups and nobody in the whole novel seems even half way decent as a person. We guessed that this was supposed to cay something about the rotten, corrupt core of Nigeria as a country.

One of the things that we thought was very well done was the Olanna’s internal conflict about her background and education. Adichie writes gorgeously about what it is like to be an educated, African woman of colour; about how education is seen, rightly or wrongly, as a “white” thing, and any attempt by a black woman to educate themselves, to benefit from learning, to be academic is seen as a bit of a betrayal of the community, a move away from the village and its inhabitants into white space, an alignment with the oppressors. “Too much book” as Olanna’s aunty phrases it.

We talked about Nigerian history, and how lacking an English education is in any historical events that did not directly impact upon England. We talked about the colonial MO and how often it has been repeated around the world. Bloody Britain.

We agreed that parts of the book are beautiful and the prose is quite lyrical in places. Significantly, the scenes that really stand out are the traumatic, horrifying events witnessed by Olanna and Richard (personally I never made it much past the Biafran independence, but am assured there was more horror to follow). The scene of the Igbo slaughter in the airport and the things that Olanna witnesses in the village of her relatives and on the train home have a savage, arresting intensity to them. These scenes are incredibly well written; shocking  and intimate and horrifying all at once.  For me personally, these are probably the only parts of this book I will remember.

As with All the Light We Cannot See, we decided that the out-of-sequence structure added nothing to the book. Though it was presumably done that way to make Baby’s parentage and the mess between Richard/Kainene /Olanna more of a reveal, it was pretty writ large what was coming, so it wasn’t really worth disrupting the narrative flow for so little twist. Numerous readers said that they struggled to keep track of events, characters, relatives and dates and that it was kind of jarring to be introduced to young Baby, then almost immediately whisk  back in time so she suddenly disappears. It’s hard to keep track of, especially amongst a backdrop of constantly appearing and then disappearing poets, academics, politicians, revolutionaries, party guests  and so on.

I think the general consensus was that whilst this is probably a worthy and very emotionally affecting  socio-historical novel, none of us really got much out of it and found it a completely uphill struggle. Maybe it’s not the right time to read a book about civil war, state-sanctioned violence and relentless suffering. Maybe it’s just too horrific a subject to expect to enjoy a book about. Maybe socio-historical novels just aren’t our collective bag.

Here’s a recent article highlighted by our resident history source Clive on the lasting implications and deadly legacy of Biafran independence. 46 years later, tensions still seem as high as ever. 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/24/nigeria-army-denies-killing-150-at-biafra-demonstrations

Anyway- we break for Christmas now, so I’ll see you guys in the new year for our discussion of His Dark Materials in January (it’s grim in parts, but hopefully will offer a bit of an antidote to all the suffering we’ve read lately). We will resolve to choose some more uplifting books in January to take us through to Easter, so come armed with a list of things you missed out on when they came out, things that have sat on your shelf for years, new paperback releases or something that you’ve always wanted to read but never got around to.

His Bloody Project, by Graeme Macrae Burnet

So apparently this sold the most copies in the wake of its nomination for the Booker Prize shortlist, but did not win in the end. But winning isn't everything, right?

His Bloody Project begins with a preface by the author, Graeme Macrae Burnet, recounting how he found the manuscript that you are about to read, intact and inexpertly bound, in the archives of an Inverness repository. The story re-imagines the supposedly real-life story of 17-year-old Crofter's son Roderick Macrae, perpetrator of a triple murder in 1869, the bloody project from which the book gets its name. The narrative is constructed of testimonials from Roderick's neighbours, teachers and other crofters in the township. Opinions of him vary wildly, from gifted (if slightly contemptuous) scholar, to quiet loner, to murderous, dead-eyed miscreant. After the short testimonials, Roddy tells his own story, in an unlikely, flowing prose from his prison cell, recounting the series of events that began with his mother's death, and led up to a triple homicide.

It's interesting in that it is not a whodunnit, because Roddy is never in any denial about his guilt. The interest arises in why. Why did this boy, an apparently clever, thoughtful lad feel driven to murder his neighbours? A boy that, on his first day of employment working for the landowner on a shooting party, scared a stag off to save such a magnificent animal from being slain. What drives a person like that to kill someone? Not just kill them, but full blown smush them to a pulp?

It's an intriguing little book- sort of a literary found footage. It's unexpectedly humorous in parts, with an oddly compelling narrator in the softly spoken, literary Roderick. It reminded me in parts of Hannah Kent's Burial Rites, in that it is a memoir written with the noose around the neck. The difference was, that narrator was innocent. It reminded me most of Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood; the idea that multiple versions of a person exist to different people perceiving them. The idea that guilt and innocence are slippery ideas, that if a person is devious enough, clever enough, if they believe their story enough they can dupe almost anyone. The innocent party becomes a character to be played, even to  themselves.

In His Bloody Project, the reader is left to make up their own mind about the accused, but they are heavily influenced by his own, lengthy account. We end up sharing Macrae's own perception of himself, whether that is what his peers see or not. We see his background, his treatment at home. We see how his beloved sister is gradually dimmed by toil, abused and then extinguished. We see his aspirations, his unlucky sequence of events. His acceptance of them. His arrival at the only conclusion; a win-win- he is freeing his father from both the burden of his torment, and the burden of his useless son.

It's an enjoyable book that paints a picture of the bleak inevitability of life in the Scottish islands- a simple, ancient life made unbearable by the arrival of power and tyranny. It's unusual in its format, and some readers might be put off by the verbose prose of Macrae's account of his life. I've just realized the author shares a name with his protagonist. *so dense*. I'd definitely recommend this to people who enjoyed Alias Grace, and to readers of crime generally. It's certainly a new and compelling twist on a very, very familiar genre. It must be hard to write a really original crime novel, but GMB has managed well. Memorable.

Broadway Book Club Discussion of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr,

Everyone in attendance had enjoyed the book; we talked about the readable, engaging prose style, the interesting central characters and the fact that Occupied France and the campaigns on the Eastern Front as World War II narratives that seem to be less common.

Most people agreed that the interweaving of the two plots  was well managed and each strand was equally interesting, but that the jumping backwards and forwards in time and location added nothing to the book. We thought that a chronological narrative would have been easier to follow and would have told the story just as competently. We could never remember if Werner was in the basement of the hotel, in the Orphanage, on the Eastern Front, back in the basement again or at Nazi school because it seemed to change too often and didn’t feel particularly consistent.

We talked at great length about how well the author portrayed the gradual rise to power of the Nazis and how sympathetically Werner and Frederick (poor, poor Frederick- he confirmed what happens to people that don’t fit the fascist mould)  were depicted despite technically being Nazis. How Germany was ruined after the First World War, its citizens struggling to survive- then jobs began to emerge and prosperity gradually returns, thanks to these apparent saviours. People are eating meat again, manufacturing is thriving and gradually more opportunities become available…a frenzy of nationalism emerges, where you are either part of the frenzy or an enemy of the state. We really felt for Werner, whose intelligence and ability bring him to the attention of the Party and he is taken away for training at the most horrific soldier school. We talked about how many ordinary Germans there must have been that were either indifferent to the emerging Nazis or quietly opposed to them, but how ineffective and dangerous this opposition must have been- so they just went along with it. It’s frighteningly familiar. One day it’s not defending a neighbour or keeping quiet when a foreign accent is derided. Pretty soon you’ve got full blown fascism and we all know the rest of that story.

We talked a lot about the book’s other characters; we loved the PTSD suffering Etienne, trapped in his house with the badass resistance leader and long-time maid Madame Manec. The impressive, brutal super-German Volkheimer, a legendary, ruthless giant that trained and posted with Werner. Though he seems so unsympathetic, we really felt for the post war Volkheimer who had sank from Nazi notoriety to a solitary, grim anonymous life of a radio installer. We were universally disgusted by the gross gemologist von Rumpel and his disgusting overflowing neck fat and his obsession with the Sea of Flames

We discussed the diamond and all the coincidences that it had encountered since its ejection from the earth- unable to decide if it was a supernatural object or just another reason for people to fight each other through history- another trinket to own. Fate, coincidence and free will are pretty consistent themes throughout the book , exemplified quite well via the mysterious diamond.

It was a really enjoyable book that prompted a lot of discussion about the tragedy of war, good and evil, doing the right thing, virtual and literal entrapment and the generally interesting things about the French Resistance and other lesser known aspects of the Second World War. We seem to know all about the Blitz and Evacuees and D-Day, but it’s easy to forget the hundreds of thousands of other stories that exist of that time.