The Kind Worth Killing

The Kind Worth Killing (2015)
by Peter Swanson

Imagine that you're reading a book and everything is perfectly fine and reasonably entertaining but you're pretty comfortable that you know where things are going... Then out of nowhere, things change. And then they change again, and again, and the book is suddenly much more interesting than you thought it would be. The Kind Worth Killing is another in the recent run of dark thrillers with a domestic bent (think Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train and Her) but it offers a new and unique spin on the genre and it's really quite cleverly done.

Delayed at Heathrow airport on his way home to Boston, wealthy businessman Ted meets fellow American, Lily. After several drinks, the two get talking and Ted reveals he's recently discovered that his wife Miranda is cheating on him. After a few more drinks, Ted and Lily hatch a plan to kill Miranda. After all, as Lily puts it, "Truthfully, I don't think murder is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be. Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended? And your wife, for example, seems like the kind worth killing".

As it turns out, Lily is a little more complicated than she seems and she has a very unique take on life with a remorseless eye-for-an-eye attitude and an alarming capacity for violence. More details from Lily's past emerge as the story develops and her unexpected interest in killing Ted's wife starts to make more sense. Things between Ted and Miranda are also a bit less straightforward than you might expect, with further complications and twists cropping up (and the body count mounting) with every chapter.

I felt like we needed another picture, so here's author Peter Swanson.

With each chapter, the narrative switches between characters and includes multiple flash-backs to further colour the reader's understanding of the characters and the connections between them. Just when you start to get a good feel for the direction of the story, a new piece of information is revealed and the narrative changes direction again. Some of the plot twists are less subtle than others but some of them are fabulous and the overall effect is to create a gripping, suspenseful story where you're never quite sure who are the bad guys and who are the good guys.

Lily is a great character - she's intelligent and crafty and completely without mercy. She's basically an awful person, but somehow you find yourself sympathising with Lily and hoping that things turn out well for her. The other characters are less unique, however. Ted is a very straightforward, slightly dull husband who seems a little bit gormless for someone who's meant to be a successful businessman. Miranda is basically just Jessica Rabbit brought to life and her handyman boyfriend is big, dumb and not particularly memorable.

Miranda and her boyfriend are about as complex as these two.

Ultimately though, this is a fairly minor complaint. The Kind Worth Killing is a great read. It's clever, thrilling and very enjoyable.

8/10

Euphoria

Euphoria (2014)
By Lily King

I took an introductory anthrolopology class in my first year at university. To be honest, I wasn't particularly interested in any of it and have since forgotten pretty much everything we covered in that class. I do, however, have a vague memory of Margaret Mead. Controversial and pioneering, she published ground-breaking research following her time spent living amongst the tribes of the South Pacific. From memory, a lot of this was later discredited and her research fell out of favour as new methods of anthropological study were popularised.
So I did kind of know about Margaret Mead, but I can't claim to have had any particular interest in finding out more about her. Having read Lily King's novelisation of her relationships in Euphoria, however, I am now really, really keen to learn more.

In 1933, Margaret Mead was conducting fieldwork in Papua New Guinea with her second husband (fellow anthropologist Reo Fortune) when they came across, and then began working with a third anthrologist (and soon to become Mead's third husband) Gregory Bateson. Lily King takes this real-life situation as her inspiration in Euphoria, a novel about controversial American anthropologist Nell Stone and her fellow-anthropologist husband Fen, who are conducting fieldwork in Papua New Guinea when they come across and then begin working with a third anthropologist, Andrew Bankson. Clearly, there are some fairly strong similarities between Euphoria's setup and the real-world situation between Mead, Fortune and Bateson - even the names are similar. I don't know enough about Margaret Mead to say whether the similarities end there or whether there are further plot points inspired by real-life events, but taken on its own merits as a novel inspired by Margaret Mead's life, Euphoria is a fascinating read.

Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune & Gregory Bateson in 1933.

In Euphoria, Lily King creates a completely convincing world, pre-World War 2, when there are still huge areas of the world unexplored and new information to be learned every day about the new societies being discovered. Anthropology is a science in its infancy and Nell, Fen and Bankson are passionate researchers, exploring new frontiers. It's easy to be caught up in the excitement and enthusiasm of the time and place. The descriptions of the Tam people in Euphoria are equally compelling. I can only imagine the amount of research that went into this book, but the lifestyles, relationships and customs of the Tam and their idyllic tropical home; it's all so well-written and so detailed that it all feels very real.

Each of the three main characters has a very clear personality and each has a different approach to their research. Nell is all-embracing, immersing herself completely in the local culture in an attempt to understand everything about the people. Fen is calculating and occasionally condescending, always with an eye on the prize in terms of digging out new, publishable findings (as well as more literal prizes at times). Bankson is fascinated but overwhelmed, with a suspicion that he is misunderstanding everything he observes. Each of the three also brings their own pre-conceived ideas to their research, with each looking to confirm their own theories about the people they're studying and quick to discredit anything that doesn't fit. It's a great illustration of the way that anthropological study must have worked at the time - despite the very best of intentions, it's not really possible to be a completely objective observer, particularly when you're living amongst the people you're studying.

Anthropology - actually pretty interesting.

There is a lot more to Euphoria though than anthrolopogy and history - the complex relationships between the three characters create a real tension that builds throughout the novel, with the conflict mirrored by events within the Tam tribe and within other groups in Papua New Guinea. The three anthropologists start out with the best of intentions, but then follows marital conflict, new romance, violence, inter-tribal conflict, death and the euphoria of the title. The storyline is anything but boring.

I did not expect to particularly enjoy a book about anthropology, but Euphoria was fabulous. It even made me rethink previously held opinions about the dullness of anthropology. Highly recommended.

9/10.

All My Puny Sorrows

All My Puny Sorrows (2014)
By Miriam Toews

Sometimes it's good to know absolutely nothing about a book before you read it. I'm pretty sure that I would've avoided this book like the plague if I'd realised what it was about - if you were to summarise the plot of All My Puny Sorrows, it wouldn't sound like a particularly entertaining read.

All My Puny Sorrows is the story of Yoli (a dishevelled, twice-divorced and financially struggling writer with two teenaged kids) and her sister Elfrieda (gorgeous and wealthy, a successful concert pianist in a happy and stable marriage). Having grown up as misfits in a conservative Mennonite community, Elf and Yoli may be dissimilar but they're close and become even closer as Yoli stands by her sister through Elf's consistent and repeated suicide attempts. You see, despite her fabulous life, Elf just wants to die and there seems to be nothing her family can say or do that will change her mind. Through suicide attempts including wrist-slashing, bleach-drinking, starvation and pills, Yoli refuses to give up and dedicates herself to trying to save Elf's life. This is not a cheery story. This is not something I would've chosen to read, but I'm so very glad that I did.

I wasn't exactly sure what a Mennonite was, so I googled it. Apparently these are Mennonites.

This book should be awful and dark and depressing. Elf wants nothing but to die - she is hopelessly depressed and Yoli cannot seem to help or to understand, despite her best efforts. As Yoli puts it, "Can't you just be like the rest of us, normal and sad and fucked up and alive and remorseful?". Yoli is desperate to save her sister and Elf is just desperate to die. It's an awful situation, made even worse when you learn that author Miriam Toews wrote All My Puny Sorrows as a deeply personal story following the suicides of her own father and sister. But somehow, All My Puny Sorrows is joyful.
It's sweet and likeable and even laugh-out-loud funny at times.

All My Puny Sorrows is incredibly well-written. Both Elf and Yoli (as well as the many and varied members of their family) are such wonderfully written characters that they're inherently believable and understandable. Miriam Toews writes about the relationship between the two sisters with such insight and sensitivity that you empathise with both of them - Yoli's desperation to show Elf that life is worthwhile, but also Elf's need to have Yoli understand her death wish. It's truly remarkable.

The title comes from a Coleridge poem: "I too a sister had, an only sister - she loved me dearly, and I doted on her! To her I pour'd forth all my puny sorrows"

At one point, the sisters' mother complains about a book she's reading: "Okay, she's sad! We get it, we know what sad is, and then the whole book is basically a description of the million and one ways in which our protagonist is sad. Gimme a break! Get on with it!". This is exactly what makes All My Puny Sorrows so good - one of the main characters is irredeemably sad but the book itself isn't really about that. It's also about all the other aspects of the characters' lives and the intricacies and joys of their relationships.

It's a beautifully written story that raises some very deep questions with compassion and a light touch. Highly recommended.

9/10

Unbecoming

Unbecoming (2015)
by Rebecca Scherm

We all love a great heist story, right? You know how it goes - there's a group of quirky characters who get together to plan an audacious crime. Following a series of misadventures, a whole lot of close calls and at least a couple of car chases, everything culminates in an edge-of-your-seat account of the heist itself and the daring escape from the authorities. The characters are normally fairly straightforward and we don't overly dwell on the consequences of the theft, but it's fast-paced and action-packed and exciting. It's a winning formula.

You know, this kind of thing. Delightfully entertaining.

In her debut novel, Rebecca Scherm has taken the idea of an art heist novel and turned it completely on its head. In Unbecoming, Grace is a young American woman in Paris, where she has assumed a false identity after an attempted heist ended in the incarceration of her friends back in Tennessee. After three years in prison, Riley and Alls are about to be paroled and in rapidly escalating distress, Grace waits for them to find her and extract revenge for her betrayal.

The storyline of Unbecoming doesn't follow any kind of straightforward chronological order - instead there are multiple flashbacks to various points in time, which work to explore Grace's character, her relationships and the events both before and after the crime that have led her to her current covert and lonely life in Paris.
It's also revealed very early in the novel that there has been a failed robbery, that Grace was an integral part of it and that it has landed two of the thieves in prison - this means that the robbery itself is not a peak moment of suspense in Unbecoming (after all, we already know how it turns out). Instead, it's a more steadily paced, slow-building tension as more is revealed about the characters and their histories - and the reasons why Riley and Alls might be very, very angry with Grace.

Riley & Alls - presumably they're meant to be a bit more threatening-looking than this

Grace herself is a fascinating character - she is very honestly written as a dishonest, conniving liar who adapts her personality to fit different situations and manipulates those around her to get what she wants. Grace is always changing herself and adapting her identity in a process of "unbecoming" (see what I did there?). She is a deeply flawed, dishonest character and yet it's her unflinching honesty in explaining herself that makes her strangely likable.

Throughout the novel, Grace is drawn to art in all of its forms and Rebecca Scherm writes masterfully in describing Grace's fascination with various artworks and her work in Paris repairing and preserving beautiful objects (which may or may not be stolen). Grace's relationships with these objects are more honest and heartfelt than any of her relationships with people and  Rebecca Scherm's rich descriptions in these parts really add something quite lovely to the story.

Unbecoming is not a perfect read. The constant flash-backs and flash-forwards can be disorienting and a little jarring at times. Grace is a well-developed and unique character but most of the other characters (most notably the jailed Riley and Alls) are less interesting and their motivations less convincing. These are pretty minor complaints though and overall Unbecoming is an unusual, well-constructed novel and well worth reading.

7/10

The Bone Clocks

The Bone Clocks (2014)
by David Mitchell

Full disclosure: I'm a little bit in love with David Mitchell. The Bone Clocks was one of the first books I read this year and it's still one of my favourites. Then I read the equally fantastic Cloud Atlas. Then I went to hear David Mitchell speak at the Auckland Writers Festival in May and he was articulate, inspiring and completely charming. I went out immediately and bought four books purely because he mentioned them in passing (Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, a book of Philip Larkin poems and a couple of Ursula Le Guin novels). He is one of the best novelists around and The Bone Clocks is an absolute masterpiece.


David Mitchell gesticulating wildly and generally being awesome in Auckland.

Much like Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks is uniquely structured, in six loosely-linked parts that also work independently as six quite different short stories. Each part of the novel covers a different time in the life of main character Holly Sykes, beginning in 1984 with Holly at 15 years old and ending in 2044 with Holly now an elderly woman, having lived a very eventful life.
Each part of The Bone Clocks is set in a different time, in a different part of the world and follows a different character (Holly appears in every part of the book, but only the first and last parts are told from her point of view). Not only that, but each part of The Bone Clocks is even written in a completely different genre, covering everything from YA to literary satire to hard-hitting war story to fantasy/science fiction to cautionary post-apocalyptic fable. It's an incredibly ambitious thing to do with a novel, and David Mitchell pulls it off spectacularly - not only can he write in six different genres, but he can write very, very well in all six of them.

This is totally not what we mean by "Bone Clock", but it's kind of cool anyway.

Despite the large changes in style from one part to another, The Bone Clocks reads as one very large-scale novel and never seems disjointed or awkward. Each part adds another layer to our understanding of Holly and the world around her, as well as further developing the sci-fi/fantasy storyline of the Anchorites, which subtly carries through in the background of each part before emerging in its full glory in the (somewhat controversial) fifth part, which is a fully-fledged celebration of the most out-there type of fantasy writing. There are immortal, multi-dimensional, soul-stealing time vampires and all sorts of other goings-on that you would not normally expect to find in a critically-acclaimed novel long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. It is absolutely mental and really shouldn't work (and to be fair, a number of critics have argued that it doesn't work, including the nice old lady sitting next to me at the Writers Festival) but it provides an insane, ambitious and glorious centrepiece for the book that makes it completely different to anything you've ever read before.

Apparently there are also a number of minor characters in The Bone Clocks who have appeared in earlier David Mitchell novels. I've only read two of his books so far, so can't really comment except to say that this makes me really motivated to go back and read all of these other books. It would seem that each novel on its own wasn't quite complex enough for David Mitchell, so he felt the need to intertwine elements from all of the books into each other, turning the whole thing into one enormous, ridiculous uber-novel. It's kind of a glorious project to redefine the way that books are meant to work.

It's four different books, but it's also one book. Kind of. 

Aside from the his ability to create a uniquely structured masterpiece of a novel, David Mitchell is a fantastic writer with a particular talent for characters and a remarkable way with words. Even when he's writing about dramatically misunderstood fifteen-year-olds or immortal super-villains, he does it beautifully : "Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul" or "Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you... No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same" or "Persuasion is not about force; it's about showing a person a door, and making him or her desperate to open it". The Bone Clocks is over 600 pages of perfectly constructed sentences, but the storylines are so absorbing that you don't even notice how good the writing is.

Here's another quote from The Bone Clocks - this one was so good, someone printed it out in fancy gold text.

I could talk for hours about The Bone Clocks and how much I loved this book, but I think the main reason I enjoyed it so much was that I knew absolutely nothing about it beforehand and I would hate to spoil that for anyone else. Just know that it's absolutely spectacular and you should read this book immediately.

10/10

The Girl With All the Gifts

The Girl with All the Gifts (2014)
by M. R. Carey

Zombies are so hot right now. The Walking Dead, World War Z, Warm Bodies, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - even Game of Thrones has been bringing out its undead of late. With so many zombies around, it's getting more and more difficult to find any kind of unique spin on the idea and it's always pleasantly surprising to come across something a bit different.
The Girl With All the Gifts is a zombie book, but it's also much more than that.

Everybody loves a zombie.

The story follows Melanie, an intelligent and curious 10-year-old who attends school in an underground bunker, strapped to her chair and watched over by armed guards.
For Melanie, life is pretty straightforward. She loves stories from Greek mythology and she loves Miss Justineau, the teacher who introduced her to the stories. She wishes her name was Pandora (the "Girl with all the gifts" of the title) and hopes to one day see the big city of Beacon.  
Melanie and her classmates are a lot like normal children, but there's also something very sinister going on behind the scenes - the adults of Melanie's world may hold all of the power, but they're clearly afraid of the children in their care and it doesn't look like Melanie will make it to Beacon any time soon.

It's no major spoiler to say that there are zombies in this book. The Girl With All the Gifts may be a zombie story, but it's not about zombies. It's about people and relationships - particularly the unique relationships between children and parents, and the bonds that form between very different people when they're thrown into a life-threatening situation together. It's about the way that humans cope with challenges and the way that we try to understand obstacles by dissecting and studying them. At it's heart, it's a story about humanity and how we define it - these are some pretty complex themes for a zombie story.

Melanie is a fabulous character and her smart-but-naive narration keeps things interesting as she doesn't always understand everything that happens around her. She's precocious and thick-skinned but also desperately lonely and so easy to feel for. The supporting cast of characters is equally interesting - the sweet but conflicted Miss Justineau, the aggressive scientist Caroline Caldwell (with her unshakeable belief that she'll find a cure for the apocalypse under her microscope), the exhausted man-in-charge Sergeant Parks - these are all well-developed characters who feel like real people with real back stories and understandable motivations. All of the characters continue to develop throughout the story, and none more so than Melanie as she comes to understand who she is and what's happening in the world around her.

Pandora's Box - do you really want to know what's in there?

It's a gripping, fast-moving and very readable story and it brings something special to the well-worn world of zombie fiction. While the plotline itself is not particularly revolutionary (there are some people being chased by zombies. Run, people! The zombies will eat your brains!), M. R. Carey has created a unique world peopled by fascinating, three-dimensional characters dealing with deeper questions than those usually posed in a run-from-the-zombies horror novel. He also has a bit of a gift himself, when it comes to putting words together in a very effective way - for example, "you can't save people from the world. There's nowhere else to take them" or "No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure".

It's not really a book about zombies at all. It's a fantastic novel, which just happens to have a few zombies in it.

9/10

Her

Her (2014)
by Harriet Lane

Sometimes a book really grabs you, right from the  first page. There seem to have been an increasing number of these absorbing psychological thrillers available of late - Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, Before I Go to Sleep, Unbecoming and The Kind Worth Killing, to name just a few. It's a great time to be an enthusiastic reader with a penchant for suspense. Her is another one to add to this list.

It's the story of two women - Emma (a lonely, stressed and tired mother with a toddler and another on the way) and Nina (a sophisticated artist with a seemingly perfect life) whose unlikely friendship starts out quite sweetly but gets creepier and creepier as it becomes clear that Nina has her own reasons for wanting to worm her way into Emma's life. Exactly what Nina wants from Emma remains unclear for much of the book but each chapter (these alternate between Emma's and Nina's points of view) adds a little more depth to the characters and to their story and the tension ratchets up with every page. Both women are extremely complex and well-written characters. Both are women who are psychologically unraveling in different ways and it's fascinating (and a bit disturbing) to see them both slowly falling apart.

Her is a beautifully written, dark novel that explores themes of memory, identity and revenge. It's a very convincing study of an unusual relationship between two women who could easily have become cliches (the unhappy stay-at-home-mum and the unhappy aging career woman) but instead are fascinating and unique characters. Harriet Lane is very good at capturing the everyday details of life and the frustrations felt by both women are so very believable and relatable that both Nina and Emma become real, three-dimensional people. Emma's housewife frustrations are beautifully and sympathetically observed, as she struggles with the loss of her own identity:"the vanishing of personality as everyone else's accrues".
The unresolved questions around the mysterious, chic, Prada-coated Nina create a building sense of paranoia and suspense, which drive the story along at a cracking pace throughout its relatively short 261 pages.

Apparently Nina wears Prada coats, so I assume she looks something like this. Classy.

There is one real issue with Her - it's not so much the ending itself (which is subtle, chilling and cleverly done) but the bit just before this, which finally explains Nina's motivation behind her actions throughout the book. Without giving away too many details, Her is a fast-paced, adrenaline-driven thriller that builds perfectly throughout until you are desperate to find out what happened in Nina's past to drive her behaviour - then you find out and it's all just a bit of an anti-climax. This has caused severely divided opinions among readers. A quick look on Goodreads or Amazon will show you a large number of 4- and 5-star reviews and an equal number of 1- and 2-star reviews, from readers bitterly disappointed by the book's resolution. According to one school of thought, this is a fantastic, well-constructed psychological thriller with a bad ending. The other school of thought argues that the book remains true to its realistic characters and their real-life motivations, culminating in a very realistic and true-to-life conclusion. The book itself argues for this point of view at one stage, when Nina is disappointed by the over-the-top ending of a novel, complaining that real life doesn't have such dramatic plot twists. Nina feels that real life "turns less on shocks or theatrics than on the small, quiet moments, misunderstandings or disappointments, the things that it's easy to overlook".

It's a good argument, but in my opinion, an unconvincing one. While Her is more than your run-of-the-mill page-turner, it is still a thriller - a very well-written one, with extremely distinctive and convincing characters - and it ultimately disappoints with a conclusion that fails to match the quality of plotting throughout the rest of the story. It is the only part of the book that seems patched-together at the last minute rather than intricately planned out, as if Harriet Lane hadn't thought of a motivation for Nina until she got there and then plonked in the first thing she could thought of to vaguely explain things...
 However, the rest of the book is so very good, that it remains a great read anyway - don't expect too much from those why-did-she-do-it chapters and you really will be wildly impressed.

8/10