Tag Archives: novel review

A PDR Lindsay Novel Review of ‘A Matter of Justice’ by Charles Todd

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ISBN: 978-0-06 -123359-3

Amazon BUY LINK: A Matter of Justice: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery (Inspector Ian Rutledge Mysteries)

Charles Todd is an American mother and son writing team. Inspector Ian Rutledge is their Scotland Yard inspector who stars in a series of novels set in the 1920s. ‘A Matter of Justice’ is the latest novel in the series.

I always have reservations about American authors who claim to love England. England is the first error, it’s the United Kingdom, usually shortened to the UK, or Britain please. Saying England insults the Scots, Irish and Welsh who are part of the nation! Such authors say they visit frequently to see the places they write about. I sigh and expect all the usual errors, the characters speaking American English, with ‘gotten’ and ‘likely that’, ‘real good’ and ‘ten after two’ thrown in along with other Americanisms which, in reality, in Britain, the always well bred and educated Main Character would not say. Americans never wholly grasp the class system and the absolute horror with which a well educated gentleman would regard certain words, ‘gotten’ being one and ‘likely’ instead of probably being another.

However I hoped I wouldn’t find too many research howlers in this series. Mother and son have quite a following and the books are now available in the British Commonwealth. British readers are not kind to those foreigners who dare to write about ‘their’ country and make a muck up of it. Mercifully there were only a few basic errors, a muddle about British money being one of them. In the 1920s the pound sterling was not decimalised. 100 pennies did not a pound make. The boy asking for ten pence was a 2010 time traveller. Threepence or sixpence he might have asked for because there were coins for those amounts, a threepenny bit and a sixpence, but no coin for ten pennies, pennies not pence. And it is a strange amount to ask for in 1920. Giving him thrupence for bringing a message would be more appropriate, although running a message for the police used to be thought a duty to be done without reward.

The plot is ingenious. There are several threads, the Boer war episode twenty years earlier, the mysterious machinations of Mr. Evering on the Scilly isles in 1920, the shadow which events during the Boer War and the Great War cast over the characters, and of course the death of a wealthy financial advisor who turns out to have been universally hated.

Inspector Rutledge, as is the way of the main character in popular fiction, has a notable foible. His is the result of the Great War where he had to shoot one of his own soldiers. He has not reconciled himself to this and so is ‘haunted’ by the soldier, at times of stress he hears his voice. An interesting take on the more usual alcohol, racial or marriage problems of fictional police inspectors.

Perhaps in other novels Rutledge is more decisive, but here he is not, and I did wonder why he worked alone, without his own team, putting up with the obvious obstructions of the local inspector, Inspector Padgett, as he slowly unravels the history and then the murder. But the plot gallops along and the authors weave all the threads together so that the reader is left with a sense of the horrors past and present and yet to come, a fitting conclusion to the complex plot. On the whole ‘A Matter of Justice’ is a good historical murder mystery and yes, I would read others in the series.

pdr lindsay

The Children’s Book

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by A. S. Byatt

A Novel Review by Victoria Bennett,
author of Dot & Charlie
(A Comedy About Love, Sexism, and Infidelity)

Hardcover: 688 pages; Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (October 6, 2009); Language: English; ISBN-10: 0307272095; ISBN-13: 978-0307272096; Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 2.1 inches

You can buy A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book at Amazon

The novel The Children’s Book, by British author A. S. Byatt, has as its title a misnomer—it is emphatically not a novel for children.  As with many of her books, it is voluminous and compendious at the same time, both long—the American hardback edition runs to 675 pages—and concise in terms of all it expresses and seeks to portray.  The book is not one for the faint-of-heart, either, when it comes to the matters it discusses.  Like Dickens in maintaining at length a fictional world which enchants, instructs, and sometimes terrifies, Byatt yet cannot be charged, as Dickens often has been (with a certain amount of justice) with being sentimental.  It is not an easy read, but it is a wondrous and compelling one.

The book is “about” the Wellwood family and their host of friends and acquaintances during the historical periods ranging from the late Victorian through Edwardian to Georgian (of George V), from the social optimism of the last of the Victorians to the great despair and anguish wrought across England and the Continent by the pain and struggle of the First World War, and the stirrings of fascism in the 1920′s.  The many Wellwood children and the other children as well whose lives are pictured in the vignettes of the progressive chapters are both the celebrities and the victims of well-intentioned parents such as Olive Wellwood, the main mother-figure, who is also a famous writer of fairy tales, a form very popular with children and adults alike during this time period.  But, as Olive, her husband Humphrey, and the other adult artistic, political, and social celebrities know perhaps subconsciously, and find for a fact in retrospect, children are not merely subjects for societal and artistic experiments, but growing people in their own right.

The Children’s Book is wonderfully personal and suspenseful in its appeal to the reader’s emotions, playing on both one’s hopes and fears for the characters with true mastery, and rewarding close attention to “the facts of the case” with a better understanding of how people work en masse as well as singly.  The reader threads her way through secondary subjects from bimetallism to socialism to women’s suffrage to Peter Pan to Victorian sexual habits to puppeteers.  Old secrets become new revelations and vice versa.  Sketches of real historical figures mingle with those of the fictional characters to add a strong dimension of verisimilitude, which in turn makes possible for the reader a “willing suspension of disbelief.”  As well, it provides a well-based notion of the sexual lives, loves, and mores of various types of historical characters, and replaces our all-too-frequent notion of the people of that era as only restrained and repressed with a good idea of what lay under the repressions and restrictions of the time.  In short, the novel is a world to live in, and its close leaves one both sad and anxious for the characters, who do not yet anticipate the advent of World War II.  Yet it remains a prize fiction as well, a moving kaleidoscope of images of beauty and terror.

To those faithful readers of Byatt who are familiar with her quartet of novels about a fictional 20th-century woman, Frederica Potter (The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman), this novel will appeal for its complexity of psychological insight into what helps build a person’s character.  To those who prefer Byatt at her mythical, magical best from such volumes of fairy tales as The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye and the fanciful stories from Elementals, the intermixture of fairy tale motifs with the modern twists and turns of the frame story in The Children’s Book will produce the same overall feeling of basic truth to psychic, yet storybook reality as her more thaumaturgically based novels do.  Alternately, it will suit those who prefer the Booker Prize-winning Byatt of the novel Possession (which combines fantastic features with fictional and period history and a generous dollop of academic satire) and the playful Byatt of the tale “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” (a deliciously wayward combination of fantasy and academic satire from the book of the same title); these readers will find themselves at home here with her wit and sagacity.  Finally, to those to whom Byatt is a new experience, this book should have the ability to fix itself in memory as a genuine picture of the combined moral earnestness and passion of the late Victorians, and of the emotional distance with which their immediate descendants found it often necessary to greet their pet projects while engaging in pursuits and enthusiasms of their own.  This novel is developed and handled with a precision and lightness of touch that belie the intricacy and excellence of the picture presented, and should be a welcome addition to the library of anyone who likes to read and re-read a complex book.

Conflict of Empires, a PDR Lindsay Novel Review

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by Sam Barone

Century, February 2010, £12.99, pb, 618 pages, ISBN:978-1-8460-5610-9.

Buy in Canada

Buy in the UK

This novel, sequel to ‘Dawn of Empire’ and ‘Empire Rising’is set in the early Bronze Age. City state, Akkad, on the banks of the Tigris river, is now a wealthy city state facing the threat of conquest. ‘Conflict of Empires’ is an action and adventure story, a kind of Bronze Age Western, and the novel stands alone, you don’t have to read the first books, although it would probably be a richer read if the reader had.

Main character and hero Eskkar, with his wife, Trella, once slave and now mistress of spies and intelligence, face the growing might of city state, Sumer, which aims to control all the Tigris and the region’s other city states. Eskkar, of course, is a mighty warrior in the style of Alexander the Great, defeating the enemy even when outnumbered six to one. He is a likeable hero, with the usual dark secrets, and a band of reliable officers whose loyalty is without question. Trella and her women have a voice at all his councils and Trella’s advice is sought and listened to. I wondered about the influence of the women, the spy network, the making of the map, and the measuring of distances. Nice touches, but I’d have liked an author’s note with the research sources, and his reasons for thinking them feasible.

The plot is one of battles and spies, for the Akkadians refuse to sit at home and wait for Sumer to attack them. Eskkar and Trella prepare for war and then take the battle right to Sumer. It’s a rollicking adventure and yarn, a light enjoyable read, but this is not a period I am familiar with, and I do not feel any more familiar now I’ve read the novel. For me there was an absence of historical setting, I garnered little feeling of place or culture. We could have been in ancient Egypt or ancient Greece. In fact, as often happens in historical novels, the book revealed more about the author’s culture and his beliefs than those of Akkad. Surely the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan loomed large in the author’s mind as he wrote, and some of the characters do seem to think in ‘modern’ concepts.

For people who like historical novels to be about battles, blood and gore, and the hero winning through impossible odds, ‘Conflict of Empires’ is a must read novel. I’d certainly recommend it to while away the time on a long flight.

pdr lindsay, www.rowanlindsay.co.nz