BOOK CLUB
THIS MONTH, WE SPOTLIGHT TWO FAMOUS NOVELISTS – AND ONE WHO’S BEEN HIDING HIS LIGHT UNDER A BUSHEL. TOGETHER, THEY OFFER A FEAST.
THE BLIND LIGHT
Stuart Evers, Picador, $39.99
Don’t be deceived by the straggling opening pages – Evers doesn’t believe in getting his trumps out first. The drama begins when the narrative backtracks to 1959. In the 1950s, British males did two years of National Service. Most went to overseas conflicts in Malaya, Cyprus and Korea. And, for the folks at home, there was no sense of security. The threat of the hydrogen bomb created a hiatus for young people. They didn’t study or choose a career, or save, or plan to marry, have children, or pay off a mortgage. They expected to be dead in a few years’ time and so… they partied. We meet Drummond, working class. At the National Service base, he spies a stranger about to be fleeced by card sharks. He steps in. The stranger, James Carter, happens to be the son of a VIP, who quietly ensures that neither of the two young men will be in harm’s way. Due to his behind-the-scenes intervention, they’re assigned to a hush-hush group in the English countryside. The task is to prepare for the aftermath of a nuclear attack. So scary that Carter builds his own luxury nuclear shelter. Drummond, disillusioned by political failures, quits his job at the Ford factory and becomes a dairy farmer. Their respective wives could hardly be more different, but the friendship lumbers on. Big drama at the end
– I didn’t know whose side I was on. Through the two families, we see changes in Britain that bode ill for the future, but humour and irony break through the sadness and we float away from the story deeply satisfied.
MOONFLOWER MURDERS
Anthony Horowitz, Century, $32.99
Horowitz’s father stashed away a fortune and no one could find it when he died. Why am I telling you this? Because it jolted him into making his own way in the world, and he did it by writing spy thrillers for teenage boys, which were (and still are) a huge success. Out of this experience came the opportunity to write Foyle’s War, a TV series which showed a less-than-heroic Britain in World War II and after. His next exploit was to write two Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Then, the trust in charge of Ian Fleming’s estate invited him to write two James Bond thrillers. Horowitz found his own voice with Magpie Murders, which featured amateur sleuth Susan Ryeland. Moonflower Murders is her second case. There’s a novel tucked within the main novel and, if you take my advice, you’ll read the inner novel first. It’s easier that way. Ryeland, an editor who has retired to Crete and owns a hotel there, comes to Suffolk to find a woman who’s vanished and, fortuitously, solves an earlier murder guided by the manuscript of the inner novel. I sat up to the wee hours to finish this. Horowitz is a phenomenon not to be missed and it’s no wonder he was awarded an OBE.
THE PULL OF THE STARS
Emma Donoghue, Picador, $32.99
Donoghue wrote Room 10 years ago, and it was a sensation both as a novel and as a film. Her fiction since has been a lot less harrowing. Now, she returns to themes that stir up indignation. Dublin in the midst of the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 had a public hospital with a special maternity ward reserved for patients with the virus. Here, Nurse Power works with almost no help and is badgered from time to time by an insufferable nun whose attitude is that babies of unmarried mothers are better off dead. One patient is having her 12th child; another must return to a husband who beats her; a third will lose her baby because of ignorance and almost no resources; a fourth is little more than a slave. Nurse Power takes a much-needed break and goes up on the roof. It’s an icy-cold winter night, but what happens there changes everything… Donoghue wrote this before our own pandemic erupted, yet it reverberates with the sorrows and strengths that we are seeing today.