Author: August

Tamburlaine Must Die was far too short. Louise Welsh has written a racy, exciting story of sex, jealousy, and revenge, and it was so short and simple as to be almost entirely insubstantial. Better to call it a novella, or a perhaps a longish short story (given the large type) than a proper novel. Christopher Marlowe came properly alive with a lively and distinctive voice, and I enjoyed him as a narrator. Welsh’s prose has the flavour of a proper Elizabethan dialect, if not exactly the form. The only book that I can think of to compare it to is Leon Rooke’s Shakespeare’s Dog, and just like in life, Kit Marlowe is wonderful, but he doesn’t quite sing like Shakespeare. I was more willing to accept Marlowe as a believable character than I expected, but the fact that all the major characters but one are major players in Elizabethan life… Continue Reading →

In John MacLachlan Gray’s sophomore effort at historical fiction, we are once again presented with journalist Edmund Whitty as our protagonist (one hesitates to label him a hero), roaming London in search of solvency, a good story, and now his dead brother’s secret. Gray’s England is less complex in White Stone Day than it was in The Fiend in Human, but no doubt the reader is meant to fill in some of the blanks based on information supplied in that previous novel. In exchange for this less fully-drawn England, Gray gives us a much more interesting and complicated mystery (or rather, criminal endeavour, as there is very little mystery as to who is doing what to whom; what remains to be revealed is if the guilty parties meet justice, and how) and characters with much more depth and psychological realism. At three hundred and thirty-nine pages, White Stone Day most… Continue Reading →

I had never heard of Georges Simenon before seeing this book in my local used book concern, but I’ve lately been on the lookout for detective or mystery or crime fiction (I’m unclear as to how the genres break down, I just know something that I like when I read it) since reading The Big Sleep and John MacLachlan Gray’s The Fiend in Human last year. The blurbs on the back cover led me to believe that I’d be getting a kind of Belgian genius of the genre, Chandler meets Sartre as it were. But Luc Sante’s introduction, stressing the volume of Simenon’s output over the quality (more than four hundred books!) actually made me a bit worried. If I’d wanted to read Stephen King, I would have purchased Stephen King. My worries were quickly proven to be unfounded. How could a man knock off a book like this in… Continue Reading →

I wasn’t quite able to finish this, my sixty-ninth book, in 2008. New Year’s Eve celebrations tripped me up with forty pages to go. Still, I regret nothing, except perhaps that various circumstances prevented me from giving this novel the attention it deserved during most of the month (!) that it took me to read it. (The saddest part of that being that I probably only spent about ten days with the book over that period, being distracted or busy or suffering from the holiday blues or whatever the rest of the time.) Like with most of Nabokov’s books, I finished The Gift feeling like I’d just experienced something profound without necessarily being able to identify, let alone understand, what that something was. On the surface the book is pretty straightforward; in the mid-1930s an impoverished Russian émigré poet, the son of an adventerous and quite dead minor noble, moves… Continue Reading →

I must admit that despite being a big, big fan of Fleming’s Bond series, I was a little disappointed by The Man with the Golden Gun. The opening was very promising: a brainwashed James Bond walks into Secret Service headquarters and attempts to assasinate M (whose name we finally learn, the biggest shock in the whole Bond series). Fleming is always at his best when Bond is on the ropes, a condition more frequent in the novels than the films. Once he meets up with Scaramanga in a Jamaican whorehouse and gets back into himself, the novel falls apart a bit. Mostly it’s due to how poorly Fleming handles American dialogue. Though Scaramanga is Catalan (Catalonian?) originally, he spent significant time in the United States and speaks in an American accent, and with Fleming’s notion of mid-60’s American slang. And Fleming really, really sucks at American vernacular. Scaramanga is a… Continue Reading →