Inglorious

Inglorious
By Joanna Kavenna
Henry Holt & Company
Reviewed by BadgerDaddy

Before you know anything else about Inglorious, you know that it's beautifully written. From the first page, I admired the writing. The vocabulary is full and expansive, the style flows and you're sucked in. The writing is, in short, excellent.

The story follows Rosa Lane, a journalist who decides, seemingly on a whim, to chuck in her job and find "elightenment." Soon, she has lost her boyfriend and her home, is still seeking some elusive knowledge and seems lost without the traditional anchors most of us have in life. The comfort blankets of routine, work, friends, all gone, and with them her recognition of where she sits in society and the community.

Inglorious is not without problems. The main one is, it's too damn clever. There are many, many references to philosophy, literature, a million references it seems. I was left feeling that some of the book's depth must be flying past me; I'm not a thicky by any means, and it's not often that I get this feeling when reading, but I didn't like it one bit. I almost felt it could have been the author flexing her muscles and showing the world how clever she is, because for a character to be so utterly self absorbed and wrapped up in her own intellect without the practical nous to go and get a job will leave most readers shouting at the pages, and not in a good way. Rosa, our hero, is without work for an indeterminate length of time, and this is really frustrating as a reader. I felt the same reading Prozac Nation, I must admit; I felt like crying out "Stop moaning and get on with it!" instead of feeling any empathy with the character.

I digress.

Underneath Rosa's inner wailing is the map of her breakdown; in its way, Inglorious is a Catcher In The Rye for the modern woman. And there's part of its problem; with its innate cleverness and seemingly being the diary of a breakdown seen from within, where is its target audience? I don't know; I know there are readers out there who will take far, far more from this book that I have, but I don't know how the book will find them. Mind you, they found Catcher in the Rye just fine…

There's a danger for a book like this, that it might end up pushed in bookshops as some kind of chick lit, when it's so much more than that. Inglorious is poorly described on the jacket of the reader's copy as "A darkly comic novel about a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, set against the backdrop of a London awash with faithless lovers, cutthroat strivers and so-called friends." Well, I didn't see a huge amount of dark humour or any other kind, and as for the so-called friends… I think the copywriter for the jacket blurb may have just skimmed the book, as Inglorious is the story of a pretty deeply selfish (and I don't mean that in a negative way) behaviour from a woman who can't begin to deal with grief.

One of the more annoying facets of the book is when the author introduces some really rather significant incident a week after it's happened. You'll be reading what you assume is minutiae, when a spanner is thrown in the works. For example, Rosa is accused of twatting her ex boyfriend's new woman at a party recently, and it had not been mentioned at all in the text. Okay, it was described as "of no consequence" or similar by Rosa, but when it is recounted it is clearly of great significance. That's kind of annoying, like at the start of Lethal Weapon 2 when you discover that Riggs can dislocate his shoulder when he feels like it. Not mentioned in the first movie at all, but right at the start of the second…

Inglorious is worth a read, no question; I didn't like it, but I certainly admired it. The author has written a non-fiction book (The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule) which I'm going to go and hunt down; I have a feeling Kavenna is a superb non-fiction author. At some point in the not-too-distant future, she's going to write some stunning fiction too, but for now, Inglorious is just too smart for its own good.

Majestic Descending

Majestic Descending
By Mitchell Graham

St. Martin's Press
Reviewed by BadgerDaddy

Some books scream "Take me on holiday! I won't let you down!" Well, Majestic Descending does just that – unless you're going on a cruise, that is.

Atlanta attorney Katherin Adams is cruising on the Ocean Majestic liner with her bezza mate, and she meets a very nice man, they become friends, she has trust issues, they snog, blah blah blah… In the meantime, a scientist has solved problems linked with stem cell reproduction that could see untold medical advances and help all mankind. Of course, they're on the same boat, and some unscrupulous characters are after the good doctor's work, and they're willing to do anything to get it. Anything at all.

Katherine travels from cruise ship to Europe and back to the States for a showdown to uncover who is behind the professor's murder, as she digs deep to find the bad guys – and save her own life.

Majestic Descending genuinely surprised me in places, and above everything it's a lot of fun. It's not much apart from a lot of fun, but that's not a bad thing. The author has an eye for pace, and his dialogue's not too shabby either. There is an occasional lack of detail, or a key event hinges on some very flimsy evidence or turn of phrase and you're almost lost as a reader, but he just about keeps the runaway train that is Majestic Descending on track.

For an action-based thriller, the main character is surprisingly well-drawn and with a strong woman leading the line, this should appeal comfortably to both sexes and all inbetween.

This is a book you'll likely see everywhere on your daily commute, it has that kind of broad appeal and it's an easy and pleasurable read. Like many action thrillers though, you get the feeling that it's eminently filmable, almost as is; if any producers are thinking about that, please note what I'm about to write: Poseidon and Speed 2.

Just don't.

Mitchell Graham clearly has some talent as, for all their simplicity, these books are tough to write and Dan Brown for one could learn a thing or two from Graham's peak-and-trough plotting; so many post-Da Vinci Code books have gone for the same kind of incessant peak-peak-peak action/cliffhanger approach. Graham has the confidence and skill to bring us to the edge of excitement, then ease off and the plunge us over the edge three chapters later. Majestic Descending is a damn fine summer read – but get it before the nights draw in…

Bane of My Existence, Part the Second: Style Over Substance

By Badgerdaddy

Often, if I reveal to the world that I think, say, Dan Brown has very little talent – if any – but is a very clever writer, people look a little baffled. Same for James Patterson; really, the man has nothing going for him except for one simple talent. Both writers share this talent, and it is a peach. I bet their agents love them; I wonder if either writer actually knows they are doing it though.

They write in such a way as to distract the reader from their writing. It’s very simple, and it leaves the reader feeling thrilled. And not, in my opinion, in a good way. How do they do this? It’s so, so simple: Short chapters.

How many chapters does The Da Vinci Code have? 106, including epilogue. The edition I have next to me is 593 pages long. Divide the whatsit by the thing and you end up with an average chapter length of 5.59 pages per chapter. That sounds like a fair amount, doesn’t it? It’s not though. Count in huge chunks of dead space at the beginning and ends of chapters, and you start to worry about the future of trees on the planet. So many of the chapters are two to three pages, and every chapter in the book ends on a cliffhanger.

Patterson does exactly the same; read his Alex Cross novels, and every fucking chapter… The first few chapters, you’re gripped; the second batch, not so much; the third, you’re feeling insulted that this writer is too lazy to build plot or suspense with character and depth but instead resorts to the kind of sensationalist writing that many of us turn our noses up at in the so-called ‘red-top’ newspapers in the UK, or the National Enquirer in the US. It’s cheap, and requires no patience. It’s the equivalent of painting by numbers – they provide the canvas and a cheap set of brushes and paints and we add everything else.

Patterson and Brown both use this short chapter so we, as readers, don’t look too closely at what we’re reading; they can be super-lazy because we’re almost ripping the pages, we’re turning them so fast. It’s effective, sure – but only for about five minutes. Some of the cliffhangers are utterly forced, some are red herrings, some are just crap.

Sometimes, a short chapter can be effective. Barry Gifford’s The Wild Life of Sailor and Lula leaps, laughing, to mind; it’s a collection of six short novels following one couple through their lives, and sometimes incidental characters. It’s exceptionally filmic in its form, if not in its content (two of the books have been filmed – Wild At Heart and Perdita Durango), but I would never describe the content of the books as being terribly cinematic, therefore it’s hard to view the stories with the same cynicism I reserve for Brown and Patterson, whose books often read like screenplays with the directions taken out. It’s like they planned to sell the movie rights before they even finished the first chapter. John Grisham’s early stuff read exactly the same way (though without the terrifically short chapters) until I suspect even he got bored of churning out yet another ‘hot-shot young lawyer learns the ropes and sees things no-one else has despite them being better educated and with a huge team of researchers to back them up’ kind of story. His sales figures may be down from the heady days of The Firm, but I bet his dignity and self-respect as a writer are soaring. Of course, his enormous bank balance from writing pure tat doesn’t hurt. My problem is not with tat – if I didn’t like reading tat, I would never have read Patterson, Grisham or Brown, after all – it’s with insulting tat.


Stephen King also uses short chapters where necessary, or breaks a long chapter up into digestible chunks while keeping an overall linearity – Salem’s Lot is a great example of this, as many short tales are interwoven into the story of a town’s death.

I like authors to build suspense because I give a flying fuck about a character and what happens to them. I like my stories to have peaks and troughs, not just peak after peak after peak. If The Da Vinci Code was an ECG readout, they’d have sedated the fucker by now. There is little skill in writing in such a way, and certainly very, very little talent, but it is clever – after all, they’ve both sold about a billion books and I’ve sold nonel.

And to follow on from last issue’s feature, the cover quotes on Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code are from Robert Crais, Clive Cussler and Harlan Coben. Oh, and there’s one from the New York Times, so that’s alright then.

Bane of My Existence: Author Quotes

By BadgerDaddy

I love books, I love reading, the whole experience, from finding a great second-hand bookshop to the kind of conversations those same bookshops encourage. The smell, the feel, everything about books and reading is, on the whole, positive.

Except one thing.

It might only be me that gets mad about it though. Bear with me here. This could be completely irrational but… I doubt I’m the only one.

Author quotes. They annoy me beyond belief. You know the ones I mean; on the front or back cover of a paperback, at the top or bottom of the page. A quote, bigging up the book in your hands, not from a professional critic/reviewer, but from… another author.
This annoys me on so many levels it’s hard to know where to start. I’ve worked as a reviewer, as a paid critic, and I always tried to remember one thing, a rule I passed on to all my staff then and since: always review something as if you’ve paid for it. As if it’s your seven or 15 quid from your own pocket, as though that’s the only book or DVD you can afford that week or month. I know very few other reviewers use that as their base criteria, so I ignore reviewers when it comes to… Well, everything. But I can see how positive quotes can help in the perception of a buyer, when you see nine or ten people have really loved the book it might sway you.

But author quotes… Why? Why are they there, and how do they get there?
Honestly, I have no idea. In some cases, it’s because the authors are friends; take Zadie Smith, for example, part of London’s ‘Literati’ and friends with every highbrow author out there. Smith and Dave Eggers seem to swap quotes like they’re saliva between horny teenagers. Is it reliable? Is it fuck.

Richard Laymon was an author who had some success in England, and every one of his books has a quote from Stephen King on it. Every one. I know for sure that didn’t add to his success – he’s a prime example of the most powerful tool marketers can never abuse: word of mouth.

So why did King do that? I’m guessing he wanted his friend to succeed, as he had been largely ignored and had some talent. His books were fun, and King is no dummy; he doesn’t put his name on shit. Unless you count his books from about 1988 to 1998, that is.
Do marketers really believe that an author’s endorsement will make someone buy the book? Are they that stupid? In some cases, it has made me put the book down and not buy it. Dan Brown’s endorsement, for example, will always result in a big, fat NO SALE sign coming down in my eyes in the style of Looney Tunes.

What marketers and reviewers need to remember is that we, as readers, remember. We only need to get stiffed once and we won’t go back. The quote whore authors need to remember this as well; if they declare that this is ‘the page-turning, rip-roaring read of the year, it’ll make your eyes bleed with joy and then you’ll weep milk to heal them’, we read it and discover it’s shite, then that’s their credibility at stake. And it is exactly that serious; in the author-reader relationship, trust is everything.

I used to respect Dennis Lehane and admire his writing, but he’s become a quote whore too. Once he hit the big time and started shifting big numbers, his name started appearing on everything. “The greatest washing-up liquid of the summer!” “The greatest muffin of our times!” Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but you know what I’m talking about.
It’s incredibly common. Even some publications are quote whoring; in the UK, if you see a quote on the front of a book from the Daily Mirror, the Daily Star or The Sun, don’t touch it with a barge-pole. Why? Those newspapers don’t have book reviewers, the quote has been bought. Maybe not with cash, but bought nevertheless. Perhaps the author is a columnist for the newspaper, or worse, a friend of a columnist for the newspaper. These quotes are that cheap, but we’re not – right?

It’s degrading for all of us, from the author of the book, to the quote whore on the cover, to me, the buyer and reader. It always, always makes me feel like the publisher thinks I’m a fucking idiot, and there’s no way I’m giving money to someone who treats me like a fool.