I need to talk to someone about this book

Review of My Memories of a Future Life by RozMorris

Last night my wife went off to her local book club and I was so jealous. Not for the normal reason, that her book club is in a pub and I was missing a few pints. No, because she was going to have a chance to discuss with a peer group the book they had all read. I had just finished reading Roz Morris's novel and it has left my head in a spin, with no pub full of cronies to help out.

As a musician, author and reader of literary fiction myself, this book was potentially right up my street. I know the author is a ghost writer and her blog posts are usually along the theme of music in fiction or writing advice. But what if it was crap? What if it was over-stuffed with in-your-face musical references and a writing style like a paint-by-numbers exercise?

I needn't have worried. From the first few pages I was in comfort. Then I began to experience discomfort. Not with the prose or undeniable musical influence, but a shared discomfort with the protagonist as she battled with a debilitating, lifestyle threatening malady. As the literary themes developed it became difficult to put the book (well, ebook, I read it on my kindle) down.

The main themes that came across to me in this book were threefold: how much a life can be impacted by devotion to a single pastime or occupation; the draw of mysticism and the subtle line between belief and cynicism; and the trust that we place in others through relationships.

Being a multi-tasker myself when it comes to hobbies and occupations, I often envy those who can dedicate themselves to one particular pursuit. They achieve a level of immersion and eventual expertise that unavoidably places the 'amateur' label on others less devoted. Morris exemplifies this very well in the character of Carol, yet her very way of life is under threat as the problem with her hands begins to marginalise Carol from her own society.

The overt chicanery of the hypnotist Anthony Morrish contrasts well with Carol's therapeutic experiences of Gene, and the other-worldly setting of Vellonoweth adds sinister elements reminiscent of The League of Gentlemen and The Prisoner. This balance between intrigue, mild terror and charlatanism is perfectly maintained throughout.

Carol's friendship with Jerry is a cornerstone of her life. The Gene thing is dysfunctional but Carol clearly yearns for that excitement. Both she and Gene are pretty screwed up compared to 'normal' people. She's very reluctant to give herself, he's an enigma and the whole thing goes on above a buried nuclear power station.

Metaphors abound in this story. The reader is regularly invited to take things on face value, push them away as fake or adopt a Zen approach to the Andreq future life and Vellonoweth shenanigans.

Morris presents the whole like a crossroads where each and any direction can make sense. My Memories of a Future Life is a wondrous book.

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Locked In

Ruby’s review of ‘How I sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!’ by John Locke

In the last two months I’ve been devouring non-fiction as research to support my new project – a how-to book on novel writing, social media and independent epublishing. It’s been an interesting journey and my final port of call was the much talked about million selling method book by Mr Locke.

The first thing I do when considering a popular book is to browse the negative reviews. Locke’s knockers were scathing, claiming he didn’t really reveal his secrets, that his method wouldn’t work for most people and he was on an ego-trip. Then I took a look at the three star reviews (the ones that Locke himself discounts when he calculates the positive / negative review score of books). I sensed from those middling reviews that he was connecting with his readers. Not everyone felt they could emulate his approach but they began to give it credence. A sample of the higher scoring reviews showed genuine praise. So I One-clicked and slipped my few bucks into Mr Locke’s bulging pocketbook.

First impression? An avalanche of advertising, branding and hammering out credentials. Close to sales pitch overload. I’m a bit of a straight-laced Brit and pushy product placement presses the wrong buttons for me. However, in between the lines of Locke’s opening gambit, I sensed warmth and something akin to humility. So I read on.

It didn’t take long before I realised that I was in the hands of a master of rhetoric. That’s a positive super-power, when used for good. Locke’s entrepreneurial understanding of sales and marketing, coupled with that gift for rhetoric, are a powerful combination. He’s a rich man who has unsuccessfully tried to herd his ebook camels into sales heaven through the eye of a needle (or some more suitable metaphor). That was the first major learning. Money thrown at traditional product promotion won’t propel an indie author onto the best seller list.

Locke went on to describe how his writing polarises readers and that demarcation defines his market niche. I read that on the day that Peril received its first ever one-star review. The reader had found my anti-hero thriller unpalatable, where others had lauded it. There, I had polarisation.

Donovan Creed, Locke’s MC in his main series, isn’t a regular guy and the quirky story lines aren’t mainstream. Bells began to ring in my head as I compared the appeal of Creed with my Peril MC Ger Mayes. Locke has a series of Creed novels and that was where my hopeful comparison faltered (note to self – produce more!)

Then Locke went on to describe his GBL (Guaranteed Buyer List) and how these people have become personal friends who not only buy his new releases but are evangelical in spreading the word. I call them the Locked In. He explained his approach to social media and how he engages in a supportive social network where spam is anathema and everyone benefits, how he communicates personally and builds relationships. I thought of people I have met on Twitter, facebook, this blog and in chat forums. How they might have bought my book but I don’t know. How I don’t know if the 17,000 people holding ecopies of Peril even know that I’ve written and released The Baptist! I’m adept at the how-to aspects of social networking and epublishing, and I think I write a decent novel but, compared to Locke’s sleek, tight and smooth machine, my marketing is a pair of old lady’s wrinkled stockings.

All the way through the book Locke promotes his sound marketing plan but the major catalyst for his success, the trigger that set Locke’s snowball rolling down the hill, is his incredible rhetoric. He attributes the initial rush of sales to a series of blog posts that hit the sweet spot with potential readers and went viral. The resulting sales success fed into his business plan with all its carefully designed components and he leveraged the momentum to great effect as the Creed series rolled out.

If you are an indie author who understands product marketing, customer relationship management and the principles of persuasion, then you have to read Locke’s book. If you don’t understand some or any of those things then you have to read Locke’s book.

At the end I wanted to hug John Locke. And I’m not the kind of guy who does man hugs. I don’t think that many people will be able to fully replicate his method. Few have the skill set, determination and work rate that he displays, but there are nuggets in there for everyone and I’m thankful to the man for sharing. And I just bought my first Donovan Creed ebook.


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I just spent the weekend with a bunch of psychos!

 The Psychopath Test – Jon Ronson

I’ve always been interested in psychology, especially abnormal psychology. Anyone who’s read Peril or The Baptist will understand. When I spotted that my local bookshop’s Minority Interest for last month was The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, I had to grab it. You can’t know too much about psychopaths in my line of work.

 Ronson is also the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats (a book that led to a very strange film with George Clooney) so I was expecting quirky humour, journalistic investigation and some genuine insights. That’s exactly what I got, with a few intriguing case studies thrown in. The 286 pages flew by.

Now that I’ve finished this book I’m left slightly perplexed. Not by the book but by the subject matter. Ronson doesn’t claim to be a clinician, he’s a journalist. He examined several attitudes towards psychology in general and psychopaths in particular.

The approach of categorising mental illness into specific codes was explored and the hazards discussed. Autism, ADD and infant bi-polar disorder were identified as diagnosis growth areas that were probably stimulated by the coding, with attendant questions about the roles of pharmaceutical manufacturers.

Ronson studied and adopted the Hare PCL-R checklist as a methodology to assess several subjects (including murderers and business leaders) for categorisation as psychopaths and, following him in his discoveries, I found myself using the same approach. He himself was at first exhilarated and then somewhat dismayed at his own jumping to conclusions based upon a few days’ training. As a wannabe amateur psychologist, I was very glad that I had read the entire book in a short space of time, narrowly avoiding the making of armchair psychiatric diagnoses of my own.

At the same time he discussed the Scientologist approach that all psychology is gobbledegook. That was a real eye-opener.

All of this was informed by interviews and meetings, sometimes a series of them, with the key players. It wasn’t a desk analysis. Ronson flew around the world to meet with pivotal individuals, past and present.

The big question is whether society is led by psychopaths. We would wish that it were led by altruists but the suggestion is that key influencers in society might otherwise be categorised as dangerous were they not in a position of power and influence. Look at a few of the twenty points of Hare’s checklist: superficial charm, grandiose self-worth, pathological lying, manipulative, lack of guilt. These, if not all the points on the list, seem a fairly typical recipe for any leader that has taken major corporations through major restructuring or brought a nation into a war zone. What if society is driven by psychopathic behaviour? Ronson’s book only scratches at the surface of that question but I suspect he is describing the human condition.


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Tired old limes stand the test of time

Ruby's review of The Green Mile by Stephen King

As an author myself, Stephen King's novels might be considered essential reading. I'm ashamed to say this was a first for me, but it won't be the last. 

Like everyone, I've seen the film of The Green Mile. Unlike everyone, I've not heard the film as I was in denial about my hearing loss for the past two decades. All the films I've watched have been looked at and not heard, so my attention wandered. I remember the mouse resurrection and that's about it. My recollections of other King stories in film are similar - Carrie and the burning sports hall, The Shining and Crazy Jack with the axe.

There was an inertia I needed to overcome in even buying a Stephen King novel. I hate to walk with the crowd, Contrary Mary that I am. Eventually I picked up The Green Mile to complete a 3 for €10 offer in a shop in Dingle, Kerry. The title didn't even register with me at the time.

Then I opened the book, began to read, recognised the premise of large, unnatural John Coffey on Death Row and was hooked.

King uses Paul Edgecombe as first person narrator to great effect. The full horror of the death penalty is the overriding theme throughout. This is Death Row and execution is by electric chair so there are necessarily graphic scenes but they're gratifying without being gratuitous.

Most of the book takes place within E Block at the Cold Mountain State Penitentiary. It's claustrophobic. The sweat and tears of prisoners and guards alike flow before the reader's face and sometimes down the reader's face. Each character comes to life, and some to death, in full 3D technicolor and the story is all about their interaction. The plot is bare bones, the reader wishing that the characters would catch up with what the reader has already divined, praying for the salvation that comes for some and not for others.

Coffey's character is truly supernatural and would bring anyone close to Believing. I was simultaneously relieved and disappointed that Coffey let the gang off the hook in the end.

The wrap-up in the retirement home was very moving - to find love again at the end of the road, an absolution for wrongdoing and acknowledgement of human frailty in the face of death.

Once or twice I was perplexed by repetition at the start of new chapters but the author's afterword explains that the story was originally issued in instalments, so that's why recaps were built in.

This is the kind of book that I could read again immediately, but my wife has already swiped it out of my hand! So I'll have to go scour my bookshelves for The Shining or Carrie.

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Awfully good! The Road by Cormac McCarthy

It’s taken me several days to come back from the place that The Road took me. Oh, yes, I’ve seen the film. So there weren’t a lot of surprises. Nevertheless, I found myself as the man pushing the shopping trolley, trying to avoid cannibals and persevering in the face of fate, all for the love of a son. As a father I can completely understand that.

During the final pages of the book I found myself looking around the train carriage I was travelling in, wondering whether I could bring myself to eat any of the passengers. Not even the old lady opposite, who smelled of ham, seemed appetising. The Road had me so strongly in its grip, but I found that I was one of the good guys. I would never consume human flesh.

I think that McCarthy’s style is ideal for The Road. He eschews the punctuation that normal humans require around dialogue, mixes direct and reported speech, and joins everything together with description of setting and action that colours the canvas like a speed painter. There is just enough to set the reader thinking about what has been left unsaid and the subject matter is perfect for that minimalism. Apocalypse, infanticide, slavery, cannibalism, starvation, futility of being. It sounds grey and ashen, the devastated world that is The Road, but I want back in. Like a dream interrupted by extreme outcomes or some external stimulus, I need to get back in. The man went through so much to protect his son, a continual search for hope and safety. I was that man and I died too, but I’m praying tonight that sleep will set me back on The Road.

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Hot and sweaty!

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I very much enjoyed this book. It's quite an epic and five different first person narrators really bring the story to life. All my senses were constantly addressed with the headiness of the Congo.

When I reached the end of the family's time at the mission I was looking for the story to end, and felt dismayed that there were over a hundred pages still to go. Looking back now, I appreciate the full denouement that the author has provided.

Kingsolver's method of using the different female voices to tell the story is perfectly applied. We're able to understand the differing perspectives of the mother and the daughters. No doubt Kingsolver considered giving us the voice of the father, but he really isn't meant to be understood.

This book will have you counting your lucky stars that you live in comfort and re-opens a can of worms concerning the involvement of Europe and the USA in Africa.

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Not just any boy

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth



My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I became really wrapped in Vikram Seth's family saga and had to get it finished before my holiday as this tome is just toooo big to carry around at 1478 pages .

At the start it was a bit challenging with so many characters rushing on-stage. I had differentiating them all from each other as they seemed to be a big bag of sons (successful or ne'er-do-well), daughters (married or unmarriagable, matriarchs and patriarchs. But something dragged me in and held me there. Perhaops it was the atmosphere of post-colonial India just coming to terms with its own societal complexities and the very effective tickling of my senses by Seth's settings.

The year or so covered by this gargantuan novel isn't exactly a day-by-day account, as there are several concurrent threads, but after three hundred pages or so (the size of a regular novel) I had a firm handle on who was doing what and how the threads were likely to intersect. I think this book just wouldn't have worked as anything less than a thousand pages.

Vikram Seth manages to avoid dramatic temptation, working very much on the personalities and their interaction. There are some events of major consequence in the final quarter but no spoilers from this reviewer. I was thrown out of the flow just once or twice, particularly when two chapters ended with a similar homo-suggestive hook that turned out to be a red herring.

A Suitable Boy was been my breakfast companion for six months. I recommend this book to anyone who has the appetite and stamina for heavy reading.

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It's Tudor time - inside the head of Thomas Cromwell

Ruby's review of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2009 and caused quite a stir at the time for a couple of reasons. Mantel's book was derided by many as just another Tudor saga, nothing new, a docudrama of sorts. The other main objection was that it was unreadable. Some people cited the numerous characters named Thomas as causing confusion, others said that the overall cast was too broad. Together, these objections were enough to stop me rushing out and buying the book at the time. Then, two weeks ago, I happened across a copy and decided to put it to the test.

Now, I’ll be honest and say that I can’t get enough of the Tudor genre. Henry and his harem – divorced, beheaded, died – divorced, beheaded, survived. And the Reformation of the church in Britain remains a contentious topic, especially here in holy Catholic Ireland. In the last couple of years I’ve read and enjoyed a number of novels set in the period, including Dark Fire by C.J. Sansom and The Queen's Fool by Philippa Gregory. I might revisit my bookshelves and designate a Tudor shelf. Wolf Hall will sit proudly on it and I'm going to tell you why, but the novel has a flaw which loses one star from this reviewer. First, the good stuff.

Thomas Cromwell is the cornerstone of Mantel’s tome. Not the Roundhead fella that wreaked havoc around the place, de-feathering cavaliers, beheading kings and ruining a lot of perfectly good castles in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. That was Oliver. No, Thomas Cromwell was the guy that became Henry VIII’s right hand man.

Wolf Hall deals with the period leading up to the ecclesiastical schism between England and Rome. This might sound like dry stuff, administrative and diplomatic wranglings, but Mantel turns it into a story of relationships, everything revolving around Cromwell. She builds the fate of the country upon his character, a great structure of power rising from a man of pragmatic principles. There is violence and torture, there are executions, burnings, beheadings, but none of it is gratuitous. Physical relationships occur and are often outrageous but not explicit.

Mantel doesn’t titillate with bawdiness. She leads the reader through the same minefield (anachronism I know, but what’s the Tudor equivalent?) that Cromwell faced in order to deliver his king a divorce, a new wife and the wealth of the church. She does, however, titillate the senses with a sumptuous serving of Tudor sights, sounds, smells and tastes. To read Wolf Hall is to look through Thomas Cromwell’s eyes, to feel his frustrations and lust, to share his victories.

The narrative viewpoint is so firmly Cromwell’s that it’s almost a first person account. It took me a couple of hundred pages to realise that. Whenever Mantel refers to what ‘he’ is thinking or doing, the ‘he’ is almost invariably Cromwell, even if it is a room crowded with men. Therein lies my only negative mark for Wolf Hall. The second chapter almost had me giving up, so many male characters with similar voices in dialogue and the narrative describing what ‘he’ was thinking. I hadn’t realised that Cromwell was and would be the dominant viewpoint.

Wolf Hall left me with a lasting moral that pragmatism is the trail of breadcrumbs which leads us through the forest of life’s complexities. There was no more dangerous and confusing time in England’s history than the Reformation. Idealists found themselves turn torturer and then subsequently themselves bound to the stake as the wind of change turned and fanned the flames at their own feet. Of course, Cromwell didn’t outlive Henry and met his own sticky end, but that’s not in this book. This is a feel good story.

My parting word on Wolf Hall is that I think the title is an ingenious little device. To find out why that might be, you’ll have to read the book!


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It's such a great read, I have to share my thoughts.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It's taken me a few days to emerge from the world of Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I totally understand why this book is a prize winner.

Post-colonial Africa holds a morbid fascination for me. There are several excellent non-fiction books that describe the inexorable slide of newly independent nations into despotism and chaos. Crises of the day are tattooed into our memories by media coverage, be that accurate or otherwise, but we are often left ignorant of the post-colonial devastation of Africa. Apart from the association of a country called Biafra with acute starvation, I had little memory of Nigeria's independence or Biafra's secession. I was too young (not often that I can say that these days). Genocide was a word that I associated with other places, other times. That was until I read this book. It’s such a powerful piece of writing that I feel I’ve lived through it.

Adichie’s alternating third-person viewpoint lets the reader into the strongly differing characters of Ugwu, Olanna and Richard. Kainene is something of an enigma as we never read from her viewpoint and that suits her character very well.

Ugwu brings his latent intelligence out of the humble village and grows in the relative splendour of Odenigbo’s home. He experiences lust, envy, loyalty and self-loathing as he travels through the story. A boy with a strong moral code, he does commit offences as do all the characters, but his ethics are perhaps the purest.

Richard is self-obsessed, insipid and weak-willed. He’s doomed to always be ineffectual and peripheral. The world goes mad around him as he indulges in the delusion of being an author. It takes a great deal of life tragedy for him to find backbone. Like a fly on the wall, the corruption, murder and starvation pass him by, personally, but he observes everything up close, uncomfortably so.

Olanna gently rejects the opulence of her parents’ corrupt lifestyle and opts for a more altruistic existence with the academic idealist Odenigbo. The small sacrifices that she makes snowball into a cataclysm of starvation as the country tears itself in two and then suffers forcible reunification. Her relationship with Odenigbo mirrors the fate of their homeland.

Kainene is the strongest of them all. As the others lurch from crisis to infidelity, she is the stalwart. Protected from the emotive events by a social awkwardness, she provides a focused ending to the book.

These characters are so real that I could swear I’ve met them. They’re fallible, admirable, alluring and frustrating. Each comes into their own at different times in the story.

The settings tickled my senses. Privileged Nigerian society led me into a web of decadent iniquity. I wandered through the Nigerian gardens, sniffing their blooms, tasted Ugwu’s pepper soup, and indulged in drunken intellectual rants of an evening.

During the food shortages I found myself running to the cupboard and digging out tinned goods that had been at the back of the shelf for ages. I opened a can of mystery meat and enjoyed my corned beef and mustard sandwich with the savour of someone who has been close to starvation for three years. Or was it one hundred pages? I ran a very tight kitchen for that phase of the book.

In addition to brilliant characterisation and aromatic settings, this book also deals excellently with many tricky themes such as the apparent futility of intellectual altruism, mankind’s inherent capacity for cruelty, and racism within racism (black, white, tribal).

Adichie conveys all of this with a seamless power of observation, imparting a storm of emotion and a litany of events without the reader feeling that a story has been told. This is a story that lives.

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Spread your tiny wings

Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was a wonder to me. A wonder that I enjoyed it so much, bearing in mind that the pivotal event is handed, pre-announced, to the reader. The rest of the book circles around this event, delivered mostly in two narratives that move in towards it, away from it and then meeting back up at the end. I gave Testimony by Anita Shreve a low score and that followed a similar format. Why then is Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates a more enjoyable read?

I found the author’s style off-putting for the first few pages. This was the first of her books that I’ve read and the constant use of dashes for pauses and italics for emphasis nearly made me put it down. I’m glad that I didn’t. It soon became a book that I looked forward to picking up every chance I had.

Krista Diehl’s first person narrative is very touching. She recalls events over the course of several years, admitting her own naivety and showing how her intuition developed into perception during that time. Her absolute, unwavering faith in and love for her father is something that any man could only hope for. That man is on a clear path to doom and Oates tells the reader on the first page that Eddy Diehl will die in a hail of police bullets. What is gripping is the emotional turmoil the characters endure as the Diehl family is ripped apart by infidelity and false accusation. Sections of narrative are introduced e.g. a section from Eddy Diehl’s perspective during his initial police interrogation, that give valuable insight into his state of mind and the mistakes he makes.

Oates uses concentric story circles of two men, Eddy and Delray, hell-bent on self-destruction through their attraction to the ill-fated Zoe who ultimately betrays them both and leaves a poison legacy of suspicion. Outside of these two men run the stories of Eddie’s daughter, Krista, and Delray’s son, Aaron. Krista is described through her own thoughts and words. Aaron is described more in the physical sense initially. His dominant presence is tangible and Krista’s attraction to him seems terrible but logical.

As Aaron becomes older, his persona turns into Krull and this character comes to life through his actions and reflections. As he, in effect, loses his father, the character becomes more sympathetic and he moves into a similar space as Krista. Both he and she have lost their fathers and Jacky DeLucca’s confession brings them together years later. This reunification is also telegraphed early on by Oates, giving credence to what otherwise might seem an improbable turn of events.

I did have a problem with the Jacky DeLucca character. When Krista meets her for the first time, Jacky’s dialogue is very heavy and I felt like the story was being delivered through her mouth. The same with her confession at the end. She seemed too eloquent and I just wanted her to stop. It was obvious that the killer was one of Zoe’s murkier lovers and Jacky’s lengthy disclosure didn’t sound like a woman dying of liver cancer. That’s my only complaint.

To end on a high point, this has to be the first book I’ve read that ends with a sex scene and well done it is too. The requiting of eighteen years of lust is a fitting climax and it’s bittersweet. I’ll definitely try more from this author.

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Da Chen - you added colour to the grey world of Mao

A memoir giving fascinating insight into the changes in rural China during and after Mao's reign. The story flows well and couples with the aspects of life that appear unique to western readers but were commonplace to tens of millions of Chinese. With new and breathtaking subject matter it is difficult to be objective about the writing. The irresistible rythm seemed to drop off in the last quarter and loses the fifth star from my review.

Colours of the Mountain by Da Chen 4 stars


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