Book review: Transcription by Kate Atkinson

Transcription
By Kate Atkinson
Doubleday Canada

Anyone who follows my book reviews knows that Kate Atkinson is right at the top of my list of favourite authors. I loved her Jackson Brodie mysteries – please may she write another one! – but her other novels have also ranked way up there. Life After Life was such an incredible achievement, that I am still in awe of it five years after reading it. A God In Ruins was nearly an equal accomplishment. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, captured my imagination immediately and I’ve got a permanent and recurring note to self to reread it and every one of her books. So yes, I’m a fan.
Atkinson’s latest novel is Transcription, the story of Juliet Armstrong, a young woman who is mysteriously recruited into the secret service in London during the Second World War. She finds herself responsible for transcribing conversations between a British agent who is posing as the leader of a group of German sympathizers.
It goes even further when Juliet is asked to become a spy. She leaps right in, going undercover as Iris Carter-Jenkins, an alter identity who is tasked with infiltrating an upper-class friend group who may or may not be on Germany’s side.
Much of the novel feels like a lark — an adventure that Juliet has been thrust into, with little experience or training. She manages to scrape by – barely – but gets herself into plenty of pickles along the way.
Juliet is a literalist and Atkinson has some fun with language via Juliet’s thoughts. When Juliet overhears the question, “Cat’s got your tongue?” She thinks to herself: What an awful idea. … How would the cat get it – by accident or design?
Much of the novel takes place in Juliet’s inner dialogue, and that’s a fine place to be. Juliet is quite hilarious at time and she’s both clueless enough and intelligent enough to make the story interesting.
And when the story comes around to serious business – the business of murder and treason – it makes a very satisfying read indeed.
The book opens in 1981, when Juliet as an older woman has returned to London. She’s been hit by a car and is reflecting on her life. A couple of snippets from that early chapter reveal Atkinson’s wit and style.
“It was all such a waste of breath. War and peace. Peace and war. It would go on forever without end,” Juliet thinks to herself. Later, she thinks: “There was to be a royal wedding. Even now, as she lay on this London pavement with these kind strangers around her, a sacrificial virgin was being prepared somewhere up the road, to satisfy the need for pomp and circumstance.”
Atkinson based the novel on an MI5 document describing a wartime spy, who lived a regular life as a bank clerk. MI5 released documents including transcriptions of the spy’s conversations that made Atkinson curious about who might’ve typed them. Thus Juliet was born. And readers everywhere will benefit from that.
Atkinson will be appearing in Vancouver on Saturday, September 29 at 7:30 p.m. at St. Andrew’s Wesley United Church, 1022 Nelson Street. Tickets are available through the Vancouver Writers Fest.
Tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book review: Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

Warlight
By Michael Ondaatje
McClelland & Stewart

The latest novel by Michael Ondaatje returns to the Second World War, a time he brilliantly illuminated in The English Patient, his 1992 novel which this summer won the Golden Man Booker Prize as the best of all Booker Prize-winning novels.
While The English Patient took place in Italy and North Africa, Warlight takes place in the decade just after the war in London. Two teenagers, Rachel and Nathaniel, are left behind by their parents, who move mysteriously to Singapore. They’re left in the care of a man they call The Moth, a man with an interesting cast of friends who take the children under their wing.
Later, their mother returns, under even more mysterious circumstances, with no sign of their father. As Nathaniel grows up, he tries to piece together his past to make sense of his teenage years.
Warlight is a complex story, in which nothing is quite as it seems. It’s a mystery, a spy story, a coming-of-age story and a tale of family bonds, but it’s not a novel that easily fits into any of those boxes. Ondaatje takes readers into the shadows of memory and time, occasionally bringing us into the conversation, but at other times leaving the details to our imaginations.
Warlight is beautifully written novel with a story that is exquisitely told by Ondaatje.
Tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book review: The Possible World by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

The Possible World
By Liese O’Halloran Schwarz
Simon and Schuster

This novel brings together three seemingly disconnected stories – an emergency room doctor, an elderly woman in a care home and a young boy suffering with anxiety – and brings them together in a complex and compelling story.
Lucy is the ER doc, who finds herself newly single as she works a gruelling night shift schedule. Ben is the young boy, who witnesses a brutal murder and appears to have amnesia due to the shock. Clare is the elderly woman, who might be the oldest person in her small town at nearly 100 years old, but who also appears to have no evidence of her birthdate.
This is not a murder mystery – the perpetrator becomes known quite quickly and simply after the crime. Rather, it is a story of life – three lives to be exact – and how people can form connections and how they can lose those same connections.
O’Halloran Schwarz is an emergency-medicine doctor herself, working in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Readers will recognize the accuracy in her descriptions of what it’s like to work an ER, including one hilarious scene that is sure to surprise.
Not only did The Possible World make this reviewer laugh, it also made me cry in its universal wisdom about the bonds between us and how ephemeral or enduring they can be. A beautifully written novel, The Possible World is a story that will enrich its readers.
Tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book review: The Punishment She Deserves, by Elizabeth George

The Punishment She Deserves
Elizabeth George
Viking

Elizabeth George is a perennial favourite of mine – I’ve been reading her mysteries for 30 years now, and I don’t think there has been one I haven’t enjoyed.
The upright, proper Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and his brilliant-but-unconventional sidekick Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers are always a pleasure to follow around the British countryside, solving whatever murder they happen to be working on.
This time, the mystery is the apparent suicide of a church deacon who had been arrested after claims of child molestation. On first glance, it appears obvious that he killed himself while in police custody, but a closer look shows many unusual happenings in the small medieval British town of Ludlow.
Regular readers will love The Punishment She Deserves, for its focus on Lynley and Havers, who solve a traditional crime with lots of sordid details and side notes. Newcomers won’t be lost in the back story and can jump right in. George lives in Washington State, but usually sets her mysteries in England.
For the first 200 or so pages – the length of a regular novel – Havers is inspecting the suicide with Isabelle Ardery, the Acting Superintendent who is dealing with a bit of an alcohol problem. Ardery’s story is interesting, but I was beginning to wonder if the author had tired of Lynley and his story. But thankfully, Lynley is at the heart of part two of the book, which clocks in at another 500 pages. Yep, this is a long book. But it’s worth it.
There’s a bit of a treatise on motherhood hidden within the pages of this murder mystery. I won’t go into too many details, except to say that readers will meet a neglectful mother, a mother who is unable to let go and a mother who is unable to stop hovering. Throw in a bit of foreign culture, a bit of religion and a bit of the freedom and damage of the first couple of years of college and you’ve got the makings of a superb murder mystery.
The only complaint I have about Elizabeth George’s mysteries is that the back story – the story of Lynley, Havers, Simon, Deborah, and all of the other characters – moves so slowly. By my count, Deborah and Simon have been trying for a baby for several decades, but they’ve barely aged.
Moving their story slowly means readers keep coming back for a little tidbit about how these characters they love are doing, but it also means readers can be disappointed with little progress.
After 30 years of Lynley, faithful readers should know not to expect a whole bunch of personal details. The Punishment She Deserves is nonetheless a delightful read, and one that brings the series back to its traditional roots. We will just have to wait for the next one to find out the gossip.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book review: Every Note Played by Lisa Genova

Every Note Played
Lisa Genova
Simon & Schuster Canada

Lisa Genova has done it again – written a brilliant, but terrifying, book about the human brain.
Her first book, Still Alice, was made into an Oscar-winning movie about a professor struggling with early onset Alzheimer’s disease.
Since then, she’s tackled the subjects of brain injury, autism and Huntington’s disease, all through human stories that reflect triumph and tragedy.
This time around, she explores ALS – Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis – a brain disease that slowly paralyzes a person so they can no longer move or breathe. Her protagonist is Richard, a gifted concert pianist who is also a bit of an arrogant ass.
He’s divorced from Karina, who was also a remarkable pianist, though she preferred jazz. She gave up possible fame to focus on his career and their baby, Grace. Grace is in college when her dad receives the devastating diagnosis. Richard is estranged from Grace – due to the divorce and his history of adultery – but he’s estranged from mostly everyone, including his father and brothers. His only companions are occasional flings.
Genova’s gift is her ability to take a complex medical diagnosis and bring it to life in a story that is detailed and complex with nuanced and genuine characters.
There will be tears in reading this book. As in real life, there are no happy endings with ALS. It is a fatal disease with no cure.
Genova said she was touched by the paralysis that affects people with ALS, but that she also wanted to explore emotional paralysis – when a person is stuck due to their fears or excuses or blame.
“We think we have forever and we don’t,” she said at an event promoting her book.
Genova’s research for the book included getting to know Richard Glatzer, co-director and co-writer of the film version of Still Alice.
“We talked about what it feels like to have ALS,” she said.
Genova was in Vancouver, in part, to do a TED Talk about reframing failure. When I asked her for context, she told me how Still Alice was rejected by many publishers and she ended up self-publishing the novel and selling it out of her car. Given the ultimate success of that book, and all of her books to date, I can imagine her TED Talk will be fascinating.
But back to ALS, a devastating disease and the core of Every Note Played.
Physicist Stephen Hawking died earlier this year from ALS, after living with the disease for several decades. He had a variant of the disease that allowed him to survive much longer than the disease’s average victim, who usually live two to five years after diagnosis.
The ALS Society of Canada says there has been more progress in the last five to seven years than there was in the past century, mostly thanks to $20 million raised through the Ice Bucket Challenge a few years ago.
Thanks to that funding, “the scientific community is now poised to find treatments that can significantly alter the course of the disease,” the ALS Society of Canada says.
Genova notes in an author’s note to the book that a new drug, Radicava, has been approved in the U.S., which in Japan showed a decline in physical symptoms by 33 per cent.
But that comes too late for Richard, Genova’s fictional concert pianist. Readers will get the nitty gritty on what it’s like to live with ALS, slowly losing control over the body. As I said, there will be tears. But there will also be raw emotions, character growth and familial love.

tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book review: Alternate Side by Anna Quindlen

Alternate Side
Anna Quindlan
Penguin Random House

Anna Quindlan is one of my favourite authors – I’ve been a fan since her days as a columnist at the New York Times. But her latest novel, Alternate Side, isn’t my most-loved. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not badly written or filled with false characters, but it’s just a bit too inside baseball for the average reader.
The game in question here isn’t the grand old game though, it’s New York City. In order to really get this book, I feel like you have to be from there, and even perhaps born and raised there.
The title of the book refers to a parking regime in NYC, whereby cars cannot park on one side of the street or the other, depending on which day of the week it is, due to a street sweeping schedule. Parking in NYC is central to this story, which is about neighbours who live in a dead-end block in the big apple.
Parking is at a premium, but the folks in the neighbourhood pride themselves on getting free parking and being able to game the system. On the dead-end block there is one empty lot, where a few cars can park. But spots there are earned on a seniority system and it takes several years to make it onto the coveted list.
This particular dead-end block has a handyman – Ricky – who everyone uses and gets to know over the years. Ricky has a pesky habit of parking his van where it blocks the entrance to the empty lot parking lot. He insists there is enough room for cars to get around, but the neighbours disagree.
One day this parking tension reaches a crisis point, an event that serves as a catalyst to move the story along, making it more than a portrait of a small community. Nora Nolan runs a jewelry museum, while her husband Charlie works in an office. Their neighbours are in turns kind, funny, too rich, cranky and bossy. An unknown someone takes to leaving bags of dog poop on Nora’s front steps; another neighbour regularly leaves notes in everyone’s mail slots.
Quindlen has written nine novels, a memoir, and several other non-fiction books. I’ve always loved her columns the most – they were short, snappy commentaries on life, politics and current events. Her novels have also been first class – an early standout was One True Thing, which was made into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Renee Zellweger. Streep was nominated for best actress for the role, which was as a mother dying of cancer, a story based on Quindlen’s real life.
Alternate Side is lovingly written – a gentle, admiring ode to the author’s home town – but it lacks the zing of her earlier novels, which tackled subjects like domestic abuse, mercy killing and mass shootings. It’s still an enjoyable ready, but don’t expect too many fireworks.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book review: The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian

The Flight Attendant
Chris Bohjalian
Penguin Random House

Chris Bohjalian – of Midwives fame – takes on an intriguing story in his latest novel, The Flight Attendant. It’s about Cassandra Bowden, who is, of course, a flight attendant. She’s also a heavy drinker, who has been known to black out.
As the story opens, she’s waking up hungover in a hotel room in Dubai. She doesn’t remember exactly how she got there, or what happened the night before. She’s horrified to find out that the man she slept with – a stranger she met on the plane – is dead in the bed beside her, horrifically stabbed and bloody.
Terrified, she decides against calling the police, since she’s not even sure if she killed him. There the saga begins. Oh, what a tangled web and all that.
The story is timed well to match the headlines, with elements of Russian spies and influence on American soil. It’s also the human story of Cassandra, as she comes to terms with who she is and what she may have done.
Because it’s about a flight attendant, the book is sprinkled with travel tidbits and is a bit of an inside scoop on what it’s like to work on an international flight schedule, arriving in Rome one day, Dubai the next.
The Flight Attendant is Bohjalian’s twentieth book – many of them bestsellers and three have been made into movies: Secrets of Eden, Midwives and Past the Bleachers. He often writes about social issues, moral dilemmas and different (sometimes radical) perspectives.
This time, it’s about alcoholism and what it can do to your relationships, your integrity, your career, your entire self. Readers may sympathize with Cassandra’s dilemma, but they will also want to physically restrain her from taking one more drink, knowing what it will do to her self control.
I enjoyed this book – it’s well-written, easy to read and there is enough to keep it interesting. Bohjalian is a gifted storyteller and The Flight Attendant doesn’t disappoint.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book review: How to Stop Time

How to Stop Time
By Matt Haig
(Published in Great Britain by Canon Gate, In Canada: 2018 from HarperAvenue)

Whenever I travel to the English-speaking world, I always check out the bestseller lists and the bookstores. My favourite place to travel (and to find books) is London. I was there this summer and I discovered a new author – Matt Haig.
He’s got a new book out in the United Kingdom called How to Stop Time. It’s not being released in Canada until next February, but I highly recommend it.
I was stopped short by the title. Who hasn’t wished they could stop time? I certainly have. I wish it almost every day when I’m plowed under by deadlines and emails I have to return and tasks I have to complete. I also wish it whenever I am struck by happiness and how things are good in the moment. Could things just stay like this forever?
So, based on the title, I had to buy this book. I’m glad I did. It’s about a man who ages slowly – very slowly. The book opens like this: “I am old. That is the first thing to tell you. The thing you are least likely to believe. If you saw me you would probably think I was about forty, but you would be very wrong. I am old – old in the way that a tree, or a quahog clam, or a Renaissance painting is old. To give you an idea: I was born well over four hundred years ago on the third of March 1581, in my parents’ room, on the third floor of a small French chateau that used to be my home.”
So it’s a fun book, based on a fanciful idea, that allows the author to play with a storyline that spans several centuries and a narrator that has seen it all. It’s also a love story, although the narrator’s love died in the time of Shakespeare. But they had a daughter, a daughter like him, who ages slowly, and who is probably still alive. They’ve lost each other, but his quest to find her is the heart of this story.
Haig is an interesting writer. He’s down to Earth and tells a quick, catchy story, but at the same time, he quotes Sartre and Montaigne and includes Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald as bit players in his novel to magical effect.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book review: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere

Everything I've Never Told You
Celeste Ng
Penguin
I’ve discovered a new author to love, something that always makes me smile.
Her name is Celeste Ng and I’ve just power-read her two novels over Christmas.
The first, published in 2014, is Everything I’ve Never Told You. It’s about a mixed-race family – the father is Chinese, the mother is white – whose teenage daughter goes missing.
The second is Little Fires Everywhere, which is about the upper middle class Richardson family living in the utopian suburban American community of Shaker Heights. A single mother and her teenage daughter move to town, serving as the catalyst for all kinds of shenanigans in the life of the four Richardson teenagers. A sub-plot deals with a wealthy white family who is trying to adopt an Asian baby who was abandoned by her mother, but who now wants her back.
Both novels are excellent. They are pitch perfect stories about today’s American families – the secrets they keep, the tensions they feel and the pressures that abound.
Ng is a talented writer, with on-the-mark pace, taut suspense, unforgettable characters and realistic situations that will get under readers’ skins.
She is adept a keeping the present-day story going, while filling the reader in on the back stories which are full of historical and modern contexts ripped from the headlines.
Ng grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a planned community, so she’s familiar with her setting. She graduated from Harvard University and studied writing at the University of Michigan. Both books have been lauded as best books of the year by many publications and have received other awards, all well deserved.
I’m looking forward to Ng’s next novel, and expect readers will be too.
Tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book review: The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman

The Rules of Magic
by Alice Hoffman
Simon and Schuster
Alice Hoffman is an amazing author – if you haven’t read her, you should. She is a lovely writer, whose books balance magic and reality and the special mix of the two that is real life.
The Rules of Magic is a prequel to her 1995 book Practical Magic, which was made into a 1998 movie of the same name starring Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock. Practical Magic is perhaps Alice Hoffman’s best-known book, but she has written more than 30 others. It’s a testament to her longevity and persistence as an author that she has now written a prequel more than 20 years after the original book.
The books in between are nearly all stunners. I’ve read most of them and loved them all. My favourites are The Red Garden – a sweeping family saga that spans more than 300 years written in 2011 – and Blue Diary – another family story about lies and hidden pasts that was written in 2001. The Dovekeepers, also written in 2011, gets honorable mention for its treatment of the siege of Masada 2000 years ago, as told from the women’s perspective.
The Rules of Magic is the backstory to Practical Magic – it tells the story one generation earlier. In Practical Magic, Jet and Frances are elderly aunties; in The Rules of Magic, they are children.
Their family – the Owens family – has been cursed since 1620, when an ancestor was charged with being a witch. Jet and Frances (and their brother Vincent) are children of the 1960s and their story mostly takes place in New York city.
All three children have special talents. Frances can draw birds to her hands with her mind, Jet reads people’s thoughts and Vincent has all sorts of hidden skills. When Frances turns 17, all three children spend the summer with their Aunt Isabelle, who lives in the same Massachusetts small-town house where Practical Magic is set. Isabelle teaches them “the rules of magic.”
I can’t give away much more without spoiling the story. Suffice it to say, if you trust Alice Hoffman to take you away with her words to a brilliant world where anything is possible, you will enjoy the ride.
Tracy.sherlock@gmail.com