To The Last Page

So how does Mark Billingham cope in his first (almost) standalone novel outside of his D.I. Thorne series? Pretty good, actually. On the surface the subject matter might not appear all that different – London mobs and gangsters and police procedural (or lack of it since his police officers often tend to work in an "unofficial" capacity) – but freed from the restrictions of the lead D.I.'s troubled private life and the increasing banality of the supporting characters over the last few Thorne novels, In The Dark is able to take Billingham's dark exploration of the criminal underbelly of London much further. It may not always make for pleasant reading, but Billingham's representation of the dangers on the streets of the UK today seems to be pretty accurate. Drive-by shootings, drug deals, street gangland initiations and larger scale criminal activities are all handled by the author with characteristic authenticity for both character and situation. Again, with a stro...

Almost without exception, Patrick McGrath’s novels are about intense, violent affairs, their inherent melodrama underplayed by the author’s beautiful, clear prose which takes a detached (sometimes unhinged) analytical view of the subject, usually from a medical or psychiatric perspective. Like Asylum , which this latest novel perhaps most resembles, (not least of which is in its admirably concise and self-explanatory title), Trauma throws a lot of complicating psychological and behavioural complications into the mix - sibling rivalry, damaged people, Oedipal and Electra complexes and more Freudian analysis than you can wave a big stick at. It’s lucidly insane, which is as concise a description of McGrath’s work as I can find. Essentially then, there is no dramatic shift in subject matter or style for McGrath in Trauma , with a flawed or unreliable narrator (this one being a psychiatrist who obviously has a tendency to be over-analytical of other’s motives and behaviour), and clashes be...

According to the author's book notes, if The Rabbi’s Cat is Joann Sfar’s exploration of his father’s Sephardic roots, then Klezmer is seeped in the tradition of his Ashkenazi mother tracing the birth and sensibility behind the Klezmer folk music of Jewish origin through a group of East European wandering musicians. Outcast by their own community the Baron of Backside, Chava, Yaacov and Vincenzo find themselves consequently even lower in the social chain in a period when European Jews are brutally oppressed. Through a series of misadventures and a few found instruments, they come together with a persecuted gypsy Tshokola and set about creating wondrous, hypnotic music to entertain both Russians and Jews and earn the few pennies they need to survive. Sfar’s art and storytelling are astonishingly fluid. Reminiscent of Sempé with the colouring of Chagall, he makes the music come alive on the page, as well as giving full expression to the emotions of the characters and bringing the lan...

Twenty years ago  Watchmen was undoubtedly the peak of the comic art form, a defining and influential work that gave credibility to the format of the graphic novel with its multiple overlapping narratives, its post-modern deconstructive outlook on the nature of comic superheroes, given psychological depth through realistic characterisation and documentary interludes, using them as a metaphor for covert US activity in the wider political world – a force with no accountability (“Who watches the Watchmen?”) that can either deter or precipitate an international crisis. Twenty years later as it is about to finally make its way onto the screen after numerous abortive attempts, Watchmen is however starting to show its age. The wordplay, juxtaposition of imagery, visual links and overlapping narratives that once seem sophisticated in the world of comics now seems very arch and even cheesy, but it’s the dark tone of dread of an imminent nuclear Armageddon that dates the novel the most. Wa...

Hooked starts with an explosion and an intriguing premise – a San Francisco journalist Nat Idle is sitting in a coffee bar when a mysterious woman leaves him a note telling him to get out of the building fast. Believing she looks like his former girlfriend Annie, who died in a boating accident, he follows her out of the café just as a bomb goes off inside. The novel however goes straight downhill after chapter one with further unlikely and ultimately irrelevant coincidences (the investigating police officer is the brother of a corrupt cop that Nat, a medical journalist, has exposed in one of his articles), poor characterisation and unconvincing depiction of the central relationships between the characters. It’s the credibility in the actual premise however that is the biggest problem with Hooked. I mean, without revealing the plot, towards the end of the novel even the villains laugh at Nat when he threatens to expose their activities. Who’s going to believe a story like that?, they t...

Following on from his first Michele Ferrara novel, A Florentine Death , the lack of imagination shown in the title of A Death in Tuscany doesn't promise any great leap forward from the inadequacy of police-chief-turned-novelist Michele Giuttari's debut novel. There is however a bit more realism in here in the police procedural and in the subject matter, as well as some contemporary relevance to the crime situation in Italy in contrast to the ludicrous serial-killer plotting of A Florentine Death . It's the death of an unidentified 14 year-old girl, presumably an immigrant, from a drugs overdose that opens up police lines of enquiry into organised crime, drug running and even a cover-up from higher authorities. Chief Superintendent Ferrara's suspicions are aroused, the head of the Squadra Mobile refusing to accept the obvious assumption that the underage girl was a prostitute. When a close friend goes missing however, the Chief switches his attentions to that case, desp...