Tag: Reviews

#WWWWednesday – 14th June 2023

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WWWWednesdays

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

Currently reading

The Sun Walks DownThe Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane (Sceptre) Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023

In September 1883, a small town in the South Australian outback huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. After a dust storm, a dreadful discovery is made: six-year-old Denny Wallace has gone missing.

As they scour the desert and mountains for the lost boy, the residents of Fairly – newlyweds, landowners, farmers, mothers, artists, Aboriginal trackers, cameleers, children, schoolteachers, widows, maids, policemen – confront their relationships with one another and with the ancient landscape they inhabit.

The colonial Australia of The Sun Walks Down is unfamiliar, multicultural and noisy with opinions, arguments, longings and terrors. It’s haunted by many gods – the sun among them, rising and falling on each day in which Denny could be found, or lost forever.

The WallThe Wall (City of Victory #3) by Adrian Goldsworthy (eARC, Aries via NetGalley)

Britannia, AD 117: Roman centurion Flavius Ferox is trying to live a quiet life of dignified leisure, overseeing his wife’s estate and doing his best to resist the urge to murder an annoying neighbour – until someone else does it for him. Dragged back into a life of violence, Ferox finds himself chasing raiders, fighting chieftains and negotiating with kings, journeying far into the north just as war breaks out.

With the new emperor, Hadrian, sending agents from Rome, the whole world seems to be changing: old friends become enemies, enemies claim they are friends, and new and deadly threats lurk in the shadows.

When, five years later, Hadrian himself comes to Britannia to inspect his great wall, a new war erupts suddenly, dividing tribes and families. Ferox is the only one who can save the emperor – but with his family, and his own life, in danger, Ferox must first decide whose side he is on…

The Voluble TopsyThe Voluble Topsy, 1928-1947 by A. P. Herbert (ARC, Handheld Press)

The Voluble Topsy collects A P Herbert’s The Trials of Topsy (1928), Topsy MP (1929) and Topsy Turvy (1947) in one volume for the pleasure and admiration of a new generation.

It is the late 1920s. Topsy is a girl about town, a society deb, a dashing flapper. She writes breathless, exuberant letters to her best friend Trix about her life, her parties, her intrigues, and the men in her life. She deploys her native acumen and remarkable talent for kindness as well as being a doughty fighter for what she thinks is right (she hides a fox from the Hunt in her car). Then Topsy is unexpectedly drawn into politics, and to her amazement, she is elected as a member of Parliament.

Topsy’s extensive social life, her adventures in and out of the House of Commons (and her audacious attempts to legislate for the Enjoyment of the People), and her wartime activity as the mother of twins were recorded faithfully by the great comic writer A P Herbert as a series of satires in Punch.

Recently finished

The Geometer Lobachevsky by Adrian Duncan (Tuskar Rock Press) 

What Cathy (will) Read Next

Voices of the DeadVoices of the Dead (Raven, Fisher & Simpson #4) by Ambrose Parry (eARC, Canongate via NetGalley)

Edinburgh, 1854, and a killer stalks the streets.

Body parts have been found across the city – a foot in the Surgeon’s Hall, another beneath a debtor’s floorboards, more pieces in the soil of a freshly filled grave – and Will Raven, assistant to the great Dr Simpson, is being asked questions about the crime.

His day job is demanding enough, striving to make his name as an obstetrician, and his home life with a second child on the way is exhausting. But Will usually finds the company of his colleague Sarah Fisher, a young widow and fellow-trainee, reviving. She is unrepentantly curious about all things: medicine, upcoming scientific advances like mesmerism, and details of this strange crime. So what is it about this killing that is beginning to turn Will into a man he doesn’t recognise?

As the clues converge and all the evidence begins to point towards a dark connection between Will’s past and Sarah’s own investigations, both must use their full skills to prevent the most terrible crime of all . . .

#BookReview The Geometer Lobachevsky by Adrian Duncan @serpentstail @waltscottprize

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About the Book

‘When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology …’

It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, great-grandson of his illustrious namesake, is surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands, where he studies the locals, the land and their ways. One afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling him back to Leningrad for a ‘special appointment’.

Lobachevsky may not be a great genius but he is not he recognises a death sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home again.

Format: Hardback (208 pages)         Publisher: Tuskar Rock Press
Publication date: 31st March 2022 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

I’m not sure I ever imagined myself reading a book that combines events in the life of a man who fears persecution if he returns to his homeland in the Soviet Union, the surveying of Irish bogland and seaweed farming. And I probably wouldn’t have had it not appeared on the shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

The Geometer Lobachevsky contains some wonderful descriptions of the wilder parts of Ireland and I liked the gentle rhythm of the life of the islanders described in the second part of the book. I also loved the amiable humour of Nikolai’s attempts to spell Irish names.

Nikolai arrives as an advisor but is happy to get stuck into the job of surveying the bog in preparation for large scale peat extraction even if he can’t get the team led by Rhatigan to understand the shifting nature of the area they’re trying to survey. Perhaps it’s in the nature of things to think you’re on solid ground even when you’re not? Having adopted a false identity in order to cover his tracks and fled to a small island on the Shannon estuary, Nikolai learns the secrets of seaweed harvesting from the families who live there. But although he might join in with things, he remains somehow always isolated from others.

There is a theme of old versus new that runs through the book. Old crafts are being lost, labour intensive tasks are gradually being mechanised and the landscape is being changed by the building of new factories and houses with modern amenities. You get a sense it’s being done to the local people not for them.

Many of the characters exhibit obsessionial traits. Rhatigan, the chief surveyor, is a perfectionist when it comes to the accuracy of surveying. One of the locals, French, has a ‘museum’ full of curiosities, such as many different types of hammer, that he has collected over the years. Nikolai himself becomes obsessed with observing the moon through a telescope in order to make precise topographical drawings of its surface. And once on the island he witnesses a prolonged and dangerous attempt, led by the son of one of the local families, to split a huge boulder seemingly for no other reason than to prove it can be done.

Right from the beginning of the book there’s an ominous sense that a bleak future in one form or another awaits Nikolai. Having seen friends (possibly lovers?) persecuted for their views, he’s afraid of what will happen to him if he returns to the Soviet Union. He describes himself as living every day ‘tired with fear’. The book’s dramatic ending proves he was right.

Given the title of the book it’s no surprise that Nikolai sees things in terms of shapes, angles and geometric patterns. I’m afraid this is where I struggled with the book because the geometrical stuff went over my head. No matter how hard I tried I could not envision the existence of a curve in a straight line or a straight line in a curve. Where Nikolai looks at the incoming tide and sees ‘plummeting curvatures’ I just see the incoming tide. Where he sees a wetland ‘mapped out with a constantly collapsing Cartesianism of intensities’ I have no idea what that is. I think this prevented me forming a stronger connection with the story. Although I admired the wonderful writing, I was left with the feeling that this is a book I was not quite clever enough to appreciate fully.

In three words: Evocative, elegaic, complex

About the Author

Adrian Duncan is an Irish artist and writer. His debut novel Love Notes from a German Building Site won the 2019 John McGahern Book Prize. His second novel A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020) was shortlisted for the Kerry Novel of the Year. His collection of short stories Midfield Dynamo was published in 2021 and longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. His third novel, The Geometer Lobachevsky, was published in April 2022. (Photo: Publisher author page)

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