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Before starting on the book, I want to mention my process for this blog. As mentioned in the description, I write each week about a book or other story I’ve read that week or possibly earlier. Some books take a while to percolate. I don’t blog about every book I read, but sometimes, as is the case today, I find myself thinking and writing about a book I had no intention of including in this blog. Also, other than a review I might run across in one of the periodicals to which I subscribe, I do not read reviews until after I’ve written about the book; I might then go back and edit if they significantly change my mind.

So I came to this book cold, not having read anything by the author. From the cover I knew that it had won the Booker Prize, often a good indication that I will find the book interesting. The Line of Beauty is the story of Nick Guest, a recent Oxford graduate, who has come to London to make his way in the world, starting with graduate work at University College of London, perhaps a study of style or Henry James. He is staying in the home of the Feddens, the son Toby having been a close friend of his at school. He ends up staying there for over four years, thinking of himself as “the lost middle child” of the family, brother to Toby and to Catherine, who is emotionally (and perhaps mentally) unstable. Their mother, Rachel, a calm, reserved woman, welcomes Nick to their home, a luxurious, art-filled residence in Notting Hill, far different from the suburban home in Barwick where Nick’s parents live, where the only art is on loan from Don Guest’s antique shop.

As the story opens, Gerald Fedden, paterfamilias, has just won an election as a Tory MP. It is the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s heyday, and the book captures well the mysterious reverence toward “The Lady”. Nick is also about to go on a blind date with a man named Leo, whose photo has virginal Nick salivating. Toby, whose “sleepy beauty” haunts Nick, is heterosexual and has never suspected the lust behind Nick’s devotion to him.

For all Nick’s talk of Henry James, the book reminds me most of Brideshead Revisited, a young man adoring and adopting the far wealthier family of his schoolfriend, cautiously accepted by the distant, patrician mother until her so-called disappointment at his perceived betrayal. The difference, of course, is that London is visited, not revisted, unmediated by the veil of memory and nostalgia. Also, Nick remains outside the family because of his homosexuality, rather than Charles Ryder’s anti-Catholicism.

As an outsider, Nick’s view of the hedonistic, Thatcher-mad London of the 1980s is smart and often quite funny. He satirises them mercilessly, even as he hovers between mocking them and begging them to let him in. The clever language and delicious descriptions kept me reading until the end, but I was curiously bored by the book. There is a hollowness at the center of it.

I didn’t care about any of the characters. I neither liked nor disliked them. Nick himself doesn’t seem to care about anyone either. Although Nick is initially bowled over by his sexual encounters with Leo, he doesn't seem to actually know Leo as a person or care about him as more than the source of sexual pleasure. Nick says that his heart belongs to Toby, but we hardly see Toby in the book. Nick seems to retain a sentimental fondness for him even when noting how complacent and fat Toby has become.

I didn’t mind the graphic homosexual encounters, but because of their lack of eroticism, they were a bit boring. Only the first date with Leo has an erotic aura, as Nick walks behind Leo, moved almost beyond bearing by the nape of his neck, the waistline of his jeans. After that, the sex is only hard and fast, often fueled by cocaine. Nick’s emotions, beyond lust, are drawn from a limited palette: desire to be as wealthy and successful as the Feddens, mild embarrassment about his parents. Not until near the end, when AIDS begins to make itself felt in Nick’s world, does Nick seem to feel any strong, genuine emotion.

The book seemed to me all flash and no feeling. Appropriate for the 1980s, I guess, and a cultural artifact like the Byatt books I’ve discussed recently, but I felt cheated. I felt like the judges on So You Think You Can Dance: the performance was technically perfect but I wanted him to leave it all on the stage.

I should have liked this fourth book about Byatt’s Potter family more than I did. After all, the main storyline, although still following Frederica who is not my favorite Potter, is about her life in London as a single parent, trying to work out what of her past to keep and what to throw overboard. These are issues which interest me and with which I have some familiarity.

I think what bothers me about Frederica in this book is how easy everything is for her. The husband who made her life a misery in the last book stays off-stage and causes her no further problems. Her old friends from Cambridge stick by her, finding her jobs and taking her about. She seems to have no financial worries. She’s found a perfect living situation, sharing a house (though they have separate apartments) with another single mother who not only becomes a friend but also helps her with child care and parenting advice.

Like the previous books, this one reflects its time period: the sour, scary trailing off of the 1960s into the twin ego trips of cults and pointlessly destructive protests. I call them ego trips because at their worst both are centered around a charismatic guru whose ego delights in the power he holds over his followers. These leaders, sometimes believing their own rhetoric, drinking their own Kool-Aid, prefigure today’s society where politicians and advertisers direct their appeals entirely to emotion, never to logic or reason, with distressingly effective results.

I was interested in the description of the early days at the BBC. The intentions we see here recall the early promise of television—the excellent dramas, the educational documentaries—to bring culture to all, not just the wealthy in their furs and top hats who have the money for season tickets to the opera and theatre, the education to want them, and the city townhouses close enough to access them.

I was also interested in how the main characters have changed from previous books. One of the great treats of a series like this is the extended length of time we spend with the characters, watching them develop across several decades of their lives. Bill, Frederica’s father and tyrant of her youth, has diminished as he ages, becoming less certain of his righteous anger, beginning to value even old enemies for their familiarity and common memories. Seeing Daniel, Alexander, Marcus and his two friends all mature in expected and unexpected ways makes me appreciate their individual paths and the tiny, almost unnoticed, choices that push us in one direction or another.

Frederica’s is meant to be the life most important to us, but she seems the weakest character to me. Byatt seems to waver between presenting her as the central character and making her transparent so we can see the age through her. Perhaps Frederica just seems too predictable to me. Perhaps it is just that I never particularly warmed to her as a character, and though she’s less abrasive than in the previous books, she still seems so privileged, making me less sympathetic to what she perceives as the great trials of her existence. In the first two books, I was far more interested in her sister and even in Marcus, their younger brother.

This is a familiar dynamic to me: in the few television dramas I watch, I can’t stand the main characters, but watch to see the development of the minor characters. I don’t know if it is because they are played by better actors or because, as minor characters, they are allowed more interesting quirks, but as a result, I prefer ensemble dramas. In these books, too, it is the ensemble that carries them for me. Also, even beyond the enjoyment of the stories themselves, they are cultural artifacts, sources future readers can consult to find out what it was like to live in certain places in England during these decades.

Even though I like to read the biography of a writer while I am reading his or her work, I don’t expect or want to see traces of authors’ lives in their fiction. Rather, I am interested in how writers balance work and life, whether and how they earn enough money to support their families while still writing, when they find or make time to write. I’m interested in who they met or what they experienced that contributed to their theories about literature.

At the same time, I recognise the danger of knowing too much about a writer, or any artist for that matter. Jonathan Franzen’s apparent arrogance in the Oprah flap has prevented me from reading any more of his books. Yes, even though I believe the work should stand alone. Equally, I cannot bear to watch films made by Woody Allen or Roman Polansky.

I blogged about Patchett’s Truth and Beauty a couple of years ago. It is a memoir of her friendship with Lucy Grealy. Well, she calls it “friendship”. I call it creepy, more of a classic addict-enabler relationship than anything else. What was most disturbing about the book was its claim to being a model of friendship between women. Ick. I hope no reader took it that way.

I’d hoped that after two years my distaste would have faded enough for me to read this novel recommended by Kim. It is the story of a family of men and a stunning encounter in a snowstorm. The father, Doyle, a former mayor of Boston, has been raising his three sons since the death of his beloved wife. The boys are grown now: Sullivan, the oldest, a rebel who has—in his father’s mind anyway—thrown his life away, and the two much-younger boys, Tip and Teddy, who are just on the cusp of adulthood, Tip a senior at Harvard and Teddy an easily distracted twenty-year-old. The two were adopted at the same time, when Tip was 18 months and Teddy five days old, and just four years before the death of Doyle’s wife. Doyle and his natural son are Caucasian; Tip and Teddy are African-American.

Their encounter in the snowstorm forces each man to question his role in the family and, going forward, his role in the world. They wrestle with big issues, questions of responsibility and sacrifice. It is an interesting story, and Patchett is a terrific writer. Her prose is compelling, keeping me reading late into the night. Not only does she manage to orchestrate just the right balance of description, dialogue and action, but her characters have interesting quirks, such as Tip’s interest in ichthyology and Teddy’s habit of quoting political speeches. Although I didn’t particularly care about any of the characters, I was curious to see what would happen to them and what they would choose to do.

Still, I couldn’t quite shake my uneasy distaste. I thought perhaps it was because Patchett, who attended Sarah Lawrence and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, tries to capture the contrast between the very privileged lives of this family and that of the woman and her 11-year-old daughter whom they meet the night of the snowstorm. Patchett describes the life of privilege beautifully, summoning up details of careless beauty, but when it comes to the women’s lives—housing projects, menial jobs, public schools—she is less successful. Similarly, she seems unable to put herself on the other side of the racial divide. She alludes to issues of race and class and economics, but ultimately trivialises them in favor of the rather common rebellions and negotiations between parent and adult children. There’s also the role of religion, Catholicism in particular, which is also touched on but never explored.

I thought perhaps she was trying to do too much in one small novel, and trying to describe worlds she didn’t really know enough about. But then there was a scene where Sullivan comforts the girl by picking her up, and the crying girl wraps her legs and arms around him, just as Patchett so often described Lucy doing, and the ick factor simply overwhelmed the story for me. The scene would not have bothered me if I hadn’t read the earlier book, so perhaps all of my reactions are tainted and should be read with that possibility in mind.

This is the third book in Byatt’s series about the Potter family, taking up shortly after Still Life leaves off. Rereading the first two books gave me much to think about, as I mentioned in blogging about them, and deepened my understanding of them, so I hoped for a similar experience with this book. I hadn’t liked it the first time around—in fact, it put me off reading anything by Byatt for a number of years—and I didn’t much like it this time either.

Set during the mid-1960s, the main story follows Frederica and her marital difficulties. This narrative is interrupted by sections of a fable about a group of people who flee the Terror following the French Revolution and set up a utopian community in a remote mountain hideaway. The story is also interrupted by Frederica’s summaries of manuscripts she is reviewing. And by sections of a fairy tale about two children on a quest. And by pages of court transcript. And by pages of text made from letters and quotations cut up and rearranged to form what looks like an essay but doesn’t actually make sense. These last are Frederica’s attempts to create something that expresses the truths she is discovering. She surrounds these chunks of text with quotations from newspapers, books, and speeches.

Yes, all very interesting in a post-modern way, and continues Byatt’s exploration of the relationship between words and the things they describe, but tedious to read. Perhaps if I hadn’t already read most of the books she quotes, if I hadn’t lived through the time period myself, I would have found great excitement in the juxtaposition of ideas that might then have been new to me. I confess I was also irritated by the fact that many of these insertions are in a tiny font that is very difficult to read. And the book is long, over 600 pages. Some of my favorite books are that long, The Discovery of Heaven for one, but this one drags.

However messy and sprawling, the structure is not inappropriate for a book set in the 1960s. Kudos to Byatt for managing to write about the period in a way that doesn’t seem silly or unrealistic. It’s not an easy time to write about. The way she accomplishes this is twofold: first, with Frederica she gives us an observer who is a bit older than most of the flower children and who has the responsibility of caring for a child; second, along with the hippies and happenings, Byatt includes the elections and sensational trials and minutiae of daily life (planting window boxes, having to go home to relieve the babysitter). Not everyone was swinging in the Sixties, not even in London.

I also have to mention how brilliant Byatt is at presenting children. All the children here are real characters, complex, true to life. It’s so hard to write about children without making them precocious brats, miniature adults, or unbearably cute manikins. Byatt’s children are children, not adults, perhaps with similarities to their parents but fiercely individual.

I love the intelligence behind the book, the way Byatt expects us to step up and stop being so lazy. There is much to like here. Another reader might find this book great fun, taking joy in seeing how all the extraneous bits are pieced together—not a melting pot but a mosaic—like the multitude of languages into which the inhabitants of the original Tower of Babel devolved.

I want to take a step back here and talk about synchronicity. In my blog about Still Life I mentioned how surprised I was when I stumbled across a long passage referencing Dawkin’s concepts as presented in The Selfish Gene which I also happened to be reading at the time. If you’ve read the last few blogs, you may have noticed that I’ve inadvertently been reading a string of books about war, why men go to war, what happens when they try to come back.

This often happens to me. Books chosen at random turn out to have a common theme or to explore related concepts. They seem—as one of my friends put it—to be conversing with each other through me. For example, I’ve also been reading a lot of Robert Frost’s poems and critical works on him to prepare for the poetry discussion I’m leading. A couple of themes resonated with another book I was reading at the same time, The Likeness which is Tana French’s second book. I blogged about her first book In the Woods a few weeks ago.

Frost was greatly influenced by Emerson. Frost’s poems about hard-working New Englanders who swing axes at alders, cut posts, mend walls, pick apples, tap maples and plough snow illustrate Emerson’s law of compensation from his essay, “Power”: “Nothing is got for Nothing.” This reminded me of where a character in French’s book quotes a Spanish proverb: “Take what you want and pay for it, says God.” He goes on to rail about our modern culture, so good at taking what we want, so bad about paying the price.

Lexie, another character in French’s book, moves through life like a shark, always on the go. She is incapable of thinking about the past, never looking back at the wake she leaves behind. Lexie reminded me of a story Wolf once told me of seeing a man, who from his mismatched layers of clothing was apparently living rough, buy a used paperback and walk off down the street reading it. As he finished the first page, he tore it out and threw it over his shoulder. As he finished the next page, he tore it out and again tossed it over his shoulder. And so on down the street, leaving a trail of abandoned story behind him.

This attitude toward the past reminded me of a quote from Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” that greatly influenced Frost: “Life only avails, not the having lived.” Power is to be found in movement, in transition. In “The Wood-Pile” the speaker comes across a cord of maple wood that had been cut and stacked and then abandoned, left to rot and be covered in weeds “To warm the frozen swamp as best it could/With the slow smokeless burning of decay.” You could say that even in repose the wood-pile is changing, but its burning is smokeless. It has lost the power it once possessed. This power is similar to Bergson’s concept of élan vitale which Frost, who had read Bergson’s work, used often in his prose to describe the force that animates life and poetry. By yet another odd coincidence, we had just been studying Bergson in the Philosophy Book Club I attend.

We’ve also been studying various philosophers who have addressed the problem of what we can actually know of the things of this world, whether our senses are reliable, whether things actually exist independently of our perceptions of them, whether somewhere outside of our knowledge things exist in their ideal form. Again, Frost reminded me of these discussions. One of his early poems is “The Demiurge’s Laugh” where the narrator is checked in his joyful flight through the woods in pursuit of what was “no true god.” In Gnosticism, the Demiurge is a god of limited ability who has created this flawed world of ours that is only a shadow of a higher reality. In Frost’s “After Apple-Picking”, the narrator speaks of seeing the world through the thin sheet of ice he has lifted from the surface of the water trough, a wonderful metaphor of our flawed perception of the things of this world.

It’s also a metaphor of the vast gap between things themselves and our words for them, Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, the theme powering the series of books by A.S. Byatt that I’ve been reading and blogging about, particularly Still Life. Perhaps these coincidences are not so significant. Perhaps it is simply that these are concepts that many writers are concerned with. Still, I like the idea of books conversing through my reading of them.

I have long been a fan of Pérez-Reverte’s books. His The Fencing Master remains one of my favorites; it brought me to a whole new understanding of the grip that the past may have upon our lives. It also made me rethink what I value and why. This book, however, is neither a mystery nor an adventure story like Pérez-Reverte’s other novels. It is something much more profound.

Set in the present day, it is the story of Andrés Faulques, an award-winning photographer who has retired from the world and from his career covering wars. Faulques has taken up residence in an old tower on the coast of Spain where he is painting the interior, creating a 360-degree mural that depicts battles ancient and modern. And the fallout from those battles: the executions, the rapes, the ethnic cleansing. There is very little of the heroic here. He has too many memories for that.

Calling his painting an attempt to come to terms with the horrors he’s seen would be much too simplistic. Rather, he is trying to find the structure, the equations and architecture, that will explain war and the cruel punishments that men inflict on each other. And on women. Collateral damage.

There is much about painting here, the effects of certain colors to portray a misty dawn or to highlight a knife’s edge. There is much about photography, the shutter speeds and so on that Faulques used for the photographs he remembers as he paints. There is much about war, details of atrocities that counteract the distance and depersonalisation of names of colors and f-stop settings. Pérez-Reverte himself was a war photographer, so he speaks from a position of authority about the role of the photographer versus the painter, the degree of immersion experienced by a war photographer, the responsibility he has or doesn’t have towards his subjects.

The story is set in motion when a stranger arrives at the tower. He turns out to be a soldier whom Faulques once snapped as the man rested, weary and dejected, by the side of a dusty road. The conversation between the two men weaves in and out of Faulques’s memories and his work on the painting. Some reviewers have felt that the philosophical bent of their conversation bogged down the book, but I found the whole thing fascinating. In fact as soon as I finished it, I started it over again, something I rarely do. If I found the ending a little too neatly wrapped up, that is the only flaw in this astonishing book.

The vivid descriptions made me feel as though I had fallen into Faulques’s life: the tourist boat that comes by at the same time every day, swimming in the sea below the tower, 150 strokes out every day, 150 strokes in. And into Faulques’s memories, such as what it is like to sit on a terrace with a fancy dinner before you and hear captured soldiers being dragged off by alligators, a particularly gruesome and sadistic form of execution. Faulques recounts all these and discusses them with his visitor using an unemotional tone that is more deeply moving than the strongest hysteria or hand-wringing. This is the way it is. This is the way we are.

Faulques circles back to a handful of incidents, such as the day he met Olvido Ferrara in a museum. She abandoned her life as a fashion model to go with him and take pictures of wars, of small things: a pair of shoes, a notebook, an empty road. He remembers her learning to break down and reassemble an assault rifle blindfolded, and the way she could analyse a painting and make him see things he had never seen before. He remembers the people in his photographs, the teacher leading a cadre of his young students, the prisoner who refused to beg for his life. Old now, older even than his years, Faulques is taking the measure of his life. Not dismissing his previous occupation, but sure that what he’s doing—painting these battles—is the most important thing he can do.

I know. It sounds awful and ugly. But it isn’t. It’s true, and it’s beautiful.

Sándor Petöfi is Hungary’s most famous poet, yet I had not heard of him until my friend Jacob recommended him to me. It is unfortunate that the literary culture in the U.S. is so narrowly focused. I try to compensate by reading review periodicals from England and by attending Toronto’s International Festival of Authors as often as possible. Even though not being able to read the poems in the original language limits me to hearing them through the sensibility of the translator, I found this collection both interesting and moving.

Petöfi was born in 1823 in Kiskoros, a community on the Hungarian plains. His early life—his mother was a peasant and his father an innkeeper and butcher—gave him an identification with the common people that he never lost. His early lyrics and epic poems included elements of folklore, and many later became folk songs. He read widely in several languages (English, French and German) and translated Shakespeare's Coriolanus into Hungarian.

In 1847, he married Julia Szendry against the wishes of her father, a member of the landed gentry. Expressions of his love for her fill many of the poems in this collection:

You praise me, dearest one, for being good!

Perhaps I am, who knows, it may be true,

But thank me not . . . the source of every good

That’s in me rises from your heart and you.

. . . . . from "You Praise Me"

While some of his poems seem sentimental, I think they need to be read in the context of both his youth and the Romantic Movement which swept Europe from about 1770 through Petofi’s lifetime. Another common theme in Petöfi’s work is nature, not an Emersonian all-encompassing Nature, but specifically the plains where he grew up. His love for his homeland is tied up with his love for his mother—several of the poems here are addressed to her—and his concern for the common people.

How long will you sleep, my land?

Till your house is burning?

Even till the tocsin rings,

Are you never turning?

How long will you sleep, my land,

Lovely Magyar homeland?

Maybe in another world

You may wake, my own land!

. . . . . from "How Long Will You Sleep, My Land?"

Caught up in the revolutionary fervor of 1848, he became one of the leaders of the youth movement to free Hungary from Austria’s rule. He co-authored the Twelve Pont, which were the demands presented to the Hapsburg Governor-General, and wrote the Nemzeti Dal, the National Song. Anyone who has heard Les Miz will recognise the echoes of Petöfi’s song:

On your feet, Magyar, the homeland calls!

The time is here, now or never!

Shall we be slaves or free?

This is the question, choose your answer!

. . . . . from "The National Song"

In 1849, he joined General Bem’s army in Transylvania: "I drop my lute to take a sword in hand,/The poet is a warrior today;" (from "Farewell"). While the army had some successes against the Hapsburg troops, they were unable to match the strength of the Russian troops sent by the Tsar in support of Austria. Petöfi died in July of 1849. His body was never found, and rumors persisted, as with so many folk heroes, that he would return in Hungary’s hour of need. But he himself knew the likelihood that he would not survive and left several poems about how fleeting life may be.

So near the dawn and now the night has come.

So near the spring and wintertime is here.

So near the day, my Julia, when we met.

You are my wife . . . as long ago you were.

So near the hours we played at father’s knee,

So soon beside grandfathers we are lain . . .

No more is life than swiftly racing cloud’s

Shadow on the river, breath on windowpane.

. . . . . "So Near the Dawn . . ."

I wrote last week about the difficulty of coming home from war. My readings about World War I have brought home to me the futility of war. I stood once on a bridge in Belgium. At one end was a plaque marking the spot where the first shot of the war was fired. At the other end, a few yards away, was a plaque marking the spot where the last shot was fired. I cannot understand the folly of choosing to go to war, but when I read some of these poems of Petöfi’s, I catch an echo of the clarion thrill of youth when you think that it just might be possible to change the world.

Like last week’s In the Woods, this marvelous novel selected by one of my book clubs brings together past and present. At sixty-seven, Trond Sander has moved to a small cabin in the woods to create a new life for himself, a simple life of doing chores, restoring the cabin, chopping wood for the winter. Most of all, what he wants is a life alone, just him and the dog he has adopted from an animal shelter, a life where he is able to think. Since the death of his wife in a terrible car accident three years previously, Trond has felt increasingly unable to go on with his prosperous life in Oslo. He does not even tell his two daughters where he is going.

But once alone, what he finds himself thinking about is the summer of 1948, when he was fifteen, when he and his father went off to another cabin, in other woods, beside a loop of river that comes in from Sweden and returns to it. Petterson moves back and forth between the two stories, subtly mirroring events and experiences. He draws in, as well, the German occupation which ended in 1945, and the absences of Trond’s father during the war. Yet I was always certain of which time period we were in; a member of my book club pointed out that with each shift, Petterson grounds us right away with something unique to that time period, such as the dog in the present day.

The writing is just amazing: clear and simple sentences that resound with emotion. Petterson worked closely with the translator, Anne Born, so I assume the prose is close to the original. He claims not to plan his books, but just to start and see where the writing takes him. If that is true, then he is either a genius or does a thorough and excellent job of revising, because the way this book is structured is so delicate and yet completely sound. The mirroring of the two stories is reflected in other doublings: obvious ones like the two sets of twins, the two encounters with lorries on mountain roads, the two times Trond falls out of bed; and more subtle ones such as Trond’s children waiting for him to return from his business travels just as he waited for his father to return from his mysterious absences during the war. Yet it is so lightly done, or perhaps I was so caught up in the story, that I was not even aware of things clicking into place. I only saw them when I went back and reread the book, which I did immediately, something I do only with the rare book that leaves me gasping.

Rereading also helped me see the seemingly unimportant details that later coalesce around an event or image and take on layers of meaning. There is Sweden, for example, that other country where Trond is certain everything will look the same but feel entirely different. And while Petterson does paraphrase Hartley’s famous opening lines, we are there well before him. Sometimes we must examine the past before we recognise the small, almost imperceptible shifts that change everything: the moment of crossing into adulthood or the moment you know you must, as Rilke said, change your life.

I don’t want to give away the plot. This story needs to unfold in its own time. This is a story about what a son may learn from his father, about communicating in this so reticent culture, about what it means to be a man. It’s also a story about coming back, a theme that resonates with me. Trond’s father returns from the war, from the danger and excitement, where he risked everything for the greater good. He returns to his wife and two children, to their second-floor flat, just as Norway itself must find a way to return to itself after the long years of German occupation. How do you come back from war and pick up your life again? Or from a terrible loss, such as the death of Trond’s wife? Perhaps you run off to sea, or yell and sing like the boaters in Oslo on the night of liberation, or perhaps you go off to a cabin in the woods and sit by the river and think.

This debut novel has won many awards, and I can see why: it is beautifully written. The story is immediately interesting: two cases twenty years apart in the same small suburb of Knocknaree in Ireland. In the first, three children disappear while playing in the woods near their homes; only one is ever found, his shoes filled with blood and his memory gone. In the second, the found boy, now Detective Rob Ryan, investigates the murder of a young girl her body discovered by archeologists who are racing against the impending construction of a motorway to excavate a site in what was once the woods. Ryan, who has kept his past a secret, is joined by Cassie Maddox, his partner and the first woman to join the Murder squad, and Sam O’Neill, a cheerful, stocky young man whose uncle is a mid-level politician, which gives Sam an in for investigating the motorway contracts.

So there’s an interesting story, a variety of characters, and enough suspense to keep me reading late into the night. But what I loved about this book right from the start was the writing. In scraps of memory that come to Ryan, flashbacks, and conversation among the team, French brilliantly evokes childhood itself, what it is like to be ten years old, vaulting over the stone wall and running down the almost invisible paths that your feet know without your even thinking about it because you and your friends have been playing Indians and explorers and all kinds of other games in it all summer long. She reminds me of how foreign the world of adults seems, and of what those first unthinking friendships are like, deeper than blood. Most of all, she makes me feel again that sense of the magic of the world, that a tent of leaves could hide anything, a troll or unicorn. Things seem open-ended when you’re young, before you know how things work and what lies beyond the hill. Maybe beans can grow into the clouds; maybe a fish can grant three wishes; maybe the stories can actually come true.

These shreds of memory, while tantalising, are only a small part of the book, which is a police procedural, recounting the investigation of the girl’s murder. Here, too, French’s matter-of-fact story-telling is enriched by her description of the friendship between Ryan and Cassie, partners and pals, joking, teasing, taking the piss out of each other, backing each other up. During the investigation, their friendship expands to include (to a certain extent) Sam, but he is not part of the late-night swing dance classes on the roof or the desperate, early-morning calls for a ride home. French captures their easy camaraderie beautifully.

She also captures the give and take of the squad room. Like any office, the Murder squad has an efficient grapevine. There are alignments and alliances, mysterious shifts of power between Ryan and Superintendent O’Neill, as well as among the detectives themselves. There are the peculiar roles that some people take on in the culture of a particular office, like Quigley whose nose for weakness makes him hang like an albatross on new recruits, burnt-outs, and failures. There’s humor here, too, in the banter between Ryan and Cassie for example, to relieve, however briefly, the tension and boredom and frustration of the investigation.

Fundamentally, this is a book about telling the truth. Any investigation has to be about determining who is being open, who is hiding something, who is lying. Here, it is not only the suspects but the detectives themselves who wrestle with truth-telling and compromise: Cassie with her refusal to lie even in the interview room, Ryan with his lost childhood. Woods have long been a powerful metaphor for what is hidden, what is kept secret, what challenges and changes us. Think of the folktales documented by Grimm brothers, Robin Hood, John Fennimore Cooper’s stories, even 1986’s musical Into the Woods. In a smart move, French touches only lightly on these allusions, concentrating on this specific section of woods in Knocknaree and what they mean to one person, Rob Ryan, who lost his childhood there.

My problems with the book are minor. You always want the characters to grow and change in the course of a story, but some of Ryan’s transformations struck me as overly abrupt. Also, in a mystery, I want closure at the end, with all the puzzles unwound and the solutions laid bare. I don’t need retribution, necessarily, nor the kind of ending where every minor storyline ties neatly together. The answers don’t have to be spelled out for me, but I expect them to be there somewhere. Yet here some questions remain once the book is done.

However, in spite of this small frustration and Ryan’s sometimes incomprehensible behavior, this is an excellent mystery. I highly recommend it and have already gotten my hands on French’s next book.

Although always scrupulously clean, Sir Edward Feathers, a retired judge, is called Filth by his colleagues (an acronym for “failed in London; try Hong Kong”) in tribute to his successful career as an advocate in the Far East. Old Filth is so colorless as to seem invisible, literally so in some scenes. Since the death of his wife, he has the chilliest of connections to the people around him, not even knowing the name of his housekeeper. Events conspire to make him reflect upon his life and reconnect with people from his past. Filth is a Raj Orphan, not a term I'd heard before though I knew that those who worked for the Raj, the British Empire in the Far East, usually sent their children back to England by the time they were five, both for schooling and to avoid disease.

The story moves back and forth across the events of Old Filth's life, with the occasional foray into the point of view of another character. While I am easily irritated by this kind of non-linear structure in the hands of less adept writers, with Gardam I was never in doubt as to the who, when and where. Writers hoping to accomplish such seamless transitions would do well to study how Gardam manages her jumps in person, time and space. Like Old Filth himself, the prose is deceptively simple, concealing gems of lovely description, sparks of satire, and deep emotions. Of his wife Betty, Gardam says, “Her passion for jewelery was Chinese and her strong Scottish fingers rattled the trays of jade in the street markets of Kowloon, stirring the stones like pebbles on a beach. ‘When you do that,' Old Filth would say—when they were young and he was still aware of her all the time—‘your eyes are almond-shaped.'”

I very much enjoyed this book, a selection for one of my book clubs, despite a couple of quibbles. I didn't much like the interpolation of a few scenes of dialogue formatted like a script. The first one in particular does not tell us anything that the prose scene afterwards does not cover. However, some members of my book club liked these scenes, pointing out that they reinforce the way Old Filth lives his life as though playing a part on the stage. I also thought the climactic revelation was unnecessary and not worth the build-up. Most of my book club agreed, though some thought we needed the revelation to truly understand him. Perhaps. But I wonder if the whole of the life, presented so brilliantly throughout the book, doesn't give us all the understanding we need.

What with the recent deaths of Ted Kennedy, Trevor Stone and Mike Seegar, as well as others in my more immediate circle, I have been thinking a lot lately about the shape of a life, the whole of a life, which we cannot see until it is finished. I recently finished a biography of Dylan Thomas by Andrew Lycett, an excellent book, well-researched and very readable. I like to read biographies, but sometimes find them depressing because of the way they condense a life. There is too short a time between the dreams and aspirations at the beginning to the disappointments and compromises at the end. In our own lives, in real time, we have the breathing room to come to terms with our limitations (self-imposed or not) or perhaps to forget our early visions, Wordsworth's splendour in the grass. Reading a biography, however long one lingers over it, one moves too quickly over the ground for such comfort, flips through the photographs too rapidly. And, of course, particularly so with Thomas's life, with its squandered promise and early death.

Making allowances for the difference between a real person and a fictional character, I had a different response to this account of Old Filth's life. Initially I found this cold, reticent man unattractive and even uninteresting. However, discovering the circumstances of his birth, the joys and trials he encounters during his life, and the way he responds to them made me understand and appreciate the man he becomes and reminds me to look more often for the complexity behind the sometimes simple masks of those around me.