Trespass, A Murder of Quality and Solar

"Trespass" is the latest novel by Rose Tremain. Not quite in the same class as her brilliant "The Road Home" or "Sacred Country", but better than "Music and Silence". It tells the story of sixty four year old Anthony Verey who is visiting his sister Veronica and her friend Kitty at their home in rural France, and how their world collides with an elderly French brother and sister. The book has a great feeling of the landscape and the stifling heat of the south of that country. The characters are well drawn and I liked how their childhood still had an impact on their later lives.. There is no rush, but at the same time always interesting. A good story, the usual great writing and some twists along the way. Well worth the read.

Once I had read John Le Carre's first novel "Call For The Dead", that introduced George Smiley, I had always planned to read his second book "A Murder of Quality". Again this is quite a short novel, but once again with a terrific plot as George travels to Carne School, an old and formidable institution, to unravel an unexplained death. Although in his early days as a novelist, this is typically a superb story from this author. A terrific plot, great setting and wonderful characters.  Le Carre writes with such style and panache that it really brought back memories of school. "Gloom and cold. The cold was crisp and sharp as flint. It cut the faces of the boys as they moved slowly from the deserted playing fields after the school match. It pierced their black topcoats and turned their stiff, pointed collars into icy rings round their necks." His third novel was my introduction to this author donkeys years ago. But I shall revisit "The Spy Who Came In from the Cold" in a couple of months time. Can't wait.

A new Ian McEwan novel is always highly anticipated, and with great reviews, I was so looking forward to reading "Solar". So it was somewhat disappointing that this time he has written a fairly turgid story. It seemed far more challenging than normal. Lots of words I did not know, and some twists on some I did ("effortfully"?). Perhaps it should have been written in the first person, as the main character fills every sentence. But what an obnoxious character is the aging Nobel prizewinning physicist Michael Beard. His only redeeming feature is that he was once brilliant, now less so. Otherwise a womanising overweight drunk. It may have seemed clever for McEwan to conjure up a comic character as some have said, but to me he was just pathetic. Like "The Social Network" I just did not want to spend time in his company. The intellectual passages (and there are far too many) about the physics of climate change and photosynthesis was way beyond my understanding ("Quantum coherence is key to the efficiency, you see, with the system sampling all the energy pathways at once."). Is McEwan trying to show off?  His last five novels are so beautifully accessible, this was really strange. The two words describing the novel on the front cover are "Savagely Funny....". I didn't laugh once.