John Le Carre has written twenty one novels and A Small Town In Germany was his fifth, written in 1968 and the last of his for me to have read. The book is set in the 1960's (when the author was actually stationed there) and the small town is Bonn (the second sentence in the book describes it as "a Balkan city, stained and secret, drawn over with tramwire"), the artificially created centre of West German government since 1949. The British Embassy has a problem. A foreign worker there is missing, and so are confidential files. Alan Turner is sent from London to investigate. But is he more interested in finding the missing man or the files? He is not well received by the staff he interviews, particularly because of a tense political situation. I felt that the novel occasionally got bogged down with a succession of characters Turner talks to, but apart from that, it is a rattling good yarn. Le Carre is comfortable in the setting and plot, and he makes Turner an engaging and interesting hero. Not his best work, and maybe that is why his next book, The Naive and Sentimental Lover was such a departure from his secret service themes. But it all came good when up next came Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Whatever You Love is one of the recent breed of contemporary fiction that combines well written middle class family drama with a violent edge. Laura is our heartbroken narrator as she tries to cope with the death of her daughter in a road accident. Her quest to find the truth behind the mystery driver sets her on a dangerous path that reaches an unexpected climax. These are the books I really enjoy. This is Louise Doughty's sixth novel and her writing is never less than gripping and powerful. Superb.
There are still a couple of Ian McEwan's novels that are still on my reading list, and one of them was The Cement Garden, his first. He had previously published two books of short stories, and indeed this story is only half the length of a normal novel. Four children from young Tom to eighteen year old Julie are alone after the death at home of their recluse mother. Fifteen year old Jack is our narrator, a strange boy, but aren't we all at that age. One review says how even here, McEwan has already, unlike many of his contemporaries, kept his authorial voice absent from his narrator and so brilliantly captures what makes this person tick. Having come to his first novel from reading all his later works, it does seem different. Is that because he is developing as a writer or is it the narration by a boy who is as morose as can be. In any event, a startling and memorable story.
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