The Art of Fielding, Landfall and The Comfort of Strangers

Funnily enough, the only boring bits of The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach were the descriptions of the odd game of baseball. As someone who only knows the basic rules, and having only seen one game live (the Yankees against the Red Socks on my visit to New York in 2008), I quite liked the explanations of some of the finer points of the game. Thankfully the book is so much more. It is a marvellous story about the intertwining lives of the five main characters on the campus of Westish College. The characterisation is first class, they are all people we warm to quickly. Obviously, they have their ups and downs, and occasionally there is a little too much repetition of their habits, but we enjoy their company all the way through to the end. But what sort of names are Skrimshander, Affenlight, and Schwartz. We have to wait for the secondary characters for sensible names such as Cox and Melkin. But I guess that is just being British.

I chose to read Landfall by Helen Gordon on the strength of the four reviews in the book club that appears in the Times on Saturdays.

I enjoyed all but the last thirty odd pages. Up until then, this is an interesting story of a modern single woman, Alice, who is in her thirties and takes refuge from redundancy after a burdensome career and relationships in the home of her parents (away on a long trip - a little contrived?) in the suburbs. She has time to reflect upon her sister, Janey, missing since she was seventeen. And she is joined by Emily, a preening teenager from America, and a niece of Alice's parents. Their time together is well documented and I liked how they both are in, what is to them, alien territory. But just as we become interested in what must be a mysterious ending, the author makes a complete mess of dreaming up a trite and sudden finale. Such a shame.

Having read nearly all of Ian McEwan's novels, I have been catching up on some of his earlier work. I enjoyed The Cement Garden and The Child In Time. In between he wrote the Comfort of Strangers. Only 125 pages, so more like an extended short story. Would it have been worth the read if it had been written by anyone else? Not really. The writing is already quite smart, but it is a fairly boring story of a couple on holiday in Venice, although the city is curiously never mentioned by name. It reminded me a little of the far superior and also brief Amsterdam. Everything is quietly set up for a devastating ending. But this time it just seems silly.