London Rules, Dear Mrs Bird and Taft

Having enjoyed Mick Herron's "Slow Horses" (the first of the five Jackson Lamb thrillers), I skipped the next three and caught up with his crew in "London Rules". The witticisms are great at first, but they do become a little tiresome by the end. One of the gang remarks: "If I'd wanted to be a librarian, I'd have gone to library school, taken library exams, and saved up enough library stamps to buy a library uniform". See what I mean? There are occasions when the writer tries to I inject some literary merit into a straightforward terror attack plot. "Night keeps it's head down during daylight hours, but it's always there, always waiting, and some open their doors to it early; allows it to sidle in and bed down in a corner". Herron should stick to the more witty stuff, but sparingly. 

I needed something light after the histrionics of "London Rules", and this book was exactly right. Emmeline is a sympathetic and lovable narrator, although sometimes you want to give her a good talking to. Despite the deadly serious background of London in the blitz, Emmeline has fancy ideas of what she can contribute to the war effort. But instead finds she is only working for a woman's magazine. The prose and dialogue wonderfully reflect the style of the early forties, but the story does lack some power and emotion that a more experienced writer might have wrung from Emmeline's predicaments.

Ann Patchett's second novel is one of her best. This is a mature white woman writing with a male narrator who is black. John Nickel is separated from the mother of his son (they were never married) and has ended up running a bar in Memphis, Tennessee. The story of the characters he meets in the bar, whether staff or visitors, mingle with his own family.  It took me a while to get used to the occasional insertions of another story, this time about the father (now dead) of Fay and Carl who appear in the bar. Is it real or imagined? Somehow it felt as this was being told by John in the third person. 

The dialogue (and there is stacks of it) is top drawer. Nobody writes family conversations better than Ann Patchett. There are some quite complicated relationships. When you come to an evening John spends with the parents of his ex and their other daughter, you know you are in the very capable hands of a great writer. She is equally good in her descriptions of place: "It's a fine day to be working outside. One of those great April days when everything is up and blooming and the weather isn't hot or cold." Just like it is now.