reading at a time of isolation

hello reader

well, i have finished (or completed) reading another two novels. not just one, look you see, or four or six or even five. two is the number upon which now i pause and pass some form of comment about them here.

this is all been written a good deal sooner than i had expected, in truth. well, what good would it do to be not truthful here, but let us move on. embarking on the first of the two which i have most recently read was a touch daunting, as in length it is somewhere either north or south of 700 pages. with limited time to read i suspected it may take a while to get through, but then that thing happened were we were all told to stay home, so i had considerably more reading time available than had been or was anticipated. every cloud, etc.

right, a look at the two (not three, or one, etc) books what i read, followed by a brief overview of each. yes, for those in a rush but wish to know the basics and to be aware of such in an entirely spoiler free way.

it is so that A Book Of Bones is John Connolly's 15th (or 14th or 16th or something like that) (could even be higher) novel in a series tracking the plight of the series' ostensible protagonist, Charlie "Bird" Parker. although he seems not to get called Bird so much now. as almost a very good entry into the series as this is, there would be little point picking it up and reading it if you hadn't read most (if not all) of the previous. yes, i would indeed recommend reading all (if not most) of them. meanwhile, Once A Crooked Man by David McCallum (yes, that one) is a rather flimsy, skimpy, frequently preposterous and at one stage downright crass, tasteless and disgusting (if not plain "offensive") novel which provides easy if not particularly enjoyable reading.

a fairly safe assumption for me to make, you would think, is that the above says all that one would probably need to know of the novels without giving all that much away. for the rest of this post, you are hereby notified that a *** SPOILER WARNING *** is in place, reading on is always your own choice, but don't say i didn't warn you.

starting off where i did, then, is to commence with A Book Of Bones by John Connolly. which is not to be confused with one that was called Bag Of Bones, which for some reason i think is the name of a Stephen King novel. yes, i am aware of it being possible for me to do a google thing and check on that, but i am not particularly interested. should you be, well i would say go for the google search.

that all important provenance of my copy? well, a tricky one for me to give an exact, precise and transparent honest on, for this was a birthday present from the family to moi. but, if you insist, around that time i believe it was available for either £3 or £3.50 as the Tesco "book of the week" sort of offer thing. now it is likely going for a "standard" price, whatever that may well be.

plot? you want me to narrow down 700 or so pages of a novel which explicitly follows some 3 or 4 previous books out of a number "in its teens" of books into a nice summary that is about a paragraph or two in length? not sure that it can be done, but i can only try.

Charlie Parker has little or no explicit interest in hunting down his quarry from the previous novel, a mysterious chap called Quayle, or his decidedly creepy companion (Mors, i think is her name). however, events and circumstances - and the will of others - compels him to carry on with the search to a conclusion. this sees Parker, along with some companions (notably the less than legally obedient Angel and Louis), and with FBI funding, head to take it key sights from Europe to bring an end to the hunt for Quayle.

overall, it's a good novel, as well written as ever and as we (being fans of the character, the series and so as a consequence the writer) have come to expect. the story is a good and interesting enough one, not tying up loose ends from the previous one as such but rather elaborating and expanding on aspects and elements of it. giving fans what they want, maybe.

but, there are some issues with it. as mentioned at least once before above, it is a novel which is on, near or around seven hundred pages in length. other than making it rather awkward to sit and read such a bloody big sized paperback, at no stage does it feel like it needed to be, or was naturally, a novel of such length. whereas one or two novels in the past by the author have been frustratingly short, this one is just too damned long for what it needs to be. yes, call me goldilocks for saying so, i guess.

another thing what bothers me is John Connolly's presumably wicked and naughty sense of humour. i flat refuse to believe that my complaint is resolved by assuming he does poor research. it was just a couple of years ago that Mr Connolly caused some outrage and upset by suggesting the English way of making tea was to commit the obscenity of (forgive me for writing this) putting the milk in first (no, it is not).that you can read more of by clicking these words. here, for some reason he describes and declares Middlesbrough (yes, that one) to be a "city". rather famously, or infamously, it is not a city, for it has not been awarded such status. no, the place is "just" a town. exactly how and why, out of all the places in all of the world, he decided to set some of it in Middlesbrough is a mystery maybe best left unsolved, but here we are.

something which might take my fellow enthusiastic readers by surprise is just how absent Charlie Parker is in this novel. maybe this is as a consequence of the exaggerated number of pages to the book, but it feels like the (ostensibly at least) main character disappears for a hundred or so pages at a time. the rest of the story going on is interesting enough, to be sure, but you get distracted by reading and thinking, well, where is he?

no matter how lengthy it is to get where it goes, A Book Of Bones is highly satisfactory. by no means is it the best of the Charlie Parker novels, but it is decidedly not the worst. curiously the next book, which i think is now out in hardback (i can wait), is a "prequel" thing, going back some 20 years. odd, as the conclusion of this one suggested that another, more "present day" story was imminent. hey ho, what there is of my wretched, f*****g miserable, hollow life is made noticeably better by the presence of John Connolly novels on a regular basis, so i shall take whatever he cares to publish.

moving on, then, and it was of course the case that i was drawn to reading Once A Crooked Man purely on the basis of the author. yes, David McCallum, as in that David McCallum. better known, possibly, over the last two decades or so as Ducky out of NCIS, but also known as Him out of The Man From UNCLE and Him out of Sapphire & Steel. if that is not reason enough to want to read a particular book, well then i do not know what is, or i am a dutchman, or similar.

provenance of my copy? off of internet, as it happens. i was aware of the book being published at the time it was, but it never ever turned up in the book section of any of the supermarkets that i went to. having forgotten about it for a year or so, recently i remembered it, and purchased a "used" copy off of internet for somewhere that i believe was just south of £3. whilst i don't remember the precise price, what i do not is that what turned up was an extremely carefully previously used (or "read") copy, as the immaculate condition of it gave every indication that no one had actually previously read it. a lovely surprise, to be sure, so i did not have to worry about a battered paperback falling apart in my hands as i read.

how about the plot? farcically whimsical, simplistically ludicrous and absurdly preposterous. and none of those in a particularly or realistically good way. let me try. in farcical circumstances a farcical investment banker / venture capitalist manages money for some farcical gangster types. when health matters make it so that, farcically, the gangster types decide to go legit, in farcical circumstances a getting by actor overhears their farcical plot to "clean up loose ends" and go straight. which sees the actor try to intervene and stop whatever it is they are doing (he is not entirely sure), by farcical means and in a farcical way. and this sees him take quite a farcical journey, or if you like, strange adventure.

i think i get what David McCallum might have been trying to do here. the vague, general sense i got was that he was trying to blend the traditions of good, old fashioned British "whoops mind my brolly" music hall farce with all this exciting crime gangster stuff what they do in America. this is a concept which generally may work in some form or another, but alas not quite in this novel.

why not? mostly due to the flimsy, skimpy way it's all written. oh, the words flow from the page just fine, it's just that everything is sort of rushed and compressed. to say characters are left one dimensional in the novel is an exaggeration, so thin on presentation are they all.

a most unexpected and indeed (very) repugnant consequence of the above is the "handling" of a British police woman of the lady type. mindful of a spoiler warning given, i would encourage you to note that decency and taste are about to go out the window here. this character is subject to a severe sexual assault, and the reaction to it is for her to fall for the abuser, ditch her police ways and follow him off in crime, all within 2, or maybe 3, pages. it serves to turn the reading experience from "harmless distraction" to "woeful garbage".

if McCallum was trying to be witty, funny, provocative, seedy or "meta", at no level does it work. a surprising element is the ringing, celebratory endorsement of the novel by no less than Joanna Lumley, who apparently is some go-to type for literary endorsements that i was unaware of. presumably she may not have actually read the novel, or is not quite so much a friend of the author as all would have assumed and her comments are sheer sarcasm, or she has a particularly peculiar slant on life.

to clarify then, those who have not a flying fig of a clue who David McCallum is will find nothing of value or interest in this novel, unless they have a most out of the ordinary value system. for those aware and do quite like him, all this novel will do is disrupt your view of that nice well spoken British chap. probably best to avoid this book all around, then.

maybe the time has come for me to simply cease indulging the literary vanity projects of actors and singers. the last few years have seen me endure, or punish myself (to varying degrees) with 'novels' by Steve Martin, Morrissey, Hugh Laurie and now David McCallum. whereas reading these works hasn't been all or mostly bad (well, yes, the Morrissey one was, and now the McCallum), none of them have brought the particular sense of reward for time invested one may hope for from a reading experience. hey ho, oh.

so, well, that's that for this, then. a formidable about of waffle i've done on two books that, in all likelihood, anyone interested or feeling compelled to read will have had a bit of a gander at long before my fingers touched the keyboard. but, thanks as ever for reading.




be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!