Bride of the Book God

I have found this a difficult book to review, because once I started reading it I realised that it isn’t really a fantasy; in fact Ryman himself in his afterword (which some reviewers have seen as a part of the novel itself) says that he is “a fantasy writer who fell in love with realism”, in as much as some of the events which make up his story didn’t really happen, or might have happened in a world that is slightly different to our own.

Was tells the story of three people, all of whom have an involvement with The Wizard of Oz. Jonathan is an actor dying of AIDS who was due to play the Scarecrow in a stage adaptation of Oz when he discovered how ill he was, and whose childhood in Canada was affected deeply by seeing the first TV broadcast of the Oz film. Frances Gumm is a child singer who will grow up to become Judy Garland with all that entails. Dorothy Gael is an orphan who goes to live with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry in Kansas in 1875, where she leads a harsh life including being abused by someone close to her, and has an encounter with a young teacher called Frank Baum which provides some of the inspiration for his children’s story.

The structure of the novel is very similar to that of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, but very different in tone and more unbalanced. What I mean by that is that the novel is really about Dorothy, and Jonathan’s search for her at the end of his life, and there really isn’t that much about Frances. The blurb on my copy describes this as “an epic fable of lost innocence” and I that feels right to me.

As I said at the beginning, whether this is really a fantasy novel in the traditional sense I’m not sure, but I found it very powerful; I became totally gripped about a third of the way through and wanted to know how things were going to turn out. The bleakness of Dorothy’s life in particular will be difficult for some to read, but I’m glad that I had the experience.

This is my second read for the Once Upon a Time II challenge.

Another book about a murder, but this takes a very different approach from my previous read.

Julie Myerson’s Something Might Happen plunges you directly into the story. A woman is horrendously murdered near her home in a small seaside town, and this is the starting point for a novel about grief, and the effect that such traumatic events can have on the people they touch. The main character in the novel is Tess, the murdered woman’s best friend, and we see the unfolding events through her eyes as the police arrive and carry out their investigation, and the questions they must ask start to expose complex feelings. Tess herself becomes drawn to one of the other characters, but then another tragedy strikes and makes her reassess her situation.

It’s quite difficult to describe this book without giving too much away, not that it’s a mystery in the conventional sense at all, but the developing emotional situation that Tess finds herself in is so well written and beautifully paced that it would be a shame to examine it too much and spoil the effect for other readers. All I can say is that I found it very moving; it’s really compelling, and for that reason is the first book for some time that I have effectively read in a sitting. Towards the end I found myself close to tears, though not quite as embarrassingly so as with another novel (about a time-traveller’s wife) that I had to stop reading on the bus in case I totally lost control.

This novel it makes very clear that real life is a mess and things are never tied up as neatly as we might like to think. Very, very sad but well-worth reading.

The Blood-Dimmed Tide is, I suppose, best described as a police procedural, a type of crime fiction which I enjoy very much (as long as it is done well). The novel is set in the early 1930s and involves John Madden, a former police inspector who, following a harrowing case described in Airth’s previous novel River of Darkness, has given up his career to settle in Surrey with his wife and children and become a gentleman farmer. His connections with his former colleagues are still very alive, and when he assists with a search for a missing child which results in him finding her mutilated body he inevitably gets drawn into the investigation of what appears to be a serial killer at work.

That’s the bones of the story but what I enjoyed about this novel was the tone, which is rather melancholy; Madden had some terrible experiences in World War One and these colour his attitude to life. This makes Madden a genuinely sympathetic character, to my mind, and gives the novel a moral centre which is there even when we are following the activities of the other characters. I also found the backdrop of growing unease about what is happening in Europe, particularly in Germany, gave the story some depth. Unfortunately it looks like Rennie Airth has only written these two John Madden books which is a shame as I would have liked to see what happened to him. If I’m wrong and there are others in this series I would love for someone to let me know.