Anders Hanson

I have just finished reading “Death at La Fenice” by Donna Leon.  I have always liked crime novels, and I have fairly recently become interested in crime novels set in other parts of Europe.  But with me having fallen in love with Italy a few years ago, and in particular having become fascinated with Venice, I felt I had to read one of Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti books.

Guido Brunetti is Commissario of police in Venice, and in this book has to solve the death of a world-famous conductor.  The story was very enjoyable and managed to go move at quite leisurely pace despite me seeming to go through the book quite quickly.   That sounds an odd contradiction, but it does sum it up.  Brunetti appears to spend much of his time simply wandering through Venice from one suspect or witness to another via bars, restaurants and the great and the good of the city.  There seems to be a complete lack of urgency in his investigation, and yet I seemed to get through the book quite quickly.  How true the book is of Venetian life I do not know (although I would suspect it is not very true) but it does seem to fit with the city and does contain quite a strong sense of place.  All in all an enjoyable book and a satisfactory albeit sudden conclusion.

I am now moving back to reading a political biography, this time of Denis Healey.  There has been a bit about him in the Yorkshire press of late, as he has just reached his 90th birthday, and so this seemed an appropriate time to start his autobiography, which I have owned for a while.

AMAZON UK: Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon

AMAZON UK: The Time of my Life by Denis Healey

Well, actually I’ve just finished reading it, but it’s “The Long Firm” by Jake Arnott. This is a brilliant book and one of the best I’ve read in a long while, and I can’t wait to read more of the trilogy of which this is the first book.

After reading it, I then googled it and realised how unfairly slated it was. The majority of the criticism seems to revolve around Jake Arnott not being worth the huge advance he was given, that the writing was not that good and the only reason he was being promoted was because he (a) fitted in with the gangster chic trend that was around at the time which then led in to any film by Guy Ritchie, (b) was gay, or (c) was young and photogenic. Whether these all helped promote him as an author or not, the fact is that the book is very good, well written and interesting.

The Long Firm is mainly set in the 60’s, (which almost put me off buying it), and is the story of East End gangster Harry Starks. Each chapter tells the story from a different person’s perspective - five in all - and the clever part is how the story is moved on over the years, but yet the characters’ stories also overlap so you end up spotting bits of the story that you had already read but from someone else’s point of view. It’s very clever and very interesting. It also managed, although I accept it is purely supposition, to really conjour up well the East End of the 60’s.

I am now starting Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon.

AMAZON UK: The Long Firm by Jake Arnott

I’ve just started reading a book that describes itself as “a journey into the English mind”. The book - “Welcome to Everytown” by Julian Baggini is about six months he spent living in S66 - apparently the most typical postcode in the country statistically. The book starts off by pointing out how most of the media portrays “middle England” as somewhere in the Home Counties, but in reality the real middle England is places like Brampton and Wickersley in Rotherham. It’s that continual difference between median and mean that is great for proving whatever you want.

Although the subject of the book is interesting in itself, the thing that drew me to it in the bookshop is that I know where the area is and to some extent what it looks like. S66 is supposed to be typical in that it has the right proportions of each social group within it. But it is soon made clear that a key point is that despite the great social changes over the last twenty years, most of England is still working class.

The interesting thing with reading the book will be to see how much I feel I can relate to the people he writes about. When you have grown up in Sheffield, you feel you understand what working class areas like this are like, and indeed anyone who doesn’t know the city assumes that the city is purely working class.  But in reality I grew up in Sheffield Hallam - supposedly the most middle-class constituency in the country and with the highest number of millionaires outside the South East. It is probably fair to say that growing up in Sheffield does at least mean that you aren’t completely clueless about “how the other half lives” as you still see a certain amount of it day to day and you work with people from different backgrounds, but it not the same as living in a working class area.

AMAZON UK: Welcome to Everytown by Julian Baggini

JULIAN BAGGINI

During the election campaign it has been particularly enjoyable to get home and read for a bit before going to bed.

The book I have just finished “Four Stories” by Alan Bennett. I have enjoyed everything that Alan Bennett has written and these four stories were no exception. I had read The Clothes They Stood Up In before, but it was worth re-reading and the other three stories were also excellent.

There is something particularly northern about Alan Bennett’s style of writing. It fits with the humour shown by people such as Victoria Wood. But it is also the details that he picks up on and the human traits that he writes about whilst keeping a lot of humour. Although I think my first contact with Alan Bennett’s writing was seeing some of his monologues performed at the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield, I saw a lot more of it when I was loaned some videos of his plays by my English teacher Mrs Everitt.  She was also a big fan, and it was these videos that led me to enjoy plays such as A Question of Attribution and An Englishman Abroad.  There is still a lot of his work though that I have never watched or read.  The piece though that particularly sticks in my mind is something he did for television called Dinner at Noon, where he basically gave a commentary on people he saw whilst staying at the Crown Hotel in Harrogate.

I am now starting on another Peter Robinson book, “A Dedicated Man”, whilst still dipping in and out of John Major’s autobiography. Although John Major’s book is interesting, it became too lengthy and detailed for me to use as a relaxing read late at night.  But I am still reading parts of it regularly and it is still proving interesting.

AMAZON UK: Four Stories by Alan Bennett

WIKIPEDIA: Alan Bennett

It’s been a while since I updated on this, but I have gone back to reading avidly.

The book I am now nearing the end of is Complicity by Iain Banks. The first Iain Banks I read was one of his most recent - Dead Air - a book that I would probably label as one of my favourites. So, hoping that I’d found an author I could without question say is brilliant, I then read The Bridge. Maybe I’m not intellectual enough, but I hated it and found it incredibly confusing. However, hoping that it was just a one off, I then started Complicity. The book so far has been very good. Basically, it is a mystery story, but what I love about this book, as with Dead Air, is the way that Iain Banks describes things from everyday, and not so everyday, life that makes you realise picture exactly what he is referring to.

The last book I read was another mystery, but along the more conventional lines. That time it was Murder in the Marais by Cara Black. I had wanted to buy this book for some time. I first found Cara Black’s books in Waterstone’s in Southampton and just by reading the back of them I wanted to buy them. So I kept looking out for the first one in the series - Murder in the Marais - from then on. I finally bought it in January this year. Murder in the Marais is about a murder with links to the occupation of Paris during the Second World War. It twists and turns quite a lot and so can sometimes be difficult to follow, but when you get back on track it all fits together nicely. Although I don’t know the Marais at all, it really did conjour up a strong image of it in my mind. A very good book, and I will certainly read more by Cara Black.

AMAZON UK: Complicity by Iain Banks

AMAZON UK: Murder in the Marais by Cara Black