Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

I’ve struggled in my previous attempts with Iain M Banks, twice failing to complete Consider Phlebas, once when I was over 200 pages in but couldn’t find enough interest in the characters or story to keep going. Despite that and having enjoyed almost all of his non Sci Fi novels and seeing the love that his ‘Culture’ novels receive both here and elsewhere I thought I’d try The Player of Games. For the first 50 pages it was touch and go if I would carry on but then something clicked and I read the rest of the book in one session scarcely able to stop to even make a cup of tea or answer the door. So now I’m hooked.

A highly readable coming of age novel which traverses the classic themes of sex, class, money and desire in 1980s Britain. That search for belonging in life is beautifully handled whilst the decade is captured so perfectly that I had to keep reminding myself that the book was only published in 2004.

And, it went out with a bang, with To Build A Fire, which I have read a few times before, originally some forty-plus years ago, and it has never left me, such is its power. It’s a tragic tale of arrogance and a gross under-estimation of the dangers of the wilds. A fable that all who take in the outdoors in any form, would be wise to read.

As the title suggests, it is a collection of ‘prose pieces’ thematically linked by that German metropolis, which was a cultural hive at the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth… in the fragments that were Walser’s speciality, his prose is almost Dickensian, especially when the world around him seems to radiate goodwill. There is a sort of running joke in Walser’s work that he is an insignificant, almost mouse-like human, and as a simple man he takes great pleasure in simple things: like taking a walk on Market day, or stuffing his face at a sort of German pub, or breathing in the musty smell of a room that hasn’t been lived in.

There’s nothing pleasant about the subject of this award-winning novel, which is drug abuse, unthinking violence and unhappy family tangles and feuds down in the Mississippi delta, and insane racist brutality at the old prison farm in upstate Parchman (in the news again for gang-war killings over New Year). But the story is well told and the author has a deep flowing stream of expressive local language. There are revenants who show a way out, and you are left with a sense that some humanity survives.

Is the young soldier preparing for D Day, who encounters young Esmé and discovers a brief friendship with her, Salinger himself? Esmé and her kid brother chat to him and joke with him – it is such a sweet story. The second half is more sombre but there is always humour at the edge of the picture and the menacing reality is so much stronger for the small details enacted offstage in memory. I found the emotion so affecting – it is a beautifully played out drama that could easily be filmed or dramatised but the rhythm of the prose and dialogue would never stand out as strongly as it does on the page.

An unsettling piece of dystopian fiction about heavily pregnant Alice, who retreats from the city with her boyfriend Pete to a new home in rural Australia as a horrific skin sealing epidemic spreads and puts massive strain on public services. It’s a short book that convincingly explores the implications of such an epidemic and I like the way Booth conveys a strong sense of paranoia on Alice’s part, so although you feel increasingly uneasy as the book progresses you’re not quite sure, until the end, just how serious the situation is. Recommended.

Ghosts, monsters and celeb cameos abound in O’Connor’s latest – a fictional treatment of Bram Stoker’s life, centring on the time he spent as manager of the Lyceum theatre in London and his relationships there with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry.

I loved this. O’Connor is a little fond of the odd digressions which sometimes sit a little uncomfortably in the whole. There’s a short chapter consisting of a description of a town on the coast of England which seems completely overdone for no apparent reason, but even that is well-written so there’s little to complain about really. It’s a grim story, but sprinkled with lightness and a lot of humour. A definite recommend.