Library Limelights 257

 

Kate Atkinson. Human Croquet. 1997. UK: Black Swan/Transworld Publishers, 1998.

A Kate Atkinson I hadn’t read?! Apparently. And it’s just as compelling as the others I enjoyed most. Perhaps it was the first of her works exploring a theme of alternate realities? The delightful and deeply imaginative Isobel Fairfax introduces us to her home, land and trees known by Fairfaxes for generations. Home presently being a large old house called Arden, full of increasingly bizarre inhabitants and relationships, depending on whichever stage of their lives we are peeking at. Some, like her father Gordon, disappear for a long time and then return. For years Isobel and her ugly but companionable brother Charles desperately long for their sophisticated, sarcastic mother Eliza who left when they were so young and never came back. Grandmother, known as the Widow, comes and goes. Isobel herself is often immersed in existential thoughts although she has time for private comments on the unattractive aspects of everyone around her. Occasionally she finds herself in a time warp.

Mrs Baxter next door is quite a comfort compared to Aunt Vinnie who cares for the Fairfax children in the absence of parents. She’s also a comfort compared to the repugnant Debbie, the new “mother” whom Gordon brings home upon his return. Isobel and Charles also deal with the odious lodger Mr Rice, not to mention Mr Baxter, a secret abuser who happens to be their school principal and another one who finally disappears. The ailing Baxter daughter Audrey is a mystery. At least Eunice and Carmen are steady ‒ if annoying – friends for Isobel. Just go with the flow—misplaced identities, fatherless babies, free-floating paranoia, hallucinated scenarios. They are all MAD. Possibly they may not know the rules for human croquet. Relax and enjoy the author’s own wonderful imagination—thought-provoking, bloody, incisive, fun. Clever, clever Kate Atkinson.*

* I’m totally charmed by the fact I read somewhere that, at one time (and perhaps still?) four great mystery writers all lived within an Edinburgh block or so of each other: Atkinson, Alexander McCall Smith, J.K. Rowling, and Ian Rankin. ☺

One-liners

▪ There was even a rumour that his attics were full of dead wives, all of them hanging from butcher’s hooks. (19)

▪ The dust in Arden isn’t dust, of course, but the talcum of the dead, a frail composite waiting to be reconstituted. (57)

▪ He’s the kind of boy you could take home to your mother (if you had one), the kind of boy you could take up to Lover’s Leap and steam up the car ‒ a boy for all seasons in fact. (47)

▪ “I spy with my little eye,” Mrs Baxter says hopefully, “something beginning with ‘T’,” and Mr Baxter shouts, “For God’s sake, Moira, can I get a bit of peace, please?” so that we don’t find out what the ‘T’ is. (100)

▪ Charles refrained from telling Mr Baxter that when she came back, Eliza was going to rip Mr Baxter’s head off and pull his lungs out through his neck. (223)

▪ “You told them I was dead?” Gordon persisted. (246)

▪ It clutched at the Widow’s strong heart to see her own perfect manly Gordon being fooled by something as tawdry as sex. (289)

Multi-liners

▪ Absence of Eliza has shaped our lives. She walked away, ‘up sticks and left with her fancy man’ as Vinnie puts it, and for some reason forgot to take us with her. Perhaps it was a fit of absent-mindedness, perhaps she meant to come back but couldn’t find the way. (35)

▪ Gordon would perhaps like Charles to make more of himself, but says nothing. After all, Gordon is a man who has succeeded in making less of himself. (45)

▪ Eliza stood on tiptoe and whispered in Gordon’s ear, her voice like burning sugar, Darling, if we don’t get a place of our own soon, then I’m going to leave you. Understand? (140)

▪ Perhaps there is no permanent reality, only the reality of change. A disturbing kind of thought. (327)

▪ “The police say it happens all the time. People just walking out of their lives.” And so it does. (408)

▪ She’s right, it’s too late, the baby’s head has already appeared. “Bloody hell,” Vinnie says succinctly. “Where did that come from?” (415)

Haunted

But there isn’t a day goes by when I don’t think about her. I carry Eliza around inside me, like a bowl of emptiness. There is nothing to fill it, only unanswered questions. What was her favourite colour? Did she have a sweet tooth? Was she a good dancer? Was she afraid of death? Do I have diseases I will inherit from her? Will I sew a straight seam or play a good hand at bridge because of her? (76)

Facts of Life

“Where do dead babies go?” Charles asked. Vinnie wasn’t fazed for a second, “In the ground,” and the Widow tut-tutted at the directness of this statement. “Heaven, of course,” she placated, “babies go to heaven and become cherubs.” Charles looked at Eliza for confirmation. They never really believed anything anyone said if Eliza didn’t verify it. Back to the baby shop to be repaired, she said, to annoy Vinnie and the Widow. (140-1)

Isobel ponders

Why am I dropping into random pockets of time and then popping back out again? Am I really doing it or am I imagining I’m doing it? Is this some kind of epistemological ordeal I’ve been set? I should never have tried to kill time. I wasted it and now it’s wasting me. (189)

Mrs B’s comfort

When the new-moon onions are soft and yellow Mrs Baxter adds the mushrooms, little cultivated buttons that she’s wiped and chopped in quarters. When they’re all nicely coated in butter she adds the big flat horse-field mushrooms that grow in the corner of the Lady Oak field, like huge grilled plates, their dark brown the colour of the earth. She stirs the fleshy slices around until they begin to wilt a little and then she adds the olive-coloured fungi that also grown in the field but are not nearly so common ‒ a treat for Daddy, for this is Mrs Baxter’s special recipe for mushroom soup. (409-10)

Ian Hamilton. Bonny Jack. Ebook download from TPL. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2021.

Some years ago I’d read one of Hamilton’s Ava Lee series and found it somewhat dull, but this is a stand-alone, and a Canadian author, and involves tracing family roots, so let’s give it a go. Not really a thriller. “Bloody” Jack Anderson is an insurance company magnate in Boston, in the 1980s, living the good (wealthy) life with wife Anne. Their three adult children are launched into careers and their own families. Now Jack, on the eve of retiring, decides to scratch a long-resented itch: why did his birth mother ‒ Jessie McPherson – abandon him as a child in Scotland, and does he have family there? Through agencies in that country (genealogically unrealistic), he knows his mother has since passed on but he locates his sister Moira whom he doesn’t remember. With a dubious Anne, he’s off to Glasgow to meet her. Moira does not measure up to the Andersons’ standards, and has only loving memories of their mother, to Jack’s irritation. But she does lead them to her younger half-siblings in Edinburgh, twins Harry and Georgina.

Discovering new family works well with the twins; as an insurance executive, Harry is more to Jack’s taste. However, Georgina has recently been left broke and humiliated by her husband, Atholl Malcolm; the crook absconded with millions of his clients’ money—including that of some gangster investors. (Was Atholl a deliberate choice for a similar-sounding word?) It’s another family shock when they discover that Jack’s father is still alive, leading to unexpected events that threaten Jack’s reputation. All in all, the Andersons are slightly patronizing snobs with a Kennedy clan air about their normal lives. The entire story is linear, balancing Jack’s emotions with Anne’s reasoning. No frills, no real depth, mildly entertaining.

Bits

▪ If the Andersons had a discernible weakness, it was alcohol in its various forms. (20)

▪ “Hello, you must be Jack,” she said, exposing stained yellow teeth. (63)

▪ “I was raised to have an open mind. In some ways it’s a curse, because people think you have no convictions.” (79)

▪ “Jack, I don’t like it when you pretend to be a paragon of virtue.” (81)

▪ All that talk about Jessie McPherson had exposed raw feelings, and it was clear that Jack and Georgie had different memories of the same woman. (146)

▪ Then McPherson hawked, leaned forward and spat. A spray of spittle and phlegm hit Georgie in the face. (236)

▪ “You’ve already resigned. Are you afraid they’ll ask you to make an early exit?” (285)

▪ I’m finished, he thought. One lapse in judgement and just like that, he was gone. (299)

▪ “Jack, don’t make me ashamed of you. I don’t think I can live with a man I’m ashamed of.” (325)

▪ “Are you telling me that a bogus story in a Scottish tabloid kills our agreement?” (297)

Linwood Barclay. Find You First. USA: HarperCollins, 2021.

Bravo! Probably Barclay’s finest thriller yet, magnetic in plotting and characters, perfect example of “can’t put this book down.” Picture a mega-wealthy tech entrepreneur—still single, hardworking, a good boss, no vices: being told he is slowly dying from Huntington’s Chorea. Meet Miles Cookson, whose only family is brother Gilbert, working for him, and Gilbert’s shady wife Caroline. As if that’s not shock enough, he learns that twenty years ago his donation to a sperm bank had resulted in nine children. And that’s only the beginning; I kept thinking Miles was going to die from a coronary attack each time the plot twisted. He has to make plans for his company and his estate, aided by his faithful P.A. Dorian. You can guess—he wants to know more about his progeny, and provide for them, especially since they could have inherited the same disease. It will be a challenge to break such news to them, and/or their mothers.

The first contact with “his” children is Chloe, a would-be filmmaker; despite his odd story, she hits it off exceedingly well with him. But Chloe had found a half-brother, Todd, through DNA testing and Todd suddenly disappears before Miles can meet him. Scary plans are clearly afoot with professional hit men to eliminate the twenty-year-olds that Miles fathered. More and more characters fill the pages. And who is Nicky, being held against her will by a lubricious celebrity? The FBI is no help for Miles, lacking evidence, so he’s desperate to find Chloe when she vanishes. Dorian, and Charise, his burly chauffeur, are his sole backup team. The tension level never drops as more issues from recent headlines complicate everything, topped with possibly the craziest climax ever, all credible in the hands of this adroit author.

One-liners

▪ “I don’t trust Caroline, and I’m not confident you could stop her from taking it all away from you.” (96)

▪ “If someone’s going to come out of the blue to tell me who my real father is, well, I think maybe it ought to be my real fucking father.” (115)

▪ They stayed until they saw the Hyundai go into the crusher and be reduced to a small cube of mangled metal and plastic. (172)

▪ Putting as much weight as he could on his good knee, he stood, aimed the gun at Kendra’s forehead, and pulled the trigger. (293)

▪ A man who hours earlier was ready to end his life evidently no longer felt a need to keep secrets. (393)

Multi-liners

▪ “It’s a brain disease,” she said matter-of-factly. “You’ll lose more and more motor control.” (17)

▪ Had he known what the future held for him, he’d never have gone to that fertility clinic. He’d have found another way to get the money for that new computer he’d needed. (44)

▪ “Look, I can’t excuse what Caroline did. I’m deeply sorry about that, but ...” And he started to shake his head angrily. “If you weren’t dying I’d kick your ass.” (97)

▪ “It might be time to bring in the police, report Todd missing,” he said. “But I didn’t want to mention it in front of his mom.” (200)

▪ Where did you hide in a mobile home? It wasn’t like there was a basement to scurry down into. No attic to crawl up into. (257)

▪ “Pleased to meet you, Chloe,” she said. My name’s Nicky. Welcome to hell.” (349)

▪ “There’s a key card in your pocket,” Broderick said. “Eleventh floor. Third room on the right after you get off the elevator.” (325)

▪ “He makes the devil look like Mr. Rogers.” (393)

What if

If he’d known, at the age of twenty, what awaited him, would he have lived his life differently? Would he have spent those two years backpacking around Europe, or would he have stayed home and gotten serious about his career sooner? For sure, he wouldn’t have spent much of his twenty-first year partying. Maybe, if he’d known the future, he’d have accelerated his efforts to reach the upper echelons of the tech world. Maybe he’d have made his first million from designing apps ten or twelves years ago instead of five.

Or maybe he’d have figured, what’s the point? Why not spend the rest of his life traveling, drinking, whoring? (45)

Mysogyny

“Nicky, what you need to understand, and I say this in all kindness, is that you are nothing.” Jeremy let that sink in for a moment. Her eyes began to well up with tears again. “You are as insignificant as an ant. You are a bug on the bottom of a shoe. You are a discarded condom, my dear. No one will ever listen to you, no one will give you the slightest attention. You will be dismissed. Oh, someone might nod sympathetically, might say they’ll look into it. But then your statement will go into the trash and you will never hear from anyone again.” (59)

Doubts

“I did some online research. You know that Huntington’s will affect his mental capacity. That dementia is part of what he’s going to go through. Maybe he’s confused, misinterpreting things, mis-remembering things, believing certain events happened that never did. For some reason he believes I did this awful thing, when the truth is I did not.”

Gilbert thought about that. It didn’t strike him that Miles was anything less than fully engaged. He had to admit Caroline was convincing in her denials, but then again, that was the sort of thing she was good at. (107)