A Problem With Genre - Master Of The Moor by Ruth Rendell

As crime fiction goes, The Master of The Moor by Ruth Rendell is perhaps one of the more subtle examples. The action is set in a moorland community, presumably somewhere like North Yorkshire, though the book’s place names are pure invention and geography is not defined. There has been a murder, a fairly vicious affair where the young female victim – perhaps a cliché in itself – has not only been stabbed but scalped as well. The body has been discovered by Stephen, a large man, passionate enough about moorland rambling to write a regular column on the subject for a local newspaper, and thus is probably not unknown in the community. The plot will not be spoiled if it is revealed that, primarily because of his intimate knowledge of the moor, coupled with his solitary nature, Stephen becomes suspect number one. There is another murder and yet another in this small, apparently tightly-knit place.

Stephen is apparently happily married in an unhappy marriage. We learn of his sexual dysfunction, as if it is advertised, while he questions his own birthright. He has a confused elderly relative who lives in a care home. There’s a famous local novelist, now dead, famous for his moorland romances, a writer with whom Stephen feels a strong and special association.

There is Dadda, meaning Stephen’s father, a giant of a man who runs a furniture restoration business. His son is an employee. There is Nick, the man Stephen’s wife is seeing. And then, inevitably, there are policemen involved. There has, after all, been a murder.

Ruth Rendell’s descriptive writing captures the landscape well and also communicates Stephen’s life-long love of the place, its history, its flora and fauna, and its uniqueness. The plot eventually works its way through its own machinations and there is something of a surprise towards the end. So why, then, is such a competently written, engaging and enjoyable book eventually such a disappointment? The answer, surely, is that demands of the genre dominate and diminish the writer’s ability to communicate. And here are four ways in which this happens.

Firstly, there is the all-seeing person at the heart of the process – the writer. As previously stated, Ruth Rendell’s book is very well written and is certainly much more than competent when compared to almost any other form. But the writer here is clearly not to be trusted. There are ideas, facts and facets relating to almost all of these characters that the writer deliberately hides from the reader, merely so that they can be revealed when the plot demands. This happens despite the God-like, all-seeing standpoint that the non-participant narrator adopts and the shifting point-of-view where, apparently, we can be inside the thoughts of any of the characters at whim. And still we do not know what they think! In The Master Of The Moor, for example, Stephen apparently changes colour when he gets angry. We only learn this some way through the tale. Do we assume that this is a new phenomenon? Has he never before been angry? Has no-one ever noticed this tendency, or remarked upon it in this small, tightly-knit community? Perhaps it is merely a convenient vehicle for the story-teller, introduced with little warning to create a spicy moment. Perhaps, then, it is disingenuousness of this type that prompts someone like Alan Bennett to confess that writers generally are not very nice people.

Secondly, there is the function of the characters in relation to the plot. Throughout, the reader senses that the only reasons for identifying aspects of character is to link them to a linear plot that will eventually be resolved, with revealed detail functioning as either evidence or motive. As the process unfolds, such details are revealed sequentially as clues to notice, like scraps of paper strewn on a forest floor to dictate the route to follow. We know that these people only exist as mere vehicles, functionaries whose existence is to serve the illusion. And the journey feels ever more like being led by the nose.

Thirdly, and by no means any less importantly, is the requirement that all belief be suspended, even within a setting that seems to rely upon establishing a sense of realism. Genre fiction seems to be, in relation to this demand upon the reader, to be more demanding than fantasy, horror or even opera. In Master Of The Moor, for instance, we have a total of three bizarre murders in a small, rural community. Not only are these crimes committed in a very short space of time, they are also in the public domain. Meanwhile people in these small towns seem to go on with their lives without those recent events dominating their thoughts, conversations or actions. There have been three murders, and yet it is the local police who are still doing the investigating. Three murders, and still there is neither a plethora of imported reinforcements from even nearby forces, nor is there any invasion by researchers, presenters, technicians or temporary twenty-four hour studios of national and international news gathering organisations. Life, and death, it seems, just goes on. There have been three murders, and apparently not even journalists from local or regional media are on the streets of this small place drubbing out a story. There have been three murders, and yet people still do not have them at the forefront of their gossip. There is no finger pointing. There are no tearful press conferences, and little speculation. And people still discuss furniture restoration, moorland grasses, old mines and out-of-date books before any of the three murders. Reality, the currency of the genre, seems to be strangely absent.

Fourthly, and perhaps most important of all, is the sense that everything presented is formulaic. The victims are all young and female, of course, and men with sexual problems behave strangely. Most people conform to social class stereotypes and anyone with an interest worthy of remark is a suspect.

Master Of The Moor is a good read. It is an enjoyable book. But, via its form, prescriptions and preconceptions, it presents an at best two-dimensional world. Its plot and characters are truly one-dimensional within that frame, mere lines that join up pre-placed dots. There is nothing wrong with the book, but, like its characters, it is imprisoned by the confines of genre and cannot transcend the imposed framework. The experience it offers the reader is therefore limited. Imagination, somehow, seem to be lacking.

The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally

The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally is based on the life of an Australian bushranger called Jimmy Governor. Fictionalised as Jimmy Blacksmith, the character takes several steps down the social ladder in terms of his name, but remains at the bottom of the pile in reality by virtue of being not only black, but also an Aborigine. As Jimmy Blacksmith, however, the character is not without skills. 

He speaks English and can build a uniform fence as strong and even as anyone. He can work as hard and deliver as much as any hired hand, except, of course, by definition. Thomas Keneally’s novel is highly successful in its presentation of white people’s assumptions of superiority.

Knowing that they occupy a level much higher up the Victorian pyramid of life that has God and The Queen at the top, they can be imperially confident that anything they might think or do must necessarily outshine what the likes of Jimmy Blacksmith can achieve. When reality suggests a contradiction, then their position of privilege allows them to change the rules in order to belittle achievement and deny results.

To label such attitudes as merely racist is to miss much of the point. These whites, always eager to proffer judgment at the turn of twentieth century Australia, did not regard their attitudes as based on race. The relevant word was surely not race, but species, since the indigenous population was seen as something less than human. So even when Jimmy Blacksmith displays complete competence, strength, endurance or cooperation, even if he becomes a Methodist Christian, marries a white woman according to God and The Law, even if he speaks the master’s language, he remains by definition something short of human. An ultimate irony of Jimmy’s acceptance of his duty to marry the pregnant girl, by the way, is that the child turns out to be white, fathered by another of the girl’s recent acquaintances.

So, as an oppressed black man, Jimmy Blacksmith is left carrying another white man’s burden. Jimmy reacts against his treatment. His reaction is violent. He takes an axe to several victims, most of them women. He then flees and is joined in crime by his brother, Mort. Together they evade capture, despite being pursued by thousands until an inevitable fate materialises. Jimmy Blacksmith presents several problems for the modern reader, however. Powerful it may be, but then Thomas Keneally’s attempt to render an accent in writing does not work. As a consequence, the dialogue sometimes seems confused and opaque.

The author stated some years later that if he were to write the book now he would describe events from the perspective of a white observer. This would, however, render Jimmy an object, and the reader is often surprised by occupying the role of subject in this book. Thomas Keneally does create some wonderful scenes. Jimmy’s shedding of blood is brutal, but is it any less brutal than the slaughter of thousands by the British? And in the end, did those with power treat their working class subjects any better than they treated Jimmy? Was the young white bride Jimmy took any better off than him by virtue of her species superiority?

Alongside Peter Carey’s Kelly Gang and, from a factual perspective, Alan Moorehead’s Fatal Impact, Jimmy Blacksmith provides a different and complementary insight. To experience the book’s power, the modern reader has to know something of Australia’s history and, crucially, something of the 1970s attitudes that prevailed at the time of writing. Any shortcomings then pale into insignificance when compared with the novel’s achievement.

A review of The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

Helen Knightly takes her clothes off for a living. It’s not what you think: she’s a respectable mother of two. She is Knightly by name, but it is her day job that sees her modelling in the nude for art college life classes. Her mother, Clair, used to model underwear. It must run in the family. Her husband, Jake, is – or was, perhaps – an artist.

They met when she was naked and carried on in the same vein. Now they are divorced, if not exactly estranged. He lives out West in Santa Barbara. He has another relationship, with a woman his daughter’s age. Helen tries to mimic. Their daughters are grown up. Helen even has a grandchild. Helen also, and crucially, still has Clair, the mother who now needs almost total care. One fraught day of many, while Helen and her mother exchange superficially meaningless conversation barbed with a mixture of half-truth, nonsense, accusation and innuendo, the octogenarian Clair fouls herself. She seems not a little proud of her odorous product. It falls to Helen to clean up her helpless and apparently resentful mother. And she snaps. 

Almost involuntarily a pillow comes to hand and Helen uses it to smother. It’s a strange word, smother, what daughters do to mothers. Helen now has a problem. Thus The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold becomes a first person account of how she copes with and reflects on her act. There is hatred, compassion, opportunism, in fact more motives beneath the surface than you could count. But on the face of things, there is no single identifiable explanation, other than frustration.

Jake is summoned to lend a helping hand, but his presence just seems to bring memories of life’s unhappiness and disappointment to the fore. Helen tries to relieve her emotional stress via sex, for the first time in a parked car, seducing a friend’s son, apparently for the hell of it, but with Helen there’s always at least a hint of motive. She raises her exploit later when it can be used to compete. She recalls her own childhood, her marriage, her children, her parents, life’s fulfilling moments, its bad times, its threats.

The Almost Moon reminds me of the work of Anne Tyler, where ostensibly ordinary households and families have their skin peeled back to reveal often surprising, sometimes dark innards. The Almost Moon is similar in its forensic detail of family life. But Alice Seybold’s style is always much more threatening, much closer to nightmare tinged with neurosis. The development of the plot is well handled, with Helen’s thoughts never linear, always tending to juxtapose interpreted past, experienced present and imagined future in most instants of her self-analysis. She is a complex person and makes some surprising, even shocking confessions.

The family – every family – is at the bottom of The Almost Moon. Families are full of disparate individuals brought together by an accident of birthright. No wonder they often don’t get on. But then birthright is also a bond, but a bond that sometimes can suffocate. Helen’s first person narrative is powerful. In the circumstances the reader begins to wonder how she might be telling such a story, given the detail it unfolds. We get to know the intricacies of her relations with her husband, lover, mother, father, children and even neighbours. In the circumstances, she seems to have plenty of time. In the end, perhaps the reader is still presented with this same dilemma, but there are suddenly several possible solutions. Don’t expect to be told what to think, and don’t, in The Almost Moon, expect to like the characters, especially Helen Knightly. She certainly would not expect it of you.

Dan Leno And The Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd

Dan Leno And The Limehouse Golem is quite simply a masterpiece. Every aspect of the novel is remarkable. It’s a whodunit, though it suggests a couple of credible suspects right at the start. It even convicts its central character to death by hanging before we have even got to know her. Clearly things are not going to be obvious. The novel is also a study in character, especially that of its central actor, Lambeth Marsh Lizzie, later Mrs Elizabeth Cree. It’s also an evocation of London in the late nineteenth century, complete with colours, smells, vistas and perspectives. 

It’s a highly literary work, ever conscious of its place beside the genres it skirts. Overall, it’s a wonderful example of how form can be used as inventively as plot to create a story. The novel has a series of interlocking stands. In one our anti-heroine, Lizzie, is accused of the murder of John Cree, her husband. In another, John Cree’s diary reveals certain secrets that not only he would have wanted to hide. In a third strand, we learn of Lambeth Marsh Lizzie’s past, how she came to a life in the theatre and how she met her husband. A fourth strand follows the career of Dan Leno, a music hall player, worshipper of the silent clown Grimaldi and mentor of Lizzie’s stage life. And in a fifth strand we see how, in a great city like London, our paths inevitably cross those of great thinkers, writers, artists and, of course, history itself. Peter Ackroyd thus has his characters cross the paths of a writer, George Gissing, and a thinker of note, one Karl Marx, as they tramp the streets of Limehouse after a day at the library. 

 As usual, sex has a lot to do with the relationships in the book. It is usually on top, but here it also comes underneath and sometimes on the side of events. Mrs Cree is accused of poisoning her husband. Their married life has been far from conventional, but are its inadequacies the motive for a series of brutal killings of prostitutes and others in the Limehouse area? As a result of the curious placement of certain trophies, the killings are attributed in the popular mind to a golem, a mythical creature made of clay that can change it shape at will. Karl Marx examines the Jewish myths surrounding the subject. Others steer clear of the subject. Lizzie continues on the stage until she meets her husband. She learns much stagecraft from Dan Leno and eventually resolves to help her husband to complete the play over which he has unsuccessfully laboured. When the book’s plot resolves, we are surprised, but then everything makes such perfect sense. And in a real piece of insight, Peter Ackroyd likens the mass murderer to Romaticism perfected, the ultimate triumph of individualism. There is much to stimulate the mind in this thriller. 

 A reader of this review might suspect that Dan leno And The Limehouse Golem is a difficult read, a book whose diverse strands never converge. But quite the contrary is true: it comes together in a wonderful, fast-flowing manner to a resolution that is both highly theatrical yet thoroughly credible. Read it many times. View the book on amazon Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem

Pain Wears No Mask by Nik Morton

Pain Wears No Mask by Nik Morton is no ordinary thriller. It has an extra dimension that constantly encourages the reader to take an interest in more than a tale of events. It is the book’s central character that provides this extra dimension, because she seems to have two quite different identities. One provides the content of her tale, while the other informs her approach and motives. 

 As Maggie Weaver, the book’s first person narrator is a policewoman in Newcastle. She is devoted to her husband, also a policeman, and is utterly involved with her work. Like many honest, hard-working law enforcers, Maggie is angered at the suffering of the victims of crime and outraged at the ability of the guilty to avoid punishment. Even greater ire is reserved for the bent cops that facilitate both outcomes.

When Maggie Weaver, the policewoman becomes involved in a particularly brutal case, the final outcome affects herself personally, her marriage and her colleagues. The case is resolved, partially, but the mayhem it generates has permanent consequences.

Sister Rose works in a hostel for the homeless in south London. She has adopted her vocation as a mature woman, trained, taken vows and spent a couple of years as a missionary in Peru. It was there, high in the Andes, working with poor people who have to scratch for a living, that she truly understands the nature of her vocation. When, back in London, Sister Rose finds herself by chance involved in a complex, multiple crime, she resolves to accept the challenge to become involved, to pursue her privately-informed investigation of events.

Sister Rose, the compassionate nun, and Maggie Weaver, the experienced crime fighter and policewoman are, of course, the same person. Maggie’s and Rose’s stories are not presented sequentially, however. Nik Morton begins with the London crime which gradually reveals its relevance to what befell Maggie in Newcastle years before. Thus, both in form and content Pain Wears No Mask transcends its genre. Because of this the reader finds that Sister rose’s future is also as interesting as her related past. When, via Peru, the story returns to Newcastle to confront the unfinished business of years before, Maggie and Rose combine talents, approaches and identities when events promise the settling of old scores and the possibility of reaching beyond the mere foot-soldiers of injustice. 

 Pain Wears No Mask is a well written, intriguing story. It will entertain those used to its genre, but it will also provide interest for the general reader.

View this book on amazon Pain Wears No Mask

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote: Crime, punishment, and more

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote was published in 1966, and is based on events that happened almost fifty years ago. The events were real. This is not a work of fiction. The Clutters, an appropriately surnamed Kansas family, have their own complications within their rambling homestead. What family doesn’t? Clutter the father is a farmer. Who isn’t in these parts? Life is not so productive of late. Whose is? The two younger children, a daughter and a son, still live in. The others have left, happily.

And then, in November 1959, the four Clutters are found gagged, apart from the mother, with either their throats cut or their brains blown out by shotgun fire, or perhaps both. The community is in turmoil. No-one can explain why anyone might have wanted to kill a whole family in Holcomb, a small, poor, rural community in the mid-West Bible belt. 

Hickock (Hicock) and Smith are two lads on the move. Their families might be dysfunctional. On the other hand they might not. Their socialisation might have been lacking. On the other hand it might not. For whatever reason, individually and collectively they prey on others, prey in a way that renders them culpable, detectable and ultimately punishable. They know thieving is wrong. So, one of them says, we’ve stolen lives, so it must be serious. It was the two of them that pulled the trigger, that blew brains out, that slit throats, that did not quite commit rape. There are limits. And all for forty dollars and a transistor radio.

I give nothing of this book away when I reveal that the two lads did commit the murders – exactly how no-one ever admitted – and that, after years of litigious wrangling, both were hanged. The strength of In Cold Blood is not what happens, but how it happens. Truman Capote offers us a vast book in just four sustained chapters, each of which is sub-divided as the narrative shifts between aspects of the different protagonists’ lives.

Throughout, the style is much more complex than mere journalism, but the clarity with which it communicates is at times breathtaking. We hear from those directly involved, both victims and perpetrators, their families, the police, the judiciary, the neighbours, the lawyers, the passers-by, the acquaintances, the cellmates. The detail is forensic. It is essential that the reader is constantly reminded that this is not fiction.

Truman Capote offers dialogue where a journalist would report, offers interpretation where an historian would defer, offer opinion where an observer might decline. And so In Cold Blood becomes and absorbing, multi-faceted, mid-twentieth century reworking of Crime And Punishment. The crucial difference that the intervening years have generated is that where the latter concentrated on the individual circumstances and motives of the perpetrator, In Cold Blood explores the social and the contextual alongside the psychological.

And this is where the book becomes deeply disturbing, because it seems to suggest that the individuality that contemporary society seems to demand of us might itself promote a degree of self-centredness, of selfishness, perhaps, that might give rise to nothing less than contempt for others. In the forty years since the publication of In Cold Blood, it could be argued that such pressures might have increased. Frightening, indeed.

View this book on amazon In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (Penguin Modern Classics)

A review of The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester

One of my greatest pleasures is eating, so I must cook. I savour, therefore I cook. I like tasty food made with fresh ingredients that address all four of our tastes – salt, sour, sweet and bitter – to create a complementary whole. Of course, there is now the fifth taste, unami, the expanding universe within soy sauce, that can amplify other inputs. I have just made an English pie, with chicken, mushrooms, a little diced bacon, seasoning and fresh herbs. It was moistened with stock and an egg before being baked in my own short-crust. Fresh gravy and vegetables alongside is all it will need. It thus has sweet, salt and bitter, but lacks sourness. A squeeze of lemon on the vegetables will compensate.

For the expansion, take one novel closely related to cooking and read. Do try the recipes, but proceed with care. Cook things right through before committing to taste. John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure is my recommendation. It’s a highly original, highly informative cookbook written by one Tarquin Winot, an expert in the field.

In one of the most original books I have ever read, John Lanchester creates a real anti-hero. Too often the concept is ironed onto a character who is just a naughty boy doing naughty, often repulsive things, the concept of “hero” being often ignored. Tarquin Winot, the anti-hero of The Debt to Pleasure, is a brilliant and learned cook. He is also highly creative, using ingredients that only those who might cook with a purpose would choose to use. He is also something of a psychopath, perhaps. That is for you to judge. But he has survived to write his cookbook and apparently savours his retirement, courtesy of those he has fed.

The Debt to Pleasure is a superb novel. Tarquin’s narrative draws the reader, perhaps unsuspecting, into his world, evoking an empathy with and for the character. That we have as yet only partially got to know this brilliant cook only becomes apparent as we proceed through his life, a life he has peppered with his personal peccadilloes. But above all, Tarquin Winot is both a planner and a perfectionist. His culinary creations are thought through, drafted like dramas to provoke particular responses, to achieve pre-meditated ends. They are also successful, appreciated by those who consume his concoctions, and eventually they succeed in precisely the way that he plans and executes.

Throughout, John Lanchester’s prose is a delight, as stimulating to the mind as his character’s creations might be to the palate. Florid and extravagant it might be at times, perhaps too much butter and cream for some diets. But The Debt to Pleasure is a satisfying, surprising and eventually fulfilling read. Tarquin fulfils both aspects of the anti-hero and ultimately we are left to grapple with the nature of self-obsession and selfishness.

View the book on amazon The Debt to Pleasure

A Million Would Be Nice by Ken Scott

I don’t read many books that claim membership of a genre. In my humble opinion, a work of fiction should aspire to create its own world, describe it, communicate it and then live in it. I want a book’s characters to inhabit the events that are portrayed, events that are clearly influenced by the character’s presence, but which are also usually bigger than any individual’s contribution. Wars don’t exist unless people fight them. Crimes are not committed without criminals. Love stories are made by lovers and ghosts don’t exist.

For instance, in my own book, Mission, there are four wars, but it’s not a war novel. There are at least three love stories, but it’s not a romance. There are several deaths, one of which is a murder, but it’s not a crime novel or a thriller. And then there’s a character who comes back from the dead to haunt an old man, but it’s not a ghost story or a fantasy. In short, it’s Mission, a novel set in Kenya.

So I approached Ken Scott’s crime thriller, A Million Would Be Nice, as a reader unused to the genre’s codes and forms.

Unlike general or literary fiction, I recognise that learning what happens in A Million Would Be Nice is one of the main reasons for reading the book. My review, therefore, cannot reveal too much of the plot. Suffice it to say that there has been a bank robbery. It was an inside job and the scenario for its execution is carefully concocted and inventively created. The perpetrator gets away with it and scarpers with the loot to live it up in Spain.

On an apparently separate thread, we meet Donavan Smith, a quite incredibly vile piece of humanity from Newcastle, of which I hope he is not representative. He’s a successful young thing, a kind of nouveau riche moron, who apparently defines his identity by surrounding himself with requisite items of designer consumption, clearly knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. He has everything, does our Donavan, but he is never satisfied. He wants more.

There isn’t a lot to endear us to Donavan Smith. He’s a misogynist, and occasionally indulges in some quite bizarre behaviour in the bedroom. He justifies everything with quotes from the Bible, a source of justification that was beaten into him by an abusing mother. He lets nothing get in his way. He has his ideas, knows how to achieve them and then ruthlessly destroys anything that might resist. In some ways, he is quite creative.

But one of his conquests becomes an accomplice, because she has inside information about that money that went missing in the bank raid. He needs her and together they visit people all over the prestigious bits of Europe, Paris, Cannes, London, the Costas, Newcastle, to pursue and realise their dream. And believe me, this Donavan is nothing if not resourceful and he certainly has a knack when it comes to making things happen.

The story moves at a fast pace. Different characters are drawn into the thread and many are inevitably cast aside by Donavan Smith, our single-minded, calculating anti-hero. And that is as much as I will relate. A Million Would be Nice claims to be a crime thriller, and a crime thriller is exactly what it is, fast paced, and packed with greed, obsession and ruthlessness.

Ken Scott’s own background as an employee of a major British bank provided him with much of the detail surrounding the original robbery. Since the back cover of the book shows him, like the robber in the book, living it up in Spain, I can only hope that this is as far as the similarity goes.

A Million Would be Nice will appeal to readers of thrillers and crime fiction. It has all the elements you would expect and, in the relationship between Donavan and his mother, perhaps something extra as well.

View this book on amazon A Million Would be Nice