Book Reviews
Fudge Book Club
Our first Book Club started back in February 2008 in our upstairs lounge at Fudge. The group has grown in numbers and is becoming one of our most popular evenings, with food, wine and discussion!
Groups meet once a month on a Sunday evening at 6pm. We are planning this to be the 3rd Sunday of each month from September. The group enjoys discussion about the chosen book with free glass of wine followed by a two course menu £12.95pp.
Gather a few friends or come alone. Email us to book your place.
MEMBERS' UPDATE:
The February meeting of FUDGE BOOK CLUB will be held on Sunday 21st February at 6pm. The book choice for February is The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. The choice for March is Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby. We normally have a few copies of the book choice available to purchase at Fudge at the previous month's meeting. The March meeting is on Sunday 21st March at 6pm. We discuss the book for about 45 mins then have food - special menu price of £12.95 for 2 courses and a free glass of wine on arrival.
Email us for Book Club diary dates for 2009-2010.
Life Class
by Pat Barker
"Is Barker out of her depth with only enough confidence to dip her toe in the water? Or is she showing that the war overshadowed and disrupted all creativity with its ‘single bullying voice’? I think she is out of her depth. On a more positive note, Barker does paint a very effective portrait of traditional relationships and shows that they are not all that they appear to be..." - Ann
The Night Gardener
by George Pelecanos
"I have found reading it an irritating experience. I am a fan of crime thrillers and have enjoyed reading the genre by authors such as James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard. However, I cannot say that I will be in a hurry to read George Pelecanos again. Whilst I appreciate that when writing about a particular section of society it is essential to use local idioms in the dialogue for authenticity, but it is used in this book to such an extent that it is nearly uninteligible, I would suggest, to the majority of readers outside the east coast of America..." - Chris
Astonishing Splashes Of Colour
by Clare Morrall
"Astonishing Splashes of Colour didn’t quite live up to the promise of its great title! The first person narrator is Kitty, a young woman who’s suffered the double blow of losing her mother at a young age and then her own child. She appears to suffer from the condition of synaesthesia, in other words experiencing emotions in colour; indeed the novel opens powerfully with an evocation of the yellowness of the school playground and the waiting mothers. Yet that potentially very powerful theme fades as the novel progresses..." - Sue
Poppy Shakespeare
Poppy Shakespeare
by Clare Allan
"Poppy Shakespeare is a distinctive and powerful debut, full of brave experiments that generate unexpectedly fierce emotional heat. In a literary scene whose established stars milk tragedies such as the Holocaust or 9/11 for precious little reason beyond their own artistic vanity, Allan has given us something indigestibly, potently true"
Suspicions Of Mr Whicher
This is a difficult book to review because it is Fudge Book Club’s first work of non-fiction and, however hard one tries not to, it’s easy to slip into a critique which measures it against fiction! Mind you, the blurb on the back of my edition didn’t help by claiming the book is as gripping as a novel. It isn’t and that’s not through any shortcomings on its part, simply that real life is messy, inconclusive and not shaped by a fictional narrative. Therefore we don’t find out who murdered Saville and we don’t really discover what makes Whicher tick. Great family secrets are hinted at but are never able to be fully unveiled... For me personally, the result was disengagement. I admired the book and have learnt a lot from it ( for example, trial by media is nothing new) but ultimately that knowledge has necessarily been of an intellectual kind, the experience serving to remind me why I love reading novels! Sue Wilsea
English Passengers
March Choice: English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. One member who has already read it says it is the best book she's read for some years.
Not all of Kneale's narrators are fully rounded fictional people: many letter writers are there purely as a sly way of shoe-horning in background information. But Kewley, Potter, Wilson and Peevay are memorable creations, and crowding in upon the fictional company are a host of deftly colourful thumbnail portraits. It's a book shouting with life. Every page fizzes with linguistic invention, and the interleaving of high comedy with dramatic terror is expertly handled. Why it has been ballasted with such a deathly boring title I cannot imagine, but English Passengers deserves to be welcomed into port with a riot of bunting and prizes.
Adapted from a review by Stephen Poole for guardian.co.uk
Netherland
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill - April 09 choice
The Road Home
Rose Tremain's book, which won the Orange Broadband prize for fiction. "I liked the way there was no sentimentality about the book: Lev, the central character, is seriously flawed and indeed his quest which drives the whole action of the book ie the desire to provide a better life for his mother and daughter, is put under scrutiny. His daughter obviously misses him badly and he keeps prolonging his return home even when he has accumulated some money.... It has some lovely descriptive touches – eg P46 daylight pale as milk but never overdoes it. My kind of book! click here for Sue's review
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo By Stieg Larrson
If, like me, you normally avoid crime thrillers, this may be the book to change your mind. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a contemporary thriller set in Sweden, the first of a trilogy by this author, who died shortly after the third book was finished.
It takes a while to pick up all the story lines, which intermesh cleverly throughout the book, but once you get into it, it’s a real pageturner, the action twisting and turning, flipping from one location to another.
Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist, has been convicted of libelling an industrialist who indulged in some very dodgy dealings. Blomkvist is taken on by the head of the large family owned Vanger corporation to investigate the death of his granddaughter 30 years previously. By a series of events an enigmatic and mysterious young girl called Lisbeth Salander, who is the real cult heroine of this series, becomes his partner in investigating the crime. She can do anything with a computer – she’s a hacker who can access just about any piece of information you can think of and the book describes these processes in some detail. She has had a difficult life, mostly in the care of state, with a legal guardian lawyer who abused her, and this has made her fierce and fearsome. Together Blomkvist and Salander do solve the crime, in the process unearthing some very dark secrets about members of the Vanger family. This book comes with a health warning as there are some disturbing scenes of a violent and sometimes sexual nature, but these are an integral part of the story and in no way gratuitous.
An excellent translation makes this book eminently readable and delivers a fast moving narrative. As a couple of Fudge Book Club members observed, by the time you’ve finished the book you know a lot about the author’s – um – areas of interest and are in awe of the Swedish capacity for consuming industrial amounts of coffee.
Jackie Goodman
When Will There Be Good News By Kate Atkinson
July 09 Book Club: When Will There Be Good News is Kate Atkinson’s third novel featuring the retired policeman Jackson Brodie. To place it in the crime genre could be misleading although it bears many of that genre’s hallmarks: the man accused of a brutal family murder thirty years before is freed from prison, one of the survivors goes missing and amateur detective Reggie suspects foul play. There are twists in the carefully constructed plot, a potential love interest between Brodie and Chief inspector Louise Munroe, some brutality and a train crash. But there are other ingredients too and this is what makes Atkinson such a delight to read: humour including ironic one-liners, some idiosyncratic characters, contemporary and cultural references and, above all, an overriding sense on the part of the reader that the author has had enormous fun with her writing! Sue Wilsea
Toni Morrison - A Mercy
This slim book by Toni Morrison deserves a review in inverse proportion to its size.
It also requires a similarly disproportionate amount of time to begin to
unpick the threads and meanings of the story. The book is set in the Atlantic
colonies between 1682 and 1690. The main narrative uses the voice of Florens, a
16 year old African slave, who is given to Jacob Vaark, an enlightened New York
farmer, to settle a debt. Florens feels betrayed by her mother, who begs Vaark to take the girl instead of her. Only towards the end of the book does it
become clear that this is a gesture of love and hope that Florens might escape
a life choked by lack of opportunity.
The themes of this book are all-embracing, taking in the philosophical, the spiritual and the feminist. The trio of principal female characters, Lina, a native American who works in Vaark’s household, Rebekkah, Vaark’s English wife and Florens, develop a subtle and often unspoken support for each other, which survives Vaark’s death and Rebekkah’s illness. The book explores the victimisation and survival of women, attitudes to religion and the roots of racism. Florens’ passion for a black freedman culminates in an event which changes her life. This is not an easy book to read, partly because of the shifts in time and Morrison’s poetic and individual use of language. It was not until the last line of the last page that some of the threads were pulled together and made a second, more informed reading seem a necessity to piece together the complex layers from which this small book is beautifully crafted. Jackie Goodman
Birds Of America By Lorrie Moore
So why wasn’t this collection of short stories more enjoyable? 
Non-communication, dislocation and women who don’t quite fit; this consistent diet becomes, perhaps, a little too rich. One longs for someone, who, just now and then, is a bit more sorted, who can drum up a positive perspective occasionally. Yet, amongst the complex relationships and dysfunctional individuals, are flashes of brilliant humour and perceptive observation. Descriptions of a bat (‘a mouse with backpacking equipment’), a visiting writer (the smile on his face was...slightly pharmaceutical’) and the mother of a baby who has been diagnosed with cancer (‘the mother’s face is a big, white dumpling of worry’) are a few of many examples of writing which is highly evocative and will, no doubt, be picked over in university literature classes.
The stories seem to work best when they focus on a short time period and a specific incident (Charade; Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens; Dance in America). Some lack resolution, which is fine if you like open-ended stories. Some are enigmatic. This collection takes some getting into and many book club members found it difficult to remember the individual stories when looking back over the book. Lorrie Moore is a technically skilled and at times highly original writer, and, like walking round Venice, the reader feels compelled to stop and admire the frequent flashes of craftsmanship, while wishing sometimes for the respite of a slightly less overpowering landscape.
Jackie Goodman
22 November 2009
South Riding
Winifred Holtby's greatest novel is a rich evocation of the lives and relationships of the characters of South Riding. Book Club member Ann Folan writes a review
