Category: Book Review

John Banville, Venetian Vespers (2025).

Good Reads meta-data is 320 pages, rated 3.66 by 372 litizens.

Genre: Mystery.

Species: Venice, death in

Verdict: What a chameleon.

Tagline: He didn’t do it, but it was done.

Author and wife go on a belated honeymoon to Venice in January 1899. She is an heiress to a great railway fortune and from the get-go strangely withdrawn, as she has been since her wedding day six months before. Of the wedding night, there has been no connubial bliss, nor any since then.  (Look it up, Mortimer!) Moreover, she has now been written out of her magnate’s will in favour of her dowdy sister. 

Thomas Cook has made all the first class travel and accommodation arrangements which were paid much earlier. Even so, damp, grey, cold, vaporous Venice is not welcoming to his senses. Don’t Look Now! To this, as to all else, Wife is indifferent. His efforts, few and feeble, to communicate with her are met with silence.  Was it something he said? No onions next time!

They move into a cavernous palazzo on the Grand Canal and meet their landlord who is like someone from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, a veritable grandee, or maybe he is an escaped extra from a Fellini movie. The palazzo has faded glory but neither heating, running water, nor plumbing.  It is the true Venice experience.  

At the start I thought I had grokked a homage to Henry James, in particular the Aspern Papers (1888), with the dependent sub-clauses from dependent clauses, attached to qualifying phrases in sentences that threaten to run-over the page.  But not quite.  Well, yes, some sentences did spill over the page, but it is not Henry James, whose genius was implicit, not explicit.  I thought of that when I read the detailed description of the rape in marriage that the Author-husband exacted.  Such might have been part of a James plot, but it would not have had a four-page description, but would have occurred off the page but nonetheless have been manifest.  Well, not everyone is a genius.

After the rape, Wife scoots and Author, now ashamed, wanders around Venice, where he encounters an old school mate and his ravishing sister.  In fact, he met them the night of the aforementioned event.  Thereafter he makes few and feeble efforts to find Wife and lusts for sister who leads by his first friend.

There unfolds in the last few chapters a denouement that this jadded lag did not see coming, and it is a stunner. Indeed!  It is convoluted but makes perfect sense in hindsight. Though perhaps it does depend on Author being dimwitted.  And, well, six months! 

A vocabulary builder: eructation, purblind, crapulous, plangency, and contemnor.  This last ‘contemnor’ is used to mean someone who has contempt for some object or person. Uh uh, in a dictionary it means someone whom a court has found guilty of contempt.  Iffy.

I had just finished re-reading Banville’s (as Benjamin Black) Black-eyed Blonde, marvelling as his ability to channel, and surpass, Raymond Chandler, when entering a bookstore in Bowral, this title greeted my eye.  It seemed obvious I should read it, so I did.  This time Banville came to the costume party as Henry James reviviscere.  

Spoiler, big time. Close eyes if you are going to read the book.  If I have made the right inferences, it goes like this.  Father denies Wife permission to marry scoundrel Redhead.  She then marries the Father-acceptable Author as a foil.  However, she still falls out with Father. Why I don’t know.  She then murders her father by staging an accident, and is surprised, though shows nothing, to find she has been disinherited despite marrying the dud Author. The considerable everything goes to Dowdy sister.  Wife then manoeuvres husband in name only Author into the belated Honeymoon in Venice, planned and paid for before Father’s death. They have had sex only once the night before the marriage. So it has been a six-month dry spell for him. In Venice by arrangement Redhead and his Ravishing Sister insinuate themselves into the dim Author’s company.  Wife goes missing as above. The Dowdy sister arrives and confronts Author over missing Wife. This argument is witnessed by many.  She sics the police onto him. Then Dowdy Sister has a convenient fatal accident arranged by Wife. Now suspicion falls on Author for both the missing Wife and the deceased Dowdy sister.  But wait, all along Wife has been sheltering at the British Consulate with a story of the rape as above. (Her plot did not depend on this rape, she could have faked it, or foregone it, but once it was done it integrated into the scheme.)  All the while Ravishing sister has led Author by his member, while the RedHead manoeuvres around him insuring witnesses. Maids and such know of the unconsummated liaison with ravishing sister, which provides a motive, first, for disappearance of Wife, later to be supplanted by the rape, and, second, the murder the Dowdy sister who threatens exposure in suspicion that he has murdered Wife.  In the end Author is not arrested since there is no evidence but sent off in shame, penniless.  Wife inherits what Dowdy sister got from mega-bucks Father and marries scoundrel RedHead.  Turns out Ravishing sister was married to consular official who connived in the plot in return for a healthy cut of the swag. 

Connect those dots! That is a plot worthy of the darkest noir.  Wife, redhead, sister, and diplomat conspired to murder dowdy heiress and implicate Author-husband. I think that’s it.

The Black-eyed Blonde (2014) by Benjamin Black (John Banville)

Genre: krimi; Species: California noir; Genus: Marlowe.

Good Reads meta-data is 289 pages rated 3.53 by 4,484 litizens.

Verdict: Pitch perfect.

Tagline: Better Chandler than Chandler.

During a SoCal summer heatwave, Phillip Marlowe’s office just got hotter still when Clare Cavendish entered. It was lust at first sight for the tough guy who turned to putty.

This homage picks up Marlowe after The Long Goodbye (1953) and spins a plot out of the stuff that nightmares are made of. It is quite a ride.

The femme fatale is on song. Marlowe’s only friend is more a frenemy.  A clue for those with a long memory: Jim Bouton.

However, I did find the persistent and mechanical descriptions of everyone’s clothing tiresome, repetitive, and pointless.  Take that.  

I have commented on this book before and I cannot add anything more.  However, I did entertain myself by reading the one measly star reviews on Good Reads.  These raters must have a lot to compensate for given how idiotic their comments are. ‘He doesn’t drink enough to be Marlowe.’ ‘He’s too tall to be Marlowe.’ ‘He’s not bitter enough to be Marlowe.’  And so on.  Others offered such insights as ‘I hate the 1950s.’ Take that!  Or, ‘I dislike noir fiction.’  What a waste of pixels.

Peter Keith, Wine Dark Deep (2020).

Good Reads Meta-data is 149 pages rated 3.80 by 390 litizens.

Genre: ScFI; Species: Hard.

Verdict: Oh Hum.

Tagline: Slam, wham, and bam. Repeat.

Earth’s first human mission to Jupiter gets caught in the crossfire of a labour dispute between the corporations on Earth that own the asteroid Ceres and the mineral riches it contains and the indentured colonists who work it.  The Jupiter bound spacecraft is called Odyssey and it becomes a hostage of sorts in the negotiations.  

Not on my watch, declares Captain McGiver of Odyssey and he makes it so with some mumble-jumbo, low-gravity athletics, and the help of A.I.  

There are pages and pages describing the Odyssey, the asteroid, and the mining equipment on it, and how Captain makes use of it to foil the rebels’ hold on Odyssey.  He has no interest either way in their cause; he just wants to complete the Jovian jaunt.  

Chose it because the title reminded me of Homer’s wine dark sea and the name Odyssey appeared to confirm the reference.  There the parallels ended.

The conclusion is a reference to the further perils in the series. Odyssey will have further adventures before returning to Ithaca.

Hard Science Fiction seems to mean a lot of pointless (as to plot or character) technical details.  This is the Geordie-speak of Star Trek Voyager. Filler.

Irving Belateche, Alien Abduction (2016).

Good Reads meta-data is 437 pages rated 4.01 by 242 litizens.

Genre: SyFy.

DNA: SoCal.

Tagline: Cyclopes.

Verdict: Less than meets the eye.

A creative take on the evergreen trope of alien abduction that I had first thought was to be played for laughs. Nope. Indeed that trope was buried in a soap opera family drama: husband loses his job, wife has cancer, truculent teenage children rebel, mortgage payments overdue, and so on, and on. Had they a dog, it would have turned rabid or something. 

I didn’t turn the pages for that, but in a page count it is bulk of the book.

Oh, the A² is there and it is well told and in a novel way.  No spoiler on that except to say it confirms a nostrum of SyFyism, the aliens want our women!

There is a lot to like: Some insights into the changing world of journalism, basics of composition, DNA testing technicalities, characterisations, the to’ing and fro’ing in the urban agglomeration of Los Angeles, the way the writer avoided explanatory details, say about the curvature drive.  Refreshing to read something by author who knows what a topic sentence is.  

What I didn’t get is where the cash money came from in $100,000 units, how the drug was marketed, what happened to the boy Mason who so preoccupied Hero’s thoughts and then drops off the page.  Did I blink?

The English Experience (2023) Julie Schumacher

Good Reads meta-data is 230 pages, rated 3.90 by 2481 litizens.  

Genre: Fiction.

DNA: USA.

Verdict: More Jay, please.  

Tagline:  Murphy explains it all. 

The unwilling and unwelcome chair of the English Department of Payne State University, Jay, backs into another unwanted assignment.  He is to escort a dozen Payne undergraduates on a three-week study tour of England.  It’s only three weeks: what can go wrong, so he consoles himself.  

Then the sea of troubles – personal, institutional, and international – strike, one after another. There is no respite. Will Jay never learn?  

One of the students did not read the brochure beyond the word ‘British,’ and thought the tour was to the British Cayman Islands.  Yeah no one else can understand how that worked, but he showed up at the airport in shorts with diving gear for a January trip to London, the one in England.  He now considers suing the University for false advertising.  

Another participant does not like to talk about his sealed police record, and so he brings it up repeatedly.  When, as a result, others begin to avoid him, he expects Jay to overcome this ostracism or he will give him a bad rating.

The identical twins are, well, identical and inseparable, though separate.  Jay can’t tell them apart, and he gradually realizes they, being well aware of that, exploit it to confuse him further, albeit he starts pretty confused.

Then there is DB who apparently missed the flight and yet appeared, briefly, at the London residence, only to disappear again.  Oh, and no one knows what ‘DB’ stands for.

Another student has never before been away from home, and her cat, and pines for the latter every minute. She believes in sharing this pining with Jay.  

Then there is Boadicea who approaches everything as Armageddon. She categorically refuses to comply with any of Jay’s few and lax requirements mainly because ‘all requirements are gendered.’  Patriarchy must be denied!  

But the peculiarities of these students pales into insignificance when the remainder of the party is considered.  

Although the dozen students all signed up for the excursion and paid for it, none of them intend to follow the prescribed program, still less write the reports Jay set, and that is fine since he had little interest in reading them.  Every step of the way it is a test of wills, and at sixty years of age Jay’s will has been eroded by the tests that have gone before it.  Most recently with the Provost to get a budget for his department, which has been on death row for some time. Few of its members will survive the killing fields of the next budget round.  But like deer in hunting season, most of his colleagues are unaware of the calendar. He hopes, no doubt vainly, that taking this assignment will earn his department a stay of execution for another budget cycle. Rumour has it that the Provost has negotiated a new contract with a salary greater than the combined salaries of all sixteen members of the English Department. Hmmm.    

If you don’t know Jay, start with Dear Committee Member, the first of the three novels chronicling his woes. Then continue with the Shakespeare Requirement, before getting to this one.  

Some readers of these books might think them satirical, but I can assure such readers that they have a core of verisimilitude.  This conclusion is contrary to some of the more sanctimonious reviews on Good Reads.  

I gulped this one down in a day and a night.  

The Fear Index (2011) by Robert Harris

Good Reads meta-data is 323 pages, rated 3.55 by 16,526 litizens.

Genre: Thriller diller.

DNA: Switzerland.

Verdict: Gulp!  

Tagline:  The AI did it!  

It all began when Rich Brain received a book fin the mail, a first edition of Chuck Darwin’s Origin of Species. Nice. It will add to his collection of first editions that he never looks at among the other luxury goods stuffed into his vast Geneva mansion. (Thereafter passages from Darwin are chapter epigrams. Neat.)  

Trouble is, who would give churlish, reclusive Rich Brain anything?  He rings up the seller at 2 am, because he is Rich Brain and time means nothing to this titan, to ask who bought the book. The groggy seller says, ‘You did.’  Huh!  That threw Big Brain but Seller read out the details, including the bank account, which is later checked and found to be one of his many stashes, this one is not in a Cayman Islands tax shelter. The mystery begins!

(I have occasionally received a book delivered in the mail and forgotten both that I ordered it and why I wanted it. But I knew who to blame.  The dog!)  

Rich Brain is a mathematical genius, just ask him. Wait! Don’t he will simply sneer at you for asking about the obvious. While Brain disdains money, he disdains even more those without it. He seems to characterise those around him from the outside in. Think Jay Gatsby. A man wearing a cheap suit must be a cheap (= stupid) man, and so on, thus reasons this Croesus.  Although it is true that he disdains just about everyone else, too. He is an equal opportunity despiser of one and all.  

This genius has devised an Artificial Intelligence program, call it Vix, capable of learning to trade stocks and he has been minting money from it.  Trades of a billion US dollars is all in a day’s work.  Overnight he makes millions, each and every night. Oh hum. 

Well the Darwin book is one thing but an intruder into his fortress home who seems to have walked in through the front door, politely leaving his shoes at the mat, despite the Maginot Line security, is quite another. The plot thickens. In what follows there is much to’ing and fro’ing in Geneva that I liked. I spent a day there once including a homage to Rousseau.  

He is now caught between two men in cheap suits, a weary police officer and the intruder. Though his coincidental sightings of the later stretch credulity.

Is Rich Brain having a schizophrenic nervous breakdown? Is someone out to get him? Are both true, or neither?  He goes off the rails, but was he pushed or did he jump? Then again, he was never quite on the rails to begin with. Meanwhile, what is Vix doing?  Well quite a lot, and that is scary, too. I thought of the Forbin Project (1970). Reviewed elsewhere on the Blog.

Vix is determined to survive per Darwin.

Great ride; no finish.  Why did Vix gaslight Brain (book) and then try to get him killed (intruder)?  Was it an Oedipus complex? Will Brain be tried for murdering the German?  Does Vix have yet a third location?  Why did Gabby latch onto Brain in the first place, and second why did she stick with him?  Will Inspector Weary make it to retirement?  

P.S. I classed it as a ‘thriller’ above but it is not written in the frenetic, confused, jump-cut style which leaves it to the reader to fit the jigsaw puzzle of words together. A mercy that.   

Hansjörg Schneider, Silver Pebbles (1993).

Good Reads meta-data is 183 pages, rated 3.58 by 189 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Swiss.

Verdict:  Bah.

Tagline: Bah!

Liked descriptions of winter weather, city, train station, and the Rhine River…. Also liked the personalities of the supermarket check-out woman and her de facto: She practical and down to earth; He a dreamer who thinks he is smarter than he is. In fact he is almost too dumb to believe.  

Didn’t like Inspector Grump’s constant whining and whingeing, and feeling sorry for himself.  Nor the aggressive verbal relations he applied to his squad members and they reciprocated.  Repetitive blaming all ills and woes on unnamed ‘higher ups.’  I suppose the author thinks that is social criticism, but it is not. It is just lazy carping. He should read some Michel Foucault.  

Very little detecting or police work, and ever more padding about snow, interspersed with Inspector Grumble’s simple-minded monologues on the idiocracy of everyone else in the Ruling Class/Deep State.

The Basel train station has an unusual history in World War II, and that fact always makes me receptive to novels set that city. The station was split, half administered by Nazis and half by Swiss.  I read a thriller that started there, see: https://theory-practice.sydney.edu.au/2021/09/target-switzerland-a-novel-of-political-intrigue-2020-by-william-walker/. I read that earlier book because I had found an intriguing reference to this railway station schizophrenia.  Nothing about that in this pot simmerer which did not reach a boil.  

Lucian, A True Story.

Good Reads meta-data is 90 pages, rated 3.5 by 4 litizens.

Genre: Fiction

DNA: Greco-Roman.

Verdict: Fake news.

Tagline: It’s all lies, and that is the truth! 

 ‘Call me Luke’ (AD 125-180) was a geographic Syrian and Roman citizen who went west to fame and fortune, first as a visiting professor hither and yon, and then as a celebrity author. He was often ‘in conversation’ with local nobs, engaged in panel discussions, and spruiked his many books at personal appearances. Like most learned Romans of the time he spoke and wrote Greek, the language of international culture, as well as enough Latin to cash his appearance cheques.

Lucian’s story is true in that it is all lies, and he tells us from the get-go. Is he that logician’s specimen come to life, a lying Blackfoot? You be the judge!

In this autobiographical foray Luke takes off, literally, in search of a good time and willing ladies, with fifty other likely lads; together they sail through the pillars of Hercules to wild and woolly adventures on earth, on the sea, on the moon, among the stars, in the belly of 300 kilometre long whale, on an island of tree women, and more.

The sarcasm and satire are piled on. The main targets are earlier tellers of tall tales like Herodotus who reported every rumour as fact in the best tradition of the free press. Lucian outdoes them all in his fantasies. But he is lying as he happily reminds the reader.

He ends by promising a volume two, but that, too, was a lie.

It figures.

Of course then as now there were Good Readers who thought the lie was itself a lie and believed what he said to be true concealed behind that lie. Straussians avant le mot. 

I got around to reading it because Thomas More with Desi Erasmus translated it from Greek to Latin, and published it in Florence (1519) in Machiavelli’s lifetime. I began to pick again at the thread that Machiavelli might then have been aware of More because he was a personal friend of the printer. Also because Lucian might have turned More’s mind to Utopia.

Keith Houston, The Book: A Cover to Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time (2016).

Good Reads meta-data is 442 pages rated 4.09 by 1161 litizens. 

Genre: History.

DNA: USA.

Verdict: A synthesis. 

Tagline: ‘It takes a strong will to resist the lure of ebooks.’

So many books are about books it is no surprise that there are books about the physical object we call a book: A biography of the book.

What I learned about the evolution of the book was that it is a tale of laborious trial and error by many hands over several millennia to get to the book as we kne/ow it: Paper, ink, fonts, binding. Gutenberg was one of a cavalcade of obsessives who went broke trying to improve book printing.  

Other tidbits include the following: 

Book-locks which I have seen were not parental controls which I had thought but to tighten closed books so that the parchment would not curl.  

The consequences of shelving books on end rather than lying flat were many. See also, Henry Petroski, The Book on the Bookshelf (2000) on this point.

In many cases fonts were named for the first to develop them. From Italy Italic was a reaction to the heavy Gothic type Gutenberg used.

Foolscap paper derived from a watermark left on certain size sheets of paper in England 17th Century after the fall of monarchy.  The crown was replaced by a ‘Fool’s cap’ watermark as sign of loyalty to the new order.

Paper sizes A1 to A10 originated in Germany.  A1= 1/2 a square meter, each subsequent size is a half of its predecessor.  Sizes of paper originated with the reach of workers who made paper.  

• Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1786): The initial idea for a proportional paper system came from this German scientist. He proposed a width-to-height ratio of 1:√2, recognizing its mathematical efficiency for scaling. A sheet of paper with this ratio can be folded in half to produce two smaller sheets that have the exact same proportions as the original.
• Dr. Walter Porstmann (1922): German engineer formalized Lichtenberg’s concept into the DIN 476 standard. This standard set the largest size, A0, to have an area of exactly one square meter, with all other “A” sizes defined by successively halving the larger sheet. Such a progression is called geometric harmony.
• Codified by International Standard Organisation in 1975.

I also found a clanger when author says Herbert Hoover was Secretary of State in Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet (p 418).  Not only was Hoover not Secretary of State, he was not in cabinet at all, though he certainly worked closely with Wilson’s administration. 

More interesting was James John Audubon:

• born in Haiti to slave owning family of planers. The family returned to France when the slave revolt stirred. In 1814 family sent teenage James John to Pennsylvania to avoid conscription in Napoleon’s endless wars.
• He was a boy naturalist, first in Haiti, then France, then USA.
• Tried to make a living out of his naturalist interest.  Bird book with travels.  No one in USA wanted to publish it.  Took it to London. No. Then Edinburgh where he succeeded.
• One copy of all ‘textual books’ must be given to British Library.  He only had 200 and was deeply in debt.  Didn’t want to surrender even one copy for nothing.  So extracted text describing locale and birds from the pictures and printed it separately and compared to the illustrated book this textual book sold cheaply and gave that to the BL, but not the picture book.

In medieval Europe mirrors were used by the faithful to reflect divine rays from relics onto pilgrim. A good business for touts outside churches selling mirrors. A proto selfie? 

So many technical details, so many proper names I got lost in the morass.

Remember the Norwegian ‘Medieval helpdesk’ on You Tube?  It is still there. 

Author opens with that tagline above and then says little or nothing about ebooks.  Whoops, no that silent withdrawal of Nineteen Eighty-Four (p 9), though he used the numeric title and not the words. Orwell stipulated words not numbers for the title, but no one listens to authors. Certainly not publishers. 

Me, I compared the resistance to printed books (leads to atrophy of memory, allows rubbish to be published and read, makes us solitary rather than conversational and convivial, and  class aesthetics because printers were begrimed working class, whereas scribes were learned, devout monks) to current resistance to ebooks (too fiddly, put bookstores out of business, allows a tidal wave of crap, and does not have the aesthetic qualities of a nice book). Certainly right about the crap. I can leave the aesthetics to others. Video dented but did not destroy cinemas and I hope digital books will not destroy bookstores. What has already destroyed far more bookstores were the predatory mega franchise chains like Barnes and Noble, Borders, Smith, Waterstone, and their ilk which set out to do so with pricing and location.

Good Reads meta-data is 331 pages, rated 3.79 by 1726 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Kiwi.

Verdict: Trying (too hard).

Tagline:  Abandon credulity all ye who read here. 

Havelock North NZ pop. 14,500 in the wine country of Hawke’s Bay is the scene of much mayhem and even, perhaps, murder.  Happily ensconced bookstore proprietors, who just happen to be retired Plods from Old Blighty, get drawn into this netherworld along with their dog, which has some of the best lines: ‘Arf!’  Their store is called Sherlock Tomes, and that bon mot is why I choose to read this book. But never judge a book by one clever twist. I tried and failed a time ago to read one featuring the Cat of the Baskervilles.  

I found this one hard going wading through pages and pages of superfluous detail. True some of it redounded later, but it was impossible to detect which was relevant. TMI. About clothes, decor, food (including dog food), many other sidetracks. Even where life and limb is threatened, the proprietors cannot focus. Neither could this reader.

There is a lot to like about the plot but it was whitened out by the blizzard of ephemera. It was hard to believe that the original police investigation was as superficial as it seemed in retrospect.  The disappearance of a school girl, followed by the departure of her best friend, the disappearance of a drug dealer, and the disappearance of $NZ100,000 all with a few days of each other, and only the first school girl was investigated. It was pretty clear that stereotyped FW was a blue herring from the get-go.  He was too bad to be true.  Likewise the multiple authorship which was hinted at in the text was on the cards.  

I read it while sitting on a veranda looking out to the Pacific Ocean in Fiji. Lucky me. I left the paperback copy in the guest library of the Royal Davui Resort, August 2025. Perhaps the next reader will be more receptive and perceptive than me. This is the first of a series and ends with a cliff hanger to the next volume.  Not for me.