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Genre: Gothic suspense Main characters: Margaret Lea, Vida Winter Time and place: Britain, in the 2000s I suppose First sentence: “It was November.” Summary:Vida Winter is a successful author and very famous, and yet, in the age of information, her past is a mystery to everyone but herself. This is why, when Margaret Lea receives a request from Miss Winter to become her official biographer, she doesn’t exactly know what to believe. Miss Lea has not published a book in her life, nor has she ever read a book of Miss Winter’s, so naturally enough she wonders if she is up to the task. But curiosity gets the better of her so, at the appointed day and time, Miss Lea ends up under the penetrating gaze of Miss Winter’s, ready to embark on the literary adventure of a lifetime.

General impression I loved this book, and I loved the feeling I had, while reading, that I was reading a classic (so much so that I was quite surprised to notice the book was published in 2006, I thought it older than that). In my defence there are many classical Gothic elements here (I think I’m getting a penchant for Gothic literature, sigh), bringing to mind all the classics I love (there’s a madwoman locked away, a destroying fire, like in Jane Eyre; an overpowering love, reminding me of Wuthering Heights; The Woman in White is also somewhat represented, ditto the Turning of the Screw and more).

Characters
In a word, the characters are fascinating. Some of them strange, some of them with all sorts of mental issues, but still fascinating. Beginning with Isabelle’s father, the man who lost his wife in childbirth, and whose only reason to live became his infant daughter, completely neglecting his son. His sadistic son, Charlie, who in time developed an unhealthy obsession with the same precious Isabelle. And this is where the story actually begins, with Isabelle herself giving birth to two twin girls. Adeline and Emmeline grew up in their own strange world, surrounded by very few people and left to their own devices.

I was in a way surprised at how real all those characters felt. Even the mad ones, or especially the mad ones. I could see the Missus in front of my eyes the whole while, even as she grew older and older and the household grew more and more in disrepair. I esteemed John-the-dig more and more, seeing the way he tried to make things as comfortable as possible to his (unofficial) charges. Both Missus and John were simple people, but so kind, each in their own way, I couldn’t not care for them. I also liked the governess, Hester, a lot, for quite the opposite reason: she may not care that much about the girls, or people in general, but she was well-read, very smart, and never shied away from work when work needed to be done.

I should also talk about the main characters a bit, about Miss Winter, and Miss Lea, but to tell the truth all the characters seem so vivid to me, even now after closing the book, I simply had to mention more of then than just the two main ones. About Miss Lea, her trait that I enjoyed most is, predictably enough, her love of reading. I am sure that every passionate reader recognizes in him/her the feelings that Miss Lea recounts, and I did too, of course. As for Miss Winter… she is quite hard to pinpoint, especially since, in her current form (old and ill), she is nothing but the vehicle for her story, a means to let the said story out into the world.

Relationships
After rambling on and on about how real the characters felt, it should by now be obvious that the relationships were just as believable (else they would have taken a toll on the characters’ believability too). And yet the way the people in the book related to one another was at times hard for me to understand (or let’s call it less than obvious), especially where Emmeline was concerned. Why did Miss Winter love Emmeline so much, for example? Anything related to the twins’ relationship with one another was somewhat of a mystery to me — natural enough, I suppose, since it was a mystery for the rest of the characters too. A quote I found interesting related to that:

“Twins, always together, always two. If it was normal in their world to be two, what would other people, who came not in twos but ones, seem like to them? We must seem like halves, the Missus mused. And she remembered a word, a strange word it had seemed at the time, that meant people who had lost parts of themselves. Amputees. That’s what we are to them. Amputees.”

Plot
The one word to describe the plot is “layered”. The reader never knows what he/she’s getting in to. It all starts out blandly enough, the life story of an old lady. Yawn. But then some of the characters are introduced (Charlie, and Isabelle) and the reader gets interested in them. Then some more things are revealed, and suddenly we have a minor mystery on our hands. Another layer comes off, and there’s another mystery. And then another, more important one, keeping the reader guessing. I couldn’t but like the way the story became more and more engrossing as the pages flew by — especially as right now no other book with such structure comes to mind.

Setting
Just like the characters, the setting, the old, dilapidated mansion the twins grew up in comes to life under the skilful pen of the writer. The topiary became, for me, a place of wonder, as I loved to imagine the shapes John-the-dig gave to the yew trees. The same goes for the burnt, ruined Angelfield (reminding me of Thornfield, of course), and the contemporary mansion Vida Winter spends her time secluded from the world.

Thoughts on the title
The title is a reference to the first book Vida ever wrote, called Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, although the number of the stories in the book was twelve. In time, the mythical thirteenth tale’s importance grew, everyone becoming curious about it, and what it might have been about. A parallel, in a way, with Miss Winter’s very life, another thing people knew nothing about and so were free to speculate upon. In the end, the two mysteries intermingle, as the thirteenth tale does surface, and it contains a experience of the author’s… but I am getting ahead of myself. Yup, I love the title, and I think it very appropriate. :)

Thoughts on the ending
The ending is one of my favorite things in the book, since Miss Lea, like the passionate reader that she is, remembered all the cases when she put a book down, then wondered about the lives of the secondary characters, about what happened to them next (because, of course, we all know what happens to the leads, but how about the others?), so the last few pages contain a detailed account of the whereabouts of everyone ever mentioned in the book, including Miss Winter’s cat (who got one of the happiest endings in itself :) ). I love this kind of endings, this particular take on “they lived happily ever after”, and the one in this book leaves nothing to be desired.

What I liked most
Why, the fact that the characters in the book are book lovers themselves. I always enjoy finding likely-minded individuals between the pages of a book, and both Miss Lea and Miss Winter value literary masterpieces above almost everything else.

For example, here is what Margaret Lea thinks about her favorite kind of books, the biographies of people long ago:

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.

How can one not agree?

Also, another quote, this time of Miss Winter’s, and this time one I am not quite sure whether to agree with or not, but whose original point of view I admire nevertheless:

Politeness. Now, there’s a poor man’s virtue if ever there was one. What’s so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it’s easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what’s left when you’ve failed at everything else. People with ambition don’t give a damn what other people think about them. I hardly suppose Wagner lost sleep worrying whether he’d hurt someone’s feelings. But then he was a genius.

What I liked least
I didn’t quite get Miss Lea’s aching for her lost twin. While I do understand why the author chose to have Miss Lea herself part of a twin duo (because who better to understand the story of twins than another twin), I could not relate to Margaret’s longing to see the sister she never knew, to be with her — and this was the one aspect of the story I didn’t much care for.

Recommend it to?
Everyone, especially people who enjoy reading the classics and/or Gothic literature.

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Genre: Paranormal Main characters: Bourbon Kid, Kyle and Peto, Sanchez, Jefe, Jessica, Archibald Somers, Miles Jensen Time and place: Santa Mondega (South America?), about 2006 First sentence: “Sanchez hated strangers coming into his bar.” Summary: A total eclipse of the sun is approaching and the police in Santa Mondega has the situation only partly under control. A savage serial killer is on the prowl, and the situation sounds so complicated that a new detective from the division dealing with the supernatural is brought in on the case (although no one actually takes him or his division seriously). It is he who makes the most important discovery of all: one thing the victims all had in common was that they borrowed from the library the same book, a book with no name and no known author. Add to that the fact that a mysterious blue stone, the Eye of the Moon, has been stolen from its rightful owners and is somewhere in town. Almost every character in the book wants to get his or her hands on it (the rest wanting to stay as far away from it as possible), because, in the hands of the wrong person, it can alter Santa Mondega forever, and definitely not in a good way.

There are a lot of strange and colorful characters in the book, and, while we don’t get to actually know them all, their trajectory within the pages is bound to keep the reader interested. To name a random one, we have the King, a hitman who always dresses like Elvis and takes pleasure in torturing his victims. We have Jessica, a mysterious woman with quite a temper, that always, unexpectedly, manages to dodge death. There are also Kyle and Peto (two innocent monks from far away, very skilled when it comes to fighting), Carlitos and Miguel, the two inseparable minions of the most powerful guy in town (who both chose Lone Ranger costumes in a particular, dress-up day), Bourbon Kid (a guy who goes crazy, killing everyone in sight whenever his lips touch bourbon), and many more.

It is actually hard to tell who the good guys are, because in a rotten town like Santa Mondega no one is remotely good. Everyone has flaws, no one shies away from a bit of killing or stealing, and so on. And yet different people at different times show that there is more to them than their money-oriented nature (Sanchez for example has feelings that can be almost categorized as tender for Jessica), so the reader always has someone to root for (and, interestingly enough, that someone may change from time to time according to the latest revelations presented in the book).

The book belongs to no set genre, being rather hard to categorize. A thing I have found very funny was that parts of it seem straight out of a cowboy movie (although the setting is contemporary): there are bars filled with people hostile to strangers, no one hesitates to draw their guns at the least hint of a conflict, some people do get shot, and so on. While I am aware there is a whole Western genre out there, I have never read one such book, so I was excited to discover this side of the book for its sheer novelty.

Thoughts on the title: I am somewhat amused at the idea of marketing this book as the one mentioned inside it :) (sure, there are no actual similarities between the two, as that book is old, and is handwritten, and has pictures and this one doesn’t, but still :) )

Thoughts on the ending: I am actually left with a lot of questions: show spoiler

What I liked most: The writing style is similar to Robert Rankin’s, Tom Holt’s, or perhaps Lemony Snicket’s, sprinkled with witty phrases, playing with the absurd. I enjoyed it, of course, and I also enjoy the mystery around the author, who is yet unknown despite having written a sequel to the book since.
(a detail that I have found amusing is that somewhere in town there’s a Cafe Ole Au Lait :) )

What I liked least: Perhaps the fact that one of the main mysteries of the book is revealed out of the blue, with no hint leading up to it, so it felt more like “yeah right, as if” than anything else.
show spoiler

Recommend it to? I have no idea who to recommend this to. At times it is interesting and fun, at times less so. It seems to be one of those books that polarize opinions, some people being thrilled with it while other hate its guts. By all means give it a try if you’re interested in a bit of mystery with a bit of paranormal and lots of blood mixed in.

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I added this book to my TBR shelf a while ago, after reading and loving The Book Thief. When I started reading this, I had no expectations. I was of course happy to notice that the writing style was very similar to TBT, perhaps with shorter sentences and fewer metaphors, but the very style I enjoyed back then. However the topic was, as I expected, a lot less serious than Nazi occupation in Germany. A bunch of kids, one in particular, doing… something. Meh. But then, without noticing, I slipped into it. The seemingly simplistic writing has a way of inescapably drawing one in. I finished the whole book in just a few hours, and only then I realized I loved it, unexpectedly, even more than I did TBT.

Throughout the book, Ed has no idea why is he chosen, who has chosen him and for what purpose, and yet he never hesitates in doing what he knows he should. Albeit an ordinary guy, with no particular set of skills, his deeds do indeed make the world a better place, for others, and ultimately for himself. He starts to gain confidence, he meets new people, he begins to live. A testimony to the power of doing good.

The characters are, all, inherently flawed. They all have their issues, from Audrey whose childhood has left her afraid to love, to Marv, who’s always grumpy and such a skinflint he’d rather kiss a smelly dog than paying for a meal. They sometimes use strong language or have casual sex. They could be called losers without batting an eyelid. And yet, somewhere deep inside, they all have redeeming qualities. I ended up rooting for each, I ended up caring for each, and I took it to be yet another sign of how great this book actually is.

Two quotes I liked:

“How do people live like this?
How do they survive?
And maybe that’s why I’m here.
What if they can’t anymore?”

and another, containing just the sort of imagery I love discovering in Zusak’s books:

“She also sits down, like the girl. She’s got her nightie on again, torn, and she has her head in her hands. [...] At one point, she holds her hands out, forming a cup. It’s like she’s holding her heart there. It’s bleeding down her arms.”

Thoughts on the ending: The kind of powerful ending that leaves people either adoring the book or hating it to bits. For me it was the. Single. Best. Ending. Ever.
show spoiler

What I liked most: First of all, the very idea the book is based on, of going around and change people’s lives for the better was bound to strike a chord within me (yup, I was a diehard fan of Quantum Leap :) ). This being said, my favorite parts were of course the most successful “messages” Ed “sends”, the ones where the recipients are touched the most. I so like reading about happy people.

show spoiler

What I liked least: There’s nothing that I did not like. Sure, it needed a bit of disbelief suspension at first, when Ed poured so much effort into something seemingly random (a card arrived out of nowhere), but somehow it all made sense later on. What if Ed’s life was simply so meaningless that he jumped at the opportunity of giving it a little meaning, even if that meant chasing card-shaped windmills? Also, Ed seems to really love people, and being around them, and so, what might have started out as simple curiosity grew into a must-do after a while.

Recommend it to? Absolutely everyone. My favorite book in quite some time.

Written by the same author:
The Book Thief

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Prepare yourselves to be amazed. Mr. Fforde has created a very original world where everything is based on color. While I was somewhat aware of that, having read some reviews previous to reading the book, I was nevertheless very pleasantly surprised to discover the actual thing.

The world has changed after Something That Happened. Even the people have evolved (or rather devolved) into Homo coloribus, people who can see nothing at night and only a certain set of colors by day. According to colortocracy, the highest ranked people are the ones who can see the most colors, for example a Grey (someone with no color sight to speak of) is lower than a Red (someone who can mostly see red, and very little of the rest), who is lower than a Purple (someone who can see lots of red and blue).

The people’s very names are based on this system too, as anyone who can see color gets to pick an appropriate name (like Russet, or deMauve, or McMustard; my favorite name was Floyd Pinken), whereas the Greys have to contend with using their own address as a last name (G-23 or G-8). Even the diseases are treated by showing people certain colors: what we know as doctors are called swatchmen there, and their medicine cabinets have been replaced by swatches of colors. Making me a wee bit dreamy as you have to agree it would simplify seeing a doctor tremendously :)

One of the elements I love in Dystopian books (or other forms of SciFi) is when the author manages to make the reader as familiar with current technology as can be. Mr. Fforde’s ingeniousness has dealt with that very well in this book: the powers that be decide, periodically, to give up some pieces of technology that they deem useless, or subversive, or whatever. The chosen technologies are then Leapbacked, meaning the artifacts are destroyed and no one is allowed to make or use them ever again. The society thus goes backwards and backwards, ending up, at the time the book opens, at a level more or less equivalent, technology-wise, with the beginning of the 20th century. A bit worse actually, since the bicycles have been Leapbacked, the books too, and who knows what else.

The country (world?) is ruled by the Munsell, whose statues are in every village and whose rules are never broken. Everything is constant, from the number of people (carefully guarded) to the shortage of spoons. The rules are incredibly strict, regulating from what outfit can be worn in a certain occasion to the minimum number of meals per day. More on the rules:

“The Word of Munsell was the Rules, and the Rules were the Word of Munsell. They regulated everything we did, and had brought peace to the Collective for nearly four centuries. They were sometimes very odd indeed: The banning of the number that lay between 72 and 74 was a case in point, and no one had ever fully explained why it was forbidden to count sheep, make any new spoons or use acronyms. But they were the Rules—and presumably for some very good reason, although what that might be was not entirely obvious.”

Unsurprisingly, loopholery abounds, people in charge always finding ways to do what they want (usually by declaring some things as being something else; my favorite example is the “chicken is a vegetable” one but there were more).

And the spoons, let’s not forget the spoons. For some reason spoons are missing from the list of items allowed to be manufactured, so the number of spoons is always constant (or even decreasing if we think some may be destroyed, or lost, now and then). So

“Acceptable rules of conduct were suspended when it came to the spoon shortage. The deficit had gotten so bad that prices were all but unaffordable, and dynastic spoon succession had become a matter of considerable interest. Spoons were even postcode engraved and carried on one’s person to eliminate theft, and good table manners, one of the eight pillars upon which the Collective was built, had been relaxed to allow tea to be stirred—shockingly—with the handle of a fork.”

Interestingly enough, although no one can see full scale, color is very important to people. Everything is colored and recolored using pipes with liquid, very expensive colors (colors that can only be obtained from artefacts that have belonged to the Previous, the ones before). And yet, color is going away from the world: everything colored falls prey to the Saturation Dispersion Index (or simply put, is fading). I sort of see a similarity with oil here, as there’s a limited quantity of it, huge yet but still limited, in our world, as are artefacts in theirs, and I thought it a nice touch (and also couldn’t help feeling sorry for those condemned to live in a black and white world after all color is gone).

To speak about the characters a little too (can you see I was head over heels fascinated by the world building?), they too are interesting, most of all by the way they grow throughout the novel. Taking Eddie Russett, he starts out as a naive person, yet with a good heart and always ready to do the right thing. Jane on the other hand is the very opposite: she knows lots of hidden secrets about their seemingly ordered world, and is ready to do anything to reach her purposes (I think I even detected a touch of cruelty in her, given how she treats people who mention her nose). Yet Eddie loves her and gradually she started to grow on me too (not to mention I was so happy to find such an atypical heroine :) )

Thoughts on the ending: show spoiler

What I liked most:
The charm is, as always, in the details. For example I have been wondered for a bit why the people in the book use the word Beigemarket instead of black market. And then it hit me: black is not a color, so it would not exist in a color-ruled world :) (speaking of beige, for the people in the book it is the color equivalent to Hell — I imagine it is so because it is so complete and utterly boring, but I may be wrong).

Other such details I revelled in were (marked as spoilers in case you want to find them for yourself):
show spoiler

What I liked least: I have found nothing to complain about. :)

Recommend it to? Anyone who loves dystopias, anyone interested in quirky worlds. Anyone else should at least give it a try :) (I was bound to say that, I love Fforde in general and I found this book in particular charming).

See also:
Some of the colors featured in the book
Q & A with the author

Written by the same author:
The Eyre Affair
Lost in a Good Book
The Well of Lost Plots
Something Rotten

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I am somewhat of a fan of Kinsey Millhone’s. I really like her no-nonsense persona (I am more of a scaredy mouse type, and it was probably natural for me to be attracted to a type so much different than my own) and her courage in getting involved with all sort of people in all sort of situations. As usual, in this book we get to find out some more details about her, a few more bits of the puzzle that she is. Some of them amusing (such as the discovery that she’s, in her own words, “a bad-ass private eye who swoons in the same room with a needle“), some of them rather touching (more of her feelings regarding the loss of her parents at a tender age).

As for the other characters, we don’t get to know any of them that well, due to their paths crossing Kinsey only when needed, and that for a very short while. However, Kinsey is very observant and a good judge of character, so we do get to know at least some parts of what makes some of them tick. Taking for example Bailey’s mother, Oribelle, a former beauty but now ravaged by diabetes, heroically trying not to complain and yet complaining all day; Bailey’s father, the type used to ordering people around, now trying to get to grips with the fact that he has little more to live and his strength is seeping day by day; the reverend of the Baptist church, acting like a pious person when in fact he isn’t precisely that behind closed doors; and many more. Bailey himself is an interesting character, albeit somewhat mysterious (and very good at fending for himself when needed); overall, the reader ends up rooting for him (a good thing too, as it was kinda obvious he didn’t do it because… well, that’s how it is in this kind of books :P ).

There’s not much I can say about the plot, since the Alphabet books are more or less all similar in that department: Kinsey is on the case, Kinsey starts asking questions, Kinsey is getting closer to solving the case, Kinsey is (usually) threatened by the criminal, Kinsey (sometimes) gets hurt in the altercation, the case is nevertheless solved, the end. The charm is nevertheless in the details, and these, of course, are not to be disclosed so as not to spoil the story.

One of the things I find amusing with the books in these series is that, while the things in the first one happened in about the same year (1982 I think) the book was published, the distance between reality and fiction slowly increases. For example this one was released in 1985 but the things in it happen in 1983. That is of course easily explained by the fact that in real life the author releases about one book per year, whereas in Kinsey’s timeline only a few months pass between cases. I am however looking forward to the more recent books (with an even larger margin), to see whether cellphones or the Internet (or other such novelties) are going to make an impromptu appearance. :)

Speaking of the series, so far I enjoyed all the books, and I am impressed by the fact that so far the author never repeated herself (in terms of characters and their actions). However I did notice a pattern throughout: whenever Kinsey has to investigate something that happened years before, whoever did the deed (that cannot be pinned on him/her, else it would have been so all those years ago) gets nervous and starts killing more people. This I think is in order to satisfy the reader’s sense of justice: as the guilty part cannot be convicted, for various reasons, of the old deed, there are these new deeds so the said guilty part will be convicted nevertheless.

A favorite quote:

I thought about my papa. I was five when he left me . . . five when he went away. [...] When had it dawned on me that he was gone for good? When had it dawned on Ann that Royce was never going to come through? And what of Jean Timberlake? None of us had survived the wounds our fathers inflicted all those years ago. Did he love us? How would we ever know? He was gone and he’d never again be what he was to us in all his haunting perfection. If love is what injures us, how can we heal?

Thoughts on the ending: This was one of those books where everyone comes under suspicion at one time or another, making it impossible (at least for me) to guess who the killer was. To my delight chagrin, the one person who did it was the one person I didn’t suspect at all. Yay! :)

What I liked most: The idea of having it all happen in such a small (eighteen blocks) town. For some reason it made it all seem both more intimate and also more creepy (since everyone knows everyone it means that everyone has talked to and smiled at the killer plenty of times). The part regarding the “Family Crisis Squad” was also quite fun to imagine :)

On the kitchen counter, I could see a tuna casserole with crushed potato chips on top, a ground beef and noodle bake, and two Jell-O molds (one cherry with fruit cocktail, one lime with grated carrots), which Ann asked me to refrigerate. It had only been an hour and a half since [event]. I didn’t think gelatin set up that fast, but these Christian ladies probably knew tricks with ice cubes that would render salads and desserts in record time for just such occasions. I pictured a section in the ladies’ auxiliary church cookbook for Sudden Death Quick Snacks . . . using ingredients one could keep on the pantry shelf in the event of tragedy

What I liked least: I loved the book up until one of the last paragraphs, where there was something I didn’t quite understand. The real criminal was (of course) apprehended, but no proofs were found regarding Jean’s murder. So the police couldn’t actually prove that the said criminal was the one who killed Jean, yet Bailey was set free — why? How come, since no one has proven him not guilty of the said murder?

Recommend it to? Everyone who loves mysteries :)

This book is a sequel to:
A Is For Alibi
B Is For Burglar
C Is For Corpse
D Is For Deadbeat
E Is For Evidence

The links to amazon.com and bookdepository.co.uk are affiliate links. If you click one of them and buy something, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price. This being said, rest assured that the few cents I might thus make will never influence what I say or do not say about any book reviewed on the site.

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There is a special magic in number three, isn’t it? Welcome to the third stop of the Wilkie Collins tour! It is the first tour on The Classics Circuit and it plans to follow Mr. Collins as he visits a few of the book blogs in the blogosphere, in hopes of making new acquaintances. Feel free to visit the previous stops (1, 2) and the full list of the stops planned for the future. And, of course, enjoy this one!

Ever since first opening the book I was amused at the shape it way written in: letters and descriptions of events by various characters, in order to record a certain story “in the interest of truth“. The very same way The Woman in White was written, and, as I liked that book, I readily prepared to like this one in turn. At first it started out a bit slowly, but once things got rolling I could hardly put it down.

Were I to name a most amusing narrator, I would certainly choose Miss Drusilla Clack, a single woman dedicated to her faith and her charitable causes, so much so that she became a caricature of such a character instead of a multifaceted human being. Among her quirks we should note the fact that she considered sympathy for the sick a very un-Christian reaction and takes pride in giving tracts to people because that’s her idea of doing them good. A funny scene involving her is when she tries to force Lady Verinder into salvation by hiding books on religious topics all around the Lady’s house (and then she goes home so convinced she did good that she feels like a young girl again).

Another narrator that I have liked was Mr. Gabriel Betteredge, Lady Verinder’s house stewart. Despite his age (somewhere around seventy and eighty) he takes pride in doing his job well and he treats the people under him as kindly as they deserve. In the course of the book he has quite a few fits of the “detective fever”, as he calls it, but always in the company of someone better acquainted with the situation and more likely to make discoveries (it can be said that Betteredge would make a wonderful Watson while never being capable of being a Sherlock Holmes himself). Although I have mostly liked him he did have at times moments of feeling superior to other people (usually women), and then I usually got annoyed at him. But then I remembered his most interesting quirk (he believed the truth, the life and everything was to be found in the pages of Robinson Crusoe) and it made me smile again.

Here’s one of his “superior” quotes, just to form an idea:

“[...] it is a maxim of mine that men (being superior creatures) are bound to improve women—if they can. When a woman wants me to do anything (my daughter, or not, it doesn’t matter), I always insist on knowing why. The oftener you make them rummage their own minds for a reason, the more manageable you will find them in all the relations of life. It isn’t their fault (poor wretches!) that they act first and think afterwards; it’s the fault of the fools who humour them.”

Ugh.

Looking back I realize I have only mentioned things I have found amusing in the book. Don’t expect this to be a funny volume though — on the contrary, it is a very serious one as the happiness of the members of a whole family is at stake. Not any members of any family, but a cast of characters that the reader grows to like and root for, and as such their happiness becomes important (or at least that’s what happened with me). The atmosphere of the book is also rather gloomy, what with everyone suspecting everyone else of theft, with even a few deaths and illnesses thrown into the bargain. It is not a happy reading in any way, but it’s definitely a captivating one.

Here is a quote from the book’s preface by the author, illustrating an interesting side of the book:

“In some of my former novels, the object proposed has been to trace the influence of circumstances upon character. In the present story I have reversed the process. The attempt made here is to trace the influence of character on circumstances. The conduct pursued, under a sudden emergency, by a young girl, supplies the foundation on which I have built this book.”

The young girl in question is, of course, Miss Verinder. She is a complex character, young, pretty, gentle, kind hearted, but with an easily excited temper. A temper that made me actually dislike her at first (way too overexcited by everything around her for my taste), but as the story progresses her strong nature begins to shine through, and the book ended with her as my favorite character of them all. As far as her way of seeing things influences the narrative, it is obviously after a while that her decisions influence the book throughout, but I think the mystery would have been just as complete even without her acting in a certain way. But, of course, I agree that the author knows best so I will say no more.

Last but not least, T.S. Eliot called this book “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels“. It is hard to believe in this day and age, when detective novels are everywhere, that a little over a century ago the genre almost didn’t exist. And then Wilkie Collins appeared on the scene. While not entirely original (parts of it are inspired from real life), the book established the cornerstone of the genre, and some of its elements are still used to this day (large number of suspects, amateur detectives, the person who did it was the least likely of all, a local policeman who does a bad job at solving the case and more).

What I liked most: There is a certain scene where Rachel has a heated conversation with the guy she’s in love with. It’s my favorite scene and I liked Rachel at least twice as much afterwards.

What I liked least: I was less than enchanted by the “medical experiment” that helps solve part of the mystery. I found it quite hard to believe despite Ezra Jennings quoting from official (and I supposed real life) books. Sure, the author assures us in the preface that he had make sure this is what it would have happened, by consulting “not only [...] books, but [...] living authorities as well“. I do believe him of course, and yet that part of the narrative was decidedly the one I liked least.

Recommend it to? Anyone who likes classics and/or good mystery books.

See also
Audrey Niffeneger’s review of The Moonstone

Written by the same author:
Poor Miss Finch

The links to amazon.com and bookdepository.co.uk are affiliate links. If you click one of them and buy something, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price. This being said, rest assured that the few cents I might thus make will never influence what I say or do not say about any book reviewed on the site.

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The book is an example of what I call “light SciFi”: everything happens in the future and the technology is very advanced — there are many things that are taken for granted by people living in that time (and our narrator, Douglas Hall, among them), and yet it isn’t hard for the reader to “get” what the new things are and what do they do. Usually the names are very descriptive (such as “simulectronics”, a combination of simulation and electronics, “staticstrip”, a strip of normal, non-moving sidewalk, as opposed to the “pedistrips” that moved along, carrying people at various speeds), and sometimes there are explanations in a few words (such as when the way laser intensity affects people is explained). Because of this I could easily get into the book and the world it depicted, despite its differences from my own world — and, predictably enough, I loved that.

The characters are very few and quite underdeveloped (and none of them except the narrator gets enough “screen time” for the reader to get to know them and/or get to care for them) — and yet this doesn’t make the book less interesting. Once, because of the plot and the mystery surrounding Hall, but also because of the questions it makes arise in the mind of the reader. For example, the professor was very attached to what he called “his little people”, and we also get some insight into the mind of one of the simulated characters (a special one, cursed with the knowledge that he was nothing but bits of information and electric impulses). It makes the reader wonder — what actually makes a person real? Can a simulated person be called a person? Does a simulated person have a soul? Are their feelings any less important because they don’t actually exist? And more such questions, because all the people in the simulated environment do not realize (with very few exceptions) that they are not real people, that their reality is not a reality. It is perhaps a perfect example to illustrate the relativity of everything and its dependence on the observer: a simulated person is real in the eyes of another resident of the same reality; and it’s just a simulation, no more serious than a plaything in Hall’s and his colleagues’ eyes.

A simile that I liked:

[...] she seemed like a fragile Dresden that might crumble beneath the feathery assault of moonlight.

As a last thought — the book was written in 1964; I wonder what would the author (dead in ’76) think about The Sims (every bit the immaterial beings in the immaterial world that he has envisioned all these years ago; sure, they don’t have consciousness as of yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that time would also come).

What I liked most: A large part of the book consists of Hall’s ruminations as he tries to make sense of what is happening around him. I very much liked the fact that he was open to all possibilities, including the somewhat lesser plausible one, that is was his mind playing games with him and that he had just imagined Lynch and and all the rest. I am trying to decide whether I would have done the same in his stead — would I be certain I had seen something or would I trust the rest — but so far I have reached no conclusion. Nevertheless this detail added depth to the character (and interestingness to the book, because, after all, one couldn’t not ask himself now and then, what if it’s all in his head?)

What I liked least: I have yet to decide whether that’s a touch of genius on the part of the author or just sort of a slip (lately I tend towards the former): at one point Hall sees the daughter of the dead professor almost crying for her loss, and he wonders why, since in this day and age the technology has made it very easy for one to be certain that one person has really died so there’s no need for wakes and funerals. First of all, I don’t very much understand what is the connection (why should there be a connection) between mourning a loss and an actual funeral. I tried hard to understand what the author wanted to say by this paragraph and ended up with two possibilities: either he wanted to make crying for a lost father seem suspicious, and this was the best way he knew how (in which case, booo!!), or it was a very subtle hint at things to come show spoiler

Recommend it to? Anyone (but, of course, SciFi fans most of all). I am not particularly fond of SciFi but I have seen The Thirteenth Floor a while ago, and, as it’s inspired by this book, it made me curious about it too and I haven’t regretted it :)


The links to amazon.com and bookdepository.co.uk are affiliate links. If you click one of them and buy something, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price. This being said, rest assured that the few cents I might thus make will never influence what I say or do not say about any book reviewed on the site.

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