Mark Billingham crime writer

Mark Billingham is one of Britain’s well established writers. His DI, (Detective Inspector), Tom Thorne novels have been spectacularly successful in the UK and abroad.  He was the opening speaker on the Friday morning session of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Festival in Harrogate.  He was also the winner of Best Crime Novel 2009 prize, awarded in the opening ceremony the previous night.

Early career

He was introduced by the author and Guardian crime fiction critic Laura Wilson, who quickly gave us Mark’s background.  He was brought up in Birmingham, trained as an actor and appeared in a number of minor roles in episodes of TV showsDempsey & Makepeace, Juliet Bravo, Boon, and The Bill.^] Afte finding himself playing a variety of “bad guy roles such as a soccer hooligan, drug addict, a nasty copper, a racist copper, or a bent copper”

He then moved into standup progressing from 5-minute, unpaid “try-out” spots to 10-, 20- and 30-minute paid slots. Within a year he played The Comedy Store on several occasions, where he also appears regularly as a Master of Ceremonies.  This combined with a number of appearances on TV and radio, such as the only human face on the  Spitting Image, “the taller half” of top double act “The Tracy Brothers” and appearences on the radio version of The Mary Whitehouse Experience.

In 1988, he was seen on the children’s comedy series News at Twelve, in which the central character “broadcasts his own (imaginary) TV news bulletin every evening.  This led to his getting a part in Maid Marion and her Merry Men, which opened the door to his writing career.

Mark played the part of Gary, one of a pair of Sheriff of Nottingham’s  henceman.  With his colleague Graeme, played by David Lloyd, and were the “bestest mates”.  Mostly they were extremely affable, but in the tradition of clever villains with idiot sidekicks, not very clever most of the time. They are often very friendly with the Merry Men, who tend to return the sentiment, except when Gary and Graeme are doing what they’re paid for.  Graeme tended to enjoy things like torture and teasing the villagers more than Gary does, though Gary would challenge Graeme for the chance to do executions.

Although a children’s programme it was much appreciated by many adults, and has been likened to Blackadder, not only for its historical setting and the presence of Tony Robinson, but also for its comic style. It is far more surreal than Blackadder, however, and drops even more (deliberate)anachronisms. Like many British children’s programmes, there is a lot of social commentary sneakily inserted, as well as witty asides about the Royal family, buses running on time, etc.  interestingly the show was brought by American TV and shown at an 11:30 evening slot.

Moving into writing

Mark was actually paid to this erm – work.  While on the set he got interested in writing and with the encouragement of Tony Robinson he developed his skills and contributed to the scripts.  He then moved into writing scripts for children’s television.  With David Lloyd he wrote and acted  in episodes of Harry’s Mad (based on the book by Dick King-Smith) and with Peter Cocks wrote and co-starred in Granada TV‘s Knight School.

He described, with a lot of humour, his writing career.  He reckons he owes a lot of his writing skills to his acting and particularly his standup experience.  His main protagonist:  London based Tom Thorne.  He talked for quite a time about the getting the character right.  It is cliche that a policeman investigating murder is flawed, but that is the reality of the job.

Structuring a book

The structure of a book is important and building tension as is bringing in unexpected twists. he gives a good example in the film Silence of the Lambs.

• Towards the end of the film we see the SWAT team has got the address of the serial killer.  They move into place around the house.
• Meanwhile Jody Foster, FBI agent, is going out to finish off a couple of loose ends, to tidy up the paperwork.
• The head of the SWAT team press the doorbell.
• We see the killer come from his basement up the stairs.
• We see the serial killer start to open the door.
• The SWAT team look tense.
• Then we realise that it is Jody at the right house and in serious danger.

This is a great example on film on how to throw the viewer.  Writers need to do something similar to keep the interest in their books.

Characterisation

Mark described his main character anvil shaped, as in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.  Ton will retain the shape of the anvil after it has fallen on his head.  Thorne has the psychological equivalent.  A bad experieince will affect and develop the character over the series, which is a good reason once you’re hooked on the books to start at the beginning of the series with Sleepyhead and gradually progress with Thorn’s troubled life.

Research

Mark talked about research.  There are certain things a writer has to get right.  The characters in particular have to be believable.  He will make a lot of effort to understand say how Alzheimer affects the individual and the family and friends of the individual.

However, he, and I strongly agree, dislikes authors who write the great ‘see my research’ tracks of their books.  He quotes, and I also agree, though my wife will kill for saying so, that Kathy Reichs spends four pages describing the difference between cat hair and dog hair. (In the book I read there were at least four pages on blood splatter and why o’ why did a sensible heroine go by herself, without backup to a drug dealing, biker’s bar – calm down Paul.)

Mark does warn that research is probably the greatest excuse not to write.  He  feels that some detail are not so important, such as ‘checking whether you can take a left turn at a certain point’ or as mark ruefully admits that there is not a Starbucks in Brixton.  He does get complaints from readers, but as he points out – it is only a story.

He was asked how he research things he doesn’t know.  He says he just asks people.  He says he has a friend who is pregnant and he goes around and asks her how she’s getting on.  ’Sore nipples’, get out the notebook write it down.  ’Leakage’, get out the notebook and write it down.

Bad experience

Laura got Mark to talk about his most frightening experience.  He was staying in a hotel in Manchester with his writing companion Peter Cocks.  They decided to stay in one night and ordered beer and pizza.  There was a knock on the door and three men wearing balaclavas burst in, beat them up and got the cash cards and pin codes.  They were held over midnight so that the gang could  maximise the withdrawals over two days.   The crime was bizarre, the Manchester police had not come across a simialr incident.  It was clear that the crime was an inside job and Mark suspects that the attackers thought they were possibly closet gays.

He has used the fear in his second book Scaredy Cat illustrating that ‘the power of fear is a very powerful weapon, and if you are prepared to instill it, you have a very powerful weapon that is every bit as dangerous as a gun or a knife.

Help for others

Besides writing books Mark is very active with the crime writing community.  As I went around the Crime Festival I noted Mark organising people, encouraging, introducing and working quite hard behind the scenes to make sure the event was a success.  He was also very active in Creative Thursday, the event for what people like my self, who are now called, prepublished authors.

Mark’s writing career to date

The first book, Sleepyhead, published in 2001, was an immediate bestseller.

The second novel, Scaredy Cat was published in July 2002 and was followed by Lazybones, The Burning Girl, Lifeless, Buried and Death Message. The newest novel, a standalone thriller called In The Dark is published in August 2008. Mark is at work on the next Tom Thorne novel called “Blood Line”

Links

Mark Billingham’s website

Wikipedia Mark Billingham

Crime scene on Harrogate Station which I saw on my way to the Old Peculier Crime Writers’s event.

Then it rained and rained and rained. Arghhh

So I had to take a taxi.

Born in Shanghai in 1930 James Graham Ballard lived the life of a rich expat’s son until the Japanese invaded 1941. He lived in an internment camp for three years. He told fellow writer, Ian Sinclair, that he spent the first twenty years trying to forget the experience and the next twenty years trying to remember.

His recollections resulted in the remarkable work, Empire of the Sun, which describes the war from a child’s point of view. This book was highly respected and as a result he was recognised as a leading writer in mainstream fiction. The book was turned into and interesting film by Steven Spielberg.

However, his main work was as a writer of generally disturbing science fiction. His second novel,
The Drowned World about people living in skyscrapers in a flooded world, establishing Ballard as a notable figure in the fledgling New Wave movement.

There followed a number of novels all predicting disaster, including the novel  The Burning World; and a world being destroyed by crystals in The Crystal World.

The death of his wife in 1964 intensified Ballard’s dark writing. His collection of disturbing short stories, with titles such as ‘Plans for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’, ‘Love and Napalm: Export USA’ and ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ meant the book,The Atrocity Exhibition, was very controversial and illustrated Ballard’s growing obsession of the growing fragmented society. The book established him as a literary writer.

The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, about a group of people who get sexual pleasure from car crashes caused quite a media and political storm.

His later work, such as Super-Cannes, about a group of of workers, who have affluent lives go out to fight and kill to alleviate their boredom; High-rise, about the affluent inhabitants of a luxury block of flats gradually descend into groups attacking enemy floors; Concrete Island, about a man crashing on a gigantic motorway exchange and being trapped on a virtual concrete island, unable to cross the motorway traffic.

All in all a great, if pessimistic writer.

He is well respected today with most of his novels high up in the Amazon sales list.

Links
Daily Telegraph Obituary
Wikipedia
BBC Obituary
Google list of blogs writing an obituary
Amazon: List of J G Ballard Books

You can freely download books from Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Kafka, Tolstoy, Jane Austin, Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo and thousands more from Project Gutenberg. In addition you can also download a wide variety of non-fiction including seminal books on History, Mathematics, Architecture, Sex, Business as well as most of the Greek and Roman classics.

Project Gutenberg is the world’s first and largest single collection of free electronic books.  It was founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, who given a large amount of free computing time, decided to use the computing power to store the text of books that were out of copyright.  Effectively Michael’s Etext is the forerunner of computing ebooks.  It was decided  that the books were to be stored in Plain Vanilla ASCII, (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), a format which meant that the books could be read on virtually any computer in existence.

The project has gone from strength to strength and now stores over 28,000 books itself and over 100,000 free books in related projects.  The philosphy of  Gutenberg is simply:

• should cost so little that no one will really care how much they cost
• should so easily used that no one should ever have to care about how to use, read, quote and search them

The aim is to eventually convert  a high proportion of out of copyright books to be stored for free access.

The front page on all the Gutenberg books states: “This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org.”

Users therefore have the right to read the books, modify the text, to convert the books to other formats and they can also republish and sell the books. In fact many of the publishers selling series of books, both in print and in ebook form, of literature, business and classics originate from Gutenberg. List of available books.

Most of the work in the project is done by volunteers from proof reading, identifying books out of copyright, burning CDs and DVDs and fund raising. Distributed Proof Readers checking one page at a time are particularly useful.

What's my name going to be?

If you want to play around with ideas then site, Seventh Sanctum is for you.  All this site does is generate names, good and evil, locations, technologies, dieties, types of government, magic spells and much, much more.  

On the site there are fifteen different generator categories, with well over fifty different generators. These range from obvious, such as name generators, to the unusual, such as the Science Fiction Government Generator or the Wacky Gadget Generator.

The site has been developed by the very admirable Steven Savage. He is clearly a serious gamer as many of the generators are clearly fantasy orientated. So in his section Darkness and Evil we have a Dark Elf Namer, the Evil Animal Minion Generator, an Evil Deity Generator and a Dark Ritual Generator.

The majority of generators give the option of one answer, five answers, ten answers and more.

All the generators are easy to use. As the Quick Name Generator demonstrates.

Results from the Science Fiction Government Generator

Confederacy of Constellations
Economic Brotherhood of Worlds
Government of Territories
Royal Monarchy of Stars
State of Planets

Results from Wacky Gadget Generator
Electromagnetic Joker-o-meter
Gyroscopic Knitting Electrochip
Iso 900-compliant Bullet Expresso
Irritant Internet-enabled Rhymer
Modified Computop-hat

Word of Warning

This site is highly addictive. Only use  it as a reward.

Develop your own generator

In the library Steven has very generously left the framework for writing your own generator. His most recent work is in php and someone with a little programming skill should be able to develop their own generating engine.

‘###articles###’

In Before The Knife Carolyn Slaughter describes her childhood, a fraught, anxious prelude to an adulthood that continued to suffer from its heritage. She tells us early on in the book what caused this anguish, and what gave rise to its associated self-pity, self-abuse and anger. She was raped by her father at the age of six. But then the book unfolds almost without another mention of the trauma until its reality is finally recognized, long after the father, the self-tortured mother, and even the younger sister have gone to their graves.

Carolyn Slaughter’s life, though not fully acknowledged in the book, could only have been lived in a narrow window of history. The British Empire, always eager to install a white face in a position of colonial authority where people of race might not be trusted, elevated many lower middle class émigrés to effective aristocracy. It meant that they could only feel at home, that is, only attain the status they assumed, if they lived outside of the Sceptred Isle. Carolyn’s mother had been born and brought up in India. She had grown used to a life with servants, where sewing, cooking and cleaning could be delegated to the competent. This created time for the important things in life, like deciding what to wear for dinner, what would go with what, and whether the lunch invitees would gel. Not that there were many expatriates to invite in the Kalahari Desert.

Carolyn Slaughter seems to have lived an itinerant’s life. More significantly she seems to have adopted an itinerant relationship with life. It happened as a result of denial, as a result of not accepting or acknowledging what happened to her. The father, a shop worker back home, was a District Commissioner in the Empire when his white face provided his main qualification. His wife, Carolyn’s mother, unable to accept what the daughter had told her or, indeed what evidence proved, slumped into a private depression that never left her.

The author’s African childhood was almost wholly unhappy, even depressing. Her tantrums angered others, her self-abuse threatened her own life, and yet the father who was the source of the tragedy soldiered on, apparently stoically, delivering whatever duty the assumptions of Empire might demand.

There were times when I lost touch with the sense of depression and foreboding, periods in the book when I knew things were lighter and brighter than the reminiscences suggested. Occasionally, the weight being borne got too much. But then I had a happy childhood, without abuse, indeed with love, affection, and support throughout, so who am I to criticize this insight into a world I never knew?

So, towards the end of the account, when the horror of the abuse can be re-lived in later life and thus partially expunged, we can sense the destructive havoc it has wreaked through the family’s life. It’s a rather one-paced account, but the seriousness of its focus justifies its form.

About the Author:

Philip Spires
Author of Mission, an African novel set in Kenya
http://www.philipspires.co.uk
Michael, a missionary priest, has just killed Munyasya. It was an accident, but Mulonzya, a politician, exploits the tragedy for his own ends. Boniface, a church worker, has just lost his child. He did not make it to the hospital in time, possibly because Michael went to the Mission to retrieve a letter from Janet, a teacher, and the priest’s neighbour. It is Munyasya who has the last laugh, however.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/non-fiction-articles/before-the-knife-by-carolyn-slaughter-551450.html

This is not a review of Losing Nelson or England, England, or a record of visits to Chester. As the title claims, it’s a reflection, a few observations on culture and identity seen through Englishness. The trips to Chester are offered by the way, as a start and a finish.

I don’t recall the year when my dad’s Electricity Board Sports Club decided on Chester as its destination for the kids’ outing. I do remember many of those annual events vividly, however, perhaps because of the unearthly hour at which we had to set off. Britain had no motorways then and dual carriageways were rare. Roads went through town centres, the concept of the by-pass having just reached the drawing board – at least in the north – and adults could still smoke on the bus, despite the fact that potted meat sandwiches were probably being consumed in the next seat. The sandwich filling has a bearing on the tale, since the price of the trip included a packed lunch, usually passed around in bulk, the sandwiches cut in triangles, not the rectangles of home, and set in Toblerone ranges on a teacloth-draped tray. There was an apple or an orange, perhaps, to finish. I don’t know why I didn’t like potted meat, but I can remember persuading my mother to do me a round of bacon sandwiches as an adjunct to the standard fare. Perhaps I was just being greedy, but they did come in handy, if in a rather unexpected way.

I can remember visiting Chester’s historic town centre, all those half-timbered buildings provoking discussions about the Tudors, who they were, how they fit into history, who came before and who followed. The predecessors interested all of us on the trip, because we were from Yorkshire and we could never accept that the Lancastrians had won the war. At least we were in Cheshire! And then there were the city’s Roman origins to consider, leading to my learning my first Latin word when we were told that Chester was but a corruption of “castra”, Latin for camp (the military variety).

And so to the zoo. Yes, there were real zoos in those days. I was a fan of Zoo Time on TV, where Dr Desmond Morris, before his higher primate fame, did live experiments with chimpanzees and rewards, all encased in a Prokofiev theme tune. At Chester I remember I liked the sea lions, found the camels oppressively smelly and learnt that elephants really like cold bacon sandwiches.

When an infant, I used to wiggle the ridges off my candlewick bedspread. I don’t know whether it was a search for solace in the tactile, but it used to exasperate my mother, because I used to pick things into holes. Charles Cleasby, the Horatio Nelson worshipping main character of Barry Unsworth’s Losing Nelson, often sleeps under a holed and worn blanket of his mother’s whenever he needs reassurance. It’s a covering of peace for him, a way of shutting out the complications of the world and operates physically in the same way that his need to wrap himself in the myth of Nelson protects him mentally. Thus he is perhaps more a worshipper than a scholar. But the myth has become part of his psyche, part of his identity. Nelson’s greatness, Nelson’s genius, are parts of the nation’s greatness and genius and thus, by association, part of Cleasby’s own moral and personal identity. But, wanting to find out more, Cleasby researches Nelson’s history, expecting to confirm greatness and therefore bolster myth. To his increasing dismay and reluctantly admitted disbelief, what he uncovers are the complications of history, the messy realities of war and the personal limitations of the historical figure, who is often revealed as less than competent, certainly less than diplomatic, but also, and more importantly, as a self-seeking, ruthless individual, certainly not a team player. The myth dissolves little by little and so does Charles Cleasby’s hold on reality. As Nelson loses his mythical status, Cleasby’s world simply falls apart. He is no longer able to interpret experience nor relate to his surroundings. The blanket cocoon offered by myth generates an intellectual and mental solace that can both justify and reinforce identity and, once the protecting wrap has been holed for Charles, at least and perhaps for a nation, it is identity itself that is challenged. Losing Nelson is a serious and moving study of the essential role of myth in defining identity and creating psyche, citing its power and its limitations, these derived from its essence of simply being myth.

In England, England, Julian Barnes inhabits similar territory, but humorously. One character lists quintessences (there are more than five) of Englishness and many, perhaps most, are myth, by nature or association. And the purpose of identifying these icons of Englishness is to facilitate the construction, by Sir Jack Pitman on an eventually independent Isle of Wight, of an England Theme Park, packed with imitation and reproduction experience, collected together to take the strain out of tourism. Theme Park England becomes, itself, the quintessence (just one) of corporate identity and presence, with the products on offer being seen and marketed as “better” than the originals. It’s all a great success until, that is, the imitations begin to adopt their assigned identities. Smugglers become a problem when they start smuggling. Dr. Samuel Johnson changes his name to – guess what? – Dr. Samuel Johnson and begins emulating the behaviour of the historical figure, along with a few of his own improvisations for added effect. The King thinks he’s a king and Robin Hood and his Merrie Men yearn to be real outlaws. They are all in breach of contract. Through humour, the book asks questions about what is essential in national personal identity. The project identifies myths and reproduces them as second order experience which themselves become as capable of fulfilling the role of identity creation, definition and perpetuation as the real thing. So, by extension, the book questions how we create, assume and sustain cultures and their associated values.

The existence of myth and its potential to influence identity and culture are highly relevant to my second day out in Chester. This time as an adult I revisited the half timbering and Roman roots, the zoo having been transformed by changed notions of the animal. And a new reality asserted itself, redrafting the assumed permanence of my childhood memories. Unbeknown to the child, the half-timbering is largely nineteenth century reproduction and imitation. If it prompts discussion on Tudor England, it does so only by assumed association learned elsewhere. And the extant Roman elements of Chester are miniscule, reduced to a few piles of stone. The town’s official guide book, which I bought to help interpret the visit, pictured a Roman Centurion on its cover. He carried a shield with the words “Tetley Bitterman” emblazoned where one might have expected “SPQR”. At the end of the visit a myth I hade grown up with had been largely exploded. The history, itself, is not the myth. It’s the evidence that’s claimed on its behalf that is the problem. No wonder Sir Jack’s Theme Park attractions were as good as the real thing when the original was originally a theme park. The myth may survive the reality, I suppose, if the individual still wants to believe it. And, by the way, I have never managed to ask elephants if they really do like cold bacon sandwiches.

Author: Philip Spires
About the Author:

Philip Spires
Author of Mission, a novel set in Kenya
http://www.philipspires.co.uk

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/fiction-articles/reflections-on-a-pair-of-novels-losing-nelson-and-england-england-and-a-couple-of-trips-to-chester-205569.html

It is not often that a novel comes to hand that has been prized, praised and pre-inflated. Half of a Yellow Sun was in that category when I opened it and began to read. And I was captivated immediately. I read the first hundred pages at a pace, delighting in the ease with which the Chimanada Ngozi Adichie used language to draw me into the middle-class clique centred on the University of Nsukka which provides the core characters of her book. Their infidelities, their inconsistencies, their desire, despite the servants, for equality and freedom are symptomatic of their time. The dissimilar twin sisters, Olanna and Kainene, one imagines will provide a vehicle for parallel and different lives, providing contrast and metaphor, and I eagerly awaited their stories to unfold.

The book’s sections alternate between the early and late 1960s, the latter period in Nigeria, of course, being the Biafran War. And, yes, the characters live through the war, and their lives and their natures, and along with them their country, are transformed by it. Perhaps even their own identity is redrawn, especially once the promise of a recognised nationality is promised and then denied. Eventually there are vivid scenes of the war’s brutality, its double standards, its compromises, its cynicism, its racism and its starvation. The images are graphic and vivid, unforgettable even, and the ability of war to undermine utterly and profoundly any assumption that an individual might harbour about an imagined future is movingly portrayed.

So why then was I so disappointed with the book? All I can offer, I’m afraid, is that eventually I found it shallow. Its apparent concentration on the domestic lives of the characters undermined their credibility as members of an intellectual elite and rendered them two (or perhaps even one) dimensional. Chimanada Ngozi Adichie carefully tells us that Odenigbo is a mathematician and in love with his subject. He covets his personal library, which he loses in the war and then has replaced by a benefactor. But in my experience, mathematicians are passionate people – and are usually passionate about mathematics. No mathematician I have ever met avoids all mention of personal academic interests in social settings as scrupulously as Odenigbo. I didn’t want the novel to become a textbook, but if characters were ballet dancers, surely we would expect to hear of the roles they had danced and the music that had moved them. Of Odenigbo’s academic character we hear nothing. Why is he therefore endowed with knowledge and interest that is never explored? Perhaps he only exists as a character to interact with the twin sisters.

And the problem is repeated with Richard Churchill who, we are told is an Igbo-speaking English radical. I knew a lot of sixties radicals and they were never slow to offer an opinion or, indeed, place themselves squarely in a space on the ideological chessboard. In Half of a Yellow Sun, we never learn if Richard is a Marxist, Maoist, Leninist or Trot. He never mentions Castro or Ho Chi Minh. He doesn’t appear to have any position on capitalism, society, business, the Third World, South Africa, Central America or even Viet Nam. I found myself wondering which sixties decade saw his radicalisation. When Chimanada Ngozi Adichie tells us that he travels to Lagos to attend a function in honour of the state funeral of Winston Churchill (perhaps no relation), I began to wonder if he was an early- (or indeed late) born radical Tory. I have been an expatriate myself, so I can forgive him his attendance of the function, but not his total silence on the issues of the day.

This becomes especially problematic when both Britain and the Soviet Union are mentioned as assisting the Federal Forces in the destruction of secessionist Biafra. What sixties radical, given the inevitability of his assumption of a Cold War bifurcated paradigm to underpin his ideological position, would not have pondered and discussed this at length, even in bed?

Eventually we also have to read along with continued adulation of Ojukwu. His Excellency might even be the Great Helmsman, himself, given that his free-thinking minions seem unable to mention a criticism of an historical character who eventually fled to Ivory Coast to save his skin and live his life in relative comfort after leaving millions of his own people dead. Perhaps he had to be preserved to fight another day, as he eventually did, if in a different way, but surely no sixties radical would have left his role unquestioned. It doesn’t ring true, and an opportunity to develop a character like Richard through his own and inevitable disillusion was ignored.

And then we are presented with a pair of American journalists that the radical Richard has to greet and service in his role as a promoter of the Biafran cause. They are both called Charles and apparently have the same nickname, Chuck – which surely should have been Charlie of the “right” variety to enhance the farce. They are simply not credible. We can probably accept as deadly accurate that the majority of Americans neither knew where Biafra was nor cared a jot about its plight, since the attentions of the politicised were focused elsewhere at the time. But the presentation of a pair of foreign correspondents as crass as these is surely incredible, as is, equally, Richard’s apparent patience in dealing with them.

I did also become mildly annoyed at what became quite extensive use of Igbo words when they seemed to offer no extra flavour, meaning or understanding. I have no problem with the use of local terms to enhance a feeling of place and sound, but their over use tends to obfuscate. We really wanted to know what these people thought, but we were never told.

So what are we left with? Half of a Yellow Sun is a beautifully written, beautifully composed domestic tale of fidelity, infidelity, loyalty and opportunism. The contrast between the characters’ and therefore the nation’s lives at the start and the end of the decade is engaging. But because their psyches are never really explored, we never understand any motives or, therefore, any consequences. Reading Half of a Yellow Sun was a thoroughly enjoyable experience which, with hindsight, I would have foregone.

Author: Philip Spires
<About the Author:

Philip Spires

Author of Mission

http://www.philipspires.co.uk

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/fiction-articles/something-of-a-disappointment-half-of-a-yellow-sun-by-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-205580.html

In offering a review of a novel by William Boyd I could certainly be accused of bias. I would proudly plead guilty, since I regard him as one of just four or five British writers who are capable of constructing supreme works of fiction, written in a framework that is both informative and thought-provoking and all this set within a continuum of contemporary or historical events which themselves become re-interpreted by the fiction. In Restless, Boyd’s latest novel, he has re-stated this ability and, if anything, written it larger via a smaller form.

The historical element in Restless is supplied by the activities of an offshoot of World War Two intelligence. Ostensibly a private, dis-ownable initiative of a particular group, Boyd suggests that it formed an integral part of the British strategy, during the early part of the war, to force the United States to join the Allied effort. The fact, therefore, that it was undermined and subverted so that it perhaps aimed to achieve the opposite of its brief was probably par for the course when espionage meets its freelance counter, but the denouement is surprising and wholly credible.

In front of this backdrop of fact meeting fiction, we have a landscape of human relationships. Ruth is a single mother in Oxford. She, herself, has had certain German connections, nay relations, hence the motherhood. She makes a living teaching English to foreign tutees, has several dubious visitors, dreams about completing an aging PhD and generally spends much of her time looking after a precocious five-year-old. And then her mother becomes someone quite unknown to her. The widow in the Oxfordshire retreat suddenly becomes part Russian, part English, with a French step-mother. She possessed several different identities before she became Mrs Gilmartin and most of these were fiction to provide cover for the others. How many of us, after all, can claim to have known our parents before they were parents?

So, as Mrs Gilmartin the mother reveals to her daughter via instalments of an autobiography that she is really Eva Delectorskaya, recruited in Paris to conduct a campaign of wartime disinformation in the United States, the complications of life gradually attain the status of the mundane. Recruited, perhaps, because she was rootless and thus expendable, Eva proved herself intellectually and operationally superior to her manipulative managers and survived the posting that was supposed to achieve their subverted ends and, at the same time, erase her potential to supply evidence. Many years later, Eva, now Mrs Gilmartin, feels the need to get even, to expose the double or triple-cross for what it was and deliver at least a prod to the comfortable, self-congratulatory but traitorous British establishment that ran her. Daughter Ruth becomes the means.

So one messy life tries to tie up its soggy ends via the actions of another who is apparently yet to attain the same depths of complication. And she succeeds. The fright is delivered. The memory that Eva, the mother, was fundamentally brighter than the upper class Brits who were trying to manipulate her is rekindled. Her training was perfect, but she went beyond it and the plan backfired, irrelevantly as it turned out because greater events intervened. But years later, Eva, Mrs Gilmartin, is still brighter than her boss and, through her daughter’s efforts, she brings a special kind of justice to bear on the double-dealer who ruined, but also perhaps made her life.

In characteristically humble terms, William Boyd reminds us at the end that we are all watched, all awaiting the cupboard to reveal its skeleton, but in our more mundane lives, it is unlikely to be as colourful an event as that which Eva Delectorskaya, Mrs Gilmartin, and her daughter Ruth uncover.

Author: Philip Spires
About the Author:

Philip Spires
Author of Mission, an African novel set in Kenya
http://www.philipspires.co.uk

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/fiction-articles/restless-by-william-boyd-209607.html