Books REVIEWS
MYSTERY THRILLER GLEN DUNCAN The Last Werewolf (Canongate) ●●●●● Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf is no ordinary fantasy. The novel is framed as the diary of 200- year-old Jacob Marlowe, the last werewolf on earth, who is pursued by government-sanctioned hunters and is resigned to death until he discovers a secret that makes him yearn for life. As in past offerings such as I, Lucifer and Weathercock, Duncan’s novel deftly eludes categorisation. It’s part thriller, part romance, part existential mystery, and every other page is spattered with either blood or semen. It’s also suffused with cultural allusions
that span the breadth of film and literary history, from Jane Eyre to Se7en. But these achievements are simultaneously the book’s downfall. Duncan’s
prose is often too crowded and sometimes too self-aware to properly digest its apocalyptic tone. It’s only in the middle of the novel, when Marlowe makes his life-changing discovery, that the story starts to fulfil its racy potential and begins the ascent towards its electrifying final pages. (Yasmin Sulaiman)
RURAL DRAMA MIRANDA FRANCE Hill Farm (Chatto & Windus) ●●●●●
‘It was the summer that everything changed’ the dust jacket intones. For trapped and frustrated farmer’s wife Isabel Hayes, something had to give. We are promised ‘a handsome farmhand, a death- watch beetle, a ylang-ylang scented blossom, a lost hedgerow, a disused water tank’; based on this litany, one might be forgiven for expecting little more than a 2D tale of unbridled passion in the hay. There’s no great surprise in the handsome
farmhand’s effect upon Isabel but the reader is simultaneously shocked and thrilled by the underplayed heart-stilling horror. A sometime List writer, France has minutely drawn a farming community, and a broken woman, with excellent skill. She is superb at plucking comedy from tragedy, as well as exhibiting a wry authorial narrative that owes more than a little to Jane Austen. She manages to square this lightness of tone with a subtle tale full of secrecy, betrayal and fear that keeps you clinging on til the end. (Peggy Hughes) 44 THE LIST 31 Mar–28 Apr 2011
CRIME DRAMA HENNING MANKELL The Troubled Man (Harvill Secker) ●●●●● For fans of Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series, news that the first new novel in almost a decade was underway was bittersweet. The Troubled Man is the tenth and final Wallander mystery and, disappointingly, it doesn’t deliver the climax we hoped for.
Mankell has populated all the Wallander novels with three
basic elements: a central crime and its subsequent unravelling; comments on the shifting social and political landscape of modern-day Sweden; and, perhaps most enjoyable of all, the day to day minutiae of Wallander’s life, from lunch to laundry. The Troubled Man is no exception, except now our hero is pushing 60 and the prospect of his own demise is staring him in the face. Wallander’s ability to painstakingly piece together an
investigation remains undiminished, but aside from that, his rarely warm, often volatile relationship with daughter Linda is the only bone Mankell is willing to throw him. You don’t go looking for happiness in a Wallander novel, but even by Mankell’s standards, this is a bleak swansong. If you can forgive the final page, which dismisses the loyal reader like an annoying pupil in detention, then The Troubled Man still ticks a lot of valuable boxes. Caught up in a crime outwith his jurisdiction, Wallander makes endless trips to Stockholm and back, tracking the disappearance of Linda’s new in-laws. Cold War politics, espionage and deceit abound but, as ever, Wallander grabs hold of the case like a Rottweiler and refuses to let go until it’s solved. His discoveries lead to sadness and betrayal, which in a way, is exactly how Henning Mankell leaves us. (Kelly Apter)
SHORT STORIES RODDY DOYLE Bullfighting (Jonathan Cape) ●●●●●
Having shouldered the full weight of 20th-century Irish history, Roddy Doyle is now almost visibly loosening up. His Last Roundup trilogy may largely have been a thing of literary beauty, but there will be readers relieved to see him return to more intimate, homely and personal ground with Bullfighting. This set of 13 stories is told from the point of view of middle-aged Irish fellas, men who are fathers to young or grown-up children, or sons of elderly parents or husbands and partners to women they have slowly lost a connection with. The setting is an Ireland which might be
continually changing, the Celtic Tiger now extinct, yet these men still know all the guys they were at school with while people dream of a land of straight roads so they can bypass the homogenised and soulless towns and cities. Eliciting both tears and laughter while revitalising the mundanity of everyday existence has long been Roddy Doyle’s finest suit. He delivers it here in spades. (Brian Donaldson)
POETRY COLLECTION WENDY COPE Family Values (Faber) ●●●●● For anyone new to Wendy Cope’s work, the opening gambit of ‘A Christmas Song’ may have you reeling. Its verse rattles along merrily with an almost painful naivety, leading you to wonder if this is a chronology featuring everything she’s ever written, including the really bad adolescent stuff. Thankfully, Family Values immediately slows the pace and picks up a more stylish momentum as Cope goes through verses tackling themes of religion, childhood, death and companionship.
Her wit is never laid on too thickly (there are no laugh out loud moments) as she prefers the gently caustic. In ‘My Funeral’, she implores anyone doing a reading to stick to their five minutes, and ‘not to use our relationship/As an excuse for an unsolicited ego-trip’; ‘Another Valentine’ questions the ethos of forcing that romantic day down everyone’s throats. While there are no great challenges in Family Values, Cope’s light trumpeting of universal emotions makes her a perfectly pleasing host. (Brian Donaldson)