Tag: 1960s

Nightingale Hall by Rachel Burton

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I loved Rachel Burton’s The Strawberry House, which I read earlier this year, so I was looking forward to reading her new book, Nightingale Hall. Like the previous novel, this one features a house at the heart of the story.

The book begins in 1969 with a party being held at Nightingale Hall, home of the baronet Sir Charles Nightingale, to celebrate the moon landing. During the evening, Sir Charles unveils a special painting, Moonlight on Nightingale, which he had commissioned from the artist Lex Cooper for the occasion.

In 2019, art gallery assistant Rosie Lopez has recently lost her beloved grandmother, Lauren, who had been closer to her than her own mother. Beginning to sort through Lauren’s possessions in her London flat, she finds a postcard tucked inside a book. The postcard depicts a painting of a full moon rising above a large stately home. When Rosie shows it to her mother and to Claire, the manager of the art gallery, they claim never to have seen either the postcard or the painting before, but Rosie is sure they’re lying. Convinced that there must be some connection between the painting and her own family, Rosie decides to find out more.

This is a dual timeline novel, moving between Rosie in the present day and Lauren in the 1960s. Although the more interesting parts of the story happen in the 1960s sections, I found I was more invested in Rosie’s chapters, maybe because she narrates hers in the first person whereas Lauren doesn’t. I also found Rosie a very easy character to like and had a lot of sympathy for her as she tries to deal with the loss of her grandmother despite the lack of support she receives from her mother, something Rosie doesn’t quite understand. Luckily, Rosie has several good friends who help her through her grief and it was nice to see her move forward with her life, gaining the confidence to work on her own art and develop her stationery business.

The two timelines weave together very well and I enjoyed seeing the characters in both periods celebrating the moon landings 50 years apart. However, the mystery element of the book is slightly disappointing and the secrets Rosie uncovers regarding Nightingale Hall, the painting and Lex Cooper are not very shocking or surprising. I also expected the Hall itself to play a bigger part in the story. The focus is much more on relationships, romance and the various ways in which decisions made in the past can affect the future.

Of the two Rachel Burton books I read, I definitely preferred The Strawberry House as I found the plot more interesting and the setting stronger, but this one was enjoyable enough, if not entirely satisfying. I need to find time to try some of her earlier novels, which also sound interesting.

Thanks to Boldwood Books for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Elidor by Alan Garner

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I’ve been meaning to re-read this classic children’s fantasy novel for a long time and was motivated to move it further up the TBR pile after reading a wonderful review by Chris of Calmgrove Books earlier this year. I first read it at the age of about nine or ten – or rather, it was read by a lovely teacher who used to read aloud to us at the end of the day. I enjoyed it so much I got my own copy to read for myself a few years later.

Elidor was published in 1965 and has a strong 1960s feel which contrasts with the eerie, otherworldly nature of the fantasy land of Elidor. It begins with Roland Watson and his older siblings Nicholas, Helen and David wandering the streets of Manchester one cold afternoon, looking for something to do to pass the time. The post-war urban slum clearances are under way and the children stumble upon a church being prepared for demolition. When one of them accidentally kicks a ball through the church window, they go in one by one to look for it and don’t return, until only Roland is left.

Following his brothers and sister into the church, he discovers a portal to another land: Elidor, a world that was once beautiful but is now dying and decaying, under attack from the forces of darkness. Here, Roland meets the mysterious Malebron – a blind fiddle player, or is he a king? – who tells him that three of Elidor’s four golden castles have now become dark, but all hope isn’t yet lost. The Watson siblings must find the four Treasures – a stone, a spear, a cup and a sword – and keep them safe in their own world until light can be restored to Elidor.

For a fantasy novel, we spend a surprisingly small amount of time in Elidor itself. Most of the story takes place in Manchester, once the children have returned with the Treasures (which, away from Elidor, are transformed into everyday objects to make them easier to hide). However, the boundary between the two worlds is thin and the dark forces of Elidor begin to find their way through. There was a scene I found quite terrifying as a child, where the hidden objects begin to create static electricity, causing interference with all the electrical items in the Watson household. I still found it very unsettling as an adult! It’s this encroachment on the characters’ ordinary lives that makes Elidor darker than, say, the Narnia books. It reminded me a lot of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, which also features a battle between light and dark and the intrusion of evil forces on the real world.

Another thing this book and the Susan Cooper series have in common is a strong mythological background, with various allusions to myths and legends woven into the plot. Roland’s name, for example, is significant because the first part of the story has parallels with the folktale Childe Rowland, in which Rowland also has two brothers and a sister, Burd Ellen, who also disappear after kicking a ball over a church. Then there’s the title Elidor, inspired by a medieval Welsh folktale (Elidyr and the Golden Ball); the four castles and four treasures, which correspond to the Irish legends of the Tuatha Dé Danann; and the untamed unicorn, Findhorn, whose song is the key to saving Elidor. Don’t worry, though, if you’re not familiar with any of these myths – they’re not necessary to understanding the story.

Although I enjoyed reading Elidor again after so many years, I didn’t find it an entirely satisfying book. There’s not much worldbuilding regarding Elidor itself; we only get a brief glimpse of it early in the novel and we never really learn exactly why it is being destroyed, who the evil forces are or what their aims are. Everything is kept intentionally vague and although this does add to the general eeriness of the book, I would have liked to have known more. We aren’t told the ages of the children either – we just know that Nicholas is the oldest and Roland the youngest. I found it surprisingly frustrating not knowing how old they were! Of course, none of this bothered me the first time I read it and it is a children’s book, after all.

I’m not sure if I ever read any of Alan Garner’s other books and can’t remember them if I did. Maybe I should try some of them now that I’ve reminded myself of this one.

Cold Sunset by William Boyd

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This is the third of William Boyd’s novels featuring travel writer turned spy Gabriel Dax. If you haven’t read the first two, Gabriel’s Moon and The Predicament, I highly recommend you do so as it will make this book much easier to follow – and they are both excellent books in their own right, so you won’t regret it.

Cold Sunset opens in 1964 with Gabriel in California where he has been instructed by MI6 to make contact with poet Francis Falkner who says he suspects his former Bletchley Park colleague, Angus Fairford, of passing information to the Russians during the war. As always, Gabriel feels uncomfortable with this kind of task and would prefer to spend his time in America researching his new book, but by now he’s so deeply entangled with his double life and the requests of his M16 handler Faith Green that he doesn’t know how to get out of it.

After returning to England (and dealing with the reappearance of a villain from the previous book who comes looking for revenge), Gabriel finds himself sent on yet another mission, this time to Russia to help exfiltrate Kit Caldwell, a triple agent who is trapped in Moscow. Gabriel has successfully managed to convince Russia’s KGB that he himself is a secret agent working for them but how much longer will he be able to keep up this pretence?

Since starting this series I’ve been particularly intrigued by Gabriel’s relationship with Faith Green. Her true motives have never been clear: Gabriel is infatuated with her, but does she really have feelings for him or is she just using him for her own purposes? I’ve never trusted her at all but Gabriel seems to trust her completely, which is quite frustrating! Even when slight doubts creep into his mind, he never acts on them. However, Boyd does a great job of keeping us wondering exactly what she’s up to and whether she’s really the person Gabriel thinks she is. I’d hoped for some answers to my questions in this book, as I believed it would be the last one – although now I’m not so sure.

Another thing I love about these books is the range of interesting locations Gabriel visits. The settings for the previous books included the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guatemala and Berlin; in this one, he finally makes his long-awaited trip to Russia, where the novel’s most dramatic scenes take place, and there’s also a section set on a Greek island. Although Gabriel finds that his travel writing usually has to take second place to his spying, we do still hear a lot about the books he’s working on and they actually sound fascinating – I wish they were real! His current project is On the Beaten Track, which looks at famous tourist attractions from unusual perspectives, and his next book, The Job, will explore people in different countries working in the same three basic jobs.

As for William Boyd’s own next book, who knows? This has been marketed as a trilogy but it ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, with some key plot points still unresolved. Maybe we’re supposed to draw our own conclusions or maybe the door has been left open for more Gabriel Dax novels – if so I will definitely be reading them.

Thanks to Viking for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie

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The August theme for the Read Christie challenge is ‘Beloved Duo’, so one of her Tommy and Tuppence books was the obvious choice for this month! I’ve read the first three in the series, which made this an ideal opportunity to pick up the next one, By the Pricking of My Thumbs.

Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, unlike Christie’s other detectives, age in real time throughout the series. When we first meet them in The Secret Adversary, published in 1922, they are young people in their early twenties; in By the Pricking of My Thumbs, published in 1968, they’re now in their sixties. Christie herself, of course, was also growing older and the topic of ageing forms a prominent part of this novel. It begins with a visit to Tommy’s elderly Aunt Ada at Sunny Ridge Nursing Home, where Tuppence falls into conversation with another resident, a Mrs Lancaster. She’s a sweet, friendly old lady and the two are getting along well – until Mrs Lancaster suddenly refers to something hidden behind the fireplace and asks Tuppence, “Was it your poor child?”

Tuppence is still thinking about those words several weeks later when Aunt Ada dies and she and Tommy return to Sunny Ridge to collect her belongings. Tuppence hopes to speak to Mrs Lancaster again, but is told that she has gone, having been taken away by a relative. Instinctively feeling that something is wrong, Tuppence tries to track down Mrs Lancaster but no one seems to know exactly where she could be. The only clue is a painting Mrs Lancaster gave to Aunt Ada before her death, showing a house by a canal. Tuppence is sure she’s seen that house before, possibly from the window of a train, so while Tommy is away from home attending a conference, Tuppence decides to find the house again in the hope that it will lead her to Mrs Lancaster.

This is a particularly dark Christie novel, which is to be expected considering the title comes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (“by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes”). I found it creepy and unsettling, with all the talk of dead or missing children, Mrs Lancaster’s complete disappearance, and the descriptions of the house, partially abandoned and, as one character says, ‘put to the wrong use’. The scenes at Sunny Ridge also show, quite disturbingly, how the concerns of elderly people can easily be dismissed as confusion or dementia. Tommy and Tuppence themselves, though, are a delight to spend time with, as always, especially Tuppence who has to learn to accept that although she may still be a lively, adventurous young woman at heart, her physical limitations are catching up with her and she can’t do all the things she used to do.

Although this book is maybe not as tightly plotted as some of Christie’s others and not one of her absolute best, it’s still very enjoyable. I found the ending quite chilling – I hadn’t guessed the solution and the culprit was someone I had never suspected. Now I only have one Tommy and Tuppence book left to read: Postern of Fate, which I’m hoping to read for the Read Christie challenge later this year.

Book 17/20 of 20 Books of Summer

The Last Love Song by Lucinda Riley

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This is a reworking of one of Lucinda Riley’s early novels, originally published as Losing You in 1997 under the name Lucinda Edmonds. After Riley’s death in 2021, her son Harry Whittaker completed her unfinished novel, Atlas, then updated another of her early books, Hidden Beauty, as The Hidden Girl. It would be interesting to know exactly how much is Whittaker’s work, but without reading the originals it’s impossible to tell.

The Last Love Song begins in 1964 in the village of Ballymore on the coast of West Cork, Ireland. When sixteen-year-old Sorcha O’Donovan goes to see a local band with her friends from school, she has no idea that her life is about to change forever. Within months she is heading for London with the lead singer, Con Daly, having been disowned by her father, who disapproves of their relationship. After a period of struggling to make ends meet while Con looks for opportunities in London’s vibrant music scene, he finally achieves stardom with his new band, The Fishermen, and he and Sorcha become rich and famous almost overnight. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily bring happiness and when Helen McCarthy, a face from both their pasts, arrives back in their lives, everything starts to go wrong.

Two decades later, preparations are being made for a huge charity concert at Wembley Stadium. The Fishermen have agreed to reform for the event, but one member is missing – Con Daly, who disappeared seventeen years ago after suffering a personal tragedy. There’s only one person who may be able to find out what happened all those years earlier; the problem is, she’s in prison…

I enjoyed this book; it was much more than just the simple romance it seemed to be at first. Although I found Sorcha slightly bland, I thought Helen McCarthy was a great character and I veered between loving and hating her at various times throughout the book. Mostly I admired her for trying to get what she wanted out of life despite things not always going her way. There’s also a crime element to the story, which becomes stronger towards the end – my biggest criticism of the book is that this part of the plot is dropped for a long section in the middle – and although I easily guessed who the culprit was, I was kept in suspense wondering when and how they would finally be caught!

What I really loved about this book, though, is the portrayal of the 60s music scene. The novel takes us step by step through every stage of the Fishermens’ rise to fame, beginning with the formation of the band and choosing of the name, their first meeting with the man who would become their manager, and the difficulties they faced in getting signed to a record label. The complex and often tense relationships between the four band members are explored and it’s difficult not to think of the Beatles, with Con and Todd in the Lennon-McCartney positions as the band’s two main songwriters, Derek as an aspiring songwriter in his own right, struggling to make himself heard, and Ian as the happy-go-lucky drummer. If you enjoyed Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, I think you’ll like the musical aspect of this novel, if nothing else!

I think there are one or two more Edmonds novels that haven’t been published yet, but I haven’t seen any news on whether Harry Whittaker will be reworking them as well. Of the books already available under the Riley name, I haven’t read Hothouse Flower or The Angel Tree yet, so still have those two to look forward to. I’ve also discovered that Harry has written his own book, Orlando, coming later this year.

Thanks to Pan Macmillan for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Final Problem by Arturo Pérez-Reverte – #ReadIndies

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Translated by Frances Riddle

It’s June 1960 and actor Ormond Basil has found himself trapped on the small island of Utakos, near Corfu. He has been invited to join a film director on his yacht to discuss a new project, but stormy weather means they are unable to leave the island until conditions improve. Luckily, there’s a hotel on Utakos where they and a small group of other guests and staff can take shelter until the storm has passed. However, there are no police on the island, so when one of the guests, British tourist Edith Manders, is found dead under suspicious circumstances, it’s up to the others to investigate until help can arrive.

Because Ormond Basil famously played the part of Sherlock Holmes on screen many times, he’s nominated to lead the investigation. No matter how much he explains that he’s only an actor and not really the great detective, everyone else insists that he must know more about solving mysteries than they do. And despite his protests, he does seem to know what he’s doing. With one of the other guests, Spanish crime author Paco Foxá, as his Watson, Basil begins to look for clues and question the suspects – but can he find the killer before another death takes place?

You may have guessed that Ormond Basil is closely based on the real life actor Basil Rathbone, who is for many people the quintessential Sherlock Holmes. I’ve talked before about not liking the current trend for using real people as detectives, but this is slightly different as the character is semi-fictional which gives Pérez-Reverte more scope to have him say and do things that the real Basil may not have done. He’s so obviously supposed to be Basil Rathbone, though, that it seems a bit pointless to pretend that he’s not. Either just calling him Rathbone or creating a completely fictional character would have worked better for me.

The novel is well plotted and the locked room mystery has a solution which is clever without being overly complex. With only a small number of suspects due to the setting, I thought I had guessed who the murderer was, but I was wrong and there was a nice twist towards the end that I hadn’t seen coming. For all Basil’s insistence that he’s not the real Sherlock Holmes, he does turn out to be an excellent detective, with powers of observation and deduction almost as good as the character he played for all those years!

However, I felt that there was far too much name-dropping of other famous actors and directors Basil had worked with, and too many long discussions between Basil and Foxá on the subject of Sherlock Holmes, in which both of them quote constantly from the books and adaptations. This all became a bit tedious and detracted from the mystery. I had a similar problem with the other Pérez-Reverte novel I’ve read, The Dumas Club, in which we’re bombarded with references to Alexandre Dumas’ books, so maybe this is just the way he writes.

I’m not sure if The Final Problem is going to be left as a standalone or if it’s intended as the start of a series; I don’t know if I would want to read any further adventures for Ormond Basil, but I did enjoy this one overall because of the interesting murder mystery. This edition of the novel is available from Atlantic Books, translated into English from the original Spanish by Frances Riddle. As Atlantic Books is an independent publisher, I’m counting this towards Read Indies, hosted this month by Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings.

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

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Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter had a lot of success last year, being shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winning the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It also appeared on a lot of people’s end of year ‘best of’ lists so I had high hopes for it, particularly as I’ve previously enjoyed two of his other books, Pure and Now We Shall Be Entirely Free.

The novel is set in the winter of 1963, one of the coldest winters on record in the UK. Beginning in late December 1962 and lasting until March, temperatures plummeted, blizzards blanketed most of the country in deep snow and rivers and lakes froze over. Against this backdrop, we see the stories of two married couples play out. Dr Eric Parry has recently moved to rural Somerset with his wife, Irene, who is pregnant. Eric is enjoying being a country doctor, but Irene is finding it hard to adapt; it’s so different from her life in London and she misses her sister, who has gone to live in America. Despite her pregnancy, she feels that she and Eric are growing apart – and she’s right to feel that way because, unknown to Irene, Eric is having an affair with one of his patients.

Bill and Rita Simmons, who live at a nearby farm, are also newly arrived in the countryside. To the disappointment of his wealthy father, who wanted him to join the family business, Bill has chosen to follow a very different path and become a dairy farmer. It’s proving to be more difficult than he expected, but he’s sure that with new ideas and investment, he’ll be able to turn things around. He just needs to convince the bank to lend him the money! His wife Rita, like Irene, is pregnant and, also like Irene, she feels lonely and out of place, so it’s probably not surprising that the two women quickly form a bond and a friendship begins to develop.

Apart from a long chapter in the middle of the book in which Irene hosts a Boxing Day party and several other key characters converge on the Parrys’ house, the main focus is on the two couples, their daily lives and the relationships between them. All four characters are believable and strongly drawn, but I think Rita is the one I found most interesting. Before marrying Bill, she had been a dancer in a Bristol nightclub, so the transition to life as a farmer’s wife in a small, quiet community is particularly difficult for her. She has started hearing voices in her head, a sign of her vulnerable, fragile mental state, but Bill isn’t able to give her the support she needs, feeling that he doesn’t truly know who his wife is and preferring to ignore her past.

Although I did enjoy following the stories of Eric and Irene, Rita and Bill, I felt that I was held at a distance for most of the book and never quite connected with the characters on an emotional level as much as I would have liked to. Maybe it was just me, or maybe it was a result of the bleak, frozen setting reflecting their troubled, isolated lives and the coldness of their marriages. Still, this is an impressive novel overall and despite not quite managing to love it I can see why it’s so highly regarded.