Peter Robinson, Playing With Fire
Playing With Fire starts with two burnt narrow boats as a scene of crime. Two of three squatters living on board are found dead. An unknown artist lived in one of them, and in the other one, a young couple. The young woman, a drug addict, died in the fire but her boyfriend was away for the night and logically becomes the first suspect…
This case will prove a difficult one for Alan Banks and Annie Cabbot, whose professional relationship is strained, since Annie has a new boyfriend, an art expert, whom Banks cannot help but dislike. As for the investigation itself, they have to determine who, of the artist or the junkie, was the intended victim, the other in all likelihood a collateral damage. In both cases, the suspects are numerous: the man who lived near the barges and whose behavior is suspicious, the girl’s father in law, a book seller, etc.
For Banks himself, it is a time of loneliness, as the trouble of juggling a relationship (Banks is dating Michelle Hart, a DI he met in his latest case) becomes more and more apparent, and as he tries to come to term with the fact that his kids are grown up and living their own lives, and also with his ex-wife Sandra having a baby with her new husband Sean.
As I have probably mentioned in earlier reviews, the inspector Banks series is one that evolved from a pleasing procedural to an exceptional and ambitious series rivaling with the greatest. The turning point for me was really Aftermath, an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Playing With Fire does not reach the excellency of Aftermath, nor of the novel after that, The Summer That Never Was, but it has come a long way since Gallows View, the first inspector Banks mystery. If the identity of the culprit does not come as such a surprise (we are led to guess it well ahead of Banks), the characters are interesting and deep, and the shifting of points of view between both lead characters and suspects, that Robinson introduced somewhere in the series and kept, guaranties a dynamic and suspenseful narration. A very good Peter Robinson with a shocking finale!
Rating: 4/5
Haruki Murakami, After Dark
After enjoying The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and the excellent Kafka on the Shore even more, I decided to read Murakami’s After Dark. Alas, I was hugely disappointed… Once again, Murakami has written a novel of magic realism, but this one felt contrived, more the work of a first-time writer than of a writer having achieved literary maturity.
In After Dark, the narrator is an omniscient “we”, that compares itself to a camera, and flies above the city (Tokyo?), or focuses on different characters, at different times on the same night. The effect is not convincing at all, it weighs the narration and doesn’t make much sense. Through this plural “we”, the reader gets acquainted to different characters:
Eri Asai is sleeping, she has been sleeping for a long time even though nothing is physically wrong with her. In her room, the unplugged TV screen flickers. Something strange is about to take place.
Eri’s sister Mari is reading a book in a bar. She doesn’t want to go home, and purposely misses the last train. Takahashi, a young student and trombone player, recognizes her and sits at her table for a while. He is fascinated by her sister Eri and wants to ask questions about her. Later, Kaoru, manager of a love hotel, who got Mari’s number through Takahashi, asks her to help with one of the customer: a young Chinese prostitute who has been beaten up by a client and can’t speak Japanese…
Shirakawa works overnight in a downtown office, his wife complains about never seeing him. He looks serious, well dressed. Nobody, from seeing him, would guess he has just beaten up a prostitute in a love hotel.
These characters seem interesting and one wants to know more about them, but the story just hovers on the surface of things, and is either too long for what it has to offer, or to short to suck the reader into its world. As other Murakami’s novels it is about urban loneliness, people surrounded by other people but lacking human connections, guilty people, people fleeing something, people searching their own identities and meeting their fates. Once again, Murakami is inspired by Paul Auster’s world, but were Auster always manages to triumph, here the novel simply fails to take form, remains inconclusive.
A lazy work by a good writer…
Rating: 2,5/5
Minette Walters, The Sculptress
The Sculptress is Minette Walters’s most famous novel, the story of Olive Martin, an overweight young woman, convicted for killing and dismembering her mother and sister. Roz Leigh, a journalist who fell apart after a personal tragedy, agrees to visit Olive when her editor wants her to write a book about her. But Roz isn’t really interested in writing about a murderess, until she meets Olive, gets to like her and becomes convinced that she is innocent.
In the midst of her journalistic investigation, Roz meets the people who knew OIive, and hopes that after four years, they will finally talk and provide the proof that Olive is innocent. She realizes that there were irregularities in the investigation and that the man who represented her at the trial was biased, he hated her and took her for a monster, like most people did. Roz also meets Hal Hawksey, an ex-cop in charge of the Olive Martin investigation, now owner of a restaurant, a shady but very attractive man, whose mysterious troubles become a parallel storyline…
The Sculptress is interesting, in the sense that it shows that people are multi-layered and that appearances can be deceiving. In the course of the novel, our opinion about the characters change, as new perspectives and new aspects of their personalities are revealed: this goes all characters, from Olive to Roz herself. The truth, in these conditions, is elusive and maybe ultimately unknowable. I have read Minette Walters before, and also I have enjoyed her novels to a certain extent, but she doesn’t have the talent of Ruth Rendell or Elizabeth George. The Sculptress is a good novel, suspenseful and original, but the characters, instead of complex and multifaceted, are sometimes simply unbelievable. I am thinking about Roz, who, from a helpless woman shattered by grief, morphs into a tough fighter, or the character of Edward Clarke, the neighbor, whose predicaments I simply can’t buy…