Tower and Town, October 2022 (view the full edition)A Good ReadWho am I to say whether a book is good or bad? It's a matter of taste, and if you love something that leaves me cold - well, so what? (Although if you violently dislike a book that's one of my favourites I shall naturally dismiss you as an ignorant dullard!) A recent read was just plain bad though, a historical novel, (no, not the Big Historical Novel of this autumn) with a good if predictable storyline, all fine. But the dialogue was stilted and unconvincing, with paragraphs of overworked exposition, just all very clunky. Bad. How very unlike Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson, with plot, setting, characters and prose harmoniously skipping along, clever and complex, somehow both clear and ambiguous, highly satisfying. Good. Two other good novels, one a mystery-thriller, one very much not. The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly is positively gothic in its convoluted plot, centred around a book which is both an artistic masterpiece and a publishing phenomenon. The closely linked families of the creator and his best friend and collaborators have been both enriched and handicapped by acclaim for the book and the obsessive fandom it engendered. It's twisty, and worryingly convincing in the depiction of delusional mania, exacerbated by social media which feeds into real life and creates genuine threat. Atmospheric, intriguing, a real page-turner. India Knight's Darling is an updated version of Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love. I approached this with slightly sniffy caution, as there are some truly awful, pointless examples of attempts to make classic novels 'modern' and 'relevant'. Just think what various people have done to Jane Austen, and shudder. But it can work, after all, Shakespeare stole or adapted nearly all of his plots, and if it's good enough for him...so I read Darling and was won over. (I'm not comparing India Knight to Shakespeare, you understand.) It's a real homage to the original, and whether you like it or not will depend on your view of Pursuit; some people love the bright, sharp tragi-comedy with the confident, confiding narrative voice, others can't get past a fuming exasperation at the obliviously posh inter-war protagonists. So, it's up to you, if you think you'll hate this, then give it a miss. But if you're a Mitford fan, India Knight has remained faithful to the original, while unjarringly updating the setting and characters. I was looking to find things wrong with it, but I found it sweet, convincing, as funny, and only slightly less moving than Pursuit. Debby Guest |