The novel is divided into two sections.  In the first, Daisy Fay lives with her Momma and Daddy in the largely deserted coastal town of Shell Beach, running a failing malt shop with with mysterious contents hidden in the freezer.   In the second, seven years after the book begins, Daisy leaves Shell Beach to compete in the Miss America Pageant.

The book is written in diary form and the distinctive and engaging voice of the narrator is apparent from the very first words of Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man:

Hello there…my name is Daisy Fay Harper and I was eleven years old yesterday.  My Grandmother Pettibone won the jackpot at the VFW bingo game and bought me a typewriter for my birthday.  She wants me to practise typing so when I grow up, I can be a secretary, but my cat, Felix, who is pregnant, threw up on it and ruined it, which is ok with me.  I don’t know what is the matter with Grandma.  I have told her a hundred times I want to be a tree surgeon or a blacksmith.

The most wonderful thing about this book is undoubtedly Daisy Fay herself.  Unlike a lot of young characters in literature I read, she is neither wise beyond her years nor imbued with an idealised amount of childlike innocence: Daisy is a perfectly believeable eleven year old.  She is bright and knows her own mind (although her opinions are sometimes rather impractical, as with her choice of career), but she is also quick to be swayed by others and is anxious to please.  She is independent, adventurous and optimistic; she’s the type of character who epitomises the word ‘spunky’.  The big gap between her warm, funny narration and her frequent lack of understanding of the things she describes, obvious to the adult reader, means that Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man is at once one of the most humorous and one of the most heart-wrenching books that I’ve read this year.

Her character shines through when she writes her own will, believing that she is likely to be killed:

This is my last will and testament and I am sorry it is so small, but as you know, most of my stuff burned up.  I leave my sweetheart pillow to my mother.  I leave my clothes to Michael, even though he will probably not want to wear that one pair of girls’ blue jeans.  If not, give them to Patsy Ruth Coggins.

I leave my cat, Felix, to my daddy.

And the last thing I have to say is that I am responsible for burning down the malt shop.  I did it by mistake, so don’t try and take the insurance money away from Daddy.

It wasn’t enough anyway.

It is not just Daisy Fay who leaps off the page; there is a whole host of characters who are bold, brash and entertaining but which manage to stay just the right side of believeable.  My favourite was Mrs Dot, self styled society lady who runs the debutante society in Shell Beach and is always dispensing little pearls of nonsensical wisdom.  Thanks to her I now know that:

Sincerity is as valuable as radium.

A lot of the events that take place are slightly ridiculous, such as Daisy’s daddy making her use an inexpertly stuffed fish to win a fishing competition or pretend that she has come back from the dead so that she can make money by preaching, but the story and the situation still feels remarkably real.  I think it’s because the novel is less about what happens and more about who it happens to; it is the characters who are most important and they are excellent.

The way in which Fannie Flagg opens the second section of the novel had my heart breaking for Daisy. When Daisy’s story picks up again she has aged convincingly although in a way that made me ache for her.  Still ultimately vulnerable and still desperate to please, she is less open than when the reader met her before.  Almost inevitably, she has grown a brittle shell around her and though she remains as bright and funny as before she has lost her innocence.

Skimming back through this book to review it, I was reminded of how much I loved it at the time.  Part of me wants to sit here and reread it right away, it’s just that good, but I think I’ll wait and instead not leave it too long before reading one of her other books.  Thankfully there are a few of them.

Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man by Fannie Flagg.  Published by Vintage, 1993, pp. 320.  Originally published as Coming Attractions in 1981.

The Pigeon tells the story of one day in the life of Jonathan Noel, a man whose existence is ordered to a fault.  He lost his parents when he was much younger during the war when he and his sister went into hiding, later went into the army and then moved to Paris where he took a small room and a job as a bank security guard, both of which he has held for twenty years at the beginning of the story.  He is content because of rather than in spite of his solitary, regimented existence, until the day when he opens his door in the morning to find a pigeon sitting outside.  Unable to follow his routine, Jonathan finds himself thrown into chaos as he is forced to leave his sanctuary of order and face the outside world.

The story begins in a way that instantly establishes Jonathan’s character:

At the time the pigeon affair overtook him, unhinging his life from one day to the next, Jonathan Noel, already past fifty, could look back over a good twenty-year period of total uneventfulness and would never have expected anything of importance could ever overtake him again — other than death some day.  And that was perfectly alright with him.  For he was not fond of events, and hated outright those that rattled his inner equilibrium and made a muddle of the external arrangements of life.

This may seem hyperbolic, but is in fact perfectly in keeping with his reaction to the ominously named ‘pigeon affair’.  The seemingly harmless occurrence jolts him out of his secure and ordered regime, and Suskind does an excellent job of showing Johnathan’s deteriorating mental state as his thoughts and actions become increasingly frantic, and fairly mundane occurrences assume augmented significance in his mind.

I don’t want to say any more, as I think this is a book best discovered for oneself, but I definitely recommend it as an effective short story.  Lots of reviews compare it to Kafka and Poe, but as I’m not really familiar with either of these writers I can’t agree or disagree.  Perhaps I should become familiar with them if this story is anything to go by.

The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind, translated from the German by Alfred A. Knopf.  Published by Bloomsbury, 1995, pp. 124.  Originally published in 1987.

Author: Ken Follett

Published: Pan, 1999, pp. 1076.  Originally published 1989

Genre: Historical fiction

Blurb: 1123.  A time of violent civil war, famine, religious strife and battles for royal succession  And a time when man’s greatest skills and aspirations gave birth to a daring and impossible dream — the building of the magnificent cathedral of Kingsbridge.

For the next tow generations men and women will struggle against their primitive surroundings to create something eternally beautiful.  Men like Father Philip, who has dedicated his life to immortality in stone.  Or Tom Builder, the architect of his awesome vision.  Women like Aliena, the Earl’s beautiful daughter, with the indomitable spirit to overcome a multitude of evils.  And Ellen woman of the forest who casts a terrifying curse…

When, where and why: In my final year of university I lived with a girl whose favourite book this was, so naturally I picked it up when I saw a copy in Oxfam.  I started reading it because I wanted to keep ahead of the television series, which I’ve actually ended up not watching, oddly enough.  It’s definitely old enough to qualify as book 25/50 for my Books Off the Shelf Challenge.

What I thought: I started The Pillars of the Earth full of expectations that I would love it: on the surface this epic of medieval life and cathedrals should have been the perfect book for me.  The middle ages is an era that has been very close to my heart ever since I was taken on trips to visit castles and cathedrals by my parents when I was tiny.  I went on to take a degree and masters focusing on medieval literature, so I flatter myself that I know a little bit about the period in which this novel is set.  Admittedly, my expectations of this book were perhaps a little high (although understandable given the near universally glowing reviews it seems to have garnered) but nonetheless, I wasn’t prepared for the enormous disappointment that this book turned out to be.

I’m not a huge stickler for accuracy in historical fiction as long as the book feels right and for me, this means getting the little details about everyday life correct.  It’s easy to get the date of a battle or a coronation correct, but knowing about how ordinary people went about their daily business is more difficult and is part of what I expect from a well-written historical novel.  Getting these things wrong sets my teeth on edge normally, but getting them wrong when you spent ten years researching and writing a book (not to mention having a paid research assistant) just looks like laziness and sloppy work.  When you have the time, money and resources to get things right there’s just no excuse, as far as I’m concerned.  This probably wouldn’t irritate me nearly as much as it does if it weren’t for the numerous reviews that suggest that people could read this book to find out about twelfth century history when all they would learn about is Ken Follett’s twelfth century history, where women are ‘hot’ and ‘sexy’, people have scullery maids and labourers have clothes which do up with multiple buttons, which is about as accurate as Hollywood twelfth century history.

Follett obviously has very fixed notions about the middle ages, which he presents as a lawless, ignorant and violent time with only a few good, educated, enlightened people (strangely enough, the ones that we’re supposed to like) among all the bad.  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle observes that King Stephen’s reign ‘when Christ and his saints slept’ was definitely a lawless and troubled one, so William Hamleigh’s actions are not unlikely, but the divide between good characters who posess modern virtues and bad characters who conform in every way to the medieval stereotype is very heavy-handed and does not make for balanced, believable characters.  I half expected the bad characters to cackle while rubbing their hands with glee, they were so one dimensional.

One particular way in which Follett distinguishes his good characters from bad through giving them contrasting ‘modern’ and ‘medieval’ values is sex.  The good characters know about things like love, mutual pleasure and orgasms, while the bad characters are either impotent or violent and prefer prostitutes and rape to loving partners.  Even if the sex scenes (of which there are many) had been well done, this would have been a crass and obvious way to show characterisation, but they are either repellent or amusingly Harlequin-esque, both of which seem totally out of place in a book ostensibly about building a cathedral.  I’m no prude, and I have no objections to the odd well-placed steamy scene in a book, but these seem totally out of context and make me cringe and wish that Follett had learned the technique of tastefully drawing a veil on proceedings.  Also, how many times do we need to read a graphic description of William Hamleigh raping a woman to establish that he is A Bad Man?  Apparently the answer is many.

The plot is quite repetitive.  That might sound reasonable for a novel surrounding something like the construction of a cathedral which necessarily takes place over many decades, but there was never any sense of progression.  Tom/Alfred/Jack builds something, William/Waleran causes problems and halts the building, Philip and co. come up with a solution and building continues.  Over and over again.  If quickly felt as if the book could happily have been much shorter without changing much at all.  I thought the end section concerning the murder of Thomas Beckett was very odd and unnecessary, considering how removed it was from the entirety of the plot so far.  Kingsbridge is supposedly near Winchester, so why Follett contrives to have it’s Prior be in Canterbury on the night its archbishop is killed perplexes me.  All it did was draw the book out even longer, and I was rather losing patience by this point.

When a plot meanders and repeats like this one does it needs strong characters to help drive it along and sadly I found Pillars of the Earth to be lacking in this area too.  I was instantly put off by the fact that they all seem to be modern people (with the exception of the bad guys, of course) speaking in modern terms who just happen to be wandering about in period costume (and inaccurate costume at that).  The two female characters are both beautiful, resourceful and educated and while I can believe that Aliena might be able to read, the likelihood of forest woman Ellen being able to do the same at a time when books were both exclusive and expensive is incredibly remote.  Agnes is probably the most plausible woman in the book, which means naturally that she’s killed off very early on because she’s not terribly interesting.  However, my problem with the female characters pales in comparison to my issue with Prior Philip.  Follett states in his introduction that, though he is fascinated by cathedrals, he is not a religious man and sadly this shines through in the text.  Philip, whom the reader is encouraged to look on as a good man of God in contrast to Waleran, a corrupt one, is undoubtedly the most secular monk I have ever encountered.  He may be good, but very rarely does he seem genuinely holy in any way.  He most frequently mentions God when he is striking a bargain with Him (“if you want me to build this cathedral, give me the money”) and there is very little evidence of prayer and serenity.  I think it says a great deal about the priorities of the author that there is more visible rape in this book than there is visible religion.

You may have noticed by now that I really didn’t like this book at all.  However, I review everything I read and it wouldn’t be fair of me to ignore this book just because I’m in the minority who loathe it.  If I didn’t subscribe to the Mastermind theory of reading as I like to call it (I’ve started so I’ll finish) I would have abandoned this book long before I trudged wearily to the end of its seemingly interminable 1076 pages.  Sometimes this pays off, and I discover a wonderful new book: this time, it didn’t.

Where this book goes: This is off to BookMooch to find a new home.  It’s quite popular at the moment thanks to the television series, so I should imagine it will go quite quickly.

Tea talk: As I can’t drink tea with interesting bits in at the moment I’ve been branching out and experimenting with some different varieties of leaf recently.  While I read The Pillars of the Earth I was trying Char’s Assam Mangalam, which is one of their gold medal winning teas.  I’m not sure who awards medals to tea, but there you go.  It’s a stronger flavour than I usually go for and I have to be careful not to brew it for too long, but it makes a nice change for the winter to drink something with a darker, fuller taste.

I have never before been this disappointed with the final installment in a trilogy. In fact, had it not been the last book of three then I would have given up when it failed to become interesting before page 200, rather than carrying on doggedly until the bitter end out of some bizarre sense of duty as I did. Even after the initial 200 pages of deathly boring sea voyage had been overcome, although the storyline picked up it never became anything particularly different or anything more than a remix of books one and two with a slightly different setting. The ending was perfunctory, out of place and completely unnecessary. It added nothing at all to the narrative and felt like it was tacked on in a vain attempt to make the otherwise pedestrian story seem more spectacular.

This particular edition (the 1988 printing) is riddled with misprints and spelling errors, which made it even more of a chore to read. While I would still reccommend ‘The Anvil of Ice’ and ‘The Forge in the Forest’, I would advise anyone tempted by this trilogy to stop at book two. This book feels like it was simply written to round out the pair of books into a trilogy and adds nothing to a story which is already nicely tied up after the initial two books.

The Hammer of the Sun by Michael Scott Rohan.  Published by Orbit, 1988, pp. 509.  First edition.

N.B. This is an old review written in 2010 and posted on Goodreads and LibraryThing before I started keeping track of all the books I read here at Old English Rose Reads.  I’ve decided to keep copies here so that this remains a complete record of my reading since I started reviewing books for my own pleasure.

This was a wonderful little collection of poems from a delightful poet. I loved the literary parodies and the way she pokes fun at the things people take too seriously. Her use of bathos is just perfect and I often found myself laughing out loud. Although the majority of the poems in this book are humorous they contain kernels of wisdom and grains of truth, and the overall comic tone of the collection makes the few serious poems seem all the more serious by comparison. Definitely not a book to read on the train, although having read Cope’s poem on the subject, I now know that this would be the perfect way to make sure I get a seat.

Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis by Wendy Cope.  Published by Faber and Faber, 1999, pp. 61.  Originally published in 1986.

N.B. This is an old review written in 2010 and posted on Goodreads and LibraryThing before I started keeping track of all the books I read here at Old English Rose Reads.  I’ve decided to keep copies here so that this remains a complete record of my reading since I started reviewing books for my own pleasure.

Reading this book, it’s hard to believe that the events it chronicles happened less than 50 years ago. The story of Malika and her family is shocking, and rightfully so, but is told in a way which is dignified and matter-of-fact rather than the tabloid style, deliberately provocative narrative it could easily have become. I was amazed at how a book which is essentially the account of twenty years of monotony in jail was never tedious or repetitive. The account was a bit slow to get going and the very straightforward writing style which works so well later on seems a bit dull at first when describing family history and Malika’s earlier opulent existence at court. Of course, this could be due to the translator rather than the author, and this section is short enough that it doesn’t detract too much from the rest of the book.

La Prisonniere by Malika Oufkir and Michele Fitoussi.  Published by Corgi, 2001, pp. 397.  Originally published in French in 1980.

N.B. This is an old review written in 2010 and posted on Goodreads and LibraryThing before I started keeping track of all the books I read here at Old English Rose Reads.  I’ve decided to keep copies here so that this remains a complete record of my reading since I started reviewing books for my own pleasure.

This book felt like the best possible combination of an exciting mystery and a really interesting history lesson. Lindsey Davis has obviously spent a great deal of time and effort researching Rome, the empire and everyday life at the time and it shows. The setting of the book is rich, believable and exactly how I imagine ancient Rome would have been. She also has an useful device of making more knowledgeable characters explain things to less knowledgeable ones, so that details which the reader might not know or understand (such as the process of casting silver pigs) are fully explained without it seeming contrived or out of place. The book managed to walk the delicate line of being educational without being didactic.

I also enjoyed how the author turned all the detective stereotypes around and created a really original character in Falco. Detectives usually have no family: Falco is at the centre of a huge Italian family of chattering women, complete with overbearing mother. They usually have troubled pasts: Falco has a slightly embarrassing one that he’d rather no one mentioned. The list of his interesting characteristics goes on, and his wry observations made him a perfect first person narrator. The other characters in the book are equally well thought out: bold, brash and full of life. I look forward to meeting them again in subsequent books, as I’ll definitely be reading more of this series.

The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis.  Published by Arrow, 2000, pp. 318.  Originally published in 1989.

N.B. This is an old review written in 2010 and posted on Goodreads and LibraryThing before I started keeping track of all the books I read here at Old English Rose Reads.  I’ve decided to keep copies here so that this remains a complete record of my reading since I started reviewing books for my own pleasure.

I first read the Deptford Histories Trilogy when I was ten and loved them, so it was a pleasant surprise to discover the first book in the Deptford Mice Trilogy was just as enjoyable now that I’m a bit older. The characters were well created and individual, the story moved along at the perfect pace and it was exciting to read. The pictures from the author really brought the story alive and I found myself looking forward to the next one eagerly.

The thing that I remember most about these books though is being really, really scared by them. I used to have to read them with my back against a wall just so that I could be sure that nothing was coming to get me from behind, and I loved that. Although this book was still darker than a lot of children’s fiction, this element wasn’t as developed as in Jarvis’ other trilogy. Admittedly, the books in the Deptford Histories are much longer and so might be aimed at a slightly older audience, and I am older myself now, but I do still think that this book could have benefited from a little more of the terrifying descriptions that I remember from these books. Although this was still a good book, I felt that the scariness was missing and I hope to find it again in the remaining books of the trilogy.

The Dark Portal by Robin Jarvis.  Published by Macdonald, 1989, pp. 243.  First edition.

N.B. This is an old review written in 2010 and posted on Goodreads and LibraryThing before I started keeping track of all the books I read here at Old English Rose Reads.  I’ve decided to keep copies here so that this remains a complete record of my reading since I started reviewing books for my own pleasure.

So from divided Kerbryhaine Elof, Kermorvan and his companions mounted an expedition to the legendary lost cities of the East; if they managed to reunite the war-torn tribes, perhaps they could stand together against the menae of the Ice. But to Elof and Kermorvan the journey would also bring knowledge: of the Powers ranged for and against them; and of the secrets within themselves waiting to be revealed — secrets that would play a part in the war yet to come.  (Goodreads Summary)

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. As the title suggests, smithcraft is central to the book, and Rohan has a knack of taking complicated forging and metalworking processes and describing them in a way which makes them interesting, understandable and easy to visualise. Unfortunately, this is sometimes to the detriment of other areas of plot, which sometimes feel cursory and inexplicable. The gradual removal of the other travelling companions, for example, often came across as rather abrupt and contrived. That said, this was a lovely rambling epic of a book and I look forward to reading the next installment.

The Forge in the Forest: The Winter of the World II by Michael Scott Rohan.  Published by Time Warner, 1990, pp. 406.  Originally published in 1987.

N.B. This is an old review written in 2010 and posted on Goodreads and LibraryThing before I started keeping track of all the books I read here at Old English Rose Reads.  I’ve decided to keep copies here so that this remains a complete record of my reading since I started reviewing books for my own pleasure.

First in a trilogy that blends magic with prehistory, here is a tale of potent magicks, immortal struggles, and human courage in the face of evil forces and awesome odds that follows Elof and his band of adventurers in a battle with the evil Mastersmith Mylio. (Goodreads Summary)

I picked up this trilogy second hand on a whim and I’m very glad I did. The first book has the stately feel of a Germanic epic, but the characters are interesting and well created. It borrows from the tradition without slavishly copying it, which made for a more interesting book in my opinion. I did find the occasional metatextual interjections stating that the story was taken from an ancient text to be slightly irritating as they interrupted the flow of the narrative, but otherwise I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

The Anvil of Ice: The Winter of the World Book I by Michael Scott Rohan.  Published by Time Warner, 1990, pp. 352.  Originally published in 1986.

N.B. This is an old review written in 2010 and posted on Goodreads and LibraryThing before I started keeping track of all the books I read here at Old English Rose Reads.  I’ve decided to keep copies here so that this remains a complete record of my reading since I started reviewing books for my own pleasure.