Perfect - Rachel Joyce

In 1972, two seconds were added to time. Could this be to blame for what happened next? Eleven-year-old Byron Hemming thinks so. Byron is a bright, imaginative child, and he worries about the effects that could come of humans meddling with something so constant as time. When his mother, running late on the school run, takes them on a detour, something terrible happens, and with his friend's help, Byron hatches Operation Perfect, a plan to put everything right. But can perfection be achieved - and if so, at what cost?

Viewed from the outside, Byron's family life might appear perfect. He lives in a big house, is sent to an exclusive public school, and his father has just bought his mother a swanky new Jaguar. But money cannot buy happiness. Rachel Joyce presents the Hemming family as viewed through the eyes of a child on the edge of adolescence, narrating what he sees and leaving the reader to understand what is shown and not told. Byron's father, Seymour, lives away from home during the week, working hard to earn piles of money, shower his wife Diana with gifts which he then uses as power over her. Diana acts the part of the dutiful wife, but this fancy lifestyle is not suited to her nature. We see Diana only from her son's perspective, but her character is brought to life as much by what is concealed as what is shown: the hints and secrets of the past of which she can never quite let go.

Perfect is a very British novel, examining attitudes towards class and social mobility, and making the reader think very carefully about their own preconceptions. We see this in the aftermath of the accident, when Diana befriends Beverley from the dreaded Digby Road, who seems to be exploiting Diana's feelings of guilt for her own gain. But I didn't feel quite comfortable to accept this interpretation of Beverley's behaviour, expecting the author to throw in a plot twist that declared: "Aha! You're just as prejudiced as Seymour and Diana and the other mothers!" On the other hand, is it completely patronising to refuse to accept that a lower-class person can be a scheming, conniving piece of work just as much as a wealthy person? Either way, the relationship between Beverley and Diana is completely toxic, and as the book progressed, I felt the absolute certainty that the plot was building up to something dreadful. Rachel Joyce teases us with the idea that a conflict was resolved, more or less, before opening up another can of worms.

Between the chapters about Byron's summer of 1972 are those of another story. Set in the present day, this other story follows a man called Jim, who has spent his entire adult life in hospital being treated for obsessive-compulsive disorder and possibly other mental disorders. Jim is now in his fifties, living in a van and working in a supermarket cafe cleaning tables. His days are dictated by rituals, and he still lives in the shadow of a terrible event of his youth, which could be connected to the something dreadful of Byron's summer. It seems clear where Jim's story fits beside Byron's, if not the details of how, but somewhere near the end started to question my assumption. The story as I understood it did not quite gel, and there came a powerful dawning realisation before the big revelation came. The novel is made all the more poignant by the joining of the two halves. I cried.

Deceptively simple in style, Rachel Joyce's prose is powerful and hard-hitting, yet it is not without hope or beauty. Perfect leaves the reader with a lot to think about and to feel, concerning family, class and mental illness, the power of friendship, the nature of time and the struggle for an impossible perfection.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer - Patrick Süskind

Just these last few weeks, it has seemed as though the whole world wanted me to read Patrick Süskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. After joining in with a customer about the merits of real books over e-readers, his parting words to me were to recommend this book. My friend had been talking about the movie adaptation, and then Ellie mentioned it as a really challenging book in reply to my comment on one of her posts. Lastly, it emerged that my latest acting "discovery" Ben Whishaw had starred in the movie adaptation. And I couldn't see the film without having read the book. Only Shakespeare is exempt from that.

Perfume starts slowly. Really slowly. We are treated to pages and pages of descriptions of smells, every scent in Paris that you might be able to think of. Scent is, of course, a hugely evocative sense, and this forms the basis of the novel, however, I'm not quite sold on how convincingly it can be described with pen and ink. But though slow, these descriptive pages are compelling. It is easy to describe the appearance of things, but there are all the other senses, and Süskind has chosen to focus on one not widely used in literature.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, Perfume's protagonist villain, is a very unusual sort of character, even from birth. Those who ought to look after the infant Grenouille are repelled by him in ways they cannot describe, other than that he smells of nothing. Yet his own nose is remarkable, able to identify the subtlest scents, and this one sense occupies his entire mind. He is utterly alien, lacking in human qualities, a psychopathic nose. There is nothing relatable about Grenouille, and yet he is pitiable. Süskind seems to use scent as a metaphor for the soul, and Perfume leads one to ponder on the nature-versus-nurture debate, presenting the uncomfortable idea of a person innately evil. Grenouille moves from place to place, and bad things happen to those he leaves behind. No explicit connection is made, but Grenouille leaves a trail of misfortune behind him, leading back even to his mother, which adds to the sense of menace.

Perfume does not end where you might think it should, and I found the expected denouement to be anticlimactic. When compared with the pages of description earlier in the book, the "finale" is prosaically described, lacking all tension. There is a sense of inevitability of events, with Süskind making no attempts to keep the reader guessing. I came to realise (thanks to my friend's comments) that this is actually incredibly clever, because, after all, this is how Grenouille sees the world. The smells are everything - human actions, life and death, mean nothing to him.

But just when I thought the ending was all wrapped up, the plot takes a horrifying turn by showing not just the evil in Grenouille's character, but the depravity he inspires in his fellow man by the seeming of purity. Perfume is a slow-burning novel, which took its time to grab my attention, but one that lingers, turning out very dark and unsettling indeed.

A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin–part 2 (pages 410-805)

Contains spoilers

Eddard Stark has been trying his hand at a bit of detective work. He suspects that his brother-in-law Jon Arryn was murdered by the evil Queen Cersei – but why. What dangerous knowledge did he discover? One might think that Ned might use a bit of caution when reveals that he too is in possession of the knowledge that got Arryn killed, but no. Honour is what Ned Stark lives by, and to keep the truth concealed would be dishonour. Of course, as soon as he threatens to tell the king his wife’s secret, the King is conveniently killed in a hunting accident. In discussion with sneaky Petyr “Littlefinger” on the subject of the next king, for the first time I sided with Littlefinger’s prudence against Ned’s honour. He lived by his honour, and when it leads to him being accused of treason, he dies by it. This did not surprise me, because, as I’d mentioned before, I’d seen a clip of this scene in a “Life and deaths of Sean Bean” montage on Youtube. The aftermath of Eddard’s execution was painful to read – first, the chapter back at Winterfell, where Bran Stark and his youngest brother Rickon are ignorant of their father’s fate but troubled by the same vivid dreams about him. Meanwhile, eleven-year-old Sansa Stark, who has been besotted with her fiance Prince – now King – Joffrey, has seen too late what he is really like, and now there is no escaping marriage to her father’s killer. And what's worse, she has to like it.

I wrote in my last post that A Game of Thrones was bringing out a rather vicious side to me, when I expressed a wish for Viserys “still not king” Targaryen to come to “an ignominious, snivelling end.” This came a lot sooner than I had expected, before he’d even crossed the seas to the Seven Kingdoms – a really horrible, shocking death. But it was very satisfying. At first we had seen Viserys through his sister’s eyes – a bullying brute with a terrible temper, who ruled her by fear. But Daenerys was a fourteen-year-old girl. When she is wedded to a chieftain of the Dothraki, a culture of horse-lord warriors, while they see Viserys as I did: a bratty, spoilt would-be king of a foreign land. Daenerys, on the other hand, just grows in authority to become a stern queen. A Game of Thrones is rife with sexism, especially in the Dothraki culture, but Daenerys won’t have any of it. I’m not talking about “sexism” as is often an accusation in fantasy: a mostly-male cast with women only as wives and maidens, or a conservative view that men should be men, women should be women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri ought to be small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. This book is full of out-and-out misogyny, women are treated as men’s property to do with what they will. There were several instances of me wanting to lob A Game of Thrones across the room, and I would have done if I owned the copy. So the fact that Dany says NO. This is Not Okay comes as a relief, and perhaps makes me like her more than someone else with similar levels of character development, due to my anger at what had come before.

One of the few things I thought I knew about this book before reading it was that “someone gives birth to dragons,” but I was sure I’d grabbed the wrong end of the stick there and embarrassed myself by announcing it. But I was much closer than I’d realised. It took me longer to really get attached to Daenerys’ story, because she was more or less unconnected with the other stories told in this volume, being the other side of the ocean. But the last couple of chapters were wonderful storytelling: twisty and devastating and brilliant. Martin broke the rules of storytelling by setting up a great prophecy about a future character – and then killing off the character at birth. So what was the point of that whole subplot? Why didn’t the crones predict that? I found that frustrating and amazing at the same time - I love stories that defy conventions of what may or may not happen. With Martin, it seems there is no may not. I was more impressed by the whole subplot about exchanging a death for a life, with its twists and betrayals, than the final image of Daenerys emerging from her husband’s funeral pyre carrying three baby dragons, as a red comet streaked across the sky. Which is a pretty impressive image.

Next up: A Clash of Kings. The Seven Kingdoms are certainly at war now, with about six contenders for the Iron Throne, some of whom are sympathetic, some decidedly not, and the one currently seated upon in it a nasty piece of work indeed. I expect this war will rage on throughout the entire series – the five books so far and however many are still inside George Martin’s head. Battle scenes don’t interest me much, and another six volumes (books 3 and 5 are split in two in their paperback format) of battle scenes fill me with trepidation – but I can tell that there is enough story to fill the pages alongside the “swording and politics.” I’ve reached the end of everything I’d been spoiled about, except for one phrase that makes no sense out of context anyway. I have absolutely no idea what to expect, except that it’s going to be awesome.

Some Girls Are, Courtney Summers

Regina Afton has worked hard to get to the top of the high school hierarchy. She's sacrificed a lot: her friends, her integrity, her conscience. When an incident at a party sparks off vicious and untrue rumours, she finds herself despised and alone, learning first-hand just what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the bullying she used to help deal out.

The mean-girl drama is nothing new in teen literature. I've reviewed similar books here at the blog: Speak, Before I Fall and Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood - and, of course, the name Regina not-so-subtly recalls Mean Girls. Some Girls Are was a pretty dark version of the story, unflinching in dealing with the inventive cruelty of teenage girls. In many such stories the victim wins out with their goodness, or rise above the pettiness of their peers by discovering their inner depths. But in this novel, the bad guys getting their just desserts would not be satisfying: after all, that is what this story's all about.

Regina's been a mean girl too long. She demonstrates feelings of regret and self-loathing for the popular girl she used to be, but she has faked so much in order to fit into the inner circle that she's lost touch with her inner goodness and decency. It's in there, but buried so deep that no one can see it any more. Regina is a complex narrator, and I wasn't quite sure how to view her. I wanted to sympathise with her, but she'd done some terrible things. Did she deserve all the abuse heaped upon her? "Nobody deserves that," said Michael, the closest thing Regina has to an ally all through her ordeal. We're not shown Regina's former cruelty first-hand, and though we see the results, she holds back from telling too much about what she'd done to make two thirds of her school actively hate her. I felt that Regina was an unreliable narrator, toning down the events of the past, censoring herself so as not to utterly alienate her audience. Something didn't quite ring true between how Regina presented herself on the page, and how her classmates saw her - 300 enemies are a lot. I also wanted to shake Regina at times for walking into the mean girls' traps, and giving them power over her.

Regina is not one to take bullying lying down, and it turns into an ugly war of revenge for revenge, spiraling out of control. For me, like for Regina, it was temporarily satisfying to see the bullies getting a taste of their own medicine, but that satisfaction is quickly replaced with unease and anxiety for what would happen next. I felt sure that the situation would escalate into disaster or tragedy, because I could not see either side backing down. Ultimately, I found the conclusion hugely anticlimactic and boggled at the author's decision to end the book the way that she did. Is that it? I wondered.

It's reading books like this that I feel grateful that I was never popular at school, with fewer expectations to live up to or compromises to make. Not that I was entirely guiltless in these matters, still moderating my Katie-ness (in fact in those days I was Kathy, not Katie, a more significant thing that you might think) in an attempt not to give people within and outside my "friendship" group reasons to pick on me. But the cost of fitting into a clique such as the Fearsome Fivesome is too high to ever be worthwhile.

Before I Go To Sleep, S. J. Watson

Memories define us. So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep? Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love - all forgotten overnight. And the one person you trust may be telling you half the story. Welcome to Christine's life.

(Cover blurb for Before I Go To Sleep.)

I'd had my eye on this book since it was published, and when I boxed up nearly all my books in order to decorate my bedroom this week, I borrowed this from the staff library at work. Although I'd read books about characters with amnesia before - and even made a half-decent attempt at writing one - Before I Go to Sleep was something altogether new. Christine Lucas wakes every single morning having to learn everything about her life and the world from the last twenty years - sometimes more. Before reading this I wondered just how Watson was going to manage to tell this story; how the reader would learn with Christine and not have to endure endless repetition as she rediscovered everything anew. Watson manages this with a simple solution: Christine's journal, which she reads before adding to each day, meaning that we are on the same page, as it were.

Before I Go To Sleep is a deep insight into what it must be like to live with amnesia: the fear and horror of not knowing anything, the world being a strange place, and discovering each day that you're twenty-odd years older than you thought. There were almost time-travel elements, as of course the world has changed a lot in the past decades. Where the world has changed gradually, to Christine it happens all at once, and she has to come to terms with the existence of mobile phones, photoshop, the Gherkin and London Eye - and living in a post 9/11 world without any understanding of the significance of that date - or knowledge that it is a significant date at all. "I must have missed so much," Christine writes. "Disasters, tragedies, wars. Whole countries might have fallen to pieces as I wandered, oblivious, from one day to the next."


Being a book all about memory, there are inevitably plenty of flashbacks, which are rather disorientating to read. Christine's mind is a very intense, confusing place to be, and the flashbacks can read like actual, physical shifts in time. Her perception of the world is a mishmash of past and present, real and imagined, and filling in the gaps where memories ought to be - but aren't.

The storytelling is very well-paced, with questions answered at satisfactory intervals - and with every question answered, another two are raised. The most straight-forward resolutions to mysteries add to the suspicion by posing another question: if this is the truth, why lie about it or conceal it up until now? Before I Go To Sleep is an intelligent, well-written thriller and psychological study that keeps you turning the pages wanting to know just what's going on. Although I had guessed at a major twist early on, it was revealed to give me a sense of satisfaction for figuring it out, rather than disappointment with the author for not being cleverer than me - a rare achievement.

Howl's Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones

When Sophie Hatter falls foul of the wicked Witch of the Waste, she heads off to the best place to get help - to the mysterious moving castle inhabited by the mysterious wizard Howl. But Howl, it is said, eats the hearts or souls of every young girl he comes across. Undeterred by the rumours, Sophie establishes herself as cleaner in the Moving Castle, and is whisked away in an adventure of magic spells and curses, fire demons, charmed suits and seven-league boots, and she even gets to peep into a strange land called Wales, before the Witch's spell can be lifted and Sophie can, despite being the ill-fated eldest child, find her happily-ever-after.

Diana Wynne Jones was my best friend's favourite author growing up, yet somehow I managed to reach my twenties without having read any of her work. My friend was determined to rectify this, and so this Christmas, alongside my presents, she handed me a huge bag of all the books I'd lent her over the past year, and a few of her own in return, including Howl's Moving Castle.


Sophie Hatter is a practical, no-nonsense young lady who is well aware of the conventions of the sort of story she lives in. She knows the importance of birth order in stories, that the eldest child is never successful in seeking their fortune, and accepts her lot in life. But when she finds herself transformed into an elderly woman, she decides it is up to her to find her way out of the mess, which she does with a level head and a lot of stubbornness. The Wizard Howl's reputation is greatly exaggerated, as such reputations usually are, but he is still a vain and selfish man who Sophie can't tell if he can be trusted or not. Still, he is an amusing and likeable character, for all his foibles. 


Some fantasy books are fantasy, and others are fairy tale. Wynne Jones establishes from the very beginning that Howl is set in the land of Once Upon A Time. The world of Ingary is a world where there is no such thing as impossible - although, of course, the impossible has its own rules - and Wynne Jones' simple, matter-of-fact narration of weird and wonderful occurrences, gives the book a dreamlike quality reminiscent of such classics as Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz. But this is a wonderland with a twist. About halfway through the novel, Howl takes Sophie to see his strange, far-away homeland - which is revealed to be 20th Century Wales, and his strange name a corruption of Howell. Howell Jenkins. We get to see our world as if it were the fairyland.




Howl's Moving Castle is a charming and cheeky fairy tale that turns a lot of the traditional fantasy conventions on their heads. I'm off to see a stage play of the story in London at the weekend, and it has also been adapted by Studio Ghibli into an anime film.

Paranormalcy, Kiersten White

I'd been vaguely aware of Paranormalcy for a while, from other people's "mailbox" and review posts, but I'll be honest, it really didn't jump out and grab me, probably because of the title. I'd been coming to think the word "paranormal" to be a bit overused, an easy categorisation of an entire genre of books, without anything to say what makes this one different. Also, as a Brit, the word "normalcy" just doesn't sound right, and that, too, might have turned me off. But then, I happened upon author Kiersten White's blog, and after reading a few posts, decided I wanted to see more, went out and bought the book.

Yesterday, I was sorting through my books, picked up Paranormalcy to add to my to-read pile, then flicked it open. I was going to pick up and reread The Princess Bride, but upon opening Paranormalcy, literally from the first line or two, I could not put this book down.

The first chapter was called, "Oh, Bite Me!"

"Wait- did you- You just yawned!" The vampire's arms, raised over his head in the classic Dracula pose, dropped to his sides. He pulled his exaggerated white fangs back behind his lips. "What, imminent death isn't exciting enough for you?""Oh, stop pouting. But really,the widow's peak? The pale skin? The black cape? Where did you even get that thing, a costume store?"

I had to read more. Just one more sentence, to see if it was as funny as the last, and another, to find out what exactly was going on. It didn't take very long to get a clear picture of narrator Evie: Sassy, snarky, exuding attitude, but a girly-girl at heart. She might be employed by the International Paranormal Containment Agency to track down supernatural creatures - vampires, werewolves, faeries, you name it - for monitoring, but despite her unusual life, Evie herself is just a normal teenage girl, who would like nothing better than to be an ordinary high school student with a driving license and a locker. Just because she has the unique ability to see beneath the glamours - magical disguises and illusions - of "paranormals" - doesn't mean she herself is anything but normal.

But then immortal creatures start dropping dead by the dozen, and the person responsible is somehow connected to Evie. They seem to have more in common with each other than any of the other weird and wonderful creatures IPCA is keeping tabs on. Perhaps Evie's not as normal as she thought.

I'm usually wary of fantasy stories set in the real world which have too many different species of impossible creatures, preferring to stick to just one. But Paranormalcy really worked. Although "paranormals" aren't known to most humans, to Evie they're just differently normal. Her best friend is a mermaid, her ex-boyfriend a faerie, many of her colleagues werewolves, and her new crush Lend is something no one quite knows how to classify. It had a bit of an Eyre Affair feel to me, with its humour and matter-of-fact acceptance of the bizarre. The book launches straight into the action, the world-building being done by immersion rather than exposition, but it is easily picked up and understood.

At first I was a bit surprised that Evie was only sixteen; her bag-and-tag job seemed far too dangerous for one so young. But as we get to know her, she is a very realistic teenager, sometimes a bit bratty but basically likable, funny, obsessed with all things pink and sparkly and her favourite high school soap opera. I found her fascination with all things high school very understandable - I'd have loved to go to an American high school, or a boarding school, just to see how different it was from my own school experience!

Kiersten White has a refreshing take on various different "paranormals" from myth and literature. Her vampires may look suave and seductive, but all Evie sees is walking corpses. Sexy(!) Her friend Lish, the mermaid, lives in a tank of water and can't speak English, so has a computer translate her speech for her. But some of her more imaginative language translates to "bleep," something that Evie picked up. I'm not sure whether "bleep" necessarily worked in this book all the time. I liked the idea of it as an in-joke that turned into a habit, and I certainly think that less is more when it comes to swearing, but it sometimes jarred, if it was at a point of high tension - I'd rather nothing at all than a substitute-swear. But that's a small criticism.

Evie's double, Vivian, was an interesting antagonist that constantly kept me questioning the morality of Evie's world. She was a villain who evoked pity and caused me to wonder whether she was really all that bad, or if there was something in her reasoning. There wasn't a clear-cut black-and-white solution to this tale, which I appreciated.

I've read on other people's reviews that, despite its title, Paranormalcy is more an Urban Fantasy than a Paranormal Romance (which I've translated as meaning that plot and character come first, rather than just being an excuse for the IMBC* mushy stuff.) It is a fun, fast-paced story that had me grinning and turning the pages right the way through. And there was a wonderful jab at Twilight and the like:

Arianna snorted. "Why on earth would a vampire go to high school?"

Why indeed?

*Interchangeable Magical Boyfriend Creature