How to Raise an Elephant by Alexander McCall Smith

 

This is the latest book about  Mma Precious Ramotswe and the No. 1 Ladies Detective agency of Gaborone, Botswana. The full cast is reassembled to tell the story of a baby elephant which has come into the possession of Charlie, part-time junior detective as well as part-time mechanic at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors where he works for Mma Ramotswe’s husband, Mr J L B Maketoni, and what is to be done about it.

Alexander McCall Smith has created an endearing yet complex character in Precious Ramotswe. She has a history which has shaped her into the outwardly gentle but inwardly strong person she is today. She had an idyllic childhood with a father she adored but went on to make a disastrous first marriage which caused her great unhappiness and suffering, both emotional and physical. She became determined to start a new life and with the help of the legacy from the sale of her father’s cattle she started her own detective agency, learning as she went along with the help of a book by the inspirational Mr Clovis Anderson.

By the time the current book appears Mma Ramotswe has gained many years of experience in her chosen profession and has an assistant, Mma Makutsi who was originally employed as a secretary but who has always seen herself as a fellow detective and so becomes involved in all the cases which the agency takes on.

As usual Mma Ramotswe is called upon to use her powers of understanding of the human psyche and what makes people tick. She has to get behind the reason a distant cousin has appeared asking her for a loan and she also gives some well considered advice to her new neighbour. All of this comes on top of solving the problem of what to do with the baby elephant.

So, Precious Ramotswe continues to find peace and fulfilment in the life she has chosen and she deserves all the happiness that comes her way. Thank you, Alexander McCall Smith for another gentle, low-key but ultimately uplifting story. I would have to give all the books in this series 5 out of 5, if only for their beautifully illustrated covers!

Published by Little, Brown.

Inside Story by Martin Amis

I have read and loved everything written by the late Elizabeth Jane Howard including the wonderful Cazelet Chronicles. I knew that she had been Martin Amis’s stepmother from 1965 to 1983 so I was interested in reading his autobiography Experience, when it came out in 2000. That was a fascinating book    but having read it so long ago I can’t recall much of the detail except for the shocking story of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared without trace in 1973 and whose remains were found in the basement of the monstrous Frederick West twenty years later. I do remember being absorbed in his stories of his life and thinking it a thoroughly satisfying read.

Inside Story is quite different to Experience. Well, of course, it is twenty years later but it is different in the way it is written. On the cover it is called a novel and I think the reason is so much of the book is about conversations which can’t be reproduced verbatim so scenes are set up by Martin in the first person but are then enacted by Martin in the third person. Names are changed as well which I guess allows him to tell stories from his view as he has remembered them. I mean I’m sure Phoebe Phelps can’t be the real name of the woman he devotes so many pages to about their five year on-off affair.

The deep and loving friendship between Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens is a constant theme throughout the book as is his love and admiration for Saul Bellow. He is devoted to his wife and children and appears to have cast off  the dirty little devil image of his younger days.

I would like to quote one sentence which I liked: ‘The twelve year hiatus - beginning on November 9, 1989, with the abdication of Communism - the great lull, the vacuum of apparent enemylessness (during which America could cosily devote a year to Monica Lewinski and another year to O J Simpson), came to an end on September 11, 2001.’  I liked that word: enemylessness. This is a long book with lots of footnotes and it takes quite a while to read, especially since there is so much in it that asks to be re-read. 

I think 5 out of 5, if you have the time and a quiet space.

Published by Jonathan Cape.

The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett

I started plodding through this book and then in no time realised I wasn’t plodding any more but eager to get back into it at every chance I got. Having followed the fortunes of Kings Bridge and Shiring from 1100 AD in Pillars of the Earth and then from 1300 AD in World Without End through to satisfying conclusions in both books I thought it would be very difficult to become interested in this new story which begins in 999 AD. I was quite wrong; although the hero is once again a clever, inventive, morally upright but low-born builder and the heroine a brave, strong, intelligent woman of noble birth their story is a fascinating parallel to what takes place in the later centuries, rather than a same old same old re-hash.

There are evil aristocrats driven by a lust for power and evil peasants driven mainly by greed and envy. There are very bad monks and also very good monks; the priests on the other hand are mostly all bad. There are marauding Vikings and cruelly treated slaves. Justice is harsh and swift but through all this hard and seemingly hopeless time opportunities are still there for someone brave, strong-minded and smart enough to rise above the almost insurmountable obstacles of every day life in the tenth century.

When we were visiting England years ago we came upon the ancient ruins of an abbey which we found almost as mind-blowing as our first sight of the York Minster. I have kept both images in mind when reading all three of these books. 

Bravery, treachery and the triumph of hope over despair. 5 out of 5.

Published by Macmillan.

The Last Lions of Africa by Anthony Ham

I wish I'd written this book.

I met the author of The Last Lions of Africa, fellow-Australian Anthony Ham, at a waterhole in Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park a year or so ago when we were both looking at lions from our vehicles. 

He told me he was working on a non-fiction book. Like the old saying goes: "I wish I had a dollar..." But it turned out he was, in fact, writing a book of great importance.

I know the stats on lions - their numbers are in free-fall decline and they've disappeared completely from about 26 African countries where they once roamed. Hunting, poaching, revenge-killing and habitat destruction are pushing the King of the Jungle into ever diminishing pockets of safety.

What Anthony Ham does, quite masterfully, is use the writer's mantra of 'show-don't-tell' perfectly to illustrate the plight of Africa's lions not by railing at the reader or bombarding them with facts, but by taking us into the lives of individual, real-life lions, and the people who care for them or kill them.

The whole story of the life, times, family and untimely death of Africa's most famous lion of recent times, Cecil, shot by bowhunter dentist Walter Palmer in 2015, is told in detail. What was amazing about Cecil, I learned, was not so much his death, but the fact that he lived as long as he did. 

Also touching to the point of tears is the heroic story of Lady Liuwa, who until she was brought some company, was the last living lioness in Liuwa Plains, Zambia, where big cats had once reigned supreme.

There are chilling stories of man-eaters (not to be read before bed time), and inspirational accounts of humans fighting to protect a species. I was given an advance copy of Last Lions to review, prior to publication, by the publishers, Allen and Unwin.

This is what I wrote for the book's cover: "Urgent and important, This moving tale with a heroic cast of characters, leonine and human, is a must-read for anyone passionate about wildlife and wild places."

5 out of 5.

Review: Tony Park

The Innocence of Roast Chicken by Jo-Anne Richards

 This book was first published in 1996 but I read a new edition with a foreword by the author, dated 2019.

Jo-Anne Richards has written a story of innocence lost and a yearning for hope regained. It moves from 1966, when Kati was a happy child celebrating every Christmas at her grandparents’ farm, to 1989 and the emergence of the post-apartheid era.

Jo-Anne’s prose describing the farm and its Eastern Cape setting is some of the most beautiful I have ever read. Scenes from Kati’s life with her brothers, parents and grandparents were vivid moving pictures in my mind. The relationships between the white people and the African employees in the house and on the farm are seen through the child’s eyes, as are the inter personal relationships between her parents and her grandparents.

Quite brilliantly worked all through the story is the gradual unfolding of how Kati changes from a happy, innocent child to a bitter young woman, constantly trying to hurt her husband and their friends, sneering at their optimistic hopes for the future of their country. The tension becomes almost unbearable while the chapters intersperse between Kati’s world of 1966 and her present life in 1989. The resolution is well worth waiting for and makes me recommend this book highly.  A very solid 5 out of 5, and I hope I can find more of Jo-Anne Richards’ books.

Published by Picador Africa.

V2 by Robert Harris

 

I don't mind reading a badly-written book now and then.  Bad books make me feel good about my own writing.

And then along comes a book such as V2, by Robert Harris, which I loved so much I almost wanted to give up writing. Almost.

I've been a big Harris fan since his first and probably best-known novel, Fatherland, set in a what-if world where the Germans won the second world war. It was brilliant, which is not to say he peaked with his first book (an author's nightmare).

He's a very diverse writer whose books have ranged from deep dramatisations of the Roman empire to nineteenth Century French politics and even Downing Street shenanigans in his excellent work, The Ghost (filmed at the Ghost Writer) about an author who is commissioned to write a former British PM's memoir. (Top tip: I actually found that book to be very handy in my own work as a ghost writer).

My favourite Harris books are those set in or around the war years (and I'd lump Fatherland into that category). His novel Enigma, also made into a jolly good movie with Kate Winslett, and his recent dramatisation of the dark days leading up to the start of WWII, Munich, are fascinating and gripping.

And now to V2, a beautifully written and pacy thriller based loosely on real life. Near the end of the war after spending billions of Marks in R and D (and causing the deaths of tens of thousands of slave labourers) the Nazis began launching V1 and V2 rockets at targets in England and Allied-liberated continental Europe.

These vengeance weapons, the precursors of today's Cruise Missiles and NASA space rockets, arrived too late to alter the course of the war, but they literally shook up London, whose residents had thought they had survived the Blitz. Thousands of homes were destroyed and about 4.500 people killed, including 150 shoppers at once in a London department store. To this day my mother-in-law vividly recalls being knocked flying in a V2 near miss.

Scrambling to find a way to stop the terrifying new technology of a ballistic missile, the British military snatches at an idea that mathematics can be used to calculate where the V2 rockets are being launched from.

Plucky Kay Caton-Walsh is a Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) officer who gets herself attached to a group of other brainy WAAFs, who are dispatched to liberated Belgium. There they'll wait for a V2 to be launched, just 70 miles away, and using a radar intercept and slide rules they'll calculate the arc of the missile's flight backwards from where it hits London, to where it's launched, somewhere in Holland.

Meanwhile we're given an insight into the ethics of the use of cutting-edge  science to cause mass destruction through the eyes of war-weary Dr Rudi Graf, a fictitious chum of the real life architect of the vengeance rockets (and later the Apollo moon landings), Werner von Braun.

Kay and Rudi both engender deep empathy - she for her dedication and professionalism in the face of institutionalised chauvinism (and a bit of mean-girl bitchiness), and he for his own internal battle with his conscience. 

The tension builds as the Nazis get wind of what the WAAFs are up to and Rudi's ordered to point his missile at another bunch of boffins

V2 is as good as thriller writing gets. This story has it all - men and women behaving badly, spies, spitfires, sex and science. I'm a slow reader, but I finished this one all too quickly - I did not want it to end. Harris' descriptions of wartime London and Belgium are spare and spot on, and the tension builds in a delicious, simmering, slow-cooker way to a heartily satisfying ending.

Here's another tip - if you want to write, read. Bad novels may encourage you by making you feel good about your writing, but stories like V2 will give you something to aim for - a 5 out of 5.

Published by Penguin

Tony Park