Book Review - Transient Desires by Donna Leon

 Transient Desires by Donna Leon

London: William Heinemann, 2021                      ISBN 9781785152627

Hmmm. I was asked to read this by someone special in my life, who had read it because Donna Leon was an award-winning crime writer. My someone special asked me to read it because she had found it extremely disappointing, and wanted a second opinion. Our opinions concur.

This book, the latest of the Commissario Brunetti series of crime books, is one of the most slapdash, poorly plotted, sluggishly paced, and just plain confusing pieces of crime fiction I have read. Now, I haven't read any others of the series, and I think this is about the 30th of the batch, so maybe the earlier ones are better, and Leon has run out of ideas and puff. Not sure.

What I can state is that the characterization of Brunetti is extremely thin - we get no sense of a personality, but rather pieces of prose that are merely the author showing off. We get some sense of place: the book is set in Venice and even Leon can't entirely destroy the images of that place no matter how much she tries. The plot is woefully plain, and yet convoluted at the same time, and the writing is wooden.

Leon's writing, in this book, is full of unnecessary description, and yet lacks description in other places where it's needed, or would be enjoyable. It is full of non sequiturs - Brunetti ruminating on Tacitus, or the state of politics, in the middle of some scene where it doesn't make sense and where someone wouldn't be thinking those thoughts. Again, these lines seem to me to be the author trying to show off.

There were other things that annoyed me such Brunetti enjoying the "verbal sparring" with another protagonist, that had me re-tracing my steps to find the page or two of bland dialogue which constituted the "sparring". The pointless addition of Italian names for things, such as telefonino - it's jarring in a novel in English, doesn't add to the atmosphere and, in my opinion is lazy and childish.

The end of the book, which I won't give away, was also infuriating: in fact I asked my someone if the last ten pages had fallen out. The book is unfinished.

Reading Transient Desires was a waste of time, and unfortunately I've had to waste more of my time writing this review. Avoid.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King

Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King

London: New English Library, 1994               ISBN 0450610098


Ever since scaring myself silly reading Salem's Lot when I was a teenager, I've had a soft spot for the works of Stephen King. Not the grandiose later works, but the early, scary stuff. His first collection of short stories - Nightshift - is a particular favourite of mine, and well worth reading.

Nightmares & Dreamscapes is not as strong as Nightshift, with some stories being a little formulaic, but there are definitely some good ones. The collection varies between outright horror, sci-fi, and the fantastic, according to the whims of King's mind. And what a mind it must be, fizzing with thoughts that most other people would not enjoy having. In the Introduction King suggests that he doesn't necessarily enjoy all of them either, feeling compelled to write. There is no doubt King is at his best dealing with horror: he is the master of the build-up; of evoking a "normal" neighbourhood and people, and then inserting the terrifying. In a collection such as this though, the normalcy tends to look the same in each story, so by the end of the book you can at times see through the construction of the tale, which bits are formula, which bits are building plot etc. None of which takes away from the pleasure of enjoying his ideas.

And there are some great ideas. Killer toad-storms, houses that are space-ships, and a great zombie story too. There are two vampire stories, both of which are good, and a couple of ghost stories, which are less strong. Also less strong are the stories that King writes as homages to other writers - in this collection there is a story in homage to H.P. Lovecraft, a Raymond Chandler homage, and a Sherlock Holmes story. When King attempts these stories they are very close to becoming parody or pastiche rather than what I'm sure he intends. The Holmes story in my opinion shouldn't have been included - the language is not right, with the story merely reminding the ready how much better the real thing is.

Nightmares & Dreamscapes is a great book for having on hand during the holiday season: not too much thought required, and entertaining enough.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Fear is the rider by Kenneth Cook

Fear is the rider by Kenneth Cook, foreword by Douglas Kennedy

Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2016          ISBN 9781925240856

Some time ago I reviewed Kenneth Cook's Wake in fright, which I was spurred to read after hearing news of an until-then undiscovered manuscript found in Cook's papers. The manuscript has been published this year under the title Fear is the rider, and if fear is your thing, this book will be worth an hour or two of your time.

This fast-paced thriller was originally developed as a film script by Cook and his children, and then novelized by Cook toward the end of his life. The story is simple: man (Shaw) travelling the outback runs into pretty girl (Katie) travelling in the outback, follows her in the hopes of beginning a romance, only to have her running at his car out of the scrub after being attacked by "the man". The rest of the story is a classic chase tale, with both Shaw and Katie trying to flee the relentless malice of this unknown killer. The characterization is thin, but the action is non-stop, a mash-up of films both old and new: Cook obviously inspired by Duel, and there are touches of Wolfe Creek in this story as well. What gives an added frisson of fear is the fact that there has been more than one occasion when travellers in remote Australia have been brutalised and murdered by mad killers.

Apart from a short and relatively under-done attempt to portray "the man" as some sort of mythological creature that has haunted the area for thousands of years, there is nothing to this story apart from the suspense and horror of the chase and fight to the death. It is definitely not up to the level of sophistication of Wake in fright, and clearly sits at the pulp fiction end of the spectrum - I could see this being turned into a very good film.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The man in the high castle by Philip K. Dick

The man in the high castle by Philip K. Dick

(Read in Four novels of the 1960s, New York :  Library of America, 2007 ISBN 9781598530094)



I saw this book listed in the Book Depository's list of "Best books ever", and given the subject and the fact that I'd never read any Philip K. Dick, thought I'd give it a go.

Philip K. Dick is a well known Science Fiction writer, but unusually perhaps better known for the film adaptations of his works than the works themselves - the most famous being the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, which is an adaptation of Dick's novel Do androids dream of electric sheep?.

This book is one of his earliest, and runs on the premise of a huge counterfactual; that is, that the Axis were victorious in World War II. Counterfactual history has had something of a vogue lately, and is something that I normally loathe when presented as scholarly work, but, as fiction can quite often produce something worth reading. In this case, I'm not so sure.

The book follows a few characters who live in the USA, which has been divided into three by the conflict - a Nazi dominated East Coast, an ambiguous Centre and the Japanese dominated West Coast. The Nazi's insane racist ideology has led them to destroy Africa with nuclear weapons, but at the same time develop the technology to travel to Mars. The Japanese have not become as technically advanced, but the belief of their superiority over their White subjects is no less than the Nazi's over their Slav, Black and Jewish ones.

The story revolves around Tagomi, a ministerial attache who is the unwitting host to a meeting between German and Japanese intelligence operatives, Frink, who has lost his wife and is trying to start again, Childan, a high-end dealer in "authentic American antiques", and Frink's wife, who has moved to the Central Zone from the West Coast.

There are two other "characters" in the book - the I Ching, the ancient Chinese astrological text, and the novel The Grasshopper, which is a semi-secret (banned in the Nazi zones) counterfactual book that posits that the Allies won the war.

These various strands entwine around each other - Tagomi likes to buy "authentic American antiques" (mostly faked) from Childan, Frink worked in a factory that faked the antiques and then striikes out to produce something new and authentic, and Frink's wife thwarts a Nazi attempt on the life of the author of The grasshopper, who is rumoured to live in a very highly fortified house in Colorado (i.e. the man in the high castle).

The book tackles themes of authenticity, collaboration and art, and uses the I Ching quite heavily, to the extent that readers who aren't familiar with it (i.e. me) can get a bit lost. Much of the counterfactual material in the book is intriguing, but not well-developed.

There is a curious dis-jointedness in the style of this book: it is very episodic and the episodes are not necessarily well connected to each other. The language is very artificial, I think to convey that the characters were not necessarily speaking in their native tongues. The result adds to the disjointedness of the writing and becomes distracting after a while. The ending has a feel of being rushed.

Overall the sum of this book is less than the collection of its parts. Certainly not one of the "Best books ever".


Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Megalodon by Robin Brown

Megalodon by Robin Brown

• London : M. Joseph, 1981.                                     ISBN   0718120426

There is a certain genre of throw-away fiction that deals with monsters, but is not really Science Fiction or Fantasy. You've possibly read a few books of the type - either an extinct creature is found living in current days, or some mixture of radiation, chemical waste or bizarre electrical occurrence causes creatures to get big and nasty. In my teen years I had a bit of a fascination for this type of book, and I can remember reading titles about ants, worms and bears, to name a few. Each book followed a standard formula - brief introduction of the "cast", usually one of whom was some sort of eccentric scientist - description of the monster, some gruesome deaths, the authorities embarrassed because they didn't believe eccentric scientist, and then the death of the creature, either through human action, or natural causes. Sometimes something lurked still, ready for a sequel if one was required by the publisher.

And so we come to Megalodon. This book was sitting on the shelf of the beach house I recently rented for the Summer Holidays, and I picked it up with a sense of nostalgia. With the caveat that I'm now considerably older and wiser and memory may be failing me, this book is by far the worst of this genre that I have ever read.

The plot is as follows - the US has discovered a huge ore body of Gold and Uranium deep in an Ocean Trench. They have sent down a nuclear submarine to scan the sea floor. The sub is partially destroyed, after being attacked by a Megalodon - a giant shark, thought extinct. The Government calls in a group of, you guessed it, eccentric scientists who have developed a system of talking to dolphins and orcas, with the thought that they could find out what's going on (at this stage the authorities don't believe it's a giant shark, but of course the eccentric scientist already has it worked out).

There are a few more disasters, and the scientists realise that their whales can't dive deep enough to use their sonar.....so they capture a Sperm Whale, fly it several thousand miles under a dirigible, and teach it to communicate with the other whales, and by extension the scientists. It has a battle with a Megalodon (by this stage we know there are two parents and a juvenile shark lurking down in the deeps).

Given that this book book was written at a high point in the Cold War, the Soviets get involved, and one of their subs gets "eaten" too, but not before destroying one of the Megalodon with an aptly gory and gratuitous explosion. The talking whales,disgusted with the whole shebang, announce their departure, and that's it.

This book has it all - including the obligatory sex-scene (that occurs at a bizarre moment in the plotline), military types that don't listen, and lots of description of high-tech gadgets, most of which are useless against the ancient shark. The sharks themselves are major characters of the book - after introducing them by explaining they are animals of almost pure instinct with tiny brains, Brown then goes on to give them thoughts and even feelings. He also greatly exaggerates their size - his beasts are in the hundreds of feet long, wheras it seems the real thing didn't get much over 60 feet.

By far the weirdest aspect of the book are the talking dolphins and orca - they take the suspension of disbelief quite a few steps too far. If I hadn't taken a vow to review every book I read, I certainly wouldn't have wasted this many words on such a pile of rubbish. The author may have intended otherwise, but this book gave me quite a few laughs on a slow TV evening.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell