I picked up this one for inspiration. I’d read that it was the book to read if you want to know how to write a travelogue. I can see why.

Check this paragraph:

The Galician night came quickly, the hills turned purple and the valleys flooded with heavy shadow. The jagged coastline below, now dark and glittering, looked like sweepings of broken glass. Vigo was cold and dim, an unlighted ruin, already smothered in the dead blue dusk. Only the sky and the ocean stayed alive, running with immense streams of flame. Then as the sun went down it seemed to drag the whole sky with it like the shreds of a burning curtain, leaving rags of bright water that went on smoking and smouldering along the estuaries and around the many islands. I saw the small white ship, my last link with home, flare like a taper and die away in the darkness; then I was alone at last, sitting on a hilltop, my teeth chattering as the night wind rose.

I would be delighted to write something as descriptive as that while sitting on the hillside as the sun went down, but this book was written in 1969, 35 years after the journey took place. That’s quite an impressive memory.

The violence of the heat seemed to bruise the whole earth and turn its crust into one huge scar. One’s blood dried up and all juices vanished; the sun struck upwards, sideways, and down, while the wheat went buckling across the fields like a solid sheet of copper. I kept on walking because there was no shade to hide in, and because it seemed to be the only way to agitate the air around me. I began to forget what I was doing on the road at all; I walked on as though keeping a vow, till I was conscious only of the hot red dust grinding like pepper between my toes.

The story, such as it is, isn’t a racer, but the descriptions paint a more vivid picture than any album stuffed full of photos. The skill in the writing is the way in which Lee manages to get away with drenching his prose in quite so many similes and metaphors without weighing it down or leaving it feeling overworked.

A great piece of armchair travel, it chronicles Lee’s two year journey through a largely unexplored country. Malaga, Marbella and Fuengirola are small fishing ports, not high-rise resorts, and as the story runs on we start to hear the first rumblings of war: civil war. It’s this momentous evolution that ultimately gives the story its satisfying pay-off, and runs it perfectly into George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

I read the first few pages of this book on Amazon. It’s a great start. Two kids larking about in the snow. One throws a snowball and misses the other, hitting the preacher’s pregnant wife instead. She goes into labour, has the child, and in the process suffers some kind of mental upset.

The snowball thrower feels no guilt at all, but the kid he missed finds himself living with the guilt for the rest of his life. This book is the story of that life, and the effect that the guilt has upon it.

Good idea, well executed, and an excellent closure at the furthest end of the book that ties it all up in a neat and satisfying manner. And actually it’s a better ending than I first realised, as it was only a couple of hours after I’d read it that I realised quite what had happened.

But there’s a whole stretch of life in the middle that I’d like to have skipped. I didn’t, of course, or what would have been the point of starting if you weren’t going to read it properly?

So it’s left me a bit undecided. Great idea. Well written. I couldn’t have changed a single word to make it any better. And yet, and yet, and yet… it didn’t grab me. It took too circuitous a route to get from that first thrown snowball to the denouement.

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I finished writing my half of a co-authored book a month or so back, and the publishers are cracking on with it at unnatural speed. It’s almost at the proofing stage, but before they send it back for checking they’ve asked me to pick five of my own pictures then I’d like them to use as openers for my four of the eight chapters.

Here are the five I’ve sent them. Which one do you reckon they’ll decide not to use?

Black cat sign at a Slovenian bar

The Yorkshire Dales

A Portuguese cafe and shop, in Porto

A Spanish sunset

The Angel of the North

This one’s a biggie. 1237 pages, so something you have to commit to. Fortunately that’s not difficult – particularly if you’ve already read The Pillars of the Earth. The two books are set in the same city of Kingsbridge, but while that first instalment was set in 1123, this one kicks off two centuries later in 1327.

I don’t actually think it’s quite as good. The Pillars of the Earth had me hooked right from the start, perhaps because I’d never read anything like it before, but World Without End treads some of the same ground. Many of the themes are familiar and a couple of the characters could easily have been replaced by characters from the other volume, which is a shame as they really should be unique and irreplaceable in each instance.

But that’s about as far as the criticism goes. Follett’s world is as big as it is convincing. He evoked a true feeling of the hardships of the time when food was scarce, suspicion was rife, plague was seen as punishment (and communicable simply by looking at someone else – it’s difficult to remember that these people had no concept of bacteria) and society was organised into a class system so severe that those who found themselves on the lower rungs could expect to have their lives controlled almost entirely by those above them.

It is this class structure that creates most of the conflict and tension within the novel, and the triumphs that mark out important plot points are themselves woven into that system. The ability of a woman to achieve a position of authority in a male-dominated world, the moment a serf gains control of his own land and the point at which a wicked nobleman is brought down by those who sit below him are so longed for and so well handled when they come along that you live the ups and downs of these characters’ lives with them – you don’t simply read about them from a passive third position.

It’s perhaps not essential reading for anyone who has completed The Pillars of the Earth, but it is an interesting and worthy continuation of the story and, should Follett ever undertake to write a third instalment, I’m sure I’ll be bagging a copy as soon as it appears in paperback.

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This could be a life-changing book. It’s one I’ve heard about several times over the last few years, and with a new edition out I decided to bag a copy. It’s a US version so all the financials are in dollars, but it’s no less an illuminating read.

The basic premise (and I’m not giving anything away here) is that if you think about it, you don’t really want to be a millionaire. It’s a nice idea, but surely the nicer idea is to have the millionaire lifestyle. In other words, to have the kind of life that a million pounds (or in this case dollars) could bring you, without actually necessarily having the money.

Author Tim Ferriss lives that kind of life, travelling the world while remote assistants take care of his business activities. The upshot is that his working week has been shrunk down from 80-hours to just four, and yet he still earns $40,000 a month. Yes, a month.

This is the story of how he did it, how you can do it and what resources and sites you need to have in your toolbox to make it happen.

It’s pretty inspirational and I actually had to stop reading it in bed as it was keeping me awake. I’d put out the light after a dozen pages or so and then lie awake for more than an hour re-reading it in my head. Switching to reading it only on the tube fixed that.

This new edition has over 100 pages that didn’t appear in the original, with loads of case studies from people who have put the techniques to good use. The layout is great, although obviously that could change when the UK edition finally appears.

If you ever wanted to automate any of the niggling, repetitive, time-consuming tasks in your life then this is the book that will tell you how to do it and, in the process, become more productive and fulfilled.

I’ve recently finished reading Talking About Detective Fiction by PD James. It’s a slim book that looks at the development of popular detective fiction from Jane Austin’s Emma onwards.

Casting a critical, analytical eye over Conan Doyle, Poe, Dorothy L Sayers and more recent writers like Patricia Cornwell it’s a masterclass on the structure and workings of detective stories and how they are generally structured. When all of the evidence is gathered in one place like this you see how formulaic a successful detective story is.

Detectives are outsiders who intrude on a settled community (or house, street, village and so on). Most are loners but they generally have a Watson figure with whom they can discuss the case (and of course tell the reader things that need to be told so that the final reveal doesn’t come out of the blue). No detective should have any more information than the reader, or else you’re cheating your audience.

For anyone writing a piece of detective fiction – as I’m attempting – it’s useful stuff from one of the most distinguished and longest-serving practitioners of the craft.

I’ll be keeping it close at hand.

It all looked so promising. A Victorian-era murder mystery set in the 1800s. Except the dialogue felt to this reader more like a script from the 1980s.

The Railway Detective is the first book in a series of novels about Detective Inspector Robert Colbeck. The Great Exhibition is fast approaching when a daring raid is launched on the mail train. Death, theft and blackmail follow as our dashing hero tries his hardest to solve the case.

There are a lot of points on which Marston has hit the bullseye. The plotting is spot on, his unravelling of the story can’t be faulted, the logic behind the investigation is strong and believable. But the main character isn’t particularly likeable, the villain’s motivation isn’t (I don’t believe) entirely plausible, and the words spoken by the characters feel strangely detached from the era in which they were spoken.

That’s where my important lesson lay.

My book is set in the years spanning 1856 and 1871 – almost the same era as this one – and like this is a detective story. The other thing it had in common, in the first draft, was fairly modern dialogue. I had wondered about that and whether it mattered, and having read this book I now see that it really does.

You can paint a scene, describing the look of the characters, the clothes they wear and the utensils they use, but unless the reader believes that they live and act within that scene in a logical and fitting manner, they feel detached and less believable. That, I think, is why I didn’t feel empathy towards the characters in this book – I didn’t believe them, so I invested very little time in hoping for a good outcome for each one.

Needless to say I’m spending a lot of time revising my own dialogue in the hope of convincing more readers that the words spoken – although spoken by fictional entities – really could have been said when I say they were.

And, of course, making sure my (hopefully) published sentences aren’t as tortuous and twisted as that one.

It helps to have a couple of weeks off work, but I raced through this book in about a fortnight. What a contrast to the last book I read, which took far, far, far longer than it should.

Secret Servant: The Moneypenny Diaries is the second in Westbrook’s Moneypenny trilogy dealing with M’s right-hand woman and James Bond’s sometime muse. Not a great premise, you might think. Apart from a trip to the races in A View to a Kill we never see her away from her desk in the films, even if she is occasionally transported to a snazzy office inside an Egyptian ruin for The Spy Who Loved Me, or a submarine in You Only Live Twice. Oh, and Bond’s apartment, briefly, at the start of Live and Let Die.

So it’s a bit of a relief to find that these books aren’t about ordering paperclips and maintaining the stationery cupboard. In the first, Guardian Angel, Moneypenny played a key role in defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis. This second volume, Secret Servant picks up the story a few months later, just as Kim Philby has defected to the Soviet Union, after years of spying on British Intelligence from the inside.

Moneypenny befriends his wife and is sent behind the Iron Curtain to bring them back.

The language very clearly evokes the feel and spirit of the sixties, when a fancy dress was a frock, flirting was discrete and the hotbed of office gossip was the powder room.

It’s as gripping as the original, fast paced and well written, with a real sense of menace running through the Soviet chapters, but in the last quarter relies a little too much on telling the reader what has happened than on letting us experience it alongside our hero. It drops a star for that, unfortunately, but Westbrook (a pseudonym) has nonetheless written a cracking tale that keeps you guessing what will happen to the very end. Indeed, at times the only reason you know Moneypenny survives is that she wouldn’t have been able to retrospectively write her diary had she not.

It’s a worthy addition to the Bond cannon, and a great lead-in to the final volume in the series, Final Fling. That’s on my shelf waiting to be read; it can’t be long before I’m reaching to take it down.

Price£7.99 (£4.98 from Amazon)
Author Kate Westbrook
ISBN 0719567696

This is a lengthy book. 1006 pages in all, although that’s not the metric I’d use when declaring it lengthy. The Pillars of the Earth is longer, but it isn’t lengthy. That’s because it’s the right length for the story it tells. It was well paced, fast moving, inspiring, engrossing and engaging enough to carry me through its 1100 pages without ever wondering when it would come to an end.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, though, often had me measuring the bulk of unread pages between forefinger and thumb, asking myself how long it would take me to get to the end. It is, then, both a long book and anlengthy book. Or at least, it was for me.

It’s an impressive undertaking – I certainly won’t deny that. Anyone who can keep track of a story so long and not lose their distinctive voice here and there along the way (Clarke never does) is a truly skilled writer, and on that score this book is a triumph, but clipping away half of the story and removing some of the various diversions would have made it move at greater pace and focussed the reader’s mind on the pertinent thread running through.

So would axing the footnotes, which present in abundance. One – an unusually lengthy one, it must be said – spreads over five pages, and I would argue that if it were really that important, and needed to be outlined in such great detail, it should probably have been weaved into the fabric of the story itself.

But, but, but, I think I may be in the minority here. It’s garnered impressive ratings on Amazon, with a four-out-of-five rating from 290 customer reviews. Professional reviewers, too, have heaped praise on the book, and their quotes are much in evidence on the covers.

So, your mileage may (and probably will) vary.

If that’s the case, Amazon is selling it at a discount right now, so bag yourself a copy and it’ll see you well into New Year.

It’s a while since I’ve written about the book, mainly because I’ve been so busy editing the thing.

It’s a big job. Some days I can work my way through three or four pages of the stuff I’ve already written. On others, three paragraphs would be something of an achievement. Am I taking too long over it? I don’t think so. There’s no point racing through and ending up with something you’re not happy with and clearly won’t sell.

I also know that this edit, making a second draft, won’t be the only one. I can see how it has improved so far, but I also know where it could yet be better. Even looking at the first couple of chapters, which I was quite happy with following the first thorough edit, I can see where a few little tweaks here and there could make things better still.

Fortunately I have two very helpful readers who have been running through it with pen in hand to pick out the bits that don’t quite work. It’s been very instructional and incredibly helpful, in large part because their points of concern have pretty much mirrored my own, which would suggest my self-criticism is valid. I’m also relieved that as we tend to agree on the points of issue I’m not kidding myself that it’s all great. That would be awful.

So the book is coming along and I’m now at the end of the second draft of the first five chapters. But that’s not the last chapter, and it’s far from the last edit, too.