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.

Fancy a bit of culture?

We spent Saturday night watching Priceless, a French film about a money-grabbing playgirl on the French Riviera. It only counts as ‘culture’ on account of having subtitles, but it’s well worth grabbing a copy now that Amazon is knocking out the DVD for £3.58.

Audrey Tatou (Amelie, The Da Vinci Code) is Irene, the money-mad con-artist, who will bed any man with a fat enough wallet, and it doesn’t give away anything to say that she ends up bedding a pauper. That’s the premise. Or – at least – the way he changes as a result. You can tell that much from the trailer:

It’s beautifully filmed, and the story, with obvious parallels to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, is genuinely funny in a gentle slapsticky way. Cultured slapstick, obviously, on account of the subtitles.

Stars? Four.

I put off reading this one for ages because, let’s face it, it’s long. Very long, if we’re being honest, and the thought of hauling around a 1100-page book for as long as it would take me to read on a daily commute didn’t appeal.

What a mistake. I’ve never read so many pages so quickly.

The Pillars of the Earth is a saga in the truest sense of the word – a sweeping story of the middle ages and the building of the fictional cathedral of Kingsbridge. Hugely frustrating when the villains get their way, genuinely edge-of-seat when the heroes get close to their goal, racy when required – slow when you need it, it’s a masterpiece that had me hooked from about 20 pages in.

Now admittedly with such a long and sweeping story some elements have to be glossed over, and there is a fairly key event close to the start that isn’t entirely believable on account of the fact that our main character doesn’t get enough time to mourn one particular event, but once beyond that it’s a non-stop rollercoaster to the very end.

And there’s real peril, too. This isn’t one of those books where everyone you like makes it through to the end, which is a refreshing, and at times shocking change to the norm.

The story is 20 years old this year and to celebrate, Ken Follett had written a new intro that you really, really, should skip – I can’t stress this enough – as it gives away the end of the book, which is just plain stupid. Nonetheless it remains his best-selling book to date, and I can quite see why.

So much so, that I’ve bought the sequel – World Without End.

Very excited to see that they’re making it into a TV mini-series.

Rating:
Title: The Pillars of the Earth
Author: Ken Follett
Price : £5.25 from Amazon
ISBN: 978-0330450133

This will be my last Coelho for a while. I’m half way through my stack of ten of his books, so I’m going to put the remainder to one side and read something else for a while. Namely The Book Thief.

It’s a bit of a shame that this one came at the half way point, as it was a bit of a dip in the series, I think. The Valkyries, although a stand-alone story, is a continuation of The Pilgrimage (although he never bills it as such) and tells the story of his trip with his wife to the Mojave desert, where he seeks out the Valkyries, a band of mysterious women who roam the plains on motorbikes.

It’s an intensely personal book, a bit of a snapshot autobiography, which says rather a lot about his marriage and his feelings for his wife (and hers for him). They’re often the kind of feelings you ought to keep to yourself. Particularly if your wife is going to read it.

It starts out well enough. His experiences in the desert are quite interesting, and he describes the arid landscape well, putting you right there beside him. After meeting the Valkyries, though, which clearly was a fairly important event in his life, it all gets a bit too intense with long descriptive passages detailing rituals he performs as a part of his quest.

Reviews on Amazon, I see, are equally mixed (although those that liked it tended to love it), so I don’t feel I’ve missed the point entirely. One for the Coelho completists, then, I think.

Price£xx (£xx from Amazon)

The Moneypenny Diaries has sat on my bedside table for months, waiting to be read. If I’d known how good it was I’d have got around to it much sooner.

The premise is simple: Jane Moneypenny, M’s secretary and 007′s muse of many years, is dead. She died 10 years before the start of the book, when Kate Westbrook – supposedly her niece – received three packages in the post, in the largest of which were Moneypenny’s secret diaries.

Highly secret, it turns out, as she should never have been writing them.

The main thrust of the story, though, takes place in 1962 and follows a year in Moneypenny’s life. In the Bond timeline that places it between On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice; in real life 1962 was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Westbrook has done a stunning job of weaving the two storylines – real and fictional – into one another, and used the books rather than the films as her source material.

But if you expected this to be the tale of life in M’s outer office you’d be wrong (and disappointed if you really did want to read about humdrum secretarial happenings). It starts out down that track, but soon Moneypenny is dragged off to Cuba on a mission with Bond, and she ends up playing a pivotal role in both the Bond timeline and world events.

There are plenty of twists, and it had me fooled as to who was good and who was bad on one of the threads right up until the last couple of pages, but it’s skilfully resolved in a very satisfying and believable way.

The question is, though, if you’re not into the Bond films would you enjoy the book? The answer is a resounding ‘yes’. Bond himself plays second fiddle to Moneypenny, and even if you’re not interested in the Bond franchise this is a cracking adventure story built around actual historical events, told at impressive speed.

Price: £7.99 (£5.99 from Amazon)
Author: Kate Westbrook
ISBN: 0719567424

I read my last London freesheet on 17 March, finished the sudoku and switched to reading books. The freesheets take less than six stops to read and do both puzzles, and then litter the tube. Not a good use of trees.

So last night I finished Eleven Minutes, my second book book in three weeks. The boycott is paying off.

It was patchy. Intriguing for the first half, dipping for the latter but ultimately rescuing itself in the last few pages, it’s the story of Maria, a Brazilian prostitute lured to Switzerland who discovers that love and sex are more meaningful than she thought. In a nutshell.

It’s simply written, like Coelho’s other books, isn’t too taxing and is quick to read. I like the way he plays with the craft of writing, doing little to hide the fact that what you are reading is anything more an a figment of his imagination. When he drops you into excerpts from Maria’s diary he does it with a quick ‘From Maria’s diary later that night…’, rather than trying to smooth the transition from third- to first- person.

He sets out his stall right from the off, making it clear from the start that this is, at heart, a simple fairy tale. From page one:

Once upon a time. there was a prostitute called Maria. Wait a minute. ‘Once upon a time’ is how all the best children’s stories begin and ‘prostitute’ is a word for adults. How can I start a book with this apparent contradiction? But since, at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss, let’s keep that beginning.

And later, a reminder that this is just a story in a book…

…lovely dark girl with her pale eyes and hair as black as the wing of the grauna (the Brazilian bird often evoked by local authors to describe black hair)…

There are references to The Alchemist when he mentions that his main character reads a book about a boy who tends sheep in Spain, and to The Pilgrimage, as Maria walks a small part of the road to Santiago.

It’s certainly not the best of his books I’ve read so far, and nothing has yet trumped The Pilgrimage, but with eight or so to go, it’ll be interesting to see where it sits in the collection, particularly as he admits in the introduction that he was nervous about publishing this one. I think I can see why.

So last week, as part of my boycotting of the London freesheets, I read The Alchemist. It’s not a long book, and I got through it in the space of four days’ tube journeys.

A slightly surprising ending, but one that teaches us to not always assume that the grass is greener wherever you’re not. The one thing that jumped out, though, was this quote from page 138, about two thirds of the way through the book:

‘Everyone on Earth has a treasure that awaits him … We, people’s hearts, seldom say much about those treasures, because people no longer want to go in search of them. We speak of them only to children. Later, we simply let life proceed, in its own direction, towards its own fate. But, unfortunately, very few follow the path laid out for them — the path to their destinies, and to happiness. Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.

‘So, we, their hearts, speak more and more softly. We never stop speaking out, but we begin to hope that our words won’t be heard: we don’t want people to suffer because they don’t follow their hearts.’

It’s as good a justification as has ever been made for not putting off, but grabbing life in both hands and doing today what you’ve always wanted, whatever the consequences, rather than tomorrow, later, or never.

I’ve been reading a lot of European history lately. For research. So it’s been a bit of a relief to switch to something lighter. Perhaps that’s why it took less than three days to work my way through The Pilgrimage.

By Paulo Coelho, it’s the story of his journey on the road to Santiago de Compostela. Having been there last month, and read two other books about the same trip in quick succession, I was keen to see what he had to say about it. I can safely say that he brought out things that I’d never seen in the other books. Or indeed any book at all, come to that.

This is a story of demonic possession, of exorcisms and speaking in tongues. Of harnessing an energy field that flows around the whole world, and of summoning up your personal spiritual guide for company, advice and inspiration. In short, it’s a story with so many more levels than anything else you’re likely to read, going beyond the realms of this world and borrowing unashamedly from the next. It’s also far less about his physical journey from one location to another, and more about his journey of personal discovery.

Of the three books I’ve read on the subject, this is the only one I’ve picked up after riding the train from Irun to Compostela myself, so it was interesting to read of the places I could remember passing through. I could recognise some of the locations, as I recalled them vividly from my own journey; particularly the old railway junk yard at Ponferrada where the old steam trains had been left, piled up on a piece of buckled track to rust and decompose over time. That very spot had been the location of a key event in the book, and was made all the more real by my own memories and, coincidentally, the notes I’d scribbled down in my notebook as I passed through.

I’d not read any Coelho before, so I took this one on faith after it was name-dropped by a casual acquaintance who, it turned out, hadn’t read it anyway. I wish I’d known that before I started: I got to the end needing someone with whom I could discuss it. But, alas, it looks like I’m alone on this one.

Most definitely a recommended read.

Probably moreso than any other book I can immediately call to mind.