SALT IS LEAVING - Book review

 

J.B. Priestley’s 1966 novel Salt is Leaving was first published as a Pan paperback original and attained a second printing in the same year.

From the first page, I was drawn in by the story and the writing style. The last novel of his I read was Saturn Over Water in 1980, which I found impressive. I still have five more of his books to read.

It begins in a Midlands bookshop owned by Mr Edward Culworth, Maggie’s father. Recently returned from London and a failed three-year affair, Maggie is helping at the shop. At times ‘Maggie felt she was quite attractive, but there were other times, and now more and more of them, when she was almost sure she was just a thick, dull lump’ (p9).

This particular day, however, her father doesn’t appear at the shop – and before long she realises he has ‘gone missing’, something he has never done before. Maggie lives with her parents and brother Alan, a University lecturer in physics.

Dr Lionel Humphrey Salt, a widower, is also concerned about a missing person – one of his patients, Noreen Wilks. At the last consultation he prescribed medicine for her liver problem. If she didn’t take the life-sustaining drug, she would die. Salt is about to depart from the town after seven years and has already been relieved in his GP role; however, he wants to locate Noreen before he goes.

Salt makes enquiries at various places, such as the George Pub: ‘The counter was thick with high blood pressures and potential coronaries, either shouting at one another or at the waiter and the barmaid’ (p24).

A link is made between Noreen and Dr Salt. So Maggie approaches the good doctor. ‘He seemed the oddest mixture – one minute sleepy, simple and rather sweet – the next minute hard and ruthless’ (p46).

Salt takes her to meet a local nightclub owner, Buzzy Duffield, who has contacts and owes the doctor a favour or two... Buzzy is quite a character – ‘He was wide and fat and bald, with an enormous face on which his features merely seemed to be huddled together in the middle’ (p47). He also exhibits a verbal tick, uttering Bzzz from time to time, but not often enough to become tedious.

Another contact they encounter is Jill Frinton, ‘A classy handsome piece – and about as soft and tender as a sheet of high-duty alloy’ (p51).

A daughter of a local big-wig and benefactor is Erica Donnington: ‘no hat but a lot of hair that needed washing, and was an expensive slut with a long loose face and body’ (p102).

Before long, Salt is approached in a heavy-handed manner, suggesting he should depart from the town immediately. ‘Somebody wants me to clear out of Birkden... simply because I’m asking questions about Noreen Wilks’ (p53).

Salt is well travelled, having served in Burma, then lived and worked in the New Territories, Hong Kong, in North Borneo, Penang and Singapore before returning to England. He’s forthright, persistent, brave, and a student of human nature. ‘When they’re deliberately lying, most people can’t maintain a steady tempo. When the big lie comes, either they hurry a little or slow down. There’s a change in tone too... With the early lies, when they feel they’re getting away with it, there’s a faint faint note of triumph, the impudence begins to show’ (p72).   

The interplay between Salt and Maggie is one of the book’s strengths.

Priestley throws in the occasional social comment in an amusing manner, such as: ‘There was no longer a railway connection between Hemton and Birkden, the nearest large town, apparently in order to make the road between them even more congested with buses and cars’ (p13). The town names are fictitious.

As the puzzle unfolds for the odd pair, sex, drugs and corruption figure though not too graphically for the reader.

The cover (artist unattributed) is excellent: Priestley refers to the ‘maze that finally turned into a high road’ (p5); the cinema ticket and the hotel room key are relevant, as is the rag doll.

A light quick read.

A PLACE IN THE HILLS - Book review

The novel A Place in the Hills is Michelle Paver’s second book, published in 2001.Though 523 pages, it’s a quick read. It’s a time-slip novel paralleling lives in Rome in 53 BC and in France in the 1980s.

It begins in 53BC in Rome during the festivities of the Day of Blood: ‘The air was thick with the smell of balsam and trampled roses, and the salty, metallic undertow of blood’ (p12). Among the crowds are a Roman officer, Gaius Cassius Vitalis, who is also renowned as a poet. His eye has caught the attractive figure of a young woman, Tacita, daughter of Publius Tacitus Silanus, one of the oldest clans in Rome. There is a mutual attraction, though a relationship is quite impossible due to their different stations in society. ‘One long look and I was brought down. She entered my blood.’

Then we briefly shift to 1972 in the French Pyrenees where Toni, eight-year-old daughter of archaeologist Charles Hunt is being bloody awkward, unlike her sister Caroline. Charles is determined to locate clues to back up his theory that the poet-soldier Cassius lived here, at the so-called Source. A book quotes Cassius writing ‘I know a place in the hills where the gods walk the earth’ (p334). In a lucid moment Toni realises that the only way she can win her father’s devotion is by becoming an archaeologist herself.

Next, we move to 1988 and meet a poor American, Patrick McMullan, who is joining his rich university friend Myles Cantellow. Myles is with Antonia Hunt, working on an archaeological site with her father, Charles. Also on the site is eight-year-old Modge (short for Imogen) and Antonia’s half-sister Nerissa.

Myles is not a likeable character. He ‘belonged to the fast set, which took hard drugs, was far too cool to do any work...’ (p51).

Against her father’s wishes, Antonia wanted to prove that Lycaris – the woman Cassius referred to in his love poems – ‘was not some dry poetic construct, but a living woman whom he had loved with all his heart’ (p365).

The dig is claustrophobic, passions are in conflict, there’s a love triangle, a misguided Modge who has a crush on Patrick, an intransigent father, and a tragedy that changes everything, and all seems lost for almost fourteen years.

The parallels between the past and the book’s present are mainly quite subtle – whether that’s a love-bite on Cassius’s neck, a piece of broken pottery in Tacita’s hand, or the convoluted relationships of the characters.

Perhaps there was too much gratuitous swearing. Despite that, the characters’ emotions and the (admittedly all-too brief) slices of ancient Rome are well realised. The writing style is good and Paver’s descriptions put you in many a scene.

And there’s a satisfying end.

 

SINGLE & SINGLE - Book review

John le Carré’s novel Single & Single was published in 1999 and deals with the world of finance after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, though of course it’s much more than that!

It begins in the present (1998) with Mr Wisner, a lawyer who worked for the finance company the House of Single & Single, facing the gun-toting Alix Hoban in Turkey. Wisner is aware that Hoban is affiliated to the Single firm and cannot understand why he is being held at gunpoint. It’s no spoiler to record that Wisner is shot dead (since it’s in the blurb!) A bit of a mystery.

Another mystery is in the form of Oliver Hawthorne. He’s is a peripatetic magic man, a conjuror, but there seems something unusual about his identity and past. He is wanted urgently by his bank manager (they had them in 1998, apparently).

Other mysteries include a Russian freighter being arrested and boarded in the Black Sea. And the disappearance of the Head of Single & Single, ‘Tiger’ Single, father of Oliver.

Mysterious Nat Brock is called in to investigate Mr Wisner’s purported suicide. He is not what he seems, a British Customs Officer...

Four years earlier, Oliver absconded from the firm of Single & Single when he discovered that his father was involved in financial chicanery with the Russian underworld, including money laundering and the dubious sale of Russian blood transfusions to America: ‘Human Blood is a Commodity – US Federal Trade Commission, 1966’) His conscience wouldn’t permit him to continue in the business, so he, ‘the idealist, the walk-in of all time’ contacts Brock...

Brock uses Oliver undercover and debriefs him when he can. ‘He had a priestly tone for these occasions. It went with a deep-felt sense of caring. When you take on a joe, you take on his problems, he would preach to his newcomers. You’re not Machiavelli, you’re not James Bond, you’re the over-worked welfare officer who’s got to hold everybody’s life together or somebody will run amok’ (p203).

‘Wasn’t that awful for you? Discovering your own dad was a crook and all?’ (p187). Reading this, I was reminded of Le Carré’s earlier masterpiece, A Perfect Spy, whose titular character, Rick Pym, was based on Le Carré’s own father, Ronald Cornwell. There’s the same love-hate relationship between father and son, and the exposure of flawed character.

Even though married with an estranged wife, Heather, and daughter, Oliver is not averse to carrying on an affair or two. His love-life might be described as ‘complicated’. ‘How is she, darling?’ Katrina cut in, with the special concern that mistresses evince for lovers’ wives’ (p213). Judging from the most recent revelations about his own affairs, the author definitely knew what he was talking about...

Oliver has returned from hiding to discover the whereabouts of his father. Not only for himself, but also to help Brock. It's a story of betrayal and redemption.

There are plenty of telling phrases and paragraphs one comes to expect from Le Carré, such as:

‘His eyes were water-pale and empty, and it was the emptiness that scared her: the knowledge that whatever amount of kindness anyone poured into them it was wasted. He could be watching his own mother dying, he wouldn’t look any different, she thought’ (p287). And: ‘Tractors sticking like slugs to their smear-trails’ (p322). And also: ‘White stubble grew where his brown hair had been, and it had spread over his cheeks and jaw in a downy silver dust’ (p3223).

And there are many varied characters to engage the reader’s attention throughout, not least Brock himself, his wing-woman Aggie, the beautiful but fragile wife of Hoban who is attracted to Oliver, the Russian dealers Mirsky and Yevgeny.

Considerable exposition is thrown into Chapter Seven, with lengthy unrealistic speech paragraphs, which slows down the narrative and causes the eyelids to drop...

Le Carré nearly always tends to play with the tenses. For this book, the narrative is past historic when detailing what is happening ‘now; for the flashbacks, he employs the present tense to depict past events and conversations!

The ending is tense and full of suspense (though not as good as The Night Manager in that regard) but I found it a little rushed. On the whole, however, it was a satisfying read.

UNCOMMON DANGER - Book review

Eric Ambler’s second thriller Uncommon Danger was published in 1937 (though my Fontana paperback shows the copyright as 1941...). 

The story begins with a Prologue at a board meeting of the Pan-Eurasian Petroleum Company in London. There are concerns about the renewal of oil concessions in Roumania. Bessarabia has been a contested area between Russia and Roumania since the Great War, mainly due its vital oil fields. ‘The party’s policy is a familiar one – anti-Semitism, a corporate state, an alliance with Germany, and the “saving of Roumania from the Jewish and Communist menace”’ (p123). The company chairman has a solution – it involved recruiting a certain Colonel Robinson to set things straight. ‘It was the power of Business, not the deliberations of statesmen that shaped the destinies of nations’ (p87).

Russian double-agent Borovansky has stolen Russian plans for a possible attack on Bessarabia, which, if made public, will generate anti-Russian feeling in Roumania and bring the Fascist Iron Guard to power who will then make an alliance with Nazi Germany. Incognito, Borovansky boards a train...

Meanwhile, Russian spies Andreas Zaleshoff and his sister Tamara are tipped off and commission a Spaniard, Ortega, to pursue Borovansky on the train, follow him to his hotel in Austria, and get the plans back.

Freelance journalist Desmond Kenton has had a bad run of luck gambling and boards the same train on his way to find a pal in Vienna who might supply him with funds. He meets a Mr Sachs. Kenton’s money troubles seem resolved when Mr Sachs asks him to deliver some papers across the Austrian border, paying handsomely – and then Kenton’s troubles begin!

An amateur hero out of his depth, Kenton discovers a dead body, is hunted as the murderer, and joins up with the two Russian spies in an attempt to obtain the incriminating plans/photos and clear his name.

In the process, Kenton is captured by Colonel Robinson (in actual fact assassin-for-hire Saridza). ‘You see, your business man desires the end, but dislikes the means... That is why Saridza is necessary... there is always dirty work to be done... and he and his kind are there to do it, with large fees in their pockets and the most evasive instructions imaginable’ (p121).

Boldly, Kenton tells Saridza, ‘It’s not just a struggle between Fascism and Communism, or between any other “-isms”. It’s between the free human spirit and the stupid, fumbling, brutish forces of the primeval swamp – and that, Colonel, means you and your kind’ (p84)

It’s a fast-paced adventure with Zaleshoff and his sister Tamara providing mystery and tension, while the villains are truly villainous.

Another excellent Fontana paperback cover