"Conclave" by Robert Harris

An audio book.

The pope has died. Lomeli (it's his close 3rd person PoV) is organising the vote. Tremblay, a Canadian, is one of the favourites, but Lomeli is told that the pope was about to sack him for misconduct. Bellini, an intellectual, is the liberals' favourite, and Lomeli's. Adeyemi is 10 years younger than the others, Nigerian and black - a reactionary. Factions develop. Female ordination? Proportional representation (will the dead pope be the last Italian one)? There are protesters outside. Benites arrives late - born in the Philipines with experience in Iraq and Istanbul, but little is known about him - he wasn't even in the list of cardinals. The pope had secretly included him. Lomeli gives a speech, trying to remain neutral, saying that variety within the church provides robustness against change. Voting begins - mobiles are banned and windows covered. Over a quarter of the cardinals get at least one vote in their favour. Tedesco is top. Lomeli supports Bellini. After the 2nd round, Adeyemi leads. But a Nigerian waitress seems angry with him. Lomeli finds out that 30 years before, when she was under-age and Adeyemi was 30, he made her pregnant. Lomeli finds out that Tremblay had arranged for her to be there. Lomeli challeges him. He says he summoned her because the pope asked him to.

Lomeli sneaks into the pope's room and finds hidden evidence that Tremblay (who has 500k euros in the bank) has been giving bribes in cash to several cardinals. He asks Bellini what to do. Bellini says that he should destroy the evidence. Instead he distributes the evidence to all. In the 7th vote, Lomeli (to his horror) is leading. Bombs go off nearby - the church is under threat. Benites wins the vote. Lomeli finds out that he's a woman with such a large clitoris that he was brought up as a boy. Benites says that the Pope knew this.

An easy read - a good audio book choice. Like others, I found it unexpectedly gripping. I was interested in the factual background and liked the way that individual morality is contrasted with the future of the institution - without doubt there is no faith; being pope may be a personal sacrifice for the sake of the church.

Other reviews

• Ian Sansom (Conclave doggedly sets out to provide readers with the fundamental satisfactions of story: of sequence, configuration and organisation.)
• shereadsnovels (it was the ending which struck the only wrong note for me. I had been able to sense that some sort of twist was coming up, and when it did, I felt slightly cheated. It was something that had actually passed through my mind earlier in the novel, only to be dismissed because I had also thought of several other, more convincing ways in which the story could end)
• dearauthor (I am still in shock trying to figure out what happened to me when I was reading this story, because I found it *gripping*. I could not put it down even despite the fact that any more or less experienced reader would know who will become a Pope the moment this character appears in the story.)
• John Boyne (it's a shame that Conclave, while an entertaining read, proves far less insightful than it might have been. ... Perhaps it's because their villainy is so rather mundane that Conclave fails to engage. It's not unreasonable to assume that many cardinals would like to become pope, but as each one slips from grace, the whole thing starts to become a little daft. ... Unconcerned with religious debate or philosophical argument, Conclave quickly descends into high camp. ... for all its faults, there’s no denying that the novel is a page-turner. The action moves at a breakneck pace and, with each passing ballot, the reader is keen to discover who’s up and who’s down. The twists keep coming, some visible from a mile away, some genuine surprises, but it’s the final one, saved for the closing pages, that stretches credibility to breaking point.)

"Old bones in Puglia" by Tom Benjamin

An audio book.

Dan (an English widower living in Bologna with his 19 y.o. daughter Rose) goes on holiday with his boss/father-in-law Giovanni (a private investigator) and Rose's friend Delores, 29. They go south. They meet an ancient relative, Adolerata, who promptly dies having seen Rose. They meet an archelogy prof and his young helper Persefone. There's a local cave which is being excavated. The prof says that an anfora from the museum has been replaced by a fake. Is the Malvaggio (the local mafia) to blame? Giovanni investigates, checking with local dealers. He used to be a policeman there, and had solved a famous case - he'd literally smoke out an old lady poisoner from the village's network of tunnels. He visits the studio of a local artist - Cornelius. He's disappeared, leaving blood which has disappeared by the next day when the police visit. There's a broken virility statue of a local businessman, Diamante - is someone putting a curse on him to cause erectile dysfunction? There are historical interludes - about Padre Pio; about how old relics have a certificated chain of provenance, like racehorses; the "male bottleneck" - a time when there were far fewer males than females.

The prof going missing. Grasso is killed minutes after giving Dan and Giovanni info. Dan sees who did it - someone who knows a local female teacher. He tells the police before he realises that being a witness of a mafia killing put him and his family at risk. They find the prof chained in a farmhouse where there's illegal betting. Persefone invites him to her house. They have sex. When he awakes, he's in handcuffs and his car has gone. He releases himself. A sex game? Rose and Delores have hardly been mentioned. Now Rose is missing. The streets are packed - a religious procession with hooded people and random fireworks. He's chased by a hooded person with a knife. He kills in self-defence. It's the female teacher. He's arrested, released. He and Giovanni explore the caves. They find a coven - a circle of cadavars and women. For decades, women have been killing men who've been bad to women. Adolerata was a leader. Rose is next in line. She's told to kill Giovanni (the poisoner had been part of the coven) otherwise Dan would be killed. They escape. There is no Malvaggio - it was a rumour the women concocted to keep the mafia away. But now the real mafia were infiltrating. The prof had been selling off relics to pay off his gambling debts, replacing them in the museum with fakes.

I think you'll need to enjoy reading about history and Italian culture to enjoy this book. Fortunately, I do. But I'm not so keen on "blood visibly dripped from the handle of her knife". Visibly?

Other reviews

• goodreads

"The illustrated man" by Ray Bradbury (Harper Perennial, 2005)

First published in 1952. In the prologue (which I found promising) a man meets a wanderer who's cursed with skin that shows stills and movies. The wanderer sleeps while the man watches the movies one by one. There are 16 stories. After reading The Veldt, Kaleidoscope, The Other Foot, The Highway, and The Man, I decided to skip the rest. The plots are sometimes ok, always straightforward, often predictable. Ditto the characters. The men generally act like your average guy.

See the Wikipedia page for details.

"Killing in the shadows" by Kate Ellis

An audio book set in York (though it's unnamed).

Little Freya is visited at night by a little girl Anna. Her brother Tom is visited by Jack. Lexi Verity, a TV presenter, is found dead in her swimming pool, stabbed. Her husband's a Lord. Her first husband's a TV actor. He's been paying Lexi's chaffeur and housemaid for information. Nathan Cord, who used to stalk her, has been recently released. Her ex-boyfriend, a chef, has asked her for loan. She's been having an affair with the gardener. Carling, a psychic who Lexi used, has bouts of authenticity that help the police. Sirus, who's making recreations of local murders in a museum exhibition, does an inexact recreation of Lexi's death. A museum worker is the ex of a policeman.

Douglas, the boss of a gambling firm (an ex-cop) is found dead, stabbed. He had a daughter, Izzy (18), out of wedlock. He'd just gone to a solicitor to change his will in Izzy's favour.

There'd been a fire in the house where Freya lives, when it was a pub. A child had died. The father (a widower) had committed suicide. The child's nurse, Matilda Smith, had been sleeping with him. Lexi's housekeeper had found docs and a birth certificate showing that Lexi had been Matilda. Bobby, a half-sister of Anna, is becoming a nun. She realised recently that Lexi might have been Matilda. Lexi had lied to police about Bobby to protect her from accusations of arson.

Penny lives in the house next to Freya's family. She's a solicitor (the one that Douglas saw). She used to be a barmaid in the pub and had a key for it. She fancied the owner. She's lit the fire. She hated Lexi and was worried that her next TV series about crimes would involve her. Douglas recognised her. She's arrested in the museum while she's looking after Freya and Tom.

PoV is quite tightly controlled but only at the expense of people having very expressive eyes, etc - e.g. "Ben thought he could see a knowing look in her eyes". Police are happy to tell suspects (or Lexi's agent) about what other suspects have said. There are many suspects and interconnections between them - much more plot than psychological depth.

Other reviews

• Carol Westron (It is an excellent story, with engaging central characters that depict the police as human and vulnerable, but also caring and decent people. The plot is complex but coherent, with many skilfully laid false trails)
• classicmystery (So many seemingly disparate threads that come together slowly to form a complete picture. Things that seemed irrelevant suddenly becomes part of the main plot, but in a way that makes sense. ... And while there’s a supernatural element in the story, it just enhances the mystery rather than distract from it.)

"She's always hungry" by Eliza Clark (faber, 2024)

• Build a body like mine - A woman who's had weight problems finds that she's losing weight though she's still over-eating. Her female lover advises her to see a doctor. She has a tapeworm. Managed, it solves her problem, thought her partner leaves her. She offers tapeworm eggs online [No - the idea's ok but the execution's rather flat]
• The problem solver - Juliet's been raped, we're told. She wants to tell someone but the only person available is flatmate Oscar. He thinks she should report it. Against her wishes he goes out (Juliet following), finds the rapist in a pub and punches him, knocking out a tooth in front of mutual friends. She starts getting messaged [No. Execution too ordinary]
• She's always hungry - Published in "Granta". It's a mermaid piece with stronger-than-usual SF/alien/coming-of-age overtones. [Yes. The world-building's unobtrusive. Could be a first chapter. The content guide says that "it takes place in a matriarcal village, where men are heavily subject to gendered repression and systematic violence"]
• The shadow over little Chitaly - Online reviews of a half-Italian, half-Chinese takeaway [No]
• Hollow bones - 33 pages. Min wakes in an alien craft. The rest of her crew died while at a dig on a distant planet. She has a leg wound which puzzles the alien, friendly Dr Noah. She drifts in and out of consciousness, thinking her mother is still alive. To complicate matters further, her translator's on the blink. Fen is beside her. Her wound is luminous blue, When she touches it, her hand develops blisters. Fen and Min distrust Noah - is Min being used as an experiment? They get a ship to collect them. Min has her leg and hand amputated. Then she notices a blue luminesence in her mouth
• Goth GF - The narrator who works in a bar has a female Goth co-worker who criticises colleagues' make-up and taste in music. She self-harms. On Instagram she has rude selfies and a big following. The narrator (who late in the story is revealed to be male) fancies her - she's doing a Ph.D. He gets tattoos like hers. She bluntly rejects his offer of a date. He gives her his tips as long as she continues to belittle him.
• Extinction event - Earth is dying. Some plant/animals are brought back from a distant plant. They breath chlorine, eat microplastics, and exhale oxygen. The narrator looks after them and works out how they reproduce. When they're transplanted, the Earth improves, but the beings die from disease and grieve for each other. The narrator doesn't think this is moral.
• Nightstalkers - California. Keith tells his mother that he doesn't want to continue school. He wants to start a band with friend Tommy and get a girl vocalist. He and Tommy sneak into unlocked houses and take things. Tommy has a new girlfriend Rainbow who wants to try acid. Keith and her try some. He drifts off on a high. Tommy finds him in a house. They start making out. They run off back to Rainbow when the owner threatens them with a gun. Keith's happy.
• Shake well - The female narrator, 15, has bad acne and older boyfriend Kyle, a minor drug dealer. She squeezes and squirts until she buys an online remedy that seems to work fine. But her face becomes brittle, it cracks and bits come off. It can be mended. She'll made do. [Not much of an ending]
• The king - The narrator is in a phone-selling company. Shauna, a colleague, isn't impressed by him. He killed and ate his father. He eats only humans. He's working his way through Roy at the moment, who's tied up in the narrator's home. Roy is a seer. He predicts the end of the world in 63 days. The narrator prepares. There's mutually assured destruction. He sleeps for 100 years, wakes to become leader of survivors who live in a theme park. He teaches them technology and farming. He expands his power. Shauna appears with her band of followers. The narrator turns out to be a female. The narrator wants to mate with Shauna rather than humans, to create a master race. 30 years later Shauna's taken control. She cuts the narrator's head off but because she doesn't eat him, he regenerates, swimming to the continent and starting a new group, planning to conquer Shauna's tribe.
• Company man - Dora's father works for the party. She's on probation. She used to be Marti. Through the story she compares her (Dora's) reactions to those Marti would have had. She has a recurring, progressing dream involving a red tent. A man from the water board dates her. She lies that she's a widow but was lonely before that. He says his young son died and then his wife died of cancer because she didn't want treatment. They start having frequent sex. She dreams that she reaches the tent, that inside there's a cabaret. The emcee gives her a knife and there's a baby. The man says he's been searching for her - she killed his son and because of her father's connections was able to start a new life with a new identity. He strangles her. She dreams that at the cabaret she's put in a cage and sees the others have fun. [Without the dream sequences this would have been passable, readers speculating about Dora's past, and her attempt to forge a new self - another SF piece? The dreams add a layer of interpretation.]

The content guide (i.e. trigger alerts) is over 2 pages long. One entry says "The shadow over little Chitaly" contains extensive descriptions of food.

After a weak start there's impressive variety - Keith's high in "Nightstalkers" is nothing like Min's drugged confusion in "Hollow bones". There's variety also in the plot/character balance. In pieces like "Extinction event" the plot summary tells you the piece's purpose. In "Nightstalkers", though a lot happens, it's Keith's thoughts about his future life that are significant. All stories involve people who can't be trusted. Gender is pretty fluid. I'm not impressed/disturbed by the humour or horror in the way that the reviewers are. Yes, there's cannibalism but it's not gratuitous.

Other reviews

• Yagnishsing Dawoor (Clark is a bona-fide queen of body horror, sadistic in her choice of imagery. ... The title story, set within a matriarchal community with strict rules for its men – fishers vulnerable to the dark call of the sea – is a delectable, code-scrambled mermaid tale that plays with ideas about male and female power (“The machinations of men had done so little for this place, and for the world outside of here”) and adds a mischievous twist to notions of communal safety and female self-sacrifice. It comes swaddled in influences, from Andersen’s fairytale to Orkney folklore and Lovecraftian mythos ... The King satirises the “femgore” subgenre with which Clark has been identified, dramatising its excesses while relishing its cliches)
• Emily Fletcher (Clark addresses sensitive topics with a humour that doesn’t feel dismissive. Instead, her approach is both relatable and, surprisingly, comforting, striking a balance that acknowledges the seriousness of these issues without losing her unique, and comedic voice. ... ‘The Shadow over Little Chitaly’ is the story that stood out to me the most – This story was extremely laugh-out-loud worthy.)
• Ian Mond (“The Shadow Over Little Chitaly” is easily one of the funniest stories I’ve read in years ... Equally funny, but with lashings of cannibalism and gore, is “The King”, my favourite piece and one of three science fiction stories in the collection.)
• Emily Goulding (My personal favourites were ‘The King’ and ‘Shake Well’, as well as the outstanding ‘The Shadow of Little Chitaly’)
• thefictionfox

"A quiet death in Italy" by Tom Benjamin

An audio book

Dan (English) works in Bologna as a private detective for the firm run by "Commandante" (an Italian ex-policeman). Before long Dan will be boss. He has a 13 y.o. daughter Rose. His Italian wife (daughter of the commandante) died 3 years before. An old anarchist, Paulo Solitudine, has been found dead in the river. He'd disappeared after a police raid on their squat. The mayor's wife Marta (who lectures about Marx) called the firm for help because she's suspicious of her husband's role in Paolo's death - she'd been having an affair with Paulo. Her husband (Carlo Manzi) has been more attentive to her recently. And a mayoral election is a month away. Dan finds that he's giving money to a pregnant woman, that he's keen on removing the red tape on city development, and has been dealing in property. Dan discovers a passage from Paulo's flat to the river. Paulo's lover Delores finds a notebook in his flat, which she passes to Dan. It's a diary going back to 1979, the time when Paulo, Carlo and Marta were socialist friends. The police take Dan in for questioning, taking his SIM card. They talk to his boss, explaining that they want stability.

We get extracts from Paolo's notebook. He and Marta had slept together (so why had Marta denied it?). Carlo had pointed a gun at him, then himself. The revolutionary group had been short of money so Paulo had been part of a group planning to steal some money. He'd got 7 years for it.

Marta asks him for an urgent meeting. Her husband and the chief of police are there. Having realised that Paolo knew about their property dealings, Carlo and Marta had schemed a revival of Paolo's affair with Marta to keep him quiet. Marta hadn't known about Carlo's affair and had been worried when Paolo died. She'd enjoyed the attention she'd been getting from Paolo. Dan wonders if she's being forced into this and offers her protection.

The commandante, the current head of police, and Dan talk. The police pension fund was dirty money, funding the mayor campaign (he'd been an informer for years). The commandante's firm may have got start-up money from the same source. "We are family," the commandante tells Dan.

At Paolo's funeral there's a protest. At the anarchist's urban farm, "Death of an Anarchist" is performed. The police raid, burning the place down. Dan ends up in an abandoned building with the head of police and a policeman, his subordinate, who he kills. He threatens an anarchist who's been working for him, saying he'll frame him for the policeman death if he doesn't continue working for him. Dan accepts the situation. He ensures that incriminating parts of the notebook are published in time for the election

In the printed book the diary extracts are in italics. In the audio version the distinction between extracts and main narrative is less clear. There's quite a lot about the sights and history of Bologna, which I didn't mind. The view of the Bolognese about themselves and other Italians might be unfair. I like how allegiances are complex. Old and young anarchists aren't always allies. Police and criminals may work together against the destabilising anarchists. I like the set piece of the funeral. I don't so much like "an audible gasp"

Other reviews

• Sylvia Maughan (On first reading, it was difficult to get a clear picture of the plot. This may have been due to the way in which much of the information comes through dialogue. The dialogue itself seems clear and very authentic, but it masks the information that is needed to understand the plot. In some places it is the speed of the storytelling that causes the difficulty.)

"Granta 163: Best of young British novelists" (Granta, 2023)

Extracts from the work of 20 novelists under 40 - about 5 men. I know of Eleanor Catton, Saba Sams and Eley Williams. The introduction by Sigrid Rausing (a judge) roughly categorizes the writers -

• affection for the local - Thomas Morris, Saba Sams
• make meaning of hard lives - Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Natasha Brown
• displacement and alienation - Olivia Sudjic, Lauren Aimee Curtis, Jennifer Atkins, Anna Metcalfe, Eliza Clark
• experimental - Eley Williams, Derek Owusu, Sara Baume, Graeme Armstrong, Sarah Bernstein
• defying categorisation - Eleanor Catton
• what is love - K Patrick
• historical - Isabella Hammad, Tom Crewe
• speculative - Sophie Mackintosh
• deadpan, experimental, alienation - Camilla Grudova

Re the judges -

• Rachel Cusk "talked about writers' ability (or failure) to control and transcend their own material"
• Tash Aw "questioned how far we should privilege a text's internal sense or logic"
• Brian Dillon "noted the slightly caressing, watery feel of many of the novels on the shortlist, and the hard singularity of others"
• Helen Oyeyemi "(the judge among us perhaps most committed to fiction testing the boundaries of convention) was also interested in whether the writer succeeded in evoking curiosity in the reader"

Armstrong's piece about gangland activity (drugs, blades) is written "in dialect" without restricting itself to one register - "The internal revealed itself in the level ae substance abuse, isolation n suicide"; "we got ready fur T in the Park the-gither n bounced on a bus wae aw the GYT wans"; "Drug-inspired delusion or Christmas epiphany, A cannae say fur sure but everyhin changed fae that night on"

Jennifer Atkins' extract has this - "I found a taxi without trouble - Annie had promised there wouldn't be trouble. Earlier that month she'd invited me to come for dinner, the last weekend of the summer, for reunion of sorts at her and Edward's bungalow. She had spoken, drolly, about the meadows and the fields in their part of the country, and the drollness with which she'd spoken didn't match the sight of the late-flourishing land I saw from the taxi window. The sight from the window didn't match anything". Note the chaining together of sentences, the linking by repetition of "trouble", "droll", and "window".

Sara Baume writes "She has been ten for a month and she does not like it. She carries the weight of her extra digit like a chain-mail vest. She hunches her shoulders as if recoiling from the cold metal."

Eliza Clark's piece has atmosphere. It's a mermaid piece with stronger than usual SF/alien/coming-of-age overtones.

Tom Crewe's piece, unlike several of the others, is a self-contained story. I like it, especially the plot. Charles and another man in his 60s are invited to an exhibition of recently-dead Soutine's paintings. They were both his models, both working for a time at the same hotel. They compare how they've changed (Charles only a little). Neither recalls the other, though the other one recalls Charles's wife-to-be, a room-maid. Charles and the room-maid had opened a shop together, then divorced childless. They haven't met for 20 years. Home from the exhibition's opening he writes her an invitation to the show.

Saba Sams' "Gunk" is maybe my favourite piece.