"Armadillo" by William Boyd

An audio book.

London. Lorimer Black is a loss adjuster. He finds a client, Mr Dupree, hanged. Lorimer's mother was a Romanian gypsy. He sleeps in Greenwich University's Sociology Dept, in a sleep lab run by Dr Alan Bury, a neighbour, who wants Lorimer to have lucid dreams.

His 3 older sisters live with his mother, grandmother, niece and ill father. His original name was Milomre Blocj but he changed it after returning from University at Inverness - as far from his family as possible. At school his exam results had been oxbridge level.

His new colleague, Torquil Helvoir-Jayne, thinks that Hogg, a boss, was involved in a shady deal - an over-insured building caught fire before it was ready. Lorimer has been sleeping for 3 years with Stella, who has a teenage daughter. He's become infatuated with a girl he's seen on TV in the company's ads - Flavia Malinverno. He writes in his journal which is called "The book of transfiguration". He collects antique helmets.

This sounds picaresque, baggy, like a Martin Amis novel. The author, by adding extracts from the journal and from dreams, can easily include extra material without needing to care about continuity. Family and work offer ways to introduce a spectrum of 2D characters. The helmet hobby doesn't make sense - a symbolic use for it is anticipated.

He negotiates a deal with the owners of the burnt-out building. Hogg tells him he's going to sack Torquil. Lorimer's next job involves a rock star, David Watts. He sees Flavia in person and asks her out. She agrees, though she's married - to a juggler.

Dimfne, a female colleague, asks to have sex with Lorimer. He declines. Torquil's wife catches her husband in bed with a young girl. She makes him leave the house. He's sacked. He asks Lorimer for help. Lorimer lets him move in. Lorimer's car is torched. He's attacked in the street. Hogg becomes suspicious of him, puzzled by some aspects of the arson case. Flavia tells him that she's told her husband Gilbert about him. The sister of the hanged man says that Lorimer's pressure forced the suicide (though actually Hogg applied the pressure). His father dies. A neighbour dies - Lorimer looks after her dog. Stella wants to move away - she's bought a fish farm and wants him to go with her. Everything seem to be going wrong.

He goes to a party. Gilbert is performing there with injuries that show he was the one who'd attacked Lorimer. The arsonist thanks him. The rock star thanks him. Torquil thanks him. Lorimer's puzzled. He writes up the arson case, showing how his colleagues are implicated. Alan tells him that his sleep difficulties are because he equates sleep to death, and he fears death. At home, depressed, he puts on a helmet and can't remove it. He goes to hospital. Flavia is offered a job in Vienna and asks him to go with her. No promises.

Like Lorimer, the author had many plates to keep spinning. I felt sympathy/empathy for nobody, though in other contexts the writing would make me feel something. The author just about holds things together - the localised farce doesn't destroy the whole. His write-up of the arson case restores the coherence - there are multiple scapegoats, and he's one of them. He adjusts to his losses. He finally has a plan.

Other reviews

• Caroline Boucher
• A.O. Scott (Helvoir-Jayne ... is one of the great comic creations of recent literature)

"The Party House" by Lin Anderson

An audio book.

Joanne is visiting Greg in the Scottish Highlands. He's a gamekeeper on an estate. They met only 10 days before in London. She has ulterior motives for staying. Lockdown is coming to a close. Greg's boss wants to re-open the Party House. During lockdown, some guests had helicoptered in and 6 locals had died from the resulting outbreak, so there's resistance to the re-opening. Caroline, the shopkeeper, is grumpy about Joanne's presence. Greg fears that he had carried the virus from the house to the village, Black Rig. In the night he hears vandals (relatives of the dead) attack the hot-tubs. Investigating, he sees a body in the foundations - a girl who'd disappeared 5 years before. Ilsa.

A group is arriving. Some were part of the group who were there at lockdown (he'd joined in with some of their sex activities).

Joanne's escaped from an abusive lover, Richard - a defence lawyer. She fears she may be pregnant by him. Greg's lied about who found the body. He has secrets about events from 5 years before. He and Caroline need to agree a story.

Joanne's pen name is Maya. She writes a blog. Caroline tells her that she was pregnant by Greg when Ilsa died. She had a miscarriage. Greg finds out that Joanne is pregnant. Greg's arrested for rape and murder then released. Caroline has offered Joanne a bed for the night then a lift to the airport - she's found out that Greg's semen was on Ilsa's body. Greg goes in the wood with a rifle. Joanne follows him.

A forest fire starts. Greg, a volunteer fire-fighter, helps stop it spreading to the Party House. Richard arrives. Joanne tells him it's his child to stop him hurting her, and tries to escape. Then she says it's not his child. He attacks her. Greg saves her and says he'll marry her whoever's baby it is. Caroline confesses to the accidental murder of Ilsa - she was jealous. She returns to London and attacks him on her blog for his attitude to women.

The author's choices about teasers and secrets don't quite work for me. Consequently the reporting of too many of the facts seems unnecessarily delayed.

Other reviews

• literarytreats (The setting was wonderfully depicted; ... But the thriller itself just wasn’t very thrilling.)

"The Color Purple" by Alice Walker

An audio book. In the preface the author says it's about a journey she's been trying to resist - from spiritualism (love of nature) to love of God.

It begins with Celie's letters - "Dear God, I'm 14 years old." Celie's mother is ill. Her father makes Celie pregnant before the mother dies, then makes her pregnant again. She's married off to Albert (a widower with 4 kids) aka Mister, who never gives her an orgasm (she's never had one). Shug stays for a while, a supposed hussy, a Blues singer, who Mister had wanted to marry. Celie's happy for the two of them to sleep together. Shug teaches her about female anatomy and orgasms, and gets Mister to stop beating her.

Sofia is married to Harpo who wants to control her. Celie suggests that he tried hitting her. He ends up badly bruised. She goes out with a boxer and is jailed for punching the major - she didn't want to be a maid.

She finds letters that have been sent to her by Nellie, the sister she thought dead. The sister had worked for a childless pair of missionaries who adopted Adam and Olivia, Celie's kids. They sailed to Africa via England. She spent over 5 years in Africa, comparing the men's attitude to women with US white's attitude to blacks. The African husbands have multiple wives and there are friendships between the wives. A UK-funded road is built through the village, knocking down the church. Nellie learns that the man she thought was her father may not be. Reading that letter, Celie investigates.

Shug wises Cilie up about God - that the God learnt about in church may not be the real God, that God invented sex, and that the white Jesus of illustrated bibles wasn't true. But that's as far as she seems to get about understanding the male/socially constructed nature of Gods. The Africans have understood Adam and Eve differently - their word for "naked" is "white" so blacks can't be naked. Nellie writes about a rich England woman who became a missionary to escape her family's pressure to marry and to have time to write books.

Celie inherits a house. She's told "you're a black, poor, ugly, woman. You're nothing." Shug (over 50) goes off with a 19 y.o blues flautist boy. Nellie returns after 30 years with Sam as husband (Sam's missionary wife having died). Celie's children return too, one of them having tribal scars (and nearly genital mutilation)

Purple is a common natural colour that amazes each time you see it.

Doesn't seem much of a book to me.

Other reviews

• Goodreads
• Mel Watkins (Most prominent is the estrangement and violence that mark the relationships between Miss Walker's black men and women. .. it was largely ignored by most black writers until the early 1960's ... If there is a weakness in this novel - besides the somewhat pallid portraits of the males - it is Netti's correspondence for Africa. While Netti's letters broaden and reinforce the theme of female oppression by describing customs of the Olinka tribe that parallel some found in the American South, they are often mere monologues on African history. Appearing, as they do, after Celie's intensely subjective voice has been established, they seem lackluster and intrusive.)

"The Accident", Katie McMahon

An audio book set in Hobart. In the prologue there's a school trip. Sirens.

There are scattered extracts from a coroner's report through the novel but we don't know who dies until near the end.

9 months earlier, Emma (12) is with Grace (43), her plain mother. Emma's the result of a one-night stand that Grace had with Chris, who still does his duties. Emma has serious eating disorder issues related to bullying. Grace is a vetenary doctor. Chris and Grace move Emma to a school where her married lover Ben (a doctor) has a daughter Jasmine. Ben and Grace were friends from 18. He'd told her about meeting pretty Louise. Grace was 21 when her mum died. At the wake, she tried to seduce Ben. He turned her down.

Zoe, an art teacher in her thirties, has been dumped by David after nearly 10 years. She stays with cousin Clare then finds a flat. She works at the school Emma goes to. She meets Nick (a carpenter) at a party and starts sleeping with him.

Imogen is a doctor. Plain, she lost her virginity to Nick and slept with him a further 7 times. She's becoming careless at work, so maybe the "The Accident" is not to do with traffic but at the hospital. She changes her route to work so that she passes Zoe's. When she faints at work, she gives Nick as her contact. The fainting was fake - she just wanted Nick to drive her around.

Zoe tells Nick that David had spend 10k dollars on IVF because of her endometriosis. Clare becomes pregnant with twins.

Emma befriends Zoe at a poetry group that Zoe runs. Emma knows who Jasmine is.

At school, Imogen did homework for several of the boys and gave them blow-jobs. She tries to befriend Zoe. Zoe knows that Imogen and Nick were friends.

Imogen tells Zoe that she tried to cover up a mistake at work. Zoe thinks she should report it. She's worried when she sees Imogen at her school. Imogen threatens to reveal Emma's problems widely to get Zoe into trouble. Zoe phones Nick and Grace suggested they should talk. They immediately drive to the school in separate cars.

Grace is in a hospital bed - dying? She astral travels. Imogen dies - she drove on the wrong side of the road missing Nick but hitting Grace. Zoe splits with Nick, being upset how he and his friends exploited Imogen. Ben and Grace marry. In a post-death chapter Imogen tells us that Ben had harmed her career by giving her a bad reference.

The ending's over-long and the plot becomes more creaky.

Other reviews

• Goodreads

"Soldier Sailor" by Claire Kilroy

An audio book.

The dedication mentions Don Quixote and Sarah Bannan our wounded soldier whose beloved sailor Rory departed this world .

She is bringing up a baby boy ("you"). The husband moves into the box room. After an argument he says he wants to communicate only via a solicitor. It's unclear when this happens - the age of the child varies from 0 to 4 years. Next day he says he didn't mean it. He works long hours. She does childcare - "The world rotated beneath us and we were the world." At one point she identifies with the virgin Mary (who suffered long-term whereas her crucified son didn't). She leaves her son in the grass with a message in his blanket and walks away - with pills? She sees a nestling on the ground. She's dive-bombed by the mother bird. She hears a dog barking when its owner finds the baby. She returns to collect the baby. The child is so "committed to being a baby that it spends half the night practising". She goes to playgroups where mothers sniff their babies to see if they need changing. Cars are parked on pavements, making buggy-pushing dangerous. The cashier are the supermarket outpaces her. Whenever she shares photos of the child doing something cute, the father quickly replies with a smiley. When he returns home the child has a bump on his head and she's hurt herself. He says that a workmate's wife had post natal depression and knives were hidden from her. One evening when he asks about her day she says that she met a friend in the playground, and she thinks she sounds like a 4 year old. He reacts as if she is. But she's met a friendly father whose wife is a doctor. She knew him at school.

They lose the child while in IKEA and blame each other. They constantly blicker. He has a busy job. He doesn't do his fair share of childcare - changing the odd nappy (and doing it pooorly) is insufficient. She takes the child in a buggy to the shore, becomes surrounded by water, has to abandon the buggy (with wallet and phone in it) and wade to safety. Maybe her friend is there to help. She will eventally ask the husband to leave?

It's a man's world. The boy dresses as Superman. The person working in the Charity Shop is a witch.

Other reviews

• Sarah Crown
• Stephanie Merritt
• Stuart Kelly (The narrative is as fractious as a toddler, with jumps in time (is Sailor two, four, newborn?) and points where there is no distinction between what Soldier imagines might happen and what is happening.)
• The fiction fox (My problem with it, is that there are already so many books that do this exact same thing. ... critiques of one individual man cross the line into generalized man-hate. I’m very tired of that trope. ... It crossed a line from righteous annoyance to wallowing in victimhood for me.)

"The Family Chao" by Lan Samantha Chang

An audio book.

On the way home after his first term at University, still a virgin, James tries to resuscitate an old man. His oriental parents have had a restaurant for decades, adapting their authentic menu to US tastes. The community is glad that the restaurant is still open, though the father's rather objectionable. Many ethnic outlets are moving away. His mother has recently moved into a Buddhist nunnery. Dargo (William), his handsome brother, has just split with Katherine (she's oriental, an orphan brought up by non-asians in the States) after 12 years. His brother Ming is the clever one. At least some of the brothers were bullied. People speculated that some of the brothers disliked their father Leo. They were brought up Christian. James has always fancied Alice, who works at the wholesale store.

Dargo wants money because he's bought an appartment to live with Brenda (who slept with all the cast in a school play). He asks his father for partnership in the firm, and asks Katherine for the return of his expensive engagement ring.

Alice is an artist. She hasn't even kissed a boy. She asks James for sex. He ejaculates with his clothes still on. He receives a message that his mother's had a stroke. He learns that the bag he picked up after helping the man had lots of cash in it. Where did it end up?

Dargo's mother tells him that he must love his cheating father otherwise he won't love the world. Dargo puts on a grand Xmas meal hoping to impress Brenda, his mother, and the community. A rival gives him a gift of meat. At the meal his father announces that he's selling the restaurant. It's suspected that the meat gift was the Chao's dog Alf. The father dies in suspicious circumstances. Soon after the mother dies (another stroke). Dargo is put on trial. The brothers are discussed online.

In court it's as if the family and their race are on trial rather than an individual. People wearing various badges (including "Justice for Alf" badges) appear at the trial. The bag contained $50. Olem (a worker at the restaurant) heard Dargo and his father argue about it. We learn that James found his father's body in the deep freeze room. The key to exit it was gone. Dargo says in court that he'd thought of locking his father in there but bottled out at the last moment. He breaks down hating his own weakness. Ming says that he'd hidden the key, that it was all his fault, and has a mental breakdown.

Outside court Olem says that she's Leo's daughter. Leo treated her mother badly, stealing from her to have the money to go to the States. Olem admits to being an immigrant without documentation. She says that when their mother suspected who Olem was, their mother went to the Buddhists. Alf is found.

Olem has the ring and the bag with $50k. James knows this, and that Olem was implicated in the murder, but doesn't say. Dargo gets 30 years. He feels he deserves it. Katherine remains bafflingly faithful, a friend of the family. Alice goes to New York thanks to contacts given to her by Ming.

For a whodunnit it does a good job of handling other themes. I missed the connections to “The Brothers Karamazov” (which I've not read). The brothers' attitude to Asians, their parents, the American Dream, etc are revealing. I like the way that the trial is used to bring these themes to the fore.

Other reviews

• Jonathan Lee (At the novel’s halfway point we are confronted with the words “THREE MONTHS LATER”. The central events on which the plot turns have taken place off stage, in an unlit space. Chang is more interested in consequences ... however appalled the sons might be by their father’s perspectives, they continue to absorb elements of his character. You are what you eat, the novel seems to suggest. And you eat what your family, or your country, puts on the table.)
• writingnearthelake
• lonesomereader (Lan Samantha Chang gives a modern-day retelling of “The Brothers Karamazov” to relate the story of a family with a domineering patriarch and three very different Chinese-American sons ... Leo is rudely vicious in maintaining his dominance and ready to serve up whatever the public wants to feed their appetites and line his pockets. He succumbs to the American ideology that whatever is most profitable is also correct. ... the tragedy which occurs sparks public reactions showing deep-seeded stereotypes and biases. Though their situation is unique and the brothers come armed with different points of view, they are churned into an ongoing discourse. It takes honest reconciliations to extract themselves from this and persist in building their own lives.)

"Belief Systems" by Tamar Yoseloff (Nine Arches Press, 2024)

Poems from Ambit, Bad Lillies, Magma, Shearsman, The Poetry Review, Wild Court, etc.

Sometimes there's dense, clipped phrasing with sound effects (e.g. "a slack clock melts frost/ ferns crust the skirting board// the country gathered in vagrancy/ before the stooping waif// he sinks in centuries of bracken/ a clockwork of hedgerows" from "Blue Rag Zine").

Some other pieces seem rather diluted to me. "Fault Lines" for example has lines of 1 to 6 words that fill a page from top to bottom. A piece of porcelain survived countless owners until the persona dropped it. The ending is "you said we can mend it,/      so we will make a start// learning to live/with what is fractured". A simple plot with too many words and too much white space, even if the stanzas are supposed to represent the jagged fragments.

Each of the 12 poems in the middle section, "Combines", is illustrated by a Rauschenberg (I recognise a few - the bed, the goat in a tyre). "Canyon" is laid out as equally-sized near-rectangles. It reads like a more colourful section of a BBC arts piece by Waldemar Januszczak - interesting enough. The next piece, "Rhyme", is in couplets that assonate or loosely rhyme - "that/back", "Stage/change", "uniforms/harm", etc. "Factum" is a loose mirror poem - a speculum? (first line like the final line, etc).

4 poems are mestostics - they have a central column of characters in bold that spell a sentence.

"Noise" is a page of lines that criss-cross the page.

"In Concert" is an easy read with standard poetic observations - "strangers sharing breath ... How strange to be silent together ... the intimacy of listening in the dark ... liquid longing of the strings ... Music could be conjured by a baton's wave".

My conclusion is that there's much variety in this book - "experimental" to mainstream. Don't be put off if you dislike the first poem you read.