Neither Here Noir There

Ok, before reading the rest of this post it is necessary to provide a caveat to you, dear reader, and that caveat is this; I've apparently become a huge noir fan. I liked Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, I downright loved Brick and now this....



Hugh Laurie is, of course, the British actor best known for playing the misanthropic American doctor, Gregory House. Prior to that he played a series of finely done comic characters on Blackadder, A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster as well as many other fine BBC productions. So, to add to this rather long list of accomplishments he also went to Cambridge (and Eton) reading Anthropology and Archeology and was a national class rower there. So, on top of being one of the better actors of our day, this man is a fine athlete (his dust-jacket proclaims him to be an avid motorcylist too), and a none-too-shabby-intellectual. Oh, and more to the point, he is also a writer.
This book is both a fine send-up of the typical spy-novel and a witty tromp through a deconstructionist view of the noir novel. The protagonist's dystopian and amusingly cynical worldview leans more towards Atkinson's Blackadder than the character Laurie plays currently.
Generally in the summertime I find room for a bit of lighter fair, and I expected this to be just that. In one sense it was an amazingly easy read, and a fun world to be tossed into, but on a whole other level it was actually very well written in a way that other writers in the genre so rarely are.

Buy the book and read it, it's summer, there's no better time.

Long time.... no post

Alright, it's been awhile, I admit. Now I should be able to post more regularly since we have cable and internet, running water, electricity, flush toilets and other apparently common ammenities of the 21st century.

So a brief review of the books of the past month or so since I last posted....


Mort, Sourcery, and Wyrd Sisters - all by Terry Pratchett


Mort may be my favority non-guards related Terry Pratchett book. The premise of Death taking an apprentice and what that would mean to a mortal is interesting. As with all the Death books this book deals with mortality, relativity and what family means.

From the best, to one of the worst (or so I think), Sourcery. Dealing with the issue of distribution of power and what paternalism and nepotism can mean it can be a bit predictable at times. And although it pains me to say it, I don't actually enjoy Rincewinds role in this book.

Wyrd Sisters, another of the witches books, retells the story of Macbeth - with only a slight gender-bending of roles. It's a great retelling and reshaping of Shakespeare from the 3 witches point of view.

The Road - Cormac McCarthy


The Road presents us with a bleak post-apocolyptic fantasy. The conceit of never revealing the names and presenting only brief and broken snippets of the story works extremely well in this dark book. It is no coincidence that the cover is plain glossy black, for that is the world that we are thrust into. This is a very good read, and is being mimicked with abandon, of course.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight - Alexandra Fuller


Having stayed for 2 weeks very near where 1/3 of this stark memoir is set, I felt more of a connection to the story than most would have. Set during the turbulent late 70s and 80s the story invokes the very feelings of the fear, hope and racism that defined the era. The book can be hard to read, at times, for the honest way in which Ms. Fuller tells the story. Her mother isn't particularly well presented, although it is probably an honest description, and the ingrained racism is hard to swallow. Though there is something to be said for people who recognize their racist roots and strive to move beyond them without neglecting whatever positive aspects of their upbringing they may have. (Man what a convoluted sentence that was...) This book would be a great companion piece to Naipaul's A Bend in the River.