The Last Devil to Die - Richard Osman

 

"Day after day, mission after mission, ridding the world of evil? Waiting for the last devil to die? What a joke. New devils will always spring up, like daffodils in springtime."

These rather pessimistic words are pondered by Elizabeth,  a former British spook, about two-thirds of the way into Richard Osman's The Last Devil to Die, the author's fourth "Thursday Murder Club Mystery." Pessimistic the words may be, but I suspect that few would argue with the truth they express. 

The "Thursday Murder Club" novels are definitely on the cozier side of the mystery genre scale even though not every character dies "off camera." The books are funny, the mysteries are challenging, and all of it is anchored by an eccentric core group of characters that Osman continues to develop beautifully with each new novel. By now, readers have also grown familiar with numerous side-characters that appear in most of the books: cooperative cops, adult children of the elderly main characters, other residents of the Coopers Chase retirement neighborhood, even a few elderly suitors of some of the core group. Personally, I came to the series a little late (January 2023), but I have now read all four of the books - and The Last Devil to Die has to be my favorite of the bunch.

Elizabeth is the real driving force behind the club's investigations. She has both the experience and an aura about her that make it only natural that Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim defer to her judgement and guidance. Now, however, because her husband's dementia has reached the point that he no longer reliably recognizes his best friends or even her, taking care of Stephen is Elizabeth's first priority. So after Stephen's antique dealer friend is found murdered by a single bullet to the head, someone else is going to have to take charge of the Murder Club's investigation into his death when Elizabeth becomes too distracted or burdened by personal responsibilities to do it herself. 

And Joyce, perhaps the least likely of the other three club members to be up to the task, turns out to be just the person to take on the challenge. 

The Last Devil to Die is one of those rare novels that made me laugh on one page and feel like crying on the next. I particularly enjoyed the way that Osman moves each character solidly forward in their quest to remain vibrant and relevant in their last years. These are not the same four people readers first met in The Thursday Murder Club; they are four years older now, and they have learned a lot about themselves while, at the same time, very positively influencing and changing each other. 

After reading The Last Devil to Die, a few reviewers speculated that the novel could turn out to be Osman's way of winding down the series. Now, I understand why they felt that way. Thankfully, Osman has stated that this is not to be the case, so fans of the "Thursday Murder Club Mysteries" have a lot more fun to look forward to with Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim. 

Richard Osman jacket photo

This Other Eden - Paul Harding

Although I personally would not have chosen Paul Harding's This Other Eden as one of the more likely survivors of the 2023 Booker Prize longlist, it did become one of the final six books under consideration for the prize before ultimately losing to Paul Lynch's Prophet Song. 

This Other Eden was inspired by a horrendous real-world eugenics program that was inflicted upon a small group of people off the coast of Maine on Malaga Island. Harding's fictitious stand-in for Malaga Island is Apple Island, an island so-named for the abundance of apple trees hand-planted there by its first male settler, former slave Benjamin Honey, in the late 1790s. By 1912, almost all of Honey's descendants still preferred living in relative isolation and poverty on the island to taking their chances on the mainland. By this point, the bloodline of Honey and his Irish wife had been further racially diluted by the occasional straggler seeking shelter on the island, many of whom were there because they were avoiding the mainland for reasons of their own. Still, the population of Apple Island was inbred enough that to outsiders a number of the residents appeared to be cripplingly feebleminded or physically impaired.

Harding populates the fictitious island with a colorful and memorable group of characters - my favorite thing about the novel. Among these are: Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Union Civil War veteran who has made a home for himself inside a hollow tree; Esther Honey, matriarch of a family consisting of her son and three grandchildren; Esther's grandson Ethan Honey, a young man of tremendous natural artistic ability; and Bridget Carney, an Irish immigrant housemaid who will come to know the Honeys intimately.

Certainly the island residents are poor, and with the exception of a few of the children who are schooled a little by a retired mainland schoolteacher, they are uneducated, but they take care of each other, and are content with their day-to-day lives. But this is not enough for the mainland do-gooders, who truth be told are offended by what is happening on the island, and decide that the islanders need to be institutionalized or otherwise relocated for their own good. Needless to say, the effort does not end well for anyone, especially those who have never known a home other than Apple Island.

This Other Eden at times read more like a fable than a historical novel, and it is heavy-handed enough to give the overall impression that it is trying just a little too hard not to offend today's so easily offended readers. That effort not to stray, along with what is at times a densely packed prose style, often makes for slow reading. The novel has a worthy theme, something legitimate to say about America's (and the world's) past in regards to racial prejudice, but I think it better belongs on the Booker longlist than on its shortlist. 

Paul Harding

Saved: A War Reporter's Mission to Make It Home - Benjamin Hall

 

"The paradox of covering war is that, while the job exposes you to unimaginable horror, you also have to love doing it."

 And Benjamin Hall feels so strongly that exposing the truth about war is his true calling in life, that he craves doing it again despite having barely survived his last assignment for Fox News covering the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. (I have to say, however, that as impressive as Hall's war reporting has been, I do hope for the sake of his wife and three daughters that he never puts himself in that position again.) 

Benjamin Hall, who holds dual British/American citizenship, was born and raised in London, and he credits his mother with instilling in him a sense of wonder about traveling the world. So, from an early age Hall developed the urge to stick himself into the middle of things while traveling rather than leaving it to someone else to decide what he would experience at any given destination. Perhaps as a result of that approach, Halls says that he had already spent "years of chasing stories that no one was paying me to get" before Fox News hired him, still on on a freelance basis, to "file a long-format piece from Iraq."

Rather ironically, by the time Fox News approached Hall about anchoring a nightly news report from Ukraine, he was a married man with children who had decided no longer to risk his life as willingly or as often as he had in the past. Still, he did not manage to resist the urge to get on-the-ground stories for himself, a fateful decision that led to Hall almost losing his life along with his four colleagues who all died the day their small car was obliterated by a nearby bomb strike.

The rest of Benjamin Hall's story reads like fiction. The circumstances and teamwork that somehow combined to get him back to Kyiv, much less across the Polish border (inside a private train being used by the Polish Prime Minister to get himself and his staff back to Poland from Kyiv) were a one-in-a-million shot that can accurately be characterized as miraculous. 

Benjamin Hall has written a remarkable account of what he experienced, and how his being "saved" has changed him as a man, a husband, and a father. 

"I can't say I spend a lot of time analyzing any psychological transformation I might have undergone. But what I can say, without any doubt, is that the person who is emerging from the bombing, from the more than twenty surgeries, from the continually painful rehab - the reconstituted whole Ben - is a better, stronger, and more joyful person than the one he used to be."

Saved is a powerful and emotional experience for the reader, a reminder that when good people combine their efforts to make good things happen, miraculous results often follow. Benjamin Hall is a remarkable reporter, but more importantly he is a remarkable human being. 

What I'm Reading This Week (December 4, 2023)

 As we approach the end of the year, I'm beginning this first week of December with a declining energy level. I am starting to find myself more and more content simply to watch something good on one of the video channels I subscribe to instead of concentrating on the pages of a good book. That's not like me generally, but it's not completely unusual either; it's happened before, and I've managed to shake it off fairly quickly. Something to do with the closing of yet another year, I suspect.

Anyway...I did finish a couple of books this week, Pearl, which I reviewed last Friday, and Benjamin Hall's Saved: A War Reporter's Mission to Make It Home, which I will be reviewing one day this week. I also continued to read from The Raging Storm by Ann Cleeves and This Other Eden by Paul Harding. I remain stalled, however, on next year's The Blues Brothers and didn't make a lot of progress on the fourth Thursday Murder Club Mystery, Richard Osman's The Last Devil to Die. Even so, I perhaps foolishly convinced myself to add a new book to those already in progress, and I find myself quite satisfied with what I read in the first chapter of Not Dead Enough by Phillip Thompson.

Not Dead Enough is being officially published today, if I recall correctly. It is the third book in a series featuring Iraq War veteran Colt Harper who has returned to Mississippi to become a county sheriff. Colt firmly believes that he shares a lifetime bond with his fellow combat veterans, but after one of them seems to be directly involved with the dead body discovered one morning in a remote part of Colt's county, he knows that that bond is about to be stretched right up to, if not beyond, its breaking point.

The Lauren Groff book I mentioned last week, The Vaster Wilds, came in late, so I'll be picking it up on Tuesday along with a scifi novel by Connie Willis called The Road to Roswell. I see, too, that I'm finally about to get my turn at Ann Patchett's Tom Lake after placing it on hold way back in July, so I'm kind of excited about receiving that one in a few days. I started to buy a copy several times, but decided to play the long game with my library out of sheer stubbornness (why is "stubbornness" so hard for me to spell all of a sudden).

I'll also be picking up The Road to Roswell. I've heard good things about Connie Willis's science fiction for a long time, but haven't read any of the books. She has won both Nebula and Hugo awards in the past and has quite a following among scifi readers who enjoy their science fiction on the more humorous and lighter side. This one is about a woman who is a little embarrassed to be going to Roswell, New Mexico, to attend the alien-themed wedding of a friend. But then she's abducted by one of the little guys herself, and finds herself teaming up with "him" in a bit of a quest. Could be fun.

You know, I think I'm ready for a bit more escape/comfort reading. I'm starting to think that the Booker List project I've been on has resulted in so much dark reading that I desperately need a change of pace to kickstart me again. Maybe some of these will do the trick. 

Here's hoping everyone has a good week ahead of them. Enjoy.

2023 Booker Prize Nominations (Part 5)

 

I suppose most everyone has heard by now that Paul Lynch's Prophet Song was announced last Sunday as winner of the 2023 Booker Prize. If you've read it, congratulations. In the US, we are still waiting on Prophet Song's appearance because Atlantic Monthly Press completely flubbed the job by initially scheduling the book for publication on December 12 - more than two weeks after the Booker ceremony in London. Now, in a case of "too little, too late" Atlantic Monthly Press has moved publication to December 5. 

Since last week's Booker post, I've finished up and reviewed Pearl by Siân Hughes, and I've read all but the last forty pages of Paul Harding's This Other Eden, bringing my 2023 Booker Prize exposure up to eight of the thirteen nominees.

My ranking of those eight books, along with links to the ones reviewed, looks like this:

• The Bee Sting -  Paul Murray
• If I Survive You - Jonathan Escoffery
• Western Lane - Chetna Maroo 
• Pearl - Siân Hughes
• Old God's Time - Sebastian Barry
• This Other Eden - Paul Harding
• A Spell of Good Things - Ayòbámi Adébáyò
• The Ascension - Martin Macinnes 

This Other Eden has an interesting premise, but I get the feeling that Paul Harding is trying a little too hard to make it all politically relevant and correct for today's readers. The novel is set in 1912 on a tiny island off the coast of Maine that is populated by a hodgepodge of racial mixes that produce offspring considered to be Black (even though some easily pass for White and escape life on the island) by people on the mainland. It comes as no surprise when racist White do-gooders spring into action and ruin everything that's remotely good about life on Apple Island. 

After This Other Eden, I'll be down to five more 2023 Booker Books, including Tan Twan Eng's The House of Doors which I have on hand and plan to tackle next. Three of the other four ( are shown in my library system as "on order," so it could be a few weeks before I get to bring any of them home. In fact, I'm twentieth in line for one of only two copies of Prophet Song that have been ordered, third in line for one of the four copes of How to Build a Boat ordered, and first in line for one of the two copies of All the Little Bird-Hearts on order. Library processing can take forever, so I'm not expecting those three any time soon. But there are supposedly five copies of Study for Obedience already on the shelves somewhere in the library system, and I'm number six on that list - and likely to get that one relatively soon. 

I've got to remember to start this challenge earlier next year - and hope to get a little more help from my library and U.S. publishers.

Pearl - Siân Hughes

 

Dealing with personal loss and grief as it does, Siân Hughes's Pearl fits comfortably into what seems to have been a common theme of the books longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. 

Marianne was only eight years old when her mother walked out of the house one day and disappeared forever, and she will spend the rest of her life trying to reconcile her memories of that tragic day. At the time of her mother's disappearance, Marianne was thought to be too young to handle the details of what may have actually happened. Now she needs to construct a coherent story, one that she can believe, something that makes absolute sense to her. Marianne's near-impossible task is complicated by the fact that her memories are largely comprised of half-remembered snippets of adult conversation heard through a child's ears.

Marianne freely follows her thoughts and memories one after the other wherever they may lead her, and it is through her stream-of-consciousness narration that the reader sorts through her perception of that dreadful day right along with Marianne. Chronological order is not important because Marianne realizes that she can only guess at the correct sequence of her earliest memories. She herself understands that she is an unreliable narrator of her own past, and soon enough the reader comes to the same conclusion. 

Pearl is a novel about losing the most important person in one's life. It's about personal guilt - both earned and self-inflicted - especially the guilt a person feels about finally just moving on with the rest of their life:

"Forgetting is not the worst thing. Remembering is not the worst thing either. The worst thing is when you have forgotten and then you remember. It catches you out. You forgot for a moment, a day, a week, a month, but the effect is the same each time you remember. You feel it rushing back..."

Siân Hughes's debut novel is one of which she should be very proud.

Siân Hughes author photograph