Pandaemonium

Not only do I forget to blog - or even to think - during the holiday period; I also give myself permission to read "holiday books", whether I'm in a foreign place or snatching some sunlounger moments in the back garden. This, chums, is such a book - and boy, did I enjoy it. Christopher Brookmyre writes the kind of stuff that I used to suggest to non-reading chaps in S5, and the author apparently once chastised my no. 1 son for letting his mother read his first oeuvre. But I have to confess to the inner tomboy, the one that climbed trees and ran wild all summer, and she (the I.T.) loved Pandaemonium in the way I remember from my childhood: carrying the book around with me, reading it on the ferry and in the hairdresser's, putting it reluctantly aside at 1am in the knowledge that I was about to read myself out of any desire to sleep.

It's a crazy story, of course, with supernatural elements juxtaposed with the more usual Brookmyre fare of stroppy Glasgow kids and a challenging environment, in this case somewhere beyond Inveraray. There's a horrific incident involving a burning bus, a crash, and a deer on the roof - but that's just to introduce the various kids as they head for a weekend of bonding and debriefing after a fatal stabbing in their school. The real horror comes from a parallel tale of an underground facility and a top-secret military experiment, long since out of control - and in the same area as the base for the bonding weekend.

The language is foul, the descriptions gory, and the discussions among the staff about the nature of belief surprisingly serious and interesting. The tension builds beautifully - perhaps hideously might be a better word - and the climax is unexpected. I didn't expect it anyway. I just enjoyed it.

At this rate I'll never read a serious book again.

Ducking and dying

Just been indulging myself with another Christopher Brookmyre, Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks. Set in and around my alma mater and familiar bits of Glasgow's West End, this is an ingenious foray into the world of psychics and mediums, which for much of its narrative has you wondering as to the exact state of its principal narrator, Jack Parlabane.

Using several points of view, the story blows a mighty wind through the mists of psychic readings and is genuinely gripping as it approaches the denouement. I love the cocky Parlabane, who first appeared in Quite Ugly One Morning, and I enjoyed picturing my old haunts thinly disguised as Kelvin University. As usual, I have the feeling that the spattering of very topical allusions in the dialogue will render these books ephemeral, but I shouldn't imagine Brookmyre worries about that.

This is a cracking good story with, perhaps, rather less of the laddishness of earlier books - which the author apparently felt made them an unsuitable read for someone's mother.

As the blurb has it: death is not the end - it's the ultimate undercover assignment.

A right stoater

Just finished the book I'd promised myself as a holiday read - though in fact I kept being too sleepy on Colonsay to read after tramping over the island every day I was there. But the latest Christopher Brookmyre, A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil, proved to be so enjoyable that I now feel quite bereft - a sure sign of a book enjoyed.

This is a murder story, beginning with the bodies and ending as the police and the amateur sleuth piece it all together. So far so traditional. But the bulk of the story takes place many years earlier, as we follow the killers, the victims and the police superintendent through their school days, from the first day in Primary One to the Leavers' Dance. The episodes from school gradually reveal more about the characters and their relationships so that we can start thinking we see it too - though in usual Brookmyre style it's a complicated story. But in addition to the murder plot there is the wonderful recreation of school life in the West of Scotland, so that I recognise some of the odd expressions my kids came home with - "gemmie" was quite new to me when Ewan first came out with it. I also understand for the first time why boys at dances used to lurk annoyingly along the far wall and march off with each other when they might have been dancing - a mystery for the past 48 years, by my reckoning.

I found the descriptions of life in Primary school rang depressingly and hilariously true *, with the mad heidie and the teachers who never listened to anyone and who were as a result doomed to be perpetually unjust, as well as the horrors of the visits to the toilets and braving the Primary 4 playground when you were in Primary 1, and wondered how much my own kids didn't bother to tell me when they were at Primary school. And the dialogue is brilliant - and very, very real.

And just when you think it's all over, there's a glossary for the non-native speaker. It's hilarious. A choice example (well, two examples):

hing : An inanimate object as distinguished from a living being.
hingmy : An all-purpose procrastinatory term for that which one cannot quite think of the name of yet. Equivalent of the French truc.

And if you read it and then find yourself indulging in Central Belt expletives in unsuitable company, don't blame me.

*See comments for further elucidation.

AFAG

I've just finished reading this wonderfully laddish book, and despite being a bit long in the tooth for laddishness, to say nothing of a small matter of gender, I enjoyed it immensely. Perhaps I was influenced by the main character's being (a) a woman and (b) a grandmother (she had her own daughter early, so don't picture grey hair and arthritis). This character, Jane, does the most satisfyingly dreadful things when compelled by the mother lioness bit of all our natures to defend her family - and in so doing escapes a life of extreme hoovering and avoiding making footprints on her wet floor.

Whenever I start reading one of Brookmyre's books - and for familial reasons I've actually read all but the most recent which is being saved for a holiday - I feel I can't be bothered. Perhaps it was the piling on of techy detail in the opening chapter which put me off this time, or the tendency to stockpile adjectives - "The blase and cocky figure who was so nonchalantly leaning ..." - but I'm glad I persevered. The story is, as usual, wonderfully filmic, and results in unputdownablity. The dialogue is slick, the Glasgow bits authentic and the violence often extreme. And he does women pretty well, actually - if you like women to play with the big boys.

All fun and games until somebody loses an eye. Indeed.