Rosetta - Barbara Ewing

Egypt has always fascinated me, from the history, culture and architecture to 'Death on the Nile', so I'm a sucker for any books with a vague connection to all things Egyptian. I watched the BBC 'Egypt' series avidly, and loved the story of the race to translate the hieroglyphics using the Rosetta stone, with Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young (amongst others) competing to win the intellectual race of the age. The protagonist and narrator of this book, Rosetta (usually known as Rose), is also fascinated with Egypt, and listens enthralled to her father's tales of the town after which she is named. With the discovery of the Rosetta stone and its subsequent fall into English hands, Rose's other obsession, words, could have lead her towards the struggle to understand the ancient markings. Unfortunately, when she does go to Egypt it is to rescue her dead husband's illegitimate child, and she leaves almost as soon as she arrives. The rest of the story is rather disappointing, with Rose struggling to keep the child from her in-laws, and generally being a bit of a martyr about the whole thing.

My overall impression was that Barbara Ewing started off wanting to write an intellectual historical novel, with adventures in Egypt and insight into the discoveries of the day, but halfway through realised that it was easier to write a historical romance. I think I was disappointed because I was expecting the former, whereas if it had been packaged as the latter I would have read it with slightly different eyes and thoroughly enjoyed it. My brother experienced a similar thing when watching 'Gosford Park' - he expected it to be a detective story starring Stephen Fry, so wasn't impressed with the atmospheric portrayal of the upstairs-downstairs shenanigans of the Thirties. Now I know how he felt.

Coincidental Malacology

I'm partial to a good coincidence, and I experienced a particularly odd one last Wednesday. I had never come across the word 'malacology' (the study of molluscs) before, but it came up the new Kathy Reichs book ('Break No Bones') due to a crucial piece of evidence in the shape of a snail shell. On my long journey down from Manchester to Sussex, I finished 'Break No Bones', and moved onto 'The Single Helix' by Steve Jones. When reading his introduction, I was intrigued to find that he had started career as a malacologist. What were the chances...

Dream squared

The other day, to my horror, I dreamt about work. Fortunately, though the dream was set at work, I didn't have to do any. In fact, there was almost an atmosphere of adventure throughout, though with an edge of surrealism thrown in. I dreamt that for some reason everyone had to spend the night in the office, and we were provided with camp beds and sleeping bags to put up under our desks while one of the Big Cheeses made us all cocoa (how terribly Famous Five of me - in real life I haven't drunk cocoa or any form of hot chocolate since a rather unfortunate incident involving food poisoning [Bleurgh]). In the dream, we all curled up on our camp beds and went to sleep, and I somehow managed to dream that I was both asleep and dreaming. My dream within a dream involved my colleague George (-ina, though no-one calls her that...) - we were in a bar and bored with our usual round of gin and tonics so decided to create a new drink, the Ginger Tonic, by adding ginger ale to the concoction. Just before I tried this interesting dream drink, I dreamt I was woken up by a colleague (back in the original, camping-at-the-office dream) who needed me for an Abstract Emergency (abstract as in short summary text to be submitted to a conference, not an emergency that was somehow detached from reality, though that would fit with the dream!). I'm not sure what this says about my sleeping brain, but on the whole it doesn't fill me with confidence...

Death at La Fenice - Donna Leon

I've always loved a good detective story, right from when the Famous Five or Nancy Drew were my investigators of choice, through Agatha Christie, Elizabeths George and Peters, Val McDermid, and Ruth Rendell, so the discovery of a new series is always exciting. I'd been meaning to sample some of Donna Leon's oeuvre for a while, but as the perfectionist I am, wanted to start at the very beginning (where else is there to start?!) and being lazy too, if it wasn't in Waterstones on the day I happened to think of it, I wasn't going to find it. Anyway, when I spotted it on the shelf as part of a 3-for-2 last week, I was rather pleased.

Being something of an Italianophile, the Venetian setting was lovely, and finding little chunks of Italian customs or intriguing bits of vocab liberally scattered though the pages was very interesting. I scampered through it at breakneck speed, and enjoyed the plot, but with mixed feelings. You see, I worked out not only who did it but why, and though there was an extra mini-twist it did only confirm my suppositions rather than turn them on their head. When reading detective fiction I always try to work it out, but seldom succeed, so when I finally did, it was a bit of a let down. Surely the author is supposed to know more/be cleverer than me?! On the other hand, this book is 15 years old (though my favourite Agatha Christies are four or five times that...) and it's the first in the series. Maybe with 'Death in a Strange Country' she will outwit me, though this will have to wait until I find it.

The History of Love - Nicole Krauss

When reading this, I had a funny feeling I had read it before. I knew I hadn't, but I couldn't shake the sense of recognition. Thinking about the story I realised there were marked similarities between 'The History of Love' and 'Everything is Illuminated' by Jonathan Safran Foer. Master-wordsmith Jewish wartime protagonists create masterpieces for their lost loves, youthful present-day Americans try to trace the story and find themselves along the way. The main difference between them is that 'Everything is Illuminated' plays it for laughs, while the sombre, eccentric prose of 'The History of Love' nearly made me give up halfway through, something I never do. I'm glad I didn't though, as the coagulation of all the streams of consciousness in the final third of the book is spine-chilling and beautiful. You can tell there are going to be connections, and some of them are visible a mile off, but when they do all crystallise and Alma and Leo finally meet I couldn't turn the pages fast enough.

When I finished reading I looked up the author, Nicole Krauss, on Wikipedia. Guess who she's married to - Jonathan Safran Foer. It almost feels as though they came up with a concept together, and then didn't talk about it until they had each finished their vastly different take on it.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - Edward Albee

The things people will do and say when driven by resentment and suspicion are captured in a concentrated form in this play. The fear of the unknown coupled with the loathing of the familiar drive four people to take ever increasing chunks out of each other, albeit very eloquently. Secrets are spilt as readily as the booze, and no insult stays unsaid, in the escalating conflict between husbands and wives until the climactic realisation that no matter what they've said and done up till now, their only chance of happiness lies with each other.

The production at the Royal Exchange was buoyed up by the sitting-room feel of the cosy little theatre - it was almost as though you were reclining on another sofa just across the room, about to start spitting your own venom rather than separated from the action by an obvious stage/audience divide. While occasional jarring accents brought me down to earth (the American 'r' can be tricky, even for actors of this calibre), the performances were fluent and engaging, the comedy perfectly timed, and the tension palpable. It also left me with a vague feeling I should be nicer to people...

The Nautical Chart - Arturo Perez-Reverte

It's always intriguing to read a book where you find none of the characters appealing. I could understand their motivations, empathised when they came up against (frequent) obstacles, and found the resolution satisfying - the best man won. However, they were all as bad as each other in so many ways that the journeys they each took were much more an impetus to continue reading than just wanting to know what happened to them. Tanger, so secretive and seemingly perfect (at least in the eyes of the hero, Manuel Coy), is cold and materialistic to a fault. Her fears of dying alone come across as the construction they turn out to be, reeling Coy in closer to her, ensuring his continued efforts will lead her towards her hidden goal. On the other hand, Coy opens up his life to pretty much anyone who notices him, and it also isn't that appealing. His propensity to violence, his hopeless devotion to Tanger, his lack of control all add up to someone you watch through your fingers, waiting for the next catastrophe to envelope him.

Be that as it may, this brine-drenched yarn of pirates, Jesuits and old sea-dogs lures you in. You know there will be treasure and hurricanes aplenty, and it does not disappoint. The plot and the secrets of the deep keep you reading, not the characters, but this doesn't mean it's not enjoyable, or that the characters are 2D. This is a complex story in places, with seventeenth century politics rearing their ugly head on occasion, but the thrill of the chase and the tang of the sea keep you whipping through the pages until the shock of the climax.