The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter

The H-Bomb Girl, for younger readers, is a time travel story calculated to appeal to the Doctor Who set.

Laura, 14, has moved to Liverpool with her mum, who is separating from Laura’s dad, who is in the RAF. It’s 1962. Liverpool is an interesting place, just coming out of the post-war austerity years, with a young and exciting music scene centred around a band called The Beatles.

Laura’s dad is paranoid about something, and there’s some strange bloke lodging with Laura and her mum, and one of Laura’s teachers is strange, too, looking at her funny and making gnomish comments. Across the Atlantic, the Cuban missile crisis is in full flow, and for a time it seems as if the world will end.

This story is a delight, full of great detail on British life in the early 60s, but also stuffed with anachronisms and strangeness, time-travel tricks and parallel worlds. As an adult you notice a few logical inconsistencies, but to give a younger reader a taste for modern science fiction it would be hard to do better.

I bought this for my daughter, following my appeal on the other blog for recommendations. I’d already spotted this on another web site, but hadn’t realised it was so recently published (Sept 2007). With a female protagonist of about the right age and a time-travel adventure, this hit the target (ten year old girl) perfectly: she raced through it and would like more of the same, she says.

Narrow Dog to Carcassonne by Terry Darlington

Give or take Driving over Lemons or French Revolutions, I very rarely read travel books, though there are a vast quantity of them out there. I also hardly ever touch humorous writing, because it doesn’t tend to make me laugh and is more likely to make me depressed. Call me contrary.

For some reason, Narrow Dog to Carcassonne caught my eye, and it appealed to me. I enjoyed Tim Moore’s attempt to “do” the Tour de France, and I always enjoy reading about the foibles of the French. After all, I married a French girl and I have to deal with the foibles of my in-laws all the time. There are things I still haven’t got used to, even after 15 years, such as the need to personally greet every single person in a room and then personally say farewell, even if you are only popping in to drop something off or pick something up. I know I should appreciate the slower pace of life, but I’m English and impatient and for me a slower pace of life means having more time to do stuff that I want to do, not filling hours with endless greetings.

Also, I can never quite get my head round the opening hours, something Terry Darlington notices, too:

The town had a restaurant but it was shut, because it was Tuesday. We had not realised that on Mondays, and sometimes Tuesdays or Wednesdays, or at weekends or at lunchtime, or in the late summer, or in the winter, everything is shut in France.

Il exagère, slightly, but the point is well made.

I liked Darlington’s style, and his technique of not bothering with punctuation for speech, and his clever literal translations of some French expressions, a habit I follow myself. I am desolated, I said, as I ordered a coffee, I have only a twenty-euro note. No problem, monsieur, said the patron, I beg of you.

The premise is this: the Darlingtons, retired, take their Whippet Jim and their English narrowboat Phyllis May across the channel and brave the vast French waterways (canals and raging rivers built on a scale that is alien to these shores) in an attempt to travel from Staffordshire to Carcassonne, in the Languedoc. Taking a narrowboat across the busiest shipping lane in the world is madness, they are told, but they do it anyway, and in defiance of all good sense and advice they follow their ambitions to the South of France.

The strength of this book is that half the time you wish you were there, and the other half you swear you would never try. You find yourself idly thinking about hiring a boat for a week or two and exploring the Burgundy Canal, or the Saône, and then you read about the locks (one every km on the Burgundy) or the scariness of rivers like the Rhône, and you decide against.

Many of the places the Darlingtons mention in the text are hard to find on a map, because they’re little places on the river/canal as opposed to the bigger place you’ve heard of that’s slightly further away, so you get an impression of a less well-known part of France, but not enough of one, I think. The journey is impressionistic, and the long hours spent between these places are not mentioned. I’m not even sure how long the whole journey takes, or how long a given stretch of canal/river might take. It’s a two-year trip, in two halves, and the Paris to Carcassonne stretch takes from Easter to September. Once I got to the bit about the forty locks in two days on the Burgundy canal, or the staircase locks at Fonsérannes, I had decided against all boating holidays.

An enjoyable read, and fairly amusing. There’s a sequel, in which they take the narrowboat across to the Eastern seaboard of the USA, but I don’t fancy that one.

Gone to Ground by John Harvey

John Harvey has been one of the leading British exponents of the police procedural since the 1989 publication of Lonely Hearts, the first in the Nottingham-based Resnick series that ended with Last Rites 10 years later. (Except Resnick is back, in Harvey’s just-published Cold in Hand.)

This 2007 novel, Gone to Ground (The paperback came out in January 2008), is a police procedural in a similar vein, with Cambridge police officers Will Grayson and Helen Walker investigating what appears to be a hate crime – the brutal murder of a gay academic. There are also links to Nottingham, though, so you’re constantly reminded of the Resnick series and some of its supporting characters.

The art of the police procedural is to show the puzzle of the crime being solved by slow, painstaking increments: leg work, paper work, and blind chance. Harvey brings to life the harsh realities of ASBO Britain, the violent, struggling underclass and their casual hatreds; and the venal, corrupt business men and their lawyers.

Neither Grayson nor Walker strike you as being brilliant: though Walker seems to have better instincts. The inquiry into one murder is complicated by another, and the officers (and the original victim’s sister) follow investigative paths that don’t necessarily pay off, but lead – eventually – to some form of resolution. Don’t come here expecting to find a maverick loner who solves crimes singlehandedly and beats up the bad guys in his spare time. Instead you get something of the flavour of what it must really be like: knocking on doors, trawling through paperwork, interviewing witnesses who may be lying – but not necessarily because they’re guilty of this particular crime.

Accurate and realistic it may be, but I didn’t find this particularly gripping. It’s been a while since I read a police procedural, and I found the progress to be a bit slow. I shouldn’t complain; the last crime novel I read, I seem to remember complaining it was all a bit skimpy. Still, if police procedural is your thing: with believable characters and a sense of how difficult it really is to get the evidence you need for a successful prosecution, then they probably don’t come better than this.