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My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
The Councillor by E J Beaton DNF 6%
Beaton is an Australian who has a PhD in English (Creative Writing), and by god, it shows. Masters of Fine Arts eat can eat her dust and be damned, she's a Doctor of English and Creative Writing and wants you to know it. Plus she's an award nominated poet as well.
I don't believe I've ever read 24 more frustrating pages than the first 24 pages of The Councillor. If you're looking for deliberate obscurity, opaqueness, ornateness for the sake of ornateness and obscurity... story be damned, you'll have found it in this book. There is a story in there, somewhere, I guess, amongst the dreams, the flashbacks, the obscure references to things, places, events, and people we don't yet know anything about. What I can tell you is that the main character is the palace scholar, an aide to the Queen. The Queen has been attacked by a panther, with yellow eyes, while hunting, and was severely mauled. She is then poisoned to death, leaving our scholar the task of choosing someone to be the next ruler of the realm, since the Queen has no heirs.
This book seems to be the favorite of several fantasy booktubers, which is how I became aware of it. However, they get advanced review copies of books like this. I never quite trust reviews from ARC readers, as it is in their interest to give the best possible review so as to be known to the publishers as reliable promotors of their books, in order to keep getting free books from those publishers... I'm not saying that they didn't like it, I just don't trust what they say. In any event, this book is clearly not for me. It did however bring to mind the the opposite type of writing, writing that is both descriptive and concrete instead of dreamy and obscure, and the master of that type of writing. Indeed, I reached over to the book shelf next to me and picked out one of his books and started to read it, more or less as an antidote to The Councillor.
The Belgium born writer, Georges Simenon wrote around 500 novels and many other books and stories in his long writing career. From his introduction in 1931, the Paris police Chief-Inspector Jules Maigret appeared in 75 novels and 28 short stories. Maigret Meets a Milord is his second novel, written in 1931 and translated into English in 1935. The edition I have, pictured above, is one I've had around for 50-some years. It is old and glue holding the pages had dried and cracked so that the pages were falling out of it as I read it.
In this story Maigret has been called to a small city northeast of Paris to investigate a murder of a woman, a murder that appears to be connected to the traffic of barges along one of France's many canals. In all these stories Maigret tries to put himself in the minds of the people involved in order to understand not only what occurred, but why it happened as it did. To do so, he talks to people and wanders around, taking in the atmosphere, as it where.
In this case, Maigret must determine first, who the woman is and then how she ended up strangled in a barn along the canal. It would seem that barge traffic on the canal was the only explanation for her to end up in the barn, so he delves into the workings of life on the canal, with its horse pulled or motor driven barges. Their movement is regulated by a series of locks, so in order to figure out how she came to be there, he studies how the canal works and who was around the night the woman was strangled. He interviews the people on the barges that were tied up that night near the scene of the crime, as well as the characters on an English yacht which was also present, in order to slowly unravel the mystery.
The reason I chose this book as an antidote to the Councillor is that Simenon is known for his simple, concrete writing style. While working as the private secretary of for a French aristocrat Simenon began to submit stories to the newspaper Le Matin. The literary editor of that magazine was Colette (famous for writing the novella Gigi) who advised him to be less literary, which Simenon took to mean use more common words and simple descriptions. Within a year he was one of the top contributors to the newspaper.
Simenon's writing is not stylish or elegant. It is simple and uses concrete examples of everyday objects in such a way as to create both a sense of place and mood. In this story, to create a sort of dark, grim, and gloomy mood, he has it raining most of the time. There is mud, and wet clothes, the greyness of the canal, the muddy canal paths, and dim lit inns; a subdued palette in both the scene and the people involved. In this book, as well as all the others, he uses this straightforward, observational writing to create characters, places and moods that seem real without long, elaborate expositions.
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