A Column Of Fire

Rich Historical Tapestry

A Column Of Fire is Ken Follett’s third Kingsbridge novel after The Pillars Of The Earth and World Without End, a sprawling historical epic that spans fifty years and is set mostly in Elizabethan England, though it travels to France, Spain, Scotland, The Netherlands—the core theme being religious tolerance.

 In the sixteenth century Catholics and Protestants were constantly at War, brutally persecuting one another, with torture, excommunication and burning ‘heretics’ at the stake. Wars are fought, massacres carried out, fortunes made and lost.

The thick novel begins in 1558, during in the reign of Catholic Queen known as Bloody Mary, because she had thousands of Protestants tortured and killed. After Mary’s death and some frantic political skullduggery, her Protestant and illegitimate half sister Elizabeth is seated on the throne, with a promise to put a stop to religious fanaticism.

 In England, the Willard and Fitzgerald families take centre stage—Ned Willard is in love with Margery Fitzgerald, but her family is responsible for financially ruining his. Ned’s brilliant mother is reduced to a shadow of herself, his brother Barney goes off to sea and builds his own life away from the family. Margery is forcibly married to a nasty Catholic nobleman Bart, while Ned goes off to work under Princess Elizabeth’s loyal spymasters Sir William Cecil and later, when she is queen, Sir Francis Walsingham.

 In France, the low-born but ambitious climber Pierre Aumande ingratiates himself with the powerful Guise brothers, uses his short-lived engagement to the Protestant Sylvie Palot to spy on her people, and causes a savage slaughter by Catholics, that came to be knows as St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. Margery’s brother Rollo vows to destroy the Protestant faith, by building a secret army of Catholics in England.

Follett’s fictional characters mingle with the real, and the novel is studded with historical events like the marriage of Mary, Queen of Scots to the ailing young King Henri II of France, the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the swashbuckling Sir Francis Drake, the infamous Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which Guy Fawkes and his Catholic co-conspirators planned to blow up Parliament, and the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots for treason.

Follett seamlessly blends, history, action, adventure, suspense, romance and thrills to create a highly readable novel that moves at a breathless pace and is also educative. There has to be a sequel to this story, and there is a hint--the word Mayflower. History buffs will get it.

A Column Of Fire

By Ken Follett

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 916

You Bring the Distant Near

In An Alien Land

You Bring the Distant Near by Mitali Perkins is slightly different from the many Bengalis in the US stories (Bharti Mukherjee, Chita Banerji Divakaruni, Jhumpa Lahiri) in that part of the Das family’s immigrant experience involves interactions with black people.

The book has autobiographical elements as it briskly tells the story of Rajeev and Ranee Das who move with their two daughters Tara and Sonia from Kolkata to Ghana to London and finally to New York in the 1970s. There are the usual adjustment problems, Ranee is concerned that their Flushing neighbourhood is black, and her racism to so deeply set that Sonia does not dare to invite her black friends home.

Sonia is the dark-skinned, studious one, who grows up to be a journalist, while her sister Tars is movie-star pretty and does end up as a Bollywood actress, but that part of the story is kept of the pages. The narration is by Tara and Sonia by turns, and one can’t but note that the book could do with a lot more detailing. There are TV serial like jumps in time, and the reader is left to imagine what might have transpired in the intervening years.

 Later, Tara’s daughter Anna and Sonia’s half-black daughter Shanti/Chantal take over the narration; Anna moves from Mumbai to New York and the reader gets yet another dose of cultural adjustment. The stories of the five women are mildly interesting, and the book is quick read, but it’s the sketchiness  that prevents it from rising above the mundane. There cannot be a novel about Bengalis without several mentions of Rabindranath Tagore, but mercifully, there is no Durga Puja sequence. The one Hindu ritual is hilariously conducted by a hippie priest!

You Bring the Distant Near

By Mitali Perkins

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 303

The Music Shop

Bitter-Sweet Love Story

Rachel Joyce, who made her writing debut with the bestselling The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry, has written another heart-breaker, The Music Shop.

This book is also about love, friendship, loyalty, compassion; added to it is the healing power of music.  Her fourth novel begins in 1988, when a dishevelled giant of a man, Frank, sets up his music shop, selling vinyl records.  He had grown up with an eccentric mother, who taught him all there is to know about music. So, Frank knows just which piece of music will help a troubled customer.

Frank’s shop with its piled of records piled up in no particular order, is located in London’s Unity Street, where a motley group of neighbors and fellow business owners are trying to keep away the grubby hands of a developer.

There is Maud the tattooist, who is in love with Frank but cannot bring herself to tell him, Father Anthony, the recovered alcoholic who sells religious iconography, Novak the baker and the undertakers, the Williams brothers. And there’s the slightly odd Kit, a young man who helps Frank in the shop, and becomes a catalyst for the joy and sorrow that befalls his kindly employer.

Despite the pressure from music companies, Frank refuses to see CDs, even it means dwindling sales. And he won’t budge from the shop, no matter what threats and temptations the developer offers.

One day, a woman in a green coat, faints outside the shop. She turns out to be a mysterious German called Ilse Brauchmann, who brings about a transformation in the lonely Frank. Ilse asks him to give her lessons in music, and as he takes her through his favourite records, a hesitant kind of unspoken romance grows, watched over by the sullen waitress at the Singing Teapot, where they meet every week.

As the reader follows the various strands of the story, there is the discovery of music and Frank’s passion for it—there are stories about composers and musicians from Aretha Franklin, Duke Ellington and Sex Pistols to Beethoven, Vivaldi and Purcell. Frank’s mother has told him, “Music is about silence… the silence at the beginning of a piece of music is always different from the silence at the end… Because if you listen, the world changes. It’s like falling in love. Only no one gets hurt.” It is these silences the emotions of the characters seem to fall into.

The prose is simple, poignant, often over-sentimental but never maudlin. Joyce makes the reader care about the characters, but does not promise them a conventional happily-ever-after. Still, it offers hope and optimism even in the depths of despair.

There is also a wonderful playlist, so readers can listen to all the music Frank talks about and discover the soul-stirring beauty and silences for themselves.

The Music Shop

By Rachel Joyce

Published by: Doubleday

Pages: 336

Hardcore 24 & Turbo 23

Plum Pudding

Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum’s books are a guilty pleasure—no matter how outlandish the plots, the feisty heroine and her madcap sidekick Lula are bound to make the reader laugh out loud.

For those who haven’t read any books in the series before, Stephanie is a self-confessed Julie Roberts lookalike, of Italian descent and has a crazy gun-toting Grandma Mazur, whose antics have driven her daughter (that is Stephanie’s mother) to despair and alcoholism. She also has a hamster as a pet, a cop boyfriend Joe Morelli and a standby ‘knight’ called Ranger—both of them impossibly hot.  In the latest of the ‘numbered’ series, Hardcore Twenty-Four, another hottie drops by—the enigmatic Diesel, with six-pack abs and extra-sensory perception. 

Lula is an Amazonian black woman, a former hooker, with a red Firebird, a huge appetite and passion for shoes. She wears garish clothes and manages to carry them off.  And if some misguided soul calls her fat, they are asking for trouble.

Stephanie is a bounty hunter, a profession not known in most countries; they are employed by bailbondsmen to ensure that felons do not jump bail and turn up at their trials.

Stephanie works for her mostly absent cousin Vinnie, and with Lula’s help—plus occasional SOS calls to security expert Ranger-- she manages to apprehend most fugitives from justice. Some assistance comes from the office receptionist Connie, who belongs to a Mafia clan and keeps Stephanie supplied with information and donuts. In the process of chasing runaways and feeding Lula, she also solves baffling murder cases, and keeps the love triangle with Morelli and Ranger as amiable as can be.

In Hardcore Twenty-Four, the cops are mystified and the people of Trenton, New Jersey, terrified when headless bodies start appearing around town. The word ‘zombie’ is uttered and believed, because people who look like those living dead creatures are also spotted.

As Stephanie and Lula try to keep their wits together, they promise to look after Ethel, the massive boa constrictor owned by ‘professional’ grave robber, Simon Diggery, or he won’t accompany them to jail. The antics of the snake and Stephanie-Lula’s reactions, provide a lot of the book’s humour; also oddball characters like a compulsive painter of garden gnomes and a guy called Zero Slick who joins protest marches for a living.

As Stephanie dates Morelli and habitually wrecks Ranger’s cars (he keep track of her, and the only reason it does not creep her out is that he saves her skin many times), Diesel lands up unannounced and squats in her apartment. She begins to suspect he has something to do with the ghoulish incidents in town, but there is more to Diesel than she can see.

Of course, Grandma Mazur gets her share of attention, by acquiring a new “honey”, that makes her daughter look avidly at the bottle of whiskey in the kitchen cabinet—the only way to keep her sanity.

The reason for the headless corpses is laughably absurd, but then who reads these books for veracity?

Hardcore Twenty-Four
By: Janet Evanovich
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

******************

In Turbo Twenty-Three, Stephanie Plum and Lula have to solve a most peculiar case. When they are pursuing a convict called Larry Virgil who has stolen an ice-cream truck, a frozen corpse falls out it, covered in chocolate and nuts.

There is rivalry between the town’s two ice-cream manufacturers, which could be the reason for people being killed by freezing. Ranger asks Stephanie has to go undercover in the ice-cream plant to trace the killer.

Lula and the tiny, pesky Randy Briggs want to be TV stars, so plan to do a shoot for a show called Naked and Afraid, and Grandma Mazur gets a new boyfriend and her long-suffering daughter has more to worry about.

This is one of the funniest and raunchiest Janet Evanovich books; just the thing for an idle weekend.

Turbo Twenty-Three

By Janet Evanovich

Publisher: Bantam

Pages: 288