Shizzle Inc. by Ana Spoke, reviewed by Mari Biella

I should start this review with a little admission: my Kindle is stuffed full of free books. I’ve always had an eye for a bargain, and if a book is on a free promo and looks even mildly interesting, I’ll almost always pick it up. Do I always read these freebies? In truth, no. Many a free book is currently mired in the metaphorical mud at the bottom of my Kindle, probably never even to be glanced at again, yet alone read.

I picked Shizzle Inc. up for free. Unlike other freebies, though, I started reading it almost straight away; unlike other freebies, I not only finished it, but loved it. It’s not even the kind of book I’d normally read, which is a great lesson in the importance of trying things outside one’s comfort zone. Sometimes, it really pays off. It certainly did so in this case.

The novel follows the gloriously dippy Isa Maxwell, whose life is changed forever when she applies for a job at the eponymous Shizzle Inc., a ‘global conglomerate of value creation processes’, owned by one Mr Hue. Mr Hue has somehow managed to build up this company despite being an idiot of the first order, and despite the fact that he does no discernible work whatsoever. He’s fabulously wealthy, and enjoys splashing his money around on things like private limos and a helicopter, which is ‘fitted with a thermobarbic warhead ... You have to be prepared for anything these days.’ He employs ditzy, uncoordinated young women on the basis of their personal appeal. ‘You never know where you might spot a Shizzle type,’ Hue says at one point. ‘I usually find them in exclusive bars, luxury resorts or private golf clubs, but every now and then one just walks in, like you did.’ He spouts dubious wisdom about business, such as this: ‘What I’ve learned, I’ve learned by doing stuff. And what I’ve learned is that we are in the business of doing stuff.’

Wait a minute! If you’ve read one of the more surprising publishing sensations of recent years, all of this may be sounding a tad familiar. Is this a parody of Fifty Shades of Grey?

I think it probably is, in many ways. And yet it’s not simply a parody. Isa Maxwell is not really anything like Ana Steele; she doesn’t get involved in any borderline-abusive BDSM relationships, and she actually shows signs of growing and becoming a better person as the book progresses. She’s also, surface dopiness notwithstanding, a resourceful young woman who once started a ‘business’ ‘where I called the customer service number on the back of every food package and complained about the quality of their products. I had refund checks and coupons waiting for me in the mailbox almost every day.’

Such inventiveness comes in handy during Isa’s progress in Shizzle Inc. Given that she was employed for a job in which she has absolutely no training or experience, however, it’s only a matter of time before things go uproariously wrong. Throw in a housemate who is not all she seems, a dysfunctional family, a disgruntled ex-employee and a policeman who appears to be stalking Isa, and you’ve got a recipe for hilarity. For once I’m not exaggerating when I said I laughed out loud on occasion and could hardly put the book down, and I think I’m generally quite a tough customer. Shizzle Inc. really is that good.

I’d like to conclude with a personal apology to author Ana Spoke. I feel bad that I got your book during the free promo, especially when it was worth every penny, and more, of the asking price. I’ll buy the next one, I promise.

To buy Shizzle Inc. - and yes, it really is worth buying - go to Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

Red Champagne by Reb MacRath

Review by Bill Kirton

Where to begin with the various pleasures of this short narrative? The atmospheric evocation of a period (the 1930s) with its music, its lifestyles and the glamour of travelling on a powerful beast of a luxury train? Well, yes, that’s a start. Then there are the passengers, a group of interesting, interacting characters, each with his or her striking characteristics and agendas and each an important element in the mystery which is the defining centre of the narrative. Or maybe we should focus on the magical aspect of a story which gives its protagonists chances to relive and actually alter the experiences that lead up to and beyond that mystery, learning more about themselves as they do so, and subtly changing their approaches to the dilemmas they face.

The truth is that all these (and other) effects are woven together with such skill and élan that we just sit back and enjoy the spectacle as we hurtle with the characters through the night of Xmas Eve 1938. the author sustains the narrative’s pace with deceptive ease, teases us with repeated snippets of events which fold us into the time shifts without disorientation, and even, despite the seeming impossibilities of achieving a satisfactory resolution, comes up with a happy ending.

On top of all this, there’s also the obvious delight he takes in using language and making his words work hard for the effects he seeks. There are the “boarded windows of bored–dead enterprises” which are both “a misty presence to the eye” and “musty presents to the fog, as happily haunted as holes in the hills." It’s a deliberate manipulation of language which both contributes to the text’s impact and offers the additional pleasure of purely linguistic effects and allusions. After a throwaway mention of Byron, for example, a conversation contains the exchange and comment:

"You're mad."

"And bad and dangerous."

To know what she'd done and to see her like this […] was more than Claire could suffer.

The positioning of that “To know” brings a smile that has little to do with the story and lots to do with just the joy and power of words.

I note that the book’s garnered plenty of 5 star reviews. That’s no surprise at all – it’s from the pen/keyboard of a real writer.

Here's Looking at You Kid by Helen Burke

Review by Bill Kirton

Helen Burke’s poems are full of ambushes. You read along, sharing reminiscences, savouring the comfortable rhythms, admiring the visual and aural images and suddenly, unawares, you’re presented with an absurdity or a marriage of things which don’t belong together or a formulation so perfectly pitched that you want to stop, read it again and reassess it and the context in which it sits. And each time it’s a pleasure, reinforcing the impact of what preceded it or taking it to another level.

It’s no surprise to read that this collection brings together some of the poems most frequently requested by audiences around the world. They’re celebrations of love, of continuity; distillations of the effect of memory as it evokes distances in time and space and yet, simultaneously, cancels them. Some are autobiographical and yet they express feelings we can share, feelings with which we can identify and which stir echoes of moments through which we also have lived. In fact, the poet hopes, in her introduction, that ‘these poems can connect with you at a heart level’. In one of them she writes ‘we are the stories that we tell not with our mouths but with our hearts’ and the notes to another say ‘the stories we write with our hearts are what matter’.

She captures perfect moments, fragments of times spent with her father and mother made of the simplest elements:

‘And we walked home, like two happy dogs

and the sky was duck-egg blue and the grass

was full of four-leaved clovers’

Meanings shift constantly, life is change and yet its essence can be caught and concentrated into a memory. Like her Dad’s Lingo, it refuses to settle into non-negotiable meanings.

Burke’s imagination is riotous. In a poem like Hospital Lingo, the ‘procedures’ the patients have to undergo are distorted, become a parade of hilarious absurdities as she piles gag on gag with meticulous timing. Yes, even though these are lines lying on a page, their timings are as immaculate as any delivered by stand-ups. Read The Christmas Letter (the poem which won the Waterstones Poetry Prize) and see how, line after line, you’re ambushed by gags (aka truths).

‘All the kids have had nose jobs

and the cat’s booked in for a boob job,

but the gardener’s making do with reiki and several flu jabs.

My cocaine habit’s coming on nicely

and the twins have made a blue movie – so hip.

Daddie's married our nanny – again – and

he'll be off to the Philippines

(once his heart can face the trip).

The dog has got his own Rolex’

And so on, and so on. It never lets up.

As well as teeming with punchlines, the poem My Wild Mother presents us with a vibrant personality we’d love to know. And we do know her. The poet’s mum and dad live in her verse, they’re so real in her memory and thinking. It’s a great proof of the persistence of love and for her it’s a constant currency.

Her dog, Baxter, is a happy Sisyphus, exuberant about life despite the restraints which mark it.

There is no cure for being free of mind and will.

Baxter, my friend, my alter ego.

Baxter – I love you.

Go on being. Baxter.

The seeming artlessness, the wit, the humour belie the fact that Burke is dealing in profound, existential truths. The instant has multiplicity and multi-valence, life is a ‘shadow dance’. She conveys the passage of time, the distance between various ‘thens’ and ‘nows’ and yet manages to experience them simultaneously. She writes, in The Serving Girl, of:

‘Your presence in your own absence.

Nothing to be done but bear it.’

In short, her poetry is packed full of experiences, conveyed in terms which help us unlock our own. It’s funny, loving, deep, witty, compassionate, fundamentally human. It’s a poetry of happy, energetic protest – not of the angry, proscriptive or restricted political kind but a celebration of living and the refusal to submit to conventions and restraints.

Fungus the Bogeyman by Raymond Briggs

Review by Bill Kirton

In the UK, one of the Christmas fixtures is a TV showing of the cartoon, The Snowman. In case you don’t know it, it’s based on the book of the same name written and illustrated by Raymond Briggs. Among his many other cartoon books (or graphic novels) are Father Christmas (who hates snow, by the way);  Father Christmas Goes on Holiday; When the Wind Blows, which is a bleak but funny account of what happens to a late middle-aged, working class couple before, during and after the dropping of a nuclear bomb; The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman – a savage indictment of the Falklands War; Gentleman Jim, a toilet attendant with ideas above his station; and Ethel and Ernest, a sad, poignant ‘biography’ of Briggs’ mother and father. They’re all variously charming, chilling, funny and desolate.

You should read all of them. But the one you MUST read is Fungus the Bogeyman. It’s a hilarious, wonderful example of existentialism in action. (Don’t let the word frighten you. In a booklet called Bluff your way through Literature – nothing to do with Briggs but invaluable for students – existentialism is defined as ‘anything that’s French, dirty or incomprehensible’.)

A bogeyman is to the British what a Boogieman is to the Americans. Fungus lives in Bogeydom – a damp, fetid, rank kingdom underground. Briggs is careful to give us a highly detailed picture of his habitat, family, anatomy, customs, hobbies, eating habits, clothes and, as well as creating very funny visual gags and inversions of our own values, he indulges in brilliant linguistic inventions and distortions. A breakfast cereal is Flaked Corns and two of the lotions on the shelf in the barathrum (a pit, chasm, abyss of muck according to Briggs’ helpful glossary) are the aftershave Old Mice and a bottle of Eau de Colon. In the house he wears wet, slimy sabots, a form of slipper cut from rotting wood (a process known as sabotage). His cat is called Pus, his dog Mucus, his friend Fester, the barmaid Salivia and the innkeeper in bogeydom is called an aubergine. These and many, many more inventions fill every page as Briggs details the day to day (or rather, night to night) thoughts and actions of Fungus, his drear (sic) wife, Mildew, and his son, Mould.

At dusk, Fungus gets out of his damp bed to go to work on the surface, where his jobs include slowly turning the door knobs of bedrooms, touching the back of sleeping people’s necks to create boils, making bumps in the night, causing stairs to creak, babies to wake and perpetrating all sorts of other refined torments that fill the night with terrors.

BUT  (and this is where the existentialism comes in) …

As he cycles up towards the darkening world, past a man with a sandwich board bearing the words ‘Nothing is permanent but woe’, we  share his thoughts, which mingle questions about the purpose of existence with a strange poetry:  ‘The brimming dykes are not so full / As my heart’s swell’, ‘I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips’, ‘this seat of desolation void of light’.

He asks the meaning of life, wonders why he’s doing all this, why he’s a bogeyman. He confesses ‘I am, yet what I am, who knows? / I am the self-consumer of my woes’, and, as he prepares for bed yet again with Mildew, he asks ‘What’s it all for?’ and ‘Does it do any ultimate good? Or even ultimate bad?’

It’s a direct, very funny exposition of the whole question of the absurd. The drawings are wonderful, the colours perfect for the subject and the word-play delightful and full of surprises and sudden depths. Briggs is renowned for his apparent pessimism, but this is a book which leaves you both reflective and smiling. I bought it to read with and to my kids but I’ve been going back to it again and again for years.

The Temporary Detective by Joanne Sydney Lessner

Reviewed by Chris Longmuir

One of my choices of Cosy Crime for my own book Crime Fiction and the Indie Contribution, was The Temporary Detective, by Joanne Sydney Lessner, and once I started to read I was surprised to discover this was an American book. I have read many American authors, and I like their style, which is quite different from most British writing. But I had not previously linked American authors to cosy crime. However, after further investigation, I discovered this is a popular genre in the US.

I loved this book. I thought it an enjoyable light read, probably ideal for the beach, or to read on a journey. It had all the elements of a cosy – an amateur detective, a mystery to solve, a whodunit, no graphic sex or violence, although it was hinted at in the book, and being a more modern cosy it did not shy away from characters who were gay, or cross dressers. The setting was New York, which it could be argued, was not a small community. However, the action took place in the offices of a company which did meet the criteria of a closed community. Above all, it had humour, as well as likeable and realistic characters. This was the first book of a series, so I will be watching out for the publication of the next one.

(excerpt from Crime Fiction and the Indie Contribution)

Chris Longmuir

You can buy The Temporary Detective from:

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com

and you can buy Crime Fiction and the Indie Contribution from:

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com

Numbers Are Forever by Liz Strachan

Reviewed by Chris Longmuir

I am no mathematician, in fact I’m probably like the teenagers described in the introduction to this book, and have to be ‘cajoled, diverted and entertained’. However, I do like puzzles, and there are puzzles in plenty in this book which is all about numbers and written by a mathematician. For example, ask someone to roll three dice and keep the result secret, this book will tell you how to work out how many spots were on each dice. Then there is the trick using words and numbers – the answer is always 4 – this book will tell you how it is done. A similar trick can be done with a secret number. I reckon these two alone would make a good party trick. Then there is the number puzzle where you always end up with 9 no matter what number you start with. Oh, and do you know how to make your calculator flash ERROR instead of giving you the answer? Just try dividing any number with 0, or zero if you prefer.

I also liked the snippets of information in this book. I discovered how to test whether a credit, debit, or any kind of card is valid by using a formula to count the numbers. The answer must be divisable by 10, otherwise your card is not valid or you’ve made a mistake in the counting. I also found out that Doctor Who used a sequence of happy prime numbers as a code to unlock a sealed door on a spaceship that is about to collide with the sun. I bet you didn’t know that! Meanwhile the humour ensures this is not a dry read. As Liz Strachan says the most brilliant mathematicians in the Stone Age were the ones who could count “One rock, two rocks . . . er . . . many rocks”.

This book is fascinating. It can be read to help with mathematics, and will show many quick ways to work out convoluted sums, or used as I did to find out the puzzles. It is written in a humorous style and is therefore entertaining. I reckon there’s something for everybody in this book.

Chris Longmuir

You can buy it here:

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore.

Review by Bill Kirton

After reading a skit I’d written, a friend recommended this book. I can now see why but the comparison is flattering. When I started reading it, I was immediately grabbed by the ease of the narrative and its relaxed, inviting tone. But I did wonder whether it would turn out to be a book which churned out variations of a single central gag for 500+ pages. Well, it did – except that there wasn’t just one central gag, but many, and beyond that, it opened some gentle but telling insights into spiritual searches, faith and the relationships between gods, organised religions and – the most important element of all – people.

The easiest way for me to get some laughs here would be to quote examples from the text; it’s consistently entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny. But taking the many one-liners out of context, while it wouldn’t diminish their impact, would do Moore a disservice, because they’re integral to the narrative and funnier in situ. I do, though, need to tell you that, throughout the book, Christ is called Joshua. Why? Well, Moore tells us at the start: ‘By the way, his name was Joshua. Jesus is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Yeshua, which is Joshua. Christ is not a last name. It’s the Greek for messiah, a Hebrew word meaning anointed. I have no idea what the ‘H’ in Jesus H. Christ stood for.’ (Although even that secret is eventually revealed.)

As the sub-title tells us, Biff is Christ’s childhood pal and, with the 2000^th anniversary of His birth coming up, it’s decided that the four gospels don’t tell the full story so Biff is resurrected to fill in the gaps, especially the first thirty years Matthew and the others seem to have left out. He spends his time in a hotel room with Raziel, the angel charged with resurrecting and looking after him. They both have the gift of tongues so the narratives and their dialogue are in colloquial modern American English. The main narrative is the gospel itself as Biff recalls his travels and experiences with the young Joshua, but it’s counterpointed with the story of the tensions between Biff and the angel Raziel, whose passion for TV soaps and wrestling colours his perceptions of modern life.

There are hilarious takes on obvious targets – The Sermon on the Mount, the various miracles, the impenetrable nature of parables, Christ’s celibacy (which is more than compensated for by Biff’s promiscuity), and the fact that bacon is delicious – but it’s humour that derives from the characters themselves, not from some clever 21^st century pastiche of familiar anecdotes. Biff even invents sarcasm, although he seems to accept that irony had already been around for a while.

Joshua decides he needs to find out exactly what being the Messiah entails so, with Biff in tow, he sets out to find the three magi who visited the manger in Bethlehem. The journey takes them over great chunks of Asia but, more importantly, reveals the teachings of other prophets and faiths to them (or, rather, to Joshua, since Biff has a much more practical approach to life and the pleasures on offer).

Subtly, and in the same easy tone, Moore suggests how Christ’s message is informed by the teachings of Confucius (‘little more than an extensive system of etiquette’), Taoism, Buddhism, the Indian caste systems, and other religious ceremonies and observances. It’s a persuasive, sympathetic vision of the underlying values and lessons of faith itself. There are no doubt people who would be deeply offended by this seemingly trivial treatment of Christianity but their offence would reveal the flaws in their own version of faith rather than in this compassionate view of how people interact with one another and channel their dreams into positive, life-enhancing ways of being. I’m a non-believer and yet this journey through some of the major religions in the company of two people who share a genuine, warm and enduring friendship felt like an affirmation of powers outside ourselves.

Despite the inevitability of the outcome, the final pages leading to the crucifixion are surprisingly tense and suspenseful and confirm how expertly Moore has constructed and written the novel. His research is impeccable, his characterisation superb and the range of his humour a constant delight. I bought Lamb  expecting to get a few laughs. I got that and lots more.

The Ruby Slippers by Helen Burke

by Bill Kirton

Helen Burke has written in several genres but it’s her poetry I want to write about because, while lots of modern poetry alienates me by, it seems, being deliberately obscure and ‘difficult’ or following seemingly arbitrary forms and structures, hers is totally accessible. This may reveal more about failings on my part than on that of the poets,  but it's the reality of my response. As often as not, Helen's poetry can also be fun, which is so refreshing when so many poets appear to assume it’s a form which demands hand- and soul-wringing angst. Yes, there are moments of nostalgia, loss, bewilderment in Helen’s work, but the overriding impression one takes away from reading a collection such as The Ruby Slippers is that she’s come to terms with the things and the experiences about which she writes, she knows them. Their resolutions are sometimes abstract but mostly express an acceptance of how things are and a wonder at the lives we live and the people we meet.

Her voice is definitely that of a poet, even when she’s writing prose. If you want to know what writing is, just read the prologue to The Ruby Slippers. It has no broken lines or apparent attempts at metric schemes, but its rhythms and its images definitely make it a poem.

The poems themselves don’t set out to baffle or impress, nor are they full of fashionable tedium or grandiose self-importance. They do occasionally echo with the fleeting, intangible abstractions one might associate with poetry but mainly they’re full of people and objects, shrewd observations of who these people are, how they behave and the tiny things that single them out and give them their uniqueness. The objects brim with meanings, memories, associations that recall past events, the person she was as a child, the person she was before her arthritis made her days so slow and painful. Each poem is carefully, cleverly crafted, leading the reader gently along paths which seem familiar or predictable only to end on a line which reveals a different truth and, with a smile, chides you for being presumptuous.

They contain unexpected turns of phrase, many narrative sequences which bind people and objects together in simple gestures which become iconic, imply greater significance, outlast the people who made them. She asks ‘How heavy is a whale’s dream?’, she races caterpillars with a cousin, bemoaning the fact that hers isn’t performing as he should:

‘My caterpillar is too laid-back.

It was a mistake to call him Ringo.’

There’s a nostalgic ache in some of the poems, such as My Red Sandals and Bless This Handbag. It’s not an expression of regret, however, but of gratitude that the experiences were lived at all. It turns them into moments that persist, that are still accessible. There’s tenderness, nostalgia without regret, rhymes, euphonies, and above all rhythms that are close to those of the everyday but shift subtly beyond them. Burke’s imagery doesn’t aim at verbal dazzling; it’s of that gentle, understated kind that acknowledges the potential values in everything and opens new perspectives on ordinary objects to make them resonate with fresh associations.

Whether it carries threads of melancholy or the sheer exuberance of being alive, every single poem is a pleasure to read. There’s word-play, wit and, above all, humour. There are deliberate absurdities, too, but ones which extend rather than question the realities we all take for granted. It’s tempting to quote the whole of the poem Drawing Dogs, in which she says they’ve ‘begun to seem more like people than people’. She feels safer with them, appreciates their laid-back attitudes, their honesty and near the end, she writes:

‘In their heads, all of them are riding motorbikes across France

Without a care in the world.

And most brilliantly of all – they do not write poetry’.

Her imagination pulses as she describes the world On the 14^th Deck of the Cruise Ship Aurora where there’s ‘no yesterday or tomorrow … there is only NOW’. Her insights, love poems, memories, absurdities, enthusiasms all use apparent artlessness to transcend limits, re-imagine sets of connections, sense the unity of everything, and articulate the importance of the perceiving consciousness.

This is poetry that’s the perfect antidote to ‘Poetry’.

All Expenses Paid by Helen Ducal

Review by Bill Kirton

The essence and the fun of this book are encapsulated in a couple of sentences from the blurb. The writer goes to France to take on the ‘simple’ task of looking after ‘an 82 year old English lady’ who looks ‘like everybody’s favourite grandmother until Jean-Louis arrives to pick her up on his Kawasaki 1200’. She discovers later that this old lady, Betty, when she heard that her daughter planned to ship her off to Brittany  to stay with her other daughter, ‘decided to have a slight stroke’.

The text is marked throughout with wit and humour that range from the gentle to the (almost) outrageous. Ducal’s characters (including herself as narrator) are beautifully drawn, not with any ostentation or wordy pretentiousness, but through observation of what they say and do. (The deceptive simplicity of ‘she decided to have a slight stroke’ is an example of the sort of economy I mean.). Ducal and the irrepressible Betty make a terrific couple. They also make a nonsense of the preconceptions about age and competence.

This was written by someone who loves life and knows how to live it. Unlike other British writers who’ve produced self-aware, often patronising books about life in France, Ducal knows what is meant by joie de vivre and contributes her own take on it. She and Betty delight in what the country has to offer and she uses her writer’s gift of observation to identify and select the elements – large and small – that make up its attractive reality. Her voice is clear, direct, inviting as she celebrates her own and Betty’s absorption into French ways. It’s a life-affirming read and it’s also great fun.