#Blogtour #Review - The Legacy of Arniston House by T L Huchu

The Legacy of Arniston House (Edinburgh Nights, 4) 
T L Huchu
Tor (Pan Macmillan), 7 November 2024 
Available as: HB, 400pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529097771

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of The Legacy of Arniston House to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

I've been really enjoying Huchu's Edinburgh Nights series, of which The Legacy of Arniston House is book 4. The setting is a chastened Scotland, humbled in the aftermath of a "Catastrophe" and held down by a resurgent England. Its capital has complex politics, criminal networks, magic and, above all, the authentic texture of an alternate Edinburgh.

Huchu's main character, Ropa Moyo, is engaging and spiky, a marginalised figure (literally - she and her gran live squatters' lives in a caravan encampment on the edge of the city) who is trying to make her way in the world of Scottish magic whose leading lights, snooty and entitled as they are, don't want to be bothering with her. At the end of the previous book, The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle, Ropa seemed to have caught a break when she was hired by the English Sorcerer Royal. While I was concerned this might take her away from Edinburgh, I need not have worried: it seems that Lord Samarasinghe has ongoing business in the North. (That can't bode well, can it...?) Ropa is therefore still hanging round her old home town, albeit cut off from magical society, something that pains her more than she expected. She's even able to revive her old gig as a ghost talker, albeit not everything seems to be well in the spirit realms... there could be trouble ahead.

Huchu definitely ramps up the tension in this book. After a deceptively calm opening (if you've read the first few chapters you may say to yourself "David's talking nonsense again" because they don't seem that calm, but JUST YOU WAIT, IT'S ALL RELATIVE) mayhem of all sorts erupts with rioting, mischief and Ropa being hunted by both magicians and Police. She's framed for a heinous crime and  the whole world she was used tseems about to be torn apart. All this leads up to a fast-moving conclusion in which we learn more both about Ropa's past and about recent Scottish history - and are then left, literally, on a cliffhanger. 

Or perhaps, over one.

Compared with the first three books, which were more self-contained, The Legacy of Arniston House represents a clear change of gear and of focus. There is, as in each of the others, a self-contained mystery and an injustice to be solved and righted (you might think, actually, several). But there is also a much more intricate and visible connection to the plot that's been glimpsable in the background, with certain puzzles finally closed from those earlier stories. At the same time, the implications of Ropa's own history and background are made plain for the first time.

A fun return to what is shaping up to be one of the most interesting and readable series of the past few years. I'll wait for the next book with a great deal of anticipation.

For more information about The Legacy of Arniston House, see the publisher's website here. 

You can buy The Legacy of Arniston House from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith or Waterstones.

#Review - The Proof of my Innocence by Jonathan Coe

The Proof of my Innocence

Jonathan Coe
Penguin, 7 November 2024 
Available as: HB, 352pp, PB, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780241678411

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Proof of my Innocence  to consider for review.

Reading a review this weekend of a new TV series set in the 80s, I found myself agreeing with the writer's point that to portray the 80s, you need to stir in a good deal of the 70s. Coe would I think agree, at least one of the characters in his novel would, asking as she does when the 80s began? (The answer isn't 1 January 1980).

The 80s 'beginning' is code in this discussion for the onset of the individualistic, consensus-breaking phase in UK national life which has often been a theme, or lurking in the background, of Coe's novels. It's particularly appropriate here since The Proof of my Innocence focusses on what one may hope is the end, or the beginning of the end, of that worldview, with a bunch of highly unattractive and ideologically bent conservatives meeting in a rural hotel to set their world to rights. This takes place as the Queen (THE Queen: sorry, but that's what she'll always be even for this anti-monarchist) dies, and Liz Truss is appointed to her catastrophic period as PM. (When I reviewed Coe's last novel, Bournville, which appeared just after that time and had a key episode around most of the significant points of post war British history, I noted it was a shame that publication timetables meant he had missed that one - he does though take it in here, most notably The Queue, is a sequence that could almost be a coda to the earlier book).  

Coe is though slightly playing games with the reader: the conference section is in a part of the book that also, or perhaps primarily, explores the conventions and settings of the cosy crime genre (the out-of-this-world setting, the eccentric detective, the unlikely murder) as subsequent sections do dark academia and autofiction (in a pleasingly meta way). They're not parodies or pastiches of those genres, still less I think meant as straight examples, but those styles do influence the events and characters. So after the gruesome country house section introduces a foodie detective who's about to retire, we get a memoir of 80s Cambridge which touches on a cabal who meet behind locked doors (and I think a walk on part by Coe himself?) and then a jointly narrated section by the two young women whose story frames this book, inspired by autofiction.

What these three interrelated stories are all about though is unpicking the tragic story of a novelist, Peter Cockerel, who committed suicide, also in the 1980s. He's a shadowy figure whose books have been given a posthumous revival by an academic, also an attendee at that conference. Cockerill's voice gives Coe an opportunity to explore a conservative worldview and vision at one remove, or two, perhaps, with something of the same distancing effect that MR James might use in a ghost: here is something I found, in the last quarter of the previous century, in an old manuscript; and here is the trouble it got me into. That distancing is I think important here as it creates a separation between what is at least a fairly human view of conservatism and the grotesque cult that it now seems to be.  Perhaps that's a true difference of perhaps it's just nostalgia. In either case Coe demonstrates, and comments on, the difference, and suggests how it perhaps arose (that moment when the 80s began!) but he is wise enough to not try to diagnose it in detail. 

Rather, the point is illustrated, in a variety of settings, throughout the book in encounters with lift controls, overheard chat on a train, and even a character who, unwittingly, sings in his sleep. What goes on in our heads, and our ability to empathise with what goes on own others' minds, is important here. Some things should be shared and others, not. Both individuality and the collective experience matter, but the boundaries between the two can shift and that is not a light matter.

In a book that features murder (perhaps more than once), suicide, and other deaths, it's hardly surprising that bereavement and how we cope with it, or don't, is also a theme. Death is of course one of the great internal/ external events in life so is a suitable part of the book's subject.

As always with Coe's books, I found The Proof of my Innocence very entertaining and funny, but it also made me think hard about appearances and reality (as I said, he plays some games). As the husband of a vicar, and someone who has far too many books, I also took the opening scenes, in a book infested rectory, very personally, and wondered if, indeed, Coe doesn't have uncanny abilities to see into others' minds...

For more information about The Proof of my Innocence, see the publisher's website here. 

#Review - Ice Town by Will Dean

Ice Town (Tuva Moodyson, 6)

Will Dean
Hodder & Stoughton, 7 November 2024
Available as: HB, 400pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781399717342

I'm grateful to the publisher for  giving me access to an advance e-copy of Ice Town to consider for review.

Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,

Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;

The sun is spent, and now his flasks

Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;

The world's whole sap is sunk...

- John Donne

Two years on from the shocking events that rounded off Book 4 in this series, Bad Apples, Tuva is keeping on keeping on. She fell back into binge drinking, but has come through that with the support of a good friend, though unsurprisingly she is still not looking after herself very well (when does he ever?) as we see with her diet. Life in Toytown is though quiet, and perhaps Tuva needs the atmosphere of a major evolving story - so she seizes the chance to drive 20 hours north to cover the search for a missing Deaf teenager in a VERY remote town.

Esseberg is something else, even among the strange locations that Dean has given us so far in this series. Entirely surrounded by mountains, it's accessible only through a single-lane tunnel that is shared between road and rail. One must wait for a time slot to drive through and, once inside the town, there is no escape when the tunnel shuts down for the night.

This place is then even more isolated, inward looking and suspicious than Gavrik - and Tuva has no standing here, no relationship with the police, and no base to operate from (she's staying at a B&B that doesn't serve breakfast, and that is also the town's tanning salon, popular in the Winter months).

Tenacious as ever Tuva goes about her work, against a background of severe cold and short days, trying to establish what has happened to Peter even as bodies begin to turn up. Dean exploits a real flair for the gothic here vin portraying how this remote community reacts to the tragedy unfolding. Several times Tuva is put in danger - visits to the creepy hotel accessible only by chairlift are especially skin crawling. St Lucy's Day, the shortest day (and the subject of Donne's poem which I've quoted above, because that last line, The world's whole sap is sunk, just seems to me to sum up the atmosphere here) is approaching. Normally this would be a big deal as the world turns back to light, but the mood is hardly celebratory rather the villagers begin to go out only in pairs and the local biker gang patrols the streets as vigilantes.

It is great to meet Tuva again. This stubborn, lonely, and often, suffering, woman has been through a lot in earlier books but she still reaches out to help others, whether it's the missing Deaf young man here or her neighbour's kid (and at the moving climax of this book, we hear of another). Strictly she's out of her own domain and has no business here, but she sets about unpicking the threads of life in a small town, allowing us encounters with many interesting characters - whether it's the ex-con ski lift manager, the self-absorbed true crime podcaster, or creepy Eric at the hotel. As ever, Tuva has to balance the need to push these people for info, to go further than the police can, with her position as a stranger, an outsider in Ice Town, someone who may herself be at risk in a tight-knit community where survival depends on the community and somebody who throws round accusations or asks awkward questions may just slip out of that circle of support...

The writing here is good - one senses a warmth from Dean for his protagonist - and we learn more about her complicated early life, but while unexpected, the details don't come as just dropped in, it all makes sense in the context of the character. Billed as a standalone episode in the series, presumably because it's set "away", this book nevertheless feels fully integrated with what's gone before and sets up plotlines and hints for the future.

It's great to this series powering forward so strongly and I am eager to hear more about Tuva Moodyson.

For more information about Ice Town, see the publisher's website here.