Book Review-When The Music's Over-Inspector Banks Mystery

I have been a fan of Peter Robinson's writing, and by inference, a fan of Inspector Alan Banks. The plotting is straight forward and the story telling excellent.

The main attractions are the locale, I spent a bit of time in Yorkshire so the people and the locale are quite familiar to me. Peter Robinson is quite adept at making the reader feel a part of  the characters lives as well as gently dropping us into the Yorkshire cities and countryside.

I have been following Banks and Annie Cabbot for so long that yes, I do feel like I know them very well.

This book, however, veers a bit from the familiar and the comfortable. it delves in the newer dark underside of the modern UK and it is the uncomfortable kind. In this book, Banks has been promoted and Annie had not, and it clearly rankles. Annie is starting to show some of the irreverence and maverick bravado that was  so much a part of Banks.

There are two crimes, as always. One is historical and one is present day. Robinson is excellent at this and he is once again telling the story with verve and aplomb.

The stories involve two very contemporary issues plaguing the western world: child molestation and racial unrest. In the aftermath of the Jimmy Savile scandal, it is no wonder that the author decided to use this motif as a centerpiece. He then adroitly mixed is with the second story involving child sex crimes  mixed in with the racial issues that is popping up in the UK. While the UK does not have the historical dysfunction that the US has suffered through for the entire history, their dealings with the problem serves as a reminder of just how emotionally explosive this issue can be, especially with the roles of the aggressor and victim reversed.

You can tell that the author is struggling with trying to tell the story well, as he does, without really getting mired down by the emotional baggage that always rears its head when it comes to dealing with both issues. They are both complex and emotional. I am not sure that the author was completely successful in treating the issues in a clear eyed way, but he did have a good go. I don't think that there is A good way to address the issues in a work of fiction that is not directly  a story that confronts the issue. I think that the author did well enough, given the parameters that he had set for himself .

Regardless of the amount of effort that he put into it, I was still left a bit disappointed by the ending of the story. It felt like there was another shoe that needed to drop, that the story was ended prematurely. This is why I only gave it a four star.

BUT, it was a jolly good read, the main characters were evolving as characters and the peripheral characters were also evolving nicely as well.

The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato

Upon hearing that I was mourning the death of Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a friend recommended this book: The Drunken  Spelunker’s Guide to Plato, as a means to read something similar and somehow re-igniting my memories of a philosophical work that changed my life. While this book is excellent in its own right, it isn’t ZAMM.

I must say that I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would, mainly because Kathy Giuffre, while a very good writer, had a hard time setting the stage for herself. I struggled with the characters as they were introduced. I had a hard time staying interested since the characters did not grip me at the very beginning, and she introduced so many of them at once that I kept sneaking back to figure out which characters she was talking about. But. She more than made up for it as  she found her groove about half way through the book. The characters became real to me and as the narrative moved along, I started to empathize with the quirkiness of all the characters,

The structure of the book is ambitious. The author interweaves the story of Josie, the narrator, and her life as a bartender at The Cave, a dark and subterranean watering hole; a contemplation of Plato’s fable of prisoners in a cave; and finally a mixture of Greek mythological tales. At first the whole structure seemed to be a pseudo-intellectual exercise in pomposity. But the tapestry works, mainly because of the author’s sense of humor and her easiness with the language and her way with the story. She easily weaves in and out of the three threads and is able to make the story illustrate the mythology and the philosophical ponderings. I found myself being drawn in to the book as the story became more interesting until I was completely captivated and charmed.  In the wrong hands, the easy parallel drawn between Plato’s cave and the bar named the Cave could have been a disaster.  A lazy writer would have gone for the facile laughs and false profundity; this author never went for the cheap laugh or the fake gravitas. She worked pretty hard, in her research on philosophy and mythology to give us, the reader, a very happy and satisfying read.

The best compliment I can pay a work of fiction is that I was sad and forlorn when I reached the end of a book because I wanted the story to continue and I wanted to be led by the author through her thoughts.

I was sad and forlorn when I reached the end of this book.