Gooley's clues

Although we increasingly rely on GPS devices to get us from door to door I guess we all know something about natural navigation. The Sun is in the South, right? Moss grows better on the North or shady side of trees, right?

It's not the fact that Tristan Gooley, in his Walker's Guide to Outdoor Clues & Signs, knows more about it than you or I that surprises me. What surprises me is that it could be so interesting.

I knew some of the plant and soil stuff (from soggy experience in the New Forest bogs) but there was a great deal of about this planet's behaviour in terms of it's near neighbours and weather that is obvious when explained if only you take the time to look. If this book does nothing else it will teach you to observe and make deductions. It is a cumulative and rewarding process.

Immortalised in print

"This is a work of fiction and any similarity to places, events or people, living, dead or unconscious, is purely coincidental."
But of course any writer draws on the people they encounter in life as inspiration for at least some characteristics of the people they create. Happily, for this reader at least, Warwick and Fru have made those coincidences funnier by not disguising some of the names in the insane old people's home in which we have both worked and that forms part of the plot.
I laughed.
I laughed a lot.
That alone is a good enough reason for me to recommend this book. True... it relies on broad, black humour but if you can't laugh at yourself, at life, at illness and at death then you are in danger of taking yourself far too seriously.
Matron take note.

The blind leading the blind

Being blind doesn't stop the mind's ability to visualise space so a model you can feel with your fingertips to gain information is a great idea. Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See uses the construction of a model town for a carpenter/locksmith's blind daughter as a symbol of how to engage with the world. But there is more than blindness she has to face. She also loses her father and her country because this is a small French girl trying to survive first in Paris then in Saint Malo during the Second World War. She is destined to meet our other protagonist who is a Nazi radio operator and so also lives in a world described to him by others. What Doerr does well is make us have equal interest and sympathy in both characters. I was a little cautious that this would turn into a corny romance. It didn't. It was romantic but the ending wasn't telegraphed in the way I expected. So for an American to set a novel in historical Europe, to enthuse it with the atmosphere of a Jules Verne fantasy, throw in the corruption of money and to contrast it all with naturalistic greed and violence is quite some accomplishment. I found the bestseller pace and short chapter formats a bit formulaic but nonetheless I thoroughly enjoyed the ride.

Mark is on the level

I saw a hummingbird in the garden one summer. It was a hawk moth. Not as striking as the psychedelic elephant hawk moth but pretty big and it's wings were buzzing away in a blur of motion as it fed on the flowers.
When Stephen Moss wrote his unassuming natural history of an English village called Mark in the Somerset Levels he chose (or maybe it was the publisher) the title Wild Hares & Hummingbirds. The name is a bit deceptive because Moss is at his most knowledgeable talking about birds but perhaps it didn't make a great title or theme for a cover graphic.
This is a very slight tome - there is nothing much to it in size or scope - but it reminds us that observation of the small things in life can be the most pleasurable and, in an inverse perspective on human life, much more significant than our short term obsessions with celebrity and political posturing.

An Island Race

For about two thirds of JD Taylor's Island Story I'd assumed that he had a fixed political attitude and a bit of a chip on his shoulder about traditional targets of establishment authority. Well, he probably does but it was only towards the end I realised that he was genuinely curious about people's sense of identity - whether misguided or not - and openly humane.
He is an entertaining but far from traditional guide around the country and sees life from a very different perspective to, say, Bill Bryson or Wainwright's walks. Taylor is an angry, bewildered, stoned young man; not a sardonic grumpy old man and that's fine.
The only reservation I would have though is the pace at which he cycles. He steams through large expanses of countryside where I would have preferred if he had gone to fewer places but spent more time, with more attention to detail. Like all pilgrimage-style journeys I suspect he learned more about himself than his surroundings but he travelled a long, long way from social work in South London and his mind was broadened as well as the reader's. He's a cyclist without a pointy hat and pink lycra and that's got to be a plus.

We Want What You Have

In a time of nonsense politics and the economics of greed, suspicion and envy then the slogan 'We Want What You Have' makes perfect sense. The British - or to be more exact the South Eastern English - are inordinately fond of owning their own property but wanting more. In many places in the world it's still more common to rent, particularly for young professionals living in the city. Home for them is more about family than bricks and mortar. When you add the toxic house price inflation of some parts of London into an already confused set of cultural aspirations it's not surprising there is tension.
John Lanchester's Capital brilliantly captures all the social threads and uniquely enables you to identify with every single family or individual ...with one exception. No, not the rich spoilt City worker. It's the poor footballer from Senegal who gets injured, plus his minder, that I struggled to find engaging. No wonder their characters more or less got dropped from the successful TV adaptation. They just didn't add anything other than be an obvious example of contrasting poverty and wealth. The rest of the inhabitants and workers in Pepys Road all resonated with warmth and cynical humour. Lanchester has a lot to teach us about ourselves and our values but he avoids being preachy or having a closed mindset - which is why everyone gets an equal grilling of tough love.

A Herd of Independent Minds

To quote Robert Wyatt quoting Noam Chomsky quoting Harold Rosenberg the trivialisation of personal experience in mass media leads intellectuals unwittingly into a conformity of herd-like behaviour both in politics and the arts. I think its simpler and more fundamental than that - we are social animals influenced by the behaviour of others, whether we admire them or not. What's worse, in my view, is that we like to categorise people of independent minds into groups and movements. It's one of the laziest tropes of literary, artistic and musical criticism and it drives me bonkers.I probably belong to the bonkers group.
So then, what is the Bloomsbury Group? An independently minded lady called Vanessa Bell fancied a change and moved house to Bloomsbury. She went with her sister Virginia Woolf (left) and often invited people round to tea. That's about it really.
I'd rather it was called the Charleston group because there is something hugely evocative about the farmhouse where Vanessa and Duncan Grant and others lived during the War years. The painted walls, furniture, garden and every aspect of their daily lives danced with an open minded cosmopolitan optimism. Frances Spalding's biographical gazetteer of The Bloomsbury Group personalities (of which there are many and various) is a good primer but don't be deceived. These people may have known each other, met and loved each other but they are not a hive mind.

Strange new books

If you're an inveterate science fiction reader you will find this book neither strange nor new. But good science fiction isn't about space opera ray guns and planetary travel. Good science fiction is just fiction about people but gives you an otherworldly perspective on the strangeness of human civilisation and puts your perception of the here and now in a totally different light.

Michel Faber's The Book of Strange New Things does exactly that.

It takes a fairly routine one dimensional story about a Christian missionary and makes it poignant by wrapping it around a story of isolation from your species and your family. It preaches tolerance and acceptance of all that is foreign and alien at a time when we need to be firmly reminded of what it means to be a citizen of somewhere and everywhere. It's not about Scottish independence by an adopted Scottish author. It's not about Brexit. It's about the practicalities of helping fellow creatures not to die.

A different story every two hours

There are several David Mitchells. One David Mitchell has lived in several countries. This David Mitchell has written several stories. One of these stories includes 6 other stories which used to be 7 and probably started out as seventy short stories. Several of the 6 stories in this book make reference to other stories he has written. Welcome to the bewildering world(s) of The Bone Clocks - a beautiful metaphor for our bodies' transformation over time.
They made a successful film of the unfilmable Cloud Atlas with Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. In many ways the narrative running through The Bone Clocks is more consistent and less confusing but Mitchell certainly packs a lot of invention, characters and different scenarios in which gives his books an epic multi-generational feel. My only reservation is that the strength of reader engagement wanes towards the end of the story which is the opposite to most reading experiences. Normally the reader starts out fairly neutral and then gets drawn into the story more avidly towards the resolution of the plot. With David Mitchell's books I've found that I think he is the best writer ever from the get go to about a third in to the book but the engagement declines as the initial characters and stories are resolved and new ones, or reincarnations, continually emerge and it starts to read like a collection of short stories. But maybe that's just my fault for reading last thing at night when I'm fatigued anyway and unable to enjoy making all the connections between different characters and story lines. After all that's what the fans of much more straightforward comic and film franchises enjoy.

Liars

I'd be lying if I gave the impression that I enjoyed every book I read. I quite often sample something just to get out of well worn literary tracks or genres. This can take me into the commercial mainstream and, in this case, to the young adult fiction of E. Lockhart's We Were Liars. So I admit freely I'm not in the target audience but I figure a good book is a good book. Isn't it?

The book hype would have you believe this is not only a good book but an extremely clever book. Shame that the target audience has the attention span of the proverbial gnat as most chapters are about two pages long and don't give any time to really give any narrative or get engaged with the 'rich kid' characters. Even the physical layout of where the action takes place and the family relationships have to be spelt out in pictures at the beginning of the book.

Whilst I'm in moan mode the other thing that bugs me about trying to do a book blog is having to select pictures that can be reproduced without copyright. The publishers are so protective of their property that this normally stops anyone giving them free advertising by showing the book graphics or even the author's mugshot. This can result in some creative lateral thinking to select an image. Not this time. E Lockhart is the pen name of Emily Jenkins.

Le Liseur propose à préposé

The blurb on Jean-Paul Didierlaurent's The Reader on the 6.27 suggests that it is similar in look and feel to the film Amélie. There is innocence and simplicity in the story but not quite the level of subversive personal charm that she possesses. The Reader is more of a narrator than a romantic agent provocateur and the sense of humour is often similarly black but rather more visceral and, on occasion, toilet based. Only the names (like the fact that the main character's name resembles 'ugly puppet') gets a little lost in translation as it has to be pointed out. A joke explained is killed but otherwise it is an amusing and refreshingly skewed view of fragmentary life experiences.

The book is, naturally enough, in praise of reading books but, more unusually, it is also about the potential social bonding that a shared experience of literature can bring. It challenges the normal behaviour on a train where people typically use books or electronic devices to separate themselves from each other and from reality. The book is quite slim - you could just about read it on a long journey - and if you want something to read on a train you could do worse than read this (aloud ideally).

Walking, thinking, writing, rhyming (sometimes)

Poets have a hard time making money. They can give readings, talks, teach, translate or write other stuff. Simon Armitage tried his hand at being a troubadour: a strolling player earning his passage from the generosity of his audience. It was an interesting experiment in striding through the ages as well as the Pennines. With Walking Away, his sequel to Walking Home, he chose the South West Coast Path. I'm not sure the financial jeopardy is sustained as he meets a lot of people who are prepared to tolerate and feed him. Unfortunately I don't think the landscape inspired him as much as it might during the tougher legs but I do know one thing. A poet writes prose beautifully and I can also recommend Armitage as a personable companion who has an eye for acerbic and amusing analysis of the people he meets. All travelogues should be written by poets.

Germany Calling

It seemed like a good time to learn more about European culture in the aftershock of Brexit (and that messy illiterate abbreviated concatenation tells you all you need to know about the level of reasoned argument). The UK may have waved goodbye to the German Christmas market but not to the things we share. Sausages and beer, oak forests, grown up fairy tales, technical efficiency, emotional reserve and, by and large, modesty. Some of us, after all, are Angles and Saxons and they also gave us a bunch of Royals. Yes ...whisper it...we are "immigrants". We sit in the European sandwich between the northern Viking raiders and the Roman Empire - so you can add Scandinavian and Mediterranean into the mix before you even get to Empire and the rest of the global community. Let's face it we all came out of Africa in the first place so what's all the fuss about?
Neil MacGregor's book Germany - Memories of a Nation is a fascinating read because he has the ability to tell the story of a culture through selective objects. Simon Schama has done something similar before and I heartily recommend his writing about the role of the Forest in the German psyche. MacGregor now works in Berlin (under the freedom of work movement we currently enjoy) and shares Schama's advantage of being an involved outsider. He can pick up the collective embarrassment of conquest by France, the abomination of Hitler and the hurt of a society Walled up against itself with a neutral approach. Interestingly Germany has also tried to take this analytical and dispassionate approach to its past and to learn lessons from it's history and culture. This is why Merkel opened her borders to refugees; without panic but without illusions as to the challenges that would bring.

Number 11 marks out of Number 10

Jonathan Coe was worried that the timing was not great for the release of his latest novel Number 11 because one of his heroes, Umberto Eco, was unleashing a satire on finance and politics at the same time called Numero Zero.

Coe's surname may be an anagramatic echo of Umberto's but I don't think the two clash in any way. On its own merits Number 11 is Coe's best and, of course, eleventh novel to date. It's also a sort of follow up to What a Carve Up! which is one of his most enjoyable novels. I prefer The Rotters' Club personally - for musical and nostalgic reasons but they're all pretty good.

This one also has a musical reference: Louise Le May's Sink or Swim from her recent and delicately beautiful album A Tale Untold which is appropriated to play a role for a talented singer who perhaps hasn't had the exposure and fame she deserves. Fiction imitating reality there. A tale untold told.

Coe has a sure touch with caricature but also with well rounded characters, particularly the young women in this story, who are completely engaging as we follow their lives, careers and experiences. The backdrop is a wry and amusing swipe at modern life and politics - not just British as the malaise and absurdities here translate widely, you just need to change the names. As an added bonus you also get a twist. I won't spoil it here but I'm not talking about a plot twist, I'm talking about a genre twist. Highly unexpected and enjoyable.

A Recycling of Witches

They, whoever 'they' are, say you should write about what you know. Deborah Harkness is an American academic who has studied European History including some of its more arcane and occult babblings. She has also written a trilogy (for starters) of novels, of which the first is A Discovery of Witches, themed on a young woman who is studying at University and falls in love with a vampire. This is not really my bag. I'm not part of the demographic for this target audience. But I like to make my own discoveries...and it was a free ebook. After a tedious start, which I recognise as the authors need to display their research, the story romps along enjoyably. The only bit I resented was the Trilogy format which meant that the book really ended 3/4 of the way through and the rest is setting up the second book. The trend of designing the writing structure for TV and film adaptation is inevitable but very frustrating for a reader like myself who will never be a devotee of the box set for this particular brand.

Here be dragons

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro is one of those novels that had everything going for it from my perspective. Mythology, landscape, self-discovery through a journey and the sense of understatement and restraint that comes from a Japanese sensibility filtered through Englishness in the early writing courses at the University of East Anglia. But frankly it is the writing style that is the problem here. It's not a literary approach versus a hack sci-fi/fantasy problem as I think high and so called lowbrow are useless concepts when it comes to assessing quality, as are genres. By which I mean it is useless to try and assess something by a set of aspirations to which the author never aspired to in the first place. The problem is that the style is deliberately clunky. In trying to emulate the sing-song declamatory style of epic myth the dialogue is stilted and the narrative laboured. It probably would have been a much better book if Kazuo had dashed it off more quickly and less self-consciously. So for what it's worth KI write again soon.

Eats Dribbles and Shoots

Bill Bryson's second guide to our small island is called The Road to Little Dribbling. It's not really a guide as it doesn't attempt to be geographically fair - Wales gets a chapter, and Scotland barely that, which would be a scandal if it were a tourist guide. It is more of a deliciously observed travelogue where Bill's curry and beer is just as important as the architecture, landscape and history of a place. It's brilliantly funny of course and we recognise ourselves in many of the encounters. If ever there was an advert for immigration it's Bill's ability to both inhabit a nation but still look on wryly as if he has only just landed from planet America. Now he has been here so long he can return the compliment when he visits there and his observations of Texas are equally funny and frightening in the current political climate.

Conceptually this book appears lazy in that it plays into the publisher's hands of repeating a known formula. In fact Britain (particularly England) has changed so much since Bill last wrote about it that the past may as well be a different country. I'm not sure if the fictional village of Little Dribbling is a reference to Bill's advancing years or a comment on the nation state. I prefer to see Bill as the happy rotund figure from Skeggy on the cover of the book but I had to settle for a picture from the Rocket League due to most publishers' insane desire to control imagery associated with their authors. Maybe it's more appropriate though given the Bryson family history with sports commentary.

Life is a Cabaret

Alternatively Life is a Cabinet. Richard Mabey (one of the Environment

Triptych above sculpted by Jon Edgar) wrote a selection of musings about Botany and the Imagination and called it The Cabaret of Plants. It reminds me more of a Victorian Cabinet of Curiosity than Liza Minnelli trying and failing to make Michael York look sexy in the musical. Oh what fun they had in Weimar during the rise of the Nazi party! 

Anyway, back to this book. As you'd expect from a miscellany of writings on plants and how they have played multiple roles in civilisation - through mythology, medicine and culture - it ranges from the fascinating to the slightly dull. But don't let that put you off. The highlights, of which there are many, are worth catching the cabaret. I particularly enjoyed tales involving the Yew, how to hide a body in a Boabab, the wreckless destruction of the Sequoias and speculation about plant intelligence. So if you don't know what these plant names are then dust off that old vinyl copy of Stevie Wonder's Secret Life of Plants (a more appropriate choice I think than some nice blonde boy belting out Tomorrow Belongs To Me) and find out more about your planet.

Meet On The Ledge

Nick Hornby is a happy chappy. His 2005 novel A Long Way Down reads like a film script and I nearly saw the film on Netflix before I'd read the novel. I have no problem with authors doing this because all it means is that the novel is cut up into small scenes (which also makes it easily readable) and there is an ear for dialogue (which in this case is presented from four different viewpoints or characters). I don't think it is too much of a spoiler to reveal that it revolves around a bunch of people that meet on top of a tall building as they are about to commit suicide (or not). A person less likely to take the plunge than Nick Hornby is hard to imagine as his novels tend to a warm and slightly sentimental bonhomie. Nonetheless I would have liked a little more musical reference in one of the characters and that probably reflects a lack of depth to back story in general - but at least the characters are believable and he pulls off the difficult task of helping the reader identify with (whilst objectively condemning) each of these very different people.

Norfolk is a Mystery

I spent 5 years of my life in Norfolk and by the way it isn't flat - although parts of it are wet. The Norfolk Mystery is, I'm sorry to say, a bit wet. I've just seen too many Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L Sayers and similar jolly murder adaptations set in or around the nineteen thirties. The lead non-narrative character in Ian Sansom's Nortolk Mystery is always quoting Latin or literary sources in a way which is potentially funny but becomes irritating on repetition and excess. I understand that this is satire. I get that. I also quite like the idea of this being a series of County based travelogues. But as farce it is just slightly the wrong side of PG Wodehouse for me. I never engaged in the 'whodunnit' element and it probably needed a dash of PD James to bring some gravitas to the murder. I just don't think he took the Norfolk motto "Do Different" seriously.

Lemons, peppers, almonds and buses

Photo: Randi Hausken

There were a few "what's not to like" factors for me when I picked up Driving Over Lemons. The first was that the company I worked for had just been acquired by a Spanish parent company and I was hungry for anything on the geography and culture of my new employers, the second was having more than a passing interest in farming/horticulture and the clincher was that Chris Stewart was an-ex drummer of Genesis. He played on their first single Silent Sun and a few other pieces although they were barely more than a glint in Jonathan King's eye at the time. Genesis had a few other forgotten drummers before Phil Collins finally filled the seat but Chris was one of the five originals. He chose a different path and, whether or not it was as lucrative as some, you have to admire the rich and rewarding life he has built for himself and his family at the remote farm of El Valero in the Granada province of Las Alpujarras.in Andalucia.

In the Last Days of the Bus Club he writes engagingly about serving Wild Boar to Rick Stein, how not to start a tractor, doing an author tour with a sheep shearer, having to consult a hands-on faith healer about his inflamed private parts, the devastating affects of flash floods and most poignantly about having to let his daughter out into the wide world (the bus club of the title being the end of meeting fellow parents at the school bus).

Maybe it's just me...

I really enjoyed the beginning of this book as Nathan Filer has a good ear for making the narrator speak from inside the character's thoughts in a refreshingly simple and sing-song way. I liked the degree to which his view of people and events was off-kilter with the sensible adult's world. But this becomes a prison - as it does for the character himself and his real and imagined relationships. The intervention of official letters and dialogue with other characters doesn't really interrupt his internal dialogue and that ultimately makes this book, ironically, too one-dimensional an experience.

This is a highly rated book and I wondered if it was just me. Maybe I had something to fear from my own mental fragility in the face of this character's story. Certainly I struggled to empathise when he tells well-meaning helpers to f**k off and leave him alone. I know this happens to those trying to help all the time. So maybe it is just me that I gave up on the character at that point. But I didn't stop reading, I just stopped empathising.

A small but perfectly formed inheritance

The hare - particularly a white hare or rabbit - is a complex symbol encompassing elements of harmless madness, purity and rebirth and is closely associated with the seasonal pull of the moon. The hare shares many good characteristics from the Chinese Taoist moon-hare that creates a herbal elixir of life, through the Japanese Usagi, to Buddhist and Hindu incarnations, the Shi'ite reincarnation of Ali and the Celtic origins of the Mad March Hare, the Easter Bunny and Jimmy Stewart's 6 foot 3 and a half inch Pooka called Harvey. But it is not well liked in Hebrew culture, and by derivation Christians, who see the hare as a symbol of fertility and is therefore bad. This kind of nonsense and religious intolerance spread spider-like through different cultures is relevant to Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes which treats art objects as telling a story beyond their creator and cultural origins in the way that they can touch many different lives.

On a recent visit to the Pallant Gallery in Chichester, UK, I saw some really paintings by an unjustly neglected official war artist Evelyn Dunbar rescued from a Kent attic and a collection of paintings, drawings, engravings and poems by an artist called David Jones. Inspired by one of David Jones' poems was an exhibition of minimalist ceramics in cases or vitrines. Visually these were no more interesting that a pile of petri dishes and I walked swiftly past them. None of the group I was with even remember seeing them. A real lesson, and I obviously needed it, that every object, like every person, has an interesting story to tell if you will only take the time to look. This book is part of that story and it is a fascinatingly rich and diverse one that I heartily recommend.

The start or end point is a collection of 264 Japanese Netsuke which are wood or ivory carvings - none of them bigger than a matchbox and all carefully designed to be slightly rounded and easily portable. Although these are figurative it is easy to see the restraint and subtlety of their design in Edmund de Waal's pottery and he won't be the first or the last potter to be deeply influenced by Japanese cultural and spiritual attitudes. This is deeply ingrained from time he spent studying in Japan - but that is only a part of the labyrinthine cultural and art historical connections that run through his family and span the globe. I'm not going to retell the story here - you need to buy and read the book. I've just a couple of other observations to make. The first is how surprisingly cool, pragmatic and level-headed his description is of the psychosis and institutional theft that rich Jewish families suffered across Europe in the Twentieth Century and the second is how heart-warming, but so frustratingly anonymous, is the tale of family loyalty shown by the German lady who hid these valuable Netsuke in her mattress during the Second World War and ensured their success as objects which frame their owner's memories.

PS. Watch The Joyless Street from 1925 on YouTube. It's not Greta Garbo you need to watch it's the fear of the international banker. Some things don't change.

That's No Child

Eowyn Ivey describes waiting to find 'her story' and it becoming her first novel 'The Snow Child'. It's just as well that the making and reading of a book is in how you tell the story not the originality of the plot because 'her story' is also the traditional Russian fairy tale Snegurochka or Snow Maiden. It also leans heavily on Arthur Ransome's 'Little Daughter of the Snow' and less consciously on picture books like Raymond Briggs' The Snowman. Certainly this is a book that would appeal to younger readers but it is more about motherhood than childhood and about the difficult and painful process of letting go. There are some poignant moments in the protagonist's relationships that everyone will recognise - not least the abandonment of pride in accepting help from friends and neighbours.

What I liked best however was the description of the harsh brutality and beauty of the Alaskan landscape where you are forced to make brutal choices such as hunting to survive. As well as paying homage to northern mythology she also generously cites twelve Alaskan writers who mostly use their natural environment front and centre in their works. Shame she didn't mention Russell (Rusty) Annabel's Alaskan Adventures and who Ernest Hemingway described as 'the finest outdoor writer' he had ever read.

Same but different

The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden is Jonas Jonasson's second novel and his self-confessed description is that it is the 'same but different' to The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared.That's just dandy for me because his first one was the funniest and best novels I've read in ages. It was a pretty good film as well with delicious black humour.

What I like best of all is the way Jonasson rides roughshod over received political opinions about international politics and boils events down to the random actions of different personalities as if the world is just one big dysfunctional family. A country and a country's culture is always more complex and diverse than can possibly be expressed in a single story and yet Jonasson's farce is uncomfortably close to the truth with broad historical events turning on the whim of a few individuals' self-interest. This time apartheid era South Africa, China, Israel and, of course, Swedish politics and monarchy come in for a bit of a working over albeit in a gentle and affectionate way for the King. Can't wait for Hitman Anders and The Meaning of It All.

Gone and Forgotten

There are two sides to every story and one is good and one is bad. I was looking forward to this book because I read a reasonably average novel called Good Girl and the press seemed to equate it with this one just because of the title. I'd seen part of the film of Gone Girl and was looking forward to reading this. Now I find myself looking forward to finishing the film in order to compare the two but I'm not one of those people who complains that films aren't like the books or vice versa. They are always quite different but complimentary. Sometimes in a good way and sometimes not so good - just different. 

Strangely though I did find the two books more similar than the book to the film. That is because what frustrated me about Good Girl was the two dimensionality of just having two characters. In a film that seems less obviously a problem as your attention span and the story are short enough for it not to matter. In Gone Girl I really wanted the parents and friends to be more fully rounded. I wanted to find out what happened to the first girlfriend. I wanted to know more about the police investigators and the lawyer. The curiosity to read on is purely plot driven rather than character driven once you've worked out the basic premise and your empathy for the main protagonists is exhausted. Nonetheless you have to respect Flynn for avoiding a straightforward good versus bad approach to her characters and letting them speak fully through the narrative.