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.