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heart-warmingly gentle pace and playfulness to his third shorts collection, titled after a Christmas tale about quarrelling kids and a faulty toy, penned for a newspaper in 1999. Mills can’t quite distort your perception as effectively over just a few pages as he does in his celebrated novels, but not one story passes without a laugh- out-loud moment.
A quiet, unrealised menace stalks the resident of a seaside hotel who mysteriously never sees his fellow guests. ‘A Public Performance’ – a 1970s Bristol-set rumination on the ‘folly of youth’, ie wearing a ridiculous military overcoat and watching Pink Floyd at their most self-indulgent – is a hilarious personal vignette in which Mills dually chuckles at his teenage awkwardness and compliments his nascent individuality. (Malcolm Jack)
FAMILY DRAMA JONATHAN FRANZEN Freedom (Fourth Estate) ●●●●●
WAR COMIC RODGE GLASS & DAVE TURBITT Dougie’s War (Freight) ●●●●●
Novelist Rodge Glass makes his first foray into the world of comics and while his intentions are good (part-funded by the Scottish Veterans Fund and Creative Scotland) the results are variable. You can’t dispute there’s a harrowing human story at the heart of Dougie’s War as Glass chronicles a soldier’s difficulties readjusting to the realities of life in Glasgow after serving in Afghanistan. By telling one character’s (fictional) story, Dougie’s War hopes to highlight the problem of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It’s certainly well-researched (Glass interviewed veterans before penning the script), focusing on an issue that desperately needs to be discussed, but you can’t help but feel we’ve been here before (most notably in Hollywood’s portrayal of Vietnam). The art from Dave Turbitt is suitably raw but needs more detail if you are to truly connect with its central protagonist. Some readers may also be surprised that the story only takes up about
half the book, the second half is an essay from journalist Adrian Searle on PTSD, which contains some shocking interviews with ex-servicemen and their experiences, followed by a tribute to, and extracts from, one of the big inspirations for Dougie’s War, Charlie’s War (Pat Mills’ groundbreaking 80s WWI strip from Battle). And while it’s always worth pointing out that the price of war is high and has implications long after the last bullet has been fired, this thought-provoking package needs more finesse to really do the issues at stake justice. (Henry Northmore)
GHOST STORY SUSAN HILL The Small Hand (Profile) ●●●●● Susan Hill has been writing precise and chilling books in the rather unfashionable genre of the ghost story for decades, so she more or less has it down
to a fine art by now. This short and typically gothic tale demonstrates the refinement of Hill’s prose, concise powers of description, vividly realised settings and characters, and a real gift for building the tension that’s obligatory for this kind of work.
Adam Snow is a book dealer who has the strange sensation of feeling a spectral child’s hand in his when he stumbles on a deserted old house in the English countryside. As the plot progresses, the relatively benign experiences turn malevolent, and something in his own hidden past turns out to
be the key to his strange obsession. Quietly chilling without ever being over the top or showy, this is undeniably quality writing in a genre deceptively hard to master. (Doug Johnstone) SHORT STORIES MAGNUS MILLS Screwtop Thompson (Bloomsbury) ●●●●●
Former London bus driver Magnus Mills’ subtle and deadpan literary sensibility inhabits a quiet world all of its own. It’s a place where mundane reality is shifted just out of focus, crafting subtle absurdities from the everyday. There’s a
It’s one thing to have your latest book dubbed the best of the year when there’s three months of it left, but to be called the finest in a century which has just over 89 years still to run seems a pretty thankless plaudit. Bold and expansive as it is, whether Freedom even manages to succeed in being the number one
publication of this fortnight is rather doubtful. After a rapid-fire start which rattles along like the opening 15 minutes of Magnolia, Jonathan Franzen’s follow-up to the Oprah-taunting glories of The Corrections settles into something all-too comfy and surprisingly stodgy in places. For all the detailed character analysis of the chief proponents (the far too- nice Walter, his increasingly discontented wife Patty and their charismatic yet massively disruptive son Joey), this sweeping panorama through the past and present via satellite figures in the trio’s lives contains occasional jaw-dropping segments but is a litany of stale set-pieces and clumsy dialogue. (Brian Donaldson)
KIDS BOOK AXEL SCHEFFLER How to Keep a Pet Squirrel (Faber) ●●●●●
The cover of this book is savagely misleading. A red squirrel on a trapeze? The pages within are bound, then, to be full of imaginary and unlikely pranks which this most beloved yet endangered of countryside creatures might get up to? Well, no, it’s a crashingly disappointing manual of tips on, well, how to keep a pet squirrel. Having beautifully rendered the words of Julia Donaldson in wonderful animation for children’s classics such as The Gruffalo, Monkey Puzzle and Room on the Broom, Axel Scheffler’s slight book obviously looks like another winner, but has little of the invention, wit and tension which have made Donaldson a household name. Instead, we are simply informed about
ALSO PUBLISHED 5 BESTSELLING NOVELS Jodi Picoult Harvesting the Heart Her second novel, originally published in the US back in 1993, features a woman grappling with the demands of new motherhood, haunted by the fact that her own mother left her when she was five. Hodder. James Herbert Ash Only 50 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide and there’s a bit of a push on to get one or two copies of this out there. It focuses on a detective investigating a secluded stately home that locals believe is haunted, but could actually house something altogether more creepy. Macmillan. John Grisham The Confession On Death Row, Donte Drumm’s time is slipping away fast. But just when his lawyer is on the verge of giving up, in pops convicted felon Travis Boyette with a dark secret to unveil. Century. Kathy Reichs Mortal Remains The Temperance Brennan books reach number 13 with this story of a fresh corpse which appears to be that of a man who had seemingly died in a helicopter crash some 40 years earlier. William Heinemann. Charlaine Harris The Lily Bard Mysteries The True Blood author releases an omnibus of her tales featuring a cleaning lady with a dark past. Gollancz.
the foodstuffs squirrels enjoy and the best way to maintain a suitable cage. If ever there was an instance of someone dipping their toe unwisely into a pool of someone else’s expertise, then this is it. (Brian Donaldson)
23 Sep–7 Oct 2010 THE LIST 45