Midnight in Peking.

What a great read. Cheers Carmel for the recommendation.  This book was a factual report of the real life investigation into the murder of Pamela, a 17 year old English girl found brutally murdered and mutilated under a tower in Beijing in the early hours of Jan 6th 1937. 

It is an account of how the investigation progresses and all the hurdles, dead ends and cover-ups which are encountered along the way. It all happens against the backdrop of fear of Japanese invasion and civil war between nationalists and communists, with the Brits trying to hang on to their interests by a thread. 

I loved the claustrophobic build up of fear and tension and the madness of the people. Everyone knew invasion by the Japanese was imminent. These were the last days of old Peking, and my God, what a place!

I absolutely loved the atmosphere the author created.  The characters and sense of place meant you could almost smell the fear, corruption and poverty hanging around the city at the time. The history of Beijing is told so well through the people who inhabit this book, both dead and alive. The grimy back streets, the rickshaw drivers, the opium addicts, the whores and pimps, the poverty stricken stateless Russians who supported the Tsar, Chinese thugs/nationalists/communists, Japanese thugs/ fascists ,the Jews, Koreans, British beurocrats and civil servants trying to keep face, exhausted coppers, American dentists,  nude dancers, hermaphrodite Russian madams with a heart. A great cast! I also feel like I have a personal taste of the events which befell Beijing during the 30s and 40s. Good god, what a time.

 Suddenly I understood why the Brits and French had to live in legations. These quarters were the only areas which were safe because of uprisings and rebellions. Laws inside these legations were different; the Chinese and British policemen were banned from investigating within their boundaries. This was so the Brits could keep face under such traumatic historical events which were unfolding around them. The thought that there was a sadistic murderer amongst them was just too much to admit.

What happened to Pamela scared locals to death. it was a highly grotesque murder. She was a fluent mandarin speaker, a girl with spirit why on Earth was she so hideously murdered? If you want to find out and have an interest  in the darker side of life read this book! 

Never Let Me Go

I have been meaning to read this book for years and have purposely never watched the movie. I lovedRemains  of the Day and have been waiting for a time to get my teeth into this.

Well I read it in just 5 days and it totally took me away to another world and yes, I loved it. This book sells itself as being about clone children who are bred to harvest their organs. But in my opinion this book is not about science fiction at all.  Infact I think it's all about the way we deceive ourselves about what the future holds.  We all know we are going to die and probably get sick and in pain but we just accept this and blindly and live our lives without many questions. This book makes us think about what it means to be human and what things in life are important to us. 

Back to the book.  these kids are all bought up in the beautiful surroundings of Hailsham House and the first half of the book is written from a teenage girl's perspective.  it's so well written. I can't believe this author would be so capable of getting inside a young girl's head. he did though and it was extremely realistic. These kids are different and know they are different but they only get ghostly snapshots and rumours of the life which is waiting for them.  There are scary rumours about donating and the euphemistic, completing. ( dying.) but not much else. no parents, no histories, no idea of careers or jobs or TV or fashion of life outside.  These kids live in a bubble where they make gifts for each other and get second hand clothes delivered once every few months. They also spend a lot of time looking at people's faces in magazines trying to find out who they were cloned from. 

Most of the time though they are making and creating things. Half of their stuff is taken away by the mysterious Madame and put in a gallery(or so they believe.) I loved this part, the kids think that the artwork is being used to prove they have souls and that two people in the future can use their artwork from when they were young to prove their love for each other and hence defer donating their organs. This bit was very clever because religion and belief  are never mentioned in this book once. This world has no room for God and the author shows how these young people grab instinctively onto quite profound issues of being human: like love, belief in something and the power of friendships.

As the book contines it becomes more and more bleak. Pitch black bleak. The way these young adults just accept their fate is beyond me. They live in a world which ghettos these people and then completely abuses them in the name of medical science. (Nothing is ever written about what is taken out of their bodies but after 3 or 4 donations everyone of them is dead. It's good that he leaves the science to our imaginations.) 

  But this book is beautifully written and the day that Kathy and Tommy have together in Norwich is wonderful. (Sounds so boring, but in this book life is so dull for these kids, any day away is amazing!)

One thing this book will do is make you totally aware that you have to grab life full on and live it to the maximum. 

I like this link discussing why the kids never run away or rebel from the fate which awaits them. 

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/apr/01/kazuoishiguro

Divergent

This was the only book I read on my holiday apart from Guide books and maps.  Anyway it's been a while since I finished it and to be honest I can't remember much.  It was a sort of 'lite' version of Brave New World. For me it was more Enid Blyton/cartoonesque than hard hitting dystopian teenage fiction.

The idea though was great, people are born into one faction with certain traits which you have to follow and live by.  For instance Abnegation are a group of people who only think of the welfare of others and lead grey, puritanical lives, whereas candour are a group who believe that the most important quality is telling the truth at all times.   Anyway these groups take on new recruits when kids turn 16 and Beatrice ends up in the Dauntless faction,the  place where people have no fear and happily spend their free time jumping off moving trains and fighting their deep fears in simulated worlds. To be honest these different factions felt more like Houses in Harry Potter's school.  Good old Beatrice or Tris as she is known ends up being divergent, that means she has the brains and ability to behave in different ways depending on the circumstances. hence she doesn't fit easily into one group. Being divergent is very dangerous...poor old Tris is in serious trouble.

Anyway, the story goes on and on and to be honest I lost the will to live a bit whilst reading. (Although I was sucked in and had to finish it!)  This book is a semi- clone of The Hunger Games because characterisation is weak and completely one dimensional. The only thing which matters is an urgent plot full of strange violence.( Violence which failed to make me feel scared or raise my blood pressure. Violence which managed somehow to seem pretty damn lame, tame and dull.  maybe I'm just too dark!!!)   There was a rather annoying love interest theme too involving lots of looking at each other longingly, sighing and stroking bits of each other's bodies. The plot was really underdeveloped. This could have been so much better if the author had created a more believable world.  To be honest the Chicago of this awful future was not described at all.  Most of the plot just happened in the equivalent of a Hogwart's school playground.  Anyway the end was quite good. One ,because the story finally got fairly interesting and two, because it was the end.