Tales from nowhere very interesting

2010′s literary haul has me impressed, even if it does miss its original target. The books that close out the year are much the same: close, but sans cigar.

61. A Certain Chemistry – Mil Millington
A Certain Chemistry is yet another book that, if it were written by a woman, would be labeled chick lit without a moment’s hesitation. It’s not even a particularly blokey variation on most garden-variety chick-lit. Switch the genders and it’s classic Marian Keyes – right down to the quirky-but-loveable partners, the ‘glamorous-but-actually-not’ career angle and the richly drawn secondary characters.

And none of that is a bad thing. When Marian Keyes is good, she’s very, very good, labels be damned. She’s fun and readable and much more intelligent than she gets credit for. When she’s good. When she’s not … well, she’s everything everyone hates about chick lit, just with a more serious message.

A Certain Chemistry is definitely more like good Marian Keyes than bad. It’s very well written and actually regularly funny. Millington is a Guardian columnist, and it shows: the text is scattered with little bits of commentary on lots of different topics, and the jokey tone mostly works. It’s not wall-to-wall laughs: sometimes the humour falls a bit flat, but given how notoriously difficult I am to amuse in writing, this amused me quite a bit.

Stylistically, the biggest problem lay in the use of the ‘God’ device. Every few chapters Millington hands the narrative reins over to ‘God’, so he can explain to us why this is all happening and how it’s his fault because he stuffed up on the sexual attraction stuff. The passages aim for fun but land at annoying and unnecessary.

Those passages aside, this is a well, written and entertaining story, and yet I found myself struggling through great parts of it. As someone who has been cheated on in the (thankfully far distant) past, there’s a big part of me that just doesn’t see the funny side of infidelity. Tom – our anti-hero – spends a great deal of this book trying in vain to make us feel bad for him, because, of course, cheating on your partner isn’t easy. It requires you to keep lots of secrets and have a good memory for lies and be quick with them when they’re required and you always want to be off having sex with the person you’re cheating with but you can’t be because – woe is you – your partner might find out. It’s hard work and Tom would just like us to acknowledge that and not go straight to feeling sympathy for his girlfriend. Which: bullshit. And to his credit, Millington knows this is bullshit and writes it as such, which actually makes the ‘God’ passages even more baffling, as their sole purpose seems to be to justify Tom’s behaviour as nothing more than human nature. Tom might want us to feel for him, but Millington – when he’s not playing ‘God’ – definitely doesn’t.

… Right up until the end, where I think we are asked to decide that a couple of years of solitary is enough and he should be forgiven. And, sure, maybe that’s true, but there’s a big difference between being forgiven and being taken back, and … I like to think she didn’t. Which kind of kills the romantic inside me to say, but makes the adult in me sing.

62. Faithful Place – Tana French
Tana French has been one of my favourite discoveries of the past year. She’s got a knack for infusing the mystery-thriller with some of the best character writing and dialogue I’ve read in recent times, and creating these heady, involved stories where you care about the outcome in part because you care so much about the people involved.

It’s a delicate path to take, and, at times, Faithful Place sees her just missing the mark by going a little too far with the emotions. The risk you take when you make your mysteries this personal is that you will end up with a Law & Order: SVU-style mess, full of self-righteous cops out for justice at any cost – and while, thankfully, this is a fair way off hitting that low, it does drift a little closer to it than either In The Woods or The Likeness did. There’s just a little bit too much family drama woven into one too many family-related subplots – and at times, the central mystery seems to take a little too much of a backseat to the Mackey family nightmare.

The result is a story that just doesn’t feel as tightly and impeccably plotted as it could be. It’s just all a little bit too busy, with all these things going on at the periphery that cross the line from enriching the story to just becoming distracting.

I have to confess, also, that I pegged the real killer quite early on – although I did so totally by chance and without any real reason. To her credit, French had me reconsidering that position through the second half of the story, but unfortunately one of the alternative scenarios she seemed to be suggesting had me preparing to be hugely disappointed in this book as a whole – bringing it right down past SVU territory and into the most clichéd kind of soapiness. The scenario didn’t play out, and to be fair, the main element of it was never actually mentioned in the book, but it felt a little cheap and obvious to even let it get as far as it did.

None of which is to say that this is a bad book. At all. Faithful Place has a lot of the same good points that French’s previous books have – it’s well-written, constantly absorbing, with richly drawn and multi-dimensional characters whose actions stem from somewhere inside them, instead of just serving the plot. The communities she creates are compelling and welcoming, even while more-than-slightly unnerving. She’s got a great sense of pace and just enough wit to keep things from getting too relentlessly bleak; this is a good book and definitely worth a read, but I would recommend In The Woods and The Likeness above it.