I like the idea that the chapters are very short. I have done 90 odd pages and I think I have read a few spoilers on here. I will come back when I have read it all.
I was mildly uncomfortable with the portrayal of non-white characters in the book. They felt as if the ethnicity was largely added on as an after thought.
That said, I have the strong impression it would do well as a tv adaptation.
@Doublethink, I remember being surprised to discover that Donna was Black. We were pretty far into the story before that was clear. I ended up having to confront my own white-centric take on the world, since I just assumed Donna was white.
I wonder, though, whether part of what I was responding to was what you've identified as the ethnicity having been added on. ...but then, I wonder, what makes an ethnicity "authentic," if a character has been living in and formed by mostly white London...
I found that suicide was promoted a bit too heavily as a way out of grief and facing punishment and would rather other solutions had been found. Possibly because I have had a couple of dark times in my life and am glad to still be here and also because in real life the suicide of someone you know, or even an attempt, is much more upsetting. Was anyone else uncomfortable with this aspect of the book?
@Mili, I found that the suicide at the end of the novel disappointing. It felt like a nod to the British mystery tradition of leaving the culprit in the library with a gun, pen, and piece of paper so he could write his confession, kill himself, and save the investigator from having to bring down a respected member of the community. However, the nod to that trope did not make for a satisfying conclusion, for me, from the perspective of justice.
Or maybe my sense of justice calls for a respect for the police and legal systems, so that I'm uncomfortable with the degree to which people throughout the novel felt free to administer justice on their own terms.
Of course the elderly get underestimated. I have been as guilty of it as the next. I often read obituaries of people I know and marvel at what I did not know about them and the full rich lives they had lived.
@Caissa, I have regularly underestimated my elders. It happened to me repeatedly in parish ministry, and I still do it. I keep trying not to and failing. Reading this novel was a reminder of the importance of not infantilizing the people around me.
For me, some of the best humourous moments came from the juxtaposition of people's expectations of elders and who the elders actually are. Like @Sarasa, I loved Donna being caught short by the responses of people to her "safety presentation." Like @Caissa I also enjoyed Joanna passing Elizabeth off as a nun, and the quickness of her capacity to do it!
Yes Donna’s character struck me in particular, a shipmate with a similar background might be better able to comment - but I suppose what I noticed was the contrast with the Rivers of London series https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivers_of_London_(novel), which are fantasy detection novels. I don’t think the author is black himself and I can’t really know how authentic the portrayal is, but it is more convincing. Just little things like the sort of thing his family would cook when he went home for a meal and so on.
If you watch performers like Gina Yashere (who I think has moved to the US now, but grow up with Nigerian heritage in London), you hear a dialect of London English with difference cadences and different word choice. (I am not talking about patois or creole or even this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English really.) Whereas, even Donna’s internal monologue it basically BBC standard.
(FWIW one of the reasons Buckingham Palace is being criticised for having only 13% non-white staff, which is not far off the national average for the population, is that London has a 40% non-white population.)
Ben Aaronovitch, the author of the Rivers of London series, has an Afro-Caribbean wife, and Peter Grant, the hero, is based on his son. Apparently Mother Thames is based on his wife, rather than Peter's mother, so yes, his descriptions of London and the black and mixed race experiences in London ring true.
From working in a very multicultural environment in London, I did pick up Donna was black and was a bit surprised there was no overt racism within the police and in the old people's home written into the story, but didn't find her character particularly jarring.
Language is odd, how my colleagues spoke varied with their origins - I worked with colleagues from across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, and parents and children from similar backgrounds. It varied hugely, I can think of very accented colleagues from a Nigerian background and a couple with no obvious accent, so speaking either BBC RP or London, although they'd slide into possibly Yoruba at moments. And similarly from different Caribbean backgrounds, there some of them would speak in patois together, but there are a lot of different Caribbean nations. At least one of my second generation Caribbean colleagues spoke BBC unaccented English, even with his other Jamaican colleagues, although he tended to hang out with someone whose origins were from Mauritius, who spoke accented English (and French). But his parents had come over with Windrush and he'd pretty much never been back to Jamaica, his links were mainly through food and music. Unlike another guy who had property out there and flew out to check it at short notice during hurricane season.
Left it a bit late - I read this a while back, and enjoyed the style, but it ran up against a personal problem. When I am reading, I construct maps of the locations. Sometimes this isn't a problem. I have had no trouble with Been Aaronovitch, for example. I know where the Effra ran. Totally imaginary places are usually OK, though I had problems with some of Andre Norton's places where journeys didn't seem to be long enough to get to where people got to.
This one nagged at me, and I have just checked out to make sure it was nagging me for a good reason.
They are in Kent, on the borders of Sussex, admittedly. Their natural shopping centre is Tunbridge Wells. But the police station is in imaginary seaside resort Fairhaven, and from the travelling instructions, that has to be in Sussex. The nearest Kentish coastal town is Hythe, much too far east and probably without a decent sized police station. The logical site is Hastings, which is Sussex.
He can't hold a map in his head. It probably won't bother anyone else.
My mental mapping had this set in the region of Robertsbridge or in the surrounding area, so roughly equidistant between Hastings and Royal Tunbridge Wells. Did he actually say it was in Kent or Sussex in the book, or did we all assume it from the information that Charing Cross is the London station?
Without checking, I think he said it, because I wouldn’t be able to draw any conclusions from London stations, and I definitely thought it was Kent. Glad I don’t know that part of the world very well, so any anomalies didn’t worry me.
Comments
@Doublethink, I remember being surprised to discover that Donna was Black. We were pretty far into the story before that was clear. I ended up having to confront my own white-centric take on the world, since I just assumed Donna was white.
I wonder, though, whether part of what I was responding to was what you've identified as the ethnicity having been added on. ...but then, I wonder, what makes an ethnicity "authentic," if a character has been living in and formed by mostly white London...
@Mili, I found that the suicide at the end of the novel disappointing. It felt like a nod to the British mystery tradition of leaving the culprit in the library with a gun, pen, and piece of paper so he could write his confession, kill himself, and save the investigator from having to bring down a respected member of the community. However, the nod to that trope did not make for a satisfying conclusion, for me, from the perspective of justice.
Or maybe my sense of justice calls for a respect for the police and legal systems, so that I'm uncomfortable with the degree to which people throughout the novel felt free to administer justice on their own terms.
@Caissa, I have regularly underestimated my elders. It happened to me repeatedly in parish ministry, and I still do it. I keep trying not to and failing. Reading this novel was a reminder of the importance of not infantilizing the people around me.
For me, some of the best humourous moments came from the juxtaposition of people's expectations of elders and who the elders actually are. Like @Sarasa, I loved Donna being caught short by the responses of people to her "safety presentation." Like @Caissa I also enjoyed Joanna passing Elizabeth off as a nun, and the quickness of her capacity to do it!
If you watch performers like Gina Yashere (who I think has moved to the US now, but grow up with Nigerian heritage in London), you hear a dialect of London English with difference cadences and different word choice. (I am not talking about patois or creole or even this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English really.) Whereas, even Donna’s internal monologue it basically BBC standard.
(FWIW one of the reasons Buckingham Palace is being criticised for having only 13% non-white staff, which is not far off the national average for the population, is that London has a 40% non-white population.)
From working in a very multicultural environment in London, I did pick up Donna was black and was a bit surprised there was no overt racism within the police and in the old people's home written into the story, but didn't find her character particularly jarring.
Language is odd, how my colleagues spoke varied with their origins - I worked with colleagues from across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, and parents and children from similar backgrounds. It varied hugely, I can think of very accented colleagues from a Nigerian background and a couple with no obvious accent, so speaking either BBC RP or London, although they'd slide into possibly Yoruba at moments. And similarly from different Caribbean backgrounds, there some of them would speak in patois together, but there are a lot of different Caribbean nations. At least one of my second generation Caribbean colleagues spoke BBC unaccented English, even with his other Jamaican colleagues, although he tended to hang out with someone whose origins were from Mauritius, who spoke accented English (and French). But his parents had come over with Windrush and he'd pretty much never been back to Jamaica, his links were mainly through food and music. Unlike another guy who had property out there and flew out to check it at short notice during hurricane season.
This one nagged at me, and I have just checked out to make sure it was nagging me for a good reason.
They are in Kent, on the borders of Sussex, admittedly. Their natural shopping centre is Tunbridge Wells. But the police station is in imaginary seaside resort Fairhaven, and from the travelling instructions, that has to be in Sussex. The nearest Kentish coastal town is Hythe, much too far east and probably without a decent sized police station. The logical site is Hastings, which is Sussex.
He can't hold a map in his head. It probably won't bother anyone else.