The Ides of March, Valerio Massimo Manfredi

I’ve been meaning to try books by this author for ever so long (at least the last six years), so it was a little disappointing to finally get round to it and find it falling rather flat. It might be partly an issue of translation, but it just doesn’t read well to me — it feels choppy and overly filled with exposition; to be all about actions rather than thoughts and emotions — I guess what I mean is that it doesn’t seem to have any emotional life. If someone is worried, the reader is told they’re worried; there’s no need to guess at it, no attempt to show their worry through their actions or reveal it through dialogue.

The writing style honestly sucked any possible enjoyment out of this for me. I don’t know how you can make Caesar’s death boring — there’s so much you can do with signs and portents, with the unrest of the people around him. Instead, it just felt flat, and I didn’t believe in the cause of any of the characters. It’s a fairly standard thriller with historical trappings without that, which is not my thing.

Rating: 1/5

Fever, Mary Beth Keane

Fever is a novelisation of the life of Mary Mallon, the famous ‘Typhoid Mary’. It attempts to dig into why she didn’t stop cooking for people despite knowing the risks; it also tries to provide her with inner life and give the reader someone human to sympathise with. It works relatively well; Mary emerges as a hard-working woman who doesn’t want to believe that something she loves could be making people sick, who struggles with the idea that maybe she is to blame, who has to find a way to get along with the skills she has. It also includes other characters around her who support her and share her views, to remind us that this is a world where germ theory is in its infancy.

It mostly does a good job of making Mary sympathetic, though it has a tough job considering her carelessness. Sometimes she does come across as lacking empathy, and of being too intelligent to miss the implications of what’s happening — so it seems as if she’s stubbornly going through with something she knows is actually a bad idea, potentially dangerous for those around her.

The most emotionally engaging thread is perhaps that of her partner, Alfred. I don’t know how much basis in reality he has, but it provides some emotional handhold throughout the book. They have an on/off relationship as he struggles with addiction and she struggles with her diagnosis as a typhoid carrier. They’re separated and yet come together again and again; there’s something engaging in the way Mary slowly accepts what he is and just works with it, and something pathetic in the way her proudness is worn down.

It’s not very sympathetic to the medical community — Soper seems like a glory hound, for example, who hunts Mary for his own fame — but that’s probably to be expected considering this book tries to see things from Mary’s point of view.

Overall, I think it’s pretty successful, and the historical details seem to be right. It’s very easy to read; the style is relatively simple, but Mary’s voice is strong.

Rating: 4/5

Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein

I really liked Wein’s books about Mordred and his children, at least as far as I remember them (it was a few years ago), so I was quite hopeful about this one. I’ve tried to read it once before, actually; I think I even got a review copy from Netgalley. But I really didn’t click with it. For one thing, the tone is too casual, Verity’s gambit too obvious. Parts of the unreliable narration are done really well, but it remained impossible for me to imagine that a German officer trying to get information would really allow Verity to keep writing about picnics and the exact details of civilian life in such a mundane way.

I ended up skimming this a lot, so any emotional impact was also lost on me. I know a lot of people really loved this, but it did not work at all for me. And I couldn’t really imagine a young female spy in WWII saying things like “dead embarrassing” about ending up crying.

Rating: 1/5