Craven Manor (Darcy Coates) ***
Daniel is down on his luck. He’s a decent guy (this is made abundantly clear) but the only thing keeping him from homelessness is his slob of a cousin. One day, a letter is pushed underneath the door of Daniel’s apartment, mysteriously offering him a job on a mysterious manor that Daniel has never seen even though he grew up in the town. With great trepidation, he makes his way over to Craven Manor, an abandoned home in the middle of nowhere. Daniel is to tend to the yard; there is a cottage on the grounds that he can live in, providing the luxury that his cousin’s sofa doesn’t. The house looks like nobody has set foot in it for years but the cottage is well-stocked with food and Daniel, who is practically starving, has little choice but to take it. But it comes with mysterious rules: be in the cottage before midnight, lock the door, pull the curtains, and for God’s sake don’t open them. Not even if someone knocks on your.
I have a weak spot for Darcy Coates. Sure, her work is not high art, but it’s fun without pretension. Her characters are barebones, but they work to carry the story. They’re almost always the same: desperate people who have no other choice but to live in the abandoned home, to borrow the distant cousin’s brother, to take the weird job in the weirdly isolated location (though my favourite of hers, Hunted, didn’t follow that line of thinking). This one isn’t her best, but nevertheless it has a few inspired twists that put your on the wrong foot, and a few sweet touches, though it’s rarely genuinely scary. Most of it is fairly predictable, though, and that’s a bit of a shame. Still, it was the perfect book for me to pick up crammed into an overfull train with no AC after a long day at work. I finished it the same night, and it’s been a while since that happened to me.
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (John Le Carré)
Alec Leamas is a spy: he is in charge of the Berlin office of the Circus (it’s never been clear to me what that is, but I assume MI6). But one day, the informant he is set to meet is caught and shot, and Leamas is transferred back to London, where he languishes in a boring desk job before being dismissed altogether. He spends a few unhappy months working dead-end jobs, is increasingly broke, and finally ends up in prison. When he gets out, a mysterious man follows him with an offer he can’t resist.
I’ve only re
cently discovered Le Carré; I’d heard of him, of course, but i’d never read his work before (though Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is one of my favourite films, its complexity is a little off-putting and it took a few repeat viewings before I got it). At the start of the year I read Silverview; his last book, by no means his best, but I quite liked it so I figured I would give this one a go.
I’m not sure what I expected – aside from a very complex plot – and honestly, I don’t know how I feel about it now. I wasn’t blown away by it as much as I thought I would be and at times, the exposition seemed to drag on a bit, though it certainly picks up the pace by the end. The characters are okay; Leamas is every inch the stoic, worn out and weary and made cynical by years of people betraying each other. The only female character of note is sweetly bland, little more than a foible and only there for the male characters to play off, but whatever; it’s a book from 1963, so I didn’t expect a feminist masterpiece.
But the plot is easy enough to follow and complex enough to be challenging – I had to backtrack a few times to get it. I find it hard to give it a rating, though; it’s a good book but I think my expectations were a little high going into it.