Category: Longform
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Books 2025, 16: The Cracked Mirror, by Chris Brookmyre
I’ve read a few of Brookmyre’s over the years, and always enjoyed them, but I don’t seek him out. So when I chanced on this in Waterstones a week or two back, I had a look. The title immediately made me think of Agatha Christie, of whose books I’ve read a few recently, and my partner and I have watched all of the Poirot series, and several of the Miss Marple TV adaptations.
So when the blurb said this:
You know Penny Coyne. The little old lady who has solved multiple murders in her otherwise sleepy village, despite bumbling local police. A razor-sharp mind in a twinset and tweed.
You know Johnny Hawke. Hard-bitten LAPD homicide detective. Always in trouble with his captain, always losing partners, but always battling for the truth, whatever it takes.
Against all the odds, against the usual story, their worlds are about to collide.
there was no way I wasn’t buying it. Yes, it’s a mashup between Miss Marple and a hard-boiled detective. How? Why? These are questions you’ll have to read it to find out.
It’s good. A gripping read, a page turner. The ending maybe falls a little flat but that might just because I’d guessed (or worked out) something fairly early on. I think you’re meant to, though.
Books 2025, 15: To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
Slightly oddly, I bought this in a bookshop in Canada on our recent trip. I mean, it’s not that odd. Toronto is an English-speaking city, with decent bookshops: why wouldn’t I get it there? Just that it’s not in the least Canadian, and it gave me extra weight to carry home.
But it was such a nice bookshop I wanted to support it (BMV on Queen Street West, if you’re interested), and this is a book I’ve meant to read for years.
Does anyone actually reach the titular maritime safety device/residence? That’s one of the things I wanted to know, as well as what else the story was about. Well, it’s Woolf, so as I wrote about Mrs Dalloway, it’s mainly about the inside of people’s heads.
Not in a gruesome way; not like that thing they do in House, where the camera goes up someone’s nose and into their brain (we’re watching the first season at the moment). I mean their minds, obviously.
Slightly to my surprise, it’s set in Scotland. Specifically, a Hebridean island, generally taken to be Skye, although there’s no lighthouse like the one in the story there. A family with about four (five, six?) children — ranging from young adults about to be married off, down to a boy of five or six — have a holiday home there. and spend the summer, along with various guest they’ve invited along.
Conversations happen, walks are gone on, and many thoughts are thought. Will James, the young boy, get his desired trip to the lighthouse? Only if it’s fair tomorrow, which his father assures him it won’t be.
In fact, we never learn if he goes there on that visit. Part two of the book is entitled ‘Time Passes’, and it certainly does. Ten years, in fact, including the First World War. Several characters die offstage. Woolf is content to tell us, in her inimitable style. Showing that kind of thing would not make sense here.
Then in the third section, what’s left of the family and invited guests visit the house again. Suffice it to say the weather is fine enough to make the trip, but the sixteen-year old James and his sister Cam do not want to go with their father, but are dragged along anyway.
I’m making light of it (ha ha), but it’s a work of complete genius in the way she takes us inside people’s thoughts. It is so convincing, even — perhaps especially — the teenage James. It can be difficult at times, but not in an unreadable way. Just in the complexity of the thought processes. Woolf was all about the interiority. It wil bear another reading, I’m sure. Probably several.
Books 2025, 14: The Final Empire, by Brandon Sanderson
This is the first book in the Mistborn series, and I saw in a bookshop the other day that it’s now published just as Mistborn. Which is more sensible. I can’t help but imagine some potential readers were put off or confused by that ‘final’ in The Final Empire.1
My son basically made me read this. He’s a Sanderson fan and I had read none. He (my son) also told me Sanderson wanted to write a fantasy where the good guys had lost. Like what would have Middle Earth been like if Frodo and Sam had failed on their trip to Mordor? Sauron would have got the one ring back and basically been all-powerful.2
So this is basically that, with quite a different setup. The empire is ‘Final’ because it has lasted a thousand years or more and is never expected to end. Most people live as peasants, near slaves, and few noble houses are allowed to exist because the empire needs trade and internal tensions and what have you. The emperor — The Lord Ruler, as he’s known — is basically all-powerful, invulnerable. He’s said to have survived various assassination attempts up to and including a beheading. Which seems… wildly improbable, but hey, this is fantasy.
But some people — the titular Mistborn, and others — have special abilities, and there are pockets of resistance.
Sanderson writes a good enough page-turner, but I don’t know if I’ll be going on with the series. First of all there are just too damn many. But more importantly, and surprisingly, this first book is actually quite a complete story, with an ending. Sure, it’s a reasonably open ending, with hints of the kind of troubles the characters are going to face, and so on. But if there were no more books, you wouldn’t feel unsatisfied to leave it there.
And I don’t care enough about any of the characters to want to invest my time in it. Which is probably its biggest weakness. I even left it at home when we went on holiday to Canada recently. I was about 100 pages from the end and didn’t want to have to pack such a huge book that I would probably have finished on the flight over. Which is not how I’d have treated The Lord of the Rings back in the day, just to give one example.
Clue, 1985 - ★★★½
This was daft, but quite fun. A film based on a board game. Specifically on Cluedo. Which in America, strangely, seems to be called 'Clue'. Why would you not use such a great, clever name as 'Cluedo'? Unless they don't have Ludo there? But that seems impossible.
It's probably the second-best thing I've seen Tim Curry in. Hmm, he was in Times Square, wasn't he? I remember enjoying that, but not much about it. Right now I'd have to but this ahead of it. He plays the butler, and since one pair of characters turn up in the same car, and it's a stormy, rainy night, I was getting serious Brad & Janet vibes. I was disappointed when they had an umbrella on getting out of the car, instead of a newspaper.
The writers had to struggle a bit to fit the conventions of the game into an actual story, but they did OK. There are shenanigans, murders, betrayals, multiple endings. All in all, not bad.
Books 2025, 13: No Great Mischief, by Alistair MacLeod
This was published in 2000, and my partner’s parents gave it to me that year or the next. I have a vague feeling I also knew about it from somewhere else. Maybe just saw it in a bookshop and thought it looked interesting. Either way, I never got round to reading it till now.
It’s the story of a Scottish family — clan, almost, and certainly they’re referred to that way in the Gaelic terms that pepper the book — that migrated to Canada some time after Bonnie Prince Charlie’s 1745 uprising. It’s simultaneously the history of that migration, and the story of a present-day descendent of the family, now a successful orthodontist in Ontario; and his older brother who is in less successful circumstances. And most of all, of how they came to be that way.
I decided, since we were taking a trip to Canada, that now might finally be the time to read it. I started it on the way to the airport, but I don’t think I read any while we were still over there.
I’ve finished it now, though, and it’s pretty good. Nice use of parallel storylines, various bits about Scottish history and modern-day (well, actually the modern parts are set in the 80s) Toronto, and so on.
MacLeod came up in conversation while we were over. Not apropos of this; I just recognised the name. He was mentioned as a poet, I think, and I believe that’s how he’s better known. Still, he’s a decent novelist too.
Persuasion, 2007 - ★★★
Decent Austen adaptation. I haven’t read the book, which, I understand, many say is her best. I thought the ending fell a bit flat.
Crucial Track for 18 June 2025: How Was it for You?
"How Was It for You?" by James
Share a song that makes time feel like it's standing still.
I’m not sure this exactly fits the bill, but a chat at work today led me to play James’s Gold Mother for the first time in a while, and ‘How Was it for You?’ had me waving my arms in the air like I just didn’t care, or like I was back at the Brixton Academy in 1990 or so.
Sneakers, 1992 - ★★★½
Watched this on the return flight from Canada home. I feel like I’ve been hearing about it for years, as a not-bad early hacking/cracking type of thing.
Which is basically what it was, with an element of heist movie thrown in. Pretty good.
Everything Everywhere All at Once, 2022 - ★★★★½
After watching this in Paris with French subtitles, I finally managed to to see it again. This time on a plane to Canada.
It holds up really well on a second viewing. The Air Canada seatback screens were pretty good. And this time I was able to get all the jokes and nuances in the non-English parts.
I love this film.
Farewell, My Lovely, 1944 - ★★★½
This appears as Murder, My Sweet, on Letterboxd, TMDB, and IMDb, but is actually Farewell, My Lovely. Apparently it was re-titled for the US market back in 1944, because there was a musical with the original name.
The original being, of course, one of Raymond Chandler's novels about the private detective Philip Marlowe. This is a really good adaptation, with what sounds like most of Chandler's dialogue (I mean, why would you change it?).
It's proper, classic noir. But/and there's a scene where Marlowe is captured by the bad guys, drugged, and interrogated, that feels more like the mind-control paranoia of sixties films like The Ipcress File. The visual ideas for suggesting that kind of thing go back a long way, obviously.