The Blue Salt Road Joanne Harris
Thirty years ago I learned to sing The Grey Selkie of Sule Skerrie. Selkies were legendary seal creatures who were capable of changing into human form. Their home was Sule Skerrie, a remote island of rock in the seas north of Scotland, west of the Orkneys. The tune is grave and beautiful, in the Myxolydian mode often used in old Scottish songs. Now Joanne Harris has taken that story, and written a poetic re-telling of the Selkie myth – just as grave and beautiful as the song. I could not stop reading until the tale was told. Harris has taken herself, as writer, to a new place, (very different from Holy Fools, Chocolat, Blackberry Wine) and a compelling one.
The High Window by Raymond Chandler.
Sometimes you take a walk on the wild side, and decide to listen to a cops-and-robbers whodunnit. P.I. Philip Marlowe is tasked, in this one, with finding a valuable gold coin missing from the collection of a man recently deceased. The chase develops twists and turns, as you would expect, but these are far less interesting than the cultural milieu the P.I. operates in. He specialises in forensic observations of buildings, clothing, accents, foibles, weaponry… and you know this investigator, usually one step ahead of the bad guys, will always get his man. The casual sexism and racism that lard the dialogue are of his time, and understood as such, but they are very noticeable. The violence is everywhere, accompanied usually by primitive one-upmanship that reminds me of the schoolyard. One of the delights of Chandler’s prose, though, is his use of simile and metaphor. These figures of speech turn up frequently, and usually make me smile.
Readers in the Mist 