Some months ago I read, but didn't review here, Rani Manicka's novel The Rice Mother which traces the history of a family across most of the 20th century. One thing which particularly caught my attention relates to the family's neighbours, and that is the presence of a female slave in the latter household from the 1930s until some time after WWII. This part of the novel is set in British-controlled Malaya.

We first meet her as a young girl, known as Mui Tsai, who had been kidnapped from her village in China and subsequently bought by her present owner. Expected to carry out household duties from childhood, on reaching puberty she was also used as a concubine for several decades, producing a regular stream of children who were taken from her and given to the patriarch's various wives to bring up as their own. Eventually Mui Tsai goes mad and disappears into an asylum, to be replaced by another girl who is also known as Mui Tsai. We discover that "Mui Tsai" is not a name but a lable meaning "little sister" and applied to a menial female servant.

More recently, I have recently read Catherine Lim's The Song of Silver Frond, set, like virtually all of Lim's works, in Singapore in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Although this particular novel of hers does not deal with slavery within the Chinese culture, I looked at a number of her other novels on Amazon and discovered The Bondmaid whose central character had been sold as a slave at the age of four. This too is set in 1950s Singapore.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this, though given the upsurge in kidnapping of men as labourers and women as wives and sex slaves in China during the past couple of decades it doesn't seem realistic to take the view that slavery or bonded labour was not part of Chinese culture in the mid-20th century.

No, my confusion derives from the fact that both Singapore and Malaya were under British rule for well over a century, and the UK had been actively rooting out slavery around the British Empire since the early 19th century. How then does it appear to continue well into the 20th century in two important parts of British territory? Did the colonial administration know of it but choose to turn a blind eye to it for some reason, did it genuinely not know of its existence, or did it think it had eradicated it?

During the course of the summer I have been working my way through the more recent novels in Phil Rickman's "Merrily Watkins" series except for one, The Remains of an Altar, which I've not been able to get hold of so far. Over the past year or so I've been reading a wide variety of crime and mystery fiction and have found these to be head and shoulders above almost all of the competition.

What I've found especially pleasing is the way Rickman is able to truly evoke a particular landscape, Herefordshire and the southern Welsh Marches, with which I'm familiar. In addition, he skillfully and evocatively weaves into his stories a deep knowledge of local history and folklore - indeed these are almost invariably central to the plot rather than being merely local colour. His use of the Templar links at Garway, the Arthur Conan Doyle links with Baskerville Hall, now a hotel, near Hay-on-Wye and the spectral black hound legend associated with Hergest Ridge, for example.

There is a strong undercurrent of horror in these novels (indeed, Rickman's earliest works were more purely works of horror) which in some respects takes mystery and creepy literature back to its roots. The earliest literary horror depended very heavily on folklore and place, on ghosts and the supernatural, but around the middle of the 19th century the focus of horror and suspense literature largely evolved from figures of folklore to a terror and dread of the unseen and unknown. (See Dark Green: Some disturbing thoughts about faeries for more about this.) Although there have been further developments since then (for many writers and film-makers the object of terror has become the flesh and blood serial killer), Rickman's work takes us back into the realm of folklore and re-envigorates an influence and inspiration that has been largely ignored for a century and a half.

In other ways, too, Rickman takes us back to the early days of gothic literature - the villages and isolated settlements and farmhouses of his Herefordshire and the Marches include a regular quota of inbred locals, many of whom are dangerously barking thanks to a shortage of branches in the family tree. His scenes are set in ruined churches and chapels and on lonely hill-tops, and his heroine dwells in an ancient and delapidated vicarage which mirrors the crumbling castles and mansions of the gothic period. And so on.

There are other influences too - modern paganism, fertility and folk music (especially that of the late Nick Drake), as well as contemporary events and society: one of the novels skirts round Fred and Rosemary West and the Cromwell Street murders, while another, written in the early years of the Blair government, satirises "New Labour" in the form of a tracksuit-clad and presentation-obsessed, but ultimately corrupt and dangerous, Bishop of Hereford.

What Rickman's novels have that other writers' don't is a complexity of theme and treatment, a deep layering of ideas and a sophistication in the way that the various strands of the story are pulled together. There are very few whodunnits which could be re-read with complete satisfaction, but these undoubtedly can. Long may he continue to write them.

I've just finished reading the first three works in Val McDermid's Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, ie The Mermaids Signing, The Wire in the Blood and The Last Temptation.

What struck me about them (leaving aside for the moment the plot, characterisation etc) was the number of Americanisms she uses and/or puts into the mouths of her British characters, such as movie instead of film or ass instead of arse. There were others which I didn't note down and cannot remember now, as well as a number of instances of American syntax, eg someone talking of doing something Thursday instead of on Thursday.

Where are these Americanisms coming from? Are they there in McDermid's original manuscript, and if not who is introducing them and at what stage in the publishing process? They seem incongruous in the British edition of her works published specifically for sale in the UK - and bloody irritating to this British reader.

I'm thinking of having a day at the Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival in July so might have the chance to ask her directly.

Hmmm, what to say about this? The front cover bills it as "The first in an exciting new series of historical thrillers". Says who? The publisher, of course.

Actually I wasn't that impressed, but this may to some extent be the result of being interrupted in the reading of it so that I picked it up and put it down again several times, each time taking up reading where I'd left off. Disjointed, in other words, and of course my reaction to the book may be flawed because of that.

The Sweet Smell of Decay is competent rather than poor, but against the huge number of historical crime novels and thrillers it just doesn't stand out. There are no obvious anachronisms, but the plot device that sets the whole thing off is frankly clunking - a very minor civil servant receives an unsigned letter, supposedly from his father, asking him to investigate the murder of a cousin he's never heard of. Unfortunately Lawrence doesn't provide any reason, eg by way of backstory, to suggest this is credible. Harry Lytle seems gullible for taking this at face value, which is not what you want when starting to read a novel whose plot requires him to ask questions and seive answers and information.

Like Andrew Pepper's first novel, The Last Days of Newgate, which I read last summer, this novel seems to waste a good idea with writing not yet mature enough to warrant publication.

Until this came through my hands I hadn't been aware that Heyer wrote whodunnits, or indeed anything other than Regency romances.

Detection Unlimited is something of a curiosity in that the writing style seems anachronistic and archaic even for the date at which it was written; in that respect it has stood the test of time less well than the contemporary crime fiction of Agatha Christie. The social milieu of Heyer's novel (an English village in the late 1940s or early 1950s amongst self-satisfied and prosperous country types) is similar to that of the later Miss Marple novels, yet Heyer's handling is much less deft than Christie's in almost every aspect of the writing. Heyer is self-conscious, never seeming at ease with her settings in the way Christie is.

The most obvious difference is that Heyer seems to struggle with dialogue and tends to give her characters unbroken paragraph-long speeches which stop the action and interaction in a most unnatural way. Christie, in the same situation, would use a conversation between several characters to move the action on or to elicit information in a more natural or realistic fashion.

Unfortunately Heyer's characters are as unconvincing as her dialogue and the plot creaks badly as well. All in all, it's not suprising that her crime fiction has largely dropped off the radar.

Some years ago, before it was taken over, the Ottakar's bookshop chain would periodically collaborate with a publisher to offer a specific book for 99p to encourage readers to try an unfamiliar author. This novel is one of the last offered before the chain lost its independence. And it has lurked on the in-pile ever since.

I have mixed feelings about this one. Somewhere around the middle I found myself wanting to throw it out of the window but persevered instead until it emerged from its rough spot and picked up again.

Leaving aside the two halves of the plot, based on two family holidays a generation apart in which adultery and deception come perilously close to destroying two marriages, I find myself ambivalent about the central character, the gay Julian or Will.

This is the first novel by a gay male writer I've read since Colm Toibin's "The Blackwater Lightship" and Alan Hollinsworth's "The Line of Beauty", and it lacks the gritty bleakness of the first and the decadent lushness of the second.

More to the point, I can't help feeling that Julian's/Will's gayness is terribly precious on the one hand and on the other so bloody stereotyped that a non-gay writer would have been pilloried for writing gay characters like that. Will is no grease monkey or engineer, no uniformed anything; he owns and runs a bookshop, for heaven's sake. He might as well have worked in an ad agency or owned a terribly bijoux little bistro. I mean, come on ....

In addition, he shags anything with a pulse. Except his father and his landlord's dog. He shags his brother-in-law and the owner of the holiday cottage and, aged 8, is already taking an interest in his uncle's arse. Promiscuity may be widespread amongst gay men, but would it be too difficult to write a main character outside of the stereotype?

2008 was to be my year of reading stuff set outside of the UK and Ireland, and for the first 6 months that's indeed how it went. Then I bought a few whodunnits and couldn't resist reading them. The result was that most of the second half of the year was spent reading crime and horror/ghost stories with a few examples of what I should have been reading slotted in as and when. So this is what I actually read during the year:

The People's Act of Love - James Meek* (Siberia/Russia)
Plain Tales from the Hills - Rudyard Kipling (India)
The Glass Palace – Amitav Ghosh* (Burma, India, Malaya)
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (Congo)
Like Rabbits – Lynne Bryan*
The Poison that Fascinates – Jennifer Clement* (Mexico)
Wagner the Werewolf – George W M Reynolds* (Florence, Istanbul)
The Coroner's Lunch - Colin Cotterill* (Laos)
Shame - Salman Rushdie (Pakistan)
Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami* (Japan)
The Outsider - Albert Camus (Algeria)
Monsignor Quixote - Graham Greene (Spain)
The Crime of Father Amaro - Eca de Queiroz* (Portugal)
An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro (Japan)
The Interpretation of Murder - Jed Rubenfeld* (New York/USA)
Memoirs of a Byzantine Eunuch - Christopher Harris (Turkey/Istanbul)
Empress Orchid - Anchee Min* (China)
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov* (Russia)
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (New England/USA)
Binu and the Great Wall of China - Su Tong* (China)
Music and Silence - Rose Tremain (Denmark)
Midwinter of the Spirit - Phil Rickman*
A Crown of Lights - Phil Rickman
The Cure of Souls - Phil Rickman
The Sultan's Seal - Jenny White* (Turkey)
Thirty Three Teeth - Colin Cotterill (Laos)
Ratcatcher - James McGee*
The Shifting Tide - Anne Perry*
The Girl from the Coast - Pramoedya Ananta Toer* (Indonesia)
The Miniaturist - Kunal Basu* (India)
The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper*
Crack Down - Val McDermid
Strange Affair - Peter Robinson*
Lamp of the Wicked - Phil Rickman
The Necropolis Railway - Andrew Martin*
The Shape of Snakes - Minette Walters
A Death in the Family - Hazel Holt*
The Harper's Quine - Pat McIntosh*
Death Cart - Susan Parry*
The Excursion Train - Edward Marston
Resurrectionist - James McGee
The Prayer of the Night Shepherd - Phil Rickman
Friend of the Devil - Peter Robinson
The Risk of Darkness - Susan Hill*
A Sudden Fearful Death - Anne Perry
Sherlock Holmes: The Game's Afoot - Edited by David Stuart Davies
An Orkney Murder - Alanna Knight*
The Janissary Tree - Jason Goodwin* (Turkey)
The Riddle and the Knight - Giles Milton*
Disco for the Departed - Colin Cotterill (Laos)
A Golden Age - Tahmima Anam* (Bangladesh)
Terror by Night: Classic Ghost & Horror Stories - Ambrose Bierce (USA)
The Crimson Blind & Other Stories - H D Everett*
The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories - Marjorie Bowen*
Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel*
The Swallows of Kabul - Yasmina Khadra* (Afghanistan)
Staying On - Paul Scott* (India)
Tales of Unease - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Aylmer Vance: Ghost Seer - Alice & Claude Askew
Uncanny Stories - May Sinclair*
Night Shivers: Ghost Stories - Mrs J H Riddell*
False Scent - Ngaio Marsh*
The Wine of Angels - Phil Rickman
The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror - Edith Nesbit
Strange Tales - Rudyard Kipling
Sweeney Todd, or The String of Pearls - Anonymous

Items marked with an asterisk (*) simply denote an author I've not read before.

I've decided to give the annual reading themes a miss for a year and allow myself in 2009 to read whatever I fancy. It'll be interesting to see where I end up.

I've just finished reading Night Shivers, a collection of ghost stories by the above published by Wordsworth in their "Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural" series. Mrs Riddell is a completely new author to me and sufficiently obscure not to be featured at all on the Gaslight website, though a number of these and other stories appear on the Horrormasters website.

The core of the volume is a collection of stories originally published in 1882 as "Weird Tales". It seems that during her lifetime she was compared to Le Fanu, and it was indeed of Le Fanu that her writing kept reminding me.

There's some fairly strange stuff going on here:

Pepper has one of his female characters, Emily, speaking of her potential ability to "sire my future husband's children", for instance - a complete nonsense, even if she were kitted up with a strap-on.

He also has his hero, Pyke, a maverick Bow Street Runner, searching the house where the bodies are found carrying a gas lamp. Had a long, flexible hose, did it?

There's the old anachronistic chestnut about cholera: Pepper has Pyke musing that the Belfast slum district he visits in his investigation is "ripe for a cholera epidemic". While the action may have been set in 1829 and cholera finally made it to Europe in that year, it did not reach Britain until 1832 so Pyke's musings are ludicrous in the context. It's like someone in 1975 musing that London was ripe for an AIDS epidemic.

Pepper also has one of his characters use a stop watch - but "The Swiss company Tag Heuer claims the first stopwatch patent, registered in 1869" (http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=161080).

This is the weakest of the historical whodunnits I've read in quite a while, both for its many and manifest anachronisms and technical cock-ups and for its rather weak plot and character delineation. Pepper is not a writer who can convincingly inhabit his chosen historical niche, because he is essentially writing a contemporary novel whose ostensibly historic setting is a gimmick. His lack of historical knowledge and seeming absence of serious research is all the more galling as he apparently lectures in the English department at Queen's University in Belfast. One would have thought he could have asked one of his colleagues in the History department to give the draft the historical once over in return for a couple of pints.

It's somewhat strange to read a "colonial" novel in which the colonial power is not British. There is presumably a body of literature in French which deals with, and is set in, the various French colonies around the world, though the only example which comes to mind is Albert Camus's L'Etranger. No, almost invariably colonial literature means literature set somewhere in the British Empire, but this one is different as Toer's novel is set in Dutch Indonesia, and Java to be precise.

The central character, the never-named Girl from the Coast, comes from a tight-knit but poor fishing community, and is married off at the age of 14 to a wealthy local aristocrat whom she had never seen. Her father, who agrees to the match, obviously sees it as a match without a down side as it allows his daughter escapes the poverty into which she was born. She enters the house of the man she will only ever know as Bendoro - not "husband" but "master" - and is given the training in etiquette and behaviour, crafts and religion considered necessary to render her a fit consort for her husband.

But the house is cold and silent, its inhabitants intimidated and ruled with severity by its (also never named) master whose austere religious exterior conceals a disdain and disregard for those not of his social class. The Bendoro is as much a collaborator with the Dutch colonial power as any equivalent Indian was in the British Empire, adopting the colonial language and seeking to become part of its power structures.

The Girl comes to realise that she is not his wife but a servant, that there have been others like her in the past whose legacy is a number of young children around the house and who were divorced and sent back to their villages when the Bendoro tired of them. She is forced to confront the reality that at best she is a concubine and not fit to be seen by aristocratic and colonial visitors to the house. After giving birth to a daughter, to whom the Bendoro is indifferent but determined to retain as his property, the Girl too is divorced and thrown out.

Although novelists are expected to become emotionally involved in their creations, Toer is unusually involved in this one on an emotional level. In itself this is not surprising, given that this purports to be family history and the main character is his grandmother. It's also an angry novel, as the story revolves around the way she is used and deceived by her husband and later discarded by him. However at times that emotional involvement in one side of the story does seem to overwhelm its other aspects, one victim of this being the roundedness and complexity of the characters which could have been more developed.

The novel's damning indictment is both of the callousness of the native aristocracy towards the native lower class population, and of the religious and moral hypocrisy of the Bendoro who seems to be obsessed with Koranic and other religious study, with building a mosque in the Girl's village and ensuring that its inhabitants are religiously instructed and observant, while lacking any of the mercy or compassion supposedly enjoined upon the pious Muslim. On the contrary, his rages and tantrums when disobeyed or challenged are profoundly childish and out of keeping with the grave image he projects to the outside world. It is his cynicism and hypocrisy which lead him to marry and discard at will a series of girls from poor villages, using and discarding them at will.

Apart from the character of the Bendoro himself, it is the life of the fishing village which is most strongly drawn by Toer, representing, no doubt, an Indonesia largely untouched by colonialism.

I came across Anne Perry in the same way that I came across James McGee - by simply browsing the crime fiction shelves of Borders looking for unfamiliar writers whose books caught my attention and intrigued me enough to part with £6.99 for one of them.

Unless McGee writes under a range of pseudonyms, as Paul Doherty does, Perry is much the more prolific author. She has been around long enough to have created at least three heros, The Shifting Tide apparently being one of the later novels featuring her best-established character, William Monk, a former London detective turned private investigator.

I'm not going to review this novel, which is largely set in the Pool of London, in depth. Suffice it to say that it was sufficiently entertaining for me to want to read more of Perry's work when my brain needs a veg-out.

The only comment really is about the inevitable anachronism: would one character be giving another a guinea in 1866 in a context which indicates that this is a coin which is being handed over rather than a sum of money (ie 21/- or a sovereign and a shilling) when the sovereign had replaced the guinea as the gold coin of issue in 1816 or 1817?

The other point is that it was the half sovereign, worth 10/-, which was the main circulating high value coin in Victorian Britain. A sovereign, or one pound sterling, represented a week's wages (or even more) for a working man and most of them were retained as people's savings rather than circulated, so how likely is it that someone would hand a near stranger a week's wages? I mean: would you casually hand over £450 cash to someone for expenses today? Or even £225 for that matter?

McGee, writer of historical whodunnits and thrillers, is a new author to me. This is the first in a series of (so far) three novels set in Regency London against a backdrop of the threat of invasion from Napoleon's French Empire. His hero is Matthew Hawkwood, crack shot and former junior officer in Wellington's Peninsular Army who was cashiered on a technicality and then joined the guerillas in the Spanish mountains, accompanied by his faithful sergeant, Jago, now turned London criminal mastermind. Hawkwood is now one of London's Bow Street Runners investigating organised and other serious crime, primarily in London. The novel is entertaining, good escapist fun and has a suitably dark edge to it, such that I'd be happy to read more of McGee's work.

So far, so good.

From internal evidence (there is a mention of the Battle of Trafalgar having taken place 6 years previously), we can determine that the action takes place in 1811. It is mildly annoying that McGee seems to have done plenty of genuine historical research for the time and place in which he sets his novel, yet there are a couple of anachronistic howlers:

The gold sovereign
In the novel, gold sovereigns are used to buy the silence of a servant. However they were not in circulation at the time of the action. The coin was originally introduced in 1489 and issued until 1604 when it was replaced by the unite, and was not reintroduced until 1816 or 1817, about 5 years after the time when the action of this novel takes place. In 1811 the gold coin in circulation was the guinea.

Cholera
In the novel, Jago's parents are said to have died of cholera when he was a boy. Since Jago appears, from internal evidence in the novel, to be aged somewhere around 40 during the novel, we can place their supposed death around 1780.

McGee is not the first author to be caught out by this particular anachronism: Patrick Suskind, in Perfume, has cholera in the slums of Paris in the 1740s. Yet as late as 1815 cholera was a localised disease endemic in Bengal. It spread across India and Asia between 1816 and 1826 and only arrived in Europe in 1829.

The Asia bookbox has been returned to its owner and originator.

During the past few days I've had an email discussion with the owner about the preponderance of material from India, China and Japan in the box and about how much of Asia is being undeservedly neglected at the same time. The owner agrees and has introduced a new "rule" to the effect that no more than half of the box's contents should relate to those three countries.

The box should be on its travels again "shortly".

I have finally received the travelling bookbox that I signed up for back in early March. It was, perhaps, too much to hope for that a selection of the books with which the box started its voyage, would still be in it when it arrived chez moi - especially as I was the last person before it returns to its owner. Only one book of the original selection remained, and that not to my taste, so my choice was essentially of books the box had acquired on its travels.

A book-box, if the reader is not familiar with the concept, is a box of books, usually on a specific theme, which passes from one participant to the next in line, usually by post but sometimes by hand, each person taking out as many books as they wish and replacing them with an equal number of books on the same theme. Popular themes include "chick-lit", thrillers, romantic fiction and "Christian literature", but as previously mentioned this one was "Asia", for books by Asian authors or by non-Asian authors but about or set in Asia.

What struck me was just how dominated the box was by India, China and Japan. There was nothing by a Thai writer or set in Thailand, nothing by an Indonesian or Korean writer and nothing about or set in those countries either. Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Nepal, the former Soviet central Asian republics, Burma et al were similar unrepresented.

I suppose the selection reflects the prominence of what I've come to term the "Big Three" in the modern western literary consciousness. Although India has been part of that consciousness, in the UK at least, for well over a century for historical (ie colonial) reasons, Japan and China have become part of that consciousness much more recently, and in the case of China probably only in the past decade or so. While there's no denying the richness of what has emerged and continues to emerge from these societies, it's unfortunate that it seems to prevent the literature of and books about other countries in Asia becoming anything like as well known.

One of the books I took out was A Golden Age by Bangladeshi writer Tahmina Anam which I replaced with The Coroner's Lunch.

When I responded to Canongate's recent offer to read and review one of its recently-published novels and chose this one, I had not realised that it was a modern retelling of a traditional Chinese folktale. This it not to say that had I known I wouldn't have asked for it, because in practice it wouldn't have made any difference. And besides, I have been a supporter of the revival in traditional storytelling in the UK for many years and the old stories are old and traditional because they have resonated with ordinary people over centuries, and in this case millennia.

One of the issues in considering a reworking of a traditional story from another culture is to work out how much of the original story is being reused, what has been omitted and what is the author's embellishment and contribution to the core story.

The core tale of Binu, or more properly Meng Jiangnü, is set in the Era of the Warring States in the late Zhou or early Qin period and tells how her husband is pressganged along with countless other men to work on the building of the Great Wall of China by Qin Shi Huang, who unified the warring Chinese kingdoms and became the first emperor. Binu sets out to walk to the far north of China to find her husband and take him warm clothes for the winter as told in this version of the story. Su Tong chooses to end his novel well before the end of the traditional tale. In Su Tong's version, finding that her husband is already dead, Binu weeps and her tears undermine and bring down a section of the wall. There is nothing in the novel about the intervention of the emperor, about Wan Qiliang's funeral or about the eventual suicide of Binu. Equally there is nothing to indicate why Su Tong chose to end the story where he did, unless perhaps he thought it more fitting that Binu should passively die of grief than take on, and trick, the emperor.

One of the most fascinating sources I dug up is this brief account of early folkloric studies of the legend and the forensic investigation of its origins and variations, suggesting that from a very simple beginning that had nothing to do with the Great Wall at all, elements, themes and ideas gradually accreted over almost 1,000 years before the story became the one which has been told since.

But what of Su Tong's telling of the tale? It is, as these types of traditional tales often are, a catalogue of the cruelties and privations undergone by the necessarily virtuous heroine on her quest. There is a tale or myth type in western culture of a heroine separated from her husband (usually as a punishment for disobeying some instruction) and having to search to the ends of the earth to be reunited with him, and reunited she invariably does (the Eros and Psyche myth is of this type), but in the tale of Binu/Meng Jiangnü the outcome is necessarily different otherwise the heroine would have had no reason to weep on reaching her journey's end. Is it typical, I wonder, of Chinese folk tales that the wife fails to find her husband? If so, why? Both western and eastern cultures have valued the concept of the chaste and loyal wife, but in the western stories the wife's virtue and persistence are rewarded whereas in the case of Binu they're not.

It is difficult, in not knowing what in this novel is part of the core story and what is Su Tong's invention, to single elements out meaningfully for comment. One of the most attractive and whimsical elements is that of the horse-men and deer-boys; these are men who substitute for horses and carry hunters on their backs and boys who don antlers and leap through the forests imitating deer to be hunted, made necessary by the commandeering of virtually all the horses in China for work on building the Wall and by the depletion of actual deer for hunting. The boys, however, are truly part of the natural world, feral by instinct and dangerous if only because they are able to operate as a pack without recourse to morals or civilisation.

What seems to be an elaboration on the source tale is the degree and frequency of Binu's weeping. In the original tale she seems to weep only when she reaches the Great Wall and learns that Wan Qiliang is dead whereas in the novel she starts weeping almost from the first page and is still weeping at the end. I'm not convinced this works. Not only does it detract from the power of her weeping at the end (the saying about keeping one's powder dry seems appropriate in the circumstances) but it also becomes rather irritating and detracts to some degree from the sympathy the reader is clearly expected to feel for her.

All in all, however, this is an entertaining read filled with magic and a sense of a very distant time and a very distant place.

On the day the sun reaches its most northerly position in the sky in the northern hemisphere, the BBC is carrying a news item on a new fiction award aimed at what is probably the nadir of modern fiction - the derisively termed "chick-lit". Except they've not given it an honest and straightforward name like "The Chick-Lit Awards" but something more grandiose and pretentious - "The Melissa Nathan Awards for Romantic Comedy".

The genre is summed up by the BBC as:

"..... everyday tales of women who muddle comically through the mundane, bagging a handsome hero along the way to the happy ending - even if he does tend to be the local headmaster or a vet."

and by awards guest Jo Brand as being:

"..... about fed-up heroines trying to get to work on time or washing their pants. Women like to read about romance, but they also want to feel that connection with the heroine as well."

There. Doesn't that make you want to hammer down the doors of the nearest Waterstones and strip their shelves of chick-lit? Nope, didn't think so.

Apparently the first awards night was "appropriately held in a club in London strewn with red rose petals, while guests sipped on pink champagne" and a judging panel which included such literary illuminaries as Sophie Kinsella (whose official website has java'd floating pastel handbags which cluster round the visitor's cursor) and Joanne Trollope doled out sub-awards in categories such as Best Bastard (presumably a reference to Heathcliffe-type characters rather than the illegitimate products of the bonking scenes, though these days I wouldn't bet on it), Best Lovable Rogue and Best Bitch. Not expecting much complex character development there, are we?

OK, go on - call me a literary snob. I confess. Guilty as charged. Wouldn't be seen dead with this stuff in my hand and wouldn't risk it even if camouflaged by something more literary because it takes only one slip of the hand for one's shame to be broadcast to the world. Even if I wanted to read it. Which I don't.

Low brow entertainment in all genres has its place. Everyone needs to wind down and relax from time to time and mass market trash, whether on paper or on TV or at the cinema, can help in that process. A former housemate of mine, a trainee surgeon, used to come back to the shared house in which we lived and immediately switch on the TV to watch Hollyoaks. Hollyoaks is superficial and crap, as she freely admitted, but it helped her to unwind after a stressful day in theatre cutting people's eyeballs open or telling patients that they'd be blind in less than a year. Fair enough - after cooking she'd then spend the evening studying.

No. It's the rest of the TV-watching, trash-reading population which is worrying. 4.5 billion years of evolution and over 125 years of compulsory state education in the UK and millions are still reading nothing more demanding than chick-lit?

The way education is going, the first university English degree in chick-lit can't be far away.

My previous experience of Fitzgerald's work was several years ago with Tender is the Night, about which I was decidedly ambivalent at the time. The Great Gatsby, being an earlier and in some ways simpler work, is a shorter, easier and more satisfying read than the later novel although it too contains autobiographical elements.

The same obsession with the ultra-rich is there but it is a "purer" obsession without the personal agenda, and the more intriguing for it. If this is a story about the hopeless love, or obsession, of Gatsby for Daisy, it is also a story about the American class system about which the US is in denial, about social climbing and the need to impress others.

Gatsby, the nobody from nowhere, as Tom Buchanan describes him, meets the socially much higher class Daisy by one of the accidents of a society in wartime. To what extent is his infatuation with her reciprocated? Certainly she remains unmarried and unattached for a year or two after the brief relationship, but she doesn't wait for Gatsby to return but marries Buchanan, a man from her own social class albeit from another part of the US. Perhaps during Gatsby's absence in Europe, Daisy grows up and grows out of an inappropriate relationship. Gatsby, however, seems unable to let go of the memory of his relationship with Daisy. He is, after all, the loser in that Daisy, all other things besides, seemed to hold out the promise of social advancement and a gateway into a statum of society that he has tasted and found irresistable.

Cut off from Daisy and her social world, Gatsby throws himself into acquiring wealth, and the social advancement it promises, by his own efforts. We are never quite sure what these efforts amount to. Buchanan expresses the belief several times that bootlegging is behind Gatsby's wealth but the only hints we have of what Gatsby's wealth is based on is in his association with Meyer Wolfsheim, said to have been the man who fixed the baseball world series several years before, and the mysterious phone call which Nick Carraway takes, shortly after Gatsby's death, about a failed attempt to launder stolen securities.

There is a degree of irony here. The American Dream would have it that to make money honestly and by one's own efforts is the source of happiness and success, and Gatsby clearly believes that it will open to him the social doors hitherto closed. But he is wrong. He fails to take into account the gulf between old and new money in the US and does not realise that, for all his acquired wealth, he is still beyond the social pale. Noticeably, the people who attend his lavish parties are outsiders from New York, not the moneyed elite of the communities he seeks to become part of, and comprise celebrities such as film stars rather than the established social elite.

This is, however, something of a side issue as social advancement seems not to be what Gatsby wants for its own sake. His obsession is to use his wealth to entice Daisy back into his life and to prise her from her marriage and husband. Yet he has clearly, once again, miscalculated. Daisy's marriage, cemented by her sometimes wavering love for Buchanan and by their child, is able to withstand the brief dalliance she again indulges in until Buchanan realises what is going on and puts a stop to it.

A further irony is that in some respects Gatsby achieves, to some degree at least, a degree of respectability by honest efforts in that he manages to obtain a commission as an officer in the army, displayed sufficient courage as to be awarded at least one gallantry award and to have been offered a scholarship at Oxford. Buchanan, on the other hand, although part of the established "old money" aristocracy of the US, is little more than a boor and a bully.

Canongate recently offered copies of three of their recent novels free to UK bookcrossers. Today a copy of Binu and the Great Wall of China, a modern reworking of a traditional Chinese folk tale, by Su Tong arrived. I chose it with a view to reading it quickly and including it in the travelling Asia-themed bookbox which will probably reach me in about a month.

According to the cover, the Guardian's critic found this novel "Spectacular ..... fiendishly clever". Is it? I'm not so sure.

This was another novel picked up in a charity shop and to be honest if I'd known it was a former "Richard and Judy" book I'd probably have given it a miss. Call it snobbery if you wish, but of the handful of books chosen by them that I've read in recent years my impression has been that they are the works of authors trying to impress and not pulling it off.

So what to make of this one? The synopsis runs something like this: an heiress is found murdered in a very expensive and exclusive flat in Manhattan and very shortly after another is attacked in a similar way but survives. Meanwhile Freud has arrived in New York prior to giving a series of lectures at Clark University in Massachussets and the group of young American and European disciple-psychiatrists who flock to him become embroiled in sorting out the mystery, except for Carl Jung who seems to both go his own way and get in the way.

While I'm not so sure about the "fiendishly clever", if the Guardian's critic had described the novel as immensely complex I would have agreed wholeheartedly. It's a plot in which various young men breathlessly follow the twists and turns of the plot while richocheting off the upper class social scene of early 20th century New York while trying to get under the psychological skin of the killer. The only problem is that it was so complex that I began to switch off and fouund myself skimming the last third or so of the novel. No doubt there are elements of the plot which eventually passed me by and subtleties that I probably missed, but I ended up not caring very much.

I can't help thinking that this plot could have been run in 400 pages rather than 530.

This novel came to me bundled with another of Ishiguro's works, the rather better known The Remains of the Day which I had previously read in a different edition several years ago.

In the present novel, Ishiguro returns to the Japan he left with his parents when very young and to the years immediately following the end of WWII. His narrator Ono, the artist of the title, after what seems to have been a decade or more in a commercial art workshop and later in retreat as the pupil of a respected established arties, breaks with his teacher and fellow students and becomes involved in the development of a new style of art whose purpose is to serve the militarising Japan of the 20s and 30s. It's not clear how deeply Ono is involved with the militaristic regime but he was sufficiently so for his position in the post-war period to be the subject of some awkwardness and to possibly damage the marriage prospects of his younger daughter.

What struck me within a very few pages, and stayed with me until the end and afterwards, was that An Artist of the Floating World is in many respects a rewrite of The Remains of the Day, or rather, The Remains of the Day, being the later novel, is a more sophisticated rewrite of An Artist of the Floating World.

The central character in both cases is an emotionally repressed and self-deceiving middle aged or elderly man finding the time to revisit his past and examine his relationships with those around him and the part he played in the rise of militaristic nationalism.

Both men are alone, Stevens the butler because he failed to see the possibility of a relationship with and marriage to the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, and Ono because his wife was killed in an air raid right at the end of the war.

Both men take both physical and psychological journeys. In physical terms Stevens takes a motoring jaunt to the West Country and Ono engages in wanderings around the unnamed city in which he lives both as he comes to terms with the changes wrought by the war and its aftermath on districts he knows well, and as he remakes contact with old acquaintances and colleagues who he hopes will speak well of him and his family if approached by the detectives acting for the family of his daughter's prospective groom. Psychologically, both are exploring the relationship between a past seemingly full of certainties and a present full of uncertainty and change which they do not seem well equipped to deal with.

Structurally the two novels are also similar with their constant swings between past and present. While this in itself is hardly unusual or distinctive as a structure, the way in which Ishiguro handles the transitions in time in both novels which seems to be essentially identical. It's as though, the technique having worked so well in The Remains of the Day, he couldn't resist squeezing additional mileage out of it by reusing it as classical composers recycle particularly impressive themes or melodies by lifing them from an overture and transplanting them into a piano trio.

Finally, Ishiguro has both of his narrators speak with virtually identical voices. There is the same pedantic urge to explain or justify what they have just said, the same stiltedness of phrasing, the same convolutedness of explanations, the same need to report a conversation in detail followed by the same backtracking amounting to "Of course it was all along time ago and I'm not sure that those were the exact words I used, but looking back I suspect they were" etc, and the same stiff and outdated vocabulary.

Of the two novels, The Remains of the Day is the more polished and successful, but then one would expect it to be, it being both a later and therefore more mature work and of course the winner of the Booker in 1989.

Another book which has languished on my shelves for several years, this has finally made it to the top of the pile.

The novel is set in a small cathedral city in Portugal in the 1870s. Our anti-hero, Father Amaro, the orphaned son of a servant, is brought up by his father's benevolent employer, and the promise he shows in his studies convinces her to leave a legacy to him to be used to put him through a seminary and ordination. Unfortunately Amaro does not have a vocation and has no interest in the church, religion or the priesthood except insofar as it might afford him social advancement.

Using the influence of his benefactor to obtain a living in a parish in the cathedral city of Leiria, he takes lodgings with São Joaneira, a seemingly respectable widow, and quickly establishes himself as a general favourite thanks to his youth, good looks and eloquent preaching. He is drawn into the salon society of this provincial city, where members of the local priesthood meet the most respectable laypeople at the widow's house to dine, drink, gossip and bitch about almost everyone else in town.

We are introduced to a coterie of unattractive but self-admiring characters: Canon Dias, Amaro's former seminary tutor, who's secretly keeping the widow as his mistress, having stepped into the shoes of the deceased precentor; Dona Josefa Dias, the Canon's arrogant, cold and hypocritical sister who bullies and sneers at those she wishes to control; Dona Maria da Assunção, a local landowner whose house is filled from top to bottom with religious bric à brac and whose heart and soul are filled with a degree of superstition one might expect to find in a medieval goatherd in a valley cut off since the ice-age; and many others both clerical and lay. Only the widow's unmarried daughter Amélia and the man who courts and almost marries her, João Eduardo, seem untouched, at least initially, by the intrigue and hypocrisy which pervades the town and its cathedral.

On the back of the book, the blurb comments that this is a novel in which the innocent are condemned, but who is innocent in this novel? The usual analysis would have the hitherto virginal Amelia as innocent, yet she is clearly an active and eager player in her affair with Amaro. Their attraction is mutual from the start and Amelia is no reluctant and bashful participant, notwithstanding her being only 15 when Amaro arrives in her life. Circumspection forces them to take things slowly, to conduct their affair with the utmost delicacy while surrounded by their usual social circle, but when the idea is mooted of deceiving the sexton, Esguelhas, into letting them use his house for their assignations, Amelia is as active in the deception as Amaro is, as it is she who sets up the cover of providing charity to Esguelhas's crippled and bedridden daughter as a reason for visiting the house.

Only João Eduardo and Totó, the sexton's daughter, seem able to see through Amaro and Amelia and the hypocritical front they present to the world to cover their activities. Indeed, Totó's fury at the way in which she is being used as a cover is almost the only truly righteous indignation expressed so far by any character. Ironically, the very fact that she is bed-ridden and therefore cut off from the social life of the town, gives her both the bitterness to see what others cannot but also the distance to see it clearly. Of all the characters in the novel, she is the one who evokes genuine sympathy in the reader, trapped as she is in a lonely hell from which the self-complacent townspeople might rescue her if they actually practised what they preached and praised.

Very different from the handful of other Greene works I've read and probably a one-off for him. I've not read Cervantes' original work so no doubt have missed many of the closer allusions but from the little I know of the original Greene does seem to sustain the parallel quite cleverly. It seems strange to think that this very late work by Greene was written only a few years after the death of Franco (hence no doubt the mayor's constant looking over his shoulder) and set in a country very much in transition from dictatorship to democracy*. How Spain has moved on in barely 30 years!

* Not to be confused with the UK which is a country in transition from democracy to dictatorship.

I originally read this novel exactly 30 years ago, in French, when it was one of the set texts for my French 'A' Level (the others being Molière's Le Bougeois Gentilhomme, Alain-Fournier's Le Grande Meaulnes and Jean Anouilh's Becket) and would have had neither reason nor opportunity to re-read it, this time in English, had it not turned up in one of the boxes of cheap classics from Ebay.

In re-reading it, this time in English, it's interesting to see what had stayed in my mind over the decades and what I had forgotten. What had remained most vividly was, perhaps not surprisingly, the killing itself and in particular the heat and blinding sunlight of that day and the effect they had on Meurseult. I had forgotten the circumstance that took him to the beach that day, though I had vaguely remembered his neighbour Raymond but not Raymond's connection to what happened.

Virtually all else - the events surrounding the funeral of his mother, his relationship with Marie, the details of the trial and the details of his life before his involvement with Raymond - had been forgotten over the years. In short, I remembered not a lot considering that I must have read the novel at least several times for my studies.

Meurseult is, to some extent, a sacrifice, a scapegoat. When I was doing my French 'A' Level the tutor said that in practice it would have been unthinkable for a white French citizen (which Meurseult is assumed to be) to be executed for the killing of an Arab and that in such a case the French accused would have been acquitted on some technicality or, at worst, sentenced to a few year in prison. So Meurseult's death sentence is, on this level at least, about much more than the murder, but we know that already because that is what the novel is ultimately about.

He is obviously poorly served by the circumstances of his trial: the hostility of the Prosecutor and his prosecution of the case on the basis of completely irrelevant matters, ie his behaviour at his mother's vigil and funeral; the fact that the newpapers, needing something to fill their pages in the news-quiet summer season, have built Meurseult's case and pending trial into a major story; and the question over the competence of his defence counsel who seems to misjudge the situation entirely.

Nevertheless, Meurseult is his own worst enemy in that he is almost entirely passive. Offered a chance of promotion and a move to Paris, he refuses on the grounds that he sees no reason to make changes in his life. He agrees to marry Marie because she suggests it and he's not bothered either way but he will do it if she wants to. He allows himself to drift into a sort of friendship with Raymond and to be used for Raymond's advantage. In short, Meurseult is a man to whom life and other things happen and who is, to an extent, an observer of his own life rather than an active participant in it. He essentially drifts into a disaster which one senses would not have happened had he taken some positive decisions earlier on.

What strikes me is that at the end of the novel, after Meurseult has thrown the priest out of his cell and refused the "consolations of religion" claiming to be an unbeliever, he anticipates his execution and hopes that he will be greeted by a crowd filled with hate. Is this a reference to Jesus carrying his cross on the way to Golgotha through jeering crowds? Is Meurseult, who ostensibly rejects God, being set up as a sort of Christ figure the way that Elzevir Block seems to be in Falkner's Moonfleet, or is he merely a scapegoat for a society which cannot come to terms with that which is different?

This proved to be a surprisingly quick and easy read, though I'm not sure I can say why. Murakami's style is undoubtedly readable and engrossing, creating a momentum which carries the reader from page to page. Even so, it's still difficult to identify anything distinctly "Japanese" about the novel and I'm not sure what to make of many of the author's characters.

Watanabe, the narrator, comes across as a thoroughly decent chap recounting only one episode, his abandonment of his first girlfriend when he goes to university, which reflects poorly on him. Nevertheless he is the narrator: the novel's action and events are told from his point of view and seen through his eyes and it's rare that a narrator, being usually the most important character in a work, is presented as a seriously unpleasant piece of work.

Naoko, his second girlfriend, is never quite present in the novel in much the same way that she is never entirely present in the world at large. Having never recovered from the death of her first boyfriend, she seems to be unwilling to belong to the world and, as we discover, eventually chooses to follow Kisuki in death.

Perhaps the most attractive character in the novel is Reiko, originally destined to be a concert pianist but whose career was dramatically cut short by mental illness and a series of stays in mental hospitals and asylums. Her greater maturity and experience of life allows her to provide support to Naoko in a way that Watanabe, the same age as Naoko, cannot do. One feels that, at the end, something has snapped back into place for Reiko and that she has made the transition necessary to step back into society.

If Reiko is the most attractive character, Midori is probably the most unattractive in some respects. Brash, crude and entirely physical, and seemingly the opposite of Watanabe, it's difficult to imagine them finding sufficient common ground for their relationship to succeed and last.

Perhaps I have missed something but this is not the demanding novel I had been expecting. That is not to say that was disappointing because it wasn't; indeed, I will almost certainly pick up another of Murakami's works in the future.

Once upon a time and long ago, in the days when the sun rose in the West and set in the East and rivers flowed from the sea to the mountains, there was a chain of bookshops named Ottakars. And every once in a while the management of Ottakars chose an author they thought people should try and negotiated a special deal with a publisher to make available an astonishingly cheap Ottakars edition of one of that author's novels.

And so it came to pass, several years ago, that Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood was briefly on offer in Ottakars bookshops for 99p, and having migrated from their shelf to mine it has sadly languished, unread, ever since.

Until now. Hurrah!

I confess that during the first 25 pages or so of reading this novel I was decidedly lukewarm about it. Its understated and very quiet style made it unexpectedly difficult to engage with, but even as I was asking myself why I was reading it I was being drawn into its subtle world.

In some respects I struggled to identify anything in it which was specifically "Japanese". Students, universities, student political activism in the late 1960s, mental hospitals, urban bars and so on - none of this spoke to me of anything identifiably "Japanese" in the way I had been expecting; indeed all could just as easily been British, American, French or whatever. What eventually started to emerge as "Japanese", however, were the subtle, light touches of Murakami's style mentioned above and the theme of suicide, in this case amongst young people. It's not that suicide does not happen amongst western young people, but that there is a very real Japanese cultural tradition connected with suicide, which would be bizarre in a British, German or American context, which Murakami seems to be exploring in this novel.

One moment which jars, possibly wrongly, is the one in which Nagasawa uses a credit card to pay for a meal for himself, his girlfriend Hatsumi and Watanabe, his college-friend and the novel's narrator. The action at this point is set in 1969, at the latest 1970, when credit cards were very new indeed and I wonder if the author, writing 20 years later, misjudges this point and introduces an anachronism.