A Most Wanted Man

John Le Carre novels have never been something that I have enjoyed reading. I tried Tinker, Tailor but found it the same as this - plodding and wordy, dialogue heavy and with little action.
It starts promisingly, with a Muslim immigrant turning up in Hamburg and claiming an inheritance from a private British bank, that was accrued by his father through nefarious means. The plot follows lawyer for the displaced and regugees, Annabel Richter, and banker Tommy Brue as they are reluctantly used by British and German politicos as pawns in a larger chess game to catch a jihadist funder of terror operations.


If it wasn't for this blog, I don't think I would have persevered with the book, as it was dull and added very little in the way of revelations to the war on terror.

If I Stay

Another Young Adult novel following on the heels of Fault in Our Stars that also features teenage love and tragic death, but falling short.
The family breakfast idyll, where a disappointing snow storm gives the excuse for everyone to skip work or school, soon shatters when they are involved in a tragic car accident. Both parents are instantly killed and daughter Mia is rushed to hospital in a critical condition. It is frustratingly unclear what has happened to her younger brother, Teddy. Mia continues to tell the story of her treatment at the hospital and the various ways in which family and friends cope with the bereavement via an out-of-body experience. The question is does Mia have anything left to live for now or should she let go?
Interspersed with the current timeframe are Mia's reminiscences of her family and blossoming first love with Adam. Mia and Adam both share a love of music, as she develops as an accomplished cellist and he as a guitarist in a rock band.

Testament of Youth

The Book

Vera Brittain's memoir of the First World War was published in 1933, quite a while after the prolific outpouring of novels, poems and biographies in the late 1920s. She acknowledges Robert Graves' autobiography, Goodbye to All That, early on and having read his harrowing, reportage of life in the trenches, I found Testament of Youth a less powerful read. I think because she is writing of her own experiences, mainly away from the front as a volunteer nurse, and relying on letters and telegrams from her brother and her tragic first love to fill in detail, the book is more personal and concentrates on her feelings and reactions to what is going on around her and out of her control.

It was interesting to read about the way civilian life back home altered as a result of WW1 and the attitudes of the older generation to the conflict, but it did not grip me as Graves did.

Keeper of Lost Causes

The Book

The book from which the Scandinavian film is adapted is Mercy by the Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen. It is the first in a series of books about a police department (Department Q) set up to investigate cold cases. The department is an initiative set up as a political ploy and to gain funding for the force, but the actual department is one man - Carl Morck - given the job as nobody wants to work with him after his last investigation left one of his partners dead and the other unable to move due to spinal injury. He is given a helper - Assad, a Syrian immigrant who has an unclear past - who prods Carl into actually doing some work rather than moping in his office.
Across its 500 pages, it manages to keep the story fresh and interesting by including various side stories while not losing sight of the main plot - the disappearance five years ago of Merete Lyngaard. The reader is aware that she is still alive and being kept in harrowing conditions, so it is a race against time to find her.

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies

 And so we finally come to the conclusion of all things Middle-Earth. The final film in the Hobbit trilogy covers the last seven chapters of the book. After wreaking revenge on the Lake people, Smaug is finally despatched by Bard with his last black arrow, aiming at the dragon's breastplate weak spot.
As the dust settles, however, as with all vacuum's created by a dictator or powerful ruler, various parties sniff the possibility of wealth and position left by the death of Smaug. Thorin's greed and stubborn pride lead him to reject any sharing of the dragon gold and he is beseiged as armies of men, elves, dwarves and goblins gather and align themselves into factions to fight for the title of King under the Mountain.
The final battle sees the return of characters featured earlier in the book, including the Eagles and Beorn, and is not without its main character casualties, which I was not expecting.