Book Review: Ape House by Sara Gruen

Title: Ape House
Author: Sara Gruen
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, Hachette
ISBN: 978-1444715996
Genre: Literary Fiction
PP: 320 pages
Price: $15.00
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

This book inspired me to do something I haven’t done in a long (long) time. I stayed awake! Until 3 in the morning! I can’t remember the last time I did this, it’s been a while since a book has grabbed me like Ape House. In fact, I think the last one may have been Sara Gruen’s much applauded Water for Elephants. This woman just has a way of pulling me into a book that makes me never want to let go.

Anyway, the blurb would have you know that this “is an absorbing, heart-warming and ultimately uplifting tale of how six bonobo apes change the lives of three humans”. Isabel Duncan works as a scientist at the Great Ape Language Lab, a scientific research facility which examines language acquistion in primates. She clearly has a better rapport with the bonobos than with humans and she is devastated when the facility is blown up, allegedly by animal liberationists and her beloved animals end up being used in a particularly sick reality tv show named Ape House. John Thigpen is a down at heel journalist who finds the bonobo story fascinating. His fiancee, Amanda, is trying to carve a career as an author but she’s not handling the rejection letters very well. Throw in a briefly appearing green haired vegan, a pink haired animal rights supporter named Celia who becomes Isabel’s ally, some lapdancers, a salivating pit bull terrier named Booger and you have a extremely quirky backdrop. What ensues is a madcap race to save the bonobos with many plot twists and turns along the way.

Ape House is simply an amazing novel! It tells the story not so much of a group of individuals, but the story of a family who manage to influence everyone around them. These apes are awesome and I loved that Gruen let the bonobos be the center of everything, even while we were worrying over John’s crumbling world and Isabel’s injuries. The apes were there to give everyone something to love and to save. Actually, they gave the book its entire purpose! (Obviously…moving on…) I thought it was great that we got to see into their (the apes) lives and were even treated to glimpses of the strange human world from behind their eyes. I loved how much I learnt from this book! Gruen did a fantastic amount of research and I could definitely feel that coming through in the stories, the actions and the descriptions of the apes.

Alongside the apes we have Isabel and John. Now that I’ve had some time to think about their characters, I actually don’t think I actually liked either of them very much. They were nice, but they were just… a bit boring to be totally honest. Luckily, Gruen placed an eccentric and fun cast of supporting characters alongside these slightly bland protagonists. First, we have Isabel’s vivacious intern/research assistant Celia, who added some needed oomph to Isabel’s chapters and who I adored! She even comes armed with a group of nerd minions who were very entertaining. Then we have my favorite random character, John’s upstairs neighbour, Ivanka the Russain stripper who watches the opera singing meth lab dog while John was off doing some reporting… you’re intrigued now, aren’t ya?!

Final thoughts: Ape House kept me turning the pages into the early morning with a gripping and unique plot that my sleep muddled brain didn’t manage to work out until practically the last chapter! It’s one of those books that had me flipping the pages, desperate to find out how it would all end, and then made me mourn the loss of the characters for days. Can I go meet some signing apes now, pretty please? Overall, another great book from Sara Gruen and I would recommend it to everyone.

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Book Review: Carte Blanche (James Bond Novel) by Jeffrey Deaver

Title: Carte Blanche (James Bond Novel)
Author: Jeffrey Deaver
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, Hachette India
Genre: Thriller, Crime Fiction
ISBN: 978-1444716474
PP: 448 Pages
Price: Rs. 499
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4/5

James Bond returns, rebooted, in this new novel set in the modern day, where he works for the ODG, a secret agency of the British government whose task is the ‘protect the realm’. When a text message is intercepted mentioning an attack and potentially thousands of deaths, 007 is called in and given carte blanche (the modern equivalent of his old licence to kill) to save the day.

The novel is presented as an interesting blend of author Jeffrey Deaver, and Bond-creator Ian Fleming’s writing styles. For the most part, Deaver’s language and plot structure comes through, but there are a few passages that are distinctly Fleming, some to the extent that I felt they could have been lifted straight from the original Bond books.

In this story, we will never look at our binmen in the same way again. Yet another eccentric businessman is intent on world domination – in his own way but thanks to the author’s craft, all is not what it seems. Most of the action takes place in South Africa with side trips to Belgrade and, of course, London itself. Bond has his usual fling though there seems something lacking in this part of the character’s behaviour. Not sure what but to his credit, the author manages to find odd but interesting names for some of the female participants. Of course, Moneypenny is still around though they’ve all undergone a radical rejuvenation to fit into Bond’s ability to deal with the all-action scenarios.

The characters, while slightly updated for the contemporary setting, are exactly those that Fleming gave us, especially Bond himself (fortunately not Daniel Craig) and M (back to the original male version), and a number of other familiar names crop up. This does become something of a cliché though in the first half of the book, where I found myself wondering which classic character would show up next rather than focussing on the plot.

I was very impressed by Deaver’s plot, which departed somewhat from what I had been led to expect from some of the early publicity around the book (a little distracting as it meant I was constantly expecting something that never came). It moves at the perfect pace to hook the reader while remaining true to the attention to detail of Fleming’s prose.

Twists and turns fly rapidly off the pages, however this is actually where I think the book is let down. There are several instances of what I consider to be Jeffery Deaver’s trademark suspense technique – resolving a cliffhanger by utilising something that happened earlier but his narrative didn’t tell us about. I find this really frustrating and it comes across as extremely lazy writing – especially when it affects a major part of the novel. In other places however, plot points are resolved without resorting to this method and I just can’t see why Deaver does it.

Overall though I must confess to being impressed – my feeling from reading a couple of other Deaver novels recently was one of trepidation, but this book has managed to impress. The die-hard 007 fan may not appreciate the effort Deaver has gone to in order to update the settings, but I found it tastefully done, and look forward to finding out who the publishers will select when James Bond returns.

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Carte blanche

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Book Review: The Burning Wire by Jeffery Deaver

Title: The Burning Wire
Author: Jeffery Deaver
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton; Hachette Book Group
ISBN: 978-1-444-704280
Genre: Thriller, Crime Fiction
PP: 462 pages
Source: Publisher
Price: Rs. 295
Rating: 4/5

Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme novels (I have read them all) have captivated me with their attention to forensic detail, interesting plots, and unerring ability to trick the reader into believing something that appears so obvious, but which really is an illusion.

Premise: One-tenth of one amp of electricity is enough to stop your heart and kill you. Your hairdryer pulls about ten amps. Scared now? I am.

Jeffery Deaver takes this simple bit of information and expands it into a thriller that you can’t put down. He’s writing at the top of his form in The Burning Wire and I loved this book. Non-stop thrills, plenty of things to be scared of, good guys and bad guys, and lots of things to learn about electricity.

Although he’s always a good writer, I’ve been disappointed with the recent Lincoln Rhyme novels and was beginning to wonder if Deaver had jumped the shark with this series, but this book may be one of the best in this series yet.

The only downside of this book is that I’m now highly aware of how much metal I touch every single day even when it’s raining and how easy it is to electrify things. This novel focuses primarily on Rhyme’s attempt to catch a villain who kills people using electricity, and secondarily on trying to catch a villain named the Watchmaker, who appeared in an earlier novel. If you did not read the earlier novel you will not really understand the Watchmaker, but doing so is not necessary for reading the current novel.

My main critique of this novel is that sometimes I felt as if I was reading a textbook on electricity. While Deaver wants the reader to understand the technical background of what the main villain is doing, he provides excessive descriptions of different aspects of electricity that serve only to interrupt the narrative and really are unnecessary. It would be like reading a novel containing a scene where a burglar alarm is disarmed, only to have the action interrupted by having one of the characters make a speech about how burglar alarms are constructed, the safeguards used to prevent their being disarmed, the different ways to overcome those safeguards, etc.

In addition, I just did not feel the same sense of excitement as in other Lincoln Rhyme novels until I was 80% through this novel. It was not until the last 20% that I recognized the trademark Deaver cleverness and misdirection, and felt that the novel’s pace had picked up–probably because by that point most of the electricity explanations were done.

Without spoiling anything, I thought that the ending was very clever, but wished that getting there could have been more interesting. All in all it was a good read.