Djibouti by Elmore Leonard

Award-winning documentary maker, Dara Barr, and her right-hand man, Xavier LeBo, arrive in Djibouti to make a film about Somali pirates. What they get instead are al-Qaeda terrorists, an elephant gun, a model with a smart mouth, the CIA, a billionaire playboy who wants to be a spy, freedom-fighting pirates,  horny goat weed and a highly explosive gas tanker.

It's a cool story that is made for the big screen. There's lots of snappy, funny dialogue and I could see the various action sequences in my mind as I read. Leonard even gets a bit meta every now and again as the main characters discuss who would play each part. The author also plays with the structure of the book, starting with a few narrative chapters that set the scene before jumping forward in time and having Dara and Xavier retell the story to each other as they edit the footage shot at sea. For me, this didn't work and I felt it bogged the story down. Thankfully, after everything is caught up to the present, the book picks up pace again and Leonard launches confidently into the finale with Dara and co. hunting a terrorist, the terrorist hunting them, and both groups trying to blow up a hijacked tanker.

I think I was unfortunate in picking Djibouti as my first Elmore Leonard book and I suspect that I picked a dud. There was more than enough material here to make a funny, fast paced thriller but it felt kind of meh and not really what I was expecting from an author as loved as Elmore Leonard.

Read On: I will give Elmore Leonard another chance and read one of his better known books, perhaps Get Shorty or Freaky Deaky. 

Scarlet by Stephen Lawhead

Hood, the first book in this imaginative retelling of the Robin Hood legend, was an enjoyable read and although I wasn't immediately compelled to pick up this book, the next in the series, I enjoyed this one as well. Stephen Lawhead shifts the action to eleventh century Wales where Rhi Bran, a king dispossessed of his lands by the invading Normans, becomes an outlaw. All of the rest of the gang are here as well in various guises, including Will Scarlet, or Scatlocke as he has been renamed. Much of the book is told in the first person as Will, languishing in jail for a crime he did not commit, tells his story to Odo, a young Norman priest. 

Stephen Lawhead writes well, with the occasional lapse into Celtic romanticism, and he obviously knows his stuff as I got a clear sense of the harshness and brutality of everyday life in the Middle Ages. Will is a great, well-rounded character and I liked that most of the story was told in his voice. What was less well done was the larger historical context. I don't know if the author assumed his readers would be familiar with the political situation in eleventh century Britain (I'm not) but I didn't really follow what was a convoluted story thread about two popes and the king's rebellious younger brother.

So, an enjoyable read but not a compelling one.

Read On: Tuck is the next in the series and I'll probably get around to reading it at some point. 

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

When Oskar Schnell's father is killed in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, the nine-year-old sets out to solve the mystery of a key he finds in his father's wardrobe. Intertwined in his story are the stories of the grandmother he adores and the grandfather who disappeared forty years earlier.

I wanted to love this book. I thought it would be beautiful and heartbreaking, and it could have been. An act of terrorism seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy? A story about a little boy mourning for his father and learning to let him go? That's powerful stuff right there. Add in the stories of his grandparents, caught up in the bombings of Dresden, and you have yourself a novel that illustrates how war wastes youth and potential. Instead, it was frustrating and pretentious and difficult to read. Oskar Schnell is the worst sort of hipster trapped in a nine-year-old's body. He's a vegan. He plays the tambourine. He makes jewellery in his spare time and talks to his grandmother over a shortwave radio. The plot is as thin as a tissue paper and full of holes which are papered over by random images, including several pages of numbers which have absolutely no relevance to what's going on. And that's the other thing. Nothing happens in this book, apart from Oskar being cutesy and precocious and people leaving things unsaid.

I know many people love this book. Perhaps I'm just too literal to get it. Perhaps it's meant to be read in hour-long sessions in coffee shops. There were times when I welled up and the story hit me right in the feels, but too often these moments were lost, buried beneath layers of achingly pretentious crap. Strip away all that, lay the story out in its bare bones, and, for me, you would have had a much more powerful, haunting and beautiful story.

Read On: I may give Coer's first book, Everything is Illuminated, a miss if it's written like this one. A better story with a child narrator is The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne.