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Michael-Israel Jarvis – Osric Fingerbone and the Spring of Jacks | Review

Title: Osric Fingerbone and the Spring of Jacks

Author: Michael-Israel Jarvis

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 274

Rating: 3.5/5

Michael-Israel Jarvis – Osric Fingerbone and the Spring of Jacks

This is the fourth and most recent of Jarvis’s books that I’ve read, and while I don’t think it’s his best, it was still pretty good. It’s also the second book in the Osric Fingerbone series, and so if you haven’t read Osric Fingerbone and the Boy Murderer, I’d recommend starting with that. I preferred the first one anyway, but also this one continues on from where the first book left off and so you’d be mad to read it out of order.

What’s great about this book – and about Jarvis’ writing in general – is that the world-building is top-notch. The entire book is set in an alternate version of Edwardian London (called ‘Londun‘) and we have places like Brummagem, Norwych and Mancester. It’s our world, but it’s our world if magic and alchemy had powered the industrial revolution instead of science and technology. In that respect, it’s almost reminiscent of Cassandra Clare’s Infernal Devices books, except better.

My only complaint here is that I struggled to follow the plot at times, and I think part of that is because it’s been too long since I read the first book and the author almost assumes that you know the world as well as he does. The thing is that I feel as though it’s my own fault as a reader, although I would suggest that if you read and enjoy the first book, you should move straight on to the second. Still, it was fun!

Michael-Israel Jarvis

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Haruki Murakami – Norwegian Wood | Review

Title: Norwegian Wood

Author: Haruki Murakami

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 394

Rating: 4*/5

Haruki Murakami – Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood is an interesting one, because it’s one of the few ‘bestsellers‘ that I’ve read of late that have actually lived up to the title. The author does a great job of blending different influences together while forging ahead with his own voice, and the result is the sort of book that captures the spirit of a generation – in this book, the 1960s – while simultaneously standing up proud as a story of its own.

Loosely speaking, it’s all about the relationships between a group of friends and acquaintances in Japan during the swinging sixties. A lot of ‘foreign‘ books (I wrote it like that because ‘foreign’ is a relative term) have a habit of over-taxing the brain – it can often be difficult to differentiate between places and character names when they come from an unfamiliar language. But that’s not the case here – it feels like a town you grew up in, or like revisiting the corridors in the secondary school you attended.

It’s also noteworthy because it brings the past and the present together in a story that’s relatable for people of all ages and from all generations. I also think it has the potential to stand the test of time, although I disagree with a few of the reviewers who called Murakami one of the world’s greatest living novelists. There are better living novelists, but there aren’t too many of them, and Murakami is certainly very good at what he does.

Haruki Murakami

Then there’s the age-old problem of trying to figure out how much of the credit should go to the author and how much should go to the translator. In this case, it appears as though both of them have done a fine job of things, and I’d certainly put this book in the top 5% of the contemporary fiction that comes out. But the top 1%? That’s a tough one.

Overall though, you’d be crazy not to recommend this, and you’d be crazy not to read it, too. There’s a lot to be said for it, and the characters are not just relatable – they’re also memorable, and that’s often, sadly, a rarity. But in this case, Murakami does a good job of things, and the result is this – a little gem of a novel.