Paul Waters – Blackwatertown | Review

August 30, 2021
Authors U-Z (By Surname)Fiction

Title: Blackwatertown

Author: Paul Waters

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 438

Rating: 3.5/5

I picked this book up because I’ve been aware of Paul Waters for a while now, and he was good enough to be one of the guest speakers at the writers’ workshops that I organised at Wycombe Arts Centre.

This book is a thriller but with a little bit of historical fiction thrown in, though probably not in the way that you’re thinking. It’s set during the Troubles in Ireland, a time of which Waters himself has some experience, and so this technically makes it an own voices novel about a period in history that’s pretty significant, especially to people from Britain.

The setting adds a lot to the story, so much so that I can’t really imagine what it would have looked like without it, but it also stands on its own two feet as a cracking little thriller. It’s nothing particularly mind-blowing, but then after you’ve read so many thrillers, they lose their ability to surprise you.

Here, the central mystery was interesting enough, but I was much more taken by the characters and the growth that they experienced. We also have that old thriller classic of there being a deep, dark past that we learn more about as the story goes on, and while normally I’m not particularly interested in that, it worked well here because of the historical backdrop of the novel.

Then there were some of the interesting and unexpected scenes that I can’t talk too much about without giving away the details. I’ll touch on just one of them, which is when a gun goes off accidentally and so the cops fake an attack by the IRA to save their backsides. But that in itself then leads to further complications and helps to push the narrative forward.

There’s a sort of cloying, claustrophic feeling throughout the book that comes from the tensions between the Protestants and the Catholics, and that also helps to lend it a lot of realism. The result is a dark thriller novel that’s also a police procedural at heart, and it also has a lot to say about the evils that people do to each other.

As to whether I recommend it, it’s a definite yes from me, although I do think that certain types of readers will enjoy it more than others. It’s also pretty different to anything I’ve really read before, apart from perhaps the Stasi Wolf books by David Young. But even those are set in eastern Europe rather than in Ireland. So yeah, there’s that too.

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Alan Bennett – Keeping On Keeping On | Review

August 25, 2021
Authors A-E (By Surname)Non-Fiction

Title: Keeping On Keeping On

Author: Alan Bennett

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 542

Rating: 3/5

This book is basically just a bunch of Bennett’s diary entries all brought together, and so that alone should be enough for you to tell whether you’re likely to find this interesting or not. For me, diary collections rank slightly above letter collections and slightly below essay collections, and all three belong firmly in the “bedtime books” category. So perhaps you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that I read this a little bit at a time.

I mean, call me crazy, but I don’t find it particularly interesting to read other people’s journals. I don’t even find it interesting to read my own. You also need to bear in mind that by the time that these journal entries even start, Bennett was in his seventies, so it’s not as though he’s living a super exciting lifestyle. He’s mostly going to National Trust properties with his partner and talking about how they no longer take sandwiches with them because he’s gluten intolerant.

Weirdly, I’ve also read a fair few of these diary entries before in one of Bennett’s other books, although I couldn’t remember which I’d read and which I hadn’t and so I ended up just re-reading them all. They were printed in another of Bennett’s books that I read as a bedtime book, and so it left me with a feeling of déjà vu.

So now we have a problem, because there’s not much more for me to tell you about this one. It pretty much just does what it says on the tin, but I have to somehow still get another 200 words into this review to make it tally with my goal of each review having the same word count as the number of pages that the book has. When I struggle to find things to say, it’s a sign that the book is either way too long or way too boring, and this one was a little bit of both.

With that said, I am still glad that I read it because Alan Bennett is one of those authors where I want to eventually read everything that he ever wrote. I’d read his shopping lists if I had to, and when I was going through this one, I wouldn’t have been surprised if a shopping list had made an appearance. It feels like everything else did.

The only real redeeming feature that I can think of is that if you’re studying him for a course or if you’re staging one of his plays, you might want to read about his own experiences with them. But that seems like a pretty niche audience, and so I’m not sure how many people will actually be swayed by that. Otherwise, I can’t really say that I’d recommend this one, just because by its very nature, it’s kind of dull.

All in all then, I’m glad that I finished it, but I doubt I’d ever pick it up again. It is what it is, it’s over and done with, and now I can move on to something else. And that, my friends, was another 200 words. Job done.

Learn more about Keeping On Keeping On.