Review: Hotel California

Hotel California by Barney Hoskyns
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"It's not easy when you take someone who's basically right out of puberty and who becomes a millionaire responsible to no one."

Barney Hoskyns's 'Hotel California' is the story of the late '60s rise of country rock and its descent into late '70s AOR; idealism into hedonism; dope smoking, laid back hippies into cokehead, egotistical control freaks. Of course, there are those who were already halfway there even at the Laurel Canyon scene beginnings - Stephen Stills comes off particularly badly - and it would be difficult to make it in music without a strong ego, but Hoskyns's story is largely a tale of innocence and experience.

This is not a primer for California music; the book is almost novelistic and has a huge cast of characters and presupposes the reader's familiarity with many of them, not just the Crosby's, Stills', Nash's and Young's but also the Warren Zevon's and Lowell George's. Hoskyns takes these characters and weaves their individual threads into a complete tapestry of the times, albeit one which becomes badly torn and frayed at the end. He takes us from the idealistic Laurel Canyon community, the singer-songwriters at the Troubadour, an extended family who wrote together and played on each others albums, at time when record companies supported 'artists', to back-stabbing, suspicious superstars who tried to outdo and undermine each other at every turn. And, along the way, the casualties like Gram Parsons and Judee Sill.

I enjoyed the book, and revisiting the music, immensely and would recommend it to anyone with more than a passing interest in the period. It is much more than the subtitle, "The True-life Adventures of Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles, and Their Many Friends", would suggest and I look forward to picking up Hoskyns's "Small Town" which I hope expands on The Band's story in the same way.

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Review: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I bought this book 18 years ago on it's release in hardback in 1999. And never read it. I don't know why... I grew up with King, one of his 'constant readers' and, while his output was slightly hit and miss in the '90s (I loved the Green Mile serial novel; wasn't overly impressed by Bag of Bones; I know I read Insomnia but can't remember anything about it - perhaps I fell asleep?), The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon should have drawn me in straight away - King is a master at writing about childhood and survival and nightmares...

I finally pulled it off the shelf after hearing a passing reference to it on a podcast. And it is excellent, classic Stephen King, up there with The Body and IT in how it gets into the experience of being a child in a scary world. The plot is a simple one - 9 year-old Patricia McFarland steps off the path for a pee while hiking in the forest and gets lost - and the book is a very slim volume in King terms, but it a wonderful book, part adventure, part horror, part fairy story. As Tricia heads deeper into the forest, and deeper into despair, she is accompanied, at intervals, by Tom Gordon, her favourite Red Sox pitcher (and a real-life baseball player), who she suspects is not really there, and a more malevolent presence, always just out of sight, which she suspects really is there.

I loved this book and the last line is a real tearjerker and one of King's best.

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Review: A Lesson in Violence

A Lesson in Violence by Jordan Harper
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An astounding, visceral, violent novel populated by "..women dumb and vicious, ... men with cruel eyes and meth stains on their hearts", A Lesson in Violence (She Rides Shotgun) is the story of a father and daughter, on the run from a death warrant. Nate McCluskey is a small-time criminal who has run foul of a supremacist gang who won't rest until he and his family are dead, but really this is the story of his daughter, eleven year-old Polly and how she comes to cope with, and thrive in, the tough underworld into which she is thrust.

Jordan Harper writes taut, brutal, poetic prose, the sort of prose that hits the reader in the gut. The plot is gripping. The characters are real - Nate McCluskey is not a hero but he is driven by his love for his daughter. Polly, initially scared, comes to terms with, possibly relish, the harsh life she shares with her father; because she loves him. And then there's the bear...

"The bear put a friendly paw up to the cage. The rooster pecked it. It said fuck you in chicken."

It is hard to believe this is Jordan Harper's debut. A Lesson in Violence is an accomplished novel, one of the best this year.


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Review: It

It by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

IT is one of my favourite Stephen King novels although I haven't read it in a long time. I decided to listen to IT on audiobook in preparation for the film adaptation - I didn't quite make it but enjoyed both immensely. Growing up, IT, Salem's Lot and The Stand were my favourites. King excels when he has a large cast, especially one with child protagonists, married to a great plot. Sometimes, Tommyknockers is an example, it doesn't work but, when it does, there are few to beat him.

Memory plays tricks. I remembered almost every plot point and scene in IT but was convinced that the adult, 1985 plot bookended the children, 1958 story - they are actually intercut, the story of the Losers' first battle with the evil presence in Derry being old in flashback interweaving with their return to face IT again as grownups. As the two stories race to a conclusion the time jumps increase in pace and frequency, bashing up against each other in a frenzied climax.

I love this huge book and loved revisiting IT. IT is not perfect and there is one ill-judged scene towards the end which is more jarring than it was 30 years ago (and which the movie sensibly side-stepped) but IT is frightening and entertaining. I may revisit Salem's Lot to see if I remember it as well. It's about vampires, isn't it...?

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