In the beautiful old police station in Goulburn, New South Wales, Australia, there is a secondhand bookshop that takes up five or six rooms and is a bit of a treasure trove.
On a rainy day recently, I dropped in and bought the three books in this picture:
The first I read was the Graham Greene. Greene described the book as a "frivolity". In the first half of the story you are on tenterhooks that poverty will result in disaster and in the second half you are led to almost believe that wealth, at least for some people, can have its own devastating consequences. I enjoyed the book. If you are fond of Graham Greene, you probably will as well.
After Loser Takes All I read the Penelope Lively. It is set in London, partly in a 'now' that is a three or four decades ago and partly in the Blitz. The parallel storylines didn't quite work for me - tricky fictional structures like this often distract me when reading, which is probably a symptom of my lack of sophistication.
In the more modern part of the story, (such as it is), the main character is an architect called Mark who spent his childhood looking at buildings and trying to make out how they were put together. He drives about London seeing it as a jigsaw of time. His musings are quite beguiling and full of ideas but I didn't really feel any great interest in this character or any of the others, (and I point blank did not accept that the really ruthless villain portrayed in its pages bore any resemblance to anyone real - not that I didn't believe in his wickedness but that I didn't believe in his stupid behaviour towards the main character).
In the book, Lively chooses to shift from present tense to past tense and then back to present tense, with no real reason, which I found annoying. It also seemed to me that she had tried, unsuccessfully, to shove an essay into a fictional framework. One striking thing about the novel though is the pre 9/11 innocence of the contents, particularly noticeable in the descriptions of tower blocks being constructed - there is absolutely no hint in the text that they might be turned into targets.
Overall, I found City of the Mind entertaining to begin with, but rather tedious after a while - not incompetent but too carefully wrought and confected. The essence of the problem for me was that I didn't care at all about the main character. It is hard to know in such circumstances whether that is the writer or the reader's fault.
Finally, I read the Michael Innes. Published in 1941, it tells the story of Inspector Appleby being shipwrecked and having to solve a murder on an island. By contemporary standards the book's language is very racist, in the sense that the white characters and the black characters are intensely aware of the other's colour. Being black isn't considered a bad thing by most of the characters, but it is considered a notable thing - those who are black are seen as 'other' in a way that is no longer encouraged. If the reader can leave that aside, the book is fun, as Innes's Appleby fables usually (although not always) are.
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