Love Is Blind, William Boyd

While more restricted in its scale than usual, Love Is Blind sits on the fictional biography shelf of Boyd's canon, taking in much of a single character's life, rather than a more focused, eventful interlude.

This time, it's the life of professional piano tuner, Brodie Moncur, who we first encounter in late 19th century Edinburgh. Charged with helping expand a piano selling business, he's sent to Paris, setting in motion a lifetime on the move, and entwining his path with that of opera singer, Lydia Blum. But Lydia's life is already bound to that of a brilliant, flawed Irish musician, John Kilbarron, forcing Brodie into years of compromise and subterfuge.

An outline of this novel does no justice to the detail Boyd that invests into Brodie's life and times. Whether it's the careful description of how he plies his trade, efficient travelogue on the countries and cities he lives in, or observations on societal change as the pace of life accelerates into the 20th century, Boyd's writing absorbs you into Brodie's world. For one, early on I doubted how interested I could be in the art of piano tuning, but it wasn't long before it became fascinating. I was reminded in this of a similar transformation in Roth's American Pastoral, where glove manufacture is similarly compellingly described.

If it lacks at all, it's only because the focus on characters is narrower, and it's shorter in historical scope than his other biographical works, where wars and larger mass movements come into view. But, as Boyd always is, it's still a very enjoyable and easy read. That's not a criticism, it's testament to his skill at so deftly writing an inviting other world.

Summary: it's been too long Mr Boyd - write faster!

A Line Of Forgotten Blood, Malcolm MacKay

Hitherto, MacKay's books have taken place in a stripped-back, contemporary Scotland, amped-up by stylish prose and meditative criminal protagonists. So my expectations here were for something similar, but in a more Caithness-ish setting.

However, there's more to the change of scene than just a journey northward.

In outline, it's a well-told crime caper, with good-guy private investigators rubbing up against bad-uns from a centuries-old banking family and their compliant local police force. Unexpectedly, it doesn't really have the distinctive pared-back styling of MacKay's other work. Darian Ross, the PI lead, *is* somewhat in the meditative mode, but the prose is otherwise quite a break with MacKay's earlier, Glasgow-set tales.

And, in what should be an even bigger break with MacKay's other work, this is actually an Alternative History novel. I'd not read its predecessor novel, so it crept up on me gradually, but the deep background is a timeline in which Scotland's failed 17th century Darien Scheme actually worked, aborting the United Kingdom. As it happens, this seismic change in history actually makes for only a slightly tilted version of the present day. This might be MacKay musing on Scottish independence, but, if so, it's very low-key musing, to the point that you wonder what he's trying to say, or why he bothered.

Still, as this is part of a series of novels, he may yet be going places with this idea. In the meantime, this is a perfectly enjoyable novel, if not up to his usual distinctive standard.

Axiom's End, Lindsay Ellis

Cora is not having a good time. Her low rent existence is already a mess of government intrusion because of her dead-beat and secrets-leaking father. But into this comes a nearby "meteorite crash" that unleashes an alien with an interest in these extraterrestrial secrets and what exactly Cora knows about them. After a rocky start involving Cora's kidnap and fitting with a tracker / mind control technology, a reversal in the fortunes of the alien, dubbed Ampersand, forces a more balanced relationship. But this new bond brings an honesty that reveals the reason for Ampersand's visit and the unwelcome implications for humanity's future.

It'd be a more than a little rude to describe this as a mash-up of a First Contact story and the Mismatched Buddy genre, but that's not entirely inaccurate. What starts as something a little like "Predator" , with Cora stalked by a powerful alien with invisibility technology, becomes more like "Leon", with Cora becoming front-of-house for Ampersand's tetchy stand-off with the US authorities. And it works through all of this, with both leads becoming more filled-out as the novel progresses, and with a solid first contact backstory slowly teased out.

Definitely recommended.

One thing that did slightly irk me is that, for reasons that never became clear, this is also a period piece set towards the end of Dubya's tenure as US President. While this does allow the author to alternative-history defenestrate him, it's never really a big thing in the book, so comes across as merely a quirky choice. Perhaps it's trying to draw a parallel between the fictional government keeping alien secrets, and the real one hiding war-on-terror ones, but, if so, it's never drawn out definitively.