Another chiaroscuro novel from Mitchell. Instead of multiple viewpoints and multiple narratives we have what might be multiple dreams or fantasies, visions of modern Japan through the mind and experiences of a boy searching for his father, haunted by his sister and bothered by his mother. Eiji Miyake is established early on as a slightly unreliable narrator, with a preference for elaborate flights of fancy over concrete actions. Nonetheless, he returns to shabby, knotty, tricky reality at the end of each initial flight, so when the story progresses through some strange and horrible adventures and misadventures, all propelled by his search for his father, the reader is left with a nagging suspicion about the nature of Eiji's reality. Then it no longer seems to matter, as at worst we are reading a made-up story by a made-up character in a made-up book. number9dream charms and horrifies and breaks the heart and heals it a little as one dream proceeds from the next.

This is my first time rereading Silence since it was originally published back in 1989. I snagged a copy from the library and never got around buying a copy of my own. It became so ubiquitous and was so influential that I somehow never got around to it, even though I know I recommended it to lots of people at the time. Then the film came out and the whole thing went stratospheric. I didn't even see the film when it was on general release: I watched it on ferry back from France. Anyway. I was annoyed at Silence because of the way it turned the police procedural into almost fetishistic forensic investigation for sexycool serial killers Me, I preferred the approach in Peter Straub's Koko, released around the same time, also about a hunt for a serial killer but with nary an autopsy or fibre analysis. Though Koko was successful in its own terms, it was Silence that set its stamp on popular culture, and I was unreasonably annoyed about that.

Weird then to discover how little forensics there is in the book itself. There's one post-mortem examination, the antithesis of every pop-video fast-cut CSI montage. It deals with the body and those who examine it with humanity and respect, and the psychological profiling is fairly basic and dismissed with contempt by good old Doctor Lecter. Even his own insights turn out retrospectively to have been the result of direct knowledge of the killer rather than second-hand analysis.

What we have then, is an amazing game of cat-and-mouse between Starling and Lector. The film has inescapably stamped its imprint all over the book, but that's okay. The book and the film complement each other quite well. So Starling is Foster and Lector is Hopkins and, not insignificantly, Scott Glenn is Jack Crawford. Certainly you couldn't ask for a better cast to voice the characters in your head, and the book has a greater depth that the film can't match.

The book is also incredibly well written, rare enough in massively popular bestsellers. It's a rare author who can handle switching POVs and moving in and out of the present tense so smoothly, giving voice to the anger and pain of the victims and the agents and the crazy evil of the killer with equal assurance. Lector's escape at the book's mid-point is one of the most riveting sequences in all of suspense fiction, and the narrative dexterity when he wrong-foots the reader a few chapters later is subtle and sophisticated. Jeffrey Deaver appears to have made a career out of replicating endless variations of that sequence and that trick, so you can appreciate Harris' restraint all the more.

I suppose it's understandable that Harris turned the sequel, Hannibal into a sort of gorgeous, camp gothic romance rather than try to replicate Silence. Whatever you might think of that, this itself remains a masterpiece of the thriller genre, and though you might expect endless imitators to have diluted its effectiveness, the fact is none of them really got to the heart of what makes it work. Read it, watch the film and enjoy it all over again.

I think this may be my favourite non-Karla le Carre novel, a post-Cold War spy thriller that darkly marks the transition from old-school espionage to more modern Pure Intelligence, recounting a desperate, but carefully and meticulously planned operation to bring down a wealthy British arms dealer by a small joint British/US agency known as Enforcement, while a larger, more powerful and shadowy set of players with tentacles in all levels of government and finance across the globe run their own, parallel operation, and would very much prefer the smaller operation to bugger off actually, thank you very much.

Point man for Enforcement is Jonathan Pine, ex-soldier, now Night Manager at an exclusive Swiss Hotel. The arrival of the arms deal, Richard Roper, one snowy night sparks memories of an earlier incident in Egypt which ended with a bloody murder, and inspires Pine to offer his services to British Intelligence. He is thereby recruited, trained and transformed, then pointed at Roper, and fired.

Every sentence shines, every character burns, every twist and turn, whether it's Pine's sweaty, queasy infiltration of Roper's life and affairs, or the efforts of members of Enforcement in London and Miami to protect themselves and Jonathan from political and economic skullduggery and a brutal war between intelligence agencies, is described with a cool, tight grace and emotional restraint as the principals become gradually aware of the extent of their self-deception in thinking they could wrestle even the smallest of victories against corruption on such a scale.

This took me a while to get into, and it took me a while to work out why. I don't read a huge amount of historical fiction, but I do have some favourites: Dorothy Dunnett and Patrick O'Brian. But these are tales of adventure and romance set against vivid historical back-drops, incorporating historical figures and events, but primarily concerned with their own plots and characters. This is historical fiction that reads like non-fiction, more like a work of journalism that recreates scenes and events than a novel. It is a novel, of course, a superb one, and it is fictional, but its primary concern is an historical figure and the historical events he was part of. History may contain plots, but it isn't A plot. History is big, sprawling, rambling, unsentimental and only has shape in retrospect. In A Dark Wood Wandering is a rigorous examination of a person and his milieu, and an extraordinary feat of sympathetic imagination.

1494, Charles d'Orleans is christened in Paris. His father, after whom he is named, is brother to the king, and the king is suffering from spells of madness. The elder Charles is being drawn into a divisive conflict with the powerful and influential Duke of Burgundy, who is pursuing his own interests in the north of France, while Orleans tries to guide the king closer to the interest of France. Courtly and political intrigue and maneuver and counter-maneuvre consume the rivals. Lies and rumours drive Orleans' wife from Paris and the conflict slowly turns deadly.

Young Charles grows up blissfully until a terrible act thrusts him into adulthood too soon and lays a heavy burden of vengeance and blood feud on his youthful shoulders. Utterly unsuited to his leadership role, Charles is intelligent and dutiful, but lacks the edge of political and physical ruthlessness he needs to be truly effective. He cannot break free of the powerful personalities that control him and out-maneuver him. His sensitive poet's soul, which he denies, suffers horribly through tragedy and loss and dire efforts to retain his honour and fulfill his duty.

The cost of duty, the merciless demands placed on the powerful, the disintegration of a once-great country and the appalling suffering that ensues. This is far from the playful textual and semiotic literary games of Name Of the Rose. This is a serious, unflinching novel, that gradually accumulates an emotional and intellectual weight until by the final few hundred pages it is nearly impossible to stop reading.

I read this on my way to London and my trip to London broke me, broke me in all the ways a man can be broken, yes, broken into a thousand little man-pieces that crunched underfoot when people walked on them, which people did even though they were me and I was saying this is me, please don't walk on m- crunch. So I really don't want to review it, even though I liked it a lot. It's one long shaggy dog story about the quest for the kingdom of Prester John and it's also about world-building and myth-making and story-telling and lies within lies within lies concealing each other and filling up the unknown spaces on the map and in the mind and in the past.

Short, funny and full of pirates and scientists. A model for what all books should be, really.