I kept hearing about this book, so just had to read it myself to see if it lived up to all the hype. Always dangerous of course. It's a good thriller, but loses its way towards the end. The story follows James, an MP and junior minister, his wife Sophie, and barrister Kate. James is a high flying political figure and close friend of the Prime Minister - they went to Oxford together, having already been friends since childhood. However, a scandal is soon to upset James' and Sophie's world when he is accused of a heinous crime. Kate is the barrister who is trying to prove him guilty, but James is adamant he is innocent. With flashbacks to their Oxford days (Sophie was James' girlfriend back then), we are built a picture of characters and relationships, and realise that everyone has secrets to hide and skeletons they'd much rather were left in the cupboard.
The story runs at a good pace, and you don't get confused with the alternating of time periods and character's viewpoints. There is a twist in the story which is obvious from early on, and I got a little bored with Sophie's character as the 'dutiful wife'. It was interesting that Kate's story is told in the first person, but everyone else is in the third. Is that showing importance of the character?
A good courtroom political drama.
These stories were my first introduction to Chekhov. They are a selection of 13 short stories - the cover describes them as 'Essential stories', so I don't know whether that means that someone has selected these as superior or more important than others of his? I always love to read the blurb in books about the author and his background, but there was nothing at all in this, just a photograph of him, and then straight into the stories. So I've googled him and, in short, he was born in 1860 in Russia, the son of a grocer. He started writing short pieces for a magazine under a pen name, and then went on to write major works such as 'The Seagull', as well as continuing his short-story writing. He died from tuberculosis at the age of 44.
I'm not usually a fan of short stories, I like to get my teeth stuck into a plot and see characters grow, but there was something calming and untroubling about these short stories. Sometimes I thought characters from one short story were appearing in another because of the similarity of some of the Russian names, and I quite liked that idea, even though I think I was mistaken about it. All the stories are, I believe, set in Russia and cross all classes. There are stories of peasants, stories of aristocrats and of soldiers, but in all cases it is made obvious that of course everyone is human and has the same feelings. The stories are romantic, moving, real. Chekhov has a definite art of describing emotion, whether the person in question is male or female. Even though you obviously assume the stories are set in the time of writing, ie the late 1800s, because they are stories of human emotion and feeling, they could actually be describing modern day characters.
A wonderful collection.
