Archangel by Richard Harris

So, to the book: as you will have seen from emails in from Mark Th, Steve and Richard, Archangel has not set the club alight, but views ranged from it being a pretty good book with a rather less good ending, to it being a dreadful book with and ridiculously bad ending.  Of those present the views were roughly as follows:

Mark T had not expected to enjoy the boo at all and found it better than expected, with insights into Russia etc, but felt that a book such as this that is almost entirely plot-driven and lacked any subtleties about what the characters feelings were about events etc was lacking and he could not forgive it for this.

Rob felt similarly and thought that in a similar fashion to Ghost, one of Harris’ other novels that has been turned into a film starring Ewan McGregor, that the author had been so set on pursuing a lot line that he had drafted up in advance that he missed great opportunities to explore other avenues that Rob was sure would have provided more interesting material.  Having said the he enjoyed the history lesson about Stalin and was comforted to know that Harris was previously an investigative journalist of some repute and that his research could reasonably be relied on to be fairly accurate.

 

Chris was a bit more enthusiastic, certainly about the first half to two thirds of the novel but felt that the ending let it down very badly.  I was slightly disadvantaged in that I had read the book a number of years ago and actually had a hard cover version of it (sorry, forgot I shouldn’t mention the H word, far too controversial) and so had to rely on distant memories.  I am a fan of Robert Harris and have enjoyed reading his books ever since Fatherland, his first, which I thought was a brilliantly conceived storyline.  I also remembered enjoying the setting for this book as it was the Moscow I first got to know only a few years before Archangel was written and I revelled in his perspective of the place.  Nevertheless, I was also disenchanted with the ending and the plausibility of it which moderated my own scoring.

 

So, overall not a very well received book, with scores ranging so fa between 2 and 6.5.  I am hoping Rob kept a note of them though as I’m afraid I didn’t so I can only reliably confirm that my own score matched Richards at 6.5.

 

Despite our small numbers it was an enjoyable meeting, especially for me having missed so many over the last 9 months, and the conversation continued and touched on subjects both closely related to the book (why did Stalin get off so lightly in historical reckoning compared to Hitler, and did Blair and Bush commit real crimes against humanity that are only lessened by virtue of scale), the book club (the H-word and electronic readers it seems will always be a topic for conversation) and beyond (retirement for example and what  to do with it, especially for those fortunate enough to have index-related, state funded pensions).