Nicholas Sparks

I picked up a Nicholas Sparks some months ago, when I was on holiday in America.  And it inspired me.  Since then I’ve read several more of his books, and have come to the conclusion that he’s a hit and miss writer.

But there’s something very likable about his books and he comes across as a man of warmth and feeling and I enjoy his work even if it is not “great literature!”  The first book I read was “Dear John”, a novel about a young man from a poor background, in the South, (like most of Sparks’ heroes).  He lives alone with his father, who is not close to him, and is not doing well at school or showing any ambition.  Then after a few years, he goes into the Army and finds a purpose in life that he hadn’t had before. He then meets a young woman, Savannah, from a different background, who is at college and is a Christian.  He falls in love with her, but the novel is about the difficulties of maintaining a relationship when one of the partners is in the military.  John means to leave the army after his hitch is up, and marry Savannah, but “9/11” intervenes. After the terrorist attack, he -like many others -ends up re enlisting and that puts a major strain on his girlfriend. She and John don’t have much time to spend together and he begins to feel uneasy with her college friends.  They quarrel at times and then when he is serving abroad, she writes to him to say she wants to break off the relationship. 

John returns to America, later, because his father is very ill. His father dies, and he goes to see Savannah who is now married to a friend of hers called Tim.  Tim’s younger brother is autistic and because of this, Savannah wanted to run a ranch for children with similar problems. They set one up then, Tim became ill with cancer and is dying.  Savannah takes him to see her husband.  John makes a big sacrifice to try to save Tim’s life and protect Savannah’s marriage.

I like this ending, as while it is not “happy ever after”, it shows that love can make things better and that real love may demands a sacrifice. And that not all love affairs have a happy ending. 

In some of Sparks’ other works, he ends with something even sadder than a near death of a character, and indeed I have to say that at times he seems to be searching the medical dictionary for illnesses to make his characters unhappy.

But in Dear John, I enjoy the problem and the resolution. I think that in his later books perhaps Sparks is under pressure to produce regularly and finds it harder to come up with plots.   But I enjoy Dear John because it seems realistic in its looking at the differences between the 2 characters  - John as someone to whom the army was important because it had provided him with a purpose, and Savannah who was more privileged and interested in intellectual matters.   She is young and inexperienced and it’s understandable that she might be attracted to John but not feel able to cope with a long distance relationship for years to come.
I’ve tried not to put too many spoilers in this!

Hazel Holt and Mrs Malory

I just saw with sadness that Hazel Holt has written her last “Sheila Malory” cosy mystery and I rushed to buy it on Kindle. I’ve read most of her books and I enjoy them very much.  They are about a middle aged widow, in a small town in rural Devon, who gets involved in mysteries and murder cases.  Sheila Malory is in her early 50s when the series starts and as I’m getting around that age now, I tend to enjoy the stories about a heroine who isn’t young and “hot”.  Titles include Mrs Malory and the Festival Murder”, “The Cruellest Month” and many more.

Sheila is a writer, who writes literary criticism and occasionally takes temporary posts in teaching and lecturing which enables her to go to other locations, such as Oxford, America and a prestigious girls school, so as to get away from the rural town location for a book. 

Her mysteries are “cozies” in the American phrase which means that they are not usually about the criminal classes, but murders in “private life” among the comfortable middle class.  And there is no real violence or gore. 

In fact in many of her books the murder victim is a very unsympathetic figure, - such as a busybody or a nasty bully, or even a potential murder.  If they are male, they are often bullying and domineering over their wife and children… and the murderer is often someone who has been wronged by the victim, who has snapped and killed him or her.

I like the characters in her books, they are older people usually and more pleasant and well-mannered than many characters in modern fiction.  More “Inspector Morse “types than characters from “The Bill”.  
One of the small problems with the books is that because the victim is usually a nasty type, (this often emerges only after his death when family problems are outed), it is hard to wish for the mystery to be solved, because you sympathise with the murderer to an extent.  Sheila does sometimes feel that she has an ethical dilemma of not wanting the murderer to be caught…  Even when she does find the murderer she often accepts their request to “put their affairs in order” before going to the police, and allows them the gentlemanly option of committing suicide. In one of her earlier ones, she and her son, Michael (who becomes a lawyer which gives Sheila access to inside knowledge about law and property deals etc.) trap the murderer into a confession and it is one of the few cases where the killer (presumably since the novel ends with his being caught) is tried and found guilty.  But again this is a case where the victim (a woman) was a bullying selfish creature who used blackmail and spite to get her way, much of her life.   I’m not quite sure why this was one of the few cases where the murderer (who was not an unsympathetic person) was caught in the normal processes of the law.
Hazel Holt’s world is pleasant and cosy, albeit she does touch on modern problems such as secret affairs, child abuse, homosexuality etc. and she shows a tolerant and intelligent viewpoint.   I’m very sorry that she’s stopping writing the novels, and hope that maybe she’ll change her mind.