"The Radleys" by Matt Haig

I seem to be falling into a pattern with my reading habits. It's either factual (popular science, economics, sociology) or it's horror. It's like the 17 year old Stephen King fan in me is fighting with the old man youth worker I am now. 

Anyway, this is another one of those 'clever twist on the vampire mythology' books that I seem to be a sucker for (pun intended).

The Radleys are a seemingly ordinary family living in a nice pleasant middle-class village. The parents try desperately to fit in with their peers through dinner parties, book groups and listening to Radio 4. Their teenage children are angsty misfits who are bullied, uncomfortable with opposite sex and dabble in poetry and veganism. So, just like every other family, right? Except of course, the Radleys are vampires - albeit Abstaining vampires.

In this mythology, it is possible for a vampire to survive by abstaining - those who have a conscience about killing to live, can choose to abstain. They'll spend the rest of their lives like an addict craving their next hit, they'll be weak and their lifespans will be terribly shortened - in other words, they'll be like most normal humans (or 'unbloods'). The sun doesn't kill them, but brings them out in a rash, and crucifixes do nothing. Garlic and stakes are still to be avoided though.

There are 2 things going on in this book. There is the story, and there is the METAPHOR. I use capitals deliberately.

The story is amusing and very easy to read - Haig writes very small chapters, making it easy to whizz through. He seems to have particular empathy with the teenage Radley children, giving them most of the emotional issues and danger. There are some clever bits - a specialist police force who negotiate with the vampire hirearchy on who they can arrest or not, and the constant referring to of who was a vampire through history (Hendrix, Byron etc).

Then there is the METAPHOR. Maybe I'm being unkind in suggesting it's a little heavy handed - I'm guessing he wasn't really trying to make a cutting social satire. But hey, no-one really feels like they fit in - we're all outsiders when you think about it, yeah? Especially teenagers - they all feel like outcasts. Uh-huh. I did enjoy the concept of an abstaining teenage vampire choosing to become vegan in an effort to stop animals running away from her though.

I believe the rights to it have been purchased by Alfonso Cuaron - who directed 'Children of Men' and one of the Harry Potter movies, and I imagine it'll make a fun film or mini tv series. I also note that when it was originally released, it was done so as adult fiction, but it's being repackaged as a 'young adult' novel now. I'm glad the copy I have has the 'adult' cover on it, so I don't feel like a nonce.

'Chavs: The Demonization of The Working Class' - by Owen Jones

For my third book this year, I've gone back to my more regular territory of factual books. If you write popular science, politics or economics, then I'm your man. If your view point is "questioning what is currently the norm", then I'm doubly your man.

 'Chavs' fits nicely into both of these pigeon-holes. It starts by asking the questions "why has it become ok to make 'chav' jokes - to mock people who are poorer than us"? Of course the response to this question is that Chavs are not the working class, but a particular type of troublemaking, dole claiming, drinking, dog fighting, Burberry wearing 'underclass'. The sort of people who don't want to work - exist on benefits, get pregnant when they are 15, get arrested and ASBO'd all the time.

What has happened in the last 30 years, Jones argues, is that the stereotypical chav image has now become seen as the 'norm'. A huge percentage of today's print and broadcast journalists come from middle and upper class backgrounds, so very few of them have any sort of perspective about working class life.

Jones says that in past generations - being working class was at least respected. Entire towns and communities were working class. Being working class meant having a trade - working in a mine, a factory and so on. Since the decline of British industry - starting in the 70's, these trades and with them the communities, have gone. They have been replaced by lower paid and less secure jobs. There is far less dignity or security in working in a call centre, than working on a Ford assembly line or even down a mine.

In fact, the concept of 'Chavs' (either a Roma Gypsy word or short of Council Housed and Vermin) is just the jumping off point - and the real subject of the book is the decline of the working class in the last 30 years. Though The Tories get most of the blame for this, New (and Old) Labour don't get away very easily either.

Jones is at his best when he using an impressive array of verifiable independent facts and statistics. He points out that Benefits cheats get a huge amount of press and attention - costing £1bn in lost revenue. He counters by observing the amount of Benefits that could be claimed each year, but are not, totals £17bn, and the governments own figures for revenue lost by tax evasion and avoidance is £70bn. It's also interesting to note that despite many newspapers screaming about benefits cheats - about 7000 people get prosecuted for it every year - a pretty small amount.

I don't agree with everything Jones has to say - he loses his way when he moves from facts into opinion. He suggests that programmes like Little Britain (Vicky Pollard) and Harry Enfield (The Slobs),
did their bit to demonise the working class, but both programmes also slagged off wealthy idiots too. He comes close to talking complete nonsense when suggesting that back in the 1990s, you couldn't move for working class bands like Oasis and the Verve (forgetting poshos like Radiohead and Blur) but these days it was all middle class like Coldplay and Keane. Leaving aside that it's been about 8 years since Keane dented the charts, popular acts continue to be a mix of the classes - off the top of my head: Plan B, Adele, Dizzee Rascal and The Arctic Monkeys are all what could be termed 'working class'.

The other main issue I have with the book is that though it is divided up into chapters, I don't really get the feeling that each chapter has a different narrative. It's mostly the same thing in each chapter. It feels like a really long essay, and though there are huge chunks of it that are very interesting and worth reading, you forget so much of it, and you forget where the interesting bit you wanted to go back to, was.

What it succeeded in doing for me - was highlighting the fact that overwhelmingly, the coverage that working class people get these days, is negative. The vast majority of people in poverty actually do have a job. The vast majority of those who don't have one, would like one. We need to concentrate a lot less on the minority of feckless criminals at the bottom, and much more the feckless criminals at the top.

To quote Jones: "it used to be that a figure of 1m unemployed people was the fault of the government. Somewhere along the way, it's become the fault of the unemployed".

'Harbour' by John Ajvide Lindqvist

So, onto my second book of the year. Actually, I started it in 2011, but it's taken me bloody ages to read. Not because I thought it was rubbish or anything, but trying to read a big novel over Christmas is nigh on impossible.

So, for background flavour - this is my 3rd Linqvist book. He is best known for "Let The Right One In", which has been made into a movie (twice). LTROI was a very clever and pretty unique spin on the Vampire myth. It was more a coming of age story than anything else. After reading that, I read 'Handling The Undead'. If describing LTROI as a vampire book was underselling it, then I'll equally undersell HTU by calling it a zombie book - but again, it was more to do with how humans deal with death and loss than anything else.

So, to 'Harbour'. A 5 year old girl completely vanishes on a small Swedish island, and her distraught father can't accept that she is gone - stumbling around trying to find the truth. I'm not a writer or a journalist, so I fear I will struggle to boil down the next 600 odd pages into a paragraph or 2 of review.

Suffice to say it involves old secrets, the sea demanding sacrifices, conjuring tricks, loss, and of course evil water zombies who speak entirely in Morrisey lyrics.

Did I like it? Yes - but only sort of. I felt it was about 150 pages too long. Another review I read, suggested that this book came out too soon as he was becoming more popular, and would have benefitted from a few more rewrites. Like 'Handling The Undead', I thought the ending didn't quite work either.

'The Good Man Jesus & The Scoundrel Christ' by Phillip Pullman

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book. I knew Pullman from his 'Dark Materials' trilogy - one of those stories written in theory for young adults, but actually read by people of all ages - including me.

With those books, Pullman had achieved success in so far as he had written fantasy books that I actually read and enjoyed. Though I enjoy fantasy and sci-fi films and TV shows, I rarely enjoy them as novels. I had also never read anything that Pullman had written for adults.

Anyway, one of the themes of the 'Dark Materials' books was how organised religion perverts individual faith and belief for its own end. Since rising to fame with these books, Pullman has become a well-known voice for "new athiesim" - Generally not as strident as a Dawkins or a Hitchens, but outspoken nontheless.

So, all of this was the background I had going into this book. The basic idea is that Pullman has written an alternative version of the life and times of Jesus Christ. On the surface, his conceit is that Mary had 2 sons: Jesus & Christ. Jesus was a normal child who became a popular evangelist and man of the people. Christ was a quiet studious and devout child who became the documentarian of Jesus's life.

Of course, what it is really about is how personal faith is different to organised religion, how history and truth are very different things, how stories change each time they are told and how circumstances can turn people into something they are not.

Pullman's real skill here is writing a book that has something in it for both believers and athiests. I imagine if you are an enthusiastic member of an organised religion there are things you can take offence at, but if your belief system is more open or personal, then there is a lot to chew on here. Despite being an Athiest, Pullman never mocks those that do believe, but he does poke and prod and asks difficult questions.

All of this makes the book sound like it is a heavy treatise on belief and spirituality. It's actually a very easy read. You will probably know most of the story already, and if you are like me, then you'll enjoy the deviations that Pullman takes from the better known version. There are of course, far more than 4 Gospels in existence, and Pullman writes as if he is just writing another version of the Gospel.

I'm guessing that most of the people who have read this book will have been confirmed athiests - which is a shame as perhaps the real target audience is those who 'sort of' believe.

Anyway, as my first book of 2012, I can't recommend it highly enough.