The Great Mistake, a novel by Jonathan Lee

Massively praised by Guardian book reviewer Alex Preston, this novel by British-born Jonathan Lee, is a dramatised biography of the life of Andrew Haswell Green, the 19th-century New York lawyer, who is regarded as having been responsible for facilitating the creation of New York Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge (the 'Great Mistake' at the time was to link Brooklyn with Manhattan) and other famous New York institutions and landmarks. 

Lee paints a fascinating picture of the strange multicultural city of New York at that time,  reminiscent of Dickens' descriptions of London.  Green's life is followed from his rural childhood, his difficult relationship with his father, his period of work in Trinidad and the very close lifelong friendship with similarly unmarried lawyer Samuel Tilden, who stood unsuccesfully for President. Much is made of the fact that Green was murdered at the age of 82 in 1903 by a Black man Cornelius Williams. So we follow in detail the obsessive attempts by local NY Police Chief McCluskey to solve the murder and his consequential exploration of the seamier side of New York life. 

The storyline is inevitably restricted by the need to adhere to known facts of Green's life and so the reader is often left to fill in the gaps.  This is frustrating when so much emphasis is placed on the murder.  As a result the book concludes in a serious anticlimax as you realise that the murder was very probably a case of mistaken identity -- the other 'Great Mistake'.❤❤❤ 

Wayward Heroes, a novel by Halidor Laxness

This is one of the works for which the author won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955. It is based on two Icelandic Sagas, principally the Saga of the Sworn Brothers (Fóstbrœðra saga), probably written around 1200, and tells the tale of two 11th-century warriors, Þorgeir and Þormóðr (Thorgeir and Thormod) who make a blood tryst to support each other when alive and avenge each other's death.

Thorgeir is extraordianary brave (we would now say insanely agressive and belligerent) and treats killing people and taking their possessions as a sport, acting as a mercenary in various hostilities in the Nordic countries and in England at the time.  Thormod is a skald -- a kind of minstrel -- famous for his lays (stanzas written and recited in praise of kings or other people of influence) and is slightly less hostile, preferring the company of women and even settling at one point to marriage and being a farmer, but when he finds that Thorgeir has been killed in battle, becomes obsessively determined to find his killers and avenge his death.  He devotes the rest of his life to doing this, travelling as far as northern Greenland to find them and suffering severe injuries and hardships on the way.  

His story is intertwined with that of Olaf Haraldsson, who became King Olaf II of Norway, who was canonised and became St. Olaf, a major romantic figure in Norwegian history and the subject of another Icelandic saga. Both Olaf and Thormod were killed in 1039 at the Battle of Stiklestad. 

Laxness's novel portrays the two blood brothers not, as in the sagas, as brave warriors but as obsessively violent individuals and objects of ridicule. Thorgeir, not surprisingly, is killed at an early age and Thormod, although he does (completely unnecessarily) avenge his blood brother's death, he does this at great personal cost to his reputation and physical and mental health. At the end it is clear that his fame as a skald is no longer recognised by King Olaf, whom he reveres and for whom effectively he gives up his life. 

Laxness tells this tale, which is complex and contains multiple characters, in a very compelling and simple way (I guess mimicking in some way the type of narrative of the sagas), such that one becomes totally involved and engrossed in the life of the anti-hero of the story. A long but excellent read. ❤❤❤❤❤

Less, a novel by Andrew Sean Greer

This is a comic novel -- not a genre I normally look for -- that was recommended to me by a reliable source.  It won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2018. 

Just as filmmakers particularly enjoy making films about filmmakers, so we have here a novel about a novelist. The main character, Arthur Less, is approaching his 50th birthday and has lost confidence in his ability as a writer.  Nevertheless, he still receives invitations to attend book prize-awarding ceremonies and, partly because he is suffering from the break-up of a relationship and partly because he can think of nothing else to do, he accepts these and creates a worldwide travel itinerary for himself.  Multiple disasters unfold, partly based on his lack of adequate finances and partly because he is particularly accident-prone. 

The plot is of course contrived (acceptably so) and allows the author to set up some comic scenarios based on well known preconceptions of the eccentricities of life in the various locations he visits: France, Italy, Morocco, India etc. He invariably meets other authors or friends from his past, who all attend the same ceremonies, and we find out more about the character and his past as he does so. The way this unfolds is reminiscent of the Anthony Powell series Dance to the Music of Time, although very much brought up to date. 

The book has some genuinely comic moments. However, the scene changes between the locations of each sub-story are not quite adequate and after a time start to become repetitive to the extent that one's sympathy for the hapless Arthur Less is eventually replaced by indifference. ❤❤❤