Winter in Madrid
May. 6th, 2024 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearI've had Winter in Madrid by CJ Sansom on my shelf for quite some time and a conversation with a friend prompted me to pick it up.
I read seven books in the first half of April, which is a bit ridiculous, so I was keen to slow down and properly appreciate my reading - and this was the perfect book to do that.
It's not difficult to read - given the subject matter (intelligence operations in Spain during the Second World War), it's quite light in tone for the most part (except for the occasional really grim bit) - but it's chunky and rewards a steady pace.
I liked both narrative threads - following Harry spying on Sandy's business dealings and Barbara trying to arrange Bernie's rescue from the prison camp - and I thought they were well balanced.
I felt a bit sorry for Sandy to begin with, given that both his friend and his lover were betraying him with their activities. But he was gradually revealed to be such a caricature of an evil capitalist and abusive partner that I lost sympathy for him (though the extremity of his faults felt a bit heavy-handed).
And overall, I was really enjoying the book - up until the last 40 pages when it all fell apart and the ultimate conclusion made the whole of the rest of the book completely pointless...
So I'm back to the age-old discussion - does a bad ending ruin the rest of a 530-page book? In this case, I would say yes, since I felt like I'd wasted all the time and energy I'd put into the book up to that point.
Oh, well...
I read seven books in the first half of April, which is a bit ridiculous, so I was keen to slow down and properly appreciate my reading - and this was the perfect book to do that.
It's not difficult to read - given the subject matter (intelligence operations in Spain during the Second World War), it's quite light in tone for the most part (except for the occasional really grim bit) - but it's chunky and rewards a steady pace.
I liked both narrative threads - following Harry spying on Sandy's business dealings and Barbara trying to arrange Bernie's rescue from the prison camp - and I thought they were well balanced.
I felt a bit sorry for Sandy to begin with, given that both his friend and his lover were betraying him with their activities. But he was gradually revealed to be such a caricature of an evil capitalist and abusive partner that I lost sympathy for him (though the extremity of his faults felt a bit heavy-handed).
And overall, I was really enjoying the book - up until the last 40 pages when it all fell apart and the ultimate conclusion made the whole of the rest of the book completely pointless...
So I'm back to the age-old discussion - does a bad ending ruin the rest of a 530-page book? In this case, I would say yes, since I felt like I'd wasted all the time and energy I'd put into the book up to that point.
Oh, well...
