Author: David Hebblethwaite

Ramsey Campbell, ‘Getting it Wrong’ (2011)

22nd October 2011 / / 1 Comment

Misanthropic film buff Eric Edgeworth is interrupted one evening by a phone call purporting to be from a radio gameshow; would he be the ‘expert friend’ of the current contestant, Mary Barton, a work colleague he barely knows. Edgeworth is convinced this a hoax being staged by some of his fellow-staff at the Frugoplex cinema; but, as the calls continue and Mary is absent from work, it becomes apparent that something more sinister is happening. This is a typically well-constructed story from Campbell, with a satisfying pay-off and a portrait of the crabby Edgeworth that’s grimly amusing. But there’s a sense of artificiality about the piece – perhaps from the fake brand names used, perhaps from those moments when the characterisation becomes a little too broad-brush – which stops it from being truly creepy.

Rating: ***

Link
Ramsey Campbell’s website

Michael Stewart, King Crow (2011)

20th October 2011 / / 3 Comments

Several hours before Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending was named as the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize, The Guardian announced the result of its third annual ‘Not the Booker Prize’, voted for by readers of its books blog. The winner was Michael Stewart’s debut, published by the Hebden Bridge-based Bluemoose Books.

King Crow is narrated by sixteen-year-old Paul Cooper; not the most sociable of boys, he’s more interested in ornithology (and peppers this first-person account with facts from his bird books). But Cooper’s life takes a turn into darker territory when he becomes friends with Ashley O’Keefe at his new school; Ashley is mixed up in drugs, and double-crosses a local gangster in a bid to strike out on his own. Cooper and Ashley end up stealing a car and driving to Cumbria – one to flee the gang, the other in the hope of seeing some ravens. Along the way, Cooper meets a girl named Becky, and starts falling in love – but Ashley isn’t happy at the thought of being ignored.

Paul Cooper is an intriguing protagonist; it would have been easy enough for Stewart to paint him as a figure deserving of our sympathy, but instead the picture is more complicated. At the very beginning, we see Cooper try to block out the sight of a gang kicking a girl by focusing on what he knows about finches (one senses that he quite often uses his love of birds as a shield against the aspects of life he doesn’t like); and our response may be ambivalent, because it’s not clear whether he is callous or just fragile. The answer is probably a mixture of both, and Cooper becomes increasingly difficult to warm to, with his uncomfortable tendency to objectify the opposite sex as he does birds, and his peculiarly understated way of reacting to events (about a third of the way through, Cooper says, ‘Since meeting Ashley, my life has definitely got more interesting. I’ve done a lot of thing I’ve never done before,’ [p. 66], which seems a rather muted way of describing experiences which include seeing your best friend being tortured, stealing a car, and knocking a man down). And yet, Cooper’s voice remains amiable.

King Crow is skilfully structured to reveal its secrets only gradually. It’s clear from early on that there has been turmoil in Cooper’s family life and trouble at school, but exactly what and how much are things which only come into focus with time (and even then they’re perhaps not made fully clear). There is also the big twist, which occurs two-thirds into the book, and which I absolutely did not see coming – looking back, it is both carefully hidden and cunningly foreshadowed. It’s a twist that both puts a new gloss on what has gone before, and adds a different kind of urgency to what remains, because of what we have now come to understand.

Stewart’s novel maintains its effectiveness almost to the very end, at which point Cooper is perhaps overly eager to explain things. This could be seen as part of the character, another manifestation of the boy’s apparent nonchalance towards his circumstances; but, still, it’s a little jarring for a book which has so carefully balanced the withholding and revealing of information to then show so much of its hand all at once. Nevertheless, King Crow remains a fine debut that leaves one interested to see what Michael Stewart will write next.

Elsewhere
Michael Stewart’s website
An extract from the novel
Some other reviews of King Crow: Sam Jordison for The Guardian; Being obscure clearly.

John Ajvide Lindqvist, ‘The Music of Bengt Karlsson, Murderer’ (2011)

16th October 2011 / / 1 Comment

Six months after his partner Annelie died in a road accident, our narrator moved with his son Robin to a cheap house in the forest; he got rid of the things he thought were unnecessary, but soon regretted being so rash in destroying Annelie’s things. All that remained was her old piano, which he now insists Robin learn to play. But what is the strange music that the narrator hears his son play, and what does it have to do with the murderer who once lived in their house. This is a great story (excellently translated by Marlaine Delargy), as Lindqvist ratchets up the tension and the sense that the narrator is losing his grip on reality. What makes the tale for me is the wonderful uncertainty or whether the supernatural explanation for events is valid, or whether it’s all in the mind of a desperate father.

Rating: ****

Link
John Ajvide Lindqvist’s website

Dennis Etchison, ‘Tell Me I’ll See You Again’ (2011)

15th October 2011 / / 1 Comment

One sweltering day, Sherron sees her friend David cycle perilously close to his father’s truck… and finds him lying underneath the bicycle, apparently with no breath or heartbeat – yet, a short time later, he’s fine. Could this be some kind of survival mechanism, and what exactly could have brought it on? ‘Tell Me I’ll See You Again’ is a short piece that uses its brevity to great effect; an atmosphere of strangeness and disorientation builds up because we have so little time to grasp what’s going on. And Etchison’s closing sentences are simply beautiful.

Rating: ***½

Brian Hodge, ‘Roots and All’ (2011)

14th October 2011 / / 1 Comment

Cousins Dylan and Gina travel to the remote farmhouse of their recently-deceased Grandma Evvie, to sort through her effects; a long-term drug problem has caused the area to go to seed. Never far from Dylan’s mind are Evvie’s old tales of what she called the Woodwalker, and the mystery of his sister Shae’s disappearance eight years previously – a mystery which will be solved by tale’s end. Hodge brings the disparate elements of his story together in unexpected ways, and thre’s a grimly satisfying inevitability about the ending.

Rating: ***

Link
Brian Hodge’s website

Thoughts on the Literature Prize

12th October 2011 / / 5 Comments

I’ve been following with interest – and some bemusement – the kerfuffle surrounding the shortlist (and the longlist before it) of this year’s Man Booker Prize. There was a fair amount of commentary (not necessarily by people who had read the books) to the effect that the judges had somehow failed in their task to select the titles they considered the best from the pool of submissions (in some quarters, opinion seemed to be that the judges had failed in their task to shortlist The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst). These arguments struck me as unconvincing because they sought to dismiss the shortlist (or longlist) out of hand, rather than engage with the books selected.

One of the key points of contention has concerned comments made by the judges on the ‘readability’ of their choices; this issue surfaced again today in the announcement of the Literature Prize, a new award being positioned as an alternative to the Booker. In the words of the Prize’s board, as reported by The Bookseller:

[The Literature Prize] will offer readers a selection of novels that, in the view of…expert judges, are unsurpassed in their quality and ambition…For many years this brief was fulfilled by the Booker (latterly the Man Booker) Prize. But as numerous statements by that prize’s administrator and this year’s judges illustrate, it now prioritises a notion of ‘readability’ over artistic achievement…

I think there’s something of a false opposition being made, there, between the concepts of ‘readability’ and ‘artistic achievement’ (isn’t a novel of any stripe a failure if it doesn’t make its readers want to turn the page?); but, more than this, the Literature Prize feels – from its name downwards – like a kneejerk reaction to this year’s Booker shortlist. One shortlist – one jury’s definition of ‘best’ – with which you disagree does not make the entire enterprise flawed.

I wish the Literature Prize well, and hope it brings to light some excellent and interesting books; but I also hope it can come to a more positive and robust sense of what it wants to achieve.

Book notes: Hampton-Jones, Fry, Wakling

11th October 2011 / / 2 Comments

Hollis Hampton-Jones, Comes the Night (2011)

Hollis Hampton-Jones’s second novel is a study of nineteen-year-old Meade Harden: bulimic, addicted to prescription drugs, and unhealthily obsessed with her twin brother, Ben Ho. Born in Nashvile, the Harden twins are currently in Paris, where their studies – Meade’s in cookery and Ben’s in art – are being funded by their parents. Concerned that she may be losing her brother’s attention to a girl he met at college, Meade takes up an offer from a fashion photographer, Majid, to get her into the world of modelling – but her downward spiral only continues.

Naturally enough, Comes the Night is very much focused on the character of Meade and her concerns; this has its drawbacks – Meade’s constant returning to the same few topics can become wearying. Yet, at the same time, there are some brutally effective moments, such as when Meade lists the contents of her own vomit as the ingredients of a recipe; and the tight focus on the protagonist’s subjectivity leads to some interesting disorientation – the novel’s sense of place is fragmented, for example, because Meade is so uninterested in the outside world. Comes the Night is a short novel which arrives, does what it does with a single-minded determination, then ends in what by then may be the only possible place.

Links
Hollis Hampton-Jones’s website
Some other reviews of Comes the Night: For Books’ Sake; Bookmunch.

Gary Fry, Abolisher of Roses (2011)

Having read and reviewed (and enjoyed) the first and third titles from Spectral Press, I now skip back for the second; however, I’m not as impressed with this tale as I was with the others. Peter, a successful businessman, travels with his wife Patricia to a gallery in the wilds of North Yorkshire, where some of her paintings are set to form part of an outdoor art trail. Peter has little time for art, or the arty types with whom his wife now associates; but he indulges Patricia’s hobby as something he’s sure she’ll soon get over – and anyway, Peter has his mistress to keep him occupied. Whilst following the art trail, Peter loses his way, and comes across some strange and macabre installations which hit closer to home than he could ever have anticipated.

The key weakness of Abolisher of Roses, I think, is that it could do with a bit more subtlety. Peter is portrayed in quite broad terms as a callous and uncaring businessman who’s contemptuous of his wife; it feels as though Gary Fry is signposting rather too heavily what we’re supposed to think of Peter. I appreciate the elegance of the story’s conceit, that Peter’s begrudging examination of art turns into a searching examination of himself; but I feel that the telling lets it down somewhat.

Link
Gary Fry’s website

Christopher Wakling, What I Did (2011)

Chris Wakling’s latest novel is narrated by six-year-old Billy Wright, who runs off one day while he’s out with his dad Jim. Eventually catching up with Billy as he runs out into a busy road, an exasperated Jim smacks the boy; a passing woman sees this, intervenes, and reports Jim to social services – and so the Wrights’ ordinary family life begins to unravel.

Billy’s narrative voice is a mixture of rambling, malapropisms, and references to the natural world (he loves watching David Attenborough programmes). For example:

I also have to warn you that nobody is bad or good here, or rather everyone is a bit bad and a bit good and the bad and good moluscules get mixed up against each other and produce chemical reactions.

Did you know cheetahs cannot retract their claws? (p. 2)

Over the course of a whole novel, this can be endearing and infuriating by turns; but it works both as a means of establishing Billy’s character, and as a screen between us and the real action of the story. Through that screen, we see that Jim is a loving father, but also that he can have a quick temper, without necessarily even realising. It’s a combination of these factors which makes the situation so difficult for Jim, because as far as he’s concerned, he has done nothing wrong; but it’s not easy for him to see how to present himself in a way that will convince the authorities of that. In its own way, the social-care system which Jim encounters seems just as opaque to him as the adult world is to Billy. What I Did is an effective portrait of innocently-intended actions spiralling out of control, and the difficulties of responding to that.

Links
Christopher Wakling’s website
Some other reviews of What I Did: Just William’s Luck; Isabel Costello; Random Things Through My Letterbox.

Angela Slatter, ‘The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter’ (2011)

8th October 2011 / / 2 Comments

Quieter in tone than the previous three, Angela Slatter‘s story concerns Hepsibah Ballantyne, a coffin-maker who arrives at the D’Aguillar household to deal with the recently-deceased father, and takes rather a shine to young Lucette D’Aguillar while she’s there. The coffin-maker’s trade is particularly important in this fictional world: get the rituals wrong, and the spirits of the dead will remain behind — as Hepsibah herself knows, because her own dead father, Hector, never leaves her side. The atmosphere of this story builds up quite nicely — Slatter evokes Hepsibah’s burgeoning attraction towards Lucette particularly well — and the  complexities of Heispibah’s character are revealed gradually and effectively.

Rating: ***½

Peter Crowther, ‘Ghosts with Teeth’ (2011)

5th October 2011 / / 1 Comment

Hugh and Angie Ritter return home to Tuboise, Maine (popn. 41), to find that something’s not right — people keep disappearing suddenly, or are in places they cannot possibly be. It’s Hallowe’en, and something is about to come trick-or-treating… Peter Crowther‘s story builds its atmosphere slowly, using commonplace things — a radio in the background, a phone call from a familiar voice — that turn abruptly sinister. The ending is also effective, making good use of the fact that, in a community as small as Tuboise, everyone knows each other — something that could have good consequences or bad.

Rating: ***½

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