Author: David Hebblethwaite

The BBC National Short Story Award 2011

27th September 2011 / / 7 Comments

Last night, 26-year-old David Wilson became the youngest-ever winner of the BBC National Short Story Award for his piece ‘The Dead Roads’. The five shortlisted stories were all broadcast on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago (which, unfortunately, I missed); but now this year’s Award anthology has been launched, so now we have the chance to read them all. And, over the next couple of days, that’s just what I’m going to do.

First of all, an index:

The tiles above will become links as I review each story — three today, and the remaining two tomorrow. I’ll be working through the shortlist in alphabetical order of author, which means of course that I’ll get to the winner last (which should provide an interesting contrast to the experience of reading last year’s shortlist, where the winner came first alphabetically).

Enough preamble; off we go…

Further links
Podcasts of the shortlisted stories
The Award at BBC Radio 4
The Award at Booktrust
Comma Press, publishers of the anthology

Gavin James Bower, Made in Britain (2011)

23rd September 2011 / / 1 Comment

Gavin James Bower’s 2009 debut, Dazed & Aroused, looked at the collapse of one man’s glamorous dream in the world of modelling; for his follow-up, Bower takes a few steps back to focus on the time in life when such dreams may begin to form. Made in Britain follows the lives of three Burnley teenagers about to sit their GCSEs, each with a notion that they need to escape their immediate circumstances.

Russell, academically-minded but also timid and bullied, could spread his wings if he moved in with his cousin Jason in Leeds and went to college there, but that would mean leaving his mother behind when she has no one else. Charlie, who has neither the time nor the will to contemplate A Levels, turns to drug-dealing as a means of raising the money his family so badly needs. And Hayley, who lives alone with her father after her mother died, dreams of being famous; love may even be on the cards – perhaps with Charlie, perhaps with Mr Mitchell, the teacher on whom she has a crush, and who might just reciprocate.

Made in Britain has a very clearly defined structure; every chapter consists of three scenes, one narrated by each of the three protagonists, in the same order (except the last chapter, where the order is reversed). For one thing, this allows Bower to reflect his novel’s concerns at the formal level, with the rigid structure representing the intractability of the characters’ situations. But it also proves effective as a storytelling device, as Bower juxtaposes different characters’ viewpoints (such as Charlie’s and Hayley’s contrasting ideas about each other), and has what may be key events for one protagonist take place in the background of another’s scene. There’s also this neat segue in the first chapter:

Russell
[…]
Life is transient, I think as I walk through my front door.
Love is forever.

Charlie
Jenny’s passed out on my lap, a bottle of White Lightning in her cold, pale hand. [p. 8]

This nicely encapsulates the distance in the book between idealistic dreams and the hard realities of life for these characters. Bower nods towards the socio-economic factors which have contributed to their circumstances (Charlie: ‘I look out the window as we drive past the old shoe factory where Mum used to work, when she was about my age. It shut ages ago, course,’ p. 110); but his focus in general is primarily on the teenagers themselves – perhaps naturally enough, given that his protagonists have to deal with their immediate situations, and dwelling too much on the past isn’t necessarily going to help them.  The author makes clear what has caused all three of his protagonists to take their respective paths, and the difficulties they face; none of the three characters has a completely free hand, but they’re not entirely forced by circumstance into what they do, either. From that point of view, Made in Britain is a story of making what seems the best choice, and then dealing with the consequences.

Towards the end of the novel, Russell reflects on the difference between Burnley and the bigger local cities:

I love going to Leeds because, there, being different isn’t about listening to metal in your bedroom or, if you’re really brave, dyeing your hair a funny colour, like it is where I’m from. In cities like Leeds and Manchester, nobody looks at you funny or beats you up for being different – because there’s always someone who’s more different than you. You can just get on with being yourself. [pp. 146-7]

This is the real issue that the protagonists have with their lives in Burnley (if not necessarily with the town specifically): they don’t have the means to be the people they could be. Made in Britain asks what it is like to be at a point of transition in life when your situation makes it difficult to make any sort of change – and the book offers no easy answers.

Elsewhere
Hackney Citizen interview with Gavin James Bower
Quartet Books
Some other reviews of Made in Britain: Helen J. Beal; Sophia Waugh for The Guardian.

Three novellas: Kaufman, Finley, Villalobos

20th September 2011 / / 7 Comments

Andrew Kaufman, The Tiny Wife (2010)
Toiya Kristen Finley, The Legend of False Dreaming (2011)
Juan Pablo Villalobos, Down the Rabbit Hole (2010/1) 

If you lost part of yourself, what would you become? What if you didn’t even know what you had to lose? Andrew Kaufman’s novella The Tiny Wife (now given a UK edition – a beautiful little hardback – by The Friday Project) begins with a bank robbery where the thief demands, not money, but that each person in the bank give him a possession of great sentimental value to them. By taking these items, the thief  explains, he is also taking more than half of each person’s soul: ‘This will have strange and bizarre consequences in your lives,’ he warns, ‘learn how to grow them back, or you will die’ (p. 9).

Strange things do indeed happen to the victims of the theft. For example, one woman’s tattoo of a lion comes to life and chases her relentlessly. The bank’s assistant manager just has to imagine being underwater in his office, and it comes to be. Stacey Hinterland (whose husband David is our narrator) begins to shrink with strict quadratic progression; the very mathematics which has been one of Stacey’s touchstones for navigating life may now prove to be her undoing.

The Tiny Wife works as well as it does because there’s a matter-of-fact quality to its telling, which both provides an effective contrast to the fantastical happenings, and grounds them; what might have come across as overly whimsical instead becomes real, and carries the dramatic weight of a problem to be solved. The process of counteracting the effects of the theft is also one of overcoming whatever’s holding the victims back in their lives; we see several characters manage to do so (though others fail), and it’s affectingly done by Kaufman.

***

The characters in The Tiny Wife lost parts of their selves in a single event, but it’s the continual harshness of her life that has taken its toll on Rue, the protagonist of Toiya Kristen Finley’s The Legend of False Dreaming (published by Pendragon Press). In the midst of hitchhiking home, Rue (down to the last of her money, and with no wish to make payment in another way) is abandoned in Bronson, a run-down, worn-out town in the south of New York State where the locals are suspicious of outsiders and a strange fog keeps people from leaving. A boy named Mack is the only person to show any consideration towards Rue; buts he is suspicious of his intentions, and wants nothing more than to find her way home.

If there’s a lightness to the tone of The Tiny Wife (more in the way it’s told rather than what it tells), The Legend of False Dreaming is, in contrast, darker and dense with sensation. Finley conveys the atmosphere of Bronson through constant reference to the town’s sights, smells and tastes; the cumulative effect of these is to underline how hard it is to escape this place, how difficult to ignore where you are. For that’s the kind of place Bronson is: a once-prosperous industrial town that’s now going nowhere and has left its people with nowhere to go. This finds an echo in the life of Rue, who was trapped by the violent relationship she had with her father (still is trapped, in a way, by what that made her as a person), and now hopes to rescue her brother Bobby from their father’s violence.

As in The Tiny Wife, there are supernatural elements in Finley’s novella; and they, too, are treated matter-of-factly. But the effect is different: strangeness intrudes on the world of Kaufman’s book, and he makes it normal; the magic in The Legend of False Dreaming feels as though it’s already part of the book’s world, and is not wondered at because there’s no room left in that world for wonder. The fantastic elements of Finley’s tale represent Rue’s anger and Bronson’s secret shame; they add another layer to a very satisfying read.

***

There’s nothing fantastical in Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Down the Rabbit Hole (now given its first English-language publication as one of the launch titles from And Other Stories), but its protagonist is rather like a Wonderland inhabitant, in that he is trapped by the limitations of his own perspective, and is not even aware that those limitations exist. Young Tochtli is the son of a Mexican drug baron, who lives happily in his father Yolcaut’s palace, with his own private zoo, his tutor Maztazin, and a few other staff. The only people Tochtli knows are those who live in or visit the palace; what he wants most of all at the moment is a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus for hor his menagerie – and what Tochtli wants, he shall have.

Life in Yolcaut’s palace is, of course, all that Tochtli has ever known; this leads him to say things which come across to us as rather chilling, such as: ‘One of the things I’ve learned from Yolcaut is that sometimes people don’t turn into corpses with just one bullet’ (p. 8). But Tochtli’s narration is also bitterly poignant at times, when it shows up just how little he really knows. Take the opening of Down the Rabbit Hole, for instance:

Some people say I’m precocious. They say it mainly because they think I know difficult words for a little boy. Some of the difficult words I know are: sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic and devastating. (p. 3).

Tochtli does indeed know those five words, and uses them repeatedly throughout the book. But, as the pages go by, it becomes less clear whether he really knows what they mean; they start to feel more like empty placeholders that emphasise the boy’s ignorance (I should add that Rosalind Harvey’s translation is excellent, really bringing the protagonist to life through his voice). There’s also an irony in Tochtli’s saying that he thinks he’s ‘precocious…in discovering secrets’ (p. 21), and his repeated assertion that ‘gangs are about not hiding things and about seeing the truth’ (p.47), because it’s quite clear from the events of the plot that Tochtli is wrong on both counts.

It takes some effort to reach Tochtli, because his subjectivity is so strong; there’s also a leap to be made between each of the book’s three chapters (the middle section, where Tochtli, Yolcaut, and Maztazin travel to Liberia under false names in search of a pygmy hippopotamus, is particularly striking; Tochtli never indicates directly who has taken on which name, and I was surprised at how effective this simple technique turned out to be at disorienting the reader). Yet it’s precisely this which makes Down the Rabbit Hole so rewarding; the book bodes well for both its author’s career, and its UK publisher’s future titles.

***

Reviews elsewhere
Of The Tiny Wife: Read Between the Lines; The Book Whisperer; Gaskella.
Of Down the Rabbit Hole: Winstonsdad; Nicholas Lezard for The Guardian; Lucy Popescu for The Independent.

Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus (2011)

16th September 2011 / / 9 Comments

Erin Morgenstern’s debut is being heralded with a considerable amount of hype, which is something that tends to make me instinctively sceptical. It would unfair, though, to feel entirely that way towards The Night Circus, which is every bit as generous with its imaginative vision as the hype promises. Where the novel falls short is in providing the support structure to bring that vision fully to life.

The starting-point for the tale is New York in 1873, where Hector Bowen (who uses the stage name ‘Prospero the Enchanter’) takes delivery of a five-year-old girl who turns out to be his daughter Celia, and to share his talent for magic – real magic, that is (Hector disguises his abilities as stagecraft). Later that year, the newest round of an old game begins, as Hector and his great rival – a mysterious grey-suited man known only as Alexander – each choose a champion; Hector’s is Celia, whilst Alexander trains up a boy who takes the name Marco Alisdair. The venue for the contest will be Le Cirque des Rêves, a travelling show founded by one Chand resh Christophe Lefèvre; Marco becomes Lefèvre’s assistant in managing the circus, and Celia Le Cirque’s illusionist. Over the years, the two compete to ouitdo the other in displays of enchantment; though things get complicated when each discovers their opponent’s identity, and love blossoms.

The Night Circus (both the novel and the fictional attraction) contains a plethora of fantastical phenomena – from the eerie white bonfire to a garden made of ice – with the potential to captivate patrons and readers alike. However, the book often seems to be trusting that the sheer fact of what’s being described will create a feeling of wonder, rather than using choice turns of phrase to bolster it. Morgenstern’s prose is not inert, but I don’t find many places where it truly fizzes, either. The brief interludes that take us on a second-person journey through the circus generally have a higher success rate than the main text; not all the vignettes work as well as each other, but their brevity, and that they show us the circus from the outside in, tends to give them an intensity of vision that I’d like to have experienced more frequently.

The book’s approach to the supernatural plays a part in this, I think. In the opening encounter between Hector and Celia, Morgenstern describes matter-of-factly how the two of them smash and restore a cup of tea through magical means; this sets a tone for the rest of the novel of magic being normalised, made familiar (for the main characters, of course, that’s exactly what magic is). This is fine as a technique, but it works against the creation of wonder and mystery – and, with the book’s fairytale tone, it’s for wonder and mystery that The Night Circus is really striving.

Morgenstern’s approach to characterisation is broad-brush (perhaps not inappropriately, given her novel’s fairytale quality), and not entirely successful. The portrayal of Celia’s and Marco’s burgeoning love walks the line between being properly affecting and overly sentimental, and sometimes steps the wrong side of that line. More effective overall is the subplot set in 1902 (and which joins with the main storyline at the novel’s climax), wherein Bailey Clarke, a boy from Massachusetts, becomes fascinated with the circus, and in particular with one of the young performers. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of the best-realised scenes in the novel involve either Bailey or other characters from outside the immediate ambit of Le Cirque; again, I come back to the idea that the strangeness of magic is best evoked from the viewpoint of those unfamiliar with it.

My fellow-book-blogger William Rycroft commented on Twitter that The Night Circus would make a good film; he’s absolutely right, because this is a novel whose images would benefit from interpreted more strongly. As it is, the book certainly has the vision, if not quite the words to do it justice.

Elsewhere
Erin Morgenstern’s website
Audio interview with Morgenstern
Some other reviews of The Night Circus: Book Monkey; For Books’ Sake.

World Book Night 2012 Top 100

13th September 2011 / / 8 Comments

This year, World Book Night asked people to nominate their top ten books, to create a list that would feed into the selection of next year’s titles to be given away. That list, the Top 100, was announced today, and here it is; in time-honoured book-blogging tradition, I’m emboldened the books I’ve read.

The 2012 Long List – ordered by number of votes:

1    To Kill a Mockingbird    Harper Lee
2    Pride and Prejudice    Jane Austen
3    The Book Thief    Markus Zusak   
4    Jane Eyre    Charlotte Bronte
5    The Time Traveler’s Wife    Audrey Niffenegger
6    The Lord of the Rings    J. R. R. Tolkien   
7    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy    Douglas Adams
8    Wuthering Heights    Emily Bronte
9    Rebecca    Daphne Du Maurier
10    The Kite Runner    Khaled Hosseini
11    American Gods    Neil Gaiman   
12    A Thousand Splendid Suns    Khaled Hosseini  
13    Harry Potter Adult Hardback Boxed Set    J. K. Rowling
14    The Shadow of the Wind    Carlos Ruiz Zafon
15    The Hobbit    J. R. R. Tolkien   
16    One Day    David Nicholls
17    Birdsong    Sebastian Faulks
18    The Help    Kathryn Stockett
19    Nineteen Eighty-Four    George Orwell
20    Good Omens    Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman  
21    The Notebook    Nicholas Sparks
22    The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo    Stieg Larsson
23    The Handmaid’s Tale    Margaret Atwood   
24    The Great Gatsby    F. Scott Fitzgerald
25    Little Women    Louisa M. Alcott
26    Memoirs of a Geisha    Arthur Golden
27    The Lovely Bones    Alice Sebold
28    Atonement    Ian McEwan
29    Room    Emma Donoghue 
30    Catch-22    Joseph Heller
31    We Need to Talk About Kevin    Lionel Shriver
32    His Dark Materials    Philip Pullman  
33    Captain Corelli’s Mandolin    Louis De Bernieres
34    The Island    Victoria Hislop
35    Neverwhere    Neil Gaiman
36    The Poisonwood Bible    Barbara Kingsolver
37    The Catcher in the Rye    J. D. Salinger
38    Chocolat    Joanne Harris
39    Never Let Me Go    Kazuo Ishiguro
40    The Five People You Meet in Heaven    Mitch Albom
41    One Hundred Years of Solitude    Gabriel Garcia Marquez
42    Animal Farm    George Orwell
43    The Pillars of the Earth    Ken Follett
44    The Eyre Affair    Jasper Fforde    
45    Tess of the D’Urbervilles    Thomas Hardy
46    Charlie and the Chocolate Factory    Roald Dahl    
47    I Capture the Castle    Dodie Smith
48    The Wasp Factory    Iain Banks
49    Life of Pi    Yann Martel
50    The Road    Cormac McCarthy
51    Great Expectations    Charles Dickens
52    Dracula    Bram Stoker    
53    The Secret History    Donna Tartt  
54    Small Island    Andrea Levy
55    The Secret Garden    Frances Hodgson Burnett
56    Lord of the Flies    William Golding
57    Persuasion    Jane Austen
58    A Prayer for Owen Meany    John Irving    
59    Notes from a Small Island    Bill Bryson 
60    Watership Down    Richard Adams
61    Night Watch    Terry Pratchett   
62    Brave New World    Aldous Huxley
63    The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time    Mark Haddon
64    Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell    Susanna Clarke
65    The Color Purple    Alice Walker
66    My Sister’s Keeper    Jodi Picoult
67    The Stand    Stephen King
68    Cloud Atlas    David Mitchell
69    The Master and Margarita    Mikhail Bulgakov
70    Anna Karenina    Leo Tolstoy
71    Cold Comfort Farm    Stella Gibbons
72    Frankenstein    Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
73    The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society    Mary Ann Shaffer
74    The Picture of Dorian Gray    Oscar Wilde  
75    Gone with the Wind    Margaret Mitchell
76    The Graveyard Book    Neil Gaiman
77    The Woman in White    Wilkie Collins
78    The Princess Bride    William Goldman
79    A Suitable Boy    Vikram Seth
80    Perfume    Patrick Suskind    
81    The Count of Monte Cristo    Alexandre Dumas
82    The God of Small Things    Arundhati Roy
83    Middlemarch    George Eliot
84    Dune    Frank Herbert
85    Wolf Hall    Hilary Mantel
86    Stardust    Neil Gaiman    
87    Lolita    Vladimir Nabokov
88    Midnight’s Children    Salman Rushdie
89    Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone    J. K. Rowling  
90    Shantaram    Gregory David Roberts
91    The Remains of the Day    Kazuo Ishiguro
92    Possession: A Romance    A. S. Byatt
93    Tales of the City    Armistead Maupin
94    Kafka on the Shore    Haruki Murakami
95    The Magus    John Fowles
96    The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas    John Boyne
97    A Fine Balance    Rohinton Mistry
98    Alias Grace    Margaret Atwood
99    Norwegian Wood    Haruki Murakami
100    The Wind-up Bird Chronicle    Haruki Murakami

So, that’s 22 titles that I’ve read (and I’ve just started The Great Gatsby, which will make 23), which is a higher percentage than I usually manage with this kind of list.

As for the list itself:  it’s the typical mixture of established classics, more recent favourites, and talked-about titles from the past year or two, that one might expect — and, from that point of view, I think it’s not a bad list. Quite remarkable showing for Neil Gaiman, though, I must say, with a full five titles (including one co-authorship) on the list.

And if I were going to choose one of these books to give away? I think I’d go for Notes from a Small Island.

Book notes: Moran, Harstad, Brill

12th September 2011 / / 7 Comments

Joe Moran, On Roads: a Hidden History (2009)

I’ve long been interested in social and cultural history, and there will always be a place on my shelves for books that illuminate the more unusual corners of history. On Roads is just such a book.

The British road system in the post-war years may not sound a particularly interesting subject for a work of history, but this is part of Moran’s point – roads are so commonplace that we hardly ever stop to think about them. What Moran suggests, however, is that the road system was a far more pragmatic creation than we might assume, and that the Brits’ relationship with their roads has, from the earliest days of the motorway, been an ambivalent one.

The sheer range of topics that Moran covers is remarkable, from road signs to service stations, caravans to roadside ecology. But, more than this, he tells fascinating stories (I had no idea that the design of British road signs had been so controversial) and makes some astute observations (such as that the image of the straight road has traditionally represented ‘cold modernity’ in England, whereas in America it’s a symbol of freedom and escape). On Roads takes an ostensibly ordinary topic and turns it into a rich and worthwhile book.

Link: Joe Moran’s blog

Johan Harstad, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? (2005/11)

Stavanger, Norway, 1999: Mattias is a gardener, perfectly content with his lot. Born on the day of the first moon landing, Mattias’ hero is not first-man-on-the-moon Neil Armstrong but runner-up Buzz Aldrin: willing to cede the glory, willing to be the second man. That’s what Mattias is happy to be – a cog in the machine, unconcerned whether others notice him.

But life won’t stand still and, when Mattias’ partner leaves him and his employer goes out of business, he accepts an invitation to go to the Faroe Islands with his friend Jørn’s band. However, instead of acting as the band’s soundman (or, as Jørn wanted, their singer), Mattias falls in with a psychiatrist named Havstein and the three inhabitants of his institution for those not quite ready to live independently – and now Mattias’ life is set to change.

Johan Harstad’s debut (translated by Deborah Dawkin) is a big, baggy novel which is unusually structured insofar as the narrative beats are not quite where one might expect them to be – but this gives the novel a distinctive flow. The story is told so thoroughly from Mattias’ vantage point that it distorts the very shape of what we learn; we gain only brief, distant glimpses of the other Mattias, the one who (for good or ill) is no quiet mediocrity.

There may be times when the prose drags, but some of the best moments are also the most densely written; overall, Harstad paints an interesting portrait of a man whose life is ordinary and remarkable all at once.

This review first appeared in We Love This Book.

Link: Video interview with Johan Harstad

Marius Brill, How to Forget (2011)

Magician Peter Ruchio was humiliated, and his career derailed, by a prank played by Titus Black at the latter’s eighth birthday party; fifteen years later, Black has grown up to be a famous illusionist (though he is not above committing murder to preserve his secrets), whilst Peter is performing tricks in restaurants and old people’s homes. A chance encounter with Kate Minola, a grifter on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, gives Peter the opportunity to take his revenge on Black; but his experiences ultimately lead  Peter to seek the help of Dr Chris Tavasligh, a neuroscientist working on a way to ‘reboot’ the human brain, thereby erasing all memories. That was three years ago, and Tavasligh subsequently disappeared; the book in our hands purports to be the scientist’s collected papers.

As befits a novel about a magician, How to Forget is full of misdirection; one is never quite sure which way the characters will turn, who can be trusted – and there’s a sense at the end that the real story is not the one we thought it was (the allusions to The Taming of the Shrew in the protagonists’ names serve, as far as I can tell, to highlight the idea of a story within a story). Not everything in the book works so well: the larger-than-life tone and occasional comic interludes tend to rub against the more serious episodes, rather than working with them; and it seems to me that Brill’s material on memory doesn’t quite integrate successfully with the plot. Better is the author’s comparison of Peter’s and Kate’s professions, which leads them to face up to some difficult questions; and the caper narrative has all the page-turning tension and momentum one could wish.

Link: Marius Brill’s website

BBC National Short Story Award 2011 shortlist

9th September 2011 / / 5 Comments

The shortlist for this year’s BBC National Short Story Award has been announced:

  • M.J. Hyland, ‘Rag Love’
  • Alison MacLeod, ‘The Heart of Denis Noble’
  • Jon McGregor, ‘Wires’
  • K.J. Orr, ‘The Human Circadian Pacemaker’
  • D.W. Wilson, ‘The Dead Roads’

My initial thoughts? I enjoyed Jon McGregor’s shortlisted story last year, and the Alison MacLeod collection I read a few months ago. I’ve read M.J. Hyland before, but it’s been a long time since; the other two authors are unknown to me. If the standard of this year’s shortlist is anything like last year’s, we’re in for a treat; the signs are good as far as I can see.

BBC Radio 4 are broadcasting each shortlisted story at 3.30pm (BST) on consecutive days from Monday 12th, with the winner to be announced on Monday 26th September.

China Miéville, Looking for Jake and Other Stories (2005)

7th September 2011 / / 5 Comments

“‘It lives in the details,’ she said. ‘It travels in that…in that perception. It moves through those chance meetings of lines. Maybe you glimpse it sometimes when you stare at clouds, and then maybe it might catch a glimpse of you, too.'”

He may be best known as a novelist, but China Miéville’s short fiction is worthy of attention, too. Reading the stories collected in Looking for Jake, I feel as though I’ve gained a fresh understanding of his concerns as a writer. Miéville has often used the term “weird fiction” in conjunction with his work, and a good number of the tales here exhibit what is for me one of the key characteristics of that type of fiction – namely, the paranoid sense that the skin of reality is as thin as a soap bubble and that, if you’re not careful, you’ll discover what’s hiding beyond.

Take, for example, the story ‘Details’ (from which the quote at the head of this review is taken). As a boy, its narrator would go once a week to Mrs Miller’s house to take her the bowl of blancmange specially prepared by his mother. It turns out that Mrs Miller eats that for breakfast because it’s entirely smooth; she has seen something in the apparently-innocent everyday patterns of lines around the house, and that something looked back at her. Even memories or daydreams with patterns are not safe (“the thing’s waiting in the texture of my dress, or in the crumbs of my birthday cake”). Of course, it’s always possible that she’s delusional…isn’t it?

The paranoid uncertainty over the nature of reality is even more palpable in ‘Go Between’, where one Morley finds mysterious packages hidden in the items he buys from the supermarket, with instructions to send them on. What’s in these packages, what or whom they’re for, who sent them – and how they could know what he’d choose to buy – are all mysteries to Morley. One day, he comes across what will seemingly be the last of these packages, and starts to have doubts (did he make a mistake at some point? Might his actions even have inadvertently caused disaster or suffering?) and decides not to forward the parcel as instructed. Miéville brilliantly increases the tension of Morley’s conflicting thoughts as the protagonist watches terrible events unfold on the news – is this what happened because he didn’t send on the parcel, or just coincidence? – until the story ends in just the right place.

Though I wasn’t previously familiar with much of Miéville’s short fiction, I had read the story ‘An End To Hunger’ in a couple of anthologies; it’s interesting to read it again now in light of the other tales collected with it. Probably the least fantastical of all the stories in the book, ‘An End To Hunger’ is set in 1997, when its narrator meets Aykan, a “virtuoso of programming” who already views the internet as yesterday’s news. In time, Aykan becomes incensed by a click-to-donate website named An End To Hunger, whose methods he regards as corrupt; Aykan institutes a series of attacks against the site, until… Even though we’re not talking about somethings on the other side of reality in this case, the sense of secret forces at work in the world still prevails, and is brought into sharper relief by the context of publication.

As well as a writer of weird fiction, Miéville is, and always has been, a writer of the city; this latter is displayed in almost every piece in the book. ‘Reports of Certain Events in London’ is presented as a series of documents sent erroneously to the author; these describe a secret society’s investigations of ‘wild streets’, unpredictable thoroughfares which cannot be trusted to remain in the same place. Miéville’s approach to the story is effective in gradually unfurling the ramifications of its central idea, and the tale has the requisite frisson of uncertainty over whether what’s happening is real or all in the characters’ minds. The title story of Looking for Jake is another of the most strongly ‘urban’ pieces, this time describing a London which has been overrun by entropy, many of whose inhabitants have disappeared; this is one of those stories where it’s not so easy to pick out individual turns of phrase which are key in creating the atmosphere, but there’s nevertheless an accumulating sense of a washed-out, threateningly empty city.

Rounding out the collection are stories that show the variety of colours in Miéville’s palette. These range from ‘Familiar’, the tale of a monster grown from a gobbet of flesh, which has the kind of squelchily descriptive prose familiar from many of the author’s novels; to ‘The Ball Room’ (co-written with Emma Bircham and Max Schaefer), which lends a menacing aspect to a children’s play area with considerable economy. ‘Jack’, set in the same world as Miéville’s Bas-Lag novels, is the story of a semi-legendary freedom fighter/terrorist in the city of New Crobuzon – but, in typically tricksy fashion, we never see the man himself directly; and ‘‘Tis the Season’, in which Christmas itself has become licensed, showcases Miéville’s sharp sense of humour.

If you’ve never read China Miéville before, Looking for Jake represents a fine introduction to his work. If you only know him from his novels, this collection will show another side to this singular writer.

This review was first published in the September 2011 issue of The Short Review, which also carries an interview with China Miéville.

Elsewhere
Read ‘An End To Hunger’
Niall Harrison reviews Looking for Jake
China Miéville websites: publisher’s site; author’s blog.

Man Booker shortlist 2011

6th September 2011 / / 3 Comments

The shortlist for the Booker Prize has been announced, and here it is:

  • Juiian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
  • Carol Birch, Jamrach’s Menagerie
  • Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers
  • Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues
  • Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English
  • A.D. Miller, Snowdrops

I still haven’t read any of these books myself, and so can’t add much more to my original thoughts on the longlist. But I will share my thoughts on hearing the shortlist.

Overall, I find this year’s Man Booker shortlist surprising and interesting. The Barnes sounded a typical ‘Booker novel’, and it’s no surprise to me to see it here; the same goes for Pigeon English, which seems to have been featured and talked about all over the place this year. I couldn’t make a call on the Edugyan, but the other three shortlisted titles certainly sounded less obviously ‘literary’ (I appreciate I’m making crude judgements here) than I would traditionally associate with the Booker.

Though I may be surprised with the shortlist, I’m also pleased, as I think it makes for rather a diverse selection of books. Also, three of the four books I named in my longlist post as those I most wanted to read have made it on to the shortlist, so I may well read at least some of the shortlist before the announcement of the winner on 18th October (any reviews will, as ever, be linked in the list above).

Congratulations to all six nominees; I wonder who will win.

Notable books: September 2011

1st September 2011 / / 5 Comments

September has arrived, and autumn with it here in the UK (not that it’s particularly distinguishable from summer…); which means: new books! I’m particularly looking forward to these:

David Almond, The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean

A book that came to my attention as a result of my interest in mainstream-published fantastic fiction, this is the story of a boy in a broken world, written as by Billy with his own idiosyncratic approach to spelling. I’m instinctively reminded of Patrick Ness’ Chaos Walking trilogy; I can only hope Almond’s novel is as good.

Gavin James Bower, Made in Britain

I liked Bower’s 2009 debut, Dazed & Aroused, more than I might have anticipated from its subject matter (a model messes up his life againsta  background of glossy superficiality); so I’m intrigued to read his second novel, which focuses on three teenagers growing up in a washed-out northern English town.

Alois Hotschnig, Maybe This Time

A departure for Peirene Press, this is their first collection of short stories. It sounds like dark, borderline-supernatural fiction, which should be right up my street.

Erin Morgernstern, The Night Circus

This tale of a mysterious and magical travelling circus in the late 19th century is being trumpeted as one of the hottest books of the autumn. I’m rather sceptical of the hype, but would love Morgernstern’s debut to live up to it.

Christopher Priest, The Islanders

Priest is one of my absolute favourite authors, so I’m always going to be interested in a new book by him. This, his first novel in nine years, returns to the setting of his Dream Archipelago stories, which also featured in The Affirmation.

The SF Gateway

If anything were ever going to persuade me to read ebooks, this may be it: vast numbers of classic science fiction and fantasy titles being brought back into print by Gollancz as digital editions. A brilliant idea.

Juan Pablo Villalobos, Down the Rabbit Hole

One of the first two titles from new independent publisher And Other Stories, this novel about a Mexican drug baron’s son who wishes for his own pet hippopotamus has made it on to the longlist for this year’s Guardian first book award.

Archives

Browse posts by author, original language of book, or post category

© 2025 David's Book World

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑