Adventures in reading
Henri Deplis comes into some money and splashes out on an elaborate tattoo for his back; however, having used up most of his funds, he’s unable to pay, and the tattoo (hailed as a masterpiece) is sold to the comune of Bergamo. Deplis subsequently becomes embroiled in an international dispute over the artwork on his back. This is a short, but nicely amusing, tall tale.
Rating: ****
Elsewhere
Read the story online
Edward Dunning, an expert on alchemy, dismisses as nonsense a paper submitted by one Mr Karswell, then finds himself the apparent target of some strange and threatening goings-on. He discovers that a man named John Harrington, who gave a negative review to one of Karswell’s earlier works, died in mysterious circumstances several months afterwards; with the aid of Harrington’s brother, Dunning attempts to avoid the same fate.
This is one reason why I’m often unsure about judging older fiction: literary styles change over time, so, if a story doesn’t work for me, how much is it an intrinsic issue with the piece, and how much just that it doesn’t chime with my aesthetic sensibilities? I’m wondering that after reading ‘Casting the Runes’, as I didn’t find James’s matter-of-fact reportage style all that effective in creating an atmosphere. Whether that’s simply because I’m used to reading supernatural fiction written in a more contemporary style, I’m not sure.
Rating: ***
Elsewhere
A PDF version of the story
Time for a new story-by-story review, and one that looks set to take me right outside my comfort zone. I bought the two-volume Oxford Library of Classic English Short Stories on a whim last year after seeing it in a second-hand bookshop, as one of my periodic nudges to myself that I ought to read more old fiction. So, now I’m going to read it.
The bibliographic information reveals that the Oxford Library was originally published as four volumes between 1939 and 1976, under the title English Short Stories of Today; this edition is therefore a pair of omnibuses. I’m limiting myself to the first volume for now, partly to see how it goes, and partly because there’s that much more distance between the stories’ original publication and their being anthologised in these books, which gives more weight to the term ‘classic’.
And now, the table of contents:
M.R. James, ‘Casting the Runes’
Saki, ‘The Background’
H.G. Wells, ‘The Door in the Wall’
John Galsworthy, ‘Spindleberries’
Leonard Merrick, ‘The Judgement of Paris’
Geoffrey Moss, ‘Defeat’
Richard Hughes, ‘A Night at a Cottage’
Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘The Dragon’s Head’
Naomi Mitchison, ‘The Hostages’
Frank O’Connor, ‘The Majesty of the Law’
Stella Benson, ‘On the Contrary’
W. Somerset Maugham, ‘Jane’
Hugh Walpole, ‘Mr Oddy’
Dylan Thomas, ‘A Visit to Grandpa’s’
Walter de la Mare, ‘Seaton’s Aunt’
Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’
Frank O’Connor, ‘Peasants’
W. Somerset Maugham, ‘Episode’
Evelyn Waugh, ‘Mr Loveday’s Little Outing’
Angus Wilson, ‘Realpolitik‘
Joyce Cary, ‘Umaru’
William Sansom, ‘The Girl on the Bus’
L.P. Hartley, ‘The Killing Bottle’
Graham Greene, ‘When Greek Meets Greek’
Joyce Cary, ‘A Good Investment’
V.S. Pritchett, ‘The Aristocrat’
V.S. Pritchett, ‘The Scapegoat’
I’ve read very little by some of those writers, and nothing at all by most of them, but even I know enough to observe that they’re not all English (judging by the blurb, ‘English’ appears in this context to mean ‘written in English’). I’m more concerned with the quality, though, as I’d expect nothing but greatness from an anthology that calls its stories ‘classic’. And there is, of course, only one way to find out about that — so, it’s time to get reading.
EDIT, 24th March: And now I’ve finished. I have a concluding post here.
Towards the end of last year, I decided to look through some publishers’ catalogues, and make a note of any 2011 books that sounded interesting. I found more than I could have any hope of reading, so I’ve decided to introduce a regular feature where I highlight some books from the coming month that have caught my eye. Here, then, are my notable books for January:
Paul Bailey, Chapman’s Odyssey
A novel viewed from a hospital bed, where the protagonist lies as the voices of characters from literature and his life speak to him.
Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall
A collection of six stories on the theme of memory. Sounds nicely wide-ranging.
Faïza Guène, Bar Balto
I’ve not read Guène before, but I understand that her work has been both acclaimed and successful internationally. This, her third novel, is a murder mystery told in multiple voices.
Ida Hattemer-Higgins, The History of History
This looks to have an intriguing combination of elements: an amnesiac woman trying to regain her memories, the history of Berlin, and a vein of fantastication.
Simon Lelic, The Facility
Last year’s Rupture was a fine debut, and this sounds an interesting follow-up, as Lelic writes of a near future in which laws have been tightened in the name of security.
Cornelius Medvei, Caroline: A Mystery
Of all the 2011 books I’ve learnt about so far, this may be the one that sounds the most fun — a story of a man who falls for a donkey.
Dinaw Mengestu, How to Read the Air
Technically a 2010 book, but, as its UK publication date was so close to the end of the year (30th December), and I didn’t actually realise, I’m going to include it here. It’s the story of a young Ethiopian-American retracing his parents’ journey, with (so I gather) a mixing of stories that sounds particularly interesting.
Sunjeev Sahota, Ours Are the Streets
I’ve heard good things about this debut, which examines what drives a young man from Sheffield to become a suicide bomber.
Kirsten Tranter, The Legacy
Apparently it draws on Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, which I’ve not read; but the idea of this tale about a woman travelling to New York to investigate the life of her friend’s missing cousin still intrigues me.
David Vann, Caribou Island
One of the most anticipated books of the whole year, as far as I’m concerned, never mind January. Legend of a Suicide was one of the best books I read in 2009, enough to make anything else that Vann writes essential reading. Simple as that.
It’s a strange feeling when a book that’s unfamiliar wins an award over one that’s beloved, because, on the one hand, for all I know, the winner was the most deserving book on the shortlist; but, on the other, it’s always nice when a book I like wins.
On that note, here are the category winners of the Costa Book Awards 2010, as announced earlier this evening:
Novel: Maggie O’Farrell, The Hand That First Held Mine
I read O’Farrell’s previous novel, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, a couple of years ago, and liked it very much. I have no reason to believe that her latest work isn’t brilliant, and I’d certainly like to read it at some point; but it was up against Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies, one of my absolute favourite reads of 2010. The Hand That First Held Mine would have to be exceptional to beat Murray’s book in my eyes; perhaps this win is an indication that I should investigate.
First Novel: Kishwar Desai, Witness the Night
Another of my favourite books from last year, Nikesh Shukla’s Coconut Unlimited, was on this shortlist; again, the category winner would have to go some way to beat it. Desai’s novel does sound interesting, though: a book that uses the form of a classic subgenre (the country-house detection) to examine contemporary issues.
Biography: Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes
I haven’t read this, but I’ve certainly heard about it, as it seemed one of the most talked-about books of last year. De Waal traces the story of his great-uncle’s collection of ivory carvings, but (so I hear) ranges rather more widely than that might sound.
Poetry: Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability
I’m not well-versed (pardon the pun) in poetry, so I can’t really comment on this.
Children’s Book: Jason Wallace, Out of Shadows
Again, I don’t have much to say as this isn’t my usual area of interest. But it certainly seems that there’s a strong set of candidates here to compete for the overall Costa Book of the Year award, the winner of which will be announced on the 25th of this month.
There are some changes underway at a couple of the blogs I visit regularly, which I’m going to mention here.
Niall Harrison recently stepped down as editor of the BSFA’s journal, Vector, and became editor-in-chief of Strange Horizons — so now he’s changing blogs. Niall is handing the reins of Torque Control over to his successor, Shana Worthen (and Vector‘s reviews editor, Martin Lewis), and beginning to post at the Strange Horizons blog. Good luck to all, and I look forward to seeing how both blogs develop.
Elsewhere on the internet, Scott Pack has started a project to read and blog about a different short story on every day of 2011. That should yield some good recommendations. Check out Me and My Short Stories to see what Scott has read so far.
Strange Horizons is kicking off the year with a look back at the previous one, as the site’s reviewers each contribute a few paragraphs on their favourite fantastic reads of 2010. That includes a contribution from me, which features some books from my general list of year’s favourites, and some others that were bubbling under.
Read the full article on Strange Horizons here.
Happy New Year! Time to begin a new year of reading and blogging; I have it in mind to make a few changes, though I’m not going to turn them into full-blown resolutions as I prefer to keep my approach to reading flexible. So: my main intention is to have a greater variety of posts on the blog, which will mean fewer reviews and more… well, I don’t quite know yet. I expect to supplement the main reviews with shorter round-ups of other stuff I’ve read; I’d like to do some more story-by-story reviews of anthologies; and I do have some tentative ideas for different kinds of posts — but we’ll see how it goes.
I don’t really like to make reading resolutions, but I’d hope to read more non-fiction next year, and more older books. There are some specific titles I’d like to get around to: it’s about time I read something by M. John Harrison, so perhaps I’ll look at the Viriconium omnibus; likewise Haruki Murakami, so I could be taking The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle off the shelf. I’ve been meaning to read Theodore Roszak’s Flicker and John M.Ford’s The Dragon Waiting for some time; I’ve got an omnibus of Mary Gentle’s White Crow books that I want to read; and I was lucky enough to win a set of F. Scott Fitzgerald books in a competition recently, so I’d like to give some of those a try… But, again, we shall see.
Here’s wishing you a great year of reading in 2011!
As the year draws to a close, I’ve been thinking over all the books I’ve read and picking out my favourites. And here they are, my favourite dozen from the year (all published for the first time in 2010, or older books receiving their first UK publication this year) — in alphabetical order of author surname:
Robert Jackson Bennett, Mr Shivers
I didn’t know what to expect when I read this book, and it turned out to be a simply stunning debut. Bennett’s fusion of fantasy, horror and historical fiction is a smart book that uses its fantasy to comment on the period.
Shane Jones, Light Boxes
This tale of a balloon-maker’s war on February is constructed from story-fragments that add up to a marvellously strange whole. It works on about three different levels at once, but resists being pinned down to a single interpretation. A beautiful little jewel of a book.
Simon Lelic, Rupture
A perceptive and well-written novel chronicling the investigation into a school shooting committed by an apparently mild-mannered teacher.
Emily Mackie, And This Is True
A sharp study of a boy who has grown uncomfortably close to his father, and the pressures exerted on him when the life he has known begins to change.
Ian McDonald, The Dervish House
A near-future Istanbul is the setting for this sprawling-yet-elegant tale of six interlocking lives, and the wider structures and systems of which they are a part.
Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
A vast boarding-school comedy with added theoretical physics. Murray’s novel has huge ambitions, and achieves them brilliantly. It reads like a book half its length, and its sheer range is astonishing.
Véronique Olmi, Beside the Sea
A very strong launch title for Peirene Press, this is an intense study of a mother taking her two children to the seaside — an apparently ordinary surface that hides much darker depths.
Adam Roberts, New Model Army
This tale of armies run of democratic principles is both a cutting examination of warfare, and a novel that left me with a feeling that I genuinely cannot describe.
Ray Robinson, Forgetting Zoë
The very powerful story of a girl’s abduction and captivity. Exquisite prose, acute characterisation, and masterfully-controlled narrative flow.
Amy Sackville, The Still Point
Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and deservedly so. An intense and beautifully written novel of Arctic exploration and the parallels between two couples living a century apart.
Nikesh Shukla, Coconut Unlimited
One of the funniest books I read all year, this tale of three Asian boys at an otherwise all-white public school is also an acute portrait of adolescence and the ways in which people try to build identities for themselves.
Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
A novel that ably switches states between time-travel metafiction and examination of its protagonist’s relationship with his father, interrogating and blurring genre boundaries as it goes.
And three great reads from previous years…
Liz Jensen, The Rapture (2009)
The brilliant tale of the mental chess-game between a psychotherapist and her patient who can apparently predict disasters — which proves equally adept at being a thriller in its later stages.
Christopher Priest, The Affirmation (1981)
A man begins to write a fictionalised autobiography… and an account by a version of himself in a different reality vies for space in the same book — which, if either, is ‘real’? Nothing is certain in this novel by the reliably excellent Priest.
Marcel Theroux, Far North (2009)
A beautiful story of survival and endurance set in a near-future Siberia.
Mark Valentine, ‘A Revelation of Cormorants’ (2010)
R.B. Russell, ‘The Beautiful Room’ (2010)
Gary McMahon, ‘What They Hear in the Dark’ (2011)
A triple-decker of single-story chapbooks, today: the latest two from Nicholas Royle’s Nightjar Press, and the launch title from Simon Marshall-Jones’s Spectral Press.
***
The first of our new Nightjar titles is ‘A Revelation of Cormorants’ by Mark Valentine. It’s not long since last I read a story one of his stories, and, when I did, I was very impressed with Valentine’s control of voice; the same quality impressed me again on reading this piece. William Utter is a writer who has rented a cottage on the Galloway coast to work on a book about the lore of birds. Today, he heads out intro the bay to see some cormorants, and it’s an open question whether inspiration or the tide will strike first. Valentine builds Utter’s mental world very well, with imagery largely built around birds and books, and a slightly dusty mode of expression. He also creates a strong atmosphere in the story; and yet… I think something about the whole isn’t quite satisfactory. I can appreciate intellectually what the ending is doing, but I find that it doesn’t have the deeper emotional impact which would lift the piece to the next level.
***
Birds appear again, though in a rather different context, in Nightjar’s other new chapbook. R.B. Russell‘s ‘The Beautiful Room’ is the tale of Maria and John, a couple looking for a house in a foreign country to where John is moving for work. As we join them, they’re looking around a place in the countryside, with which Maria has fallen in love, thanks to one room in particular; John is much less keen, and would prefer to live in the city. Their initial argument over this reveals deeper tensions in their relationship: Maria has sacrificed her work to make this move possible, and resents John’s not putting her wishes first in the house choice. Russell depicts these rising tensions elegantly, and they carry over into the second half of the story, when the couple investigate a mysterious scrabbling sound coming from behind the walls. The unexpected final moment comes as a beautiful image of release.
***
Coincidentally, there’s a couple with a new house and a relationship under strain in Spectral Press’s first title, ‘What They Hear in the Dark’ by Gary McMahon. Rob and Becky are renovating a house whilst still coming to terms with the death of their son Eddie, and find a strange room which, according to the plans, shouldn’t be there. They call it the Quiet Room, because it seems to absorb all sound.
There is, of course, something mysterious about the Quiet Room, but McMahon’s ultimate focus is less that than the characters of Rob and Becky. What impresses me most about the story is what’s going on beneath the words and imagery, the way that the Quiet Room comes to embody the couple’s different responses to Eddie’s death — for Becky, the silence is comforting, as she feels it brings her closer to Eddie; for Rob, the Quiet Room is a place of fear, caused by his search for a deeper explanation for his son’s death than the one Becky has accepted. These conflicting views come to reflect the wider tensions in the couple’s relationship, making for a nice balance between character and atmosphere. McMahon’s story is a good start for Spectral Press; I’ll be keeping an eye on what they do in the future.
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