Author: David Hebblethwaite

Andrew Hook, ‘Love Is the Drug’ (2010)

8th September 2010 / / 1 Comment

At some point in the future, when life has become more regimented and emotions repressed, an ordinary family man buys a drug named ‘conflict’, and finds himself experiencing feelings he has never known. Hook’s tale is an interesting combination of a subtly oppressive future (for example, instead of booking leave from work as we might, people are told when to take ‘time-owed’ leave) and a depiction of the human psyche that suggests (chillingly) just how far the world of the story has moved away from what we know.

Rating: ***½

Elsewhere
Andrew Hook’s website

Ursula Pflug, ‘Even the Mirror’ (2010)

8th September 2010 / / 2 Comments

Pflug’s narrator travels back and forth across the Atlantic, in search of someone seen (and loved) in dreams. That person remains elusive, but the protagonist does encounter someone else from those dreams — a woman named Tullis, who has in turn dreamt of the narrator. This whole story has a suitably dream-like quality, and a final line that leaves proceedings nicely open to interpretation.

Rating: ***½

Elsewhere
Ursula Pflug’s website

Matt Beaumont, e Squared (2009)

7th September 2010 / / 3 Comments

My fourth and final choice for the Transworld Summer Reading Challenge, e Squared is the book I’m giving a second chance. I tried reading it last year, but didn’t find it particularly amusing, and so gave up. When I saw it on the list for the Transworld Challenge, though, I thought it might be interesting to give it another go. I’m glad I did, because this time, I found the novel hilarious.

e Squared is a follow-up to Matt Beaumont’s debut novel e, and its short sequel The e Before Christmas (both published  2000). It concerns a London advertising agency (sorry, I mean “thought collective”) called Meerkat360, and is told entirely through emails, instant-message and SMS conversations, and blog posts. I haven’t read either of the two earlier books, but, although I inevitably missed some of the context, it didn’t matter too much – enough time has passed in fictional terms for e Squared to pretty much stand alone.

Since so much of the fun of reading Beaumont’s novel lies in discovering the absurdities of its characters and situations, I won’t reveal too much here. But the cast of e Squared includes: David Crutton, the CEO of Meerkat360, whose relationship with his wife Janice becomes so strained at times that they resort to communicating with each other via their PAs; Liam O’Keefe, whose debts are so large that he’ll filch anything he can from the office and sell it on eBay; the hopelessly naive Harvey Harvey, who doesn’t understand the concept of spam email, and is deeply concerned about all the lonely girls who keep emailing him; and Caroline Zitter, who’s forever out of the office at some outlandish seminar or other. I’m holding back a little in my descriptions, there; the absurdities of these (and other) characters are turned right up to the maximum.

The events of e Squared are also gloriously daft. The Creative Department of Meerkat360 employs various staff to enhance their creativity, including a hairdresser and clown (much to the consternation of David Crutton). Some of the agency’s commissions are rather dubious (e.g. cigarettes with added vitamins and minerals – “your 5 a day”). A former creative director of Miller Shanks (the forerunner to Meerkat360) has retired to France, from where he chronicles his life in blog posts that nobody reads. Transworld Publishers make a cameo appearance, and are shown   to have some of the same emailing habits as Meerkat360 (though surely it’s not like that in real life…).

What really adds an extra dimension to e Squared for me is the way that Beaumont uses the epistolary form for effect. For example, the first chapter intercuts Janice Crutton’s annual Christmas email to her family and friends – which paints life in the Crutton household as a model of familial happiness and harmony – with other emails and exchanges which suggest a rather different reality. And there are times when the distancing effect of having events reported to us in emails, rather than “witnessing” them directly, gives the humour a deadpan quality.

But, you know, e Squared is a whole lot funnier to read than it is to describe like this. So I shall stop there and just suggest that you go and read it.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of e Squared: Rather Lovely; For Books’ Sake; Bookmunch; Den of Geek.
Matt Beaumont’s website
Meerkat360 website
Den of Geek interview with Beaumont

David V. Griffin, ‘Violette Doranges’ (2010)

6th September 2010 / / 1 Comment

A senior employee of a philanthropic organisation finds himself with the phone in one hand and the name ‘Violette Doranges’ in his thoughts, as though he’s just had a conversation with someone of that name, though he remembers no such thing, and knows no such person. In the subsequent days and weeks, the name of Violette Doranges crops up again and again; it turns out that she is a glamorous young socialite who moves in similar circles to the protagonist, though they’ve never knowingly encountered each other. Our man resolves to find a way to meet this mysterious woman, but doing so proves harder than he expected.

Early on, I thought I knew where Griffin’s story was going – his protagonist was not going to meet Violette; she’d always be nothing more real than a whispered name to him – and settled down for a dance towards and away from the revelation of Violette’s identity. But it was not to be so: towards its end, the story takes a turn that opens up the possibilities of interpretation, and leaves the tale alive in the mind for quite some time afterwards.

Rating: ***½

Vandana Singh, ‘Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra’ (2010)

3rd September 2010 / / 1 Comment

Trying to untangle this week’s selection for the Torque Control Short Story Club (published here at Strange Horizons) is not something I’m going to be able to do completely, and perhaps not even in large part, for ‘Someadeva: A Sky River Sutra’ is like a kaleidoscope of story: tales within tales, refracting as far as the eye can see.

To start with the history: Somadeva was an 11th-century CE Brahmin who collected and retold the tales of the Kathāsaritsāgara for the queen Sūryavati. In Singh’s story, his personality and memories are recreated centuries later by a woman named Isha, who has read the Kathāsaritsāgara, and wants to collect the stories belonging to the peoples of her galaxy, Sky River. Isha’s hope is that she may discover her origins, all knowledge of her past having been erased from her memory.

The structure of ‘Somadeva’ mirrors that of the Kathāsaritsāgara, in that it consists of a number of interlocking stories, some embedded within others (Singh also writes herself briefly into the story, as the authors of some texts did and Somadeva here wishes he had). One result of this is to make it more-or-less impossible to tell for sure whether Somadeva is in the future with Isha, or in the past telling all this to Sūryavati, or perhaps somewhere else. It’s handled elegantly by Singh, the effect is not so much disorientation as a satisfying recognition of the shape of the whole.

One of the main themes of ‘Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra’ is the extent to which stories can – or should – be pinned down to one definitive interpretation. Isha is excited to discover that a tribe named the Kiha tell stories that can be interpreted as describing fundamental scientific processes; it’s an appealing way to read them, but then Somadeva reminds us that those tales could just as easily be read in other ways – none necessarily invalid.

Perhaps, following on from this, it’s best to leave one’s interpretation of this story open. But there is one thing I think I can say with some certainty: at the start of the tale, Somadeva says,’ I was once…a poet, a teller of tales’; by its end, he’s declaring that he is those things. Whatever else stories do, they bring Somadeva to life.

Elsewhere
Vandana Singh’s website

David M. Fitzpatrick, ‘Lucien’s Menagerie’ (2010)

2nd September 2010 / / 1 Comment

Julia Trafton discovers that her late husband, the wealthy but cruel Lucien Kane, has been unexpectedly generous in his will: he has bequeathed Julia’s family home (which she gave over to Lucien when they married) to her. There’s a condition, however, Julia must remain in the house for one night, without moving any of fifty-two marked objects. This may seem straightforward enough, but the objects turn out to be the fruits of Lucien’s interest in taxidermy – including his own stuffed corpse, proudly on display in the bedroom.

The idea behind ‘Lucien’s Menagerie’ is creepy enough, but what makes Fitzpatrick’s story work even better is a wonderful ambiguity over the exact nature of the events taking place. Nicely done.

Rating: ***½

Elsewhere
David M. Fitzpatrick’s website

S.D. Tullis, ‘The Return’ (2010)

31st August 2010 / / 1 Comment

A girl who disappeared to who-knows-where, for who-knows-what reason, returns home as mysteriously as she vanished. She is different – withdrawn and unresponsive; nothing her parents try is able to bring their old daughter back. And then they discover that she has changed in ways far stranger than they could ever have imagined. I can’t quite piece together in my mind a conception of everything that goes on in the story; but Tullis’s writing is wonderfully unsettling.

Rating: ***½

Jess Walter, The Financial Lives of the Poets (2009)

28th August 2010 / / 3 Comments

It seemed like a good idea at the time to Matt Prior: to leave his job as a financial journalist and set up a website focused on providing financial writing of a higher literary quality  than usual – financial advice in the form of poetry, anyone? The site proved unpopular, and Matt is now just a few days away from losing the home he shares with his wife Lisa, sons Frankiin and Teddy, and his ailing father Jerry – not that he’s told any of them. What’s more, Matt thinks Lisa has reconnected with her ex-boyfriend online. It’s a pretty dire situation, then; but a chance encounter with some youths at a 7/11 leads Matt to think of a way out of his problems – dealing in dope. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time…

The Financial Lives of the Poets is, above all, a very funny book. Much of the humour comes from Matt’s narrative voice, which is dense with observation. For example:

The advice you get when your mortgage is in danger is to “contact the lender.” The last time I contacted my lender, some twenty-five-year-old kid answered the phone and talked me into forbearance, this six-month amnesty of procrastination. I should have known it was a bad move when I contacted my lender the next time and found out the kid had been laid off, that our mortgage had been bundled and sold with a stack of similarly red paper to a second company, and that the second company had been absorbed by a third company. Now I have no idea how to “contact my lender.” I seem to spend hours in automated phone dungeons (“For English, press one”) desperately looking for a single human voice to gently tell me I’m dead. (29)

Walter achieves a nice balancing act with Matt’s voice and character, I think: there are wisecracks, but there’s also enough desperation in Matt’s narration to keep him grounded firmly in the messy business of the story, rather than floating freely above it where a quip and a raised eyebrow could save the day.

Matt is (appropriately, I’d say) simultaneously sympathetic and unlikeable. There’s something almost endearing about the way that his attempts to dig himself out of a hole end up pushing him further into one; but we can see that he has the best intentions at heart – except that, sometimes, he doesn’t. He’s under pressure from about five or six different angles and, though his responses aren’t always commendable, they ring true emotionally. There’s also an undercurrent of poignancy when Matt confronts issues like his father’s dementia, which acts as a counterpoint to the humour.

The Financial Lives of the Poets feels very much like a novel that belongs to today: it’s a story that grows out of the current economic climate, and examines the lengths to which someone might go to deal with a bad situation – and there are plenty of laughs along the way. Warmly recommended.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of The Financial Lives of the Poets: Just William’s Luck;  Bookmunch; Raging Bibliomania.
Jess Walter talks about the book
Jess Walter’s website

Peter Watts, ‘The Things’ (2010)

24th August 2010 / / 1 Comment

A new season of the Torque Control Short Story Club begins this weekend, and I thought I’d take a look at the first piece up for discussion, especially as it’s by Peter Watts, an author I’ve been meaning to read for some time. I glanced at the comments before reading the story, which gave me some useful context – Watt’s tale is a response to John Carpenter’s film The Thing, which I haven’t seen; but reading a plot synopsis gave me an idea of the background. I don’t suppose it’s necessary to know about The Thing to understand ‘The Things’, but it did deepen my appreciation of the story.

So: a research station in Antarctica has been attacked by a creature able to take on the forms of its victims; only two survivors remain at the end of the movie, Childs and MacReady. Watts posits that ‘Childs’ is actually the creature in disguise, and tells his tale from its point of view – and what a beautifully unsettling depiction of a non-human intelligence this is. The creature in ‘The Things’ is no mindless monster, but a highly intelligent being whose awareness is suffused throughout its being, which is what allows it to assimilate others. There’s a certain grandeur, even a kind of nobility, about the way this being presents itself:

I was so much more, before the crash. I was an explorer, an ambassador, a missionary. I spread across the cosmos, met countless worlds, took communion: the fit reshaped the unfit and the whole universe bootstrapped upwards in joyful, infinitesimal increments. I was a soldier, at war with entropy itself. I was the very hand by which Creation perfects itself.

And now, here it is on Earth, faced with humans who can’t partake of its ‘communion’, because their intelligence is held within a specific part of the body. The whole concept of this is abhorrent to the creature, who views the human brain as a kind of tumour. And so, the creature becomes a monster to the human characters, because its motivations are as unfathomable to them as theirs are to it. All is very effectively done by Watts, and the second Short Story Club is off to a great start.

Christopher Fowler, Bryant & May On the Loose (2009)

22nd August 2010 / / 5 Comments

On to my third choice for the Transworld Summer Reading Challenge, selected because I’ve been meaning to read Christopher Fowler again for ages. I first really became aware of him when he was a Guest of Honour at FantasyCon in 2003, where he gave a brilliantly impassioned speech about the field (I believe a transcript was printed in an issue of Postscripts). During his interview, Fowler mentioned a novel of his called Disturbia (1997), which sounded interesting; I tracked a copy down, and enjoyed it – but I remember having to adjust the way I was reading it part-way through, when I  what I thought was a straightforward contemporary London setting turned out to be something slightly different.

I had a similar experience with the present book, in that it really has to be approached with an awareness of what the author is seeking to do – which is to set a Golden Age detection in the present day – and the particular technique he uses to achieve that. Bryant & May On the Loose is the seventh novel featuring the titular detectives (though I’m sure at least one of them was in Disturbia), octogenarian but still active in the Peculiar Crimes Unit, set up to handle all the crimes that were just too odd for the mainstream Metropolitan Police.

At the start of this book, though, the PCU has been closed down, and its members have gone their separate ways. But then a headless body is found a freezer, there are sightings of a man dressed as a stag, with knives for antlers., and it all looks to have something to do with the building work taking place at King’s Cross. Sounds like a job for the Peculiar Crimes Unit, which reforms, albeit without official sanction, and with far fewer resources and rather less comfortable accommodation.

The first thing to say about Bryant & May On the Loose is that, even though it’s the seventh volume in the series, I didn’t feel disadvantaged at jumping straight in. There were inevitably going to be some references to back-story, but from my perspective, Fowler did a good job of balancing those with making the novel stand alone. And it makes me want to read the others so I can appreciate this one in context, which is no bad thing.

Before I started reading, I was half- expecting Bryant and May to be parodic, larger-than-life characters; but, actually (and I think this is a more interesting approach) they’re more low-key than that.

Arthur Bryant is the ‘Golden Age detective’ figure,  steeped in knowledge of (and looking for clues in) local history and folklore; he’s subdued to begin with here, with the closure of the PCU, but soon gets back into his stride (I’d love to see him in ‘full flow’, which I guess I’ll find in other Bryant and May books). John May takes a more conventional approach; the differences between the two are summed up in this passage, spoken by May:

You always want to think [you’re searching for] twisted geniuses…You long to pit your wits against someone who hides clues in paintings and evades capture through their knowledge of ancient Greek. Forget it, Arthur; those days have gone. (362)

This highlights another key aspect of Fowler’s technique: though Bryant gets his time in the sun (e.g. the chance to explain everything to his colleagues at the end), his Golden-Age style is constantly being interrogated (pardon the pun) and shown to be an ill fit for the modern world – even when it has apparently been vindicated.

Above this level, we have a novel which is – in true Golden Age tradition – a great pleasure to read.  There are a few moments where I feel the exposition is overly dense; but, mostly, the book rattles along. I’ll be reading more Bryant and May novels in the future, no doubt about that.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of Bryant & May On the Loose: Chasing Bawa, Notes of Life, Five Minutes Peace
Christopher Fowler’s website

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