Author: David Hebblethwaite

D.P. Watt, ‘Apotheosis’ (2010)

20th August 2010 / David Hebblethwaite / 2 Comments

One of the contributors to Null Immortalis has suggested I might find that William Meikle’s story gains greater resonance once I’ve read the book, because of the connections brought about by its context in the wider anthology. I suspect that will indeed happen – and here’s a story whose affect is certainly amplified by its context.

In Watt’s tale, S.D. Tullis is an enormously prolific and celebrated writer, whose secret is that his work is assembled from the solicited contributions of who-knows-how-many others. Our narrator is one such writer, who received a letter from ‘Tullis’ and responded with a short paragraph – and now obsessively checks Tullis’s output for signs of his contribution. ‘Apotheosis’ works enough well on its own as a character study and a story that hints at a hidden view of the world; but it works even better in Null Immortalis, whose structure echoes that of the work in the story.

Rating: ***½

Daniel Pearlman, ‘A Giant in the House’ (2010)

17th August 2010 / David Hebblethwaite / 1 Comment

I love this kind of fantasy story, where the fantastic elements slide from metaphor to concrete reality and back again, and can be read just as fruitfully either way. Pearlman’s narrator looks back on his relationship with his father, which began with him viewing his dad as a giant of a man, and grew worse as the protagonist his father’s shortcomings. At every stage, the father’s stature diminishes – figuratively and literally – in his son’s eyes, and the intertwining of reality and fantasy results in a very fine tale.

Rating: ****

William Meikle, ‘Turn Again’ (2010)

17th August 2010 / David Hebblethwaite / 4 Comments

A shared interest in the building of a wind-farm leads Patty to begin conversing with the enigmatic Mr Tullis, who has much to say about the symbolic significance of the wheel shape described by the turbines’ blades, and is – of course – more than he seems. This is a short (four-page) tale that doesn’t quite pack all the emotional intensity for which I think it aims. Mr Tullis’s talk of ‘wheels within wheels’ successfully creates a frisson of wonder that there’s more to Meikle’s fictional reality than the world we know. But I feel that the emotional heart of the story takes off a little too late in proceedings for it to have quite as strong a pay-off as I’d have liked.

Rating: ***

Elsewhere
William Meikle’s website

Null Immortalis: Nemonymous Ten (2010)

16th August 2010 / David Hebblethwaite / 3 Comments

It’s the end of the line: after ten years and as many volumes, Nemonymous has come to an end. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the stories in each volume were published without bylines, with the authors’ names being revealed at a later date. Null Immortalis is a little different: as it’s the final Nemonymous anthology, bylines are already assigned to the stories — which gives us the following contents list:

William Meikle, ‘Turn Again’

Daniel Pearlman, ‘A Giant in the House’

D.P. Watt, ‘Apotheosis’

S.D. Tullis, ‘The Return’

David M. Fitzpatrick, ‘Lucien’s Menagerie’

David V. Griffin , ‘Violette Doranges’

Ursula Pflug, ‘Even the Mirror’

Andrew Hook, ‘Love Is the Drug’

Joel Lane, ‘The Drowned Market’

Tim Casson, ‘The Scream’

Tony Lovell, ‘The Shell’

Gary Fry , ‘Strings Attached’

Derek John, ‘Oblivion’

Margaret B. Simon, ‘Troot’

Mike Chinn, ‘A Matter of Degree’

Richard Gavin, ‘Only Enuma Elish’

Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., ‘Icarus Above…’

Reggie Oliver, ‘You Have Nothing To Fear’

Rachel Kendall , ‘Holesale’

Roy Gray, ‘“Fire”’

Cameron Pierce, ‘Broom People’

Stephen Bacon, ‘The Toymaker of Bremen’

Mark Valentine, ‘The Man Who Made the Yellow God’

Steve Rasnic Tem, ‘The Green Dog’

Bob Lock, ‘Haven’t You Ever Wondered?’

Tim Nickels, ‘Supermarine’

I’ll be blogging these stories one at a time, with links appearing in the list above as I go.

(One last note before we start: last year, Nemonymous editor/publisher D.F. Lewis ran a competition to see who could match the greatest number of authors to their stories in the previous anthology, with the prize being the chance to appear as a character in every story in Null Immortalis. The winner was Scott Tullis, who is also a contributor to the book; I’m particularly intrigued to see what he’s written…)

Elsewhere

D.F. Lewis & Nemoymous website

Firestation Book Swap on Tour @ London Review Bookshop, 5th August 2010

6th August 2010 / David Hebblethwaite / 7 Comments

Yesterday, I caught the train down to London, to go to an event that I’ve wanted to attend for ages: the Firestation Book Swap. Hosted by publisher Scott Pack and author Marie Phillips, with a couple of guest authors, this is held every month at the Firestation Arts Centre in Windsor; but they’ve also had a few tour dates, and last night the Book Swap came to the London Review Bookshop.

The format of the event is a literary evening with a twist: no readings, but plenty of questions – some posed by the hosts, others written by the audience and drawn at random from a basket; the only catch is, the questions can’t have anything to do with books. There’s also cake, and plenty of it; you can actually get in for free if you bring a homemade cake. And, of course, there’s the swapping – everyone brings a book to swap, with opportunities to pitch yours (or have it pitched by the hosts) throughout the evening). So, with my copy of Tim Davys’ Amberville in hand, I went along.

My evening got off to an unplanned start when I managed to trip up in the road outside and cut my knee; my thanks to the shop’s first-aider who supplied the rather dramatic-looking bandage which I spent the rest of the night holding against the wound (to think I nearly took this book to swap, which would have been mildly amusing).

Anyway, the guest authors for this session were Patrick Neate (whom I’ve been meaning to read since I saw him at Cheltenham last year, and still haven’t) and James Miller (of whom I hadn’t heard before, but whose near-future thrillers sound interesting). Both were highly entertaining (as were the hosts), and the discussion ranged widely, from the question of whether reading was a dying art (Neate was fairly optimistic about this, Miller less so; certainly I found it dispiriting to hear about undergraduate literature students who haven’t read anything) and whether it’s more accepted in publishing for authors identified as literary to draw on elements of genre than it is for genre writers to break away from the ‘genre’ tag (unfortunately, I suspect this is the case, though it shouldn’t be), to the subject of the guests’ favourite cake.

Ah yes, the cake. This gets passed around the audience, and includes the traditional Firestation Book Swap cupcakes (decorated with the letters of ‘Firestation Book Swap’), of which I got the last one. It was delicious, as was all the other cake I tried.

And the swapping? I ended up swapping with Scott afterwards, and now have a copy of Geisha by Liza Dalby; a very different book from the one I took with me, and probably not one I’d have chosen to read otherwise – but, to me, that’s the whole point of going to an event like this. All in all, I had a great time, and would heartily recommend the Book Swap to anyone. If you can get to one, do.

Stories: Conclusion

4th August 2010 / David Hebblethwaite / 1 Comment

Having reached the end of Stories (click here for the index of my posts), it’s time for a few remarks in closing. I’d characterise this as a solid anthology — a broad range of material, and nothing particularly bad (Gene Wolfe’s is probably the weakest story, and even that has a certain amount of interest). However, more stories fall into the ‘quite good’ bracket ( as opposed to the ‘good’ bracket) than I’d have liked, and this is what makes the anthology solid rather than spectacular for me.

What, then, are the best stories in Stories? Roddy Doyle and Jodi Picoult do interesting things with fantasy, and demonstrate how fruitful the results can be when ‘mainstream’ writers try their hand at the fantastic. Michael Swanwick, Jeffrey Ford, and Joe Hill contribute perhaps the best-told tales; and Kat Howard’s piece is a strong debut.

Finally, how far does the anthology meet its stated aim: to collect stories that encourage readers to ask ‘and then what happened’? Quite well, I think — for all the criticisms I might make of some 0f these stories, they’re rarely dull. I’m wary of saying that any anthology has ‘something for everyone’ — but I think Stories comes close.

Joe Hill, ‘The Devil on the Staircase’ (2010)

3rd August 2010 / David Hebblethwaite / 1 Comment

And so, we reach the climax of the anthology, and this is a great way in which to end it. Hill tells of a boy who lives in Italy (towards, I’d surmise, the end of the 19^th century), in a mountain village accessible only by a network of staircases cut into the cliffs. The boy has eyes for his cousin, Lithodora, and one day kills her lover in the heat of the moment. He then encounters a devil in the form of a child, who gives him a tin bird that sings a beautiful song when told lies.

Hill’s telling has the flow of a folktale; the rhythm of his prose is emphasised by the downward slopes in which the text is arranged on the page. Add to this a neat metaphorical undercurrent (the tin bird comes to represent the spread of propaganda), and you have a fine story indeed.

Rating: ****

Elsewhere
Joe Hill’s website

Elizabeth Hand, ‘The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon’ (2010)

3rd August 2010 / David Hebblethwaite / 1 Comment

A museum exhibit designer takes it upon himself to restage the first flight of the Bellerophon, a Heath Robinson-esque aircraft which crashed in mysterious circumstances, and of which only a few seconds of film footage survives. At fifty pages, this is the longest story in the anthology — but it zips along so briskly that it feels only half its length. Told with brio, Hand’s tale is great fun, and saves a moment of real poignancy for the end.

Rating: ***½

Elsewhere
Elizabeth Hand’s website

Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep (2005)

2nd August 2010 / David Hebblethwaite / 2 Comments

Prep is my second choice in the Transworld Summer Challenge. I chose it because a) i didn’t want all my selections to be by men; and b) this was the only book by a female author on the list that sounded as though it might be of interest (I say this without knowing whether ‘Tim Davys’ is the pseudonym of a male or female writer). It probably wouldn’t have appeared on my radar if not for the challenge… and there’s a big ‘but’ stopping me fully from celebrating the fact that it did.

Prep chronicles four years in the life of Lee Fiora, a girl from Indiana who gains a scholarship at Ault, a prestigious Massachusetts prep school. The book is structured episodically, effectively becoming a series of linked novellas that reveal how Lee struggles with the reality of life at Ault being very different from the rosy image presented in the glossy brochure, and the difficulties she faces finding her niche in the school as an outsider.

What Curtis Sittenfeld does particularly well here is capture something of the confusion and contradictions of teenage life, those years when identities are still being formed, the perceptions of others seem so vital, and friendships are constantly in flux. Lee is never quite sure what she wants from her life at Ault (‘I was always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely’ [25]). Her relationships with her fellow-students can be fluid: for example, the way Lee and Cross Sugarman, the class basketball star, behave towards each other resembles an elaborate dance – moving closer together, then further apart, then again closer; they never become anything as straightforward as boyfriend and girlfriend. Lee puts on an air to get by at Ault, then finds it taking over as her real self. One senses just how difficult these waters are for her to navigate.

Sittenfeld does something else with Lee’s character that makes the depiction of her more interesting – and, I suspect truer. Lee is not easy to warm to: she can be cold and selfish; she can push away people who like her. For all that she goes on about not having friends at school, Lee seems uncomfortable if people get too close to her – when one character tells her that her tendency to spend time alone is not as strange as she thinks it is (because anybody dedicated to a pastime has to spend time alone on it), to be understood in that way is ‘the most terrifying thing in the world’ (453) to her. Lee is a complex character, and it’s her characterisation which is at the core of Prep.

Now for the ‘but’ – I think Prep is too long to sustain the story that it wants to tell, particularly as Lee’s character doesn’t seem to change all that much over the course of the novel. I think it could probably still work at even half its length. That quibble aside, Prep is an incisive study of a teenager not just trying to fit in, but trying to decide if she even wants to fit in.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of Prep: Iris on Books; Amused, Bemused and Confused; Fervent Reader; The Bookish Type.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s website

July round-up

1st August 2010 / David Hebblethwaite / 3 Comments

I thought I’d start doing a more detailed end-of-month post (partly modelled on what Jackie does at Farm Lane Books), and list everything I’ve reviewed in the month. Which, in July, was a fair amount, and pretty much all of it worth reading. My pick of the month is The Radleys by Matt Haig, which might be the most enjoyable book I’ve read all year. (An honourable mention must also go to An A-Z of Possible Worlds by A.C. Tillyer, which is excellent, but which I read last year and only got around to reviewing now.)