Author: David Hebblethwaite

Paul Murray, Skippy Dies (2010)

28th February 2010 / / 14 Comments

One thing’s for sure: there won’t be another book like Skippy Dies all year. Paul Murray’s second novel (his first in seven years) is a 661-page opus (published as a three-volume box-set) set in an Irish boarding school, largely about the trials and tribulations of growing up and falling in love (both as a teenager and an adult), but also touching on the First World War, theoretical physics, and the changing face of education in the modern world. One other thing – it’s excellent.

The book opens with a doughnut-eating contest between Ruprecht Van Doren – a fourteen-year-old maths prodigy with a weight problem – and his diminutive room-mate, Daniel ‘Skippy’ Juster. In accordance with the title, Skippy drops dead during this race – though not from choking on a doughnut. The rest of the novel explores events leading up to, and beyond, the fatal moment.

Skippy Dies interleaves the stories of several characters: there’s Ruprecht, obsessed with the physics of higher dimensions and set on building a machine that could enable travel between universes. There’s Skippy, who has a crush on Lori, a pupil at the neighbouring girls’ school, and can’t believe his luck when his love is returned (if only Carl, the school’s hard-man drug-dealer, didn’t also have his eyes on her). There’s Howard Fallon, the history teacher who falls for a lovely substitute teacher, Aurelie MacIntyre, and is determined to win her love, even if doing so wrecks his existing relationship. And there’s Seabrook College itself, a Catholic school not quite at ease with the changing times.

For all its length, Skippy Dies never once feels like a hard slog, never once feels as though it doesn’t deserve all its 661 pages. But what makes Murray’s achievement in this novel so extraordinary is the sheer range of effects he produces. First of all, and particularly at the beginning, this is a very funny book; the banter between the boys is good, with Murray demonstrating well their tendency to bring even the most serious, high-flown ideas crashing back down to earth with a word. As an example, when Ruprecht describes an invention he’s working on that will broadcast classical music into space in the hope of reaching alien life, another boy replies, ‘What’s the point of playing a load of boring music into space? You want them to think that everyone on Earth is like a hundred years old?’ [127]

Skippy Dies also has much to say that is serious, and does so very eloquently indeed. For example, points are made around the issue of education: the school’s Acting Principal, Greg Costigan (known to all as ‘the Automator’) is the epitome of the target-driven, commercially-minded headteacher, who doesn’t approve of Howard’s teaching the First World War; it’s not in the textbook, it won’t help the boys pass their exams, so (to Costigan’s way of thinking) it has no value. I don’t think there’s much doubt over where the novel stands on that issue.

Murray succeeds on the level of character, too, where he has some subtle and highly effective touches. One of these is the way he reveals the turmoil of Carl’s home life; the boy’s parents row with each other, but it goes on in the background while we’re following Carl’s viewpoint – and it’s all the more chilling because he completely ignores them.

Also striking is the way that some of the concepts from physics described in the book become mirrored in the emotional events of the story, often leaving some incisive observations behind. For instance, there’s the idea that the smallest possible units of matter act randomly and unknowably; then we learn how Howard (who became a teacher pretty much by accident) attended his school reunion recently, and wondered whether everyone went along in the same fashion: ‘Could the dark truth be that the system is composed of individual units none of whom really knows what he is doing, who emerge from school and slide into the templates offered to them by accident of birth…’ [191]  But it’s Ruprecht who gets stung the most by this use of physics, when he comes to realise that the physical laws he puts such trust in just aren’t enough to deal with the human universe.

And I’m only scratching the surface, here, of what Skippy Dies has to offer. It’s a rich, immersive read that you shouldn’t miss.

Link
Penguin Books – interview and extract

What I’ll be doing at Eastercon

25th February 2010 / / 1 Comment

I have some news.

Eastercon, for those who don’t know, is the British national science fiction comvention. It’s held in a different place each year, over the Easter weekend; this year’s is Odyssey 2010, at Heathrow. I went last year for the first time, just for a couple of days; it was fun, but I decided that I’d only really get the best from it if I went for all four days. So, this will be my first full Eastercon.

But that’s not the news. The news is another first.

I’m going to be on a panel.

I should explain how this came about. Last year Niall Harrison of the British Science Fiction Association conducted a survey of British sf and fantasy writers (a follow-up to an identical survey run by Paul Kincaid twenty years earlier), exploring what they thought about their work, whether and how ‘Britishness’ related to it, and so on.

The results of the new survey will be published (along with a reprint of the 1989 survey’s) next month, but Niall also decided to organise a panel of non-writers to discuss the results at Eastercon — and he invited me to take part in that panel.

I was surprised to be asked — after all, I’d never done anything like it before — but also pleased, naturally. And now I’m more than a little nervous, as I really have no idea what it’s going to be like. I never anticipated, when I booked for Odyssey, that I’d end up particpating, but that’s what’s going to happen.

As far as I know, the panel is scheduled for 5pm on the Friday — and, of course, I’ll be at Eastercon all weekend. Perhaps I’ll see you there.

Interzone 226: Stephen Gaskell, ‘Aquestria’

23rd February 2010 / / 1 Comment

On the planet of Aquestria, the two resident human factions — the Loyalists and the Senastrians — are at war, though both are suffering the effects of a plague which is killing off plants and animals alike. Isiria and Kelif, two Senestrian Special Investigations officers, respond to a call and find a strange man with his tongue cut out.  Thinking he might be a Loyalist, Kelif interrogates the stranger, until his methods become so aggressive that Isiria takes matters into her own hands.

This story is… okay. There’s a nice idea at its heart, and some deft touches in Gaskell’s writing where he evokes Isiria’s unease with Kelif’s tactics. But, though it’s always readable, much of the story doesn’t really leave a lasting impression. ‘Aquestria’ is decent enough, but nothing special.

Link
Stephen Gaskell’s website

Click here for all my Interzone 226 posts.

TV Book Club: The Rapture

21st February 2010 / / 0 Comments

This week’s TV Book Club was about The Rapture by Liz Jensen, which I reviewed last week (click here to see what I thought). The series got off to a shaky start, but has been improving week on week; so I was keen to see how it would go this time. In the end, it was better than some weeks, but not great.

One again, the panel was a member down, with Gok Wan away; once again, the format worked better with fewer people. This week’s guest celebrity was Martine McCutcheon; the interview with her contained the show’s first misstep. In previous weeks, this segment has been much better when the guest was interviewed about the books they like to read, rather than about their own book. The first question was about the former subject, but the conversation soon turned to the writing of McCutcheon’s novel — and the end result was indeed poorer than the interviews in the last few episodes.

I’ve always found the vox-pop non-fiction items unsatisfactory, but I think this week’s was the worst so far. It was about a book on regional dialects, called How to Talk Like a Local, by the Countdown lexicographer Susie Dent. This could have been such ain interesting item, particularly if the author had contributed — but, no. What we got instead was a comedian named Alun Cochrane travelling back and forth between the West and East Midlands, trying to find the point at which the local word for a bread roll changes from ‘batch’ to ‘cob’. That was it: no exploration of where those words come from, or how such differences arise — nothing. One could be forgiven for watching that item and not being able to name the book connected to it. Very disappointing.

After a weak first half, then, we headed out of the commercial break, and into the usual short filmed interview with an author who’d been chosen for the Book Club in previous years (this week it was David Mitchell, of Cloud Atlas fame — another book I should probably read, but haven’t). Then it was time to turn to The Rapture — and it wasn’t a bad discussion, actually. The panel had a lot to say about the novel (which they all liked); it was perhaps always going to be an impossible task to really get under the skin of the book in the time available, when it can be approached from so many angles — but the conversation brought across just how much there is in The Rapture. And McCutcheon, while not as insightful as some of the previous guests in the series, made a worthwhile contribution nevertheless.

Not one of the better TV Book Club episodes, I’d say, let down in particular by a poor first half — but quite a good discussion of the featured title, which is of course where it counts the most.

Links: 19th February

19th February 2010 / / 2 Comments

A selection of links which may be of interest:

Paul Kincaid reviews Liz Jensen’s The Rapture for SF Site.

Martin Lewis’s double review of The Rapture and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, at Strange Horizons.

Simon Savidge reviews Little Hands Clapping, and interviews Dan Rhodes.

Another Dan Rhodes interview, from the Independent on Sunday.

A further review of Little Hands Clapping, from Bookmunch.

Reviews of Simon Lelic’s Rupture: Dovegreyreader, Farm Lane Books and Reading Matters.

Lotus Reads on Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy.

Adam Roberts on Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch.

A couple of short stories on Untitled Books: ‘Homecoming’ by Simon Lelic; ‘Scuttle’ by David Vann.

Liz Jensen, The Rapture (2009)

17th February 2010 / / 9 Comments

I read The Rapture in advance of this week’s TV Book Club; I had no particular expectations of it – and it turned out to be the best book I’ve read so far this year. Certainly, if I’d read it last year, it would have been on my list of favourites for 2009.

A few years in the future, the climate has changed for the worse, and the summer heat is unbearable; religious groups have sprung up, proclaiming that the end times are near. In a town on the south coast of England, psychotherapist Gabrielle Fox is treating Bethany Krall, the teenage daughter of a preacher. Bethany savagely murdered her own mother, and is now being held in a secure institution. She’s a difficult patient – Gabrielle being only the latest in a string of therapists who have tried to understand the girl – but it’s in Gabrielle’s interests to succeed in treating Bethany. A car accident left Gabrielle paralysed from the waist down; Bethany is her chance to prove that she’s still up to the job. What’s particularly unusual about Bethany is that she is apparently able to foresee natural disasters – and she has predicted that the end of the world will come in a matter of months.

The Rapture is narrated by Gabrielle in the first person; her voice is descriptive, measured, and rather cold – for example, she describes her father’s demise from Alzheimer’s in terms that betray no feeling of sadness or loss. She is not a protagonist one can warm to easily, yet Jensen makes her a compelling presence for all that. Gabrielle’s sparring with Bethany is fascinating to read; despite the girl’s violent tendencies and physical superiority over Gabrielle, one senses that Bethany’s greatest weapon is her articulacy. Gabrielle’s profession requires her to be alert to the nuances of language, but now she’s up against someone who knows how to play that game, knows what buttons to push. That’s why Gabrielle feels threatened by Bethany – because the girl can attack her in an aspect of life where she still felt secure.

Jensen’s keen observations don’t stop at the relationship between these two characters. Convinced that she’s never going to be in a relationship again, Gabrielle is unprepared for when she meets Frazer Melville, a physicist who falls for her. We see the complex tangle of emotions that Gabrielle is feeling when Frazer first acts romantically towards her: ‘I can’t handle it. It will kill me. It will kill my belief that I am no longer a woman. No, worse, it will revive the hope that I am, and then all that can happen is that it will be shredded. [p. 112]’ Even such a positive development is not without its dangers to Gabrielle’s sense of self.

Nor is Jensen’s acuity limited to relationships. When Gabrielle and Frazer discover that Bethany’s prediction of an earthquake was accurate, they have a crisis of conscience – having withheld their knowledge that this disaster would occur, doesn’t that make them complicit in the resulting deaths? But, if they had alerted someone, who’d have believed them? It’s not just that Jensen is examining here the issue of responsibility when one has privileged knowledge; there’s a sense of deep uncertainty over how to handle new kinds of knowledge – Gabrielle and Frazer now know things that others will find impossible to believe; they don’t know the right thing to do because there is, by definition, no precedent on which to draw.

So, I like very much the way that Jensen observes people in her novel; one of the most impressive things about The Rapture is the way that she highlights the personal, human responses against the background of grand catastrophe. What’s also impressive is that the novel works from so many directions, even when they might seem to be contradictory. As I’ve already described, it works well as a character study; in the second half, when the time comes for The Rapture to be a disaster thriller, it doesn’t disappoint there, either. Jensen ramps up the pace, and provides the necessary spectacle and borderline (im)plausibility, leading to an entirely apposite conclusion.

If there’s a weakness here, it’s exactly that – that the text sets itself free of plausibility in the name of storytelling. But that’s the nature of Jensen’s story: it’s what the novel needs at that point, and it’s done with enormous panache. The Rapture is a novel that appeals to the head and the heart, and doesn’t skimp on either. As I said at the start, it’s my favourite read of the year to date.

Further links
Liz Jensen’s website

Girl in a Thunderbolt – Songs for Modern Lovers EP: Culture Revival review

11th February 2010 / / 0 Comments

Chances are, you won’t have heard of Girl in a Thunderbolt (Norwich singer-songwriter Maria Uzor); neither had I until I was sent her EP to review for Culture Revival — and what a discovery. Songs for Modern Lovers is a set of four dark, folk-ish tracks to which no simple categorisation can do justice. I loved it.

Read the review in full.

Video: ‘Run Away’ (NB. Not on this EP)

Interzone 226: Rachel Swirsky, ‘Again and Again and Again’

8th February 2010 / / 4 Comments

Oh, but I loved this. A two-page chronicle of children rebelling against their once-rebellious parents, from the dawn of the twentieth century to the future, where technology makes the possibilities for shocking the previous generation ever more extreme, until…

Well, if I’m any more specific, I’ll spoil all the fun for you. And that’s what this story is – great fun, and (one suspects) only too true.

Link
Rachel Swirsky’s website

Philippe Claudel, Brodeck’s Report (2007/9): Not the TV Book Group

7th February 2010 / / 0 Comments

Introduction

In the wake of The TV Book Club, four book bloggers (Lynne Hatwell of Dovegreyreader Scribbles, Simon Savidge of Savidge Reads, Kirsty of Other Stories, and Kimbofo of Reading Matters) have launched their own online reading group, which they’re calling ‘Not the TV Book Group’. The group will run fortnightly on Sundays for sixteen weeks, with discussions being hosted on each blog in turn. The schedule is:

7 Feb – Philippe Claudel, Brodeck’s Report

21 Feb – Ali Shaw, The Girl with the Glass Feet 

7 Mar – Susan Sellers, Vanessa and Virginia

21 Mar – Jennifer Johnston, The Illusionist

11 Apr – Mary Swan, The Boys in the Trees

25 Apr – Neil Bartlett, Skin Lane

9 May – Jon Canter, A Short Gentleman

23 May – Octavia E. Butler, Fledgling

I thought it would be interesting to join in, which I’ll try to do for all eight books (though, of course, we’ll see how well I manage!). For now, though, let’s turn to the first selection, Brodeck’s Report by the French writer Philippe Claudel (very well translated by John Cullen). I’m hoping to make this review more reactive than usual, so I’ll be looking out for commentary elsewhere online and maybe updating this post as the day goes on (and, of course, commenting on the actual discussion when it goes live). First of all, here’swhat I thought:

My view

One night, in a remote village somewhere in post-war Europe (Claudel is deliberately vague about place and time in the novel), there is a murder. The victim is known only as ‘the Anderer‘ (‘the Other’), a colourful stranger who arrived in the village from who-knows-where, and immediately drew fascination (gradually turning to suspicion) with his unusual dress and manner.

The Anderer has been killed by men of the village, who ask Brodeck — a villager who didn’t witness those events, but has attended university and so (the logic goes) can write — to produce a report on what happened, so there can be an authoritative statement. Alongside his report, Brodeck writes a second account, which forms the text of Claudel’s novel; this longer account covers not only matters concerning the Anderer, but also key events of Brodeck’s life — including his time in a concentration camp.

Brodeck’s Report comes garlanded with many glowing quotes from newspaper reviews; I’m not quite as thoroughly enthusiastic about the novel as they appear to be, but I still think it’s a very good book. Claudel’s central theme, I think, is that, given the right circumstances, anyone could be party to monstrous acts; there are strong parallels between the villagers’ treatment of the Anderer, and Brodeck’s treatment by the camp guards — and even Brodeck himself is not entirely innocent. This is a powerful demonstration of how even apparently ordinary, decent individuals could come to do the worst.

One of the most striking things about Brodeck’s Report is Claudel’s construction of the novel. Instead of taking a linear approach, he moves backwards and forwards between times and events — sometimes even within the same passage — yet never loses his control over the narrative. As the threads swirl around and move inexorably towards their conclusions, the story itself becomes a kind of net, mirroring the way that the characters become snared by events, prejudice, and social pressures. Claudel’s prose (and, of course, Cullen’s translation) succeeds at more detailed levels, too; there are some very well written, highly affecting scenes (often concerning some of the plot’s most harrowing events).

I doubt I’d have read Brodeck’s Report if not for this book group (actually, never mind that, I wouldn’t even have heard of it) — but I’m glad I did, and I look forward to seeing what others have made of it.

Updates

11.10 – The discussion is now underway at Dovegreyreader Scribbles.

Archives

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

© 2025 David's Book World

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑