So today I’ve been a World Book Night giver – and it was inspiring. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to share a love of books. I have seen people’s faces light up today as I’ve never seen before; that, for me, is what it’s all about.
Author: David Hebblethwaite
“Took the end of the world to make us kings for a day”
Peter Heller, The Dog Stars (2012)
Why write about the end of the world? I suppose one of the attractions, for some writers at least, must be the capacity to strip the world back to its bare bones, and focus all on the subjects one wants to explore. These thoughts crossed my mind on reading Peter Heller’s first novel, because The Dog Stars leans so far towards certain issues that the book as a whole gets pushed out of shape.
It is the near future, after a vaguely defined pandemic that did away with most of the people, and a side-order of climate change that (it seems) did away with much of the wildlife (Heller is sketchy on exactly what happened, but the point is that it was the end of the world). Our narrator, Hig, is one of the small number of humans who were immune to the sickness and are now eking out a living as best they can. Hig’s sole companions are Jasper, his ageing dog; a little Cessna aircraft that he nicknames the Beast; and Bruce Bangley, the only other human for miles around. There’s not much to be done beyond surviving, as other people invariably tend to be hostile, and hence need to be dealt with before they deal with HIg and Bangley. But the loneliness gets to Hig, and eventually he is driven to jump in the Beast to see what, or who, may be out there.
Hig’s narrative voice is what keeps The Dog Stars together: the spare, weary voice of someone resigned to the possibility that there may be nothing left worth saying, but who feels compelled to carry on speaking as it keeps the silence at bay. Hig feels guilty because he survived when his wife Melissa did not – and because he was the one who helped her through death’s door when she asked. In contrast with the much more hard-headed survivalist Bangley, Hig would be happiest just spending time fishing and flying; but Bangley’s disdain for such “Recreating” is hard to ignore. The gulf between the two men is underlined by a sequence where Hig attacks a drinks truck for its bounty and thinks he’s done well – until Bangley tears his pride to shreds by pointing out all his careless mistakes.
If the novel were just Hig, Bangley, and Hig’s introspection, I suspect that The Dog Stars would be a perfectly decent read. But there’s a world beyond them, and I’m with Nina Allan in thinking that Heller falters whenever he turns his focus towards that outer world. I’m willing to overlook the sketchy background, because the foreground interests me more (though it seems odd for hostility to be the norm amongst the survivors when there appears to be enough food and other natural resources to go round). But I can’t ignore the issues with plotting (the closing encounter is far too silly); or the way that Cima, the only living female character, is objectified and generally exists only to serve as an adjunct to Hig.
But perhaps my most nagging doubt over Heller’s book is the thought that it doesn’t really need its post-apocalyptic setting, and might even be better off without it. Hig remarks on the first page:
The tiger left, the elephant, the apes, the baboon, the cheetah. The titmouse, the frigate bird, the pelican (gray), the whale (gray), the collared dove. Sad but. Didn’t cry until the last trout swam upriver looking for maybe cooler water. (p. 3)
This is the sticking point: Hig pines for his wife and his trout. He’s not so completely self-absorbed that he dismisses the wider world; but his personal losses are far more important to him than any broader ones. As a result, the novel doesn’t feel nearly as emotionally invested in its end-of-the-world elements as it is in Hig’s personal reflections. Despite its flaws, The Dog Stars is not a bad portrait of someone coming to terms with loss and finding a way to move on. But add in everything else, and the book just unbalances.
This book has been shortlisted for the 2013 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts on this year’s Award.
The Road (Home) to World Book Night
It occurred to me that I hadn’t mentioned this on the blog yet, so it’s about time I did: this year, for the first time, I applied to be a World Book Night giver – and was accepted. So, on Tuesday 23rd, I’ll be around town, giving out copies of The Road Home by Rose Tremain.
How about you – are you going to be a World Book Night giver? Have you been one in the past? Any tips or interesting stories?
The Women’s Prize and Granta’s Best Young Novelists
A couple of lists which have been announced in the last 24 hours. First, the shortlist for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction:
- Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
- Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver
- May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes
- Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
- Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
- NW by Zadie Smith
This list reminds me that I want to read Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Life After Life. I also find it interesting that, after a couple of years where the Orange Prize (as was) has been won by debuts, this year we have a list strongly weighted towards more established names.
But this is also a time for new names, because Granta have announced their fourth Best of Young British Novelists list:
- Naomi Alderman
- Tahmima Anam
- Ned Beauman
- Jenni Fagan
- Adam Foulds
- Xiaolu Guo [my review of UFO in Her Eyes]
- Sarah Hall [my review of The Carhullan Army]
- Steven Hall [my review of The Raw Shark Texts]
- Joanna Kavenna
- Benjamin Markovits
- Nadifa Mohamed [my review of Black Mamba Boy]
- Helen Oyeyemi [my review of Mr Fox]
- Ross Raisin
- Sunjeev Sahota [my review of Ours are the Streets]
- Taiye Selasi
- Kamila Shamsie
- Zadie Smith [my review of NW]
- David Szalay
- Adam Thirlwell
- Evie Wyld [my review of After the Fire, a Still Small Voice]
Of course there are limitations to any exercise of this nature, and I don’t think there’s much mileage in treating the list as anything approaching ‘definitive’. Taken as a selection of names, though, I rather like this list. I’ve reviewed books by eight of the authors (linked above) and enjoyed them all. (I have read – but not reviewed – a ninth, whose book I didn’t care for; so be it.) I’m pleased to see women and non-white writers so strongly represented. And there are quite a few names on there whom I’ve been meaning to read. I think I might do a story-by-story review of the anthology, once I get hold of a copy. For now, congratulations to all!
The Wasp Factory: Reading Iain Banks
If ever there were an author whom I wanted to go back and read from the beginning, it’s Iain Banks. I’ve read a few of his books over the years, but have never felt that I knew his work as well as I’d have liked. After the shocking announcement of Banks’s terminal cancer last week, there was an enormous outpouring of appreciation for his books, on Twitter and elsewhere (just look at his guestbook). This has spurred me on to start investigating Banks’s oeuvre properly.
One initiative that came about in the wake of last week’s news was the BanksRead forum, set up by my fellow book bloggers Alan and Annabel for discussion of Iain Banks’s work. I expect I’ll chip in there periodically, but my personal reading project is for this blog: I plan to go through Banks’s books in order, at the rate of one a month (we’ll see how it goes, but that’s the plan for now) – which means it’s finally time for me to read The Wasp Factory.
I saw Iain Banks at Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2009, discussing his then-latest novel, Transition. His typically exuberant manner was very much at odds with the serious tone of the interviewer. I was reminded of this while reading The Wasp Factory because I started wondering how Banks’s debut might have seemed on its first publication back in 1984, how different it must surely have been compared with the rest of the literary scene at that time.
The Wasp Factory is narrated by the teenage Frank Cauldhame, who lives with his father on a remote Scottish island, and has a penchant for killing animals in inventive ways (he also killed three of his relatives when he was younger, but insists that was “just a phase”). The attic of the Cauldhame house contains the titular Wasp Factory; we don’t find out exactly what the Factory is until late in the novel, but we do know that it speaks to him, is important to him – and we can guess that it’s not going to be pleasant. Most of the novel is an exploration of Frank’s life and world; but there is also the plot hook that Frank’s brother Eric has escaped from his hospital, and is heading back home; his telephone calls to Frank punctuate the novel as indications that a reckoning is on its way – and we can guess that that won’t be pleasant, either.
Read in 2013, there’s still power in the vividness of The Wasp Factory’s violence (hiding a snake in his younger brother Paul’s artificial leg is just one example of what Frank gets up to); but I find myself thinking that I can’t make it “new”. I wish I’d read this book when I was younger, because I wonder what I would have thought of it. It strikes me as the kind of novel that, if read at the right age or in the right context, could change a person.
The edition of The Wasp Factory that I read comes with an introduction by Banks (dated 2008) in which he says that he thought of himself (as I believe he still does) as a science fiction writer first and foremost, even as he was writing The Wasp Factory: “The island could be envisaged as a planet, Frank…almost as an alien”. That kind of sensibility – a desire to confront and explore strangeness – is apparent all the way through the novel: Frank has his own personal geography for the island (with locations named after significant moments in his life) and his own way of looking at the world; there’s a gap of understanding for the reader to bridge, just as with a science fiction story.
Frank’s world may be unknown to the reader, but Banks also shows how much Frank doesn’t know about himself, how much he’s trapped in his own belief system. The protagonist is keen to deride Eric as an oddball, but is at the same time unaware of how idiiosyncractic his own thought and behaviour patterns are. Frank is not even as much the lord and master of his own domain as he thinks he is, as revealed by the closing twist.
Ah yes, the twist. I already knew what that was, because an audience member at the Cheltenham talk blithely gave it away in her question (“Hope that doesn’t spoil it for anyone!” cried the author). I didn’t mind – I’m not so bothered about knowing endings these days as I used to be – and it did let me see how Banks builds up towards the revelation. But, as I discovered, I actually only knew half the twist, and it led to some oddly dissonant moments when I tried to apply what I thought I knew to what I was reading. Of course there’s part of me that’s curious to know how I’d have reacted if I’d known nothing about the ending; but I don’t wonder about this as much as I do the original reception – I find the journey of the novel more powerful than the destination.
So, now I’ve read The Wasp Factory, what is my sense of the start of Banks’s career? From this remove, his debut feels like a prelude, but one with the promise of great things to come. I believe that the next two novels, Walking on Glass and The Bridge, are among Banks’s most highly regarded works; I’m glad to have embarked on this project, and am excited about its next stages.
Arthur C. Clarke Award 2013: The Shortlist
You can’t predict the Clarke Award, though you can try. Whatever anyone may have predicted, it almost certainly won’t have been the actual shortlist, which was announced this morning:
- Nod by Adrian Barnes (Bluemoose)
- Dark Eden by Chris Beckett (Corvus)
- Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway (William Heinemann)
- The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (Headline)
- Intrusion by Ken MacLeod (Orbit)
- 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
(Links above go to my reviews.)
In the end, I guessed four correctly – though, as Nina Allan points out, the two books I missed have given the actual shortlist a rather different shape. I have also read four of these novels already; so I can say with some certainty that, on its own terms, this is a good shortlist featuring some strong works.
Still, there is no getting away from the fact that this an all-male shortlist, the Clarke’s first since 1988. As Niall Harrison says, this is something that was probably bound to happen sooner or later. There’s been a chronic lack of science fiction by women published by UK genre imprints these last few years; if you look at this year’s Clarke submissions, the titles by women tend to be borderline fantasy (such as G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen), YA (such as Juliana Baggott’s Pure) or mainstream-published (such as Juli Zeh’s The Method) – all categories which are far more hit-and-miss in terms of their shortlisting chances than (say) a Tricia Sullivan or a Gwyneth Jones (neither of whom, I believe, has a UK publishing contract at the moment). When we look for genre sf among this year’s submissions, we’re looking at something like Madeline Ashby’s vN, which is simply not a good book – and, if you don’t have strong core-genre candidate titles, there’s more likelihood that the fringe titles with more hit-and-miss chances will – well, miss.
This situation should change next year, as there’s a substantially larger amount of genre sf by women being published in the UK in 2013 (Niall has a good list in his post). So, what of the books actually shortlisted this year?
For me, the shortlist falls interestingly into two halves. First, there are three genre titles – the Beckett, MacLeod and Robinson. It is notable that these books also featured on the shortlist for the (popular-vote) BSFA Award; and notable in turn that the Clarke omits the other two BSFA nominees – no M. John Harrison, no Adam Roberts. So there is a sense in which this side of the shortlist is playing it safe to an extent; Robinson, Beckett and MacLeod are all good writers who are serious about their work and the possibilities of science fiction (and I think two nominees of theirs that I’ve read deserve their places on the shortlist) – but all write firmly within the core of genre.
This is so striking to me because the other three shortlisted novels are all non-genre – an unusually high proportion for the Clarke, especially in recent years. There’s also an interesting range of flavours amongst them. It’s nice to see Harkaway getting some Clarke recognition after he missed out with The Gone-Away World; he’s a distinctive and significant new voice in contemporary fiction, I think. I’m pleased that Nod is on the list, because it hasn’t had much attention from the sf community as yet, and I think it’s an intriguing book that could have good cross-over appeal. I don’t know much about the Heller, but it looks like the most traditionally “mainstream” Clarke nominee, and I didn’t have it down as a contender.
Finally, my plans for blogging the shortlist: though I’ve read four of the titles, I have reviewed only three – I never got around to writing up Dark Eden. I’ll be concentrating on reading and reviewing the two unfamiliar titles,which are 2312 and The Dog Stars; if time allows, I will go back to Dark Eden. But I’m fully intending to have at least read all six titles by the announcement of the winner on 1 May.
Bookish travels
I’ve been away these last few days, and now it’s time for a catch-up. Last week was the third annual Penguin General Bloggers’ Evening, when a bunch of book bloggers and vloggers gathered together at Foyles in London to hear eight of Penguin’s authors read from their latest books.
My favourite reading of the night came from Bernardine Evaristo, who read a hilarious passage from her forthcoming novel Mr Loverman. This was one of those rare occasions when a single short reading was enough to make me want to read everything an author had written – Evaristo was that good. It was also a pleasure to hear Mohsin Hamid read from How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia; I liked the book anyway, but Hamid was an excellent reader who brought it to life for me once again.
Other highlights from the evening included James Robertson’s ominous extract from The Professor of Truth; Jonathan Coe’s amusing scene from Expo 58; and Joanna Rossiter reading the opening of The Sea Change, a book that I already wanted to read, and am now looking forward to reading even more.
***
Then, at the weekend, it was off to Bradford for this year’s Eastercon. It was good to catch up with people like Kev McVeigh and Ian Sales; to have a proper chat with Nina Allan and Chris Priest; and to meet new people, such as Anne Sudworth (who paints the most wonderful pictures) and Stephanie Saulter (whose debut novel Gemsigns sounds interesting).
I was particularly pleased to take part in the “Best Books of 2012” panel, where a group of us recommended some favourite reads from last year. I went for Karen Lord’s Redemption in Indigo; Lucy Wood’s Diving Belles; and Adam Roberts’s Jack Glass – and I was able to sneak in a bonus mention of Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child during the audience questions. I picked up a couple of recommendations myself from the rest of the panel: I’ve read Frances Hardinge before, but her latest sounds interesting; and I’m coming to think I should try something by Chuck Wendig.
The BSFA Awards were also announced during the weekend:
- Best Novel: Jack Glass by Adam Roberts
- Best Short Fiction: ‘Adrift on the Sea of Rains’ by Ian Sales
- Best Non-Fiction: The World SF Blog, edited by Lavie Tidhar
- Best Artwork: Cover of Jack Glass, by Blacksheep
That’s a fine list of winners, a real vote of confidence in people who are concerned for the vitality of science fiction.
Now Eastercon is over for another year, and it’s back to reading (for the time being – I’ll be at the World Fantasy Convention this autumn, for instance). Now my attention turns to the Clarke Award, whose shortlist is announced in a couple of days. And it goes on…
Bookmunch’d: Alejandro Zambra and Sayed Kashua
Two recent reviews from Bookmunch:
Alejandro Zambra, Ways of Going Home (2011/3)
Chile, 1985: as the neighbourhood gathers to shelter from an earthquake, a nine-year-old boy strikes up a sort of friendship with Claudia, the twelve-year-old niece of his neighbour Raúl. Claudia asks the boy to keep an eye on her uncle, and so he does – soon discovering that Raúl has frequent rendezvous with a mysterious woman. But no sooner has the boy prepared to reveal all to Claudia than she relieves him of his duties, and moves away.
This narrative then breaks off, and we meet a (similarly nameless) writer in the present day, who is apparently writing the noel we have been reading. He’s struggling to find his place in life, beset by a nagging feeling that his parents wrote the novel of the world, leaving his generation as “secondary characters”. The doubts and tensions raised by this feeling work their way into the writer’s novel, and this project becomes his focus – if he can get the novel right, maybe life will follow. We then return to the ‘fiction’ as, twenty years on, the boy-turned-man meets Claudia once more, and learns the truth.
Alejandro Zambra’s third novel (translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell) thus sets up a parallel between its two storylines. The young boy’s inability to grasp the realities behind adult interactions is nicely handled (as in the scene where he sees his father and Raúl talking about what he assumes to be “solitude”, but is presumably “solidarity”), as is his older self’s reaction to learning what was really going on in his childhood. But the two sides of the novel don’t quite seem to gel: the writer storyline doesn’t reach as far into its themes, which unbalances the book as a whole.
Any Cop? It’s a mixed bag. One half of the novel is good, but the other doesn’t quite match up to it.
Sayed Kashua, Exposure (2010/2)
Exposure is the story (translated from the Hebrew by Mitch Ginsburg) of two unnamed Arab citizens of Israel, both living in Jerusalem. One is a successful lawyer, who has made his wealth working on behalf of resident Arabs who are not citizens; his status gives him an informal, but valuable authority:
Without [Israeli Arab professionals]who would represent the residents of east Jerusalem and the surrounding villages in the Hebrew-speaking courts and tax authorities…Many of the locals preferred to be represented by someone who was a citizen of the state of Israel… Somehow, in the eyes of the locals, the Arab citizens of Israel were considered to be half-Jewish.
One day, on a whim, he buys a novel from the second-hand book store, and finds tucked inside it a love letter, unmistakably in his wife’s handwriting. The volume is inscribed “Yonatan”, and the lawyer becomes consumed with the question of who this unknown suitor might be.
Sayed Kashua’s second protagonist has been rather less lucky in life: he’s a social worker, whom we first meet as he’s burying the 28-year-old Yonatan. We discover that Yonatan had been in a coma, and the social worker had taken on the job of minding him at night – a thankless task, but also a relatively straightforward source of income that the social worker welcomed. Looking after Yonatan also gave him something else: the opportunity to assume the Jewish man’s identity when registering on a photography course.
Exposure works best as a study of identity, and how it may be used and abused. Both protagonists operate at the boundary between Arab and Jewish identities: the lawyer acts as an intermediary between the two; the social worker becomes able to cross from one to the other. The comatose Yonatan becomes an anonymous canvas on which both men can project an identity: the lawyer creates a target for his jealous hatred, while social worker reinvents himself.
Kashua’s novel is not quite so successful in terms of plot, though. There are a couple of coincidences too many for it to satisfy as a mystery; and when the two men’s stories finally converge, it doesn’t seem to add much. Whatever the destination, though, the journey is worth it.
Any Cop?: As a study of character and issues, certainly; as a mystery story, less so.
“To leverage is to be immortal”
Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013)
It’s been a good few years since I read The Reluctant Fundamentalist, but I can still recall the experience quite vividly. What lingers most in my memory, though, more so than any details of the plot, is the way it is told: that measured, reasonable voice telling its story to a stranger at a Lahore café. Mohsin Hamid’s new novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, is also framed as a text directly addressed to someone, but the roles are reversed: the teller is the anonymous figure, and the addressee is the protagonist. Hamid’s marvellous control of voice remains, however.
Hamid’s unnamed protagonist, the ‘you’ of the novel, is a boy born into poverty who, from the first, is presented as someone who wants to get on in life:
Your anguish is the anguish of a boy whose chocolate has been taken away, whose remote controls are out of batteries, whose scooter is busted, whose new sneakers have been stolen. This is all the more remarkable since you’ve never in your life seen any of these things. (p. 4)
He has a general desire for something that he cannot name, but it’s something beyond the life’s basic needs. He does indeed get there eventually, through hard work and no small amount of pragmatism: the boy’s background denies him access to the little privileges that would make university life smoother, so he gains power by joining a political group – and leaves again when the time is right; later, he spots a business opportunity in the shape of bottled water, and it is with this that he ultimately makes his fortune.
Pragmatism, it seems to me, is a theme running through the entire book; at various levels, we see characters doing what they need to make the best of their situation. When the boy is born, his father is at first reluctant to move the family from the village to the city, but is eventually persuaded that it’s the thing to do. A video retailer has equipment in the back for making bespoke pirate DVDs, as he finds it’s the best way to meet the demands of his customers. As more and more people take advantage of good fortune, there has emerged “a hypertrophying middle class, bulging from the otherwise scrawny body of the population like a teenager’s overdeveloped bicep” (p. 150).
There’s a certain sense of unease about that image I’ve just quoted, and it’s one of several points in Hamid’s novel to give a feeling that not all is rosy. The text is framed as being a self-help book, but its narrator is quick to point out the limitations of such books. The terms ‘filthy rich’ and ‘rising Asia’ are used so repetitively that they start to lose real meaning – suggesting, perhaps, that there’s no such thing as an easy fortune, and that maybe ‘rising Asia’ isn’t necessarily rising for everyone. And, for all that he eventually gains, there’s a sense that the boy never quite has what he truly wants.
What he wants is represented by a pretty girl he first meets as a teenager, and again at various points during their lives, when she has become a model, and afterwards (whatever her age, she is always ‘the pretty girl’ to him). It’s not (quite) that he wants her for a lover and she’s unattainable – they sleep together more than once, but that doesn’t blossom into a relationship – it’s that she symbolises a different path in life, one where he might have followed his heart rather than pursuing wealth. The tension of conflicting goals is perhaps one of the defining characteristics of his life.
Hamid’s use of the second person, and his keeping the protagonist essentially anonymous, despite taking us through the man’s life results in an interesting effect, as the character is by turns brought closer to us and pushed further away. But the prose, and the brisk pace the author sets, make the events of his protagonist’s life leap from the page. We end up with a whirlwind tour of a society, refracted through the experience of one individual. So that’s another Mohsin Hamid novel I can’t imagine forgetting.
Guessing the Clarke Award shortlist
Let me point you towards a couple of excellent posts discussing this year’s potential Clarke Award nominees, by Nina Allan and Niall Harrison (the latter with a substantial comment thread, including some thoughts from me).
I’ve been struggling to come up with my own guess at the Clarke shortlist this year, because there are many titles which seem to me equally plausible candidates (not necessarily equal in terms of quality, but in terms of whether I could instinctively imagine their being shortlisted), and I’m honestly not sure how to choose between them. For that reason (and because I don’t have as much spare time at the moment as I’d wish), I’m not going to go into detail about my thoughts.
But here is an approximation of what I think the 2013 Clarke shortlist may look like:
- vN by Madeline Ashby
- Dark Eden by Chris Beckett
- Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway
- Intrusion by Ken MacLeod
- Jack Glass by Adam Roberts
- 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
And my preferred shortlist would look something like this:
- Nod by Adrian Barnes
- Empty Space by M. John Harrison
- Intrusion by Ken MacLeod
- Jack Glass by Adam Roberts
- The Explorer by James Smythe
- The Method by Juli Zeh
The shortlist will be revealed on Thursday 4 April, with the winner to be announced on Wednesday 1 May.
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