Category: Authors

One by Conrad Williams (2009)

11th June 2009 / / 2 Comments

Conrad Williams‘ The Unblemished was one of my favourite books of 2008; sadly, his new novel, One, doesn’t reach the heights of that earlier work — but it’s an interesting read with some very fine moments nevertheless.

The novel is divided into two distinct parts. In the first, ‘Births, Deaths and Marriages’, Richard Jane is a saturation diver working on an oil platform off the coast of Aberdeen, when the apocalypse occurs. Eventually making his way back to land, Jane’s only thought is to travel to London in the hopes of finding his young son, Stanley. He sets off, gaining along the way a number of fellow-survivors as companions, notably a hospital radiologist named Becky, and a five-year-old boy named Aidan. After the requisite trials and tribulations, the party reaches London, and the first part ends. The novel’s second part, ‘Lazarus Taxon’, takes place ten years later. Jane still hasn’t found Stanley, but he is now part of a group of survivors in the capital who call themselves the Shaded (because some form of shade, or depth, is what apparently saved them from the disaster). They have to contend with not only the pitfalls one might imagine would be found in a collapsed society, but also with something unimaginable — the Skinners. These are creatures grown from the spores that came with the apocalyptic ‘Event’, spores that invaded the bodies of the dead, distorted and animated them. Even a minor wound could turn you into one of them. There are rumours of a raft floating off the Kent coast, built by scientists and waiting to rescue people. Is it true? And what rescue could there be in this world anyway?

One is the kind of work which makes plain that genre distinctions (in this case, science fiction and horror) are ultimately limiting and artificial. There is a scientific underpinning to the ‘Event’, but it’s never explained in the story itself; Williams’ acknowledgements page refers to gamma ray bursts, so one assumes that’s what did for us here. But Williams is noted as an author of ‘dark fiction’, and his novel is tilted firmly towards that end of the spectrum; which, I think, is just as it should be — after all, if the average person got caught up in the aftermath of an apocalypse, they probably wouldn’t understand what had happened; and what wouldn’t matter nearly as much as what next? There are also scenes of great horror and carnage, that one is wary of visualising, in case they turn out to be even more horrifying in the mind’s eye than they are on the page. But this too is appropriate: One is horror because its subject is horrific, because there could be no response to what happens other than horror. Williams is not a writer of gore for gore’s sake; he understands the gravity of horror, and makes one feel its pull.

What I particularly like about One is that it’s intensely personal, despite the vastness of its backdrop; the novel is very much about relationships and character, and especially those of Richard Jane. There’s a pleasing complexity to his depiction; he’s not a straightforward heroic figure, but can decry selfishness in others whilst at the same time being willing to put his search for Stanley ahead of anything else (and if he’s doing this for his son, is it selfish or not?). Making Jane a diver was an interesting choice on the author’s part, as it automatically generates a certain amount of difference. It’s not just that the image of Jane wandering through the devastated landscape in his protective gear makes him seem like an astronaut exploring an alien world. It’s that being a diver (according to the novel) changes you, subjects you to pressures (figurative and literal) that others don’t experience, involves being away from home and in isolation for long periods, could lead to sights that others would never see (like the bends: ‘All the limbs withdrawn into an impossible core of pain. The welter of blood at every orifice, fizzing bright red. Bubbles opening in the jelly of the eyes’). The demands of his profession have driven a wedge between Richard and his (now ex-)wife Cherry; and Williams skilfully shows the thoughts and feelings of both parties, even as he writes only from Richard’s viewpoint — and the author is just as adept at writing about the personal as he is at depicting epic disaster.

Of the novel’s two parts, I think the first is the better: what could have been just a repetitive trudge through lists of examples of destruction and scavenged foodstuffs (I did wonder how long it would really be possible to survive in such an environment without proper medical facilities, having to travel mostly on foot and live off whatever tinned food you could find — but the strength of the telling soon put such concerns to one side), instead gains genuine power, most especially from Williams’ ability to evoke the reality of the situation, the sense that, whether or not Jane succeeds in attaining his goal, there can be no lasting escape.

The second part of One is still good but, as it’s necessarily more fantastical, it doesn’t have quite the same resonance — it doesn’t allow one to feel that this is how the world could become, not in the way that the first part does. Still, Williams once again creates that profound sense of unease which is the true affect of horror — an affect born not from blood and guts, but from the utter and irrevocable destruction of what we know. And the ending (which I’ll admit I didn’t fully comprehend) returns to the personal — which seems entirely appropriate for this very human view of world’s end.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl (2006)

4th June 2009 / / 1 Comment

Blue van Meer has lived a peripatetic existence with her father Gareth, a professor of political science (her mother having died in a car accident several years previously), until her senior year of high school, when he deigns to let the two of them stay in the same town for the whole year. At her new school, Blue becomes drawn into the world of the glamorous, captivating film studies teacher, Hannah Schneider; and the select circle of students, nicknamed the Bluebloods, whom Hannah keeps close. Then, on a camping trip later that year, Blue finds Hannah’s body hanging from a tree — apparently suicide, but could it have been murder? What Blue discovers subsequently may draw into question everything she thought she knew. This is her story, in her own words.

I had never heard of Special Topics in Calamity Physics before seeing it in a bookshop on holiday, but it seems that it caused quite a stir on publication, being lauded as the startling debut of a young, talented author. I’ll be honest and say that I was half expecting the book to be insufferably pretentious — and, in some ways, it does try one’s patience. But it’s actually quite fun to read once you get into it; and there is much to admire within — which may be the novel’s main problem: plenty to admire, but less that’s easy to truly love.

First, the prose. Blue van Meer is a very bookish girl — very bookish, and it shows in the volume she has ‘written’. All the chapters are named after books, the text is full of quotations from books (many of which, in keeping with the novel’s playfulness, have been made up by Pessl — even one of the chapter-title books exists only in the pages of Special Topics), and Blue has a habit of making comparisons by referring readers elsewhere: ‘Jade was the terrifying beauty (see “Tawny Eagle”, Magnificent Birds of Prey, George, 1993)’. Pessl also writes Blue as tending to overdescribe and digress; in short, the narrative voice is full of quirks that become wearying over 500 pages… but not as much as you might think. If these quirks get tedious, they’re quite easily ignored; and for the most part, they make the book sparkle.

What’s less easily ignored is the voice of Gareth van Meer. We often get to hear what he thinks of this or that (he’s usually critical), in his pompous drone that makes one feel almost like tuning into some mindless, lowest-common-denominator TV show, just out of spite. Blue does come to question whether all her father’s ideas are as right as they appear; but that doesn’t stop his interjections dragging the book down. A bigger problem, though, is that, for all Pessl’s undoubted verbal dexterity, she comes up with some real clunkers. I like some of her insights and images, such as ‘Dad picked up women the way certain wool pants can’t help but pick up lint’; more often, though, we get lines like ‘[a] gold, five-tiered chandelier at the center of the room hung like an upside-down duchess shamelessly exposing to the paying public her ankle boots and froufrou petticoat’. It works insofar as you can see what the author means; but it doesn’t half feel awkward.

Moving on from the prose, the characterisation in Special Topics is an interesting issue. I’ve read an interview with Marisha Pessl in which she says she deliberately wrote the novel to be ‘larger than life’, and this it certainly is. Would any teenager be as immersed in books as Blue van Meer, or as beuatiful as the Bluebloods? Would any teacher be as extraordinary as Hannah Schneider, or any academic as relentlessly intellectual as Gareth van Meer? Probably not, but then again… I remember how adult some sixteen-year-olds semed to me when I started high school; and I’ve encountered my share of people who seemed as remarkable as Hannah Schneider does. They might not have been so in real life, but that’s what these characters are like: not real people, but mental images of people viewed at a distance — not how they might really be, but how one could imagine them to be.

Of course, there’s a trade-off associated with larger-than-life characters, which is that the author has to work harder to make us care about them. It’s a task that Pessl doesn’t always succeed in: for example, a scene where Blue confronts her father, and ends up throwing books at him, ought to be one of the most emotionally charged in the book; but Blue lists every single book she throws (complete with author and year of publication), and it comes across as absurd. So, although it’s possible to make real people in one’s mind out of these extraordinary characters, and it’s possible to see Blue in particular learn, grow and make mistakes; one has to dig pretty deep to be able to do so.

And then there’s the plot. Special Topics is very cleverly plotted, with many apparently incidental details brought back and reinterpreted in the final act. The trouble is, the solution to the mystery hinges on information not known to the reader in advance — information that, moreover, is entirely fictional in nature. There’s absolutely no chance of ‘playing along’, no feeling of ‘I wish I’d noticed that’, because you could never have noticed. It’s like watching someone else completing a difficult jigsaw puzzle, rather than being involved yourself.

So, as I said at the beginning: there’s plenty to admire here, but not so much of what can bring a book close to my heart. It’s possible to admire Pessl’s ability to make words dance, but not necessarily what she says with them. It’s possible to admire her depiction of extraordinary characters, but less easy to fully care about them. It’s possible to admire her ability to construct a detective puzzle, but not necessarily to enjoy that puzzle. In the end, I like Special Topics in Calamity Physics, but I don’t love it. It will, however, be interesting to see what Pessl writes next.

Replay by Ken Grimwood (1986)

4th June 2009 / / 4 Comments

Jeff Winston is 43, his life at a dead-end, when he dies suddenly — and wakes up back at college in 1963, with full knowledge of the intervening twenty-five years. He has the chance to create a better life for himself, and Jeff seizes the opportunity with gusto, placing bets and making investments that leave him a very wealthy young man. Jeff makes a hash of trying to impress his old wife this time around, and isn’t really keen on the heiress he eventually partners; but Jeff does love Gretchen, the daughter resulting from that relationship. So Jeff has pretty much made it — until he reaches the age of 43, dies at exactly the same moment, and returns to 1963, with the previous quarter-century erased from all reality, except in Jeff’s own memories.

And so the cycle repeats, with Jeff living out his life anew, able to remember each iteration but not to make any lasting change — until, in one ‘replay’ (as Jeff calls these iterations), the anomaly of a blockbuster movie he’s never heard of before leads Jeff to Pamela Phillips, the film’s maker and a fellow replayer. Perhaps inevitably, as the only two who know (or could ever understand) what the other is going through, they fall in love. But they discover a pressing issue: the beginnings of each replay are becoming ‘skewed’; though the moment of death for both Jeff and Pamela remains the same, the time their awarenesses return to is growing later and later — so much so that they may only have a handful of replays left.

I came to Replay with a certain amount of anticipation: it won the World Fantasy Award, and was reprinted in Gollancz’s Fantasy Masterworks series a few years ago, so clearly it had a high reputation. There was also the general sense of apprehension one often has on reading a ‘classic’ (even one that’s only twenty years old), wondering if it will stand the tests of time and of familiarity with its themes. Well, there was no need to be concerned this time — Replay is a wonderful book that deserves all the praise it has been given.

It’s important to say first what Replay is and isn’t about: it’s a time travel story, but not one about time travel per se; Grimwood attempts no real explanation of why the replays are happening. Rather, he is much more interested in the emotional ramifications of the premise on his characters, and it’s here that the novel really shines. Each replay is different, as Jeff chooses different paths through his life; and these never feel arbitrary — there’s a logic to their progression. He starts off, as one might in his situation, using his knowledge of the future to improve his lot materially. Then he moves to trying (unsuccessfully) to change history for the better; learning from his first replay to create greater contentment in his second; descending into hedonistic nihilism in the third when it becomes clear that nothing he does will last; and so on. And it rings true at every stage.

The interplay between Jeff and Pamela also changes subtly each time they meet, as their different experiences change them; and this too remains believeable throughout. There’s a moment towards the end that particularly made me smile (I’ll not elaborate on it, to preserve the effect), when Pamela reacts to Jeff in a way he isn’t expecting; and, as readers, we can see the matter from both sides — and have sympathy for both characters. The final position of the protagonists’ relationship is also unexpected and yet, with hindsight, is probably just as it would be in reality. It’s this emotional authenticity that makes Replay such a joy to read.

Something else that makes Replay a joy is the way it’s written — not so much individual nuggets of prose (though it has its share of them, such as the passage describing what goes through Jeff’s mind as he dies for the first time), as the way the novel is structured, and its general tone. There are a few times when the book gets tedious (Jeff’s hedonistic period drags in particular); but, generally, Grimwood knows exactly when to throw something new into the mix to move the story forward, whether it’s Jeff’s discovery of other replayers, or… well, find out for yourself. There’s also a very welcome lightness of tone to the book — not an absence of seriousness, but an energy to the telling. One useful function of this is to stop this moral tale feeling too preachy. There were a few a moments when I felt that Grimwood-the-author was lecturing me-the-reader, but they are few; even the ending, with its moral of ‘make the most of the life you have’, doesn’t really feel didactic, because the story has made the case for that viewpoint so persuasively.

Apparently Grimwood was working on a sequel to Replay when he died (at the sadly young age of 59). I’m ambivalent towards the idea of a second book: on the one hand, if he could have made it as good as this, I would love to find out what he had planned. On the other hand, Replay is fine as it is, needs no embellishments, and deservedly puts its author’s name down in history as one of the greats. Replay was not the first text to examine the question ‘what if you could live your life again?’, and it certainly wasn’t the last — but, in its elegance and eloquence, it must surely be one of the best.

BOOK REVIEW: The Little Sleep by Paul Tremblay (2009)

24th May 2009 / / 0 Comments

A detective novel with a narcoleptic PI. Sounds gimmicky, I know, but Tremblay mostly (though not entirely) avoids the pitfalls that might be associated with that device. The prose and narrative voice are great, the plot less so; which is why I gave the book 3 stars over at The Zone.

Read the review in full here.

Mars in their Eyes by Colin Pillinger (2006)

14th May 2009 / / 0 Comments

One of those serendipitous finds I had in a charity book sale, this is the catalogue for an exhibition at the Cartoon Museum a few years ago. ‘Scientists are human too and enjoy a laugh as much as anybody, even if it is at their own expense,’ says Colin Pillinger in his introductory note, and I suppose he needed a sense of humour more than most.

I was surprised and impressed by the range of different kinds of Mars-themed cartoons on display here: there are political cartoons, cartoons about the search for alien life, cartoons about scientists, about missions to Mars (including, naturally, plenty concerning the ill-fated Beagle 2).Some of my favourites include Martians hurriedly scrawling ‘H.G. Wells Was Here’ on a rock before a satellite looks their way; a scientist taking great pains to stress the tentative nature of the evidence they’ve foudn that suggests there might have been life on Mars in the astronmically distant past — which has journalists screaming, ‘We’re not alone!’; and the Martian cup final being interrupted by the crash-landing space-probe that those hooligans from Earth sent up.

The cartoons are organised into chapters (some themed more loosely than others), each of which begins with a selection of facts about Mars and our exploration of the planet. Each cartoon also has its own piece of commentary by Pillinger; some of these are linked more tenuously than others, and the ‘flow’ between commentaries can feel disjointed at times.

But the cartoons make me wish I’d seen the exhibition; and Pillinger is a passionate and persuasive advocate of space exploration. His closing words ring true: ‘we should not discourage our children from asking difficult questions.’ And the cartoon accompanying this? Father-and-son aliens stand alone on a barren rocky world, looking up at the stars. The son asks, ‘Dad, do you think there’s life on other planets?’ ‘I dunno,’ comes the reply.

Clarke Award Winner

29th April 2009 / / 0 Comments

Well, I only got through two-and-a-bit of the Clarke Award shortlist, which is far from what I intended, but life intervened. Anyway, the winner has been announced, and (gleaned from Torque Control), the 2009 Arthur C. Clarke Award goes to… Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod.

As it happens, this was one of the books I did blog about; you can read what I thought about it over here. I liked it, though I felt it had enough flaws that it didn’t really strike me as ‘award-winning’. Nevertheless, I am pleased to see it win — particularly because a small press book (in this case, one from PS Publishing) has won such a high-profile award (though I must admit, I don’t really follow awards, and this may happen more often than I think it does).

Anyway, the night belongs to Ian MacLeod, so congratulations to him and all concerned!

Clarke Award: Martin Martin’s on the Other Side by Mark Wernham (2008)

17th April 2009 / / 2 Comments

I’ve had to make a decision: what to do if I find one of the Clarke nominees unbearable. Do I carry on to the end (I have undertaken to read and blog about these books, after all) or not? I’ve decided not, as I got through 70 pages of Martin Martin’s on the Other Side, and really couldn’t face the other 230. If that invalidates the whole process, so be it — but I will explain myself.

I didn’t get far enough in to gain a full understanding of the plot, but this is what I can gather. Perhaps a hundred years hence, our ‘hero,’ Jensen Interceptor, is a consumer researcher for the government (such research now being an official undertaking, as the authorities issue personalised money-off vouchers). He’s is sent to interview a man named Reg, whose answers suggest he is not toeing the line sufficiently. This leads to Jensen being recruited as a spy to investigate Reg, whom, it transpires, is involved with a group called the Martin Martinists.

That’s about where I got up to, but I gather that Martin Martin was a TV psychic from the early 21st century, who (his cultists believe) really was psychic, and whose death (again, so they believe) derailed the progress of society. There’s some stuff about Martin Martin seeming to come back from the dead, or something like that (apologies for the vagueness, but I would have to have read further to be able to be more specific).

Why, then, did I feel the need to abandon this book? Could it be because of a narrative voice like this:

What you’re about to read is all tru. The incomplete truth is tru, innit? Geddit? Ha ha ha.

I’d quote more, but it’s annoying me already. Actually, it’s not because of this, not entirely; though Jensen’s voice is certainly difficult to tolerate (and I wasn’t overly keen either on Mark Wernham’s narrative voice in the prologue, which seems to rely too heavily on long lists of details). But the whole point is that we’re supposed to find Jensen and his world repugnant.

I think the real trouble is that the author doesn’t make it worthwhile persevering. Wernham labours some of his points into the ground through repetition, and I didn’t find his satire all that great. True, some is quite subtle (such as Jensen’s concern for his score on the entrance exams for his new job, rather than for how much he learns); but I found other ideas unconvincing — for example, people in this future are born with a ‘Life Debt’, and receive payments for that instead of a monthly salary. It’s an amusing idea, but I can’t see that it would ever work in practice, and that lessens its impact for me.

I hear there may be a kernel of a good book within Martin Martin’s on the Other Side, but I’m in no hurry to find out for myself.

‘Understand’ by Ted Chiang (1991)

1st April 2009 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been contributing to a discussion over at Torque Control about Ted Chiang’s BSFA- and Hugo-nominated story ‘Exhalation’, which I liked, but was not as enthusiastic about as some people, including the blog’s own Niall Harrison. ‘[F]or those who are less keen on “Exhalation”: how do you feel about “Understand“?’ Niall asked in the comments. I’ve answered him over there, but thought that a  longer post here would also be useful.

Ted Chiang, if the name is unfamiliar, is a science fiction writer who has published relatively little (eleven pieces of short fiction since 1990), but has nevertheless been very highly acclaimed. ‘Exhalation’ was my first encounter with Chiang’s work; the 1991 novelette ‘Understand’ was my second — and now I really begin to see the reason for all the acclaim.

A holographic designer named Leon Greco is revived from a deep coma by treatment with ‘hormone K’, which restores damaged neurons. An unexpected side-effect of the treatment is increased intelligence, with the increase in direct proportion to the amount of brain damage originally sustained. Leon’s brain damage was more severe than anyone else treated with hormone K; and, sure enough, he finds his intelligence growing to levels unprecedented in humanity. Presently, Leon starts to see the patterns underlying everything, and becomes able to do pretty much anything he wishes, including evading the authorities who see him as a danger to [insert name of your choice]. He is master of his self and his destiny — until he detects the presence of a comparable human intelligence…

It seems to me that Chiang set himself a remarkably difficult task with this story: to enable his readers imagine the unimaginable, and then to make doing so for an extended period feel worthwhile — it wouild be quite easy for a reader to turn around and say, ‘Okay, I understand that he’s working on projects entirely beyond my comprehension, so please can you stop trying to describe them, and move on?’ There’s no need for that here: Chiang gets the balance right, giving us enough to get a flavour of how Leon uses his new-found abilities, but not so much that it becomes tedious.

We also see how Leon’s intelligence changes him — subtly at first, then increasingly less so; from quite a sympathetic character to something nigh-on un- (or in-) human, motivated by only knowledge and aesthetics. As the story progresses and Leon makes new discoveries, there’s a constant momentum driving us forward and forward, until… BANG! And Chiang manages to keep it grounded; even the final showdown between Leon and his hyper-intelligent nemesis — which is, in a sense, two gods hurling thunderbolts at each other across mountains — has a vital air of authenticity (as much as it could ever have one!).

‘Understand’ also poses interesting moral questions. If it were possible to ‘grow out’ of normal human intelligence, would one also grow out of human morality? Would that even be desirable? Leon and his nemesis adhere to two different post-human moral frameworks, neither of which seem particularly good to me. But that’s my human morality talking.

In sum, I found much to think about in ‘Understand’, and much to enjoy. And I have another nine Ted Chiang stories to go yet.

Clarke Award: Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod (2008)

30th March 2009 / / 5 Comments

Hmm.

Ian MacLeod‘s Song of Time begins as Roushana Maitland, an aged concert violinist, finds an angelically beautiful young man washed up on the shore near her Cornish home. He has no memory of himself or his past, so Roushana calls him Adam, which becomes, in effect, his real name. She tells the young man stories from her life — memories of her childhood in Birmingham, of travelling to India with her mother to aid the victims of nuclear fallout, of her musical career in Paris. But there’s another point to these recollections (which alternate with present-tense passages depicting Roushana and Adam in Cornwall): Roushana is dying, but has a chance to preserve herself by ‘uploading’ her memories to a crystal implanted in her brain, which will enable her to enter a virtual ‘afterlife’ (wherein she will still be able to interact with the world, albeit non-corporeally). And, of course, Adam has a secret — but so does Roushana.

My journey through Song of Time was a strange one. For the first third, I found the book very moving; I was feeling the emotions while bypassing the words, which doesn’t happen very often. But the remainder of the novel was much less affecting — apart, that is, from the final pages. Much of that opening third details Roushana’s early life, when she was merely a good musician, overshadowed by her brilliant brother Leo. But Leo had contracted ‘white plague’, an engineered virus that caused multiple food intolerances, and did not have long to live. It’s this early part, laced with tragedy, where I found MacLeod’s writing to be particularly evocative and poignant. For example:

‘All I remember is being summoned from lessons at school just before lunch, and finding Mum sitting waitinf for me on the sofa in the head teacher’s office, her face white and entirely blank. The head seemed embarrassed, and mumbled that it was probably better if she left us both alone.’

So what happens to the emotional impact later on? What changes? In a way, nothing — what happens is that, as the story moves on, something comes to the foreground that had been niggling me from early on. It gives rise to my main problem with Song of Time: that I don’t buy into the future presented by the book. Throughout, the prose style is quiet and reflective; this is appropriate, given the nature of the story, but has the effect of ‘muffling’ the futuristic changes. So, when Roushana describes the more extreme weather of her childhood, we don’t feel that weather — it feels as though life carries on pretty much as it does now, however much the author suggests that it does not. And the Paris of her adult years does not feel as turbulent as the text says it is. Even Roushana’s Cornwall, in the closing years of the current century. has a timeless quality about it; only the sequences set in India don’t feel so distant.

But my credulity was most tested with the eruption in the novel of the Yellowstone supervolcano. I may be mistaken, but my understanding is that such an event would be disastrous for human civilisations the world over. Yet even the impact of this eruption, as depicted in the novel, did not feel as great to me as I thought it should. I had a hard time believing that the world of Roushana’s old age could emerge from that cataclysm, because in many ways it doesn’t feel all that different from our present.

The title Song of Time refers to part of a generative symphony that Roushana performs; music is one of the novel’s key themes, though I can’t really say much more about it — I don’t know enough about music to be able to judge what MacLeod does with the subject. But the book has another important theme, and that’s memory. ‘Memories are what you are,’ says the book, near the beginning. In the case of the dead, with their newly virtual existence, that’s literally true; in the case of Adam — well, he has no memories, so who is he?

And Roushana? Although the connection is never made explicitly in the novel, a life composed of memories could be seen as a ‘song of time’, one that can be changed and re-interpreted each time it’s rehearsed. Perhaps, in the end, Roushana is whatever she wants to remember — or be remembered as.

I may have given the impression here that I dislike Song of Time more than I actually do. It’s flawed, no doubt — but at its best, it is beautifully written and moving  (and, though I haven’t touched on this, the characters never rang false even though the world didn’t entirely convince me). In short, the good parts are very good indeed; I just wish there were more of them.

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