Category: Authors

“Took the end of the world to make us kings for a day”

21st April 2013 / / 3 Comments

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 Wasp Factory: Reading Iain Banks

10th April 2013 / / 3 Comments

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.

Bookmunch’d: Alejandro Zambra and Sayed Kashua

28th March 2013 / / 2 Comments

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”

25th March 2013 / / 7 Comments

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.

Books in brief: Mid-March

19th March 2013 / / 1 Comment

Manisha Jolie Amin, Dancing to the Flute (2012). Kalu is a poor boy whose life is changed when a healer overhears him make music with a rolled-up leaf, and offers the boy an apprenticeship with his musician brother. Kalu learns to play the flute, which will eventually take him from around the world. Amin’s novel is a celebration of music, which changes Kalu in more ways than one. But it also keeps an eye on the people left behind in Kalu’s village, and shows how even apparently ordinary lives may be transformed.

And, if you’d like to win a copy of Dancing to the Flute and three other books by women writers, the publisher is running a competition:

Easter-Women-Comp

Pascal Garnier, The A26 (1999/2013). Translated from the French by Melanie Florence. As the modern world encroaches in the form of a motorway, a brother and sister cling to 1945 in their cottage. Bernard is terminally ill, and develops a taste for killing in his final days. Yolande just stays at home in her own little world. This is a nicely creepy novella that leaves you unsure how everything will end, but almost certain that it’s going to be bad.

Elizabeth Fremantle, Queen’s Gambit (2013). A novel about the final years of Katherine Parr, beginning shortly before she enters Henry VIII’s court, and chronicling her marriage to the king and affections for Thomas Seymour. Fremantle examines the place of women at court, finding both opportunity and restriction: Katherine’s maid, Dot Fownten, can move up in the world, even find love. Katherine also gains status as queen, power as regent, and can pursue projects such as religious reform – but, as a woman, there are still limits on what society considers acceptable from her.

W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe (1982). This is an odd book, especially if you come to it cold, like I did (I knew it inspired Field of Dreams, but have never seen that film). The protagonist, farmer Ray Kinsella, hears a voice saying, “If you build it, he will come”; this inspires him to construct a baseball field – which brings the legendary baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson back to life. Ray then persuades J.D. Salinger to join him on a road trip in search of other faces from the sport’s past. Possibly you need to be into baseball to fully appreciate the novel, but there is quite some charm in its willful and direct strangeness.

Susann Pásztor, A Fabulous Liar (2010/13). Translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside. Joschi Molnár: raconteur, Holocaust survivor, late patriarch of a rather extensive family. On what would have been his hundredth birthday, various branches of Joschi’s family gather to work out just what may have been true out of all the stories he told about himself. Pásztor paints a careful portrait of a family forced to question even the most basic ‘facts’ they thought they knew, and examines the pros and cons of doing so.

Comparing Book Covers: UK vs US

17th March 2013 / / 7 Comments

I’m always fascinated by the differences in book covers between countries. The Millions runs an annual feature comparing US and UK cover art, and a similar post appeared on Flavorwire a few days ago. I’ve decided to do a cover post of my own, with some of the books I’ve featured on this blog.

(UK covers are on the left, US covers on the right; title links go to my reviews of the books, for context.)

Diving Belles – Lucy Wood

 dbuk  dbus

The UK cover indicates folklore and the sea; it’s nice enough, but feels perhaps a little too obvious. The US cover, I think, captures the deeper heart of the book – that mixture of domesticity and sinister magic; I especially love the way that the stairs shade into abstract geometry. Winner: US

The Buddha in the Attic – Julie Otsuka

 bauk  baus

Two broadly similar treatments here, with the red parasol as focus. I think the closed parasol in the case evokes the novel’s themes better. Winner: UK

Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry – B.S. Johnson

 cmuk  cmus

The covers of the most recent editions. There’s a simple elegance to both, but for me the disintegrating ledger is a little too literal, especially compared with the boldness of the UK cover. Winner: UK

The Longshot – Katie Kitamura

 lsuk  lsus

I like the composition of both these covers, but the image of the fighter and his trainer walking away makes it look as though their job is done. The clenched fists of the US cover evoke the tension and violence which are at the novel’s core. Winner: US

The Still Point – Amy Sackville

 spuk  spus

Oh, there’s no contest here: the paper cut-out look of the UK cover is gorgeous; the US cover doesn’t come close for me. Winner: UK

Redemption in Indigo – Karen Lord

 riuk  rius

The composition of the US cover is elegant, but I think the UK cover better evokes the tone of the book (tricksy-but-serious) . Winner: UK

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe – Charles Yu

 hluk  hlus

Hmm. Yu’s novel plays with the conventions of both sf and mainstream ‘literary fiction’, which is captured nicely by the UK cover, with its ordered arrangement of laser guns. But it’s also a playful novel, and that spirit is evoked by the US cover, made to look like an old manual, complete with ‘creased’ cover obscuring the publicity quotes. I can’t choose one over the other. Winner: it’s a draw.

Communion Town – Sam Thompson

 ctuk  ctus

I’m not sure either of these covers really captures the essence of Thompson’s book, but the UK one wins out for me as being more intriguing and distinctive., turning a map into abstract art. (Incidentally, this is the cover of the UK hardback; the paperback cover, like the US one, goes down the less-interesting ‘murky skyscraper’ route.) Winner: UK

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This – Robin Black

 iluk  ilus

Well, I don’t think the UK cover is very interesting at all. The US cover is not great, but the paint effect is a nice touch, and the title is used well within the composition. Winner: US

The Sisters Brothers – Patrick deWitt

 sbuk  sbus

Wow. What a difference in treatment. I love nigh on everything about the UK cover (it looks even better on the physical object). The US cover is too specific to suit the novel’s air of ambiguity, and just isn’t as well conceived as the more stylised version. Winner: UK

Success and secrets: Will Storr and Beatrice Hitchman

14th March 2013 / / 0 Comments

Will Storr, The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone (2013)
Beatrice Hitchman, Petite Mort (2013)

Killian Lone used to be one of the world’s greatest chefs (he tells us this from beyond the grave, so you can guess how well that turned out). His fascination with food began as a child, learning recipes from his Great-aunt Dorothy, one of whose ancestors was burnt at the stake for (it is said) producing food that drove people mad. Killian went on to study catering at college, and displayed such a rare talent that his teacher was able to land him a six-week placement at King, the restaurant of his idol, celebrity chef Max Mann – something unheard of for a lad of Killian’s background.

Max Mann had a reputation as the ‘Gentleman Chef’, who never let an apprentice go; Killian soon discovered why – Mann could wield silence where others might resort to threats. Just about the only bright spot amid the seemingly relentless hazing was Killian’s fellow-apprentice Kathryn, who would eventually become his wife. And Killian would go on to greater success as head chef of a rival kitchen, once he’d uncovered the true secret of his family’s cooking – but, like I said, you know how well it turned out…

Perhaps the scenes that most stand out most in Will Storr’s first novel are those depicting the ritual humiliation of Killian in the kitchens of King (such as the time Mann and his underling give Killian conflicting instructions over quality control, then alternately berate him for doing the ‘wrong’ thing). These scenes are excruciatingly vivid; Storr says in his closing note that they’re based on factual accounts, which only makes them seem more extraordinary. The author paints other emotions in similarly broad strokes, which can sometimes feel overly unsubtle (from the way Killian builds up his rosy preconception of Max Mann, it’s all too obvious that the chef will turn out to be a bastard), but is nevertheless always engaging.

But what really makes The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone shine for me is the way that Storr parses Killian’s ambition through his use of the Lone family secret. We’re so focused on the helping hand Killian gets that it takes a while to realise that he’s become like Max Mann. It’s a very effective way of showing someone being corrupted, unawares, when power goes to his head, because it puts the reader in the same position as Killian.

***

The protagonist of Petite Mort, Beatrice Hitchman’s debut, dreams of making it in another world whose outward glamour may mask a darker reality: the world of early cinema. Adèle Roux’s life changes in 1911, when she first sees a moving picture, and is caught by the allure of its female lead, known as Terpsichore – more than that, she wants to be her. Two years later, Adèle journeys from her provincial village to Paris, determined to become an actress; she does end up working for Pathé, but as a seamstress.

Yet, as we learn from a parallel plot-line, Adèle did indeed become a star, of sorts. In 1967, a journalist named Juliette Blanc seeks to interview her about her 1914 film Petite Mort, never seen and thought destroyed, until a print turned up with a scene missing. Back in the 1910s, we read, a special effects pioneer named André Durand plucked Adèle from her costuming work, gave her a job – and embarked on an affair with her. Adèle became the assistant of Durand’s wife:  none other than Terpsichore – and a ménage à trois soon develops.

Petite Mort is a novel of masks and secrets, whose protagonists have all been able to reinvent themselves: Adèle the village girl; André the boy from a Louisiana orphanage; Terpsichore the girl of noble birth, sent away at the age of six after being involved in a riding accident – each, to an extent, can leave their past behind in the film world. The theme of secrets carries through to the plot, which revolves around the mysterious print of Petite Mort. Hitchman juggles a good number of individual plot strands; but, whatever she’s writing about at any given point, the pages always demand to be turned.

Despite the hooks of the plot, though, the true heart of Petite Mort is perhaps the relationship between its three main characters As in Storr’s novel, we have a portrait of ambition and power, but this time mediated primarily through the changing balance of its characters’ relations. It’s a technique that leaves you wondering just how this will all end. Both of these books also leave me wondering where their authors will go next – and keen to find out.

Books in brief: early March

9th March 2013 / / 10 Comments

Lloyd Shepherd, The Poisoned Island (2013). Another Regency mystery for magistrate John Harriott and constable Charles Horton of the Thames river police, last seen in The English Monster. This time they’re investigating the strange deaths of crewmembers the Solander, recently returned from Tahiti, while an unidentified tree brought back on the ship grows rampant at Kew. As in the previous novel, there is an engaging subtext of transition and the tensions it brings – East London becoming a hub for trade; ideas of evidence-gathering changing the way crimes are investigated. The Poisoned Island is particularly alive to the fact that expeditions such as the Solander’s had a complex range of consequences, both positive and negative. Shepherd’s series is becoming something quite distinctive.

Birgit Vanderbeke, The Mussel Feast (1990/2013). Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch. The new Peirene Press novella depicts a revolution in microcosm. Shortly before the fall of the Berlin wall, a family sits down to welcome the father home from his business trip with a large pot of mussels for dinner. But the preparation is a lot of work for the mother, considering that she doesn’t like mussels herself – and especially considering that the father doesn’t even come home. Especially in the beginning, Vanderbeke uses repetition to emphasise how the family have become trapped in the same thought patterns. As the book progresses, we learn more of the father’s hypocrisy and the hold he has over the rest of his household – then we start to see them break away. It’s a wonderfully controlled piece of writing.

Chris Paling, A Town by the Sea (2005). A man wakes up on the beach, and wanders through a strange town whose inhabitants he can barely understand, as we gradually piece together something of his history. The set-up is intriguing, but it becomes frustratingly difficult to arrive at a satisfactory interpretation (even an uncertain one) of what’s happening. My best guess is that our man is a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and his journey in the book is an externalised working-through of his feelings of dislocation from life. The novel can be nicely atmospheric, but ultimately I think it’s rather too nebulous.

Jonathan Pinnock, Dot Dash (2012). This is a collection of flash fiction (‘dots’) and longer stories (‘dashes’). What brings them together so well is Pinnock’s wry wit, his knack for sharp twists and rueful endings. The dots are marvellously concentrated bursts of language – not just punchlines, but stories reduced to their essence in a few sentences. Among the dashes, we find a harrowing tale of memory loss told in reverse; a street artist taking poetic revenge on a corporate boss; a girl who tries to bring Cairo to her dying grandmother’s bedroom; and more. Lovely stuff.

James Wheatley, Magnificent Joe (2013). In north-east England, Jim works as a labourer, his plans for university having been cut short when he was arrested as a teenager after a fight went too far. Now he’s working with his old school friends and living in his old village, with no apparent prospect of change. But Jim has also become friends with Joe, a fifty-year-old learning- disabled man – Jim gives Joe a helping hand, and Joe reminds Jim that there’s more to life than his immediate circle. The events of the novel will disrupt both of their lives profoundly: seeing events from Jim’s viewpoint perhaps dilutes some of the impact of what happens to Joe, but Wheatley paints an interesting portrait of a stable situation disintegrating despite the best attempts to hold it together. Magnificent Joe is its author’s first novel, and leaves me wondering where he might go next.

“They’d never see it coming”

3rd March 2013 / / 10 Comments

Ken MacLeod, Intrusion (2012)

The thing about choice is, there are so many variables. In the future of Ken MacLeod’s Intrusion, there is a “free and social market” to give people a hand with all that choice. As the protagonist’s MP explains:

For the market to be really free, it has to work as if everyone involved had perfect information…This is where the social side comes from – the state…steps in to allow people to make the choices they would have made if they’d had that information. Because these are the really free choices (p. 147, italics in original).

This sort of pernicious rhetoric has pervaded government and society in the novel: licensed venues don’t allow music or swearing (“Creating a hostile environment,” p. 28); hand-delivering a letter to your MP is considered a possible act of terrorism (who knows what could be inside, and why didn’t you use the official channels?). It’s absurd, but this is the world in which MacLeod’s characters find themselves all the same.

The particular development which provides Intrusion’s impetus is a pill called “the fix”, which a pregnant woman can take to safely eliminate genetic defects from her developing baby. I say “can”, but talking the fix is on its way to becoming compulsory in England, unless you have a legitimate objection. Faith-based objections are fine, and there are various acceptable humanist justifications available; so more or less anyone who objects to taking the fix has a way out. No problems, eh?

No problems, that is, unless you don’t really have a reason for objecting to the fix – unless you simply don’t want to. This is the situation of Hope Morrison, expecting her second child, who can’t honestly commit to any of the stances that would permit her not to take the fix. The saying goes that nature abhors a vacuum, and the authorities in Intrusion abhor people like Hope, because they cannot put these individuals into boxes, and hence cannot understand them – and who knows what such people might do?

The main engine of Intrusion’s plot (particularly in its latter half) is the Morrison family’s attempt to escape London for a now-independent Scotland (where Hope’s husband Hugh was born) – but it is in MacLeod’s portrait of his future society that the novel shines most brightly. Several times, we see how the authorities cross-reference online traces and other seemingly-unremarkable points of data, and infer that someone might be a security risk – and the first they know of it is when the police come for them. This mirrors the novel’s sense that isolated bits of rhetoric have cohered invisibly to form the framework of government ideology; which can also be a net to trap the unwary, as Hope and other characters discover. The ending of Intrusion is also built on the idea of isolated details coming together unexpectedly, which is a satisfying touch.

Perhaps what’s most chilling about Intrusion is its quietness. As terrible as the society and events of MacLeod’s novel can be, its prose treats them largely as banal, which is quite fitting for the insidious way they’ve come about. Intrusion is likewise a book that creeps up on you – and stays there, just out of sight, waiting.

This book has been shortlisted for the 2013 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts on this year’s Award.

Books in brief: late February

27th February 2013 / / 0 Comments

Susannah Cahalan, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness (2012). Cahalan is a New York Post journalist who contracted a rare form of encephalitis which induced a period of mental illness. This book is her account of that time, reconstructed largely from secondary sources (Cahalan having been left with few memories of her illness). It’s an interesting story, ranging from the development of Cahalan’s symptoms, through her eventual diagnosis, to her trying to understand the illness as she recovers.

Anouk Markovits, I Am Forbidden  (2012). A novel chronicling fifty years in the lives of a Jewish family, beginning in a Hasidic community in Transylvania, and moving through Paris and England, and ending in New York. I appreciate its careful portrait of the pressures faced by its characters when their wishes clash with law and tradition; but I did find the book hard to engage with at times, and its latter stages felt overly compressed.

Bianca Zander, The Girl Below (2012). Suki returns to London after living in New Zealand for ten years, and finds herself out of place in even the most familiar surroundings. The job of minding an old friend’s teenage son gives Suki a chance to find her bearings once again – but she keeps having visions of her childhood, and an incident in an old air-raid shelter in the garden. That adds an intriguing and unexpected extra dimension to the story of Suki’s finding her place.

Hugh Aldersey-Wlliams, Anatomies (2013). I loved the idea of this book: a tour of the human body, taking in art and culture as well as science. It packs a lot in, from historical attempts to depict the body, to the physicality of dancing, to Shakespeare’s anatomical idioms. There is a lot of interesting material, but ultimately I think the book is that bit too diffuse: some chapters wander a little too far away from their named subject; some sections I just wish were longer. As a whole, Anatomies is okay, but it could do with more focus.

 

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