Category: Authors

Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death (2010)

18th July 2010 / / 3 Comments

This is the first time I have read any of Nnedi Okorafor’s work, and I suspect that what I’m about to write will not do justice to Who Fears Death. I suspect that I’ve seen only a fraction of what there is to see in the novel, but I’ll try to put my impressions into words nevertheless.

Some distance in the future, when disaster and the weight of centuries have turned our present time into echoes, a girl named Onyesonwu – ‘Who Fears Death’ – is born of violence, her Okeke mother raped by a Nuru man, as part of a concerted effort by the latter tribe to wipe out the former (Okorafor draws parallels in the book with the situation in present-day Sudan). Onyesonwu is thus Ewu, with sand-coloured skin and hair – a social outcast.

And there is something else which marks Onyesonwu out as different: she has powerful juju, of which shapeshifting is merely one of the first manifestations. This normally being the preserve of men, Onyesonwu has to push against multiple barriers in her desire to learn more. But learn she does and, in the course of doing so, discovers that her biological father, Daib, is himself a powerful sorcerer who wishes her dead. Onyesonwu resolves to take her revenge on the Nuru general, and sets out across the desert with a group of friends, and Mwita, the boy she loves – and finds that her reputation has preceded her.

There are many different aspects of Who Fears Death on which one could focus, but the one that stands out to me is the way in which it interrogates a standard literary template – namely, the  fantasy quest; I think Okorafor does that as thoroughly as China Miéville did in Perdido Street Station, albeit in a rather different way. The structure of Who Fears Death is superficially that of a quest fantasy – a band of companions crosses a landscape to defeat an antagonist intent on taking over the world of the book; there’s also a prophecy concerning the fate of the world, which could be fulfilled by either Onyesonwu or Daib – but the end result does not play out in the way one might typically expect of that form.

For example, Onyesonwu is not a straightforwardly ‘heroic’ protagonist: she is prone to anger, may at times be hated by her friends, and the use of her powers can result in death and destruction. The protagonist may actually be every bit as dangerous as her enemy. Though Who Fears Death tells of someone overcoming the obstacles to truly become herself, it’s a rite of passage that comes at great cost to Onyesonwu, those close to her, and the wider world.

Something else that particularly struck me about the novel is that Okorafor includes some aspects which would normally drive a fantasy novel straight off the rails for me (such as the exercise of mighty, world-changing magical powers), but which don’t seem so problematic in the context of Who Fears Death. I think there are several reasons why this is so, One is that the sorcery is very well woven into the fictional world; one accepts easily that this is how that world is. Furthermore, all this power does not come without consequence in the book: it may cause great pain, even when used for beneficial purposes; and there is often a price to be paid for the use of magic – and not always paid by Onyesonwu.

So, that’s what I took away most from Who Fears Death. Sampling some of the other online commentary on the book, it seems that others have found a range of things to talk about. To me, that’s a sign of a rich work of fiction; I’d recommend Who Fears Death as a book well worth reading.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of Who Fears Death: Matthew Cheney for Rain Taxi; Carol Cooper for The Village Voice; Zetta Brown for The New York Journal of Books.
Nnedi Okorafor’s website

Tim Davys, Amberville (2007/9)

16th July 2010 / / 6 Comments

This is the first book I’ve read for the Transworld Summer Reading Challenge; I thought I might start my posts on the challenge with a few words on why I selected the books I did. It’s quite straightforward with Amberville: anyone who reads this blog regularly will know that I have a soft spot for odd books, and this was the most obviously odd title on the list – a noir thriller with a cast of stuffed animals.

The story goes like this: Eric Bear has a happy life, married to the beautiful Emma Rabbit and with a good job in advertising. But, in his past, Eric was involved with some shady characters, one of whom now comes calling – Nicholas Dove, who has heard that his name is on the Death List, which means (if the tales are to be believed) that the Chauffeurs will shortly come to escort him on the ultimate one-way journey. Dove demands that Eric find the Death List and get his name removed from it, or Emma will be the one who pays the price. The job should be straightforward enough, because the Death List is just a fable; but Eric gets his old gang back together all the same – and, of course, the truth proves more complicated than anyone thought.

So, this Scandinavian crime novel (the author is Swedish; ‘Tim Davys’ is a pseudonym) is far from the norm, and could have been ridiculous – but it’s not. What is perhaps most striking about Amberville is that Davys tells his tale with a completely straight face; one might laugh briefly at the thought of, say, a stuffed dove walking around with two stuffed gorillas for heavies, but not for very long, because it’s not funny at all in the context of the story – it’s deadly serious. Davys creates his world with such integrity that one can’t help but take it seriously. His control of voice is also superb, switching between different characters whose voices are all distinctive, no matter how brief their turn at narration (and here, I must also acknowledge Paul Norlen’s excellent work as translator).

Driving the plot of Amberville is a mystery – is there a Death List, and, if so, who’s behind it? – which is deeper for reader s than it is for the characters, because we have more questions to ask: what is this place, Mollisan Town, inhabited by walking, talking, living stuffed animals? What goes on behind the scenes to make it all work (the inhabitants of Mollisan Town know that the young animals are manufactured somewhere and delivered to the city in vans, but no one thinks to question any further)?

Well, Amberville is the first novel in a series (though that’s not clear from the edition I was reading), so the answers aren’t all forthcoming here. That’s not a problem in itself, but I do think it has a knock-on effect – it seems to me that the major revelations for this volume are made some time before the end, leaving the rest of the book to be mostly i-dotting and t-crossing, which feels somewhat anti-climactic. This is unfortunate, because most of the rest of Amberville is pacy and engaging (with an added helping of speculation about the nature of good and evil, courtesy of Eric’s brother Teddy).

My misgivings about the conclusion of Amberville make me feel a little less inclined to find out where Davys takes his series; but the momentum of the earlier parts of the book is considerable. It’s worth a look, I think.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of Amberville: Jane Bradley at For Books’ Sake; Presenting Lenore; Mike Krings; Mur Lafferty.

Diana Wynne Jones, ‘Samantha’s Diary’ (2010)

15th July 2010 / / 3 Comments

It’s a skilled writer who can indicate the broad arc of her story within a couple of pages, and not leave the reader feeling short-changed for having that knowledge. Diana Wynne Jones is, of course, a highly skilled writer, and achieves the feat with flair in ‘Samantha’s Diary’.

Our story begins on December 25th, 2233, as well-to-do  Samantha returns home to find an unexpected  present waiting for her – a Christmas tree, complete with its own bird. Samantha has to look the bird up on the Net, discovering that it is a partridge – and we know, long before she does, what will arrive at Samantha’s door in the coming days. But we don’t know exactly how it will play out, which is what maintains our interest. I won’t say more, except that it’s very funny indeed.

Rating: ****

Elsewhere
Diana Wynne Jones official website

Nick Arvin, The Reconstructionist (2010)

14th July 2010 / / 1 Comment

Ellis Barstow is an engineering graduate who still hasn’t found his métier, until a chance encounter with Heather Gibson, his half-brother Christopher’s ex-girlfriend,  leads to Ellis taking a job with Heather’s husband, John Boggs, in the forensic reconstruction of traffic accidents. The relationship between Ellis and Boggs is as much one of friends as one of boss  and employee; but Ellis is conducting an affair with Heather – and, when Boggs finds out, he storms off on a tour of crash sites, leaving Ellis to track him down. And, before novel’s end, Ellis will have cause to re-evaluate much in his life, including the fatal accident that claimed Christopher.

Perhaps more than any other novel I have read recently, The Reconstructionist is driven by poetic logic: key events happen more because they fit the pattern of metaphor Arvin is setting up – namely , the comparison of accident reconstruction with that of ‘reconstructing a person’s life and motives. This does allow one to look back to the telling with a certain satisfaction – one can see that, yes, maybe that set of circumstances was a little unlikely, but it was right for the story. However, I feel the book sags a little too much in the middle, spending too long on Ellis’s search for Boggs, to build properly to its ending. Still, Arvin’s prose is smooth, successfully evoking a character for whom detail is vital, without getting swamped with too much of that detail. The Reconstructionist is a decent enough short read, but unfortunately not as satisfying in the round as one would wish.

Elsewhere
Nick Arvin’s website

Chuck Palahniuk, ‘Loser’ (2010)

13th July 2010 / / 3 Comments

My first experience of reading Palahniuk – and what an experience.  ‘Loser’ is a portrait of a student who, according to fraternity tradition, has gone along to a recording of The Price Is Right, taken some acid – and is invited to come on down. Palahniuk’s telling is intense, conveying the disorientation of his protagonist, who can’t remember the name of the show but knows it’s not that one,  and is surprised to see bread in its raw state, before made into sandwiches. It may take a moment to return to reality after reading ‘Loser’ – and the story has left me intrigued to read more of Palahniuk’s work.

Rating: ****

Elsewhere
Chuck Palahniuk’s website

Jeffrey Ford, ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’ (2010)

12th July 2010 / / 1 Comment

I find Jeffrey Ford to be a reliable writer of interesting (by which I mean good) fantasy. This story is a fine example of his talent, as what appears at first to be an evening out for a couple in love proves instead to be more of a nightmare – and the price of escape is high. Ford leaves his readers to piece together exactly what is happening in ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’, and I think that’s the key to the tale’s affect, as the real tragedy of the situation emerges gradually from the happiness.

Rating: ****

Elsewhere
Jeffrey Ford’s website

A.C. Tillyer, An A-Z of Possible Worlds (2009)

9th July 2010 / / 11 Comments

Now here’s a book which has clearly been made with great care and attention by its publishers (Roast Books of London): An A-Z of Possible Worlds is presented as a box of twenty-six individually-stapled booklets, one for each letter of the alphabet, each containing its own story. Happily, the tales themselves more than live up to the presentation.

Anne Tillyer has written a set of stories which each concern a place that doesn’t exist. Generally speaking, they stand alone: there are several scattered cross-references and commonalities, but the unity of the collection emerges not from them, but from Tillyer’s style, which I’d broadly characterise, rather unhelpfully, as a ‘storytelling’ style – that is, she captures something of the timeless quality, the flowing rhythms, of folktales. This can lend itself to imagery, such as the following evocation of place:

The central boglands are both the beginning and the end of the world; the place where everything comes to nothing and nothing ever changes. Nature lies in a coma, time has given up trying to pass and the only things that move are the flies and the fog and the driving rain. Here, the natural cycles of birth and decay have unravelled and run in a straight line. Even the rain that falls on the bog is never released into rivers or the roots of trees but seeps from puddle to mud and stagnates there forever. It is the stasis that all life must overcome and to which all life will return. Evolution never made it past first post… (‘The Bog’, p. 1)

This is a long beginning that repeats its point, but I think that very technique works well here: an accretion of detail, like layers of sediment,  that brings home the stifling atmosphere of the bog. (The description continues as Tillyer moves into the story proper, with similarly atmospheric results.)

It’s not all about the imagery, though. There are stories here with fascinating ideas, such as ‘The Labyrinth’, with its people whose ancestors made home on an island generations ago, and who now have no sense of time; reading about their actions is unsettling, but also fires the imagination. There are also tales of the absurd, like ‘The Job Centre’, in which a country’s leader declares that there is full employment in his nation – which is news to the people queuing in the job centre at that moment. A plan must be devised to create work for these people, and the results raise a wry laugh.

As much as the stories in An A-Z of Possible Worlds stand alone, they gain considerably from being part of the whole. Not all of them completely satisfy as stories in their own right – there are some, for example, where a turn of phrase really stands out in my mind rather than the plot – but these are bolstered by other tales, which have complementary strengths. It’s the whole edifice of what Tillyer has created which impresses most, rather than individual pieces of it.

Which is not to say that there aren’t some excellent individual stories here. To pick out two: ‘The Youth Hostel’ concerns a remote hostel which is one day visited by a journalist from an interiors0 magazine, who writes a feature on the place as an example of ‘rustic charm’. The popularity of the youth hostel grows exponentially as a result, but visitors don’t necessarily get what they were expecting. This story is both neatly plotted and makes pointed commentary on attitudes to ‘tradition’.

Another story I liked in particular was ‘The Casino’, which is about a country colonised by the wealthy and turned into their own private playground, where they can enjoy the finest luxuries and the best healthcare. But this lifestyle is threatened by too many people living too long, and the proposed solution is not a pleasant one… Again, this is a nicely constructed tale (there is a certain inevitability about the plotting of both ‘The Casino’ and ‘The Youth Hostel’, but Tillyer’s craft is such that one does not feel short-changed by this), with an added vein of satire, this time on the subject of authority.

The way that Tillyer writes about places in these stories – often in the abstract, without names or many other specifics – they really do become ‘possible worlds’. They’re places that one knows don’t exist, but could, perhaps, if the world had more interstices. Imaginary as they are, though, it is fascinating to explore these worlds in this remarkable collection.

Elsewhere
Further reviews of An A-Z of Possible Worlds: The Fiction Desk, The Literateur, and Vulpes Libris
Interview at The Literateur with A.C. Tillyer, and Faye Dayan of Roast Books

Matt Haig, The Radleys (2010)

7th July 2010 / / 6 Comments

There isn’t exactly a dearth of vampire fiction around at the moment, so it would take something quite distinctive to stand out from the crowd. I think Matt Haig’s new novel manages to do just that. The Radleys may appear to be a normal family living in a sleepy North Yorkshire town; but parents Peter and Helen keep a dark secret from their neighbours, and even from their children – The Radleys are a family of abstaining vampires.

The secrecy can’t last forever, though. When young Clara Radley is attacked by Stuart Harper, a boy from school, she defends herself by biting his hand, which draws blood; that first taste gives Clara a strength that she’s never known, and a desire for more – Harper doesn’t stand a chance. Peter does his best to cover up the killing, and (against Helen’s wishes) calls on his brother Will, a practising vampire with hypnotic powers and a distinct lack of morals. The careful charade of the Radleys’ existence may be about to come to an end.

There are two things which, to my mind, make The Radleys work so well. One is that the book has the conviction to take its central idea seriously. Sure, there are some jokes – about, for example, the hidden perils of modern middle-class life (garlic in the salad dressing!), or vampire pop-culture (songs like ‘Ain’t That a Bite in the Neck’) – but the underlying tone is not whimsical, but quite matter-of-fact. What could have been played entirely for laughs instead has some dramatic heft.

What combines with this seriousness of tone to make the book such a success is that Haig roots his story so firmly in everyday life, and, by doing so, he is able to move beyond it. The problems of the Radleys are the problems of many a family like theirs – teenage children trying to work out their own identities, parents wishing to protect them from life’s dangers but not necessarily being able to, and so on – but given a particular twist because they’re vampires. It is tempting (and possible, to a degree) to read the vampirism as a metaphor –think of it as a murky past, for example, with Will the wayward uncle who might lead the kids astray; for blood, read booze or whatever – but I don’t think anything fits quite perfectly. And I’d say that’s a good thing – the fantastic is more real within the story if can’t easily be reduced to a single metaphor.

It would be reasonable to observe, I think, that The Radleys is not doing anything drastically original. But it is different enough from the norm, and so well crafted, that it’s a great pleasure to read.

Elsewhere

Reviews of The Radleys at Chrissie’s Corner and Book Chick City
Matt Haig’s website
Canongate

Lawrence Block, ‘Catch and Release’ (2010)

6th July 2010 / / 1 Comment

Block’s protagonist calls himself as a catch-and-release fisherman, but what he goes after most often is not fish, but women — he used to kill the women he caught, but now he lets them go (without their necessarily even knowing that they were ‘caught’), and instead imagines what he would have done to them. But perhaps it’s time for a change…

Naturally, this character’s mind is a deeply unpleasant place to be, making ‘Catch and Release’ disturbing to read. But the story achieves its effect well, as Block maintains the suffocating (for the reader) focus of his protagonist’s viewpoint, and ramps up the tension as the tale moves towards what may be  (though one hopes not) the inevitable.

Rating: ***½

Rowan Somerville, The Shape of Her (2010)

5th July 2010 / / 1 Comment

There are three narrative strands in The Shape of Her, Rowan Somerville’s second novel. The main one takes place in the present day, and concerns a young couple, Max and Tine, who are spending the summer together on the Greek island where Tine holidayed as a child. All begins happily, as Max particularly is full of the joys of young love; but Tine grows standoffish, and it becomes apparent that the secrets of the past may be about to resurface. The two other strands delve into the protagonists’ childhoods – specifically Tine’s holidays on the island, and Max’s time at boarding school – to explore what’s behind the events of the present, before everything converges at the end…

I’m torn, here: I think some aspects of The Shape of Her are very good, but then I have reservations about the whole. On the plus side, Somerville has a deft turn of phrase; for example, one image that stood out to me was when Max and Tine were described as sitting on their plane,  drinking ‘brackish coffee from  cups  the colour of prosthetic limbs’ – I find this such an unexpected comparison, yet it works so well in conveying just what those cups of coffee must look and taste like, and the atmosphere in which they’re being drunk. Also, the three plot-lines contrast each other well, as we gain a very different view of the two protagonists – Tine’s first-person voice when narrating her memories is much spikier than Max’s love-struck view of her might lead one to anticipate; and Max was almost a completely different person at school, a sense only added to by the use of his surname in that strand.

With so much that’s good, why the reservations? It’s the resolution of the three narratives that doesn’t quite work for me. The two childhood strands inform the ending of the present-day one in a way that seems to me to reduce their own intrinsic interest – as though the main focus is on what they can give to the contemporary narrative, and less on what they might offer in their own right. But, even if the destination of The Shape of Her may not be everything one might hope for, the journey is still an interesting one to make.

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