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August wrap-up

31st August 2011 / / 0 Comments

As August draws to a close, here’s the usual look back at activity on the blog.

Book of the Month

No contest this month — the best book I read in August was Robert Shearman’s superlative story collection Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical. Certainly the best book of short fiction I have read so far this year, I expect it’ll also feature on my best-reads-of-2011 list.

Reviews

Features

Science fiction in the mainstream: Clarke Award contenders

15th August 2011 / / 6 Comments

Two things struck me during a recent Twitter discussion on favourites for next year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award. The first was that relatively few genre names came to mind; a few Clarke stalwarts were mentioned — China Miéville, Christopher Priest, Adam Roberts, Neal Stephenson — but only enough to be a very small proportion of the 50-60 books which make up a typical list of submissions for the award (and it’s not even certain that the relevant books by all the writers I’ve named above will qualify as sf).

The second thing that struck me was that the number of mainstream-published novels which could be read as science fiction is rather high this year. ‘You should do a blog post!’ said Martin Lewis; so here is a list of those titles I know about (note that I haven’t read them all, so I’m going purely on the synopsis in some cases).

David Almond, The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean

The first adult novel by children’s author Almond (Skellig) is a dystopian story narrated by young Billy in his own vernacular. With its manner of telling, comparisons with Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy may well ensue.

Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

A near-future tale of gangsters, set in a fictitious part of Ireland. Seems to be gaining acclaim for its prose style in particular.

Marius Brill, How to Forget

A magician with a murky past becomes involved in an experiment on memory which may allow him to forget the things he can’t help but remember. The potential is there for this to be reminiscent of Richard Powers’ Generosity from last year’s Clarke shortlist (albeit of course with different subject matter).

[EDIT: I’m wrong! How to Forget isn’t actually science-fictional at all.]

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Probably the best-known book on this list. I felt the novel was good, but no more than that; and only tenuously justifiable as science fiction — but, then again, I did find its sf content rather effective. My instinct is that Goon Squad is not a likely Clarke nominee, but I wouldn’t rule it out.

Benjamin Hale, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

The memoir of a chimpanzee who acquires human language and intelligence. A very long book which seems to have attracted relatively little attention, but I’ve seen some very positive commentary.

Sam Leith, The Coincidence Engine

Interesting developments come to the attention of the ‘Directorate of the Extremely Improbable’, beginning with the spontaneous assemblage of an aircraft during a hurricane. Leith’s novel may or may not fall under the heading of Barleypunk, but it would seem to have a similarly self-aware approach to that of Martin Martin’s on the Other Side, the Mark Wernham title that was shortlisted in 2009.

Simon Lelic, The Facility

A near-future political thriller revolving around a secret detention centre. I think the novel takes an interesting approach to its form, but in doing so becomes less successful as sf, which might weaken its chances of being a real Clarke contender.

Anna North, America Pacifica

In search of her mother, a seventeen-year-old girl heads towards the only temperate land in a frozen world. From recent Clarke shortlists, this brings to mind Marcel Theroux’s excellent Far North; one can only hope it’s as good.

Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb

The science fiction novel that made it on to the Booker longlist. May make an interesting point of comparison with the David Almond title above, as both seem to focus on young narrators who are key to their worlds’ survival.

Jonathan Trigell, Genus

A tale of life among the have-nots in a near future where complete genetic selection is available to the haves. I think the evocation of the setting is the greatest strength of this novel; whether that’s enough to make it a likely Clarke contender, I’m undecided.

Katie Ward, Girl Reading

Of all the novels I’m listing here, this is probably the one that looks least like science fiction at first sight, as it comprises a sequence of historical novellas on portraits and their subjects. But the final chapter is set in the future and makes sf out of the rest. I rather liked this book, and Adam Roberts really liked it; instinct says it may be too obliquely sf-nal to be shortlisted for the Clarke — but then, Cloud Atlas was shortlisted, so that instinct may be wrong (and I’d have no problem if that turned out to be the case).

Naomi Wood, The Godless Boys

The last on my alphabetical list and, conveniently, the one I’ve read which I like the most. Set in an alternate England where those of religious faith were exiled to an island off the north-east coast, Wood’s novel has a great sense of place and is a fine portrait of its world. I would certainly be happy to see this on next year’s Clarke shortlist.

***

There we have a dozen non-genre sf novels receiving their first UK publication this year, though I doubt very much that my list is comprehensive (for a start, it doesn’t include YA, which is not a field I know much about); I’d welcome any suggestions of books that I’ve missed.

What I don’t doubt is that mainstream-published work is a key part of the UK science fiction landscape at the moment, and it would not surprise me to see that reflected in the next Clarke Award shortlist. The Clarke hasn’t gone to a non-genre title since The Calcutta Chromosome in 1997 — will that change next year? Of course, until we see the shortlist and read the books, it’s impossible to say; but I suspect the genre titles will have a run for their money.

Book notes: Grimwood, Trigell, Gardner

5th August 2011 / / 5 Comments

Jon Courtenay Grimwood, The Fallen Blade (2011)

Jon Courtenay Grimwood made his name as a science fiction novelist; now, for his eleventh book (and first in five years), he’s turned to fantasy, beginning his ‘Assassini’ sequence. The 15th-century Venice of The Fallen Blade is ruled by a dynasty founded by Marco Polo, with a certain rivalry between the Regent Alonzo and his sister-in-law Alexa, mother of the imbecilic Duke Marco IV. As the novel begins, a mysterious silver-haired boy is found captive aboard a Mamluk ship; given the name Tycho, he has no memory of how he came to be there, but hungers for blood and possesses preternatural reflexes, which latter catch the eye of Venice’s chief assassin, Atilo, who has it in mind to train the boy to become his heir. Elsewhere, the planned strategic marriage of the Duke’s cousin, Lady Giulietta, is derailed when the Mamluks kidnap her in revenge for the attack on their ship – and the intrigues only continue…

Grimwood brings his Venice to life well, in both its atmosphere (squalid and smelly) and the complexity of its political and social codes (for example, a soldier’s instinctive action to save a noble’s life may be tantamount to choosing factions). The action sequences are involving, and Grimwood also evokes the conflicting senses of reluctance and desire felt by both Tycho as he discovers more of who (or what) he is, and Giulietta as she becomes attracted to him. The deployment of the supernatural is strikingly low-key: the word ‘vampire’ is not in the novel’s vocabulary (nor does Tycho quite fit that mould); and, on the occasions when characters do use magic, there’s nothing flashy about it – it comes across as just another tool to be used.

At the same time, it can be difficult to fully engage with The Fallen Blade. Many of the characters commit violent and abhorrent acts (as befits their society and their positions within it), and don’t always have enough charisma in the reader’s eyes to balance that out, even in the case of Tycho, the book’s de facto ‘hero’. Nor is the novel always sufficiently clear on the status of its various political intrigues. Still, The Fallen Blade is a good start to its series, and carries the promise of revelations and complex plots aplenty to come.

This review was first published on Fiction Uncovered.

Jonathan Trigell, Genus (2011)

Jonathan Trigell is best known for Boy A, his debut about a young offender trying to reintegrate into society after spending most of his life in prison. For his third novel, however, Trigell has turned his hand to science fiction. In a future London stifled by a series of wars and unchanging government, advances in genetic technology mean that perfection is available to anyone who can afford it. Those who can’t, the ‘Unimproved’, end up somewhere like The Kross (King’s Cross as was). Genus follows a number of characters living in and around The Kross, mostly notably Holman, the disfigured son of the last natural beauty queen; and Günther Bonnet, the cop with ‘the best set of genes on the force’, who has a series of murders to investigate.

The actual plot of Genus, the mystery around those deaths, is relatively straightforward, and not the novel’s main point of interest. Where the book rerally succeeds is the way Trigell depicts his future, world; our perspective is firmly rooted on the inside, to an almost suffocating degree. We barely see anything of life outside The Kross, never mind outside of London; and it’s difficult to get a real handle on how this world developed and how it operates – we understand to an extent, yes, but a full picture of the world is as distant from us as it is from the inhabitants of The Kross; they just have to get on as best they can, and that’s what Trigell makes his readers do. There’s also some nicely effective prose in Genus; I wasn’t too keen on the use of alliteration, but the jerky, rapid-fire sentences of Günther’s scenes do much to convey his character, and Trigell frequently juxtaposes different senses of the same word or phrase to great effect. I’ll certainly be reading more of Trigell’s work after this.

Cate Gardner, ‘Nowhere Hall’ (2011)

The latest chapbook from Spectral Press is the story of Ron Spence, a man who’s had all the hope and colour wrung out of him, and contemplates stepping into the path of oncoming traffic. But instead of actually doing so, Ron goes into a nearby hotel, which may be opulent, or derelict, or both at once. He wanders through its rooms, where nothing quite makes sense, but there’s a vaguely familiar mannequin that seems strangely alive.

A story like this really stands or falls on the atmosphere it creates, and ‘Nowhere Hall’ does well on that score. Cate Gardner uses recurring images, such as dust and umbrellas, to build up the sense of a web tightening around her protagonist; and Ron’s sense of the hotel’s rooms having a distorted familiarity further increases the tension. I don’t think I grasped everything that was going on in ‘Nowhere Hall’, but what I particularly appreciate is the way Gardner suggests that the world outside the hotel is just as strange as the one inside it – so maybe there’s not much of an escape for Ron after all.

Notable books: August 2011

1st August 2011 / / 1 Comment

Another month is here, and as usual I begin it with a list of forthcoming books that have caught my attention…

Marius Brill, How to Forget

This sounds fascinating: a professional magician longs to be able to forget certain events in his past — then learns of an experimental procedure that may allow him to do just that.

Joe Dunthorne, Wild Abandon

I heard Joe Dunthorne read from this novel, about the changing life on a commune and a boy convinced the world is about to end, at an event in March. I enjoyed that reading, and I look forward to finding out what the whole book is like.

Anna North, America Pacifica

This post-climatic-apocalypse novel comes with recommendations from Charles Yu and Jedediah Berry, which is good enough for me.

Adam Roberts, By Light Alone

Adam Roberts is fast becoming one of my favourite authors; his last two novels have been in my top five reads of their respective years. I wonder whether his latest — set in a future where humans have gained the ability to photosynthesise through their hair, and eating food has become a means of signifying one’s wealth — will do the same.

Sarah Salway, Tell Me Everything

Another reissue of a Sarah Salway novel by the Library of Lost Books? That’d go on my to-read list without my even having to read the blurb. But the premise of the book, a woman building (perhaps literally) a new life for herself by telling stories, also sounds intriguing.

Christopher Wakling, What I Did

This could be an interesting exploration of some social issues, as it explores the consequences of a passer-by seeing a father smack his child after the boy ran across a busy road.

July wrap-up

31st July 2011 / / 0 Comments

Another month ends; here’s what was on the blog…

Book of the Month

In July, this blog was mostly concerned with short stories, and it’s a collection of those which takes the top spot this month: Stuart Evers’ Ten Stories About Smoking.

Reviews

Features

Man Booker Prize longlist 2011

26th July 2011 / / 5 Comments

The Booker longlist for this year is out, and it is full of books (and authors) I haven’t read. So I thought I’d take a look at the chosen thirteen to see which appeal…

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape)

A short novel  about a middle-aged man discovering that the truth of a weekend in his childhood may not be quite as he remembered. I’m torn here, because I like the idea of the “mutable past” (to quote the blurb) as a theme and plot device, but the actual synopsis sounds less interesting.

Anticipation rating: ***

Sebastian Barry, On Canaan’s Side (Faber)

The life of Lily Bere, who left Dublin after World War One to live in America, and is now (in the novel’s present) in her eighties. Again, not something I’d probably pick up from the synopsis alone; I’d have to research more opinions first.

Anticipation rating: **½

Carol Birch, Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate)

This one was already on my radar, the tale of a Victorian boy who joins a seafaring menagerie. Simon Savidge really enjoyed the book, and it does sound a proper rip-roaring adventure story.

Anticipation rating: ****

Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers (Granta)

A Western that sounds intriguing, but not at all like something I’d expect to see in contention for the Booker:twoo assassins travel to California, only to find that their intended target has an invention that could be the making of them.

Anticipation rating: ****

Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail)

A novel revolving around the arrest and ‘disappearance’ of a black jazz trumpeter in pre-World War Two Berlin — not an aspect of history with which I’m familiar, so this could be interesting.

Anticipation rating: ***½

Yvvette Edwards, A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)

Over the course of a weekend, secrets are revealed concerning the killing of the protagonist’s mother. I think I’d want to see other opinions before I decided whether to read this one.

Anticipation rating: ***

Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (Picador)

This is title I was most certain of seeing on the longlist (owing purely to the reputation of its author). I’ve heard great things about The Stranger’s Child (a journey through the 20th century with a particular poem at its heart), though the synopsisi alone wouldn’t cause me to read it.

Anticipation rating: ***

Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)

Rather like Emma Donoghue’s Room last year, Pigeon English seems to have been on some high-profile lists — the Waterstone’s 11, The Culture Show‘s New Novelists — and now here it is on another. When I read an extract earlier in the year, I was undecided about the book, and that opinion has not changed.

Anticipation rating: ***½

Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days (Seren)

A novel set in Bucharest at the end of Caeucescu’s regime. As with the Edugyan, I’m not familiar with the background, which is what catches my interest.

Anticipation rating: ***½

A.D. Miller, Snowdrops (Atlantic)

A crime story set in contemporary Moscow. Sounds good for the portrait of its setting as well as the plot.

Anticipation rating: ***½

Alison Pick, Far to Go (Headline)

The tale of a Jewish family fleeing Czechoslovakia after the Nazi invasion.Another one that I’d want to read about further before it went on the to-read list.

Anticipation rating: ***

Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone)

The Booker has a reputation for overlooking works of science fiction, but here’s one (admittedly not published within the genre, but still). I’d already intended to read this near-future dystopia; perhaps its being longlisted will spur me on to actually do so.

Anticipation rating: ****

D.J. Taylor, Derby Day (Chatto & Windus)

A Victorian-set mystery with as the title suggests) the Epsom Derby as its backdrop. Once again, I’m inclined to reserve judgement about reading it until I’ve heard more.

Anticipation rating: ***

===

So, of that baker’s dozen, I’m most interested in reading the Birch, deWitt, and Rogers; and I think the Edugyan would be my first choice out of the rest. What strikes me most about the list as a whole is how many of the books — at least six, and I think seven — are from independent publishers, which is great to see. The shortlist will be announced in September; for now, though, congratulations to all authors and publishers on the longlist.

Book notes: Hershman, MacLeod, Galloway

15th July 2011 / / 6 Comments

Tania Hershman, The White Road and Other Stories (2008)

One of the good things about short story collections is that they help give shape to an author’s work as a whole in a way that’s not necessarily apparent from individual pieces in isolation. Reading The White Road, I gain a sense of two main strands running through Hershman’s short fiction: first, there are a considerable number of short-shorts in the book. I think this is a particularly tricky form to do well, because the prose has to be so much denser to have impact; the short-shorts in Hershman’s collection are amongst the strongest I can recall reading, and having them together in the same volume only reinforces that impression.

Perhaps the main concern of the stories in The White Road, however, is science; many pieces begin have an epigraph from New Scientist, the subject of which may then be explored directly or more tangentially. ‘On a Roll’ begins with an epigraph about the randomness underpinning casino games, then tells of a woman who first has a dream in which she puts up an expensive pair of shoes as a stake at the roulette table, then seeks to enact her dream in reality; it’s a study of how the protagonist’s understanding of randomness enables her to make peace with her life.

‘My Name Is Henry’ employs a fairly straightforward reverse chronological structure to great effect, as it depicts a young man who knows his name, and goes backwards in time to uncover the cause of his amnesia; that progression is both affecting and chilling. The story ‘The White Road’ is set at a truck stop on the way to the South Pole, whose owner, Mags, travelled down there to escape a tragedy in her past; when that tragedy catches up with her, she knows it’s time to take drastic action. As so often in this collection, the human story is firmly to the fore; but the scientific underpinning gives the tale an added dimension of inevitability.

Tania Hershman’s website
Salt Publishing

Alison MacLeod, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction (2007)

As the title suggests, the stories in this collection are populated mainly by lovers, at various stages of their relationships. Macleod’s tales are at their most striking for me when organised around a central metaphor or structure; for example ‘so that the land was darkened’ portrays a couple at three moments of literal darkness, showing the different moods of their relationship: the rush of new love during the 1999 eclipse; tension during a power cut in Toronto in 2003; and a realisation of deep love and concern after the London bombings of 2005. ‘Radiant Heat ’focuses alternately on a physicist taking a flight to a conference, and a long-haulage driver joining the effort to wreckage of the physicist’s plane. The concept of entropy, of heat in the universe dissipating, becomes a metaphor for the trajectory of the scientist’s marriage; and the contrast between the two strands of the story creates a real poignancy.

Elsewhere in the collection, ‘Sacred Heart’ is an effective portrait of a nineteen-year-old Naomi’s confused feelings towards the man who (she believes) died whilst sitting beside her on a park bench; she can’t decide whether she was  attracted or repelled by his earlier advances, and the ebb and flow of this is very well realised. The protagonist of ‘The Will Writer’ is single, but dreams of sitting alongside his ideal woman in the SUV he’ll buy if his lottery numbers come up. Over the course of the story, his work brings him into with various couples, and the degrees of contentment they have in their relationships mirror the fortunes of the will writer’s own life, with the hoped-for lottery win seeming by turns a possibility and a distant dream; MacLeod makes this a fine character study.

Janice Galloway, Blood (1991)

The tales in Blood take real life and filter it through dense, sometimes fragmented prose, until it becomes… more concentrated, one might say. In the title story, for example, a girl has her tooth removed by the dentist, and her desire to stanch the bleeding comes to represent something of a wish to hold herself in, as it were. ‘Plastering the Cracks’ begins with the straightforward premise of a woman calling in workmen to repair a room, but treats its material with a twist of absurdity, as the builders move in and communicate with the woman only through notes.

The piece ’two fragments’ deals directly with the idea of ‘inflating’ reality, as it contrasts the ways in which a father lost two fingers and a grandmother one of her eyes, with the outlandish explanations given to the narrator as a child. ‘Love in a changing environment’ pushes its subject slightly out of reality in a slightly different way, as it depicts the ups and downs of a couple’s relationship being affected by the changing nature of the shop above which they live. A series of pieces called ‘Scenes from the Life’ depict various situations, such as a father’s harsh life-lesson to his son, and an elderly woman’s appointment with a health visitor, as theatrical scenes, which puts distance between reader and action in a thought-provoking way.

Janice Galloway’s website

Notable books: July 2011

2nd July 2011 / / 3 Comments

July is upon us, a month about which I’m particularly excited because (as I may have mentioned before, I’ll be taking part in the panel on reading short stories at the ShortStoryVille festival in Bristol on the 16th. For now, though, here’s a selection of the new books that have caught my attention this month:

Ben Brooks, Grow Up

When Téa Obreht won the Orange Prize, the fact that she was just 24 when her book was published attracted some comment. Well, Ben Brooks is 19; I am curious to see what this coming-of-age tale is like.

Enrique de Hériz, The Manual of Darkness

A magician is going blind as he searches for the secrets of a Victorian master pickpocket. Novels about magic tend to intrigue me, and this is no exception.

Helen FitzGerald, The Donor

This promises an interesting expolartion of ethical issues, as a single father finds both his daughters needing a new kidney–and he’s a match for their rare organ type.

Keigo Higashino, The Devotion of Suspect X

The UK publisher’s blurb for this Japanese bestseller is exceptionally cagey, promising a puzzling crime and surprise ending, whilst giving almost nothing in the way of detail. But it’s worked, and made me curious about the book.

Ryan David Jahn, The Dispatcher

I really enjoyed Jahn’s debut, Acts of Violence (recently published in the US as Good Neighbors), but for some unfathomable reason, I’ve never got around to reading his follow-up, Low Life–I must rectify that at some point. Anyway, this is the author’s third novel, about a police dispatcher seeking to rescue his missing daughter; I’d anticipate Jahn putting an interesting twist on the material.

M.D. Lachlan, Fenrir

Sequel to the excellent Wolfsangel, this moves Lachlan’s Viking fantasy to Paris a hundred years later.

Alice LaPlante, Turn of Mind

This could be  powerful: a novel about a former surgeon with Alzheimer’s who is suspected of killing her best friend.

Amos Oz, Scenes from Village Life

I’ve never read Oz before, but this does sound interesting– a set of linked stories mysterious happenings in an Israeli village.

Jonathan Trigell, Genus

From the author of Boy A comes a novel of a near future in which genetic enhancements are readily available to anyone who can afford them. I’m always interested in mainstream-published speculative fiction, so this goes on my reading list.

June wrap-up

1st July 2011 / / 0 Comments

June was an exceptionally lean month in the life of this blog (and things are likely to remain that way until I’m in a position to devote more time to reading and blogging), but here’s what there was.

Book of the Month

I’ve been reading quite a lot of short stories lately (in preparation for ShortStoryVille), and my pick of the month is a collection of those: Sarah Salway’s Leading the Dance.

Reviews

Features

Notable books: June 2011

1st June 2011 / / 3 Comments

It’s the first day of summer, and as good a time as any to cast an eye over some new books on their way this month.

Alice Albinia, Leela’s Book

A family drama set in Delhi, complete with  appearances from Ganesh. Sounds delightfully intricate from the synopsis.

John Burnside, A Summer of Drowning

 

Was the drowning of two boys on an Arctic island an accident, or the wok of supernatural forces? I hope this is as atmospheric as it sounds.

Richard T. Kelly, The Possessions of Doctor Forrest

A doctor goes missing, and two of his old friends and colleagues investigate. The publisher’s synopsis is rather vague about what ensues beyond a general promise of strangeness, but strangeness is fine with me.

Helen Oyeyemi, Mr Fox

For some reason, I was originally under the impression that this was a short story collection, but the synopsis makes it sound like a novel, yet the ShortStoryVille programme describes it as ‘linked stories’. I will just have to read this tale of a writer and his (imaginary, or possibly all-too-real) muse to find out.

Jan van Mersbergen, Tomorrow Pamplona

A boxer and a father meet on the way to the Pamplona Bull Run, each trying to escape from something. The latest novella from Peirene Press, this is particularly interesting to me because I know the translator, Laura Watkinson.

David Whitehouse, Bed

The winner of last year’s To Hell with Prizes for unpublished novels, this is the story of a boy who’d like to change the world, but won’t get out of bed, and begins to change. Very intriguing.

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