Tag: fantasy

Reading round-up: early March

5th March 2014 / / 1 Comment

Rebecca Hunt, Everland (2014)

EverlandThe author of 2010’s Mr Chartwell returns with a tale of polar exploration. In March 1913, three men embark on an expedition to an uncharted Antarctic island which is being dubbed ‘Everland’ – a journey that we know won’t end well, as we’ve already seen others of their ship’s crew go after the men a month later, and find only one alive. In 2012, the men’s expedition has become famous, and three researchers set out from their base on their own trek to Everland. Over time, the two expeditions start to parallel each other – subtly at first, then more overtly, in terms of both events and the frictions that develop within each group. Hunt places her characters in a situation where they’re trapped by their environment, then uses the parallels between the two groups to underline just how much they are trapped.

Tamara Astafieva, Born in Siberia (2014)
Translated from the Russian by Luba Ioffe

Born in 1937, Tamara Astafieva became a television editor for the Soviet press agency, Novosti. This book is a collection of autobiographical essays (and the occasional poem) sent by Astafieva a few years ago to an old acquaintance, British TV director Michael Darlow (who also provides linking commentary throughout). Born in Siberia illuminates a time and place in history that I personally didn’t know about; and Astafieva comes across as a bright, charismatic personality who is a pleasure to meet through the pages of her book.

Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)

This was my book group’s latest choice: the tale of Thomas Fowler, a British journalist working in Indochina, and the idealistic American Alden Pyle, who believes that the  war can be ended with a ‘third force’. Reading The Quiet American was an unusual experience for me, as I saw the film back in 2002, but don’t remember much about it; so the book kept snagging on shadowy memories. I often find it difficult to get into books written in the 1950s and earlier (I don’t know why; a cultural distance that’s hard for me to cross, perhaps); and this was true for Greene’s novel to an extent – though I appreciated its nuanced exploration of morality; and the ending could still shock me, even though I knew what was coming.

Carlos Busqued, Under This Terrible Sun (2009)
Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, 2013

I said to myself that I would only buy an e-reader if I felt that I were truly missing out on ebooks that I wanted to read. I finally reached that point when I started hearing about publishers like Frisch & Co., a Berlin-based who specialise in digital works in translations; and my first electronic title is one of theirs.

Under This Terrible Sun (the first novel by Argentinian writer Busqued) begins as Javier Cetarti – who does little more than lounge around his apartment watching documentaries – learns that his mother’s lover has killed her, and Cetarti’s brother. The bearer of this news, Duarte, has an idea to cash in on a life insurance policy, and Cetarti is happy to play along. But Duarte has darker motivations than Cerarti realises. Busqued’s novel works almost by stealth: the characters will drift along for a while; then something sinister or violent will intrude – unbidden at first, then with growing tension, until… ah, but that would be telling.

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (2013)

Flamethrowers

In 1977, Reno (not her real name, but it’s as much as we’ll get) heads east on her motorcycle to New York, where she becomes involved in the art scene. A relationship with an Italian artist leads her to Milan, where a more political revolution is taking shape. The Flamethrowers is a long novel, dense with incident; yet in some ways Reno’s narrative voice remains detached from it all. Kushner‘s novel reflects on performance, and finds it in all the worlds through which Reno moves – and not always to the good. The ending manages to be poignant, chilling and optimistic all at once.

Emma J. Lannie, Behind a Wardrobe in Atlantis (2014)

Mantle Lane Press is a new small publisher focusing on short volumes by writers with an East Midlands connection. This, Mantle Lane’s second book, is a set of eight short stories by Derby-resident Emma J. Lannie. Lannie’s stories are snapshots of characters at key emotional moments, and are shot through with flashes of myth or fairytale. So, for example, ‘Rapunzelled’ sees a girl caught in the shadow of her photographer sister as they go on a shoot in an abandoned tower; while the narrator of ‘Not Gretel’ wanders through the forest, leaving her old life behind, in search of… something. This book is an intriguing start to Lannie’s career, and I look forward to reading more from her in the future.

Reading round-up: books for Christmas presents

9th December 2013 / / 0 Comments

This isn’t meant to be a guide to Christmas gift ideas as such (for that, let me direct you to Kim’s excellent series of posts over on Reading Matters). It’s more that I’ve read a few books lately which, it struck me, would make good Christmas presents; so I thought I’d put them together into a blog post, and add in some other titles that I reviewed earlier in the year.

Non-Fiction

Letters of Note, ed. Shaun Usher

This huge, lavishly illustrated collection of letters (based on the website of the same name) is an ideal gift for anyone interested in the personal side of history, or who likes letters and books as objects. Read more about it in my original review.

Wordsmiths & Warriors by David and Hilary Crystal

This is an illustrated travelogue of significant places in the history of the English language in Britain. I haven’t seen the finished book, as I read a proof version when I reviewed it; but I’ve no doubt that it will look beautiful.

Fred's WarFred’s War by Andrew Davidson

Andrew Davidson’s grandfather Fred was a medical officer of the 1st battalion Cameronians during World War One. Although photography was banned on the front line, Fred and several other officers had cameras with them, and took photographs of their lives at war. Davidson uses these images to tell the story of the 1st Cameronians during the year that Fred was a serving officer. It’s a vivid and intimate account; there’s a real sense of the war gradually coalescing around the men as they march through France. Though Davidson refers to the photographs, he doesn’t caption them, which adds to the sense of this being an unfolding story for the men involved. Fred’s War gives a personal portrait of the conflict which is not quite like anything I’ve come across before.

Girl from Station X

The Girl from Station X by Elisa Segrave

Here’s another book based around personal wartime accounts, this time the diaries of Elisa Segrave’s mother Anne, who was stationed at Bletchley Park during World War Two. Again, it’s a fascinating glimpse into history, seeing Anne move from her privileged girlhood world into her wartime career; but this is Elisa’s story as much as Anne’s. Segrave describes how Anne’s diaries revealed to her a side of her mother that she had never known, and enabled her perhaps to understand Anne as she had not previously been able to. This double story is what particularly intrigues about The Girl from Station X.

Fiction

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

Yes, I know: any excuse to enthuse about The Luminaries. But it is just the sort of big hardback novel that would make a great Christmas gift, especially for readers who may have been undecided about trying it out for themselves (it may take them well into the new year to read it, too).

If not The Luminaries, then Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch or Sergio de la Pava’s A Naked Singularity may also fit the bill (I have heard great things about both, but haven’t read them, so I can’t give a personal recommendation).

Crystal MirrorThe Crystal Mirror by Tim Malnick and Katie Green

From three long books to a much shorter one. This is a crowd-funded collection of “timeless tales for children and grown-ups alike”, written by Tim Malnick and illustrated by Katie Green. The five stories are all about characters changing their outlook on life to find a way forward, from the painter imprisoned in a bare tower room, to a bat fascinated by daylight. Malnick’s prose has the rhythms of a classic fairytale, and Green’s illustrations are gorgeous. I may not be quite the intended audience for The Crystal Mirror, but I found the book absolutely charming.

Non-Fiction about Fiction

Novel Cure

The Novel Cure by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin

Subtitled “An A-Z of Literary Remedies”, this book has suggestions for reading to help alleviate a variety of ailments. Some are quite tongue-in-cheek (David Vann’s Caribou Island as a cure for enthusiasm with DIY; Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry by B.S. Johnson to treat fear of doing your tax return); others more serious (Wuthering Heights to cure a desire to seek vengeance; Mrs Dalloway to tackle that Monday morning feeling). But the entries are always written with wit (I especially love the entries which spoof the style of the book being recommended; my favourite is the one for House of Leaves) and enthusiasm. After reading The Novel Cure, or even just dipping into it, you’ll almost certainly have some new books that you want to try. Now, what’s the cure for an exponentially increasing to-read pile..?

Adam Roberts, The Soddit (2003): Vector review

10th October 2013 / / 1 Comment

The latest issue of the BSFA critical journal Vector has landed, and it contains my review of The Soddit by Adam Roberts. The Soddit was the first of the parodies that Roberts has produced alongside his ‘canonical’ novels; originally published in 2003, it was reissued last year. I started out imagining that the review would be just a bit of fun; as I went along, though, I found myself thinking more about the playful side of Roberts’s work, and what it is that draws me to his writing. Interestingly, Dan Hartland writes about similar qualities in his review of the story collection Adam Robots in the same issue. It seems we’re on the same page as regards Roberts’s “wilfulness and idiosyncrasy”.

Anyway, on to The Soddit…

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Anyone who follows Adam Roberts on Twitter will know of his penchant for puns, which are always excellent, and never induce groans at all – honest, guv. (Thought I’d indulge in some irony, there.) And anyone who’s followed Roberts’s bibliography over the years will know that his sense of humour has found a home in his fiction, most obviously in the series of parodies he has written alongside his more serious SF novels. The first of these parodies, The Soddit, has recently been reissued (there was even a film to mark the occasion, or something), and I agreed to review it. What did I let myself in for?

You’ll have some idea of how The Soddit goes purely from knowing how The Hobbit goes, so I won’t rehearse the plot too much: a Soddit named Bingo Grabbings is cajoled by a group of dwarfs and the wizard Gandef to join them on an expedition to the Only Mountain, home of the dragon Smug; they are at pains to emphasise to Bingo that this quest is all about taking the dragon’s gold – honest, guv. An episodic narrative of various encounters then follows, until the group reaches its destination.

The humour of The Soddit typically starts with a pun on the name of a character from Tolkien’s work, and extends outwards from there. Some of Roberts’s ideas work better than others: for example, the shape-shifter Biorn is an inconsistent mishmash of Scandinavian stereotypes – he speaks in Abba lyrics occasionally, and likes his flat-pack furniture – that I found too broad-brush to be truly amusing. But I loved the translation of Gollum’s riddles in the dark into a philosophical contest with ‘Sollum’.

Beyond the humour, what comes through time and again in the book is a trait that Roberts shares with Tolkien (though it manifests in very different ways in the authors’ respective work): a love of language. In The Soddit, it’s not just about puns: there are passages where Roberts is clearly revelling in the possibilities of prose, the pure rhythm and flow of writing. If you like that in a work of fiction (and I do), it is a joy to read.

But The Soddit is not all about play; there are elements of a straightforward, serious novel here, and they work rather well. Instead of a Ring that makes him invisible, Bingo finds a Thing (complete with registered trademark) which makes true the opposite of whatever someone speaks through it. Cue the classic fantasy trope of ‘be careful what you wish for’, which Roberts uses very neatly. And I must admit to being surprised by the twist in the nature of the group’s quest, a twist that succeeds on its own terms even as one senses that Roberts is deliberately making the gears of narrative grind noisily. The Soddit is a showcase for Roberts’s sense of humour, yes; but his skill as a storyteller is also firmly on display.

BBC National Short Story Award 2013: the result

9th October 2013 / / 0 Comments

Last night, the 2013 BBC National Short Story Award was won by Sarah Hall for her story ‘Mrs Fox.; Lucy Wood was runner-up, for ‘Notes from the House Spirits’. It’s a good result, I think: Hall’s story, about a man whose relationship starts to break down when his wife undergoes a profound transformation (which may or may not be literal, for all the difference it makes), has a brilliant sense of wildness and mystery. I’ve already written about Wood’s tale in my review of Diving Belles; it was one of my favourite stories in her collection.

Actually, Hall’s and Wood’s were two of my three favourite stories on the Award shortlist (the third was ‘Barmouth’, Lisa Blower’s depiction of a woman’s life depicted through her caravan holidays, which creates a wonderful sense of time and place, and captures the melancholy of change). Interestingly, both the first- and second-place stories make use of the fantastic to explore personal concerns and notions of change. You can still pick up a copy of the Award anthology, which I’d suggest is well worth doing.

Strange Horizons: new review and fund drive

18th September 2013 / / 0 Comments

Today I have a new review up at Strange Horizons, looking at The World of the End, the debut novel by Ofir Touché Gafla (translated from the Hebrew by Mitch Ginsburg).Gafla’s book is the story of one man’s journey through an unacceptably strange afterlife, searching his late wife, whom he thought would be there to meet him. As you’ll see from the review, I ended up feeling ambivalent towards The World of the End; it’s a lot of fun to read, but its disparate elements doesn’t quite seem to gel.

Strange Horizons is currently in the middle of its annual fund drive, so I’d like to take the opportunity to say a few words about why I value the site. In my view, SH is simply the number one place to go (online or off-) for writing about speculative fiction (I’m less familiar with the fictional content myself, but its reputation precedes it). There are two values at the heart of this: SH stands for serious, in-depth engagement with its subject matter; and it champions diversity of all kinds within the field. That’s what I want from commentary on speculative fiction (actually, make that commentary on any kind of fiction). With Strange Horizons, even if the subject of a particular piece doesn’t interest me personally, I can pretty much be sure that the writing will be engaged and engaging. To write for SH myself is always a pleasure and a privilege.

Strange Horizons is a non-profit operation which relies entirely on donations to keep going, hence the fund drive. If you already know and like SH, why not consider chipping in? If you’re unfamiliar with the site, I strongly recommend you check it out – you never know what may be of interest.

The Winter Witch: first chapter

17th September 2013 / / 0 Comments

This post is part of a blog tour for Paula Brackston‘s new novel, The Winter Witch. It is the story of Morgana Pritchard, a young woman in 19th century Wales who is the subject of rumours in her village. Morgana’s mother marries her off to a farmer named Cai Jenkins in the hope that she will be safer in a community where she is unknown – but it seems that  some people there already have some idea of Morgana’s secret.

The Winter Witch has a very down-to-earth approach to depicting  magic, which I particularly appreciated. By arrangement with the publisher, Corsair, I am hosting the opening sequence of the book; we join Morgana as she is about to marry Cai…

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Continue reading

Reading round-up: late July

21st July 2013 / / 1 Comment

Catching up on some of the books I’ve read recently…

Rachel Joyce, Perfect (2013)

In 1972, two leap seconds are added to time, and Byron Hemmings wonders if this is what led his mother to cause a road accident that she didn’t even notice; Byron sets up ‘Operation Perfect’ with his school-friend James Long to find out. Meanwhile, in the present day, middle-aged Jim is trying to rebuild his life after years in a psychiatric hospital; we may guess that these two narrative strands are connected, so the question becomes: how? Perfect is quite different in subject and tone from Joyce’s Booker-longlisted debut novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry; but it shares the earlier novel’s underlying seriousness, which gives Perfect a firm emotional grounding.

Monique Roffey, Archipelago (2012)

A year after their home flooded, Gavin Weald and his daughter Océan still cannot settle back into life. So, along with their dog Suzy, they head out from Trinidad across the ocean on a voyage which is at least as much emotional as it is physical. With that in mind, the archipelago of the title could be all the many pieces of life that the Wealds encounter on the journey, as well as the islands they travel through. By novel’s end, there is a sort of peace, but it is not easily won.

Antoine Laurain, The President’s Hat (2012)
Translated from the French by Louise Rogers Laulaurie, Emily Boyce and Jane Aitken, 2013

Daniel Mercier is eating out when none other than François Mitterand sits at the next table; when the President leaves, Daniel sees that he has left his hat behind. Deciding to keep the hat for himself, Daniel finds his life start to change – until he leaves the hat behind somewhere. We then follow a succession of characters who gain possession of Mitterand’s hat, each gaining that extra confidence to do something different. I found this book simply great fun to read; as a nice added touch, there are different translators for each viewpoint character.

Marlen Haushofer, The Wall (1968)
Translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside, 1991

On a visit to her cousin, a woman wakes one day to find no other people in sight, and an invisible wall cutting her off from much of the outside world. Some years later, still (for all intents and purposes) the only human about, she writes her report of what happened, which is the book we now hold. Told precisely and coolly, The Wall is a tale of survival not so much as heroic endurance but as keeping going because that’s all there is left.

Carmen Bugan, Burying the Typewriter (2012)

A memoir of the author’s childhood in Ceaucescu’s Romania, where her father was a dissident and her family surveilled by the secret police. There are some good scenes in this book – a sequence where the young Carmen tries to visit the American embassy is as tense as any fictional thriller; and there’s a real sense towards the end of how out-of-place the secret police are in Carmen’s village – but, as a whole, it didn’t quite engage me.

Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders (2001)

A novel set in the Derbyshire village of Eyam, which voluntarily cut itself off from the surrounding country when the plague struck in 1665, seen through the eyes of Anna Frith, a young housemaid who remains immune. There’s lots of interesting historical detail in here, but sometimes to the detriment of the book as a novel – and the ending especially feels rather too abrupt.

Read This: Cooking with Bones by Jess Richards

26th June 2013 / / 2 Comments

I have a new review up at Bookmunch, and wanted to flag this one up especially, because the book is so good. In fact, it’s my favourite read of the year so far. Without further ado, I present to you Cooking with Bones by Jess Richards…

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Amber looks at her sleeping sister Maya and sees a thousand phantom faces. Maya is a formwanderer, a “mirror of want” – a human specially engineered so that anyone who looks at her sees her as whatever they want to see, even if they’re not aware of what that is. Formwanderers have a difficult existence – there are reports of them killing people because their observers unwittingly desire it – but perhaps Maya’s greatest problem is that she doesn’t know what to be for her self.

When their parents announce that they have found jobs for the sisters that will split them up, Amber and Maya flee their home city of Paradon to a coastal village. They take up refuge in an abandoned cottage, where Amber finds a strange recipe book, cooking utensils made of bone, and cupboards full of ingredients. Discovering that more food is regularly left outside the front door, Amber sets about trying out some recipes, unaware of the effects they have on the outside world. Meanwhile, the villagers leave their tithe of goods out for the witch Old Kelp; but one child, Kip, is about to stumble across a secret.

Cooking with Bones is, quite simply, one of the best books I have read this year. Its vision is so confident and complete, its language a joy. One has the sense that Paradon houses endless stories waiting to be told – Amber’s new job at the Tear Lab, “where sadness is measured”, is just one tantalising detail – but they are not to be told here, as the city is swiftly left behind. This is the depth of texture with which Jess Richards imbues her novel’s world, and it is exhilarating to read. The recipes dotted throughout the text also evoke a real sense of magic:

“Sieve together the cornflour and sand, thinking of sand clocks, of life cycles, of beginnings and endings, of cliffs crumbling to rocks to stones to sand, and footprints leading along an inevitable path.”

As for the story, it strikes me most of all as a tale of growing up. The three young protagonists are all, in their own ways, being held back: Maya is so used to (literally) existing for other people that she can’t work out what she wants; Amber doesn’t really know what she wants either, but feels that primal want all the same; Kip just wishes to be Kip, though others place obstacles in the way. All will find some sort of resolution, though a happy ending is not guaranteed.

Cooking With Bones is a novel that draws you so completely into its world that it is hard to step out again. Whilst you’re there, it is a delight. Now I need to go back and read Richards’ debut, Snake Ropes; and you should definitely read this book.

Any Cop? Without doubt. As far as I’m concerned, with this book, Jess Richards has established herself as an important new voice in British fantastic literature.

(Elsewhere: read other reviews of Cooking with Bones at Workshy Fop and Learn This Phrase. They also think it’s great.)

“This is how hard you should have fought for my son when you brought him into the world”

12th June 2013 / / 4 Comments

Adam Marek, The Stone Thrower (2012)

Who is the Stone Thrower? In the title story of this, Adam Marek’s second collection, he is a boy killing the chickens  of the lakeside house that Hal’s family is renting. Hal pulls out all the stops to save his birds, demonstrating an action hero’s dexterity – but he is unprepared for just how determined the boy is to achieve his goal. In the collection as a whole, the figure of the Stone Thrower may the extraordinary forces at work in Marek’s stories, forces that may inspire extraordinary (to us, at least) responses in the adult characters seeking to protect their charges (chickens in Hal’s case, but more often children).

Marek’s tales typically begin with what appears to be a fairly unremarkable situation, but as they develop we may discover that not all is as it seems. In ‘The Stormchasers’, a father heads out with his son Jakey to go looking for a tornado. At story’s end, however, we find that the true purpose of that journey was to protect Jakey from a different kind of storm which has been going on at home. ‘Remember the Bride Who Got Stung?’ sees Victor out on a picnic with his family, when his allergic son Nate is stung by a bee; having left behind Nate’s shots , Victor determines to get the child’s adrenaline flowing – by any means necessary.

That latter story in particular illustrates one of Marek’s common techniques: to show how particular circumstances have shaped a character’s psychology in ways that appear reasonable to them, but may not to an outside observer like the reader. But – like many of The Stone Thrower’s tale’s – ‘Remember the Bride’ is understatedly and elegantly fantasticated. The appearance of a bee is a rare occurrence in the world of this story; and that’s the only hint we receive that we may be reading about a near future.

When Marek writes about the future (or an alternative present), there’s usually a greater degree of difference than that; but he’s always primarily concerned with the characters and their relationships. ‘Tamagotchi’ sees a new, more sophisticated, generation of those virtual pets on the market. Young Luke has a Tamagotchi which is sick, and spreading that sickness to other children’s pets; one parent asks that he keep away from the other children at a birthday party. But Luke is also epileptic, and his parents talk about him having a “design fault”: the stigma of having a sick Tamagotchi shades into how Luke is treated because of his condition, and affects the way his parents think about him. Sometimes this kind of mirroring extends further outwards: in ‘A Thousand Seams’, a mother clutches her ill son in the midst of a protest and tells him, ‘”WI’m going to make everything okay”. It’s an open question whether the boy or society is more threatened by having too much pressure placed on their respective weak points.

The collection ends with ‘Earthquakes’, which tells of a boy named Toby who has a rare condition that induces seizures which have external effects. The effect is different in each case (Toby’s seizures cause earth tremors), but no children with the syndrome have yet lived into their teens. The format of this story gives it a slightly different tone from most of the others in The Stone Thrower: it’s written as a generic fundraising letter – the details of the case are specific, but there’s just a placeholder for the recipient. So we have a curious mix of the personal and impersonal: there’s enough of a story about the text that it carries emotional weight; but there is also a sense that it may all be fake, a marketing document generated to drum up sympathy and cash. Even if we accept ‘Earthquakes’ as genuine, it feels like a lonely cry in the dark, because the mother writing this letter doesn’t know if anyone will ever read it. But, as ever in Marek’s stories, the adult characters will go to any length for their children if the circumstances demand it.

This book has been shortlisted for the 2013 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Click here to read my other posts on the shortlist.

Reading round-up: early June

8th June 2013 / / 2 Comments

More snapshots of some of the books I’ve read lately:

Patrick Ness, The Crane Wife (2013). Fortysomething George Duncan removes an arrow from the wing of a crane which has mysteriously appeared in his garden… then falls in love with a woman named Kumiko who visits his print shop the next day. But what follows is not so simple as “Kumiko is the crane” – she becomes the missing piece in more than one character’s life, and highlights how others do the same. The Crane Wife is a neat exploration of love and communication; I especially like the subtle ways that Ness alters the style and tone of his dialogue, depending on which characters are in conversation.

Kristina Carlson, Mr Darwin’s Gardener (2009; translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah, 2013). The latest Peirene Press title centres on Thomas Davies, non-religious gardener to Charles Darwin, who wonders what is left to live for after his wife has died. Carlson’s prose swoops in and out of the minds of various inhabitants of Downe village, examining their faith and slowly revealing their own personal doubts. The lines between faith as a belief and a way of life blur, as do notions of living for this world or the next, in a complex portrait.

Meike Ziervogel, Magda (2013). And here is the first novel by the founder of Peirene Press. It’s a composite of story-chapters, in various voices and styles, about Magda Goebbels, her mother Auguste, and eldest daughter Helga. Ziervogel ddepicts Magda as a girl given the fear of God at convent school; a woman who sees in Hitler what she had been searching for; and a mother preparing to kill her children. She also traces the psychological changes in her characters over the generations, in an interesting piece of work.

Rupert Christiansen, I Know You’re Going to Be Happy (2013). The son of two journalists, Christiansen is himself a newspaper opera and dance critic. In this memoir, he attempts to unpick the story of his parents’ divorce (his father left when Christiansen was a young child; the last time that the author never saw him was at the age of five). Christiansen is frank that this is an act exploration for him as much as one of recollection; but he creates vivid vignettes, whatever he turns to (I particularly appreciated his depiction of the ambivalence of growing up in suburban London). Christiansen’s story is compelling, and his prose a joy to read.

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