Tag: literature

Sheri S. Tepper, The Waters Rising (2010)

21st April 2012 / / 6 Comments

The Waters Rising is a loose sequel to Sheri Tepper’s 1993 novel A Plague of Angels (the two books share a protagonist, but pretty much stand alone). In a distant future where, after collapse, society has reverted to a medieval milieu, with added ‘magical’ phenomena (such as talking animals) courtesy of largely-forgotten science. Travelling pedlar Abasio and his wisecracking horse Big Blue arrive at the Duke of Wold’s castle, where the Duke’s Tingawan wife, Xu-i-lok, is ailing. Abasio meets Xulai, the young Tingawan charged with the traditional responsibility of carrying Xu-i-lok’s soul back to Tingawa, should the princess die away from her home country. Xu-i-lok does indeed die towards the start of the novel, and Abasio joins Xulai and guardians on their journey to Tingawa, where a solution might also wait to the rising waters which threaten to engulf the land – but, of course, there are those who would see Xulai fail in her quest.

Since I’m reading this book in the context of its Clarke Award nomination, I need to address the question of genre; because, for a novel which has been shortlisted for a science fiction award, The Waters Rising spends an awful lot of time looking like an epic fantasy. Yes, it’s set in the future; and, yes, its fantastications have scientific underpinnings; but they might as well be magical for all the difference it makes. Here, for example, is the evil duchess Alicia explaining the ‘curse’ she has placed on Xu-i-lok:

There’s no such thing as magic. No. My favourite machine makes lovely curses, invisible clouds of very small, powerful killers. I can make the cloud and keep it alive in a special kind of vial. Then, if I get close enough to the person and release the cloud, the cloud will find that person among all the peoples who may be near, no matter where the person is hidden, so long as I release it nearby! (p. 25)

What Alicia is describing here – though she doesn’t know the scientific words for it – is a nanotechnology weapon tailored to its target’s DNA; but it could just as easily be a magic spell. To me, his isn’t the sort of sf/fantasy bleeding that justifies considering a novel as science fiction. I’m not great fan of A Plague of Angels, but it was far bolder in the way it combined sf and fantasy: its characters moved knowingly between fantastical and science-fictional venues, and the novel held the two modes in tension. By The Waters Rising, enough time has passed that the science fiction is largely hidden behind the curtain of fantasy; and the odd intervention like Alicia’s nanotech ‘curse’ – or even the book’s final third, where the sf becomes more overt – is not enough to alter my perception that the beating heart of Tepper’s book is a traditional quest fantasy. That’s one reason why I’m annoyed that The Waters Rising has been shortlisted for the Clarke.

Another reason is that the book really isn’t very good, even as a quest fantasy. Structurally, the story is a fairly straightforward wander across the map, with occasional scenes joining the caricature villains (one even laughs, ‘Heh, heh, heh,’ at one point), who helpfully do much of their plotting out loud for our benefit. This might be fine in Saturday morning cartoons, but it reads very crudely in a novel. There are some diverting pieces of fantastication, such as the villagers of ‘Becomers’, whom Alicia has persuaded they must behave in a certain way (singing to each other, for example, or painting themselves blue) to receive the king’s favour.  But, like Declare on last year’s Clarke shortlist, too much of The Waters Rising is overstuffed with detail (the low point of this for me is a pages-long description of an abbey’s mealtime procedures).

As I mentioned earlier, the novel’s science-fictional aspect comes more strongly to the fore as we reach the final third, which is when the party reaches Tingawa, and solutions to humanity’s problems are mooted and implemented. But, even here, Tepper’s book frustrates. The Waters Rising has environmental degradation caused by humans in its background (‘Men were foolish and did foolish things [says one character], they did not respect the earth, they worshipped the ease machines and the world punished them by becoming barren,’ p. 200); but the immediate difficulties being faced in the novel have more fantastical origins, and the means of addressing them likewise. To my mind, this undercuts the book’s moral message, as well as its status as science fiction.

In sum, I really have no idea what The Waters Rising is doing on the Clarke shortlist, and can see no reason to recommend it.

This novel has been shortlisted for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts about the Award.

Greg Bear, Hull Zero Three (2010)

18th April 2012 / / 3 Comments

When I think about what I want from a literary award shortlist, a selection of excellent books is of course a must; but I’d also like to see books that, once read, feel essential – selections that mean you’ll have missed out if you don’t read them. In Hull Zero Three, the Clarke judges have chosen something different: a decent-enough novel that nobody needs to read.

A man, who comes to be known as ‘Teacher’, wakes (with no memory) from his induced hibernation to discover that his dream of having travelled across the stars to a new planet has not become reality. On the contrary, Teacher finds himself aboard a cold, dark, and largely deserted spacecraft (called simply ‘Ship’)  – deserted, that is, but for the monstrous creatures which threaten to do away with him; and the handful of survivors who might help him figure out what has happened.

As a mystery-thriller-in-space, Hull Zero Three works well enough. True, its prose rarely rises above the level of straightforward functionality; but the aesthetic that creates is entirely appropriate for the stark geometry of Ship and claustrophobic focus of the novel (tellingly, I think, those scenes where the prose does move into a more poetic register tend not to be set in the fictional present). The pacing is fine, and Greg Bear is a sufficiently canny science fiction writer that his plot twists and resolution are interesting.

But the mystery is all in Hull Zero Three, and the novel can’t move beyond the limitations that creates. There’s not much room for characterisation, nor to really explore the moral issues raised by the situation. And, even though Bear’s narrative moves along at a fair old clip, three hundred pages still feels rather long for what it is.

Hull Zero Three is a novel that can sit happily on bookstore shelves and be pointed to as evidence that solid reads are still being produced in the science fiction genre. But, if you never took it down from the shelf to read it, you would be none the worse off. It’s a book that passes the time, but I can’t get at all excited about it; that’s not the kind of work I want to see on the Clarke shortlist.

This novel has been shortlisted for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts about the Award.

Drew Magary, The End Specialist (2011)

16th April 2012 / / 6 Comments

A few years hence, an accidental scientific discovery has led to a treatment which will halt the process of ageing; barring disease or accident, immortality may be yours – provided you can afford the fee, of course. Divorce lawyer John Farrell has the ‘cure’ (as it’s known) in 2019, weeks before it is legalised in theUSA. We then follow his life at various intervals over the course of the following sixty years, during which Farrell ultimately changes career to ‘end specialisation’, facilitating (for a fee) the deaths of those who wish to end their lives, in the manner of their own choosing.

The End Specialist (aka The Postmortal) provides an interesting point of comparison with its fellow Clarke Award nominee The Testament of Jessie Lamb, in that both examine futures with game-changing medical developments, but do so firmly from the vantage-point of one individual. The key difference, I think, is that The Testament shows the outside world from within Jessie Lamb’s frame of reference – which makes for an incomplete examination, but one that nevertheless works as an aesthetic whole; whereas The End Specialist tries to show the outside world from beyond John Farrell’s frame of reference – hence the protagonist includes news reports and link round-ups in the ‘blog entries’ that make up the text of this novel – and, in doing so, reaches beyond itself.

Much of the positive commentary I’ve seen on Drew Magary’s novel – both in reviews and the Not the Clarke Panel at Eastercon – seems to emphasise the extent to which Magary delineates the consequences of the situation he sets up. There are certainly aspects of The End Specialist which ring true, such as the sense of ennui felt by Farrell when he notes that his photo doesn’t change, and wonders if maybe he hasn’t either (‘The time span is invisible. It’s as if I haven’t lived at all,’ p. 84); and I can buy, for example, the idea that some people might be pettily cruel enough to blind or scar immortals out of spite. But much of Magary’s depiction of his wider fictional world (whether within or outside theUS) feels superficial to me, because it is dependent on John Farrell’s interest; and, as a character, Farrell really has only a passing interest in the world beyond his immediate circumstances.

Even when it’s concerned with Farrell’s circumstances, though, The End Specialist falls short. As Dan Hartland notes, Farrell is a fairly anonymous presence; nothing really seems to touch or change him, no matter what he might say in his narration (that’s another way, incidentally, in which the depiction of the world feels flat; no matter how sour life has apparently becomes, the fictional society feels much the same, because the tone of Farrell’s narration doesn’t change). The depiction of the secondary characters is similarly wanting, particularly that of the female characters; it’s true that most of the minor characters, male and female alike, exist to be adjuncts to Farrell, but I gain more sense of his father and adult son as rounded individuals than I do the key women in Farrell’s life. I rolled my eyes particularly at the essentialism of a scene in which Farrell leaves his pregnant partner Sonia rather than get married, because immortality has caused him to realise (as the other men he knows have similarly concluded in their own lives) that he can’t make a lifelong commitment to her – whereas Sonia maintains a desire to fulfil traditional gender roles (and Farrell has no doubts about his ability to commit to his son for however long their lives may be).

On the level of prose, I’m still struggling to see The End Specialist as a worthwhile read. The scene I mentioned earlier, where Farrell is reflecting on his unchanging appearance, stands out to me for its writing; as did one in which an end specialism client describes his wish to become one with the sea. But the rest feels unremarkable, even when the novel takes on the shape of a thriller in its second half – and a thriller can’t do its job if it doesn’t have gripping prose.

Frankly, I’m baffled as to why this book is on the Clarke shortlist. However I look at The End Specialist, I see a novel which is mediocre at best – and sometimes considerably poorer. What I can’t see is any way in which it could be considered one of the six best science fiction novels of the year.

This novel has been shortlisted for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts about the Award.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)

4th April 2012 / / 4 Comments

Cloud Atlas is a novel that feels like a turning point. I can imagine people reading it at the time of its publication, seeing its structure – six novellas, moving forward in time from the mid-1800s to a post-collapse future, each one (bar the sixth) split in half by the next as we approach it – and thinking: where can David Mitchell go from here? What structural theatrics could follow that? From the vantage point of eight years and two more novels, we know that Mitchell turned to ostensibly more conventional narratives; so his third novel still feels like a significant moment in his career even now.

In his World Book Night programme last year, John Mullan held up Cloud Atlasas an example of an unconventional novel which has nevertheless been immensely popular. It’s not hard to see why so many people have been taken with Mitchell’s book: it’s highly entertaining. Mitchell’s control of voice and tone in all the stories – be they pulp thriller, science fiction, or period journal – is superb. The author is also adept at bringing characters to life in relatively few words; such as Robert Frobisher, the composer who flees to Holland in 1931, and whose letters to a friend form the second novella:

When insolvent, pack minimally, with a valise tough enough to be thrown on to a London pavement from a 1st or 2nd-floor window. Insist on hotel rooms no higher. (pp. 43-4)

Just about the only segment of Cloud Atlas which doesn’t quite work for me is the present-day tale of Timothy Cavendish, an elderly publisher who gets inadvertently ‘checked into’ an old people’s home when he’s expecting a hotel. Whilst I’ll concede that Mitchell’s parody of contemporary literary fiction is on the button, this was the only narrative which annoyed rather than engaged me – because it’s the only one of the six to exaggerate the form it embodies.

The title of Cloud Atlas recurs in the novel several times, most literally as the name of a piece worked on by Robert Frobisher; but also in Timothy Cavendish’s wish, as he thinks back on happier times in his life and longs to find that place again, for ‘a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable’ (p. 389). From that point of view, Mitchell’s book is an aerial view of human history. It speaks to the existence of repeating patterns, reflected in the twist in each plot, and the ways in which groups and individuals prey on each other throughout the narratives.

But the structure of Cloud Atlas also speaks to the distinctiveness of times and experiences: the world of each novella is imagined so solidly that it emphasises the distance between them all, heightening the feeling of disconnection when the narrative we’ve just read is mentioned as a text in the following one. When a group of 19th-century characters discuss a future in which all peoples will know their place on the ‘ladder of civilization’ (p. 507), they have no notion of how different from that the reality will be – but we’ve seen it in the sixth novella, which returns to the same Pacific setting as the first, several centuries hence. The islanders of that latter time worship a goddess named Somni, whom we know as the artificial-human protagonist of the previous tale. Each story shapes its own world, even as we see the links between them.

One life may be a drop in the ocean, muses 19th-century notary Adam Ewing at novel’s end, ‘[y]et what is an ocean but a multitude of drops?’ (p. 529). The drops of story in Cloud Atlas coalesce into a majestic whole.

Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb (2011)

2nd April 2012 / / 11 Comments

They called it MDS – Maternal Death Syndrome. No one knew where it originated, but its effects were all too familiar: to lay waste to the brains of any women who became pregnant – with no possible exceptions, because everyone carries the disease. Jessie Lamb is a teenager living near Manchester; though her father is a fertility scientist, she has little care for the state of the world – as far as she’s concerned, this is just the way things are, and any problems are for adults to deal with.

But then, through a friend, Jessie gets involved in Youth For Independence (YOFI), a movement centred on the idea that young people must repair the damage to the world which adults have caused:

[…]maybe, if we could get enough people to join us, trying to create a different way of living on the planet, maybe that in itself would start to produce an answer to MDS. A solution we couldn’t even imagine yet. (p. 29)

There’s a touch of wishful thinking in Jessie’s thought process, here; and she soon leaves YOFI when the reality doesn’t match up to what she’d hoped. But there’s also a strong desire to do something to help; and, though none of the other protest groups which spring up in the wake of MDS is attractive to Jessie, she never loses that desire.

Jessie finally believes she has found the thing she can do when she hears about the Sleeping Beauties: girls who have volunteered to be placed into a coma so they can bring to term frozen embryos which can then receive a new vaccine against MDS (frozen embryos alone can be vaccinated because they don’t carry the disease). Jessie’s father is quite enthusiastic about the prospects of this programme initially, but soon changes his tune when his daughter declares her intention to volunteer – so much so that he holds her captive to stop her; that’s where we first meet Jessie, and where she’s writing the text we hold, which is her attempt to explain herself.

The whole world might be in the grip of an epidemic in The Testament of Jessie Lamb, but the focus is decidedly intimate. Jane Rogers seems to signal this near the near the beginning of the novel, when she has Jessie and her friend Sal imagine what would happen in a world without humans – the implication being that this playful speculation is as far as the book is going to go down that particular avenue. Likewise, though there’s social unrest in The Testament, it all takes place ‘off-stage’ or on TV news reports. This novel is about Jessie, her relationships, and the decision she wants to make.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb is a novel that challenges its readers to see things from its protagonist’s point of view. In the end, I can’t quite do this: I can see where Jessie is coming from – for her, it’s about having the power to do something that makes a difference, even if adults think that difference is too insignificant for the price that must be paid – and Rogers charts the course of Jessie’s thoughts clearly. But I still feel as though I’m viewing Jessie’s thought process as an outside observer, rather than truly inhabiting it. Be that as it may, The Testament is unforgiving in its treatment of hard consequences and decisions; it has the courage of its convictions and, for that, firmly deserves to be read.

This novel has been shortlisted for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts about the Award.

Elsewhere
Jane Rogers’ website
The publisher, Sandstone Press
Booker Prize interview with Rogers
Some other reviews of The Testament of Jessie Lamb: Niall Harrison for Strange Horizons; Aishwarya Subramanian at Practically Marzipan; Richard Palmer at Solar Bridge; Sophie Playle for MouthLondon.

Lucy Wood, Diving Belles (2012) – Strange Horizons review

30th March 2012 / / 1 Comment

Would you like to hear about the best book I’ve read so far this year? Here it is: the debut collection from Lucy Wood, a set of contemporary stories inspired by Cornish folklore. Wood is clearly going to be a name to watch out for in the future; to find out why, I’d invite you to read my review of Diving Belles, which is up on Strange Horizons today.

Click here to read the review.

Further links
Video interview with Lucy Wood
Wood reads from ‘Notes from the House Spirits’

Nick Harkaway, Angelmaker (2012)

27th March 2012 / / 3 Comments

Two novels into an author’s career might be too soon to generalise, but we have to work with what we’ve got. I’m coming to think of Nick Harkaway’s novels as battlegrounds between whimsy and cold, hard seriousness. The Gone-Away World combined mime artists and digressive prose with a desire to treat the effects of its reality-bending weapon matter-of-factly; Angelmaker embodies the conflict in its protagonist. Joe Spork’s father, Mathew was a master criminal – and no ordinary one, but a gentleman-crook of the old school. As a boy, Joe spent his days in the world of the Night Market – the kind of shadowy gathering which one assumes could only exist in fiction, whose changing locations is revealed only by clues hidden in newspapers. It’s crime that belongs in a heightened version of reality; but here it is in the world of Angelmaker, and Joe wants none of it; instead, he has followed in the footsteps of Daniel, his grandfather, and become a clockmaker. But his latest job makes Joe cross paths with Edie Banister, a nonagenarian ex-spy; and eventually he gets caught up in a plot to end the world with a swarm of clockwork bees – components of the Apprehension Engine, a device which would cause people to apprehend truth so clearly that it would render the universe static.

Like the criminal underworld of Joe’s youth, Edie Banister’s world of espionage is  more colourful than our reality should be able to hold – she was schooled in the ways of spying from an early age, aboard an artisan-crafted train and submarine, and has a ruthless arch-enemy who makes Keyser Söze look like a sissy – and Joe remains protected by a firm of old-school-tie types with seemingly bottomless resources. But Harkaway underlines that the passage of time has been squeezing out these ways of being: ‘The world was getting old and cruel. The great game [Edie] had played, the wild, primary-colour roller coaster, had become something harsher.’ (p. 347) That primary-coloured world is what Joe has spent his life trying to escape, but his story throughout Angelmaker is one of learning to balance his past and presenrt – just as the novel as a whole finds a balance between its outlandish and down-to-earth aspects.

Not everything in the novel works so well: Joe’s love interest, Polly Cradle, remains a little too close to the stereotype of super-competent totty; and I think Angelmakerasks its readers to feel more warmly towards its larger-than-life crime capers than I personally was able to. But then the novel treads its high-wire with nimble feet and gives us genuinely chilling scenes in which Joe has been seized and is tormented by his gentlemanly captors. It shows that Edie’s nemesis is no cartoon villain, but all too real and ruthless beyond belief. It causes the hairs on the back of one’s neck to rise with its fantastical hints of a world changed by the Apprehension Engine. It wrong-foots us with passages of genuine emotion in the midst of a deceptively light narrative. If Angelmaker pits whimsy against seriousness, the outcome is a stalemate; but the real winners of the fight are Nick Harkaway and his readers.

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

Elsewhere
Nick Harkaway’s website
Some other reviews of Angelmaker: John Clute for Strange Horizons; Emily St. John Mandel for The Millions; Matt Craig at Reader Dad.

Arthur C. Clarke Award 2012: The Shortlist

26th March 2012 / / 8 Comments

For the second year running, I’ve predicted only a third of the Clarke Award shortlist. Here are this year’s contenders:

Greg Bear, Hull Zero Three (Gollancz)

Drew Magary, The End Specialist (Harper Voyager)

China Miéville, Embassytown (Macmillan)

Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone)

Charles Stross, Rule 34 (Orbit)

Sheri S. Tepper, The Waters Rising (Gollancz)

(The titles above will become review links as I work my way through the shortlist.)

It’s customary, on first seeing a shortlist, to rue the absence of certain titles – I’ll name Christopher Priest’s The Islanders as the big genre name I expected to be there; Naomi Wood’s The Godless Boys as the book I wanted to be shortlisted because I loved it; and Lavie Tidhar’s Osama as the talked-about genre title I was looking forward to reading – but what of the actual shortlisted books?

It’s no surprise to see China Miéville shortlisted for the Clarke when he has an eligible title, and Embassytown is his most unambiguously science-fictional work yet. It wouldn’t be much of a surprise if it won (which would give Miéville his fourth Clarke win), but I found Embassytown rather dry to read, and can’t see it as a sure-fire winner.

There are no other previous winners on this year’s shortlist, but Sheri S. Tepper has been nominated for the Clarke three times previously, in 1997, 1998,and most recently in 2009 for The Margarets. I tried to read that book at the time, but didn’t get along with it; The Waters Rising, though, is sequel to a novel I’ve long wanted to read – 1993’s A Plague of Angels – so we’ll see.

Greg Bear has been shortlisted twice previously, in 1987 and 2004. Like Tepper, I think of him as a writer whose heyday was in the 1980s and ‘90s; but the premise of Hull Zero Three – the voyage of a generation starship goes badly awry, and it falls to the survivors to work out what happened – sounds intriguing enough. I’m less sure that it sounds like the premise of an award-winning science fiction novel, though.

Charles Stross has received one previous Clarke nomination, in 2006. I’ve not read him before, but Rule 34 – a near-future thriller concerning an investigation into the murders of several spammers – has been well-received, and it is probably the book on the shortlist to which I’m looking forward to reading the most.

Jane Rogers’ The Testament of Jessie Lamb is this year’s non-genre contender. It was, of course, longlisted for the Booker last year, and has been rather well-liked in sf circles; however, I don’t know that what I’ve heard about it convinces me that it was the best mainstream-published sf novel of 2011. Still, I have been intending to read this book for ages, and now I will finally be doing so.

Which leaves Drew Magary’s The End Specialist as the least-known quantity on the shortlist for me. From my researches, I can tell you that it’s a debut novel, a thriller set in a future where a treatment has been developed to halt ageing, and there have been a range of reactions to the book. The synopsis wouldn’t move me to read The End Specialist, but if its Clarke nod means I’m introduced to an enjoyable book, that’ll be great.

I must own to being less excited about reading this year’s Clarke shortlist than I have been in the last couple of years. The Miéville is far from being its author’s best work. Bear and Tepper would not spring to my mind as authors who might be producing cutting-edge science fiction in 2012, though Stross probably would. The Magary doesn’t sound like anything special; and the Rogers, good though it may be (and strange though it seems to say about a book from such an obscure publisher), feels like the most obvious choice for a non-genre title.

My main sense at the moment is of wells untapped – I can’t help but wonder about the other debuts that were eligible, the other mainstream-published titles, the other books by established names. But I am always open to having my preconceptions overturned, and I very much hope that will happen with this year’s shortlist; there is a lot of overturning to be done.

Book and story notes: Claire Massey and Pascal Garnier

23rd March 2012 / / 2 Comments

Claire Massey, ‘Into the Penny Arcade’ and ‘Marionettes’ (2012)

Time for some new Nightjar Press chapbooks, and this year both their spring titles are by the same author – Claire Massey. The cover quotations from Robert Shearman and Liz Jensen talk about ‘making the ordinary something very sinister’ and ‘quiet disturbance’; I’ll go with that, as both these stories reveal something dark at the heart of the mundane, and do so in a restrained, subtle fashion.

‘Into the Penny Arcade’ is a great story, whose schoolgirl protagonist is attacked by a group of other girls, then rescued by the driver of a lorry which contains a number of old, and rather strange, penny arcade machines. Massey uses spare details and short, sharp sentences to build up the atmosphere – the run-down street, the lorry parked there day after day – and the tension only increases once we’re inside the arcade. The machines themselves are cast in a deliciously sinister light; and the ending has the same subtlety as the rest of the tale, as it suggests a chilling turn of events without being definitive.

‘Marionettes’ takes us toPrague, where Massey’s (unnamed) protagonist has travelled with her partner Karl. The pair come across a shop selling remarkably detailed marionettes, though Karl has little time for that. As the tale progresses, the couple’s relationship comes under increasing strain; and the marionette shop gains some familiar-looking puppets in its window.

As with ‘Into the Penny Arcade’, Massey here creates a sense of unease from some fairly ordinary things – in this case, the strange puppets and the disorientingPraguestreets. The link made between the protagonist’s relationship and the marionettes is effective, but the ending doesn’t quite work for me; I think it takes an imaginative leap further than the build-up can support, whereas in Massey’s other Nightjar story, the conclusion flows more naturally from the tale’s main body. Still, these are a fine duo of stories, and I will be looking out for more of Claire Massey’s work in the future.

Pascal Garnier, The Panda Theory (2008/12)

Gabriel arrives in a small Breton town, finds a restaurant, and strikes up a friendship with the owner, José, whose wife is ill in hospital. Gabriel is a good cook and a friendly face, and presently attracts a small circle of friends, including Madeleine, the receptionist of his hotel; and Marco and Rita, a couple also staying there. But he’s also carrying baggage from his past…

The Panda Theory is one of three books by the late Pascal Garnier which will be published by Gallic Books (who also provide the translation). Particularly effective is the contrast between the ordinariness of the novel’s present and the darkness of the flashbacks to Gabriel’s past – the details of which only gradually emerge. All the people Gabriel meets have holes in their lives, and – as his name suggests – the protagonist is something of an angel, in that he comes into their lives and changes them. But the question of exactly how he does so is one that remains open right up to the tense finale.

Book notes: Joyce, Sahlberg, Francis

20th March 2012 / / 4 Comments

Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012)

Harold Fry is whiling away his retirement – pottering about in south Devon, the spark long having gone out of his marriage to Maureen – when he receives a letter from Queenie Hennessy, an old work colleague. Queenie has written from a hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed to tell Harold that she is dying of cancer; moved that she still remembers him after all this time, Harold writes a letter in reply, and goes out to post it – but that feels inadequate to him, and Harold soon finds himself on a mission to walk all the way to Berwick.

Rachel Joyce’s debut is a delight to read: it reminded me of a (less macabre) Dan Rhodes book in its ability to combine whimsy with a genuine emotional punch; Harold’s journey may be eccentric, but his reasons for making it are not – and the colourful characters he meets along the way may have painful stories of their own that they don’t want to share. I particularly like the way that the changing character of Harold’s pilgrimage reflects and reinforces the waxing and waning of his hopes (at his most optimistic, Harold gains a new lease of life, and people want to travel with him; at his most despondent, he is bedraggled and alone). I’ll be interested to see what Joyce writes next.

Asko Sahlberg, The Brothers (2010/2)

Peirene Press’s theme for 2012 is ‘The Small Epic’ – ‘novella length stories of more than 35 chapters’ according to the publisher’s catalogue; but this book (Sahlberg’s ninth, translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah) also fits the bill as a grand-scale story set in a small space. That space is a Finnish farmhouse in 1809, inhabited by brothers Erik and Henrik; their mother; Erik’s wife, Anna; and the brothers’ cousin (who is treated little better than a servant), Mauri. Henrik has been estranged from the rest of his family, and fought on the opposite side to Erik in the recent war between Sweden and Russia. Now, in peacetime, Henrik returns home – and the battle for mastery of the household begins.

There’s a strong sense of character here, especially of Henrik, with his heavy, deliberate steps, and his childhood affinity with a violent horse. The story itself progresses in broad narrative moves, with the small domestic setting only heightening the sense of drama at the plot and character twists. The Brothers feels longer than its 122 pages, in the best possible way.

Paul Michael Francis, The Silver Bridge (2012)

Pavlos is frontman of the band Karma, a rock star with a conscience who is growing disillusioned. He becomes re-energised when he starts to have visions of a beautiful woman, and even more so when he discovers that she is real – the woman is Claire Davis, a Hollywood actress. She has problems of her own, not least her overly controlling mother. Pavlos and Claire might just be the best thing ever to happen to each other – if they could only get it together…

The Silver Bridge is the debut novel by Paul Michael Francis; despite all the differences in setting and subject matter, it shares with The Brothers a larger-than-life quality. I get the sense that Pavlos and Claire might realise how right they are for each other if they’d just stop and think for a bit – but that’s not the kind of story Francis is telling here. It’s outrageous optimism which drives Pavlos to approach Claire in the first place, and the pair fall in and out of love with similar degrees of intensity. Will they get together in the end, or won’t they? It wouldn’t be right for me to say – that’s all part of the novel’s game – but it is rather good fun finding out.

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