Tag: literature

My favourite books of 2010 so far…

2nd July 2010 / / 2 Comments

We’re halfway through the year, and I thought I’d mark the occasion by taking stock and looking back at some of the highlights of my reading year so far. I’m limiting myself to five titles, and concentrating on books that had their first English-language or first UK publication in 2010. I’ve judged them on how much they have stayed with me since I read them. So, in alphabetical order:

Robert Jackson Bennett, Mr Shivers

Ostensibly a search across the Depression-era United States for a ruthless killer, this book has a rich metaphoric subtext that makes it a very satisfying piece of work.

Shane Jones, Light Boxes

My favourite read of the year so far. A short, magical tale of the battle against February, that works on about three levels all at once.

Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

From a very short book to a very long one. An Irish boarding-school comedy with added theoretical physics throws in so much that there’s probably a kitchen sink in there somewhere – but it all works superbly.

Adam Roberts, New Model Army

Begins as the tale of an army that functions democratically, but transforms into something that genuinely is like nothing I have read before.

Amy Sackville, The Still Point

The parallel stories of a fateful Arctic expedition and a present-day couple at a turning-point in their relationship, wrapped up in a fascinating prose style.

My pick of pre-2010 books for the year so far is Christopher Priest’s excellent The Affirmation, the story of how a man’s life and his fictionalised autobiography intertwine until… well, read the book and see for yourself. And, of course, I’d recommend all the others to you as well.

Those are my picks for the first half of 2010, then. What have you most enjoyed reading this year?

Jonathan Lee, Who is Mr Satoshi? (2010)

1st July 2010 / / 2 Comments

At forty-one, Rob Fossick is drifting through life, his glory days as a photographer behind him. Some years previously, Rob’s wife died in an accident – and, as the book opens, his mother, Alice, dies in a fall whilst Rob is visiting her care home. Just before she went out on to the patio where she fell, Alice showed Rob a shoebox and said, ‘The plan is to deliver it to Mr Satoshi’. Talking to one of his mother’s friends at the home, Rob discovers that ‘Mr Satoshi’ was a nickname for a man named Reggie, with whom Alice was in love before she ever met Rob’s father, and now apparently resident (if, that is, he’s still alive) in Japan.

This man now becomes the focus of Rob’s life. Having mentioned Japan in passing to his agent, Rob finds himself travelling there, ostensibly to take the photographs that will re-ignite his career, but really to track down Reggie/Satoshi and hand him Alice’s package. Rob falls in with a student named Chiyoko, who also works as a receptionist at a ‘love hotel’ in Tokyo; and, together, they set about trying to find out the truth about the mysterious Mr Satoshi.

What strikes me in particular about Jonathan Lee’s first novel is that, for all that the question posed by the title is central to the novel – really, it’s the very engine that drives the story – in some ways it is one of its less interesting aspects. The answer to ‘who is Mr Satoshi?’ is less important, I think, than what the mystery represents to Rob Fossick – it doesn’t just promise the truth about his mother’s life, it also brings purpose to Rob’s life (though he might not recognise or admit the latter). Lee is particularly good at showing the changes in Rob’s character: his reclusiveness and reliance on pills make it hard for him to deal with the bustle and noise of Tokyo at first; but the eye of the photographer is still there, though it takes the ups and downs of Rob’s relationship with Chiyoko to bring it to the fore.

Thy mystery of Satoshi itself is quite interesting, but I don’t think it would have pulled me through the book if it hadn’t been bolstered by the deft characterisation of Rob. And I do feel that the novel concentrates on the mystery to the extent that some of the broader detail that could have rounded the book out more is pushed out. But Who is Mr Satoshi? is a welcome debut, and it will be interesting to see what Lee does next.

Elsewhere
Louise Laurie reviews Who is Mr Satoshi? at The Bookbag

Lines Drawn in the Air: literary and genre fiction

25th June 2010 / / 5 Comments

Occasioned by the Gaiman/Sarrantonio Stories anthology, David Barnett has written a blog post for the Guardian on ‘literary’ versus ‘genre’ fiction. I can’t help thinking that it’s based on a false opposition. He writes:

The ongoing, endless war between “literary” fiction and “genre” fiction has well-defined lines in the sand. Genre’s foot soldiers think that literary fiction is a collection of meaningless but prettily drawn pictures of the human condition. The literary guard consider genre fiction to be crass, commercial, whizz-bang potboilers. Or so it goes.

Well… Maybe some people do hold views like these, but I struggle to accept it as a generalisation. From my point of view, the kinds of distinctions to which Barnett refers are simply artificial. I’d agree with Aliya Whiteley that all the plot in the world is no guarantee of a good read, not if you don’t care about it; and that that both fast- and slower-paced novels can be worthwhile. I also think that Sam Jordison has it right in his comment on Barnett’s post when he points out that plenty of ‘literary’ fiction tells a good story. And I would disagree with the implication that a page-turner must be plot-driven. We turn the page because we want to know what’s written on the next one; I don’t see that it makes much difference whether what’s written there is a plot point, or a character observation, or whatever.

I define the focus of this blog as ‘literary fiction’, but I deliberately take a broad view of what that term means; some of it would be considered genre, some perhaps not. As far as I’m concerned, no matter what I’m reading, my basic approach doesn’t change: what I want is for a book or story to be the best it can, whatever it’s doing – and I hope that attitude comes through in what I write.

The divide between literary and genre can vanish with a tweak of perception. Consider this post by Larry Nolen, in which he responds to another blog post that identified lack of sf/fantasy authors in the New Yorker’s recent list of 20 American writers aged under 40, and contrasted  that with the  Daily Telegraph’s similar list of British writers.

(I will pause briefly to wonder what definition of ‘British’ led to the inclusion of Paul Murray in the Telegraph’s list, then move on.)

Larry points out, quite rightly, that the New Yorker list does include some authors of fantastic literature; it’s just that their work tends not to appear on the science fiction and fantasy shelves. However, we could go further, and note that China Miéville is the only writer on the Telegraph list who is published as a genre author. All the others on that list who could be considered to have written science fiction or fantasy, from Rana Dasgupta to Scarlett Thomas, are published as mainstream – just like the writers Larry mentions.

If there are lines between literary and genre fiction, I would suggest that they’re not so much drawn in the sand, as drawn in the air – and can be stepped over just as easily.

Christopher Priest, The Affirmation (1981)

20th June 2010 / / 9 Comments

The other week, Jackie from Farm Lane Books asked for recommendations of literary science fiction and fantasy. I recommended (amongst other names) Christopher Priest, as did Amanda of Floor to Ceiling Books; Jackie subsequently read The Prestige, and now it’s one of her top 20 favourite books. Of course, I’m pleased that Jackie enjoyed it so much; but I was also reminded that I am not as well-read in Priest’s bibliography as I’d like to be, so I took his 1981 novel The Affirmation down from the shelf.

Having lost his father, job, home, and relationship, all in quick succession, Peter Sinclair is at his lowest ebb. He takes on some work helping to renovate a friend’s country cottage; inspired by his ability to turn his vision for one of the rooms into reality, Peter resolves to write his autobiography, in the hope that, by doing so, he can make some sense of his life. After trying various approaches, he decides that the best way to achieve what he wants is to write metaphorically about his life; it won’t be what ‘actually’ happened, but it will attain (what Peter sees as) the ‘higher truth’ of capturing what the events of his twenty-nine years meant to him.

So, Peter creates an alternative version of himself, with the same name, but living in an imaginary world, and all the key people in his life given different names – and writes this Peter’s life story to represent the ‘higher truth’ of his own. Peter has almost completed the manuscript when he is interrupted by the arrival of his estranged sister, Felicity, and is forced to break off his work mid-sentence.

This happens in the fourth chapter of The Affirmation; the fifth is again narrated by Peter Sinclair (his voice is recognisably the same), but it’s the Peter of the imaginary world (a world, incidentally, also used by Priest as the setting for his ‘Dream Archipelago’ stories), who is sailing south to a clinic, having won a lottery to undergo a medical procedure which will effectively confer immortality on him. Okay, one supposes, this must be an extract from the ‘real’ Peter’s manuscript – but, no: the Peter in this world has also written a fictionalised autobiography; and the events of this strand subtly contradict what we know of the other Peter’s manuscript. One is left with no option but to conclude that the ‘imaginary’ world has its own valid reality.

And so, as the novel continues, the two realities shift back and forth, with the reader never allowed to pin down one of them as being more real than the other. Even the nature of the text presented to us is uncertain: we never knowingly get to read any of the manuscripts referred to, so what exactly is the testimony that we’re reading? And we only know Peter Sinclair through his words on the page, so what can we trust? This is what Priest is so good at: undermining our expectations, hiding the truth, making the realities of his stories profoundly uncertain.

There are imaginative pleasures a-plenty in The Affirmation, then; but the novel also works on other levels. It’s a fine meditation on memory, and how it can make us who we are. Peter believes that memory is central to the creation of identity, but he also knows how fallible our memories can be; this is played out in several different ways in the novel, including a quite literal one in the shape of the athanasia treatment – a side effect of the procedure is to erase patients’ memories; they’re required to complete a questionnaire beforehand, which will be used to reconstruct their memories – but can they possibly be the same people afterwards?

The Affirmation is also an acute portrayal of a man in a fragile mental state (though, as noted, it resists being interpreted as solely a tale of delusion). We discover early on that Peter hasn’t actually painted his ‘white room’ at all (though he imagines it painted, and it’s that ‘higher truth’, he insists, that really matters); this is only one of the first indications that the world viewed through Peter’s eyes may not be what a third party would see. This leads the protagonist into difficulties relating to other people. For example, Peter’s ideas of what his girlfriends (in both worlds) are like don’t reflect the reality, which puts a strain on his relationships; the way Priest reveals the ramifications of this is simply superb.

I’ve read three of Chris Priest’s novels now, and they have all been excellent. Seriously, if you have yet to read him, you’re missing out. As for me, I doubt it will be long before I read another of his books, and I very much look forward to doing so.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of The Affirmation: John Self at The Asylum; Matt Cheney at The Mumpsimus; David Auerbach at Waggish.
Christopher Priest’s website

Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio (eds.), Stories (2010)

15th June 2010 / / 3 Comments

Anthology titles don’t come much simpler than that. And the aim of the anthology (according to Neil Gaiman’s introduction) is similarly direct — to present good stories:

…[Al Sarrantonio and I] wanted good writing (why be satisfied with less?). But we wanted more than that. We wanted to read stories that used a lightning flash of magic as a way of showing us something we have already seen a thousand times as if we have never seen it before. Truly we wanted it all.

What the editors got was… this:

Roddy Doyle, ‘Blood’
Joyce Carol Oates, ‘Fossil-Figures’
Joanne Harris, ‘Wildfire in Manhattan’
Neil Gaiman, ‘The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains’
Michael Marshall Smith, ‘Unbelief’
Joe R. Lansdale, ‘The Stars Are Falling’
Walter Mosley, ‘Juvenal Nyx’
Richard Adams, ‘The Knife’
Jodi Picoult, ‘Weights and Measures’
Michael Swanwick, ‘Goblin Lake’
Peter Straub, ‘Mallon the Guru’
Lawrence Block, ‘Catch and Release’
Jeffrey Ford, ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’
Chuck Palahniuk, ‘Loser’
Diana Wynne Jones, ‘Samantha’s Diary’
Stewart O’Nan, ‘Land of the Lost’
Gene Wolfe, ‘Leif in the Wind’
Carolyn Parkhurst, ‘Unwell’
Kat Howard, ‘A Life in Fictions’
Jonathan Carroll, ‘Let the Past Begin’
Jeffery Deaver, ‘The Therapist’
Tim Powers, ‘Parallel Lines’
Al Sarrantonio, ‘The Cult of the Nose’
Kurt Andersen, ‘Human Intelligence’
Michael Moorcock, ‘Stories’
Elizabeth Hand, ‘The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon‘
Joe Hill, ‘The Devil on the Staircase’

I’m intrigued by that contents list, because it includes both names I’d readily associate with the field of fantastic literature, and others which I generally wouldn’t. I’m curious to see how that selection plays out, which is why I plan to review this anthology one story at a time (here, I must tip my hat to the excellent Martin Lewis, whose similar short story projects have partly inspired me to do this).

I should say that I’m declaring my intention to review Stories in this way without having actually read any of the tales, so it remains to be seen how I’ll feel about that decision 400-plus pages later. There’s only one way to find out; it’s time to open the book…

UPDATE, 4th Aug: I’ve now completed the anthology, and posted some concluding thoughts here.

Elsewhere
Neil Gaiman’s website
BBC News interview with Gaiman

Priya Basil, The Obscure Logic of the Heart (2010)

13th June 2010 / / 2 Comments

They meet at university in London: Anil Mayur is the non-religious son of a wealthy Sikh family from Kenya; his ambition is to be an architect, rather than to take over his father’s business empire. Lina Merali is the daughter of a devout Muslim family from Birmingham, and interested in humanitarian issues. Whatever their differences, these two fall in love; they try their best to keep it a secret, but that can’t last – and life gets only more difficult as the years go by.

What makes Priya Basil’s second novel so interesting is the complexity of the scenario it presents. One can imagine this kind of story being treated rather simplistically (as, for example, a tale of the heroic lovers striving to overcome all the obstacles life places in their way), but Basil doesn’t do that – all her characters face difficult questions, and there are no easy answers. Both sets of parents would disapprove of Anil’s and Lina’s relationship, but the two protagonists have difficulties of their own to work through as well – Lina remains torn between Anil on the one hand, and her family and faith on the other; whilst Anil can sometimes be as controlling as he accuses Lina’s parents of being.

The familial situations are also presented in a nuanced fashion. In the case of Lina’s parents, for example, her mother, Iman, takes the sterner view of her daughter’s relationship, but not without reason; Iman found true love and happiness through time and staying true to her values, values to which she wants Lina to live up. Shareef, Lina’s father, is in a more complicated position, because he was in a relationship (which he ended) with a non-Muslim woman before he met Iman, so he recognises the situation in which Lina finds herself, and is more inclined to tread carefully. There’s nicely rounded characterisation like this all the way through The Obscure Logic of the Heart.

Adding a further layer to the novel is the way that events in its wider world interact with and reflect the personal stories of the protagonists. Time and again, a wish to shape the world, to change it for the better, comes up against a harsh reality. Lina can quote the statistics about political corruption, but is still unprepared for an encounter with it. She gets work with the UN, but finds colleagues unable to help everyone they would like, because they simply lack the resources. In a sincere spirit of education, a tour guide in the UN building asks her party, ‘Do you know what an anti-personnel landmine is and how much one costs?’, only for a girl to reply, ‘It can cost you your life.’ (229) The problems of the world, Basil suggests, can be as intractable as those of the heart.

In all this, I haven’t mentioned that Basil’s novel is a good read purely in terms of its plot, as she manages several times to wrong-foot the reader over what will happen (or has happened). Yet there’s so much more here besides, and it all makes The Obscure Logic of the Heart very satisfying to read.

Elsewhere
Priya Basil’s website

Johan Theorin, The Darkest Room (2008/9)

11th June 2010 / / 1 Comment

The manor house at Eel Point, on the Swedish island of Öland, has had a dark reputation ever since it was built using salvage from a shipwreck. There have been a number of deaths associated with the place over the years, and the latest happens shortly after Joakim Westin moves in there with his family – his wife Katrine drowns, apparently accidentally. A young police officer named Tilda Davidsson looks into events, and starts to wonder if Katrine’s death really was all that accidental – whilst Joakim’s subsequent experiences might well lead him to wonder if the tales of the house’s being haunted have some truth to them.

The Darkest Room is Johan Theorin’s second novel set on Öland (both translated into English by Marlaine Delargy), and it has certainly made me interested in going back to check out his first, Echoes from the Dead. On the downside, I don’t find the prose to be quite as atmospheric as I think the story needs it to be, such that the details of what happens worked more to spur me on through the book than did particular turns of phrase – but those details are quite enough to make for a worthwhile read.

I particularly appreciate the way Theorin uses the investigation into Katrine’s death to illuminate character: Tilda has been dumped by the man with whom she was having an affair, and deals with it by throwing herself into her work, trying to establish a rational explanation for events. Joakim, on the other hand, is having to cope both with his grief at losing Katrine, and with trying to explain to his children that their mummy isn’t coming back; and he starts to take a kind of refuge in the possible supernatural explanations for the voices and other strange occurrences about the house.

Theorin also creates some memorable secondary characters, such as Mirje, Katrine’s flamboyant artist mother, and Tilda’s sprightly great-uncle Gerlof, with his tales of the past. The ending ties up the threads of the plot enough to be satisfactory, but leaves enough dangling to leave one mulling certain things over. Yep, I’d say The Darkest Room was a good read.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of The Darkest Room: Maxine Clarke at Eurocrime — It’s a Crime! — Andy Plonka at The Mystery Reader — Michael Carlson
Johan Theorin’s UK website

Colin Greenland, Take Back Plenty (1990)

10th June 2010 / / 6 Comments

The novel on this year’s Clarke Award shortlist that stuck out as being most anomalous was Chris Wooding’s Retribution Falls, because it was the kind of exuberant adventure sf which tends not to do well at the Clarke. Probably the last time a book of that kind won was back in 1991, when the Clarke went to Take Back Plenty by Colin Greenland, a novel which also has a reputation as being one of the founding texts of the ‘New British Space Opera’ that’s flourished in the past two decades.

Quite a weight of expectation, then – but I’m pleased to say that, a few references to ‘tapes’ aside, Take Back Plenty holds up remarkably well today. Partly, I think, this is because the particular twist that Greenland puts on his setting hasn’t (as far as I know) been employed much since; and party it’s because of its sheer brio and sense of fun.

Take Back Plenty is set in the future of a different universe, a universe in which there really are canals on Mars and swampy jungles on Venus. Numerous alien species have made themselves known to humanity and populated the Solar System; but no one can leave, thanks to a barrier put in place by the mysterious Capellans. Greenland’s protagonist is Tabitha Jute, pilot of the Alice Liddell, who starts the novel in trouble with the authorities on Mars, and takes on a passenger because she needs the money to pay a fine. But that passenger. Marco Metz, and the other members of his entertainment troupe, may turn out to be more trouble than they’re worth.

I doubt it’s any coincidence that Greenland starts the novel during Carnival and names the ship after the girl who inspired Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, because Take Back Plenty is a parade of incident and colour. Tabitha and colleagues hurtle out of one scrape and into another, but never with a sense of being all-conquering heroes – Tabitha is very much an ordinary, fallible human being; the Alice Liddell gradually falls to bits; and her passengers hinder as much as they help. Yet the rhythm of the story is as it should be: just when you think things can’t get worse, they do; and just when you think there’s no hope, there is. Greenland walks a fine line, but I think he gets the balance just right – Take Back Plenty is self-aware enough to recognise its absurdities, yet it’s also celebratory in its sense of fun, without either being ironic about it or skimping on substance.

The novel is also wonderfully written. Tabitha has periodic conversations with her ship’s AI persona; in what I think is a rather brilliant touch, the Alice Liddell seems to communicate at times in the style of the ELIZA program. Then there’s Greenland’s superb eye for description:

Carnival in Schiaparelli. The canals are thronged with tour buses, the bridges festooned with banners. Balloons escape and fireworks fly. The city seethes in the smoky red light. Though officers of the Eladeldi can be seen patrolling everywhere, pleasure is the only master. Shall we go to the Ruby Pool? To watch the glider duels over the al-Kazara? Or to the old city, where the cavernous ancient silos throb with the latest raga, and the wine of Astarte quickens the veins of the young and beautiful? A thousand smells, of sausages and sweat, phosphorus and patchouli, mingle promiscuously in the arcades. Glasses clash and cutlery clatters in the all-night cantinas where drunken revellers confuse the robot waiters and flee along the colonnades, their bills unpaid, their breath streaming in the thin and wintry air. (6)

I love the vivid details in that passage, and the rhythm of the sentences… just great. Take Back Plenty has stood the test of time so far, and I think it will continue to do so. I’d say it’s a worthy winner of the Clarke Award, and it shows just what adventure sf can be.

Shane Jones, Light Boxes (2009)

3rd June 2010 / / 7 Comments

Five-star read

Here is a tale to make a reader’s heart soar.

Light Boxes was first published last year by a small press named Publishing Genius, in a limited-edition run; now, larger publishing houses have given Shane Jones’s debut novel a wider release – and deservedly so, because it’s an absolute gem. It’s the story of a balloon-maker named Thaddeus Lowe, whose town is held in the grip of February. Flight, by any means, is prohibited, and wintry weather is the norm. The town’s children have been going missing in mysterious circumstances, including Thaddeus’s own daughter, Bianca. War is declared on February, and Thaddeus seeks answers – or revenge.

The first thing one notices about Light Boxes is, perhaps inevitably, its format. Physically, this is an unusually small book – it could well be read in one sitting, and that’s what I’d advise; Jones creates an intense vision, which is best experienced in a single sustained burst. The chapters are also very short, and different fonts indicate (for example) first- and third-person narration; both these techniques give the impression of a story being built out of brief glimpses that are taken from different angles – which is entirely appropriate for the kind of uncertain, oblique tale Jones is telling.

Jones has an eye for a striking image, be it horses covered in moss or a group of bird-masked balloonists; all adds to the pervading sense of unreality in his novel. But what really makes Light Boxes work so well is the sense that it’s operating on about three different levels of reality at once, and that no single interpretation makes complete sense. One could read the story as a metaphorical representation of Thaddeus Lowe working through his grief. Or it could be seen as a tale of a writer literally affecting the world and lives of his characters as he writes – or maybe both of these things, and more besides.

I could describe the experience of reading Light Boxes as being like witnessing a beautiful mirage, but that wouldn’t be correct, because a mirage is ultimately insubstantial. Jones’s novel comes together enough that one can formulate theories about what’s going on; but it drifts apart beautifully when one tries to pin it down. What a wonderful read.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of Light Boxes: Savidge Reads; The Bookbag; Gonzobrarian; Matt Bell; Rozalia Jovanovic at The Rumpus.
Shane Jones’s website
Bookslut interview with Jones

Chris Beckett’s ‘The Turing Test’: a guest post on NextRead

1st June 2010 / / 0 Comments

Gav Pugh of the NextRead blog devoted last month to posts about short stories. He published a number of guest reviews during the month, and was kind enough to accept one of mine. I decided to go back to Chris Beckett’s collection The Turing Test (which I reviewed here last year), and look at the title story in more detail.

My review of ‘The Turing Test’ is here, and you can read the story itself here. While you’re at NextRead, be sure to check out the other Short Story Month posts; there’s quite a variety of stuff covered in them. My thanks to Gav for posting my review, and for highlighting short fiction in this way.

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