Tag: literature

Cheltenham Literature Festival Diary: Part 2

22nd October 2009 / / 2 Comments

Part 1 of this diary is available here.

Tuesday 13th

10.00 am: My first history talk of the festival — Frank McLynn on Marcus Aurelius. I don’t know much about Roman history, so I don’t think I got the most out of it that I could have; but McLynn was interesting and engaging nonetheless.

12.00: Today’s Guest Director is Alice Roberts, and spotting her for my game of ‘Guest Director bingo’ will be easy, as I’m attending two of her events. The first of these is called ‘Journey into Colour’, with a panel consisting of Roberts, the writer Victoria Finlay (who wrote a book on colour which I actually bought several years ago, but have never got around to reading) and Mark Midownik, a materials scientist. Finlay was enthusiastic, and her talk fascinating; but I felt that Midownik was not a good speaker, and his contribution on the science of colour was rather dry. I really should read that book of Finlay’s, though.

4.00 pm: My second of Alice Roberts’s events — geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer on the story of human migration. An interesting subject but, unfortunately, the talk was a little too technical for me.

6.00 pm: Ronni Ancona and Alistair McGowan on football — specifically, on Ancona’s attempts to wean McGowan off it. The readings from their book were excellent, and the whole hour was hilarious.

8.45 pm: My last event of the day, and this time it’s a ‘proper’ author — Sarah Waters. I’ve never read her work, but do have a copy of The Little  Stranger, which I’ve been meaning to read. Interesting stuff, though I stll haven’t got around to reading the book.

Wednesday 14th

10.00 am: Matthew Rice on ‘The Language of Architecture’. I took a chance on this event, and am so glad I did. Rice was hilarious, and gave a brilliant introduction to a subject I’m not well-versed in.

2.00 pm: Sara Wheeler on the Arctic. This was a combined history and travelogue; interesting enough, but perhaps too ‘bitty’.

4.00 pm: Another hsitory talk — Jenny Uglow on Charles II. Uglow illuminated a part of history I never really studied in detail, so I was pleased to go to this.

5.15 pm: Today’s Guest Director is Monica Ali, whom I was due to see now, alongside another novelist, Geoff Dyer. Unfortunately, however, Ali is unable to attend owing to illness, so this event is Dyer on his own. I’d never heard of him prior to this, but he was a highly entertaining interviewee, and reader and he joins my list of ‘writers I must investigate’.

8.45 pm: I was due to see Keith Floyd at this point, but of course he sadly passed away last month. I raise a glass in his honour.

Thursday 15th

10.00 am: Today starts with my best history talk of the Festival — David Horspool on English rebellions throughout history. He’s a great speaker and storyteller, and shows the value of taking a broad historical view of one topic.

4.00 pm: From history to historical fiction, with Tracy Chevalier and Hilary Mantel. I’ve already seen the latter in my first event, of course, and she’s engaging once again. I’m very intrigued by the sound of Chevalier’s latest novel, about the early 19th century paleontologist Mary Anning. The TBR pile grows ever larger…

7.0o pm: Travel writer Christopher Somerville on his new book of walks around Britain. Fascinating stuff, as Somerville covers areas that don’t necessarily come to mind as fruitful areas for walks, such as Canvey Island and the circular walking routes around London. He also relates tales of a walk across Crete in the winter for his 50th birthday, and walking to the very northernmost point of the British Isles for his 60th. Somerville becomes another writer I should read.

8.45 pm: A performance of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World by the Paper Cinema and Kieron Maguire. How to describe this? They film cut-out paper puppets and project the results on to a screen, while Maguire provides a live soundtrack. It was good, but I think I’d have enjoyed it more if I knew the story better.

9.30 pm: I still haven’t spotted today’s Guest Director, Rageh Omaar. I know he is in the middle of a talk now, and I could hang around the signing tent for half an hour until he comes in — but I’m not really that bothered, am I? I decide that I’m not, and head off back to the hotel instead.

Part 3 of the diary coming soon…

Two Stories: Tim Pratt

7th October 2009 / / 0 Comments

It’s occurred to me that, if I’m going to do the occasional random short fiction review (as I did yesterday), it might be more interesting to cover two stories at once, to give a point of comparison. So let’s try that, and see how it goes. The author I’ve chosen today is Tim Pratt, whom I’d heard good things about but never actually read – though I’ve had a story collection of his on my shelves for several months, and really must get around to reading it.

Anyway, the first story I’m covering in this review is ‘A Programmatic Approach to Perfect Happiness’ (2009), published in Futurismic. The story is described by the site’s Pail Raven in his introduction as ‘a little Gonzo, a little retro, but all Tim Pratt’. I can’t really judge the last of those yet (though I suspect, and hope, that it’s true), but the first two are definitely right.

This is a robot story that has an air of old-school science fiction about it, but not in a way that comes across as a tired retread or too-knowing pastiche; it’s more that Pratt knows the area in which he’s writing, and uses its history and conventions as a way in to the story he wants to tell. Our narrator is Kirby, a sentient android who has married a human woman, April. Essentially, the tale is a portrait of familial (and extra-familial) relationships, though there are also mysterious ‘emotional viruses’ in the background (April’s daughter Wynter, usually a moody goth, has contracted a virus that makes her happy – which explains why she’s being unusually civil towards Kirby).

What I like about this story is that it’s deceptively light: it’s humorous, but searching questions are being asked underneath humour. I’ll quote a passage which illustrates both of these points (context: Wynter has just explained to Kirby why she is often difficult with him:

“I understand.” I do. Like most of my kind, I am exceptionally good at running theoretical models of human interior experience, and of constructing self-coherent theories of mind.

There’s humour here in the incongruity between the typical human platitude and Kirby’s robotic literalness (I should add that the over-formal diction Pratt uses for Kirby’s voice is just right); but deeper issues are being explored here: is a model constructed inside a sentient computer truly equivalent to human feelings? There’s more elsewhere in the story: if a robot like Kirby can reprogram himself to feel anything he wants, is a robot emotion equivalent (or less genuine? or more?) than a human one, caused by chemical changes in the brain? Then there are the ethical dilemmas, which I won’t get into, because it would spoil the story for you. Go and have a read.

The second Pratt story I read (I should say, I chose these more-or-less at random) is ‘Her Voice in a Bottle’ (2009) from Subterranean magazine. This is a very different tale from the previous one – more serious in tone, magical realist rather than science fiction – but I can see common characteristics: playfulness and seriousness combined, and a sense of putting a well-worn theme to work. I still haven’t made up my mind about the story – not about whether I like it (I do), but about whether it pushes its luck too far.

You see, the protagonist is a fictionalised version of Pratt himself, yet the story purports to be ‘filled with true stories of my life’ (I say ‘purports’ because I have no way to judge how far that’s true), whilst acknowledging and reflecting upon its own fictitiousness. I’m wondering if the piece is too self-referential for its own good… on balance, it probably isn’t, otherwise I wouldn’t be asking myself the question! And, to be fair, the metafictionality (is that even a word?) is integral to the project of the story.

So, we have our protagonist, Tim (for the sake of clarity, I’ll refer to the character as ‘Tim’ and the author as ‘Pratt’), who tells us about his ex-girlfriend, Meredith, who flits in and out of his life like a recurring dream. I use that phrase quite deliberately: she is apparently able to appear and disappear at will; no one other than Tim actually ever meets her; and nothing else is quite as real to him when he’s in her presence.

All this leads naturally to the assumption that Meredith is a product of Tim’s imagination, made flesh only in his own mind; but Pratt knows this, and addresses it directly – coming to the conclusion (as I read it) that whether Meredith is real or not makes no difference, because the effect she has is the same either way. ‘Her Voice in a Bottle’ evokes a kind of young love that’s like a whirlwind, that seems more vivid in later years than it probably (but who can say?) than it was at the time; and the story asks, would you want to return and find out what it was really like, or are you content with your memories, inaccurate though they may be? A fascinating, thoughtful piece. Go and have a read of this one, too.

These two stories are very different, but I found both to be equally accomplished and a joy to read. I really, really do need to read more of Tim Pratt.

‘Even If You Were Here’ (2009) by Angi Becker Stevens

6th October 2009 / / 1 Comment

‘Even If You Were Here’ by Angi Becker Stevens is a great little story which appears in the September issue of The Collagist. Essentially it’s a character study of a thirteen-year-old girl who, I realise now I come to think about it, is never actually named. I didn’t notice this when I was reading, and I think that’s because the character is so solidly imagined – she becomes familiar enough to us that we don’t need to know her name, because we know her.

The first-person voice that Becker Stevens creates is pitch-perfect: halting (almost staccato at times), candid, spilling thoughts out almost as they come to mind – it sounds like a teenage girl talking to you, sorting through a confusing time of life as she does so.

And what a time this girl is going through: her younger sister Francie is preoccupied with death; her older brother Peter has gone of travelling to who-knows-where; her mother is struggling to cope; she wonders who her father is (whoever he is, he’s also Peter’s father, but not Francie’s); and she’s exploring her own burgeoning sexuality.

What I particularly appreciate about this story is that, even though we see everything through the eyes of the protagonist, the other characters nevertheless come to life independently. We can sense the whirlwind of emotions that Francie must be feeling, even though we mostly only have her sister’s wry observations of Francie pretending to die every day (‘Some days she freezes to death and the house is nice and quiet so I can pretend I’m home alone.’). The presence of Peter looms large, even though he isn’t there; our protagonist wonders whether her brother is searching or just escaping:

‘I didn’t understand what it meant to find yourself [she says]. I didn’t know how Peter could possibly find himself anyplace we weren’t in. I thought losing yourself was a better phrase for what he was trying to do.’

The girl’s mother is a closed book to her; all she really knows is that she’s ‘very tired’ – but even that is enough to open the character to us as readers. Then there’s Stacey, the girl who – tentatively at first, then less so – is becoming the protagonist’s lover. One gets the sense that Stacey is as much an anchor as a lover for the girl, the only person in her life who speaks plainly – the only person, perhaps, who is there for her.

Through these waters, our protagonist tries to navigate, tries to shake off her family and become herself. Perhaps she can do that; perhaps it’s beyond possibility at the present time; perhaps distancing herself is the wrong approach. ‘Ever If You Were Here’ is a thoughtful, well-written piece at which I recommend you take a look.

Bad Marriage (2009) by John Tagholm

6th October 2009 / / 0 Comments

This is a strange feeling: there are many things about John Tagholm’s second novel that bug me, because they don’t work as well as I wish they did. Yet I stayed with Bad Marriage, and I think there is something about the whole that compensates for the weaknesses of the parts. I embark on this review without being able to articulate what that something is; perhaps by the end I’ll have a better idea.

Three strands of story run through the novel. In the first, Habiba Popals, a young British-born Pashtun woman, carries out an elaborate, Hustle-style theft of a painting from the National Gallery. The second strand deals with the investigation into the theft, spearheaded by DI Colin Tyler and the Gallery’s new head of security, Giacomo Baldini. The third explores Habiba’s past, notably her strained relationship with her late father, and the ramifications of the event that changed everything – the time when, four years previously, Habiba was assaulted by Sean Dunmore, a security guard at the National Gallery.

My first points of contention are certain aspects of the plot. I never really bought into the idea of Habiba single-handedly pulling off this elaborate con; I’m not sure whether anyone could do it without specific skills or experience, and I don’t see anything in Habiba’s background to suggest that she has such attributes. Neither was I convinced by the way that Baldini effectively takes over the investigation when he works with the police: I don’t know whether or not museum security staff have investigatory powers, but it just didn’t ring true for me.

Another problem I have with the investigation is that it doesn’t seem to uncover anything that has not already been revealed in the other plot strands, leading me to wonder whether it has any greater purpose that bringing Baldini into the story. Yet, despite all this, the way the three plot strands intertwine is like a dance; and, even if you can see what’s coming at times (and you can’t always), the experience of watching events unfold is an enjoyable one.

Tagholm’s characterisation is uneven, but can be quite effective nevertheless. The character whom I found to be most fully realised was actually Dunmore, a violent racist and misogynist with no redeeming features whatsoever; Tagholm portrays this character’s inner life vividly, and it is deeply unsettling to be inside Dunmore’s mind for any length of time. I find the author’s characterisation of Habiba to be less accomplished, however: we see her clash with her father and his more conservative outlook on life; we see her try to come to terms with her assault (the attack itself is never depicted); and we see her feelings of vulnerability harden into determined resolve – but I don’t think Tagholm succeeds in making us feel these at the same level as he does with Dunmore’s mentality. And I’m even less sure about Baldini’s character; I can’t shake the feeling that he’s just there as a device for moving the story on.

The prose of Bad Marriage is rough around the edges: I was particularly irritated by Tagholm’s occasional switching between viewpoint characters within the same scene (for example: we’re with Habiba when Dunmore first approaches her, then suddenly we have a couple of paragraphs of him leering, then we’re back to see through her eyes again), and the excessively rigid way he refers to some characters by their full names (for instance: there’s a scene of several pages where the author refers to Colin Tyler as either that or ‘the DI’, but not as ‘Tyler’ or anything else; this technique draws too much attention to the names, disrupting the flow of the writing). Yet, at the same time, the writing of Dunmore’s viewpoint works well, as I’ve already said; the passages which are there to thrill do exactly that; and I especially liked Tagholm’s evocation of the bustling National Gallery, with visitors who might be looking at the pictures, might be paying more attention to the audio tour, or might just be there because it’s a place to go.

The novel’s title refers to the concept of a marriage arranged in negative circumstances, something that happened twice in Habiba’s family history (including the marriage of her parents). There’s a suggestion that Dunmore’s assault on Habiba was itself a kind of ‘bad marriage’; and, by extension, a suggestion that Habiba’s response to the assault is also a way for her to work through her unfinished relationship with her father – or so I think.  If I’m right in identifying that connection, though, I don’t think it’s made as strongly as it ought to have been.

I’ve dwelt quite a lot on the negative in this review, but have I come any closer to pinning down the elusive quality I referred to at the beginning? Actually, I think it’s what I said about the plot threads coming together like a dance. Bad Marriage may not reach the heights to which it aspires; but it does what it does fully enough to maintain one’s interest to the very end.

Legend of a Suicide (2008) by David Vann

5th October 2009 / / 7 Comments

David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide is one of those books that takes concepts like ‘novel’ and ‘short story collection’, tears them up into tiny pieces, and leaves the reader to make sense of the result. It comprises six chapters/stories, the longest of which takes up 170 of the 230 pages. The five shorter pieces may or may not take place within the same chronology; the novella probably doesn’t, because it contradicts the rest of the book – but it depends how you interpret what happens.

What, then, is the purpose of this narrative structure? To answer that, we have to go back to the event around which the text revolves. Roy, Vann’s protagonist, is a boy of twelve when his parents divorce, and not much older when his dentist-turned-fisherman father shoots himself in the head. The first chapter essentially tells the story of this; the others explore how the characters (in particular Roy and his parents) are affected by those events.

Vann pulls off a tricky literary feat in depicting three characters who all have personal qualities that would, in isolation, put one off wanting to know them; yet are still sympathetic, because we see enough of the whole person. Roy’s mother Elizabeth is the one of whom we see the least (the father-son relationship is most prominent, after all); but we nevertheless gain a sense of how profoundly she has been affected by her husband’s actions (his unfaithfulness was what precipitated the divorce). After the suicide, Elizabeth is unable to hold down a relationship for any length of time, actively pushing her lovers away. This is unfair on those men, of course; but, after what Elizabeth has been through, it’s no wonder that she might behave in such a way.

One is far less inclined to sympathise with Jim, Roy’s father; and I don’t think he does ultimately inspire sympathy – nor empathy, for that matter. Acceptance, perhaps. Jim’s character is most fully explored in the novella-chapter, wherein thirteen-year-old Roy leaves his mother’s California home to spend a year with his father in a cabin on a remote Alaskan island. The first part of this story, told from the boy’s viewpoint, establishes the pair’s routine: attempting to live self-sufficiently during the day (though they came ill-prepared, and pay dearly for it), and Jim crying himself to sleep at night. This cycle could have been too repetitive, but Vann maintains his narrative momentum through a combination of careful plotting that shakes things up every so often, and quietly skilful writing which carries a suggestion that all this physical activity is displacement activity, so father and son don’t have to confront the issues between them.

They do so eventually, of course, and Jim confesses his inadequacy – he knows the type of man he ought to be, but not how to become that way. We gain more insight into Jim’s state of mind in the second part of the novella, where the viewpoint shifts to him, and the mood changes subtly. The intensely purposeful activity of the first part now gains a frantic edge, and a sense that Jim is buckling under the pressure of reality. He becomes something of a tragic figure as the tale progresses, and starts to redeem himself in the final sentences – but, alas, by then it’s too late for him.

On the face of it, Roy would seem to have come through things relatively unscathed: his first-person narrative voice is calm, measured, reasonable – which makes it all the more disarming when, in that same voice, he tells of smashing all the windows in his mother’s house. At the age of thirty, Roy returns to the Alaskan island of Ketchikan, where he grew up – an attempt to lay the ghosts of the past to rest, but it turns out to be misguided. By the very end of the book, however, Roy appears to have come to terms with the events of his childhood – but his method is rather drastic. If he has indeed made peace with life, it’s an uneasy truce – which is perhaps the best he could have hoped for.

Legend of a Suicide is an intensely personal book (it is dedicated to Vann’s father, who himself committed suicide); there is a sense of protagonist and author alike working through their experiences – but not in a way that makes the reader feel unwelcome. This is a book that asks for thought and attention, and repays them richly. The title suggests an event which has grown larger than itself, which echoes long after it has finished. One might say something similar – albeit with more positive implications – about these stories.

Knight Crew (2009) by Nicky Singer

1st October 2009 / / 3 Comments

Just when you think there are no new twists to be found on the Arthurian mythos, along comes Nicky Singer’s Knight Crew, which takes place among feuding street gangs in a contemporary British city.

Our narrator is Art who, along with his hot-headed brother Mordec, is a member of the (mostly mixed-race) Knight Crew, rival gang to the (white) Saxons. Tensions escalate between the two gangs when, in the heat of a fight, Art fatally stabs a member of the Saxons – but it’s OG, the leader of the Knight Crew who ends up being held by the police, leaving a power vacuum. Myrtle, the strange old ‘baglady without a bag’, has prophesied that one day, Art will become ‘king’ – and, in due course, he does. But if Art wants to find happiness with his girl, Quin, he’ll have to deal with Mordec’s ambitions; Lance, the dashing white knight who later appears on the scene; and the Saxons, who are out for revenge…

Let’s be clear at the start that Knight Crew is not an Arthurian fantasy – it’s not a case of gangs throwing magic at each other, or anything like that (the only ‘spells’ in the book are periods of imprisonment). Rather, the purpose of the Arthurian references is to dictate the shape of the book. This goes far beyond superficial naming, and into the heart of the issues with which Singer is concerned (for example, knives gain a similar significance to the Crew as Excalibur has as a symbol of Arthur), not to mention the trajectory of the plot (there are signals throughout that all ends in tragedy; this point is probably laboured too much, but still I didn’t foresee what actually happens).

The Arthurian elements also give the story something of a timeless quality – not entirely so, as we’re recognisably in contemporary Britain; but there’s a sense that Knight Crew takes place in its own little world. The city in which it is set is not named – it’s probably London, but the lack of any recognisable place names generates a feel of somewhere to one side of reality. This works well with the bold strokes of the plot; but I was also going to say that it acts as a cushion, even if only in a small way, from the harsh reality of the gangs’ world.

Ah, but it’s not that simple, because the life of the gangs creates its own sense of being in a discrete bubble of reality. The vast majority of the book takes place ‘inside’ the Knight Crew: when the plot intersects with life outside, it is like stepping into another world. One of the key themes of Knight Crew is the power of words to make change, to shape reality; and we see this very clearly in the book – the Crew’s street argot is a way in which they structure their identity, but it proves inadequate for Art as he struggles to come to terms with what he has done: ‘murdered is not the same as merked [street slang for killing]. It’s more serious. More dreadful.’ The contrast between the street language Art uses in dialogue and his more conventional narrative voice is symbolic of the emotional transformation he undergoes over the course of the novel.

Art himself is a pleasingly rounded character, very much a flawed hero. He recognises that he has done wrong, and does his best to change, but never becomes squeaky-clean (he’s not above petty jealousy of Lance, for example). Not all of the characterisation is as sharp, which is fine to an extent (the Knight Crew are all about action, not reflection), but it does leave some of the minor characters hard to tell apart.

I haven’t really mentioned the prose yet; and I should, because Singer writes some beautiful passages – such as this expression of the burgeoning love between Art and Quin [edited slightly to avoid a spoiler]:

I took her then, took her in my arms and pressed my lips over hers as if I could take some of that sorrow and that joy in mouth. She gave herself to me, folded into me, all arms and softness and wanting and no division at all, and that lit something in both of us and we were mad and passionate for a while, tumbling on the earth beside the canal…and under the stars…

I also haven’t gone into much detail about the plot, and don’t really feel a need to. It seems to me that the details of Knight Crew’s plot are less important than its broader arcs; after all, the book draws on one of the most fundamental of all British stories, a story which deals in archetypes. Nicky Singer has brought together the old and new to craft a fable that demonstrates the enduring relevance of even the most apparently well-worn legends, whilst asking questions about the world in which we live today.

***

I understand that Knight Crew is currently being adapted into an opera, to be staged next year. Now, I don’t pretend to know anything about opera, but I can see this working well; it’s the kind of story that could be told well in song. It’ll be interesting to see the results, anyway.

Cern Zoo: Nemonymous Nine (2009)

27th September 2009 / / 2 Comments

Nemonymous, that annual extravaganthus of unattributed fiction curated by Des Lewis, returns for a ninth outing. As ever, the authors involved are listed only on the back cover; they are: Rosalind Barden; Gary McMahon; Amy Kinmond; Tim Nickels; Bob Lock; Lesley Corina; Jacqueline Seewald; Dominy Clements; A.J. Kirby; Brendan Connell; Daniel Ausema; Gary Fry; Mick Finlay; Robert Neilson; Steve Duffy; Geoff Lowe; Stephen Bacon; Rod Hamon; Lee Hughes; Lyn Michaud; Tony Lovell; A.C. Wise; Roy Gray; and Travis K. Weltman. But as to who wrote what, we can only guess for now.

The stories in Cern Zoo are a nicely eclectic bunch; this is true not only of their subject matter, but also of their relationships to the anthologys title, which range from close to non-existent (as far as I could see). Some tales take inspiration from CERN and the Large Hadron Collider, such as ‘Being of Sound Mind’, whose retired narrator finds one day that a young girlk has inexplicably appeared in his house. He tries to work out what’s going on, whilst struggling against the tide of suspicion — and we readers have our own bit of detective work to do, to understand why the narration switches between first- and second-person. I think it’s fair to say that CERN aspect feels a little ‘tacked on’ (though it’s necessary for the story); but the rest is beautifully disorientating — to the very end, we can’t be sure whether all this is just in the narrator’s mind.

Other contributors base their stories around zoos. ‘The Lion’s Den’ tells of strange happenings in a zoo, beginning with a boy throwing himself into a lion enclosure. Of course, he’s set upon and killed — but no trace of him remains, not even a speck of blood. Then the lions are seen outside their enclosure, in places where it would be impossible for them to be — and so on. The zoo-related material in this story is fascinating; if based on actuality (as I assume it is), it reveals aspects of working life in a zoo that I had never really considered. And the events of the plot — and their implications — are powerful, all the more so because they remain mysterious.

Some of the tales use the image of chalk figures like the Cerne Abbass giant. One such story is ‘The Rude Man’s Menagerie’, in which Rebs, working on the remains of her late father’s Michigan tree farm, discovers the chalk figure of a man who appears to have drawn various animals to himself. The man appears malevolent, and Rebs resolves to free the animals — but how? This is a satisfying piece of fantasy that runs on its own internal logic; by the time reality comes gently free of it moorings, one is happy to go along.

In still other stories, ‘Cern Zoo’ (if it features at all) is really just a name. ‘The Ozymandias Site’ takes us to the Moon, where some future species (from the world of Cerne) has travelled to investigate the ‘giant leaping creature that once accompanied [them] in the universe’. No prizes for guessing that we are those long-gone beings; and the expressions of human folly in the story are rather unsubtle. But what makes this talew shine is the way it’s told, as it takes you into the minds of these strange creatures who have five-part personalities in the same body. I don’t think I grasped ‘The Ozymandias Site’ fully (understandable, I think, given the manner of telling!), but the journey was worthwhile regardless.

‘The Devourer of Dreams’ is another story whose voice is the star attraction. A successful writer looks back on his childhood in post-war Suffolk. His father, an innkeeper, suddenly developed a talent for writing, and produced several best-selling books. One day, the boy discovered the macabre secret behind this turn of events — a secret he went on to exploit himself. The plot of this tale is, to be honest, nothing particularly special; but the narrattion certainly is. The author pulls off a difficult balancing-act, creating a voice which convinces as that of someone (albeit elderly) living in the present day, yet has enough of a Lovecraftian touch to give ‘The Devourer of Dreams’ the menacing atmosphere of an old weird-fiction tale.

Last year, I reviewed the previous Nemonymous anthology, Cone Zero (you can read that review here), and thought it excellent. Good as some of the stories are in the present volume, I would say that the overall quality of Cern Zoo is not quite as high — not because there are fewer good stories in the present book, but because a greater proportion (there are 24 pieces in Cern Zoo, as opposed to Cone Zero‘s 14) don’t quite have that extra something (that’s my impression, anyway). So, for example, ‘Dead Speak, with its tale of an investigation into the mysteries of CERN, starts off interestingly, but seems to me to stop before it really gets anywhere. ‘Dear Doctor’ is amusing, but essentially nothing more than a shaggy-dog story. ‘Turn the Crank’, which tells of a mysterious organ-grinder, brings a variation of the ‘malign carnival’ trope into the present day; it works, but does seem a little over-familiar.

It’s worth noting that I am being only half-critical with those exampless; that’s because I’m not talking about bad stories as such, but stories that don’t reach their full potential. For all of these, there are other tales in Cern Zoo that succeed more fully: ‘Parker’ is an intense study of someone getting rather too excited about a pen. ‘Sloth & Forgiveness’ starts with a man climing a tree naked and encountering a talking sloth; it gets away with being ridiculous simply because it never loses its conviction. ‘The Last Mermaid’ is about Carlos II of Spain, and has a heady atmosphere; it hovers on the borderline of being nothing but atmosphere, yet it has a unique ‘flavour’, as it were. On the surface, ‘Pebbles’ appears a slight story, of a girl collecting pebbles from a beach and carrying them away in her jumper; but there are subtle clues which, if I interpret them correctly, hint brilliantly at what’s going on behind the words.

I’ll finish with my personal favourite story in Cern Zoo, which is ‘Artis Eterne’. This revolves around an old pub (‘The Cerne Abbass’) and one of its fixtures, a strange man called Albert; ‘fixture’ is the right word, because he never moves from his seat. He’s there throughout our narrator’s childhood, and still there when he returns for a work conference many years later. Apparently Albert decided literally to ‘live in the moment’, and to see how long he could make that moment last — and it would seem to be working.

‘Artis Eterne’ is a joy to read because so many of its elements work beautifully together. The prose is wonderful; for example:

I was born in the kind of parochial town whose aspirations held it closer to the nearest big city than mere geography. This same giant metropolis held our status as a smaller cousin in careful equilibrium, maintaining and coveting our local charms while at the same time sending out regular raiding parties of young adults who would drink too much and too loudly, making us feel like aliens on our own streets on summer weekends.

This strikes me as a very sharp observation of life in a satellite town in contemporary Britain. And there’s more to enjoy here than just the writing: Albert’s idea captures the imagination, but best of all is how it acts as a counterpoint to the protagonist’s life, and the gravity exerted by his (or her) home town.

I wish I knew who wrote this story, so I could track down more of the author’s work. But I’ll have to wait a while before I can do that. For now, I can — and do — heartily recommend Cern Zoo to you.

For more on Cern Zoo and Nemonymous, including purchase information, visit www.nemonymous.com.

600+ pages…

24th September 2009 / / 5 Comments

Yesterday on Twitter, Matt from Penguin General Marketing asked, ‘Why is 600+ pages so off putting to a literary fiction reader, but not at all to [a] mass market reader?’ I’ve been on both sides of that particular fence and, though I’m uncomfortable with the sharp distinction Matt makes, I’ll take his question at face value and try to answer it.

(Please note: this is going to involve some generalisation and stereotyping, as I try to put people in neat little boxes where they don’t really fit. It’s not my intention to offend anyone’s sensibilities; I apologise in advance if I do.)

So: why would there be different attitudes to a large page-count? Essentially, I think it’s because we’re talking about two different groups of readers who are looking for different things from their books, one of which is facilitated by such a page-count, whilst the other of which may not be.

I would say that, for the kind of mass-market reader to whom Matt refers, ‘more is more’. There was a time when one of the main criteria by which I judged whether to buy a book was its length: longer books, to my mind, represented greater value for money. Of course, this is a very crude way of assessing a book’s worth; and, though we may still balk just a little at the thought of paying £7.99 for a 150-page book (I know I did a few months ago – though I bought the book in question nonetheless), I think that, as book-lovers of any sort, we move on from that attitude pretty quickly.

But there’s another attitude, or cluster of attitudes, that has more to do with what’s actually in a book. What is most satisfying for our hypothetical mass-market reader is the ongoing experience of reading, which may transcend individual books. If you’ve ever welcomed a new volume in a series because it was the chance to return to the lives of a set of favourite characters, or a new novel by a favourite author who writes a specific ‘type’ of fiction (be it medical thriller, wartime saga, epic fantasy, or whatever), you will have experienced the feeling I’m talking about. Under this view, a lengthy page-count prolongs the reading experience, which is why it’s so welcome.

For our hypothetical literary reader, however, what is most satisfying is the specific experience of reading each individual novel. Such readers are more likely to be concerned with the craft of the whole as a distinct piece of work, to ask how well different aspects work in each particular case – to ask of a 600-page book, ‘Did this novel justify its 600 pages?’ Often, the answer is ‘no’, simply because, the longer a novel is, the more room it has to slip up, and the harder it has to work to make its pages really count. That’s why a 600-page book might make a literary reader’s heart sink: the very real possibility that it would have been a better piece of work at half its length.

Of course, there is all manner of overlap between the two categories I’ve just described. Mass-market readers appreciate individual pieces of work, literary readers return to favourite authors because their books have signature characteristics, and so on. But I think there’s something in that basic distinction.

To sum up my answer to Matt’s original question in one sentence: broadly speaking, it’s because, for one group of readers, the 600+ page-count must be justified by the book itself; for the other group, the page-count is its own justification.

Books from FantasyCon

21st September 2009 / / 2 Comments

Three points:

1. I’ve decided to get more into photography — not in any major way, just to practise a bit and see how well I can do.

2. Yesterday, I returned from FantasyCon with… er… ‘a few’ books in tow.

3. I’ve seen other bloggers do ‘books received’ posts, but never done any like that myself.

Combining all these three, I present to you some gratuitous shots of the books I got from FantasyCon. (I know they’re not the best possible photos, but I’m uploading them as they are to record what level I start from with the photography.)

FCon books 1a

FCon books 2a

FCon books 3a

As to when I’ll get around to reading any of these books: your guess is as good as mine…

Archives

Browse posts by author, original language of book, or post category

© 2025 David's Book World

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑

%d