Tag: literature

Shot Glass Stories and Other Small Indulgences (2009), ed. Sophie Playle

16th September 2009 / / 5 Comments

Shot Glass Stories is an anthology of fifty-one short-short (200-word) pieces by various writers from the Critters Bar forum. This is the sort of book where any issues of uneven quality are balanced out by the sheer number of stories and the fact that, if you don’t like one particular story, there’s another one on the very next page. Having said that, the overall quality here is pretty good. Rather than go into every single piece, I’ll pick out a few. In alphabetical order of author:

Serena Alibhai, ‘It Hits Hard’: This explores a different way of telling a story within the 200-word format, and it works well. A first-person narrator (I assume male) goes on about how he’s so much better than his ex-girlfriend.- but quite a lot is implied rather than spoken; and the piece builds into an effective character study.

James Boyt, ‘Coming to God’: A boy looks into a house, misunderstands what he sees and hears – and if I say any more than that, I’ll spoil the effect for you. But Boyt’s narrative voice is spot-on, and his piece is very funny indeed.

Robert Aquino Dollesin, ‘Scratches’: The nicely surreal tale of a boy who gets trapped inside his mother’s dining table, and is stuck there for years, unmissed and undiscovered. Raises a smile whilst still being genuinely unsettling; after all, what if you went missing and your loved ones really didn’t notice?

Jessica Patient, ‘How to Breathe on the Train’: An intense and vivid depiction of claustrophobia, which throws the reader right into the situation. Not pleasant to read, naturally; but superbly effective writing.

Sophie Playle, ‘The Green Fairy’: The tale of a five-inch-high (and shrinking) woman who makes a living dancing in cocktail glasses. Playle’s writing captures the feel of a fairytale, without being overly bound by the expectations raised by that term – and the ending raises a wry smile.

Ian Rochford, ‘Waiting at the Altar’: Put simply, a man waits at the altar for his bride-to-be. But it’s not that simple, and poignantly so. A quietly powerful piece.

Amy Roskilly, ‘Wildfire (Population 66)’: An evocative portrait of a small town destroyed by an unspecified catastrophe. Some striking prose; for example: ‘the townsfolk were following [the evangelist who visited town] like hungry strays, pawing at her floral dress like the very frills of its hem would save them.’ Really brings a shiver to the spine.

Colin Sutherland, ‘No Angel’: A plane is about to crash, but thankfully there’s a real, actual angel on board; so they’re all safe, right? Well, see for yourself; but this is an engaging idea, with a good punchline.

Frances Taylor, ‘Would You Rather?’: A story told mostly in dialogue, as a couple find out more about each other. But what makes this story work so well for me is its final sentence. Quite a few of the tales in this book have twist endings, but perhaps none as effective as this, which casts a whole new light on the situation.

Shot Glass Stories is available to buy or download here.

The Year of the Flood (2009) by Margaret Atwood

13th September 2009 / / 5 Comments

The latest novel by Margaret Atwood takes us back to the world of 2003’s Oryx and Crake; though The Year of the Flood is not so much a sequel to it as a companion novel, taking place as it does in more or less the same timeframe. It’s not essential to have read the older book to comprehend the newer (though of course certain events carry more resonance if you have); and I’d say that, overall, The Year of the Flood is a better ‘way in’ to this world of Atwood’s. I would also say it is the better book of the two.

In the near-ish future, most of humanity has been wiped out by a plague. We focus on two survivors: Toby, who has sequestered herself away in a spa; and Ren, who was in quarantine when the plague hit, waiting on test results after being bitten by a client of the sex club where she worked. What the two women have in common is that both were members of God’s Gardeners, a nature-based cult whose philosophy fused science and theology (the book’s title refers to the ‘Waterless Flood’ which the cult believed would spell the end for humanity). The novel follows the lives of Toby and Ren through their time in God’s Gardeners and after, up to the fictional present, where they discover that they’re not alone.

The earliest time depicted in The Year of the Flood is still in the future from our vantage point, and it’s a future of powerful corporations, corrupt law-enforcement environmental pressures, and hybrid species created by genetic manipulation. Atwood brings to life the horror of living in this bleak world, perhaps most vividly early on, when she describes Toby’s attempts to survive after losing her parents: renting a room above a shop that trades illegally in endangered species, she first gets a job dressing up in animal-suits to advertise things; then she sells her hair; then her eggs (which leaves her sterile); before finally landing a job at SecretBurgers (where the secret is what kind of meat you’re eating.

It’s after an altercation in this job that Toby is taken under the wing of God’s Gardeners, and she becomes one of the cult’s teachers; Ren joins along with Lucerne, her mother, when Lucerne leaves her husband for her new lover, Zeb. The Year of the Flood is, for the most part, a portrait of the cult and the effect it has on the protagonists. The cult means well, but life within is not entirely rosy: some members are unable to adhere to the rules (for example, we see Zeb smuggling in meat, when God’s Gardeners are all supposed to stick to a vegetarian diet); and even the cult’s philosophy can be fluid if needs be (at one point, the leader, Adam One, talks of the need to present the cult’s theology in a way that will ‘push popular sentiment in a biosphere-friendly direction’; ‘God needs to be filtered’, as he puts it later). Furthermore, being in the cult affects the way its members deal with the world when they leave; for instance, after Lucerne quits and takes her daughter with her, Ren has to adjust to being in a ‘normal’ school, and the cult’s insistence on memorising everything leads her to mistrust the school’s methods: ‘it seemed so dangerous, all that permanent writing that your enemies could find’ – even touching the tools and products of writing leaves Ren feeling literally unclean.

This portrait of the cult and its world is, I would say, the main point of the novel: the characterisation is rather too patchy for the book truly to work as a character study (none of the characters really leaps off the page as a rounded individual); and the plot seems more or less to be just ‘life going on’ (even accounting for the Waterless Flood, which is not depicted in overly dramatic terms). This leaves us with the issues to be the primary focus of The Year of the Flood; and I find the book to be ambivalent about them.

On the one hand, the heart of the society Atwood depicts is clearly rotten; on the other, as noted, the cult is not presented in a highly positive light (and the sermons delivered by Adam One throughout the novel smack of increasing desperation as time goes on). Yet I don’t gain a clear sense that this ambivalence is really intentional. Be that as it may, these are the moments that represent for me The Year of the Flood’s key point: Toby listening to birdsong, imagining her knowledge of language being supplanted by this ‘ceaseless repetition, the song with no beginning and no end.’ And Ren telling us her motto: ‘We are what we wish. Because if you can’t wish, why bother?’ What matters, this seems to say, is the ability to imagine a changed life, and to work towards that vision. Perhaps the failing of God’s Gardeners is that they were ultimately not up to that task. Perhaps the Waterless Flood took away all chance of anyone doing that; then again, given the book’s ending, perhaps it didn’t.

Thoughts on Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood

12th September 2009 / / 0 Comments

Something has been niggling me about Oryx and Crake ever since I finished reading it. I’ve been trying to put my thoughts into a review; but, for whatever reason, can’t get them into a continuous piece of prose. Rather than continue to sit here, stumped, I have decided to write down my thoughts as they occur to me, and we’ll see how that goes.

First of all, here’s the plot summary I wrote:

Some time after the apocalypse, Snowman is the only human left alive — the only human of a kind we would recognise, anyway. The other inhabitants of this world are the Children of Crake, genetically-engineered humans who might as well be a different species, so alien are they physically and mentally. Crake — and Oryx — are god-like figures to these humans; Snowman says he was sent by Oryx and Crake, and now acts as a kind of messenger.

Of course, it’s all a pretence — Snowman’s way of surviving (or justifying his existence) in the transformed world. In the past (which is still in the future), ‘Snowman’ was named Jimmy; Crake was his friend Glenn, who grew up to be the geneticist who wanted to create a better kind of human. Oryx was a child prostitute who would become the teacher of the ‘Crakers’, as she called them. Oryx and Crake the novel chronicles how one world became another.

And here are my scattered thoughts:

  • There’s something over-familiar about the worlds of both strands of the novel. In the further-future, post-apocalyptic strand, there are real marks of strangeness (like a bioluminescent rabbit, and the Crakers themselves); but I don’t feel the true frisson of alienness that I would expect from this kind of setting. Perhaps it’s a consequence of seeing this world through the eyes of Snowman (which I appreciate is vital to the story Atwood is telling), who’s the closest the book has to ‘one of us’, and therefore a way in to the world that we wouldn’t otherwise have.
  • The nearer future — dominated by corporations, with living-spaces divided between the Compunds (where young JImmy lives) for the well-off, and the ‘pleeblands’ for everyone else — is better realised (just as well, as it’s where we spend most of the novel), but still has its shortcomings. An example of both sides: there’s a passage where Atwood describes how executions and suchlike have become a form of mass entertainment, and it comes across as pretty hackneyed to me. But then, immediately afterwards, the author puts in different terms: the culture of the body has taken over from that of the mind and soul. This, I think, is much more evocative and striking.
  • Making the ‘last man’ such an ordinary person as Jimmy/Snowman is interesting, and perhaps closer to how such a situation might play out in reality than making him an ‘expert’ (then again, who really knows?). I appreciate Atwood’s observation that the world has become static for Snowman — he can’t move on, because there’s nothing to move on to. Even at the end, the last chapter begins in the same way as the first, as though to suggest that nothing has really changed (though perhaps it has…). But I’m not sure that this feeling is really evoked through the prose.
  • When Oryx tells Jimmy about her past, he can’t understand why she’s so at ease with what happened to her (it’s because she feels it could have been much worse); this is mirrored by a rosy glow to the writing that contrasts most effectively with the grim nature of the events themselves. But I don’t think Atwood matches prose to effect quite as well as this in the rest of the book.
  • We don’t learn the nature of the catastrophe that befell the world until over halfway through Oryx and Crake — and it doesn’t matter so much even then, because it’s the ethics in which Atwood is most interested. And there are real dilemmas to think through here, most clearly embodied in the differing views of Crake and Jimmy/Snowman. For example (I may be skating over some philosophical questions here, but please indulge me): if you could remake humans so that they lost some of their negative attributes and became better adapted for survival, but in the process they lost some of their capacity for free thought — if they became less recognisable to us as ‘human’ — would that be the right thing to do? Atwood offers no firm answers.

I chose to read Oryx and Crake now as a prelude to reading The Year of the Flood (which I should be getting to next). I’m curious to see how the two will compare.

Transition (2009) by Iain Banks

6th September 2009 / / 3 Comments

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When I first got my copy of Transition, I took a quick glance at the beginning, and grinned at what I found. The epigraph reads, ‘Transition – based on a false story’; and the opening sentence is one of the most endearingly cheeky I’ve ever come across: ‘Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you’re told you deserve whatever you get.’ That’s the start of an Iain Banks book, and no mistake.

Well, now I’ve read the whole thing, and am I still grinning? No, unfortunately — not because Transition is a bad novel (it isn’t), rather because it promises much but doesn’t manage to come together to deliver on that promise.

Unbeknownst to most people, there is a multiplicity of realities out there, each with its own Earth. A few people, known as transitionaries, are able to move their consciousness between realities, temporarily taking over other people’s bodies in the process; most of them work for the Concern, a vast organisation whose (apparently self-appointed) task is to intervene secretly in the realities to ensure that good things happen and bad things don’t — this might mean (for example) saving the life of someone who will go on to make an important discovery, but it can also mean ‘eliding’ undesirables if necessary.

The structure of the novel mirrors the idea of ‘flitting’ between worlds, as it moves back and forth between the stories of a roster of protagonists (some narrated in first-person, others in third-). But perhaps the main protagonist is Temudjin Oh, one of the Concern’s assassins, who must decide whom he trusts: Madame d’Ortolan, the current leader of the Concern’s Council, who’s given him orders to ‘elide’ several prominent Council members who are (allegedly) threatening the Concern’s stability; or Mrs Mulverhill, the renegade transitionary (and Oh’s former lover) who maintains that Madame d’Ortolan has her own hidden agenda, and is the real threat. Other narrators include Adrian Cubbish, a City trader from our Earth taken on by Mrs Mulverhill; and the mysterious Patient 8262, who has hidden himself away from his pursuers on some obscure world — he remembers being a transitionary, but has been here so long that he’s having doubts.

As you’ll have gathered, Transition is a complex edifice; but Banks is eminently capable of holding it together. He marshals the different plot strands and characters skilfully, such that we become disoriented but never hopelessly lost; and his control of voice is great in particular. There are secrets to be revealed, of course; but the effect is more jigsaw pieces joining together than layers of onion peeling away; more is told and less implied than perhaps one would like, but Banks never stalls in his telling.

Now for the ‘buts’. As the pages recede, one starts to think that Banks is cutting it a bit fine with the resolution. Too fine, it proves: a character named in the prologue but not properly introduced until 60 pages before the end provides a deus ex machina, shortly after the plot has become a fairly straightfoward chase. Not a great way to wrap up a novel.

There are some passages which consider ethics — is what the Concern does worth it? do their methods make them any better than the people they work against? — but I find them ultimately quite superficial; I don’t see these concerns worked through in the text itself. However, I think it’s quite clear what judgement Banks makes, what with the morality-tale way certain characters get their comeuppances.

There’s a larger-than-life quality, too, to the characterisation. The Concern seems fond of elaborate balls and fancy dress, and Mulverhill and d’Ortolan in particular feel more like figures in a parade than ‘real’ individuals. The other Concern characters are relatively more rounded, but not a great deal more; and even Adrian Cubbish is pretty much a stock ‘unsympathetic City boy’. I am quite willing to believe that Banks intended this effect; but I don’t think it encourages serious consideration of the issues underpinning his narrative.

I’ve spent more time talking about the negative aspects of Transition than the positive; yet the positive aspects probably occupy the greater part of the text — it’s the nature of the negatives that makes them such an issue. But, bearing these objections in mind, you’ll find Banks’s novel interesting and engaging for the most part.

Heroes in the Wind: From Kull to Conan (2009) by Robert E. Howard

3rd September 2009 / / 1 Comment

Heroes in the Wind is a new volume from Penguin Modern Classics collecting together fourteen stories by Robert E. Howard, selected and introduced by John Clute. In a way, this development may be surprising: if you’d never read a word of Howard, what would you imagine his stories to be? Escapist potboilers with mighty-thewed heroes, perhaps? In a range of ‘classics’?

Clute asks a similar question at the start of his introduction: knowing what we do about Howard, should we — do we want to — read him? Yes, says Clute, because whatever else Howard was, he was a storyteller (literally speaking the words of his stories aloud as he typed them); and because he had more to say to us than bald synopses of his tales may suggest.

What do I make of that, reading Howard for the first time here in 2009, and being of a similar age as he was towards the end of his career? I cannot be as enthusiastic as Clute, but I do see where he’s coming from.

Let it be acknowledged first of all that the negative aspects we may anticipate — the stereotyping, the bloody violence — are indeed here; and, regardless of the distance of history, they make for unpleasant reading (to put it mildly). But, side-by-side with these, Howard’s fiction has what Clute referred to in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) as the ‘wind of Story’ — a restless storytelling energy that led to such dynamic passages as this charge into battle led by Cormac of Connacht (from ‘Kings of the Night’):

A wild roar answered [Cormac], and loosing rein he shot down the slope with five hundred yelling riders plunging headlong after him. And even at that moment a storm of arrows swept the valley from either side like a dark cloud and the terrible clamor of the Picts split the skies. And over the eastern ridge, like a sudden burst of rolling thunder on Judgment Day, rushed the war-chariots. Headlong down the slope they roared, foam flying from the horses’ distended nostrils, frantic feet scarcely seeming to touch the ground, making naught of the tall heather…

I can’t deny the sheer kinetic force of such writing. Yet I find myself feeling ambivalent about these stories. I think it’s because I don’t find the positive qualities to which Clute refers to be as prevalent within the tales as I’d have liked.

Yes, I know: other people’s readings should have no bearing on mine; but this is one occasion where what I’ve read about the book (namely Clute’s introduction) has influenced how I read the book. I don’t actually think that’s a bad thing here, because Heroes in the Wind is Clute’s book as well as Howard’s; and I feel it’s only right to pay attention to his views on the material he has compiled.

Clute’s introduction is, incidentally, a fine example of what an introduction should do, which is to provide context and illuminate the book in a way that enhances the reading experience, rather than obviating it. How many times have you seen an introduction to a work of ‘classic’ fiction that starts with a warning like: ‘This introduction makes the plot of the book plain’ — or that does exactly that, but without the warning? Not here, thankfully.

The main positive qualities of Howard’s stories that I take from Clute’s introduction are the dynamism of telling which I noted earlier; and a certain sense of bleakness that gives the tales more of an edge. I see both of these qualities in the stories themselves; the trouble is that, too often, I found myself noticing them intellectually, rather than feeling them emanating from the prose (admittedly, this was more often an issue with the latter quality than the former).

The stories of Heroes in the Wind are grouped into three sections. The first contains early sword and sorcery tales with a number of protagonists, notably the Atlantean Kull, King of Valusia, and the Pict Bran Mak Morn. Though there is an energy about these pieces (they include ‘Kings of the Night’, from which I quoted the passage above), I get a sense of it being held back. In part, I think this is because the characters are held back somewhat (most especially Kull, who longs for the days when he was a warrior, free to roam); and of course Howard had less experience as a writer then.

What I think comes through most strongly in these first tales is a sense of horror at what lies beneath the skin of reality: most of them involve an encounter with supernatural entities from beyond (on a historical note, it’s fascinating to see how much thinner the line the line between sword and sorcery and horror could be eighty years ago than it is today). There’s also a recurring theme that time and civilisations will pass, that we are ‘the jest of the gods’ – but the full force of this didn’t come across the same.

The volume’s second section moves away from sword and sorcery; and it’s here, in ‘Graveyard Rats’, that I find Howard really hitting his stride. This is a horror story which begins with a man being driven insane when he finds his dead (and buried) brother’s head on the mantel and goes on to unravel what happened, and why. The momentum of this piece never lets up, and Howard smartly plays on our expectations; but I wouldn’t go so far as Clute does in calling it ‘an oneiric vision of how the world claws its victims into obedience and death’  — I don’t find the story quite as powerful as that.

Also in this section is one of the collection’s longest tales, ‘Vultures of Wahpeton’. John Middleton, the sheriff of Wahpeton, hires a Texan named Steve Corcoran as his deputy to deal with a mysterious gang known as the Vultures. But there’s more to the situation than meets the eye: Middleton is actually the leader of the Vultures, and makes a deal with Corcoran to double-cross the gang and split a hoard of gold. And the intrigues continue… Again, Clute is a good guide to the story — ‘we are left with a sense of the profound entrapping starkness of the world’ — but, also again, I do not feel this as strongly as he suggests. There is a bleak moral complexity to this piece: ‘Vultures’ could as well be a metaphor as the name of a gang; and, thanks to his background, even Corcoran’s moral code is more elastic than one would anticipate from a ‘hero’ (even taking into account historical distance). Yet, I keep coming back to that same stumbling-block: that something stops me experiencing this on a deeper emotional level. I’m coming to think  that I just don’t find Howard’s pulp style very effective in this regard.

On to the final section, and Howard’s most famous creation — Conan; and, straight away, I feel that the ‘wind of Story’ blows more strongly here than it did through the earlier sword and sorcery tales. Conan is a freer protagonist, and Howard’s telling is freer; ‘The Tower of the Elephant’ demonstrates marvellously what its genre can offer: the unceasing forward motion of the quest, and the fizz of strangeness and magic. I don’t think it works quite so well when we don’t travel directly with Conan (or Howard’s secondary protagonists)– for example, there are passages in ‘A Witch Shall Be Born’ in which past events are reported, and they don’t have the same impact as when we are ‘there’, so to speak; but, at his best, Howard is every bit the storyteller that Clute’s introduction promises.

I’d like to conclude by returning to a subject I mentioned in passing at the beginning — are these stories really escapist? I suppose, before I started Heroes in the Wind, I was expecting  to find bracing adventure stories within. What I found was something slightly different, something that I don’t feel is quite so well suited to being read for escapist motives; because these stories seem all too mindful that there is ultimately no escape. In this context, the fight of the warrior reads like a frantic attempt to beat back the inexorable tide of reality — the kind of bleakness to which Clute refers.  [EDIT 9th Sept: I’ve been made aware that my wording here is not as clear as it could be, so I’ll clarify. I was talking about escapism because it’s an accusation often – and often unfairly – levelled at fantasy. Howard’s fiction isn’t like that, which, in my view, is wholly a positive attribute.]

In the end, I have to say I’m rather ambivalent towards these stories as a whole; I see what’s good about them, but there isn’t quite enough of it in them for me. But there’s more to Howard’s tales than first appearances suggest; and his heroes will live on. I think it’s good that we have Heroes in the Wind as an overview.

Link: Jeff VanderMeer on genre ‘culture wars’

30th August 2009 / / 0 Comments

Just wanted to share this insightful post by Jeff VanderMeer, in which he argues against drawing lines in the sand between ‘genre’ and ‘literature’. An extract:

I just want smart and savvy and, yeah, I veer between wanting simple and wanting complex, of loving and appreciating a novel that gives me traditional pleasures and then loving and appreciating a novel that has no interest in giving me those traditional pleasures but something else just as pleasurable instead (to avoid using false oppositions like “entertainment versus literary”) and there’s nothing pretentious or pulpish about that.

I would tend to agree with that.

Confessions of a Fallen Angel (2008) by Ronan O’Brien

28th August 2009 / / 1 Comment

A childhood brush with death leaves the (unnamed) narrator of Ronan O’Brien’s Dublin-set first novel with the kind of ‘gift’ he could do without: dreams of his best friend drowning. Convinced that these dreams are prophetic, he tries to avert the fatal events; but inadvertently causes his friend’s death — which occurs in exactly the manner foretold. A few years later, the visions return, this time showing the death of Mrs Horricks, the old (and later retired) librarian whom the boy has befriended. In due course, the dreams again come true — at the same time as an innocent mix-up over a defaced library book escalates into an incident that lands the narrator in a young offenders’ institution.

Upon his release, the young man (now aged 19) manages to get a job behind the bar at a rough pub named Happy’s. It’s here that he meets his soulmate, the beautiful Ashling; the two fall head-over-heels in love and, in short order, marry. But we know (because the narrator has already told us) that it will end in tragedy: our man dreams of his wife’s death, and destiny proceeds as before. The loss of Ashling sends the protagonist into a downward spiral of depression and alcoholism, and he is placed in a psychiatric unit.

When he’s released into society once more, the narrator decides to sell his house, and unwittingly ends up moving next door to Norman Valentine, a violent thug he first met back in the young offenders’ institution. He meets — and, over time, finds that he cares deeply for — Valentine’s abused wife Chloe, and daughter Zoe. Then our man provides the evidence that  leads to Valentine’s arrest for assault; and the dreams come back, foretelling the death of Zoe. Will tragedy strike once again, or can the protagonist defy fate at last?

The great strength of Confessions of a Fallen Angel is the portrayal of its central character and his journey through life. It is quite disarming at first to discover that this lively, amiable narrative voice belongs to someone who has seen so much of life’s darker side. But what O’Brien does so convincingly is to show how an intelligent, fundamentally decent lad with a sharp tongue could fall through the cracks. School doesn’t really interest the boy, then his stepbrother wrecks the library book; one thing leads to another, and he ends up where he does, instead of on the more successful path one senses he could have taken had life worked out just a little differently.

Another aspect of the plot that I thought rang particularly true was the way our man falls in love. This happens twice, and each time is subtly different. The first time, with Ashling, O’Brien captures the whirlwind of ‘true love’, and just about succeeds in making it nearly as wonderful to read about as it is for the characters to experience (though it does feel a little too sickly at times). The second time the narrator falls in love is with Chloe, but it’s love of a different sort (though no less genuine) — not the intensity of falling for ‘the one’, but a more gradual flowering of attraction. One gains the impression that O’Brien is a skilled observer and depictor of life.

As a character, the narrator comes vividly to life; his sharp wit is especially welcome, as it undercuts even the bleakest episodes of his story, and maintains a constant thread of hope. O’Brien’s secondary characters don’t have quite the same depth (perhaps inevitably, as they’re all viewed through the lens of his narrator), but some leave quite a strong impression — in particular the librarian who replaces Mrs Horricks (he’s something of a comic cut, but you’ll surely have encountered people like him); and Norman Valentine, the kind of dangerous individual one wishes didn’t exist and hopes never to meet.

O’Brien gives his tale a light dusting of fantasy, which ultimately soured it for me a little. The narrator’s dreams aren’t a problem: they’re just a harmless plot device. But the author’s use of the afterlife gives the novel (particularly the ending) something of a fairytale aspect that O’Brien doesn’t manage to reconcile with the harsh reality of the protagonist’s life. It makes the ending feel cosier than it really is. Nevertheless, Confessions of a Fallen Angel shines brightly as a character study, and is a fine début.

SHORT FICTION REVIEW: Jupiter XXIV, Iocaste (April 2009)

27th August 2009 / / 0 Comments

I have a review up at The Fix of the April 2009 issue of the science fiction magazine Jupiter. I won’t say much here, as it’s all in the review; but this particular issue has stories by David Conyers; Gustavo Bondoni; Andrew Knighton; A.J. Kirby; James McCormick; and Gareth D. Jones.

Read the review in full.

My favourites of 2009 so far…

21st August 2009 / / 0 Comments

I know we’re some way past the halfway point of 2009, but I wanted to do a mini-review of the year so far, as I’ve read so many great books this year that I’d like to highlight the best once again. So these are my top five reads of the year so far (all had their first UK publication in 2009), in alphabetical order (click the titles to read my reviews):

Keith Brooke, The Accord

Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal

Rana Dasgupta, Solo

Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels

Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia

An honourable mention goes to Ken Grimwood’s Replay, which is my favourite pre-2009 book that I read for the first time this year. All six books are excellent, and I woud urge you to seek them out.

(Of course, I don’t just blog about books on here; so, for the sake of completeness: my favourite fiilm of the year so far is Franklyn; and favourite album of the year so far is Kingdom of Rust by Doves, which I will get around to blogging about eventually…)

Sunday Salon: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

16th August 2009 / / 0 Comments

TSSbadge4The Picture of Dorian Gray falls squarely in the category of ‘books I know about and so don’t need to read; except that, when I do read them, it turns out I didn’t know them at all’. What prompted me to read it now? It was the choice for a new reading group I’ve joined, which met for the first time this afternoon; and it seems a good subject for a Sunday Salon post. (NB. This is more likely to be a series of scattered impressions than a proper ‘review’.)

If you had asked me to summarise the book a couple of weeks ago (i.e. before I’d started reading it), I’d have told you that Dorian Gray was a man who didn’t age, whilst the figure in the portrait of himself that he had hidden away aged instead. And I’d have been wrong. It’s true that Dorian doesn’t age; but the picture bears the marks of psychological ravages as well as physical ones — and it’s the former that prove more damaging.

We first encounter Dorian Gray at the home of his artist friend Basil Hallward, who’s been painting the titular portrait. Here, Dorian meets the vile Lord Henry Wotton, a hedonistic aesthete who values ‘beauty’ above all else, and disapproves of such values as loyalty and unselfishness. Dorian is at first wary of Henry’s worldview; but, when Sybil Vane, the young actress to whom he is engaged, kills herself (because of the harsh way in which Dorian dismisses her and the acting which is so close to her heart), Dorian sees the first change in his portrait — and this causes hm to throw himself into a life of decadence. The rest of Wilde’s novel chronicles Dorian’s decline, as he becomes ever more selfish, ruining the lives of others, even to the point of murder. He does start to have doubts and regrets in the end; but by then it may be too late for him.

I found The Picture of Dorian Gray to be a fascinating psychological portrait; what’s particularly interesting is the way that Dorian’s life and ‘self’ become distorted, even as his body stays the same; he might have escaped the ageing process, but Dorian can hardly be said to have remained immaculate, as he wished.

Related to that last point is the issue of morality. Wilde’s preface (I’m unsure whether or not it is meant to be taken at face value) includes a comment that ‘there is no such thing as an moral or immoral book’; but I do see the book as quite moral, because the Dorian’s selfishness and hedonism seem to me to be presented in an ultimately negative light. However, I don’t think a reading of the novel as a bad-things-happen-to-bad-people moral fable quite works; because, strictly speaking, Dorian gets his comeuppance for seeking to abandon his decadence (as symbolised by the portrait); and Lord Henry, who espoused in the first place the philosophy that led to Dorian’s (and others’) ruin, gets no comeuppance at all. So there is some moral ambiguity there; I think the issue is probably going to remain unresolved in my mind.

As a novel… I hestitate to judge a hundred-year-old book by my own modern standards of how a novel should be; but, for what it’s worth, I thought it well written but a little awkwardly constructed, with Wilde whizzing over a period of eighteen years between the most important events in Dorian’s life, and leaving the details of who some of the characters are rather sketchy.

Anyway, the most imprtant thing is that I found The Picture of Dorian Gray to be a good, thought-provoking read — deservedly a ‘classic’.

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