Tag: Reviews

“You can’t get thoughts out of your mind just by trying”

1st July 2013 / / 5 Comments

Jon McGregor, This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You (2012)

Perhaps above all else, what emerges clearly from this collection for me is that Jon McGregor is a superb writer of the mundane. I suspect this is an undervalued quality in a writer (certainly I have undervalued it in the past); but This Isn’t the Sort of Thing demonstrates its value quite clearly.

The book’s opening piece, a two-page vignette entitled ‘That Colour’ is a fine example of what McGregor can achieve on a small canvas: while her partner (the narrator) washes the dishes, a woman looks out of the window and tries to describe the colour into which the trees are turning (“When you close your eyes on a sunny day, it’s a bit like that colour”). Sensing her apparent surprise, the narrator describes the process of chlorophyll breaking down in leaves; but the woman already knows that: “It’s just lovely, they’re lovely, that’s all, you don’t have to”. There we have two characters sketched briefly yet precisely – one thinking in practical terms, the other more intuitively – and the sense of an awkward emotional space between them. We can only guess what may have happened to create that space; but the simple gesture at the end, of the pair holding hands and the narrator saying, “But tell me again,” is enough to show that the gap between the couple is starting to be bridged. It’s a small but telling moment, depicted economically yet with a true sense of the way people talk around each other.

This Isn’t the Sort of Thing has a good number of these very short pieces (some just a few sentences long) which capture little ironies and significant details. ‘Airshow’ sees a family returning from a funeral, and deciding to take the grandfather to see his old station during the war – but there’s nothing much to see at the airfield, and nothing much that he wants to say. The family also goes past a current RAF base, where there’s a display of vintage aircraft; at home, the grandfather asks “just what it was those people with the binoculars had thought they might be waiting to see”. That one remark encompasses thoughts on the passing of time, and the transformation of the horrors that the grandfather would have seen into a nostalgic tourist attraction. ‘The Remains’ evokes the despair of losing a loved one through the use of dispassionate sentence-fragments which could all begin with the two words of its title (“Are believed to still be intact,” and so on). The piece ends with the phrase “Have yet to be found” repeated over and over – a truth inescapable on the page, as it would be in life.

[EDIT: Max’s comment below prompts me to add, in case I’ve given the wrong impression, that there are also some longer pieces in the book – though a majority are ten pages or fewer.]

One of McGregor’s hallmarks in these stories is how, through language, he shows characters trapped in particular thought and behaviour patterns. ‘If It Keeps On Raining’ (which I wrote about previously here) focuses on a man building a shelter for the flood he’s sure is coming; we discover that he was a police officer at Hillsborough, who cannot let go of what he experienced there – the surging river reminds him of the surging crowd, and images of that day go around and around in his head. The narrator of ‘What Happened to Mr Davison’ is giving evidence at an inquest; they hide behind the rhetoric of officialdom to deflect attention from whatever it was that affected the titular farmer – but occasionally we catch glimpses of the real person underneath, who would like to be more forthright, though the circumstances (and perhaps also professional obligations) do not allow it.

McGregor’s stories are populated by often anonymous characters, at what may often seem at first to be unexceptional moments in their lives. But, time and again, the author takes us beneath the surface to show how pivotal those moments can be.

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

See also:
My other posts about Jon McGregor’s work.
Some other reviews of this book: Sam Ruddock for Vulpes Libris; dovegreyreader; Valerie O’Riordan for Bookmunch.

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

12th June 2013 / / 4 Comments

Adam Marek, The Stone Thrower (2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We all trailed home along the sleeping streets, with youth packed away, and life about to begin”

19th May 2013 / / 3 Comments

Kevin Barry, Dark Lies the Island (2012)

In the title story of Kevin Barry’s second collection, the protagonist Sara has travelled to the edge of Clew Bay, County Mayo, which seems to her father quite a desolate spot to be heading in October. Ostensibly, Sara has gone there to work on some art projects during her year out; but it is soon clear that she is at Clew Bay to get away from it all, in the most final sense. Sara’s human contact is largely limited to the other members of an internet forum accessed on her holiday home’s creaky dial-up; for the rest of the time, it’s just the landscape of Clew Bay and the inside of Sara’s own head, ‘the itch of her blood as it sped’. ‘Dark Lies the Island’ is an intensely discomfiting piece that ends with an ambiguity, perhaps a fragile hope.

So I’ve headed this review with a quotation which refers to life beginning, then I immediately launch into talking about a story that hovers on the verge of death. But that is both the breadth of life which Barry fits into his stories, and that there’s always a sense within them that life carries on, bringing with it variously hope and melancholy. In a few pages, ‘Across the Rooftops’ brilliantly captures the uncertainty of youthful attraction, as its student narrator tries to read the signs of the girl he’s with, waiting for the right moment to make a move that could take their journey of the last few months to its next stage, or end it altogether. The men in ‘Beer Trip to Llandudno’ have all been hurt or damaged in some way; and what seems at first like a jolly outing to sample some pubs may actually be the only thing holding these men together. Whatever happens, there’ll always be another pub to try, and the possibility of a fine ale.

This is one of Barry’s common techniques: to show how his characters use external events as a shield or distraction from what is happening deeper inside. ‘Wifey Redux’ begins with its narrator. Jonathan, describing his fairytale marriage to his school sweetheart, Saoirse –  but he has already warned us that the tale will end with his being arrested. And, sure enough, cracks begin to show in the couple’s relationship as their daughter Ellie grows up, becoming the image of her mother as she was. Jonathan takes a dislike to Ellie’s new boyfriend, and is increasingly uncomfortable with the thought of his daughter doing the same sorts of things that he and Saoirse did at her age. As we come to  see, though, Jonathan is not so much protecting Ellie’s honour as he is trying to reassert himself when he feels that what he had – what he was – is slipping from his grasp.

Some of the tales in Dark Lies the Island shift the general tone of the collection quite effectively. ‘Ernestine and Kit’ starts off as a whimsical road-trip taken by two chatty old women, but gradually turns more sinister, as Barry ups the ante more than once. Then there are the stories where Barry’s humour – often a subtle undercurrent – comes strongly to the fore: ‘Berlin Arkonaplatz – My Lesbian Summer’ sees 21-year-old Patrick spend an odyssey of a summer with the fabulous Silvija (‘By her own reckoning, Silvija was at this time the most brilliant fashion photographer in all of Berlin. This didn’t mean that she got paid’). The narrator of ‘Fjord of Killary’ bought a hotel which came with idiosyncratic locals (‘The primary interest of these people’s lives, it often seemed, was how far one place was from another, and how long it might take to complete the journey, given the state of the roads’), and is now coming to the end of his tether. For Patrick, the summer is – of course – too wonderful to last; but something happens which allows the hotelier to find his feet once more. There’s life moving on again, bringing or ending joy.

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

(Elsewhere: see what RobAroundBooks and Valerie O’Riordan (writing for Bookmunch) had to say about Dark Lies the Island.)

Success and secrets: Will Storr and Beatrice Hitchman

14th March 2013 / / 0 Comments

Will Storr, The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone (2013)
Beatrice Hitchman, Petite Mort (2013)

Killian Lone used to be one of the world’s greatest chefs (he tells us this from beyond the grave, so you can guess how well that turned out). His fascination with food began as a child, learning recipes from his Great-aunt Dorothy, one of whose ancestors was burnt at the stake for (it is said) producing food that drove people mad. Killian went on to study catering at college, and displayed such a rare talent that his teacher was able to land him a six-week placement at King, the restaurant of his idol, celebrity chef Max Mann – something unheard of for a lad of Killian’s background.

Max Mann had a reputation as the ‘Gentleman Chef’, who never let an apprentice go; Killian soon discovered why – Mann could wield silence where others might resort to threats. Just about the only bright spot amid the seemingly relentless hazing was Killian’s fellow-apprentice Kathryn, who would eventually become his wife. And Killian would go on to greater success as head chef of a rival kitchen, once he’d uncovered the true secret of his family’s cooking – but, like I said, you know how well it turned out…

Perhaps the scenes that most stand out most in Will Storr’s first novel are those depicting the ritual humiliation of Killian in the kitchens of King (such as the time Mann and his underling give Killian conflicting instructions over quality control, then alternately berate him for doing the ‘wrong’ thing). These scenes are excruciatingly vivid; Storr says in his closing note that they’re based on factual accounts, which only makes them seem more extraordinary. The author paints other emotions in similarly broad strokes, which can sometimes feel overly unsubtle (from the way Killian builds up his rosy preconception of Max Mann, it’s all too obvious that the chef will turn out to be a bastard), but is nevertheless always engaging.

But what really makes The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone shine for me is the way that Storr parses Killian’s ambition through his use of the Lone family secret. We’re so focused on the helping hand Killian gets that it takes a while to realise that he’s become like Max Mann. It’s a very effective way of showing someone being corrupted, unawares, when power goes to his head, because it puts the reader in the same position as Killian.

***

The protagonist of Petite Mort, Beatrice Hitchman’s debut, dreams of making it in another world whose outward glamour may mask a darker reality: the world of early cinema. Adèle Roux’s life changes in 1911, when she first sees a moving picture, and is caught by the allure of its female lead, known as Terpsichore – more than that, she wants to be her. Two years later, Adèle journeys from her provincial village to Paris, determined to become an actress; she does end up working for Pathé, but as a seamstress.

Yet, as we learn from a parallel plot-line, Adèle did indeed become a star, of sorts. In 1967, a journalist named Juliette Blanc seeks to interview her about her 1914 film Petite Mort, never seen and thought destroyed, until a print turned up with a scene missing. Back in the 1910s, we read, a special effects pioneer named André Durand plucked Adèle from her costuming work, gave her a job – and embarked on an affair with her. Adèle became the assistant of Durand’s wife:  none other than Terpsichore – and a ménage à trois soon develops.

Petite Mort is a novel of masks and secrets, whose protagonists have all been able to reinvent themselves: Adèle the village girl; André the boy from a Louisiana orphanage; Terpsichore the girl of noble birth, sent away at the age of six after being involved in a riding accident – each, to an extent, can leave their past behind in the film world. The theme of secrets carries through to the plot, which revolves around the mysterious print of Petite Mort. Hitchman juggles a good number of individual plot strands; but, whatever she’s writing about at any given point, the pages always demand to be turned.

Despite the hooks of the plot, though, the true heart of Petite Mort is perhaps the relationship between its three main characters As in Storr’s novel, we have a portrait of ambition and power, but this time mediated primarily through the changing balance of its characters’ relations. It’s a technique that leaves you wondering just how this will all end. Both of these books also leave me wondering where their authors will go next – and keen to find out.

Robot stories: vN and Black Mirror

16th February 2013 / / 3 Comments

Last week in Strange Horizons, I was disappointed with Rosa Montero’s Tears in Rain. But I actually read that book a month or so ago; more recently, I’ve come across two more pieces of fiction that have caused me to continue the train of thought I started in my SH review. The first is vN by Madeline Ashby, which I read because I saw it being discussed as one of the likely novels that missed out on the BSFA Award shortlist.

For the first few pages of vN, my impression was favourable. We’re introduced to Jack Peterson, whose wife Charlotte and daughter Amy are both self-replicating androids (von Neumann machines, or vN). Right from the start, ethical complexity is at the front and centre: all vN from the same clade (‘family’) look identical, and this will also be trur for Amy and Charlotte; so, Jack wonders, “what if one day, years from now, he kissed the wrong one as he walked through the door?” (p. 8). There’s no chance of that yet, though, because Jack is deliberately refraining from feeding Amy a full diet of vN food, so that she can grow up at the same rate as a human child. But, as Amy’s principal points out, this may not be such an appropriate thing to do: “She is not a kindergartener, and has not been one for years” (p. 22). The stage is set for a thought-provoking read.

By the end of the prologue, I was feeling less enthusiastic. At Amy’s kindergarten graduation, her grandmother Portia appears and tries to kill her. A boy dies in the ensuing scuffle, and a ravenously hungry Amy eats her own grandmother, which causes her body to grow into that of an adult. In the context of another book, I’d probably like this offbeat spirit; but here it set alarm bells ringing that cartoonish violence might win out over the more thoughtful material – and so it proves.

Amy spends most of the novel on the run, pursued by members of her own clade and others besides. She’s of interest to them because her failsafe (which stops vN from harming humans, but also induces nausea in them if they witness human injury and suffering) no longer works. This chase plot allows Ashby to show more of her future society. There’s further exploration of the place of vN, and how their presence has changed things. it is certainly much more searching and satisfying than the examination of ideas in Tears in Rain – but, for all that, it’s  clearly playing second fiddle to the action.

And, despite some striking images (such as Amy being set upon by crowds of vN who look just like her), much of the novel is quite uninvolving, Partly this is down to the prose, which never seems to catch fire again as it did in the first pages. But mostly I think it’s because the sense of place is so very sketchy. The backdrop of Tears in Rain may be generic, but at least it has an atmosphere, however ready-made; too often, the events of vN may as well be taking place in front of a blank wall (a sequence set in a museum of the city of Seattle really shows up the limitations of the rest). As a result, Ashby’s book is lacking in the detail and context that would help to give the action dramatic weight. By the time the final plot revelations came, I just didn’t care any more.

***

My other recent robot story is ‘Be Right Back’, the first film in the new series of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. We meet a young couple, Martha (played by Hayley Atwell) and Ash (Domnhall Gleeson). He heads out to return a courtesy car to the garage; she, an illustrator, stays at home to work on an urgent new commission. But Martha experiences a growing sense of dread that the worst has happened to Ash – and her fears are swiftly confirmed. At the funeral, Martha’s friend Sarah offers to introduce her to “something that will help”. At first, she doesn’t want to hear it; but soon finds herself signed up for – and swiftly drawn into – a service that uses a dead person’s online traces to reconstruct a virtual version of their personality. Martha moves from messaging ‘Ash’, to speaking to his construct on the phone – before paying for it (him?) to be downloaded into an artificial body.

As a fully rounded piece of drama, ‘Be Right Back’ has its shortcomings, particularly that the opening section establishing the couple’s relationship is that bit too compressed for one to become fully invested in it emotionally. But ‘Be Right Back’ is weighted towards its ideas, and there it works better. I actually found it the most satisfying of these three robot stories, because it’s best able to achieve what it sets out to do, and reaches furthest into its issues.  ‘Be Right Back’ is content just to focus on the relationship between two individuals, which is quite a refreshing change in a contemporary work of science fiction. We see Martha’s changing reaction to Ash, shifting from the delight of being able to hear his voice again to the despair of the uncanny valley as she realises that this is not him – that the robot looks and sounds like Ash, but doesn’t sleep, breathe, or react like him. The surface is there, but not the spark.

In the great scheme of things, ‘Be Right Back’ may not go as deep as it could (it’s not as searching or elegant as Chris Beckett’s ‘The Turing Test’, for example). But where it does go is still worthwhile: in one of the film’s later scenes, Martha – now at her wit’s end – has taken the Ash-robot to the cliffs, and instructs it to jump. At first, ‘Ash’ is calmly accepting of this, until Martha remarks that he would be afraid – at which point the robot slips seamlessly into the role of crying, pleading Ash. It’s a stronger moment than anything in vN or Tears in Rain – and just the sort of touch that a story like this needs.

Strange Horizons review: Rosa Montero, Tears in Rain (2011/2)

7th February 2013 / / 0 Comments

Today, Strange Horizons publish my review of Tears in Rain by Rosa Montero (translated from the Spanish by Lilit Zekulin Thwaites). The book came from the SH review pile, and I was especially interested in reading it because it’s a work of science fiction in  translation – and we don’t see nearly enough of those in Anglo-American publishing. It’s not just the case that sf imprints don’t often publish translations; publishers who specialise in translated works don’t often cover science fiction (with the odd exception like Haikasoru).

So when a translated work of sf does come along, it is still something notable. Sadly, though, Tears in Rain is not a good book.

It’s a common enough view (one for which I generally have little time) that “mainstream” writers who use sf tropes recycle them unimaginatively because they’re unfamiliar with how they have been used in the past. What concerns me more is when sf writers who do know the tropes are still content to just go through the motions – and this latter is what Tears in Rain feels like to me. But I would not consider Montero a genre sf writer, so why does her novel have such an air? I tried to explore something of this, albeit indirectly, in the review.

In my mind, I kept coming back to the idea of “off-the-shelf futures” that came up in the discussion of Paul Kincaid’s LA Review of Books piece (see the comments for his use of that term). I think that’s what we see in Tears in Rain: a kind of science-fictional future which is so familiar as an archetype that you don’t need to be steeped in knowledge of sf to draw on it – and one so familiar that it has no purchase on the imagination. This – coupled with a thriller plot that doesn’t thrill – is what’s at the root of Tears in Rain’s weaknesses.

Click here to read the review in full.

Adrian Barnes, Nod (2012): Strange Horizons review

21st November 2012 / / 0 Comments

I have a new review up at Strange Horizons today, of Adrian Barnes’s superb debut novel, Nod. I read it shortly after contributing to the debate on freshness in works of the fantastic, and it struck me as just the sort of thing I wanted to see.

In Nod, most of the world’s population loses the ability to sleep, which leads to psychosis within a few days – to the point where people’s perceptions can be manipulated with a word. Barnes tells of the power plays – the literal war or words – that goes on in a corner of Vancouver.

What interests me most about this novel is its pervading sense of unease at a situation which is all-consuming for its characters, yet is explicitly temporary. It makes for a fascinating read.

Click here to read my review of Nod in full.

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

Harry Karlinsky, The Evolution of Inanimate Objects (2012): Strange Horizons review

24th October 2012 / / 0 Comments

Strange Horizons have published my review of The Evolution of Inanimate Objects by Harry Karlinsky. I was talking yesterday about creative approaches to the material of sf, and here’s one — a pseudo-historical biography of Charles Darwin’s (fictional) son Thomas, who applies his father’s theories of evolution to the development and classification of everyday items.

This is a playful concept, but Karlinsky’s novel is more than a diversion: it’s also an effective character study, and a reflection on science and how it progresses (see Alan Bowden for more on that point).

Click here to read my review in full.

Book notes: Richard Weihe and Robert Jackson Bennett

20th October 2012 / / 3 Comments

Richard Weihe, Sea of Ink (2003/12)
Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch

Peirene Press’s Year of the Small Epic has so far brought us a grand domestic drama and a study of bereavement. The series takes a lighter turn in its final instalment, with Swiss writer Richard Weihe’s fictionalised biography of the Chinese painter Bada Shanren. He is born Zhu Da, a scion of the Ming dynasty; but political change and his father’s death lead him to join a monastery and devote his life to art, going through many names before settling on Bada Shanren, ‘man on the mountain of the eight compass points’.

Sea of Ink has eleven illustrations of Bada’s beautiful paintings, and Weihe includes descriptions of how the artist worked, his brush strokes and hand movements. This has the striking effect of creating a detailed impression which remains just that – an impression. Even though we can see the final paintings, there’s room for our subjective interpretation of Weihe’s words. The novella itself works in a similar way, its short chapters acting like brush strokes to create a portrait of Bada’s life which is necessarily a fiction, a construct.

The ultimate story told in Sea of Ink seems to me one of a man finding peace in life through finding (or accepting) his place – finding the world in the marks of ink and brush. The tone of the writing is quiet and reflective; I’d say this is ideal reading for an autumn night.

Robert Jackson Bennett, The Troupe (2012)

Over the last few years, Robert Jackson Bennett has been crafting his own distinctive visions of the American fantastic’s iconic tropes. For his third novel, he turns his attention to the magical travelling show. We meet George Carole, a sixteen-year-old vaudeville pianist as he leaves his current job to visit the troupe of Hieronomo Silenius, whom George believes to be his father. Silenius’s reputation precedes him, but no one ever remembers the details of his show. When George watches a performance, he finds out why: the Silenius troupe plays an extraordinary song that make those who hear it forget what they’ve seen – but it doesn’t work on George.

Falling in with the troupe, George discovers that this music is pat of the ‘First Song’, the one that brought Creation into being; peforming it is the only thing that holds back the ‘wolves’ who would seek to devour reality. Silenius’s band go from place to place in search of fragments of the First Song, which only those of the Silenius blood-line can carry (the song didn’t work on George because he is of that line). So begins a journey into the world’s mythic spaces, with reality itself at stake.

Bennett achieves a nice balance between the personal and cosmic focus. All the members of Silenius’s troupe are pretending to be something they’re not, and the theme of escape runs through the novel – escaping the past, and escaping the inevitable. The ending makes use of a risky technique (I appreciate this is vague, but want to avoid a spoiler), but Bennett pulls it off. His body of work continues to intrigue, and I look forward to seeing what comes next.

Scarlett Thomas, Monkeys with Typewriters (2012)

23rd September 2012 / / 7 Comments

The infinite monkey theorem says that, given enough time, a monkey with a typewriter will almost certainly produce the complete works of Shakespeare just from tapping the keys at random. As Scarlett Thomas points out in the introduction to this creative writing book, though, writers don’t work that way – they write with purpose (though of course that’s not the be-all and end-all of a finished work), and don’t have unlimited time. This is one of the recurring themes of Monkeys with Typewriters: that writing is more than a technical exercise, even if you can see some of its workings.

It’s fair to say that I wouldn’t have chosen to read this book had the publisher not sent me a copy on spec, because I’ve no ambitions to write fiction. But Thomas has such a distinctive style of writing fiction that I was intrigued to see what she had to say. It turns out that Monkeys with Typewriters is interesting for readers as well as aspiring writers. Thomas is less concerned with telling her readers ‘how to write’ as encouraging to think more deeply about how what they read and write works.

The first half of the book is devoted to ‘Theory’, and especially to examining the mechanics of plots. Thomas goes from Plato, through Aristotle and Nietzsche, to Northrop Frye and Christopher Booker, examining (and sometimes criticising) the different ways plots have been analysed and classified. There’s plenty of food for thought here, even for a non-writer – I like Thomas’s distinction between story (the chronological events that happen) and plot (how those events are arranged by the writer), which I hadn’t thought of in the way before. It’s also fascinating to see the connections Thomas makes, such as when she highlights the similar basic narrative arcs of Toy Story, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, and an episode of Supernanny. Underneath it all is an enthusiasm for writers to find and do their own thing; after presenting her idea of ‘the eight basic plots’, Thomas invites her readers to devise their own taxonomy.

After ‘Theory’ comes ‘Practice’. Some of the material in this section (such as the chapters on having ideas and the practicalities of writing) is inevitably going to be of more specialised interest – but, even then, it’s not unengaging. The rest will surely get any reader thinking anew about characterisation, narration, and how sentences work. Thomas is an excellent guide through her examples, drawing on classic and contemporary texts alike (from Anna Karenina and Middlemarch to The God of Small Things and number9dream). For her, it’s not about one size fitting all, but about whatever works in context. And this section might well cause you to add one or two books to your to-read list; it only took Thomas to quote one short sentence (‘The lawn was white with doctors’) to convince me I ought to read The Bell Jar.

Whether you want to write or not, Monkeys with Typewriters is the kind of book that renews your enthusiasm for reading in general, a book that believes – and encourages its readers to believe – that great fiction matters. Thomas ends her book with a checklist of key questions for writers. The last one is: ‘If the only copy of my novel was stranded on the top of a mountain, would I go up to rescue it?’ Perhaps the key message of Monkeys with Typewriters is that the only fiction worth writing – and reading – is the sort for which you would head up that mountain. And I’d say a book which argues that is one worth reading.

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