Tag: Reviews

Book notes: Route’s Next Great Novelist… and William Boyd’s short fiction

27th June 2012 / / 3 Comments

Sophie Coulombeau, Rites (2012)

Last year, the Pontefract-based publisher Route announced its ‘Next Great Novelist’ award, which would lead to the publication of a book by a new novelist under the age of 30. Sophie Coulombeau won, and Rites is her winning novel. Told in the form of interview transcripts, it is the story of four Manchester teenagers who made a pact to lose their virginity to each other in 1997, an incident which gained notoriety (for reasons unspecified as the book begins); in the present day, the then-teenagers – and other characters involved – look back on that time, and leave the reader to construct exactly what happened.

Coulombeau’s great strength in Rites is in how she controls the flow of information, and plays with and against readers’ expectations. When her opening narrator Damien suggests (in his pitch-perfect, insufferable voice) that only some people think what his teenage self did was ‘terrible’, we’re immediately put in mind that our initial assumptions about events may come to be overturned – and so it proves, but subtly, as ‘blame’ passes between the characters, and we realise that everyone has slightly different memories of the past. So there’s a wonderful sense of uncertainty – the feeling that, even when we think we know everything, perhaps we don’t after all. Add to this some insightful observations – on growing up, falling in love, and more besides – and you have a fine debut novel.

William Boyd, Fascination (2004)

The other week, I decided it was about time I read something by William Boyd – but where to start with such a prolific author? I asked for suggestions on Twitter, and the most common response by far was his 1987 novel The New Confessions. I looked for that book next time I was in the library, but they didn’t have it; instead, I came away with Fascination, one of Boyd’s short story collections – and it wasn’t the best place to start.

Most of Boyd’s protagonists in these stories experience sudden (and often unhealthy) desire for another person; this can lead to some effective moments, as in ‘The Woman on the Beach with a Dog’, whose married main character pursues a woman he encounters, but has no idea what to do after he’s done so. But, too often, I get a sense that, take away Boyd’s formal conceits – a story told in the form of a diner’s notes on a week’s lunches, for example; or one where individual scenes are headed with video operations (past-set scenes labelled ‘rewind’, and so on) – and there’s not much left to make the tales stand out.

I certainly get enough of a sense from Fascination that Boyd is a writer worth reading: ‘The Ghost of a Bird’ is a poignant portrait of a convalescing soldier recovering his memory, and struggling to distinguish between reality and fantasy. The title story draws neat parallels between two relationships with women in a journalist’s past and present. ‘The Mind/Body Problem’ deploys its theme in interesting ways, as a philosophy student makes fake lotions and potions for a female bodybuilder at his parents’ gym and in a sense ‘remakes’ her as a person when her attitude changes. But I think I should have started with one of Boyd’s novels, so I’ll have to keep an eye out for The New Confessions.

Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth (2012)

24th June 2012 / / 3 Comments

On the face of it, Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter may not be a particularly obvious writing partnership; their distinctive brands of comic fantasy and hard science fiction might seem incompatible. But, then again, Pratchett’s interest in science often comes through in his work; and both writers share an ability to create grand fantastic visions – whether Baxter’s evocations of the vastnesses of space and time, or the large-scale comic set-pieces which crown Pratchett’s best novels. So the prospect of a co-written work from them is intriguing, and now we have The Long Earth, the first novel in a projected duology– though the end result is more frustrating than anything.

A few years hence, more or less everyone has access to a ‘stepper’, a device that enables travel through the chain of parallel worlds known as the Long Earth. There are certain practical concerns – worlds can only be accessed in sequence; iron cannot be carried between them; and each ‘step’ induces fifteen minutes of debilitating nausea. Moreover, most of the parallel worlds are empty, minor climatic and geographic variations on our own prehistoric Earth. But none of this stops people making the journey between worlds, to exploit the resources there, or to start their lives anew.

It takes a while for The Long Earth to coalesce, as a number of plot strands present themselves at the outset, and it’s not clear initially which will be the main focus. But it’s quite exhilarating, first to begin the story at a point where the notion of parallel worlds and the stepping technology are well established (and, even though Pratchett and Baxter do fill in the back story, they don’t especially dwell on it), then to have this sense of a raw story coming together as the pages turn.

The novel eventually settles on a main narrative thread, concerning Joshua Valienté, one of a select few able to step between worlds unaided and with no ill effects. The existence of this ability is unknown to most, but not to Lobsang, a supercomputer who claims to have once been a Tibetan motorcycle mechanic. The ‘transEarth Insititute’ enlists Joshua to be Lobsang’s escort on an airship voyage to the far reaches of the Long Earth, where they discover the threat that will presumably become the key focus of the second volume.

In terms of its authors’ other work, The Long Earth – as Adam Roberts rightly suggests in the Guardian – is much closer to Baxter’s usual territory than Pratchett’s. There’s not much humour in the novel, and what there is – such as the comic-cut biker nun, Sister Agnes – feels somewhat out of place. But the book’s interplay of fantasy and science fiction is interesting; structurally, the Long Earth could be seen as a scientific riposte to the traditional fantasy multiverse – steppers have no prospect of a swashbuckling adventure through outlandish worlds, just a systematic trudge through near-identical Earths. (Joshua and Lobsang also discover a rational origin for the idea of elves and trolls.)

The thing is, though, that – almost by definition – this is not a set-up that lends itself naturally to drama: there’s nothing much for characters to act against , and most problems can be solved simply by stepping to the next Earth. The novel never manages to find enough drama to compensate for this: Lobsang controls the central journey to such a degree that Joshua’s main function as protagonist is to witness rather than act; and the subplots exploring other aspects of the Long Earth recede too far into the background to carry enough weight in the book as a whole.

Overall, I’m inclined to agree with Paula at The Broke and the Bookish that The Long Earth feels more like a beginning than a tale that stands alone; there’s too strong a sense of pieces being moved into place for a game to be played out in the next volume. Pratchett and Baxter explore some interesting ideas of the different paths terrestrial life might have taken, and how modern humans might respond to vast new wildernesses; but the book has really only just got going as it ends.

(A shorter version of this review appears at We Love This Book.)

Elsewhere
Terry Pratchett’s website
Stephen Baxter’s website
Some other reviews of The Long Earth: The Literary Omnivore; Baltimore Reads; Birth of a New Witch.

Book notes: Shepherd and Lightfoot

21st May 2012 / / 2 Comments

Lloyd Shepherd, The English Monster (2012)

(NB. I can’t say what I want to say about this book without revealing a key plot development from about a third in; bear that in mind if you read on.)

Lloyd Shepherd’s debut novel takes as its foundation theRatcliffe Highwaymurders, a pair of multiple killings which took place near theLondonarea of Wapping in December 1811. As Shepherd presents them, these gruesome crimes are beyond the comprehension of most people; but John Harriott, magistrate of the Thames River Police, is determined that the culprit will be brought to justice. His watchman-constable, Charles Horton, has an unorthodox technique for fighting crime: the systematic investigation of evidence – ‘detection’, as Harriott calls it.

A parallel storyline begins in 1564, when we join young Billy Ablass as he’s about to set sail fromPlymouthin search of fortune. But the ship he has joined is on a mission to gather slaves, and its voyages lead Billy ultimately toFlorida, where he becomes the victim of a curse – never to die, but always to carry the burden of what he and his crewmates have done, a burden which will rot him from the inside.

As a crime story, The English Monster fairly rattles along; but, in the end, the mystery element comes to seem almost beside the point. What interests me most about the novel is its subtext, which is all about the the emerging modern world. The two narrative threads highlight key historical junctures and the tensions around them: a more ‘scientific’ approach to policing is emerging, but is largely viewed with suspicion; the Wapping docks are growing, but not everyone will experience the economic benefits; a world is being built on the trade of human beings. Against this background, Charles Horton and Billy Ablass could be seen as emblematic opposites: Horton as the positive force for progress, Ablass as the negative aspects of human nature which persist and hold us back.

I understand that Shepherd is planning more novels featuring The English Monster’s characters; the pace and subtext of this first one leave me very keen to see where he goes next.

Frederick Lightfoot, My Name Is E (2011)

Judith Salt, Abigail Sempie and Grace Powers are three deaf girls all born in the same Cumbrian village in 1945. Though unrelated, they meet each other as young children and come to think of themselves as ‘sisters’. Judith’s and Grace’s Grade II deafness is acquired, and they have some ability to speak and hear; but Abby is Grade III deaf from birth, and can utter only the single syllable ‘E’. It’s apparent from the beginning that something happened to Abby, because Judith (our narrator) returned to her home village aged twenty-five, intent on avenging her. Judith tells the intertwined tales of that time, her childhood, and her current life at the age of sixty.

I’m ambivalent about My Name Is E. On the one hand, Frederick Lightfoot creates a vivid portrait of the village community and its precarious social terrain; on the other, I find his prose style a little too dry at times. The mysteries of Abby’s fate and what the twenty-five-year old Judith with do are strong narrative hooks, though the resolution of that latter thread is less effective. I find myself remaining on the fence as far as this book goes.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989)

17th May 2012 / / 9 Comments

I’ve been thinking back to that Leo Benedictus article on ‘hindered narrators’ which crossed my mind whilst reading The Quiddity of Will Self. In it, Benedictus refers to the previous generation’s idea of ‘a literary novelist: a titan of the typewriter [whose] own voice was all you ever got from them, even when they swathed it in a made-up “I.”’ I’ve often had trouble with that sort of writing myself; I tend to think that a first-person voice should be tailored to the narrator’s character. That was one of the problems I had with Kazuo Ishiguro’s novella collection, Nocturnes – each of its narrators had the same voice, and it was one which didn’t suit all of them.

It was time to try Ishiguro’s work again, and I went for his most lauded novel, The Remains of the Day. I found that same first-person voice here, but its slightly stuffy formality works perfectly for this narrator: Stevens, the butler of Darlington Hall in Oxfordshire, whom we join in July 1956, as he’s preparing to take a drive to the West Country. He’s planning to visit Miss Kenton (now Mrs Benn), a former housekeeper of the Hall, who has written to Stevens after many years, describing how her marriage has foundered and hinting (so Stevens reads into the letter) that she may wish to return to Darlington; Stevens’ pretext for the journey is to discuss the latter with Miss Kenton, because he’s struggling to manage the Hall with the few staff he has left; but there are hints from the beginning (and growing throughout) that there may be a more personal dimension to their relationship than Stevens is willing to admit.

Something else that didn’t sit right with me in Nocturnes was a character who was effectively dismissed completely as a person by a supposed friend, and just accepted it – I simply couldn’t imagine someone in the present day being so yielding about that. Again, I find similar character traits in The Remains of the Day; and, again, they make more sense in this context. Stevens’ life and outlook are defined by service: his job, as he sees it, is to facilitate the work of the gentlemen he serves; the man Stevens might otherwise be himself is subsumed under that notion of duty. To his mind, the most fundamental quality of a great butler (not that he would be so bold as to consider himself ‘great’, you understand) is ‘dignity’ – the capacity to retain one’s composure whatever the situation; not to let one’s inner life become apparent to the outside world. There’s no doubt Stevens has this capacity: the most extreme example is probably when Stevens’ father (who at the time was working under him at Darlington Hall) has a stroke and dies below stairs whilst his son is attending to a conference of dignitaries; Stevens carries on performing his duties, keeps his emotions largely in check, and still feels a small sense of ‘triumph’ thirty years on at being able to maintain his dignity on that occasion.

Stevens’ relationship with Miss Kenton is similarly characterised by such ‘dignity’. Their conversations, as he recalls them, are stiff and rather cold; when she tries to inject some warmth into them, Stevens doesn’t respond to it, and Miss Kenton in her turn becomes barbed and distant in how she deals with Stevens’ professional requests – but, crucially, he can’t now recall whether some criticisms came from Miss Kenton or his old employer, Lord Darlington; this both underlines how Stevens’ work and ‘personal’ life are as one to him, and emphasises the mental filter through which we’re viewing events.

The theme of conflict between private and public life is reflected not just in the person of Stevens, but also in wider life at the Hall. Stevens remarks at one point that important political decisions may influenced at private gatherings in country houses – and it’s such a diplomatic conference that Lord Darlington organises in the 1930s in an attempt to avert war; one delegate warns another in secret that he may be the target of manipulation – and, in an illustration of the social forces at work, this is brought sharply into the public sphere.

But it’s Stevens who is ultimately the focus of Ishiguro’s novel, and we see a man who lacks vital self-awareness. He may be at pains to stress – may believe ardently – that he’s a servant; but his bearing makes it easy enough for some of those he meets on the road to mistake Stevens for a gentleman. He acts well enough like a lord in his own domain; is quite unaware of the effect that can have on others; and takes the view that ‘ordinary people [cannot] be expected to have “strong opinions” on all manner of things’ (p. 204). It’s only gradually that Stevens comes to realise some of his negative qualities, and something of what he may have missed out on in life – and, even then, it’s clear he’s only just beginning. At the start of the novel, Stevens is unsure how to feel about and respond to his new American employer’s banter; by the end, he’s coming to think that banter ‘is not such a foolish thing to indulge in – particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth’ (p. 258). It’s the first step on a new road for him.

After I’d read the prologue of The Remains of the Day, I was concerned that the novel might be too unsubtle in its depiction of Stevens. Now I see I was approaching the book in the wrong way: what Ishiguro does is take a character who might border on caricature and make a fully-fledged individual of him. So I’ve come to appreciate Ishiguro’s work that bit more with The Remains of the Day; it’ll be Never Let Me Go when I read him next, I think.

Book notes: Darling, Zeniter, Meredith

14th May 2012 / / 3 Comments

Tom Darling, Summer (2012)

Tom Darling’s second novel, Summer, is the story of teenage Grace Hooper and her nine-year-old brother Billy, who arrive on their grandfather’s farm as orphans, their parents having been killed in an accident on holiday. School will not begin again for several months; until then, the children face a summer in an environment far removed from the London they know (underlining their sense of disorientation, it is never clear just where the farm is), with a relative who might as well be a stranger (and, indeed, is referred to almost exclusively in the book as ‘the old man’).

Summer is a quiet book that takes time to unfold, often telling its story in the gaps between scenes as well as within the scenes themselves. It moves between the present, the past, and the old man’s dreams, generally maintaining the same tone. These techniques can be effective; the children’s memories feel like the mirages they are, aspects of the present rather than an equal reality; and, though it’s evident from the grandfather’s bad dreams that something terrible has happened on the farm previously, the reader has to piece that together over time. However, the novel also feels a bit too diffuse; its different narrative components are not tied together as closely as they might be, and some key points may be lost amongst the whole.

But what Darling does particularly well in Summer is delineate the change in his protagonists. At first, it’s Billy who takes instinctively to the farm environment, and his grandfather is only too happy to accommodate his interest. Billy’s existence on the farm becomes almost elemental, and he spends more time in one of his outside hideaways than in the farmhouse. Grace, in contrast, is more cast adrift at first, but eventually comes to her own instinctive—though subtly different—understanding of her surroundings; her relationship with the farm is mediated through human contact more than is Billy’s, and the way she ultimately views the place is more ordered. It’s in details like this, and as a study of character, that Summer shines most strongly.

This review also appears on Fiction Uncovered.

Reviews elsewhere: Learn This Phrase; What Sarah Reads; Stevie Davies for the Guardian.

Alice Zeniter, Take This Man (2010/1)

Alice Zeniter was 23 when she published Jusque dans nos bras (now superbly translated from the French by Alison Anderson as Take This Man), and it really feels as though she has captured in it something of contemporary life for her generation. We meet Zeniter’s protagonist (also named Alice Zeniter) as she is about to marry her Malian childhood friend Amadou (‘Mad’) Traoré – a marriage brought about because it will prevent Mad from being deported under new immigration laws, despite his having lived in France most of his life. The novel’s chapters alternate between the lead-up to the wedding and Alice’s various encounters with racism.

Take This Man begins with a brilliant passage listing the touchstones of Alice’s generation as she sees them; it captures a mixture of optimism and anxiety which carries through to the main novel, where one senses that Alice is never quite sure whether marrying Mad is really the right thing to do (her first-person narration frequently lapses into addressing herself as ‘you’, emphasising that dislocation). Zeniter traces the complexities of Alice’s situation – her father may be from Algeria, but she appears white, and discovers that her experiences are not the same as Mad’s – and charts her growing political awareness, all in fizzing prose.

Review at Soifollowjulian.

Christopher Meredith, The Book of Idiots (2012)

Christopher Meredith’s first adult novel in fourteen years seems at first like a tapestry of the mundane. Interspersed with tales of boyhood games, Dean Lloyd narrates episodes from his adult life: interviewing candidates for a new position at his workplace; conversations at the swimming pool with Jeff, an old work colleague whose trunks keep threatening to disintegrate; a country walk with a friend named Wil Daniel, who tells Dean about a chance meeting at hospital with a woman he once knew, and its consequences. But there’s more going on than Dean – or the reader – may suspect.

Meredith has a particularly sharp ear for dialogue which feels like actual speech; and he creates a sharp portrait of thwarted potential – for example, Wil wonders what use his degree in English and history has really been; the answer, as far as the novel goes, is that he can play a guessing game with Dean about how different historical figures died.

I don’t think I managed to grasp everything Meredith was doing in The Book of Idiots; but the title intrigued me and, with the novel’s mentions of Ancient Greece, I looked up the original meaning of ‘idiot’ – which, as I understand it, was someone focused on the private sphere, on themselves. Viewing the book through this lens, I see characters with personal concerns which they don’t share, or don’t recognise in others – with tragic consequences. It’s the unseen things in The Book of Idiots which carry the greatest impact.

Review and interview by Gwen Davies in New Welsh Review.

Charles Stross, Rule 34 (2011)

29th April 2012 / / 8 Comments

Charles Stross returns to the near-future Edinburgh of his 2007 novel Halting State for this police procedural (though I’ve not read the earlier book, I don’t believe there is any substantial crossover between the two). A decade from now, DI Liz Kavanaugh’s CID career has stalled as she’s currently heading up the Innovative Crime Investigation Unit (or ‘Rule 34 Squad’), which investigates crime based on the spreading of internet memes; one of ICIU’s current cases, the bizarre murder of a known spammer, suddenly gains more prominence when similar crimes come to light. Elsewhere, Anwar Hussain, an ex-crook on probation, gets a job through a friend as Consul for a months-old breakaway republic, though he doesn’t quite appreciate what he’s getting into; and a man known to us as ‘the Toymaker’ arrives in Scotland to set up a new branch of his criminal enterprise – if only the people he’s there to recruit didn’t keep getting themselves murdered…

Perhaps the most immediately noticeable thing about Rule 34 is that (like Halting State) it is written in the second-person. Now, a childhood of adventure gamebooks and text adventures means I’m reasonably used to being addressed as ‘you’ by a text; but that kind of narration has always tended to distance me from viewpoint characters, because it focuses my attention on action rather than on interior life – and I found that to be the case again here. There are a few occasions when emotion leaps off the page; but, for the most part, the style gets in the way.

Mentioning the style brings to mind Christopher Priest’s infamous comment that ‘Stross writes like an internet puppy’. He has a point – Stross tends to include slightly more detail than will sit comfortably in the narrative, and there are times when this threatens to halt Rule 34 in its tracks (especially a long stretch of exposition towards the end) – but there’s also a restless energy to Stross’s telling; at its best, the writing works very well indeed (a passage on the war on spam, for example, captures an aspect of Stross’s imagined future in a particularly compelling way).

Stross presents an intriguing vision of a society which is substantially more technologically advanced than the present, yet still fraying at the edges; a world of fluidity and compromise. Police officers are wired into an augmented reality called ‘CopSpace’, but useful teleconferencing and face recognition remain beyond reach.Scotland has seceded from the United Kingdom, but not fully, so politics can be messily ambiguous. Policing is less about great detectives than groups of workers searching for patterns in data (‘crowdsourcing by cop,’ as Stross puts it [p. 227]). Throughout the novel, we see individuals, groups, and nations finding gaps and weak points in the system to use to their own advantage, or at least to get by.

As a procedural, I don’t think Rule 34 works quite so well: some of the connections between plot threads take too long to come into the narrative after they’ve been made apparent to the reader; the threads as a whole don’t mesh together as successfully as they might; and the foregrounding towards the end of a particular plot element (which has previously been mentioned in passing) is rather too abrupt. But the book and the world around the procedural are what make Rule 34 worth reading – and what make it one of the stronger titles on this year’s Clarke shortlist.

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

Elsewhere
Charles Stross’s website
Some other reviews of Rule 34: Maureen Kincaid Speller; Dan Hartland; Niall Alexander.

Drew Magary, The End Specialist (2011)

16th April 2012 / / 6 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)

4th April 2012 / / 4 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nick Harkaway, Angelmaker (2012)

27th March 2012 / / 3 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Frances Hardinge, Twilight Robbery (2011)

16th March 2012 / / 3 Comments

I keep hearing Frances Hardinge’s name mentioned as a YA fantasy writer whose work is of interest to adult readers; here’s my chance to judge for myself. Twilight Robbery is the standalone sequel to Hardinge’s debut, Fly By Night; it’s the continued adventures of an orphan girl named Mosca Mye, and her companions, Eponymous Clent (a thief and con artist) and Saracen (a goose whose default temperament is that of the Unseen University Librarian when the latter gets called a monkey). Travelling to the walled town of Toll, the three get caught up in a plot to abduct the mayor’s daughter. But Toll is no ordinary town: inhabitants and citizens alike are classified into ‘day’ and ‘night’ according to the folk deity under whose auspices they were born, and are only allowed to ‘exist’ during the relevant period (the town is even built so that its layout can change from day to night) – and, as story-luck would have it, Mosca and Clent fall on opposite sides of that divide.

For a start, Twilight Robbery is great fun to read: an intriguing plot with considerable momentum (even the many references to past events only make me want to read Fly By Night, rather than leaving me frustrated that I haven’t); and some lovely, rhythmic writing – like this, when Mosca is escaping from capture:

It takes time to find a lantern in the dark, long enough for two quick legs to sprint away into the heaving labyrinth of gorse. It takes time too for sleep-fumbled hands to strike tinder and nursemaid the trembling flame to the wick, long enough for small, cunning hands to snap off a fern-fan the right size to shield a black-haired head from sight. (p. 35)

Mosca Mye is a very appealing character. She’s exceptional in many ways – able to read in a world where many people of her social standing are not; just about the only person in Toll who isn’t charmed by the mayor’s daughter; able to move faster and squeeze into smaller spaces than lumbering adults – and thus a character whom change will follow; this, together with Mosca’s wit and the friction between her and Clent, make her a very engaging figure to read about.

Alongside all its brio, however, there’s a serious heart to Twilight Robbery; Hardinge does not shy away from the harshnesses of life, as shown when Mosca comes across a dead body in a wine cellar:

Mosca stood on the threshold and quivered. She hoped the cask had split. She hoped the darkened pool around the cask was wine. It smelt like wine. She wondered if she would ever be able to bear the smell of wine again. (p. 264)

Perhaps the central issue embodied in Twilight Robbery is that of social segregation; and, of course, Hardinge’s fantasy structure enables her to literalise that concept to an extraordinary degree. My main quibble with the novel has to do with how she handles this. Towards the end, Mosca is frustrated that she can’t do more to help; Clent replies that she has much to learn:

‘Bold actions have consequences, child…To be young is to be powerless, but to have delusions of power. To believe that one can really change things, make the world better and simpler in good and simple ways. To grow old is to realize that nobody is ever good, nothing is ever simple. That truth is cruel at first, but finally comforting.’

‘But…’ Mosca broke in, then halted. Clent was right, she knew that he was. And yet her bones screamed that he was also wrong, utterly wrong. ‘But sometimes things are simple. Just now and then. Just like now and then people are good.’ (pp. 454-5)

I find myself somewhat in sympathy with Clent’s view, here – not that people are never good, but that big issues tend not to have simple solutions. But the world of Twilight Robbery is a larger-than-life one where problems are responsive to bold actions, and a young girl like Mosca Mye can be an agent of change. I suppose this is partly in the nature of children’s literature; but the ending does feel like a disappointing flinch from a book which has not been afraid to be ‘grown up’ when it needed to be.

On balance, though, Twilight Robbery is a book I’m glad to have read, and Frances Hardinge an author I will be reading again in times to come.

Elsewhere
Frances Hardinge’s website
Martin Lewis reviews Twilight Robbery for Strange Horizons

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