Tag: Reviews

Brian W. Aldiss, ‘The Difficulties Involved in Photographing Nix Olympica’ (1986)

11th March 2012 / / 1 Comment

Sergeants Ozzy Brooksand Al Shapiro take a week’s leave to travel across Mars from their base, to fulfil Brooks’s ambition of photographing Olympus Mons. The trip brings out the pair’s different characters, with Brook’s romanticism (when they spend the night on the floor of a giant ravine, he says: ‘wouldn’t this spot make a dramatic tomb?’) contrasted against Shapiro’s more practical nature.

I’m not sure what to make of this story: despite the closing twist of the protagonists’ fates, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s little else to the piece besides that contrast in personalities. I may be missing something; I hope I am.

Rating: ***

This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Not the Only Planet.

Henry Green, Loving (1945)

28th January 2012 / / 4 Comments

Writing is all just words, isn’t it? After all, differences in language notwithstanding, each writer uses essentially the same building blocks. Well, there’s nothing like reading a book where an author writes about a relatively unremarkable situation in an apparently ordinary way – yet still produces something utterly distinctive – to demonstrate that there’s so much more at play than only words. Henry Green’s Loving concerns the lives of the servants and masters of an Irish country house during World War Two, is told largely through dialogue – on the surface, nothing too unusual; but the way Green approaches his material turns it into something more.

Reading the dialogue of Green’s characters is rather like eavesdropping on them: sometimes we join them ‘in the middle’ of a discussion, and there’s often a sense of details remaining unsaid, as of course happens in real conversation. Come to that, there’s a naturalistic feel in general to the structures and rhythms of Green’s dialogue; that, and other techniques such as shifting between separate conversations without a scene-break, encourage a slow, concentrated approach to reading, which suits a book that reveals its details gradually and obliquely.

What emerges within the pages of Loving is a portrait ofKinaltyCastle as a building of contested space: the different servants have their own areas, and for one to enter another’s domain has political meaning. Charley Raunce, the head footman, seizes the opportunity to move up in the hierarchy when the old butler dies; but his wish for one of the maids (rather than his own pantry boy) to bring his tea in the morning becomes a bone of contention because of the shift in power it would represent. Even the manner in which one addresses another is important for the relationship it indicates; Agatha Burch, the head housemaid, tells Raunce: ‘you’ll never get a Mr out of me not ever, even if there is a war on.’

Loving begins with ‘Once upon a day…’ and ends with ‘…happily ever after’, though it’s clear enough that conventional fairytale happiness will not be easy for the characters to achieve. Yet there is something of the fantastical edifice about Kinalty: its inhabitants are so isolated from the war and the outside that the castle effectively becomes a threshold between worlds; the vivid imagery Green often uses to describe Kinalty only adds to the atmosphere of intrigue.

Then, as the novel’s title suggests, there is love. From the complex dance of attraction between Raunce and the maid Edith, to Violet Tennant’s (daughter-in-law of the household) dealing with the absence of her soldier husband Jack – and beyond – love manifests itself in various ways as part of the novel’s web. I don’t think I’ve come across a novel quite like Loving before, and would certainly be intrigued to read Green again.

Thanks to Stu from Winstonsdad’s Blog for hosting Henry Green Week, which was what led me to read this book.

Nina Allan, The Silver Wind (2011)

29th November 2011 / / 6 Comments

Nina Allan is gaining a reputation as one of the most interesting British writers of speculative short fiction to emerge in recent years; her new collection is ample demonstration of why. The Silver Wind collects five ‘stories of time disrupted’ which are set in London and/or Sussex (though not necessarily the same ones), and which ostensibly share characters (though a character in one piece may be different when we encounter them again in another). The ultimate story of the volume may lie just as much in the spaces between tales as it does in the tales themselves.

Our guide through most of the collection is Martin Newland, a young man who has been fascinated with time ever since he was given a beautiful watch (which he calls his ‘time machine’) as a birthday present. We first meet Martin in ‘Time’s Chariot’, where his uncle Henry gives him a Longines watch for his eighteenth; much as Martin treasures the watch, though, his greatest love is for his sister Dora – a love which verges on the incestuous, and constantly threatens to tip over. Just as Dora is planning to study at Cambridge, however, she is diagnosed with terminal leukaemia; Martin’s greatest wish is that he could turn the clock back.

In the second story, ‘My Brother’s Keeper’, things are rather different. Here, there is no Dora, and never has been; rather than facing the loss of a sister, Martin has already lost a brother – Stephen – whose ghost remains by Martin’s side (and, indeed, can be seen by a few others). This Martin Newland’s first watch was a Smith, given to him at the age of fourteen by his mother’s friends, Judith and Myra. The story chronicles that birthday, when Martin visits Judith and Myra at their seaside cottage, becomes injured on the beach, and is helped in an unexpected way by Andrew Owen, an ex-circus performer who has an affinity of his own for time.

The figure of Andrew Owen reappears in all five stories, though in the title piece (which provides the hub of the collection), he is Owen Andrews, a clockmaker who allegedly worked with the army on experiments involving time travel. The Martin of this story visits Andrews in the hope that he might be able to find out how to avert the accidental death of his wife Miranda. What Martin discovers, however, is that that it’s not ‘time travel’ as such which is possible, but travel into different versions of reality: ‘The time stasis might grant you access to what you think of as the past, but it wouldn’t be the past that you remember. You wouldn’t be the same and neither would [Miranda].’

So that’s what we have in The Silver Wind: five different versions of reality; though it’s left to the reader to decide how (or indeed if) they fit together. What’s particularly striking about these stories is how grounded they are. Even when the collection is at its most fantastical, in the title story, Allan’s keen sense of place and solidity of detail anchor the supernatural (including the fairytale concept of a forest haunted by monsters – here subjects escaped from an experimental facility, whose bodies have been twisted by their ordeal) in a hard reality.

But Allan’s main focus in The Silver Wind is less on the fantastic and more on her characters and their emotions. This is perhaps felt most keenly in ‘Time’s Chariot’, which confronts the simple implacability of loss. That intensity of focus may slacken a touch as the collection moves towards the more overt fantastication of the title piece; but it’s right there again in the fourth story, ‘Rewind’, where our viewpoint character is Miranda, and the question is whether she and her work colleague Martin will come together – for, as we already know, happiness is far from guaranteed in these stories.

‘Time travel’ in The Silver Wind is not a magic solution to the characters’ problems – it’s not about getting a second chance at making good an old situation; at best, it gives you a new situation, with its own potential pitfalls. But there’s a note of optimism in the final piece, ‘Timelines: An Afterword’, which puts a different spin on the previous stories, and suggests that things can turn out all right if you’re lucky – or if you take control of life yourself. However you view these five stories linking together, they add up to an intriguing collection.

Elsewhere
Nina Allan’s website
Eibonvale Press
Sofia Samatar reviews The Silver Wind for Strange Horizons;

Christopher Priest, The Islanders (2011)

18th November 2011 / / 10 Comments

Christopher Priest’s work has given me some of the best reading experiences I’ve ever had, so I opened The Islanders – his first novel in nine years – with no small amount of anticipation. For this book, Priest returns to the world of the Dream Archipelago, setting for a number of short stories and, in part, 1981’s The Affirmation (rest assured that The Islanders stands alone, though readers of the earlier works will recognise a few names and concepts). The Dream Archipelago is a great, world-spanning array of islands; a neutral zone between two countries at war. What we’re presented with in the pages of Priest’s book is ostensibly a gazetteer of some of these islands; but, as well as the standard geographical information one would expect, some of its entries comprise narratives or other sorts of text.

Who (within the context of the fiction) wrote and compiled these entries is uncertain; but the gazetteer’s introduction is credited to one Chaster Kammeston, an Archipeligan native and celebrated writer in the world of the book. Not that Kammeston is convinced that the volume he’s introducing will be of much use, as actually mapping and navigating the Archipelago are nigh on impossible: partly because there are so many different naming conventions for the same geographical features (the ones that actually have names, at least); and partly because of the naturally-occurring “temporal vortices” which distort one’s very perception of the world. Kammeston is even unsure whether he’s the right person to be writing an introduction to a work about the vast expanses of the Archpelago, given that, as he says, “I have never stepped off the island [of my birth], and I expect never to do so before I die.” (p. 1).

But something is not quite right, here. We meet Chaster Kammeston again in the entries of the gazetteer itself; and, if we can believe what we read there, not only has he willingly left his home island several times, he is also dead – yet there he is, alive to write an introduction, apparently after the book has been compiled. Kammeston’s is just one story woven through The Islanders; other characters (many of them artists and thinkers of one kind or another) and events recur: the mime Commis is murdered in a theatre when a sheet of glass is dropped on him from above – but maybe the identity of his killer is not as cut-and-dried as it first appeared; Jordenn Yo travels the Archipelago, creating art installations by tunnelling through islands (presumably that’s what landed her in prison); we may never meet the painter Dryd Bathurst properly ‘in person’, as it were, but we hear enough about him to piece together an impression of who he is and what he might have done.

That last comment points towards a key aspect of The Islanders: namely, that its very structure forces us to construct its story (or stories) for ourselves. This is more than just a simple matter of chapters being arranged out of chronological order; as Adam Roberts notes, the novel itself can be seen as an archipelago, with each chapter an ‘island’ of narrative. Formally, Priest’s novel embodies something of what it suggests about island life:

Islands gave an underlying feeling of circularity, of coast, a limit to what you could achieve or where you might go. You knew where you were but there was invariably a sense that there were other islands, other places to be. (p. 281)

Individual entries within the book point at connections between themselves, without overtly having the sense of being linked that we would normally expect the chapters of a book to have. Priest leaves us to make the links ourselves; but, more than having to assemble a set of puzzle-pieces into a coherent picture, more than having an incomplete set of pieces and having to fill in the gaps, in The Islanders we can fill the gaps in many different ways, thereby imagining new connections. Is Character A also Character B? Could Place X be another name for Place Y, and what does that imply if so? Just as the Dream Archipelago is ultimately unmappable, so The Islanders refuses to be understood definitively. It’s a novel which challenges our conceptions of what a novel can tell.

I’m not sure that The Islanders is right up there with the best of Priest’s work for me – it doesn’t give the great shock to the imagination that The Affirmation, The Prestige, and The Separation do – but it’s no less an elegant construction for that. It lulls you in with the measured neutrality of its prose, and the familiar, non-specific modernity of its world; so that those occasions where the narration does break out of its gazetteer-like register, or a properly fantastical notion is introduced, are all the more effective. And, as a novel which embodies its concepts and concerns within its very foundations, The Islanders is a work of art.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of The Islanders: Niall Alexander for Strange Horizons; Ursula K. Le Guin for The Guardian.
Christopher Priest’s website

Book notes: Benedictus, Ward, Medvei

18th May 2011 / / 5 Comments

Leo Benedictus, The Afterparty (2011)

Here’s a good example of a book which didn’t sound instinctively like something I would enjoy, but which turned out to be well worth a read. The Afterparty tells the overlapping stories of four people over the course of one night: Hugo Marks, an actor whose birthday celebrations provide the backdrop to events; Mellody, his supermodel wife; Calvin Vance, the young pop star to whom Mellody takes a shine; and Michael Knight, a journalist who’s attending the party reluctantly after being given a colleague’s invitation. The actual text of the novel is framed as the work of one William Mendez, whose emails to a prospective agent, Valerie Morrell, alternate with the chapters. Mendez has plenty of ideas for aspects of his novel’s marketing (all of which have made it to the finished version), but is reluctant to reveal his identity; so Morrell calls on a columnist named Leo Benedictus to stand in for him…

A novel as self-referential as The Afterparty risks getting lost in its own cleverness; but there’s such charm (and a certain audacity) in the way Benedictus lays bare the workings of his book that it won this reader over. It also adds another layer to what seems to me the novel’s main theme: the gap between reality and perception. That theme is reflected in the main text by the subtly different glosses which each viewpoint character places on events (the use of a different font for each viewpoint emphasises that, in a way, we’re reading four different stories). It’s also echoed in the novel’s treatment of modern celebrity culture: Calvin is shown not really to understand the world he’s entered (a world exemplified by Mellody, who has been through it all and bears the scars); Hugo is frustrated at the way celebrity has caused him to be perceived to an extent as ‘public property’; Michael is about to find out what it’s like to be in the limelight, when he gets caught up in a tragedy in which perceptions of reality will be all-important.

Add to this some skilful prose (Benedictus is particularly good at creating striking images of rather mundane phenomena), and you have a fine debut in The Afterparty.

Leo Benedictus’s website; Booktrust interview.

Katie Ward, Girl Reading (2011)

Turning now to another fine debut, though one rather different in subject matter and approach. In Girl Reading, Katie Ward imagines the stories behind a number of portraits of girls and women reading; the portraits range in past time from Simone Martini’s Annunciation (1333) to a photograph on Flickr in 2008, and a concluding chapter set in 2060 provides context for the previous six. Ward has a distinctive writing style that creates a strong atmosphere for each of the time periods, and allows her to weave in details very subtly. I’ll single out her portrayal of Gwen –  a girl in love with an artist in 1916, and who sees a rival for her affections in a visiting woman – as one of my favourite moments, but there are plenty more from which I could choose.

The chapters of Girl Reading are not linked overtly (though some of the portraits do appear in later chapters, and it can be nicely disconcerting to see the gap between what later characters think of the subjects and what we’ve seen of them previously); it’s more that there are contrasts and connections in theme and content. For example, Ward shows the variety of functions which the portraits might fulfil – an expression of a political alliance, say, or a tangible reminder of what has been lost. Similarly, literacy represents different things to different characters; the act of creating each portrait has varying significance; and so on. Girl Reading is an intricate tapestry of a book, and one that leaves me with little notion of what Katie Ward may write next, though I do know that I’ll want to read it.

Katie Ward’s website; East Anglian Daily Times interview.

Cornelius Medvei, Caroline: a Mystery (2011)

A journalist is contacted by an old school friend named Shaw, who wants to tell the story of Caroline. This Caroline is the donkey Shaw’s father first encountered on a family holiday and who soon filled a void in his life that he didn’t know existed. The father became devoted to Caroline: took her home, looked after her, taught her to play chess (she turned out to be rather good at it). It was a wonderful period in his life; but, of course, there was always the danger that it wouldn’t last.

Cornelius Medvei’s second novel has a folktale quality about its telling; the city in which it’s set is never named (neither, for that matter, are most of the characters), and there’s a timelessness to its depiction (it’s probably set in the 1980s or thereabouts, but there are few specific details). Nobody bats an eyelid at the outlandish events that take place, which is just as it should be; the novel depends on our ability to take its absurd premise seriously, and it is imagined so solidly that we do.

But where Shaw’s narration pushes the tale one step out of reality, the journalist’s voice which frames the account brings it back in. There’s not much of that voice, but it is subtly different enough to provide a real jolt when we step from one to the other and begin to doubt what we have read. Caroline the donkey may fruitfully be interpreted as a metaphor for an all-consuming interest, under which light Medvei observantly illuminates his protagonist’s situation.

Then again, Caroline may just be a donkey; as the journalist concedes, ‘in this city, private and public life, the ordinary and the fantastic, are mingled everywhere you look.’ Strange things happen, so why not this? In Caroline, Medvei leaves the question open in a small but finely wrought – and very enjoyable – read.

This review first appeared on Fiction Uncovered.

Cornelius Medvei’s top 10 talking animals in literature (Guardian).

April wrap-up

1st May 2011 / / 0 Comments

Time for a round-up of what was happening on this blog in April.

Book of the Month

I meant to read it last year, but never got around to it; and I should have done, because it’s excellent. Mike Thomas’s debut novel Pocket Notebook is a brilliant study of a policeman’s life spinning out of control, and a superb piece of writing. I can’t wait to see what Thomas comes up with next; I’ll be following his writing career with great interest.

Reviews

Features

Philip Palmer, Version 43 (2010)

23rd April 2011 / / 2 Comments

Version 43 is a novel of vast, widescreen scope. It is constantly pulling back its focus to reveal a wider stage for its action. It is also full of incident and rarely pauses for breath. And yet… it seems rather less engaging than one might anticipate.

Philip Palmer’s third novel takes us to the planet Belladonna, and more specifically to Bompasso, more commonly known as Lawless City, thanks to its being run by criminal gangs. The only way to reach this world is via quantum teleportation, a process with only a 50% chance of survival; the scrambled bodies of five medics would seem to suggest that, somehow, the technology is now being used as a weapon. Sent to investigate this is our narrator, a Galactic Cop, once human, now a cyborg in his 43rd iteration; he is immensely powerful and unwavering in the pursuit of his mission – which turns out to have a much larger context than he first thought.

Alongside the main narrative, we follow the Hive-Rats, a species bent on conquest, controlled by a hive-mind of the species they have absorbed, and able to alter the flow of time (and hence to subjectively speed up their evolution in response to any obstacle). Eventually, the two story-strands intersect, giving the Cop even more to contend with.

An ever-expanding canvas like this would seem to lend itself naturally to an exciting sf adventure story but, in this case, I find that the combination of the plot’s great scope and the Cop’s detached viewpoint instead distances one from the action. It becomes difficult to care about what’s happening, partly because individual dramas get lost in the throng and partly because the Cop doesn’t care – his directive is all and it doesn’t matter who gets hurt or killed along the way; there are a few moments of introspection where the Cop starts to wonder about the ethics of what he is doing but they don’t change the overall affect of the story.

Even on a scene-by-scene basis, the action is not particularly involving. It feels like watching one video-game fight sequence after another, without the immersion; this impression is reinforced by the episodic structure of Version 43, which sees the Cop repeatedly destroyed then regenerated as a new version; as he remarks towards the end: “They could keep killing me; I would keep being reborn; it would be a long slow game of attrition.” Quite so – and that, I think, is part of the problem.

There’s a certain amount of interest generated by the sheer amount of plot, as one wonders just how Palmer is going to resolve everything. And the squabbling between the Minds of the Hive-Rats is quite entertaining. Overall, however, Version 43 is not a great read.

This review first appeared in Vector 266, Spring 2011.

March wrap-up

31st March 2011 / / 0 Comments

March felt like a month that was relatively light on reading, though I must admit I haven’t counted up to confirm this. There was still a fair amount of stuff on the blog, though, as I shall now list.

Book of the Month

The best book I read in March came from the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist. Generosity by Richard Powers is a fascinating story about stories and science and being caught up in change. It’s in my top two contenders for the Clarke, with only one book on the list left to read.

Reviews

No book notes this month, but quite a few full-length reviews:

… and I finally completed Volume I of The Oxford Library of Classic English Short Stories.

Features

February wrap-up

1st March 2011 / / 0 Comments

A new month begins, so here’s a look back at what appeared on this blog during the last one.

Book of the Month

I should read non-fiction more often, and I’d love it to all be as good as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot’s wide-ranging account of how one woman’s cancer cells became, unbeknownst to her family, a key tool in modern medical science. It was the best book I read in February.

Reviews

Full-length reviews:

Shorter write-ups:

… and my blogging of Volume I of The Oxford Library of Classic English Short Stories continued.

Features

127 Hours

9th January 2011 / / 1 Comment

127 Hours is a film about Aron Ralston, a climber who became trapped in a canyon for several days, his only course being to cut off his forearm. It’s the second Danny Boyle film I’ve seen (after Slumdog Millionaire), and once again I’m very impressed, though the two movies are very different.

When we first see Aron (played brilliantly by James Franco), he’s leaving home for an expedition, with no care to answer his family’s phone messages, or even to turn off the dripping tap he used to fill his canteen. Aron travels to Utah, and begins hiking; presently, he meets two lost female hikers, and guides them to the pool for which they’re searching. The Aron we meet in these first fifteen minutes is cocky, self-assured, slightly insufferable… yet still ultimately likeable, because he is so clearly in his element out here in the wilderness.

Things change, though, when Aron travels through a particularly narrow part of Blue John Canyon and dislodges a boulder, which falls and wedges his arm against the canyon wall. He can’t move the rock or his arm, no one can hear him shout – so there he stays for most of the rest of the film.

This could, of course, have been a recipe for a very monotonous movie, but Boyle and Franco extract a remarkable amount of variety from the situation. Franco shows many sides to Aron’s character, as he shuttles back and forth between practicality, despair and delirium. On the directorial side, there’s some clever intercutting that gradually blurs the line between reality and hallucination, as Aron thinks about his past and the outside world. There’s also a strong sense of claustrophobia in the filming. The scene in which Aron cuts through his arm is, as one might expect, bloody and hard to watch, but filmed in a similar way to the rest of the movie, as though to emphasise that the quality of this experience is not that different from any of the others Aron has gone through whilst trapped.

One of the other things that struck me about 127 Hours was its great use of music, as when Aron’s (ultimately futile) attempt after a couple of days to rig up a pulley is counterpointed by Bill Withers’ ‘Lovely Day’ on the soundtrack. Then there’s the ending, when Aron has made it out of the canyon and finds help; this entire segment is accompanied by the music of Sigur Rós, the default soundtrack, it seems, to big/epic/uplifting visuals these days. But whilst the music feels triumphant, what’s on screen doesn’t quite feel unambiguously so, because Aron is still desperate for water and hardly out of danger yet. Yes, there is some sense of triumph over the odds, and why not, because Aron is lucky to be alive after what he went through. But the main feeling I get from the ending is of life going on; which, I suppose, is what it does, following even the most extreme circumstances.

Archives

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

© 2025 David's Book World

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑