Tag: Reviews

Rebecca Hunt, Mr Chartwell (2010)

21st October 2010 / / 5 Comments

Winston Churchill famously described his depression as a “Black Dog”; the premise of Rebecca Hunt’s first novel is that there really was a black dog – Black Pat Chartwell, a six-foot-seven talking dog who walks on his hind legs. The events of Mr Chartwell take place in July 1964, in the week running up to Churchill’s retirement from Westminster (and scant months before his death). Black Pat becomes a lodger in the home of Esther Hammerhans, a clerk in the House of Commons library. Just as Churchill is steeling himself for the end of his parliamentary career, so Esther is watching the calendar with trepidation; the two will come together by novel’s end, and the shadowy figure of Black Pat will never be far away.

Reading Mr Chartwell, there’s no doubt that we’re in the hands of a singular new talent. Hunt has an ear for a striking image (e.g. “Terrified, she spoke with all the pepper of lettuce,” [p. 9]); sometimes (as with the example I’ve just given), I was left unsure just how well the imagery actually worked – but, at its best, it’s very good indeed; and I’d much rather have a distinctive authorial voice that takes a few risks than a generic one that plays it safe.

Literalising Churchill’s metaphor of depression, as Hunt does (and it’s no secret: Black Pat declares his identity on page 38), is an interesting move, because it allows the author to demonstrate in a very concrete way how depression encroaches on the protagonists’ lives. Both Churchill and Esther are shown to be putting up a shield to the outside world – he, his bons mots; she, a nondescript appearance and manner. We see how Black Pat inveigles his way beneath both characters’ façades, at the same time as his physical presence intensifies (for example, the increasing amounts of hair and mess he leaves around Esther’s house represent Black Pat’s growing closer to her).

However, I came away from Mr Chartwell feeling that it hadn’t quite achieved what it seemed to be aiming for. Black Pat never seemed to be quite a sinister enough presence, nor his gaining of influence over Esther delineated quite clearly enough, for the novel to be fully effective. But it’s an interesting read for all that, and it places Hunt squarely on my list of writers to watch.

Elsewhere
Telegraph interview with Rebecca Hunt
Some other reviews of Mr Chartwell: A Rose Beyond the Thames; Between the Pages; Pages of Hackney.

Douglas Thompson, Ultrameta (2009)

30th July 2010 / / 3 Comments

If you thought Cloud Atlas was a little too conventional, Ultrameta may be the book for you. Trying to interpret (let alone synopsise) Douglas Thompson’s extraordinary first novel is probably a fool’s errand, but let’s see what happens anyway. Subtitled “A Fractal Novel”, Ultrameta is constructed as a series of linked short stories and story-fragments, but exactly how they’re linked is open to debate.

Ultrameta centres on Alexander Stark, a university professor who disappeared, and then apparently began sending letters to his wife Charlotte – letters written not as by him, but as by a series of different characters, some describing events thatcross over into the surreal. Later, Stark reappeared, with no memory of what had happened, but took his own life – and more notes were found on his body. Subsequent investigations undertaken by a journalist named Martha Lucy, and DI Walter Dundas of Strathclyde Police establish that many of the people named as the “writers” of Stark’s letters actually existed. Is Stark deluded. Might it be that Stark was all of these people? Could there really be such a place as Ultrameta, the “city of the soul” to which Stark refers, that constantly refashions itself? Or is Stark just deluded?

The novel Ultrameta is presented as the collected notes of Alexander Stark, bookended by correspondence between Martha Lucy and Charlotte Stark, and introduced by Walter Dundas. But Stark’s notes link together in an unusual way: the first fragment ends with the narrator listening to a radio play whose words begin the second chapter, narrated by a ten-year-old Stark in the library of his house; that chapter ends with the boy reading a manuscript which begins with opening words of the third chapter, and so on. The twenty-five chapters are arranged in twelve pairs, running from 1a to 12a, and then from 12b back to 1b, on either side of the central chapter 13 (also called ‘Ultrameta’. In effect, the novel is a journey through a series of nesting shells, and back out again.

A complicated structure, then, but what does it do? To my mind, it sets up two contrasting views of what Ultrameta is: on the one hand, a linear narrative; on the other, a set of smaller narratives. The first view, perhaps, invites an interpretation of continuity (i.e. the narrator is genuinely the same person throughout, taking on different personas); the second, an interpretation of separateness (i.e. these are all different people, and Stark is deluded). But no single interpretation quite fits.

Identities and realities are constantly shifting in Ultrameta. Multiple characters return home with amnesia and start reading through their mysterious notes. The letter from Charlotte to Martha placed at the end of the book is a world away from the one at the beginning to which it’s replying. Even the novel’s structure cannot be relied upon to stay the same: the chapters don’t all flow neatly into the next; and the second chapter in a pair isn’t always a direct continuation of the first. There probably isn’t a definitive interpretation of what’s going on in Ultrameta, but that hardly matters when the ride is so intriguing.

And, though Thompson’s prose can be overly dense at time, there are some very fine moments to be found within the pages of Ultrameta – to name two, I was struck by the chapter that brings Icarus into the present day (rendering modern technology strange by having someone from the past describe it isn’t a new idea, of course, but Thompson does it very strikingly); and the eerie section in which the narrator makes an organism out of his house, with himself at its centre. But it’s the entirety of Ultrameta that impresses the most; there’s nothing else quite like it, I’m sure.

Elsewhere
Douglas Thompson’s website
Eibonvale Press

A.C. Tillyer, An A-Z of Possible Worlds (2009)

9th July 2010 / / 11 Comments

Now here’s a book which has clearly been made with great care and attention by its publishers (Roast Books of London): An A-Z of Possible Worlds is presented as a box of twenty-six individually-stapled booklets, one for each letter of the alphabet, each containing its own story. Happily, the tales themselves more than live up to the presentation.

Anne Tillyer has written a set of stories which each concern a place that doesn’t exist. Generally speaking, they stand alone: there are several scattered cross-references and commonalities, but the unity of the collection emerges not from them, but from Tillyer’s style, which I’d broadly characterise, rather unhelpfully, as a ‘storytelling’ style – that is, she captures something of the timeless quality, the flowing rhythms, of folktales. This can lend itself to imagery, such as the following evocation of place:

The central boglands are both the beginning and the end of the world; the place where everything comes to nothing and nothing ever changes. Nature lies in a coma, time has given up trying to pass and the only things that move are the flies and the fog and the driving rain. Here, the natural cycles of birth and decay have unravelled and run in a straight line. Even the rain that falls on the bog is never released into rivers or the roots of trees but seeps from puddle to mud and stagnates there forever. It is the stasis that all life must overcome and to which all life will return. Evolution never made it past first post… (‘The Bog’, p. 1)

This is a long beginning that repeats its point, but I think that very technique works well here: an accretion of detail, like layers of sediment,  that brings home the stifling atmosphere of the bog. (The description continues as Tillyer moves into the story proper, with similarly atmospheric results.)

It’s not all about the imagery, though. There are stories here with fascinating ideas, such as ‘The Labyrinth’, with its people whose ancestors made home on an island generations ago, and who now have no sense of time; reading about their actions is unsettling, but also fires the imagination. There are also tales of the absurd, like ‘The Job Centre’, in which a country’s leader declares that there is full employment in his nation – which is news to the people queuing in the job centre at that moment. A plan must be devised to create work for these people, and the results raise a wry laugh.

As much as the stories in An A-Z of Possible Worlds stand alone, they gain considerably from being part of the whole. Not all of them completely satisfy as stories in their own right – there are some, for example, where a turn of phrase really stands out in my mind rather than the plot – but these are bolstered by other tales, which have complementary strengths. It’s the whole edifice of what Tillyer has created which impresses most, rather than individual pieces of it.

Which is not to say that there aren’t some excellent individual stories here. To pick out two: ‘The Youth Hostel’ concerns a remote hostel which is one day visited by a journalist from an interiors0 magazine, who writes a feature on the place as an example of ‘rustic charm’. The popularity of the youth hostel grows exponentially as a result, but visitors don’t necessarily get what they were expecting. This story is both neatly plotted and makes pointed commentary on attitudes to ‘tradition’.

Another story I liked in particular was ‘The Casino’, which is about a country colonised by the wealthy and turned into their own private playground, where they can enjoy the finest luxuries and the best healthcare. But this lifestyle is threatened by too many people living too long, and the proposed solution is not a pleasant one… Again, this is a nicely constructed tale (there is a certain inevitability about the plotting of both ‘The Casino’ and ‘The Youth Hostel’, but Tillyer’s craft is such that one does not feel short-changed by this), with an added vein of satire, this time on the subject of authority.

The way that Tillyer writes about places in these stories – often in the abstract, without names or many other specifics – they really do become ‘possible worlds’. They’re places that one knows don’t exist, but could, perhaps, if the world had more interstices. Imaginary as they are, though, it is fascinating to explore these worlds in this remarkable collection.

Elsewhere
Further reviews of An A-Z of Possible Worlds: The Fiction Desk, The Literateur, and Vulpes Libris
Interview at The Literateur with A.C. Tillyer, and Faye Dayan of Roast Books

Joanne Harris, ‘Wildfire in Manhattan’ (2010)

17th June 2010 / / 1 Comment

‘Wildfire in Manhattan’ is, as far as I can gather, related to Joanne Harris’s 2007 YA novel Runemarks (exactly how, I can’t say, as I’ve not read that book). Long after Ragnarök, the Norse gods remain with us, and Aspects of several currently reside in New York. Our narrator is one such, Lukas ‘Lucky’ Wilde, now a semi-retired rock musician. In this story, Lucky and Aspects of other gods are being hunted by agents of the Shadow, who seek  to destroy them.

The idea of gods from historical pantheons living in the present day is not an unfamiliar one, which means this story has to do that bit much more work for it to shine, and I’m not sure that it succeeds. It’s a jolly adventure, but the plot is not inventive enough, nor the sense of magic deep enough, to make ‘Wildfire in Manhattan’ anything more than that. Harris’s breezy first-person narration ensures a fun read, but that’s as far as this tale goes.

Rating: ***

Elsewhere
Joanne Harris’s website

Priya Basil, The Obscure Logic of the Heart (2010)

13th June 2010 / / 2 Comments

They meet at university in London: Anil Mayur is the non-religious son of a wealthy Sikh family from Kenya; his ambition is to be an architect, rather than to take over his father’s business empire. Lina Merali is the daughter of a devout Muslim family from Birmingham, and interested in humanitarian issues. Whatever their differences, these two fall in love; they try their best to keep it a secret, but that can’t last – and life gets only more difficult as the years go by.

What makes Priya Basil’s second novel so interesting is the complexity of the scenario it presents. One can imagine this kind of story being treated rather simplistically (as, for example, a tale of the heroic lovers striving to overcome all the obstacles life places in their way), but Basil doesn’t do that – all her characters face difficult questions, and there are no easy answers. Both sets of parents would disapprove of Anil’s and Lina’s relationship, but the two protagonists have difficulties of their own to work through as well – Lina remains torn between Anil on the one hand, and her family and faith on the other; whilst Anil can sometimes be as controlling as he accuses Lina’s parents of being.

The familial situations are also presented in a nuanced fashion. In the case of Lina’s parents, for example, her mother, Iman, takes the sterner view of her daughter’s relationship, but not without reason; Iman found true love and happiness through time and staying true to her values, values to which she wants Lina to live up. Shareef, Lina’s father, is in a more complicated position, because he was in a relationship (which he ended) with a non-Muslim woman before he met Iman, so he recognises the situation in which Lina finds herself, and is more inclined to tread carefully. There’s nicely rounded characterisation like this all the way through The Obscure Logic of the Heart.

Adding a further layer to the novel is the way that events in its wider world interact with and reflect the personal stories of the protagonists. Time and again, a wish to shape the world, to change it for the better, comes up against a harsh reality. Lina can quote the statistics about political corruption, but is still unprepared for an encounter with it. She gets work with the UN, but finds colleagues unable to help everyone they would like, because they simply lack the resources. In a sincere spirit of education, a tour guide in the UN building asks her party, ‘Do you know what an anti-personnel landmine is and how much one costs?’, only for a girl to reply, ‘It can cost you your life.’ (229) The problems of the world, Basil suggests, can be as intractable as those of the heart.

In all this, I haven’t mentioned that Basil’s novel is a good read purely in terms of its plot, as she manages several times to wrong-foot the reader over what will happen (or has happened). Yet there’s so much more here besides, and it all makes The Obscure Logic of the Heart very satisfying to read.

Elsewhere
Priya Basil’s website

Colin Greenland, Take Back Plenty (1990)

10th June 2010 / / 6 Comments

The novel on this year’s Clarke Award shortlist that stuck out as being most anomalous was Chris Wooding’s Retribution Falls, because it was the kind of exuberant adventure sf which tends not to do well at the Clarke. Probably the last time a book of that kind won was back in 1991, when the Clarke went to Take Back Plenty by Colin Greenland, a novel which also has a reputation as being one of the founding texts of the ‘New British Space Opera’ that’s flourished in the past two decades.

Quite a weight of expectation, then – but I’m pleased to say that, a few references to ‘tapes’ aside, Take Back Plenty holds up remarkably well today. Partly, I think, this is because the particular twist that Greenland puts on his setting hasn’t (as far as I know) been employed much since; and party it’s because of its sheer brio and sense of fun.

Take Back Plenty is set in the future of a different universe, a universe in which there really are canals on Mars and swampy jungles on Venus. Numerous alien species have made themselves known to humanity and populated the Solar System; but no one can leave, thanks to a barrier put in place by the mysterious Capellans. Greenland’s protagonist is Tabitha Jute, pilot of the Alice Liddell, who starts the novel in trouble with the authorities on Mars, and takes on a passenger because she needs the money to pay a fine. But that passenger. Marco Metz, and the other members of his entertainment troupe, may turn out to be more trouble than they’re worth.

I doubt it’s any coincidence that Greenland starts the novel during Carnival and names the ship after the girl who inspired Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, because Take Back Plenty is a parade of incident and colour. Tabitha and colleagues hurtle out of one scrape and into another, but never with a sense of being all-conquering heroes – Tabitha is very much an ordinary, fallible human being; the Alice Liddell gradually falls to bits; and her passengers hinder as much as they help. Yet the rhythm of the story is as it should be: just when you think things can’t get worse, they do; and just when you think there’s no hope, there is. Greenland walks a fine line, but I think he gets the balance just right – Take Back Plenty is self-aware enough to recognise its absurdities, yet it’s also celebratory in its sense of fun, without either being ironic about it or skimping on substance.

The novel is also wonderfully written. Tabitha has periodic conversations with her ship’s AI persona; in what I think is a rather brilliant touch, the Alice Liddell seems to communicate at times in the style of the ELIZA program. Then there’s Greenland’s superb eye for description:

Carnival in Schiaparelli. The canals are thronged with tour buses, the bridges festooned with banners. Balloons escape and fireworks fly. The city seethes in the smoky red light. Though officers of the Eladeldi can be seen patrolling everywhere, pleasure is the only master. Shall we go to the Ruby Pool? To watch the glider duels over the al-Kazara? Or to the old city, where the cavernous ancient silos throb with the latest raga, and the wine of Astarte quickens the veins of the young and beautiful? A thousand smells, of sausages and sweat, phosphorus and patchouli, mingle promiscuously in the arcades. Glasses clash and cutlery clatters in the all-night cantinas where drunken revellers confuse the robot waiters and flee along the colonnades, their bills unpaid, their breath streaming in the thin and wintry air. (6)

I love the vivid details in that passage, and the rhythm of the sentences… just great. Take Back Plenty has stood the test of time so far, and I think it will continue to do so. I’d say it’s a worthy winner of the Clarke Award, and it shows just what adventure sf can be.

Nina Allan, ‘Flying in the Face of God’ (2010)

9th May 2010 / / 3 Comments

I’ve heard great things about Nina Allan’s fiction, but (as far as I’m aware) this is the first of her stories that I’ve read — and all those great things I’ve heard were correct.

In the world of this story, a process has been developed called the ‘Kushnev drain’ which alters human physiology to allow those who undergo it to travel through space, though they are changed fundamentaly as a result. Anita Schleif is making a film about female ‘fliers’, and in particular her friend Rachel Alvin. That’s the background, but the tale is less concerned with space travel than about the difficulties of dealing with profound personal change.

Anita is very fond of Rachel, and secretly distressed at the prospect of losing her friend, even though Rachel is fulfilling her ambition; the film is at least as much an attempt by Anita to hold on to her friend as it is a product of genuine interest in the subject. Allan also sets up some neat parallels that give the story a satisfying cohesion: Rachel’s single-minded determination to become a flier is not so different from Anita’s desire to keep Rachel in her life however she can;  and the transformation through which Rachel is going is analogous to the mental decline of Anita’s grandmother — both involve the loss of a human self as conventionally understood; so Anita is effectively seeing the two most important people in her life disappear before her eyes, albeit in very different ways.

‘Flying in the Face of God’ is a superb piece of fiction, and you can be sure that I’ll be looking out for more of Nina Allan’s stories in the future.

This story appears in issue 227 of Interzone. Read all my blog posts about that issue here.

Véronique Olmi, Beside the Sea (2001/10)

4th May 2010 / / 4 Comments

This is the launch title of Peirene Press, a new publisher specialising in English translations of short European works. And what a book to begin with. Véronique Olmi’s Beside the Sea, first published in France in 2001, and now available in Adriana Hunter’s superlative translation, is the story of a single mother taking her two sons to a seaside town. But all is not as happy as it sounds. Here is how Beside the Sea begins:

We took the bus, the last bus of the evening, so no one would see us. The boys had their tea before we left, I noticed they didn’t finish the jar of jam and I thought of that jam left there for nothing, it was a shame, but I’d taught them not to waste stuff and to think of the next day. (9)

Ordinary enough details, but with dark undertones — why leave so furtively? Why dwell on the unfinished jam? Even in this first paragraph, the seeds of the ending are sown, but the power of Beside the Sea lies in how the journey unfolds. Olmi gradually reveals just how fragile is her protagonist’s psyche: the narrator is a woman ill at ease with the world, reluctant to engage with other people, simultaneously protective of her children and at times uneasy around them.

Reading this character’s story is an intense, discomforting experience; her words spill out in a torrent of clauses, pushing inexorably on to the conclusion, which has no less impact for being anticipated (and may actually have more). Beside the Sea is a superb character study that marks out Peirene Press as a publisher to follow. Recommended.

Link
Peirene Press

Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones (2009)

30th April 2010 / / 7 Comments

This is a story about growing up, but also one about stories: the stories we tell about people, and how the image held of a person in the mind’s eye may not be the truth of who they really are – or might be all the truth there is, as far as someone else is concerned.

The year is 1965; the place, Corrigan, a mining town in Western Australia. Charlie Bucktin is 13, a bookish, studious boy – which doesn’t make for an easy life amongst his peers, for whom  sporting prowess is the key measure of status. One night, there is a knock on Charlie’s bedroom window; it’s Jasper Jones, the half-Aboriginal boy  considered the town’s main troublemaker, asking for Charlie’s help.

Jasper leads Charlie to his secret clearing, where he has found the body of Laura Wishart, daughter of the shire president – hanging from the very rope Jasper uses to swing across the river, and about which nobody else is supposed to know. Jasper swears he had nothing to do with this, but is well aware that no one is likely to believe him; so he wants Charlie’s help in uncovering the truth (Jasper is convinced the culprit is Mad Jack Lionel, a bogeyman among Corrigan’s children, who lives alone in a cottage on the edge of town). So, Charlie becomes burdened with a dark secret he can’t disclose to anyone, and the problem of working out how he can talk again to Laura’s sister Eliza, on whom he has a crush.

There are two aspects of Jasper Jones that make it stand out as one of my favourite reads of the year so far. One is Craig Silvey’s skill with characterisation and dialogue. Charlie in particular leaps off the page as a character: a boy who finds that he’s suddenly lost part of his innocence about the world, and wishes desperately that he could have it back; whose frustrations that the world is unfair on other people have selfish undercurrents that Charlie might not care to acknowledge (and perhaps he doesn’t even realise they’re there);  who knows he’ll take a beating from the bullies for being too clever, but continues to provoke them anyway, because it’s the only power he has. The banter between Charlie and his best friend, Jeffrey Lu, is a delight to read; the flow of it rings absolutely true, to me – and the way Charlie gets tongue-tied when talking to Eliza Wishart is just as good.

The second aspect of Silvey’s novel that I particularly like goes back to what I said earlier about the images we have of people. Almost every character in the book has a story believed about them which is shown to be not quite the truth; even Charlie’s parents are different from the idea he had of them, so perhaps it’s no wonder that Jasper (of whom Charlie thinks he can see past the popular perception) comes to be such an anchor in his life. Over the course of the novel, we see how pernicious these myths about people can be (for example, Jeffrey may be a superb cricketer, but his Vietnamese family still face abuse), but also how they can change things for the better.

Jasper Jones is Craig Silvey’s second novel; it makes me keen to check out his first – and to recommend the present book to you.

Links
Silvey talks about the novel
Windmill Books

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