Tag: Reviews

Pam Bachorz, Candor (2009)

6th December 2010 / / 1 Comment

The Floridian model town of Candor is a picture of wholesomeness, its children impeccably behaved. It’s all thanks to Candor’s founder and mayor, Campbell Banks, and the subliminal Messages that he pumps out underneath the town’s ever-present music. Families pay a hefty fee to move to Candor, but the deal they make if life-long; once you start hearing the Messages, even a single night away from them is fatal, and anyone showing signs of deviance may be subjected to a programme of complete mental reconditioning in the ‘Listening Room’.

The only kid who knows about the Messages is the mayor’s son, Oscar who has trained himself to resist, and now maintains the pretence of being a perfect child of Candor, whilst covertly arranging escapes from the town (and supplying clients with CDs of his own counter-Messages) . At the start of the novel, Oscar meets Nia Silva, an edgy new arrival in Candor, as yet unaffected by the Messages; he soon becomes attracted to her, and it’s a race against time for him to keep her as she is – not that the attraction is entirely mutual.

I’d characterise Pam Bachorz’s debut as an interesting novel that doesn’t quite live up to its promise. On a narrative level, Candor is efficiently told, and the multiple iterations of will-they/won’t-they are very nicely handled; there’s no shortage of page-turning tension. But what I find missing is a true sense of the strangeness of this place. That narrative efficiency is perhaps a little too efficient to really build up the atmosphere; yes, I felt the chill of what it means to live in Candor at a couple of plot pivots, but it wasn’t there as a constant note in the background.

Similarly, the novel makes some examination of ethics, but it only goes so far. Campbell and Oscar Banks represent two opposing ‘ sides’, but it’s made clear that both have their rights and wrongs – yet I don’t feel the issues these raise are examined as fully as they merit. Campbell is the villain of the piece, and, though we do learn the reasons behind what has done in Candor, it never really prevents him from being unambiguously a bad guy.

This matters less, though, than the case of Oscar, where I think the novel is aiming for a more firmly ambiguous portrait, and doesn’t quite get to the heart of it. Though he is the novel’s narrator and ‘hero’, Oscar is hardly the most sympathetic character, because he is so self-serving. The question is raised of just how much better he is than his father – after all, Oscar is not above manipulating others for his personal gain, and not always with the excuse that he’s helping them escape. Yet, though the question is asked, it’s not explored in detail, and I think that Candor misses out on some depth as a result.

In sum, Candor is a fast read, and a rather engaging debut – a good way to spend a few hours – but it doesn’t truly linger.

Elsewhere
Pam Bachorz’s website

This review is posted in support of ‘women and sf’ week at Torque Control.

Green Books Campaign: Javascotia

10th November 2010 / / 0 Comments

This review is part of the Green Books campaign.Today 200 bloggers take a stand to support books printed in an eco-friendly manner by simultaneously publishing reviews of 200 books printed on recycled or FSC-certified paper. By turning a spotlight on books printed using eco-friendly paper, we hope to raise the awareness of book buyers and encourage everyone to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books.

The campaign is organized for the second time by Eco-Libris, a green company working to make reading more sustainable. We invite you to join the discussion on “green” books and support books printed in an eco-friendly manner! A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on Eco-Libris website.

The book reviewed here is printed on FSC-certified paper.

Benjamin Obler, Javascotia (2009)

It’s 1994, and Mel Podgorski – still in his early twenties, with a failed marriage behind him, and a year spent in the doldrums – gets another chance to make something of himself. He lands a job as a market researcher working on behalf of a large coffee chain, and is sent across the Atlantic to Glasgow, to scope out the competition. Whilst there, Mel finds himself falling for an art student named Nicole Marston – and gets caught up in the group of anti-motorway protestors to which she belongs.

Javascotia is one of those frustrating reads which is never quite as good as one senses it could be. Benjamin Obler has a flowing prose style, tending towards lengthy expression, but only rarely in a way that outstays its welcome. However, some aspects of Mel’s first-person narration are more problematic: for example, he’ll note the differences in language (“[…]most of the listings were bedsits – in American English, studios or efficiencies – and the section of the paper was headed adverts”, p. 39); which is fine at the beginning, to show that Mel is still finding his feet – but he’s still making such remarks towards the end of the novel, when the technique is redundant and can be pretty irritating. I’m also not sure that the novel’s structure serves it all that well – Mel’s life in the US is dealt with mainly in one long section (over a hundred pages) in the middle, which I found to really disrupt the momentum built up in the earlier part of the book.

There is an interesting theme running through Javascotia, though, which I’d characterise as exploring the gap between impression and reality. It’s there in the way that Scotland doesn’t live up to its tourist-brochure image for the American characters (Mel isn’t the only scout we meet), and the way that Glasgow’s coffee outlets aren’t as Mel imagines them to be. It’s there in the way that Mel is shown not to have known his wife (and, indeed, his parents) in the way he thought he did. And it’s there in a nicely rueful ending.

There’s an interesting story told in Javascotia, but the way it is told doesn’t quite do it justice.

Elsewhere
Ben Obler’s website
Extract and Obler’s “five favourite cups of coffee”, at Penguin Books
Obler’s top 10 fictional coffee scenes, at The Guardian

Robert Edric, Salvage (2010): Strange Horizons review

5th November 2010 / / 0 Comments

Today, I make my debut as a reviewer on Strange Horizons. SH is, in my view, pretty much the best place to go online for reviews of speculative fiction, and I am very pleased to be contributing to it.

The book I’m reviewing is Salvage by Robert Edric, a novel set one hundred years into the future, when climatic disruption has displaced many and new towns are being built to house them. Edric’s protagonist, Quinn, is an auditor sent to examine the development of one such town; what he finds is, to put it mildly, not encouraging.

But, already, I’m going over ground covered in the review itself, so I’ll stop there, and invite you to read my Strange Horizons piece by clicking this link.

Opening The Portal

31st October 2010 / / 0 Comments

This weekend saw the launch of The Portal, a new website reviewing sf, fantasy and horror short fiction –both Anglophone and non. Besides its intrinsic interest, the site is relevant to my blog because I’m one of the contributors.

My first review for The Portal is of the September issue of the webzine Ideomancer, covering stories by Catherine Krahe, Lenora Rose, and Sandra Odell. The review is here, and the issue of Ideomancer under discussion is here.

Nikesh Shukla, Coconut Unlimited (2010)

26th October 2010 / / 9 Comments

Nikesh Shukla’s first novel is the story of Amit; he and his friends Anand and Nishant are the only Asian boys at their private school in early 1990s Harrow. They find themselves struggling to be accepted anywhere: their ethnicity marks them out as different at school, and their schooling marks them out as different amongst the other Asian kids in town. The boys find refuge in a shared love of rap, and decide to start their own hip-hop band, which they name Coconut Unlimited (after Amit’s sister, Nish, calls him a coconut – ‘white on the inside, brown on the outside’ [p. 28]). They just need a bit of practice first. Okay, maybe a lot of practice…

This is such a great book, so sharply observed and amusing. At one level, Coconut Unlimited captures gloriously the awkward moments of adolescence. There’s a wonderful scene where, on a family trip to London, Amit is desperate to buy some baggy jeans, and his mum takes charge, dragging him into a streetwear shop and demanding to know where the jeans are… it makes one’s toes curl in empathy. Amit’s first kiss also runs far from smoothly: he doesn’t quite know what to do with his tongue, the experience feels quite strange… These and other moments are vivid demonstrations of the choppy waters through which the teenage Amit is voyaging.

On another level, Shukla’s novel is an acute portrait of putting on a mask in the aim of being perceived in a certain way, and finding that mask uncomfortable to wear. Unable to reconcile the two cultures he’s caught between, Amit tries to define himself by a third; he’s drawn to the glamour of hip-hop, but doesn’t embrace it wholeheartedly. Amit will put on an accent and use street slang, but wants nothing to do with real crime, and is distinctly out of his depth when dealing with local ‘badboy’ Ash (‘the closest thing to ghetto in my life’ [p. 83]). He’s keen to show off his knowledge (real or pretended) of hip-hop as a way of constructing a persona, but is wrong-footed when he meets a new Asian lad at school who seems to know more about the genre than he does. Amit will criticise his sister for the way she lives her life (‘So insular. All her friends were Gujarati. All her references were Indian’ [p. 70]), and he’ll observe that his mother’s sense of having struggled in life is crucial to her notion of self-worth (‘She thought it made her more humble, when in fact it gave her a feeling of martyrdom’ [p. 72]) – but he can’t see the parallels between those and how he’s using hip-hop culture in his life.

There’s a bittersweet note to the story, in that we know from the prologue that the band doesn’t land, and Amit ends up with a comfortable, middle-class English life. But having that knowledge in the back of one’s mind makes for an effective counterpoint to the main narrative, and the journey through the book is highly enjoyable.

Throughout Coconut Unlimited, Amit repeats that he wants his band to be pretty cool. Well, the band might be pretty cool, but the novel is way cooler than that.

Elsewhere
Nikesh Shukla’s website
Metro interview with Shukla
Some other reviews of Coconut Unlimited: Winstonsdad’s Blog; GQ.
Quartet Books

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

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