Tag: Reviews

Marcel Theroux, Far North (2009)

14th April 2010 / / 13 Comments

Marcel Theroux’s Far North is a tale of endurance and survival, though not necessarily in the way one might anticipate.

Our narrator is Makepeace Hatfield, the constable of a frontier town in Siberia, though she’s not really sure how many people there are to protect and/or fend off any more. Makepeace is the daughter of parents who, along with others from the US, settled in Siberia looking for a simpler life, environmental changes having put intolerable pressures on the life they knew. It didn’t work out, and now who knows what’s going on in the wider world? Not Makepeace, who has enough on her plate with day-to-day living. But when, one day, she sees a plane – a sure sign of other humanity – she decides to head out beyond her town to see what she can find. In due course, she is captured and taken to a prison-town, where she discovers that maybe not all of that old world has gone, or perhaps a new one may yet be forged.

Far North is striking both for what it is and is not. It is a clearly told tale (Theroux’s prose is expressive, but not densely poetic; the latter would be out of place in the harsh world of his book) of a woman who has to face up to a life and world of deep contradiction; for example, she doesn’t ‘share [her parents’] view of the merits of scarcity’ (50), yet efforts to rebuild the world bring their own difficulties.

But, even though Far North tells of an individual making her way through the wilderness, it’s not a tale of survival in a documentary sense; the landscapes and how people live are in there, but the details of those aren’t the main focus. Rather, I think Theroux is interested in depicting a more fundamental kind of endurance – the endurance of the human spirit.

Throughout the novel, one is constantly reminded that this is a story: the references to Makepeace writing her words down; the beats of the narrative (the knowledge that Makepeace is a woman comes twenty pages in, in a way that could wrong-foot the unwary reader). And, if we take the view that stories are a way in which humans make sense of the world, then we can say that a story is being enacted even in this harsh setting, which would seem to have no room for stories. Yet the story goes on, and so does humanity.

What I take away most from Far North is a sense of the enormous pressures (and I’m talking about psychic pressures here as much as physical ones) under which Theroux’s characters have been placed, and the price they’ve had to pay within themselves in order to survive. The novel’s title refers to a moral compass as well as a geographical one, and the idea that, if you travel far enough north, all directions start to lose meaning. Both Makepeace and other characters have done (and do) morally reprehensible things; but right and wrong become malleable concepts in the reality of this book, and that’s what Theroux captures so well.

Far North announces itself quietly, and never raises its voice – but its echoes remain after the book is closed. Like humankind in the tale, it endures.

Links
Marcel Theroux’s website
Theroux writes about the novel

This book has been nominated for the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Read all my posts on the Award here.

Alastair Reynolds, Terminal World (2010)

30th March 2010 / / 1 Comment

It’s more-or-less exactly a year since I read an Alastair Reynolds novel for the first time, and now here I am, looking at his latest book. Once again, I had a great time reading him – though I can’t shake the feeling I like the idea of Terminal World (and here I’m referring to the underlying structure of the story, rather than the novel’s setting, which is a fine creation) more than I like how that idea plays out in actuality.

At some point in the future, after even the word ‘science’ has been forgotten by many, there is Spearpoint, a giant vertical city divided into ‘zones’, each of which, by some quirk of reality, has a limit to the technology that will function within its boundaries; the further up you go, the more advanced is the technology that becomes feasible. Passing through a zone boundary places great strain on a human body, and ‘antizonal’ drugs are needed for survival (though they’re not a panacea; they just mean you don’t die as quickly).

In the zone of Neon Heights (whose level of technology is equivalent to that of a couple of decades or so before our time), an angel (highly advanced human, that is) falls from the levels above, and is taken to the district pathologist, Quillon. This apparent accident has been engineered just to get a message to Quillon; the pathologist is himself an angel, who was modified to see if the human zones could be infiltrated – and now the angels are coming after him.

In short order, Quillon is given a female bodyguard/courier, Meroka; covertly escorted from Spearpoint; and sets off across the lawless face of Earth to the safety of another human settlement. Capture, intrigue, rescue and discovery all ensue.

The thing that struck me first of all about Terminal World was that Reynolds is a great writer of pace; especially at the beginning, he keeps the plot moving with merciless efficiency. Unfortunately, the pace flags a bit towards the middle, though it does crank up again towards the end. I also found the characterisation rather sketchy (Meroka, for example, never seemed to me to become much more than a ‘tough female bodyguard’, and Quillon felt too much like someone the story happens to, rather than a fully rounded character).

But… Reynolds does something particularly interesting in this novel, which is to take a world with a puzzle at its centre (i.e. what happened to create the zones?) and make that puzzle a tangent to the main story. In other words, this isn’t a straightforward tale of Uncovering the Secret of the World – but, you know, that’s not to say it doesn’t happen… As I said at the beginning, I like the idea of this technique, but I’m not sure how well the mix actually works; in a way, it seems to work against the forward momentum of the story. Still, despite these reservations, I enjoyed Terminal World; it’s a good read.

Link
Alastair Reynolds’s website

TV Book Club: The Silver Linings Play Book

28th March 2010 / / 2 Comments

So, that was the first series of The TV Book Club, and it has been rather a mixed bag. The series was notable, partly for being a programme about books (of which there are very few on British television), but also for being a continuation of the highly influential Richard & Judy Book Club. Although it improved as it went along (certainly compared to the first episode, which, let’s be honest, was a mess), I don’t think the show ever quite lived up to what it could have been.

The format stayed essentially the same throughout the series: a short interview with the guest celebrity panellist; a filmed ‘non-fiction’ item; an interview with the author of a title chosen in previous years, examining what has happened to them since; and discussion of the week’s choice, after a short filmed interview with the writer. All these elements have had their ups and downs: the panellist interviews were better when the guest was talking about the books they liked, rather than their own book, or something else entirely (a more diverse range of guests would also have been welcome). The ‘book club stories’ always struck me as rather too much like trumpet-blowing (though some of the authors’ comments were interesting), and the non-fiction items were often just too frivolous for their own good.

The discussion of the weekly choice is the centrepiece of the programme, yet even this has been variable – indeed, for the first week or so, it seemed almost an afterthought to the interview with the guest panellist. Some, however, have been rather good (taking into account that there’s obviously a limit to what can be covered in eight or ten minutes): for example, I thought this week’s discussion of The Silver Linings Play Book was quite robust, with some lively debate.

But I think the greatest weakness of The TV Book Club – something which was carried through to the very end – is an apparent reluctance to engage seriously with its material. Whether it was generally superficial discussion, or a tendency to undercut serious points with a quip, it seemed to me that the show was uncomfortable with saying substantial things about books. And it needn’t be – discussion can be intelligent without being forbidding or abstruse, and, in my view, book programmes should assume that’s what their audience wants. The TV Book Club was at its best when it was making substantial points.

I like the idea of a reader-focused book programme, but, for all its improvements, The TV Book Club still has some way to go. I hope its creases can be ironed out in time for its return in the summer.

Matthew Quick, The Silver Linings Play Book (2008)

24th March 2010 / / 1 Comment

Matthew Quick’s The Silver Linings Play Book is the final choice for the current series of The TV Book Club. The last time I opted to read one of their choices, I made a good call, with Liz Jensen’s excellent The Rapture; this time, however, it wasn’t such a good call.

We meet Pat Peoples just as he’s about to be released from a psychiatric unit (the ‘bad place’, as he calls it) to move back in with his family. Pat believes his life is a movie directed by God, and that every cloud must have its silver lining. He’s lost track of time in the hospital, and can’t even remember why he was admitted – but Pat looks forward to the end of ‘apart time’, when he’ll finally be able to go back to his wife, Nikki. In the meantime, Pat finds himself gaining the attention of Tiffany, a friend’s sister; he tries to ward her off, but perhaps he should be doing the opposite.

Don’t get me wrong: when The Silver Linings Play Book is at its best, it’s very good – but there’s something that stopped me getting along with it fully, and it took me a while to put my finger on exactly what that something was. It’s partly the somewhat-naive tone Quick uses for Pat’s narrative voice, which does create his character well – and is particularly effective when the calmness of that tone acts as a counterpoint (almost a mask) to Pat’s periodic outbursts, reminding us that he’s still in a fragile state – but gets annoying after a while. It’s also that the novel seems content to amble along for about half its length before really getting going. Most of all, perhaps, it’s that I just didn’t find the book as touching as it tries to be.

So, The Silver Linings Play Book is okay, and rather better than okay in places, but, overall, I found it unsatisfying.

Link
Matthew Quick’s website

Suzanne Bugler, This Perfect World (2010)

14th March 2010 / / 1 Comment

At the age of thirty-six, Laura Hamley lives the life of a stereotypical ‘yummy mummy’ — married to a successful lawyer, attractive children, yoga classes, paninis and air-kissing and dinner parties with friends. She has attained an aspirational dream of the times, but a phone call threatens to dredge up her past. The caller is Violet Partridge, whose daughter, Heddy, went to school with Laura. Heddy has been placed in a psychiatric institution, and Violet wants to get her released; perhaps Laura, being married to a lawyer, could help? There’s a very good reason, however, why Laura doesn’t want to get involved: she hated — and bullied — Heddy at school; but, try as she might, Laura can’t seem to extricate herself from the situation.

This Perfect World (Suzanne Bugler’s first adult novel, following two YA books) is a sharp character study. Bugler paints Laura as someone who’s only too aware of the artificiality of the world in which she lives (‘Do any of [her friends] have a skeleton rattling around in their cupboard? […] We meet, we chat, we think that we are the dearest of friends, but we all keep our cupboard doors firmly shut’ [41]), but clings on to it regardless, for fear of where she might be otherwise — the world she came from, as exemplified by Heddy and Violet Partridge.

I think Bugler spells out Laura’s view of her current life rather too much — it becomes clear enough in quite subtle ways, and we don’t really need (for example) Laura to reflect ruefully on her vow never to become like The Stepford Wives, because we’ve already understood the point. This is a collective problem, however; individually, Bugler’s observations are incisive and striking.

The author also establishes some effective parallels within her narrative. As far as Laura is concerned, Heddy Partridge is a blank screen on which to project her memories; she remembers what she did to her, but has never thought about Heddy as a person in her own right — what matters is that Heddy was, and is, the polar opposite of Laura. So, when Laura learns from Violet that Heddy has been cutting herself — like Laura did as a girl (because that’s what her friends did) — she has to consider the uncomfortable possibility that she’s closer to Heddy than she thought.

Bugler also skilfully portrays Laura’s adult social world — with its social conventions, and boundaries of speech and action that you don’t cross — as being every bit as mired in politics and snap judgements as was the playground. Laura’s discontent with her life bubbles under throughout, eventually bubbling over — and the result is a fine novel that stays in the mind afterwards.

Alex Preston, This Bleeding City (2010)

4th March 2010 / / 1 Comment

This Bleeding City is one of those novels with which you can tell roughly where it’s heading more or less from the outset – not because of any clumsiness on the author’s part, but because the story is so archetypal: young man goes off to seek his fortune, and discovers that what he thought he wanted wasn’t necessarily so great after all. The context for this particular telling of that story is the City of London (where Alex Preston himself works) in the run-up to the recent financial crisis.

To fill in more specifics: whilst at university, Charlie Wales’s ambition is to work in the City; to truly become part of the smart set in whose circles he moves; to meet the expectations of Vero, the beautiful French girl whom he loves. On graduating, Charlie moves to London with Vero and another university friend, Henry; and eventually finds work at a hedge fund. But Charlie struggles with the demands of the job… and you may be able to guess much of the rest (though probably not all of it; the story isn’t quite as straight forward as you might anticipate).

When you know the broad trajectory of a novel – and the prologue of This Bleeding City shows explicitly that tragedy is on the horizon, so there’s no getting away from that knowledge – the telling has to carry even more of the weight; Preston does a pretty good job here, on the whole. Having said that, some aspects of his style can be difficult to warm to; for example, his dialogue can sound too much like speechifying:

‘[…]I’m sorry that I’m not planning a play for the Festival or writing reviews for a highbrow theatrical website, but we all made those choices, and it’s trite but true that it was a long chain of little decisions, a series of mistakes and ill-chosen priorities and… and we ended up here. We had so many ideals, so many dreams, and we ended up settling for money.’ (32)

I’m not generally keen on dialogue that draws attention to itself, as this does. But there is a way in which it works quite well, because it foregrounds the fictionality, emphasising that there’s a greater story behind the specific one being told here. And there’s narrative power in Preston’s writing nonetheless; it’s not so much that particular images or sentences stand out (though there is a description of a sunset which is striking, albeit less because of the words on the page than the way Preston depicts it as a rare moment in which the workers of the City can unite in taking their minds off their jobs), but that the text as a whole has the pull of good storytelling.

The main weakness of This Bleeding City, I’d say, is that the characterisation of Charlie doesn’t quite come together.  He seems to me a very self-aware sort, who sees shortcomings in his chosen career path even early on (as an example, consider the passage of dialogue I quoted earlier, which is spoken by Charlie to Vero); he doesn’t strike me as the type who would carry on doing something for so long when he knew in his heart that it wasn’t right for him (or, if he is that type, it doesn’t come across strongly enough in the novel). And, since Charlie’s character is the fulcrum of the book, this can’t help but dent its success to an extent

So, This Bleeding City has its flaws – but it’s still a good read for all that, and one I’d recommend. I’ll be interested to see where Alex Preston goes next with his writing.

Links
Alex Preston’s website
Preston talks about the novel

TV Book Club: The Rapture

21st February 2010 / / 0 Comments

This week’s TV Book Club was about The Rapture by Liz Jensen, which I reviewed last week (click here to see what I thought). The series got off to a shaky start, but has been improving week on week; so I was keen to see how it would go this time. In the end, it was better than some weeks, but not great.

One again, the panel was a member down, with Gok Wan away; once again, the format worked better with fewer people. This week’s guest celebrity was Martine McCutcheon; the interview with her contained the show’s first misstep. In previous weeks, this segment has been much better when the guest was interviewed about the books they like to read, rather than about their own book. The first question was about the former subject, but the conversation soon turned to the writing of McCutcheon’s novel — and the end result was indeed poorer than the interviews in the last few episodes.

I’ve always found the vox-pop non-fiction items unsatisfactory, but I think this week’s was the worst so far. It was about a book on regional dialects, called How to Talk Like a Local, by the Countdown lexicographer Susie Dent. This could have been such ain interesting item, particularly if the author had contributed — but, no. What we got instead was a comedian named Alun Cochrane travelling back and forth between the West and East Midlands, trying to find the point at which the local word for a bread roll changes from ‘batch’ to ‘cob’. That was it: no exploration of where those words come from, or how such differences arise — nothing. One could be forgiven for watching that item and not being able to name the book connected to it. Very disappointing.

After a weak first half, then, we headed out of the commercial break, and into the usual short filmed interview with an author who’d been chosen for the Book Club in previous years (this week it was David Mitchell, of Cloud Atlas fame — another book I should probably read, but haven’t). Then it was time to turn to The Rapture — and it wasn’t a bad discussion, actually. The panel had a lot to say about the novel (which they all liked); it was perhaps always going to be an impossible task to really get under the skin of the book in the time available, when it can be approached from so many angles — but the conversation brought across just how much there is in The Rapture. And McCutcheon, while not as insightful as some of the previous guests in the series, made a worthwhile contribution nevertheless.

Not one of the better TV Book Club episodes, I’d say, let down in particular by a poor first half — but quite a good discussion of the featured title, which is of course where it counts the most.

Liz Jensen, The Rapture (2009)

17th February 2010 / / 9 Comments

I read The Rapture in advance of this week’s TV Book Club; I had no particular expectations of it – and it turned out to be the best book I’ve read so far this year. Certainly, if I’d read it last year, it would have been on my list of favourites for 2009.

A few years in the future, the climate has changed for the worse, and the summer heat is unbearable; religious groups have sprung up, proclaiming that the end times are near. In a town on the south coast of England, psychotherapist Gabrielle Fox is treating Bethany Krall, the teenage daughter of a preacher. Bethany savagely murdered her own mother, and is now being held in a secure institution. She’s a difficult patient – Gabrielle being only the latest in a string of therapists who have tried to understand the girl – but it’s in Gabrielle’s interests to succeed in treating Bethany. A car accident left Gabrielle paralysed from the waist down; Bethany is her chance to prove that she’s still up to the job. What’s particularly unusual about Bethany is that she is apparently able to foresee natural disasters – and she has predicted that the end of the world will come in a matter of months.

The Rapture is narrated by Gabrielle in the first person; her voice is descriptive, measured, and rather cold – for example, she describes her father’s demise from Alzheimer’s in terms that betray no feeling of sadness or loss. She is not a protagonist one can warm to easily, yet Jensen makes her a compelling presence for all that. Gabrielle’s sparring with Bethany is fascinating to read; despite the girl’s violent tendencies and physical superiority over Gabrielle, one senses that Bethany’s greatest weapon is her articulacy. Gabrielle’s profession requires her to be alert to the nuances of language, but now she’s up against someone who knows how to play that game, knows what buttons to push. That’s why Gabrielle feels threatened by Bethany – because the girl can attack her in an aspect of life where she still felt secure.

Jensen’s keen observations don’t stop at the relationship between these two characters. Convinced that she’s never going to be in a relationship again, Gabrielle is unprepared for when she meets Frazer Melville, a physicist who falls for her. We see the complex tangle of emotions that Gabrielle is feeling when Frazer first acts romantically towards her: ‘I can’t handle it. It will kill me. It will kill my belief that I am no longer a woman. No, worse, it will revive the hope that I am, and then all that can happen is that it will be shredded. [p. 112]’ Even such a positive development is not without its dangers to Gabrielle’s sense of self.

Nor is Jensen’s acuity limited to relationships. When Gabrielle and Frazer discover that Bethany’s prediction of an earthquake was accurate, they have a crisis of conscience – having withheld their knowledge that this disaster would occur, doesn’t that make them complicit in the resulting deaths? But, if they had alerted someone, who’d have believed them? It’s not just that Jensen is examining here the issue of responsibility when one has privileged knowledge; there’s a sense of deep uncertainty over how to handle new kinds of knowledge – Gabrielle and Frazer now know things that others will find impossible to believe; they don’t know the right thing to do because there is, by definition, no precedent on which to draw.

So, I like very much the way that Jensen observes people in her novel; one of the most impressive things about The Rapture is the way that she highlights the personal, human responses against the background of grand catastrophe. What’s also impressive is that the novel works from so many directions, even when they might seem to be contradictory. As I’ve already described, it works well as a character study; in the second half, when the time comes for The Rapture to be a disaster thriller, it doesn’t disappoint there, either. Jensen ramps up the pace, and provides the necessary spectacle and borderline (im)plausibility, leading to an entirely apposite conclusion.

If there’s a weakness here, it’s exactly that – that the text sets itself free of plausibility in the name of storytelling. But that’s the nature of Jensen’s story: it’s what the novel needs at that point, and it’s done with enormous panache. The Rapture is a novel that appeals to the head and the heart, and doesn’t skimp on either. As I said at the start, it’s my favourite read of the year to date.

Further links
Liz Jensen’s website

Girl in a Thunderbolt – Songs for Modern Lovers EP: Culture Revival review

11th February 2010 / / 0 Comments

Chances are, you won’t have heard of Girl in a Thunderbolt (Norwich singer-songwriter Maria Uzor); neither had I until I was sent her EP to review for Culture Revival — and what a discovery. Songs for Modern Lovers is a set of four dark, folk-ish tracks to which no simple categorisation can do justice. I loved it.

Read the review in full.

Video: ‘Run Away’ (NB. Not on this EP)

Robert Jackson Bennett, Mr Shivers (2010): The Zone review

26th January 2010 / / 2 Comments

Now, here’s a book where I’d urge you to look beyond the synopsis – not because it doesn’t necessarily sound like much, but because no plot synopsis can capture what’s great about Robert Jackson Bennett’s Mr Shivers (the subject of my latest review for The Zone). It’s a novel about a man trekking across the 1930s USA in search of the mysterious scarred man who killed his daughter. This would in itself be an interesting twist on the usual fantasy quest, but the subtext turns the novel into something greater. If you’re at all interested in fantastic literature, Mr Shivers should be on your reading list.

Read my review in full at The Zone.

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