Tag: science fiction

Richard Powers, Generosity (2009)

18th March 2011 / / 4 Comments

Russell Stone is a washed-up writer making ends meet by teaching a ‘Journal and Journey’ class to a group of art students at a Chicago college. One member of that group stands out because of her remarkable personality: Thassadit Amzwar is a young woman from Algeria who is apparently happy all the time; nothing seems to bother her, and people are naturally attracted to her sunny disposition. Even after everything she has experienced in her life, Thassa remains in perpetual good humour; Russell speaks to Candace Weld, one of the college’s counsellors, who can only conclude that nothing is wrong, and Thassa is just a naturally happy person. At the same time, we read about Thomas Kurton, a biotechnologist with an evangelical zeal for his work in the field of genetics. Kurton’s current project is to isolate the genetic basis for happiness; when he hears about Thassa, he invites her to participate in his study – and soon she becomes public knowledge.

Generosity has a number of concerns, but the one that’s most prominent to me is stories. The novel is full of then: the creative nonfiction taught by Russell makes a story out of one’s life; media reporting makes a story out of science; science itself makes a story out of the stuff of the universe. The characters are presented to us through filters of story: we first encounter Thomas Kurton as a talking head in a science documentary; and there are frequent asides from the narrator (whose identity is unclear; it may be Richard Powers himself, or perhaps Russell Stone, or the science broadcaster Tonia Schiff, or someone else entirely) which emphasise the fictional nature of what we’re reading. The effect of this is to suggest that reality is mutable: our conceptions of the world change with the telling, and there is no escaping the web of story, however much we might think otherwise (some of the most effective passages in the book show this in action, describing the spread of information in an age when the boundary between public and private has all but dissolved).

This leads into another of Generosity’s main themes, which has to do with the ethics of science and its reporting. Powers is more concerned with dramatising questions than providing answers, and paints a complex picture: is it unethical for Thassa to profit from her genes, if it means that she can improve her family’s lot to a degree that would otherwise be impossible? When Kurton makes a song and dance in the media over his company’s research, is he feeding the flames of hype, or just doing what he has to do to get noticed in that day and age? Such issues never quite lose their shades of grey in the book, as characters are shown to both benefit and lose out from the choices they make.

I’ve been thinking about the characterisation in Generosity for some time, particularly that of Thassa. For one so charismatic with by definition an extraordinary personality, she comes across on the page as remarkably unremarkable – I never felt Thassa’s charisma when reading about her. At first, I considered this a problem, because generally I want to experience characters’ traits, rather than just read about them. But now I tend to think it’s a way of showing how this aspect of her character can be a space that other people fill in their own way; there’s a striking scene where Thassa makes an impassioned speech that spreads all over the internet, but we witness its detail only through the online reactions and imitations. Of the other characters, I found the depiction of Russell Stone particularly vivid; in some ways, he is the opposite of Thassa – where her personality faces naturally outwards, his turns inwards (when we first meet him on the train to work, Russell is described as being ‘dressed for being overlooked’). Over the course of the novel, Powers traces the (fairly complex) development of Russell’s character, as he becomes less withdrawn, but without shaking off his doubts.

Generosity leaves one with much to think about in a variety of areas, from ethical issues in science to the effects on people of being caught up in scientific change; from the place of story in the world to the effects of contemporary communication methods. Recommended.

Elsewhere
Richard Powers website
Generosity reviewed elsewhere: Paul Kincaid for Strange Horizons; Just William’s Luck; Word Travels; David Loftus for the California Literary Review.

This novel has been shortlisted for the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts about the Award.

World SF Blog fiction, Jan-Feb 2011: The Portal review

17th March 2011 / / 0 Comments

My latest review is now up at The Portal; this time, I’ve been looking at the stories published on the World SF Blog during the first two months of the year. The authors featured are: Nick Wood; Pyotr Kowalcyzk; Michael Haulica; Ekaterina Sedia; Eliza Victoria; Stephen Kotowych; and Charlie Human.

Click here to read the review.

Arthur C. Clarke Award 2011: The Shortlist

4th March 2011 / / 13 Comments

The speculation was fun (though I was only a third right), but now the real journey begins, as this year’s Clarke Award shortlist has been announced. It’s a fascinating and exciting list:

Lauren Beukes, Zoo City (Angry Robot)

Ian McDonald, The Dervish House (Gollancz)

Patrick Ness, Monsters of Men (Walker)

Richard Powers, Generosity (Atlantic)

Tim Powers, Declare (Corvus)

Tricia Sullivan, Lightborn (Orbit)

(Links above are to reviews of mine.)

Some general thoughts: I’m glad that sf by women has made such a strong showing on the list. It’s good to see such a diversity of publishers, and I like that four of the authors are first-time Clarke nominees. It’s also an interesting combination of nationalities (four American writers, one from the UK, one from South Africa).

I’ve said all along that The Dervish House was a dead cert for the shortlist, and so it has proved, giving McDonald his fourth Clarke nomination (though he has never won). It’s also no surprise (in a good way!) to see Zoo City and Lightborn nominated – both fine sf titles from last year; Lauren Beukes gets her first Clarke nod, and Tricia Sullivan her third (one of which led to a win, for Dreaming in Smoke in 1999).

The other three novels on the list are perhaps more unusual nominees, and therefore deserve a little more introduction here. Monsters of Men is the third volume in Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy, which – rarely for the Clarke Award – is YA fiction. Regardless of this, the Chaos Walking books are well worth the time of adult readers; it’s a pleasure to see this excellent series gaining such recognition.

Richard Powers is an author who has been on the barest fringes of my consciousness; I’m not even sure whether or not he is routinely identified as a writer of science fiction (not that it matters, of course). Generosity, in which the genetic basis for happiness is discovered, sounds interesting; and Paul Kincaid’s glowing review at Strange Horizons makes me even keener to read the novel.

Declare is probably the most surprising novel on the shortlist, because it dates from as far back as 2000. Tim Powers has been out of print in this country for many years, but his alternate-world Cold War spy novel finally received its first British publication last year, which made it eligible for the Clarke. It comes with a strong reputation (it won the World Fantasy Award, for one thing), and I very much look forward to reading it.

***

On a personal note, the shortlist presents me with ‘interesting’ questions over how to blog it, because I’ve read four of the books but only actually reviewed two of them. Zoo City and The Dervish House are already written up, and linked to above. Generosity and Declare are new to me, so those books will be my priority. And the other two…

I took part in the Torque Control discussion on Lightborn last December, and it was clear to me at the time that I lacked the frame of reference to do the novel justice. I probably still don’t have the frame of reference, but I would be interested to return to Lightborn in light of the discussion, and see what more I can find.

I’ve read all three of the Chaos Walking books, but only reviewed The Knife of Never Letting Go because, though I liked the later volumes, I didn’t feel I had enough to say about them. At this stage, I honestly don’t know whether I will revisit Monsters of Men, as these are all pretty hefty tomes, and I don’t know whether I’ll have time for all of them. We shall see.

***

Finally, some thoughts on the shortlist as a whole. The overall quality of the list strikes me as very high indeed. If I wanted to demonstrate to someone the vibrancy, vitality and quality of sf as a literary form, I could hand them the books on this shortlist. I also think that – perhaps more so than is usual for a Clarke shortlist – these books go well together as a set; I think we’ll find some interesting commonalities and contrasts to discuss amongst them. I look forward to seeing how those discussions unfold as we count down to the announcement of the winner on 27th April.

UPDATE, 28th April: Read my thoughts on the winner here.

Notable books: March 2011

1st March 2011 / / 2 Comments

This month’s list of forthcoming books that have caught my eye.

Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

This novel of a near-future Ireland has been on my list of books to investigate ever since I first heard about it. After reading a sample chapter when the book was selected for the Waterstone’s 11, I was left undecided as to whether I wanted to read the whole thing; but I will be keeping an eye on its reviews.

Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination

An interesting concept — pain and illness begin to produce light.

Stuart Evers, Ten Stories About Smoking

I’m intrigued by this book for a number of reasons, from the mere fact that it’s a debut short story collection appearing from a mainstream publication, to its packaging (designed to resemble a box of cigarettes), and the fact that I’ve followed Evers on Twitter for some time and been curious to see what his work is like.

Tom Fletcher, The Thing on the Shore

Fletcher is, in my view, one of the most exciting new horror writers around. I’ve loved everything I have read by him so far; naturally, then, I’m keen to read his new novel.

Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife

This enigmatic-sounding novel would have caught my interest even had it not been selected for the Waterstone’s 11; that I liked the sample chapter so much has only increased my interest.

Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

Theme parks, alligator-wrestling, an affair with a ghost… sounds delightfully odd, and therefore right up my street.

Conrad Williams, Loss of Separation

Williams is another key horror writer, consistently excellent as far as I’ve read him; I’m very much looking forward to reading his new novel.

Sarah Winman, When God Was a Rabbit

Another of the Waterstone’s 11 that went straight on my to-read list, and one for which the quality of the sample chapter was the deciding factor.

The obligatory Clarke Award speculation post

28th February 2011 / / 3 Comments

It’s that Clarke Award time of year again, and the list of submissions has been published over at Torque Control, in advance of the shortlist being announced this Friday. Fifty-four titles submitted, and it looks a pretty comprehensive list to me – I can’t think of any books I’ve read that have been undeservedly omitted; and the only other title of which I can think that perhaps should be there Walcot by Brian Aldiss. But it’s a very good pool all the same.

In terms of what may appear on the shortlist, it is a very open field this year. There’s only one title I’d consider a certainty to be shortlisted, and that is Ian McDonald’s excellent The Dervish House. The rest is wide open, though I’d imagine that some titles are more likely to reach the shortlist than others.  Before I make my prediction of the shortlist, I’ll go through what strike me as some of the more notable or unusual submissions.

Chris Beckett’s The Holy Machine has had a rather ‘interesting’ publishing history, and only received its debut UK publication last year, despite being originally published in 2004. I haven’t read any of Beckett’s novels, but his short fiction is excellent, and I’d imagine this book is a strong contender.

It’s left to each year’s Clarke jury to decide what constitutes ‘science fiction’ and a ‘novel’; perhaps no title amongst the 2011 submissions would have tested those parameters more than Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, a semi-fictional history of the Soviet planned economy. It has been highly regarded, but will the judges have considered it valid for the Clarke Award?

Joanna Kavenna’s The Birth of Love, Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, and Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming are all mainstream-published titles which I meant to get around to reading last year but never did. They’ve had mixed reviews, so I’m not sure how the judges will have viewed them; but, if there are going to be any wildcard entries on this year’s shortlist, I suspect these three are the most likely candidates.

Tom McCarthy’s C of course made the Booker shortlist. It’s debatable whether it can be read as sf, but it would certainly be an interesting addition to the shortlist.

Of all the submissions, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl is the one I’ve previously tried to read and given up on doing so; I just couldn’t get into it. I’m sure it is no coincidence that the book is set in the same world as the story in Pump Six with which I struggled the most. I will give it another go at some point, though; and that’ll be sooner rather than later if it makes the Clarke shortlist.

China Miéville, of all authors, can’t be ruled out of Clarke contention; but still I’d be surprised to see Kraken on the shortlist. I think its claim to being science fiction (rather than fantasy) is more tenuous than for any of his other novels, and too tenuous for it to be a contender. Never say never, but I don’t think it’s likely.

What do I think may be on the shortlist, then? A combination of wishful thinking and what I know of the books and their reputations leads me to suggest the following:

Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl

Chris Beckett, The Holy Machine

Ian McDonald, The Dervish House

Adam Roberts, New Model Army

Tricia Sullivan, Lightborn

Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

If you’d like to make your own guess, you can do so here, where anyone who guesses correctly by Wednesday night will win a copy of the entire shortlist.

Book notes: Politycki, Skloot, Langford & Grant

24th February 2011 /

Matthias Politycki, Next World Novella (2009/11)

Matthias Politycki’s Next World Novella (translated from the German by Anthea Bell) is the latest title from Peirene Press, which would be enough on its own to interest me in reading the book, as I’ve enjoyed all their previous selections. Add to this that it’s a tale with shifting realities, and my interest only increases. Having read it now, though, it didn’t quite work for me, and I’m not sure I can put my finger on why.

Academic Hinrich Schepp finds that his wife Doro has died at her desk, where she has apparently been editing the attempt at a novel that he abandoned years before. Reading the manuscript, Schepp discovers that Doro’s edits constitute a commentary on their marriage, and that his wife was far from as content as he’d assumed.

The beginning of Next World Novella is especially potent, as the reader is a fraction behind Schepp in realising that Doro has died, and anticipates the jolt which is to come. There’s also effective interplay between the gradual unfurling of Doro’s true feelings and Schepp’s inability/reluctance to perceive the truth (e.g. he refuses to acknowledge the extent to which his abandoned novel reflected his own life). Yet I finished the book feeling that I hadn’t quite grasped something about it, and I can’t put into words what that might be. Next World Novella is well worth a look, though.

Interview with Matthias Politycki (Worlds Without Borders)
Next World Novella elsewhere: Just William’s Luck; Cardigangirlverity; The Independent.

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)

A brilliant fusion of biography, social history, and history of science, that tells a fascinating story. Henrietta Lacks was a poor African American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951; as with other cancer patients at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital, a sample of the cells from Henrietta’s tumour was taken, without her knowledge, for research purposes. Those cells were the origin of the HeLa cell line, the first human one to be propagated successfully in the lab (‘immortal’ because they can divide indefinitely in culture). Henrietta’s cells facilitated many medical advances, but it was twenty years before her family even learnt that a sample had been taken.

Remarkable as this story is, it is Skloot’s treatment of it that makes The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. She moves back and forth between time periods and perspectives, weaving together details  of Henrietta’s and her family’s lives; the wider social and scientific contexts; the ethical issues raised by Henrietta’s story; and Skloot’s own experiences meeting and interviewing the Lacks family. There’s great breadth to the material, and Skloot’s control of it is superb. What an engrossing read.

Rebecca Skloot’s website
Interview with Skloot (Wellcome Trust)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks elsewhere: SomeBeans; Savidge Reads; Take Me Away; Lovely Treez Reads.

David Langford and John Grant, Earthdoom! (1987/2003)

A gloriously over-the-top spoof disaster novel featuring all manner of world-ending phenomena which appear on the scene in quick succession: a spacecraft on a collision course with Earth; an antimatter comet on a collision course with Earth; invading aliens; rabid lemmings; the Loch Ness Monster; a time-travelling Hitler who takes advantage of the handy cloning technology he finds on a Devon farm; sentient superglue… You get the idea.

Langford and Grant relentlessly send up the conventions of the disaster novel, with their cast of gung-ho male scientists and impossibly-attractive-yet-brilliant-except-when-the-guys-need-to-show-how-much-better-they-are female scientists; the plot contrivances which are eventually abandoned altogether when it suits; the characters’ helpful-for-the-reader recapping things they already know; and the prose. For example:

Jeb’s [the Devonian farmer] words rang hollow in his ears, not merely because in these grim days his accent was failing to convince even himself. Ambledyke Farmhouse was sealed against the horrors outside, its boarded-up windows blind as proofreaders’ eyyes. The inner dimness throbbed with a stench of ancient, decaying pizza. (p. 121)

Great stuff.

David Langford’s website
John Grant’s website

Notable books: February 2011

1st February 2011 / / 1 Comment

To begin the month, my round-up of forthcoming books that have caught my eye:

Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales

Subtitled ‘The Curious Lives of the Elements’, this book promises to range across art and history as well as science in exploring the chemical elements. Sounds interesting, and a great cover too.

Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

I love fiction that brings a tinge of fantastication to the everyday, so this sounds right up my street: a girl discovers that food carries for her a taste of people’s emotions.

Francesca Beauman, Shapely Ankle Preferr’d

I like books that look at history from an unusual angle, and this history of the lonely hearts ad sounds like just such a book.

Carol Birch, Jamrach’s Menagerie

Canongate publish some great books, and this seafaring historical adventure looks promising.

Ellen Bryson, The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno

It’s the setting — Barnum’s American Museum — that intrigues me about this one.

Lucy Caldwell, The Meeting Point

This Bahrain-set novel sounds as though it could have some interesting contrasts.

Jon Courtenay Grimwood, The Fallen Blade

Grimwood turns from science fiction to fantasy, and I’m interested to see what he’ll do with the genre in this tale of vampires in 15th-century Venice.

Sophia McDougall, Romanitas

A reissue (revised, I believe) of the first volume of McDougall’s trilogy in which the Roman Empire has survived to the present day. I missed it the first time around, but am curious to see what this is like.

Matthias Politycki, Next World Novella

I would read this because the synopsis intrigues me (‘shifting realities’ as a man gains a new view of his marriage after the death of his wife), but I’d also read it just because it’s published by the reliably-excellent Peirene Press.

Gordon Reece, Mice

There’s quite a buzz about this tale of suspense centred on a mother and daughter who have retreated to the countryside, and then find their cottage broken into — it sounds to be  worth a look.

Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb

I read a couple of very good books from Sandstone Press last year (Up the Creek Without a Mullet and Love, Revenge & Buttered Scones), so I’ve high hopes for this new title of theirs, a novel about a girl living in a world affected by bio-terrorism.

Nat Segnit, Pub Walks in Underhill Country

A novel written (at least at first) in the form of a walkers’ guide. I’m interested to see how that works.

A squad of debuts: the Waterstone’s 11

28th January 2011 / / 9 Comments

This week, Jackie from Farm Lane Books has blogged about why she loves debut authors, and now her thoughts on the Waterstone’s 11. This is not a football team, but their selection of eleven debut novels, all to be published in the UK during 2011. A sample chapter of each book is on offer available at the Waterstone’s 11 website; Jackie has read all those and posted her reaction.

Well, I also like debut novels, so I thought I’d do the same as Jackie and see how our opinions compare. Many of the selected books were already on my radar, so naturally I am interested to find out what they’re like; and I’m intrigued by the ones that are completely new to me.

So, following the same order as Jackie, here we go:

David Bezmosgis, The Free World

1978: a family of Jewish refugees are travelling from Latvia to a new life in Chicago; this opening section follows them from Vienna to Rome. I liked the prose at the beginning, but found the extract as a whole difficult to grasp — partly, I think, because I’m unfamiliar with the subject matter. I gain the impression of a talented writer and a significant book; but, like Jackie, I’ll be waiting to see what others think before I decide whether to read on.

Anticipation rating: ***½

Sophie Hardach, The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages

A Kurdish refugee enters Germany, and, years later, a German registrar (now working in Paris) who once knew him questions of the legitimacy of a forthcoming wedding. I love the writing in this extract — the opening scene is especially vivid — so this novel is definitely going on my list of books to investigate.

Anticipation rating: ****

Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

Mainstream-published books that could be read as speculative fiction will always pique my interest, and this near-future tale of crime bosses in an Irish city is no exception. Jackie didn’t much care for this extract; like her, I found the dialect quite heavy going, but I am intrigued and suspect I will return to the book.

Anticipation rating: ***½

Amanda Hodgkinson, 22 Britannia Road

A woman travels with her son from Poland to England, where she will be reunited after six long years with her husband, who had been serving in the Polish Corps and now has a house for the family in Ipswich — but the years apart have changed them. I’m ambivalent about this book — I think it’s well written, but at the same time, it doesn’t grab me. I’ll put it down as a ‘maybe’.

Anticipation rating: ***½

Shehan Karunatilaka, Chinaman

A dying sports journalist resolves to find a cricketer whom disappeared years ago — a cricketer he considers great, but who is otherwise largely unknown. Jackie doesn’t like cricket, and couldn’t drum up any enthusiasm for this extract. Fair enough. I don’t like cricket, either, but I thought this was great; the prose is vigorous and quirky, and I want to read more — I have a real sense that I could fall in love with this book.

Anticipation rating: *****

Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English

Narrated by a Ghanaian boy now living on a London estate, this was Jackie’s favourite extract of the eleven. Myself, I think Kelman creates the boy’s voice very well, and I can already see some interesting contrasts being established –yet I don’t have the instinctual feeling that the book is for me. I’ll be seeking out other opinions, I think.

Anticipation rating: ****

Sam Leith, The Coincidence Engine

The most clearly speculative title in the selection, with its “Directorate of the Extremely Improbable” and a hurricane that spontaneously builds an aeroplane from junk, this most certainly goes on my list. It could go either way — depending, I suspect, on how tongue-in-cheek it tries to be — but there’s enough interesting strangeness in this opening extract to make me want to find out.

Anticipation rating: ****½

Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife

In 1941, German bombers ruin a city in the Balkans, and a tiger escapes from the zoo, eventually making his way to the village where the narrator’s grandfather (then a boy) lives. For that boy, it is an occurence as wondrous as if Shere Khan himself had come to life. The synopsis of the book (which points to intriguing developments beyond the scope of this opening extract) alone would persuade me to read on; now I’ve read the sample, the prose does likewise. Put both factors together, and…

Anticipation rating: ****½

Johanna Skibsrud, The Sentimentalists

At the start of this extract, the narrator moves her ailing father to another town, to live with the father of his friend who died when the two were serving in Vietnam. I have less of a sense from reading the sample of what the novel as a whole might be like than I’ve had with any of the previous titles on the list; though I’m broadly in agreement with Jackie — the writing is nicely descriptive, but I’m not really inspired to read further.

Anticipation rating: ***

Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator

Kashmir, 1993: a teenage boy is made to collaborate with the Indian army; in the opening extract, he is sent to collect weapons and ID cards from the fallen bodies. There’s an effective contrast drawn between the boy’s valley before and after the army arrived, and the prose has considerable momentum. I don’t think it’s a book for my must-read list, but I can imagine returning to it in time.

Anticipation rating: ***½

Sarah Winman, When God Was a Rabbit

It’s quite difficult to give a flavour of this extract without going into too much or too little detail; to say it focuses on a girl growing up in the 1970s is too bald a description, but so much happens and is hinted at that it’s hard to summarise. But that doesn’t matter, because the prose is brilliant. Jackie wonders if the novel will be too busy for its own good, and that’s a possibility; but I’m optimistic, and I know I’ll be reading this book on its publication.

Anticipation rating: *****

===

So, out of eleven books, there are four I will definitely be reading (Chinaman, When God Was a Rabbit, The Coincidence Engine, and The Tiger’s Wife); several more I may read at some point; and, though not all the extracts are to my taste (nor would I expect them to be), there’s nothing that makes me go, ‘what were they thinking?’ I think this is a list which genuinely has something for everyone. Good work.

Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, Vol. 3 (2010)

26th January 2011 / / 5 Comments

The Bristol Short Story Prize is awarded annually to stories of up to 3,000 words, with the twenty shortlisted pieces being published in an anthology. On the table today is the anthology resulting from last year’s Prize, and a nicely wide-ranging selection it is, too.

The three stories on the winners’ podium are printed first in the anthology, so that seems a good place to start. The story awarded first prize by the judges is the shortest of all, just a few hundred words, yet it’s plain to see why the judges thought so highly of it. ‘Mum’s the Word’ by Valerie O’Riordan is about a girl being abused by her father; its detail is so chillingly precise (‘Three times with his grunting and the calloused hand over my mouth…’) that the story has a much greater impact than its length might suggest. A worthy winner.

Ian Madden was the second-placed author, for ‘Only the Sure of Foot’, a tale of grudges and secrets on a Scottish island. Madden evokes the harshness of his setting well, and how that has shaped his characters; I particularly like the ending, which effectively uses the landscape as a metaphor for the unspoken territory between two of its characters. Third prize went to a debut story, ‘Gardening’ by Rachel Howard, in which an old woman named Elena moves into the garden of Alice, who has become too afraid to leave her home. I like the matter-of-fact tone of this piece, the way that the rather odd situation becomes something important for both women – and the story ends in just the right place.

Though I’ve described the situation in ‘Gardening’ as rather odd, there’s a whole different level of oddness in Ben Walker’s ‘Bitter Gourd Fruit’, where a man from our present day wakes to find himself a severed head (with faculties and speech intact) on board a ship, apparently some time in the past. Walker tells his story with a straight face, and the occasional nod which acknowledges the absurdity of its premise (with the protagonist’s help, the ship’s crew end up rehearsing an adaptation of Highlander). It’s a tone that works well at keeping the story sufficiently grounded, all the way to the nicely-judged ending.

Mike Bonsall’s ‘Man Friday and the Sockball Championships’ is another story that takes a fantastical situation and works by focusing on the reality of that situation rather than on explaining it. Bonsall’s protagonist is imprisoned in one of a series of cubes in a vast cavern; he doesn’t hunger, and heals completely if injured – but he can go nowhere, and doesn’t know where he is or how he got there. Bonsall explores well the emotional state of his protagonist, and the varying stages of bewilderment, claustrophobia, resignation, and trying to cope. Natasha Tripney’s story, ‘An Experiment’, likewise features a protagonist trapped by forces beyond their control, though in a very different setting. Cecily is a (presumably poor) girl who has been taken into a wealthy household to receive the kind of education (in Latin, piano, arithmetic, and so on) that would otherwise have been denied her; here, Cecily’s benefactors assess her progress. This is a tale where the connotations of the title carry considerable weight: Cecily’s humanity has been eroded, because she is viewed in the story as an experimental subject, Tripney never allows her readers to lose sight of that, and it gives the story an effective note of unease.

Several stories in the anthology carry a sting in their tail. ‘A Sense of Humour’ by Rik Gammack – about a man who had himself cloned as insurance against dying, and hatches a plan to take advantage of the situation – is essentially a shaggy-dog story, but amply serves its purpose as a light, entertaining read. ‘Born Not Made’ by Rachel Sargeant works well enough without the twist at its end, as it transplants the rivalry between Mozart and Salieri to present-day Britain with the tale of Mozza, a young trouble-maker with an uncool interest in (and talent for) music – an interesting juxtaposition of subtext and surface tale. Darci Bysouth’s ‘Marrakech’ is a very effective piece in which a mother reminisces to her daughter about the time she lived in Marrakech. The city becomes a symbol of lost dreams; the contrast between the mother and her more practical-minded is brought out well; and the final shift of perception adds yet another layer to the story.

There are also pieces that transport us very well into the distinctive minds of their protagonists. For example, in ‘Ten Plastic Roses’ by Yana Stajno, the protagonist, Melanie, obsesses over the fake flowers she has thrown out. They were the last gift given to her by her ex-husband Richard, and now that final symbol of him is gone – except that the council’s waste collectors won’t take the roses away. Stajno controls the flow of the story well: Melanie’s attitude changes unexpectedly, and there’s a hint that her history with Richard may not be all that she claims. The narrative voice of Clare Wallace’s ‘But Then Again, Maybe It Is’ is superbly realised; Wallace’s narrator – a man out looking for the girlfriend who has left him – is consciously unreliable, revising his testimony as he goes, such that there are few secure footholds in the story. And Sherri Turner’s ‘Being Mother’ is an unsettling piece whose narrator takes her children out for an old-style tea-party (insisting they wear traditional clothes); layer on layer of perception and reality is peeled back as the story goes on, to great effect.

So, that’s a tour of some of the highlights of the third Bristol Prize anthology. There is some good stuff here, and the book is well worth seeking out.

Elsewhere
A.J. Kirby reviews the anthology for The Short Review

Book notes: Coles, Lelic, O’Flynn

11th January 2011 / / 6 Comments

Amongst my longer reviews, I’m going to start posting brief notes on some of the other books I’ve read. Here is the first round-up:

William Coles, The Well-Tempered Clavier (2007)

Kim, Coles’s narrator, looks back on his Eton days in the early 1980s. At the age of seventeen, Kim fell for India James, his beautiful young piano teacher — and, somewhat to his surprise, found his affection reciprocated. Of course, these are difficult circumstances in which to conduct a relationship anyway, but Kim’s eagerness to think the worst does nothing to help. The Well-Tempered Clavier is a neat portrait of a teenage crush as a whirlwind of uncertainty and possibility, a rush of love (or lust, or both) mixed up with doubt. I think the level of foreshadowing in the narration dilutes the novel’s impact somewhat, but, in general, this is a worthwhile debut.

William Coles’s website
Legend Press
The Well-Tempered Clavier blogged elsewhere: Reading Matters; Stuck in a Book; Musings from a Muddy Island.

Simon Lelic, The Facility (2011)

Lelic’s debut, Rupture, played about with the conventions of the police procedural to produce an interesting examination of bullying, and the issue of where our sympathies should lie if someone who is bullied takes extreme measures. The author’s follow-up novel, The Facility, looked set to do a similar thing with a different subgenre and moral issue, namely the near-future political thriller, and the issue of government responses to security threats – but it’s not quite as successful.

Several years hence, a ‘Unified Security Act’ has been passed in the UK, which essentially allows the government to go to any length in the name of maintaining security. A secret hospital/prison has been established, and a number of people detained there without explanation. We follow three protagonists: Arthur Priestley, one of the imprisoned; Henry Graves, governor of the facility; and Tom Clarke, the journalist approached by Priestley’s wife, Julia, who believes her husband has been detained under false pretences.

Thinking back to Rupture’s brilliant handling of multiple first-person voices, I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of disappointment that The Facility’s third-person narrative voices weren’t as sharply delineated. But Lelic has a knack for creating a sparse atmosphere that reflects the austere nature of the facility.

The novel could be seen as inverting the stereotypical trajectory of this kind of story, in that it’s less concerned with revealing the great conspiracy of silence at its heart than with keeping things hidden – for example, it’s not until a third of the way through that we learn why the facility was established (to quarantine people with some unspecified disease), and there’s a general sense of murkiness to proceedings throughout. This is an interesting approach, one that closes off the possibility of easy answers to the problems it raises; but I think it also makes it difficult for the novel to really examine those problems. Though there are some moments that reveal moral complexity, overall I feel that this novel doesn’t treat its issues in the same depth that Rupture did its. The Facility is good as far as it goes; I just wish it went a bit further.

Simon Lelic’s website
Extract from the novel
The Facility reviewed elsewhere: Metro; Sunday Herald.

Catherine O’Flynn, What Was Lost (2007)

I was looking forward to reading this, as it sounded just the sort of quirky book that I enjoy. And parts of it were just that — but the whole didn’t quite hang together.

In 1984, ten-year-old Kate Meaney decides to set up her own detective agency, covering her Birmingham neighbourhood and nearby Green Oaks. After 68 pages following Kate, the action shifts to 2003, where we spend the bulk of the novel’s remainder, in the company of Kurt, a security guard at the Green Oaks Shopping Centre, and Lisa, assistant manager of a record shop. We learn that Kate Meaney went missing back in 1984; by novel’s end, we find out what happened to her.

I find O’Flynn’s control of voice good: she really captures the mixture of precocity and naivety that makes up Kate’s character in the first section; and there are some striking vignettes of people in and around the shopping centre in 2003. Kurt and Lisa don’t come across quite as strongly, but there’s still a sense of the monotony and frustration they feel in their working lives.

Yet I’m not sure that What Was Lost quite works at the broader structural level. There are themes running through the book concerning the limitations of consumerism and the decline of traditional industry, but I don’t see that the main plot fully reflects those themes. It’s tempting to see Kate’s disappearance as representing a loss of innocence; but that reading doesn’t quite hold up for me, because there wasn’t really innocence there to begin with — for example, the 1984 depicted in the book does not appear to be a substantially safer time and place for playing games of girl detective than the 2003. I liked What Was Lost particularly at the beginning, but the rest didn’t live up to that early promise.

Tindal Street Press
What Was Lost blogged elsewhere: Asylum; Dovegreyreader; Farm Lane Books.

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