Forthcoming

For the first time ever, Blue Book Balloon is going to be part of a blog tour... we'll be landing in the gritty world of Helen Giltrow's debut thriller The Distance, which is just out, tangling with identity, guilt and rehabilitation.  That's on 7th March, when I'll be posting a review of the book - one that had me desperate to see what came next... but terrified of what might happen. Real hiding-behind-the-sofa stuff.

We'll just have to hope that the Balloon gets aloft again, and isn't hijacked for nefarious purposes by the inmates of The Program.

From the press release:

"They don't call her Karla any more. She's Charlotte Alton: she doesn't trade in secrets, she doesn't erase dark pasts, and she doesn't break hit-men into prison. Except that is exactly what she's been asked to do. The job is impossible: get the assassin into an experimental new prison so that he can take out a target who isn't officially there. It's a suicide mission, and quite probably a set-up.

So why can't she say no?"

Intriguing - and Charlotte is a great protagonist, brave, capable, holding her place in a very shady underworld and facing off some markedly dangerous characters.

After that, I have a couple of other review copies and my first Netgalley lines up, and I've also been on  a bit of a buying spree: there have been so many great books published in the past few weeks - from Sarah Pinborough (The Death House), Claire North (Touch), VE Schwab (A Darker Shade of Magic) and Naomi Foyle (Rook Song) - and there are others too - that it's been hard to keep up, I want to put up reviews of at least some of these here, in the next couple of weeks.

And there is another blog tour as well, with a book that's quite different from those I normally review, but which is proving VERY interesting... more on that later...

Review: The Raven's Head by Karen Maitland

The Raven's Head
Karen Maitland
Headline Review, March 2015
Paperback, 512pp


I received a copy of this book from Amazon Vine.

This is a swashbuckling tale of escape, magic and survival against a grim background of medieval Europe. I hadn't read any of Maitland's books before this, but will be catching up with them now.

Vincent is a penniless, orphaned apprentice scribe in France.

Wilky is a young boy wrenched from his family in England and sent to live at a monastery, spending each night in terror that he will be woken from his bed and taken away...

Gisa works for her uncle and aunt, learning the trade of an apothecary.

Through their eyes we see a rather different Europe from that of knights and princesses, kings and battles. And it's a pitiless one, with injustice, starvation or death from cold never far away.

Vincent knows this and wants to rise - so when he sees an opportunity to blackmail his master, he seizes it, setting off the action of the novel with a string of encounters, escapes and betrayals which occupy the first half of the book. In the meantime we slowly learn the history of Regulus, for whom the white-robed monks seem to have a particular purpose in mind, and Gisa.

It's all bound up with alchemy, that hybrid of secret philosophy and experimental science by which medieval scholars hoped to achieve power, wealth or immortality. In the climax to the book we discover that alchemy has been shaping Vincent's steps all along, and that there is a purpose, too, for him...

Maitland backs up her story with several pages of notes explaining terms, customs and history and each chapter opens with a quote from a genuine alchemical text. That is pretty incomprehensible stuff, to be honest, and I was intrigued by the contrast between this "real" hidden, magical learning and the typical magical/ occult system of a fantasy world.

It's a sign, perhaps, of how completely the worldview that created alchemy has been replaced by science that even made up "magic" seems more rational and systematic. You (literally) couldn't make it up. So by grounding her book in this stuff Maitland both makes it both more realistic than typical fantasy (whatever that means!) and also more alien. It's an impressive achievement, and a cracking read.

Review: Weathering by Lucy Wood

Weathering
Lucy Wood
Bloomsbury, 2015
Hardback, 290pp

If you read and enjoyed Wood's collection of short stories, Diving Belles, you'll recognise the smell and taste of this book. Or rather, the smell and taste are different: while Diving Belles was all about the salt-sea and the sand, Weathering is imbued with cold and muffling snow.  Wood has moved inland, upriver, to where the water is fresh.  But like the earlier book, the elements are almost like characters or plot, defining the shape of the story (born in Autumn, carried away, at the end, on a Spring flood) and setting limits for the protagonists.

The book is about three women, mother and grandmother Pearl, mother and daughter Ada, daughter and granddaughter Pepper,  At the start, Pearl finds herself in the river. She wants to get back into her house, where Ada and Pearl have arrived, but that pesky river keeps carrying her away.

Ada walked out years ago, leaving Pearl, not in a drama but at the same time, intent on getting away, living a life.  Now she has come back, with strange Pearl - who can't settle at school, doesn't get on with the other kids - to clear out the cottage. Not to live there: she'll only be around a few weeks.  Good thing too - the roof leaks, the log burner is spiteful, the electricity intermittent.  Perhaps she can get something for the house from Ray, he of the thin smile.

And there we are.  Ada and Pearl make a home, temporary, like all the other places where they wash up.  The story drifts back and forward in time, meandering a bit, showing how Ada grew up and how Pearl declined.  Unlike Diving Belles, there's nothing magical (though the way the story's told might reflect the supernatural - or it might not...) but it has the same clarify of focus, the same flow, the sense of watching ripples in the river, as that book. Also, the same magical use of language, close observation of the world and sympathy for its characters: they are human, they manage as best they can, what can you do, it seems to say.  The heron will be here next year, whatever.  The snow will melt, the flood will rise, everything will be rinsed away down to the sea.

It is a captivating, magical book, to be read slowly and appreciated. Buy the print version, not the e-book - there is a beautiful, tactile cover: simply holding it is a pleasure.

This is the sort of book that gets literary fiction a good name.

What a terrific writer: I'm really, really hoping for more from Lucy Wood.

Review: The Chimes by Anna Smaill

The Chimes
Anna Smaill
Sceptre, 12 February 2015
Hardback, 304 pages

I was sent a copy of this to review by Amazon Vine.

There is a lot of debate on reviewer websites, book blogs and book podcasts about whether to persist with a book which is difficult to get into. There are so many books, and so little time, after all, that it's tempting to give up and move on.

But every so often a book comes along which rewards perseverance.

This is such a book, and while it may not be to everyone's taste, I want to persuade you to give it a chance, because, once you "get" it, it is beautiful, moving and - yes - exciting and dramatic.

We are introduced to a London not unlike our own, but distinctly pre-modern: there no machines and no electricity.

Following his mother's death, a boy travels from the bulbfields of Essex to find one of her friends in the city. What he is to do then we don't know. The atmosphere is very constrained: facts are few and hard to interpret. Smaill is, I think, leading us into the mindset of her characters, showing what the world they live in like, through that atmosphere. So, memory is important. Somehow it keeps being lost: everyone forgets pretty much everything each day and has to continually relearn who they are and how to live. The only solid memories are those anchored in items which you carry round with you ("objectmemory") and in learned skills ("muscle memory"). There is always the risk - if one sets foot outside the familiar - of going adrift, becoming "memoryless", a hopeless, pitiable state. A story told about people like this is necessarily allusive, missing out facts and connections that have simply been lost by the characters, dwelling on the little knowledge and few incidents that they recall, celebrating and turning on minor - to us - triumphs of recall, before lapsing again into darkness and chaos.

That makes it hard, at first, to enter the world of this book, as did - at least for me - the musical metaphors used in the story. This is a world where writing is banned, memories full of holes: but music is everywhere. Music supplies the place of maps, of print and television (instead of which, the citizens come together every morning and evening to hear the "Chimes" of the title, a musical creation broadcast on some remote instrument of unimaginable power which both binds them together and splinters away those precious memories).

Music soaks this book. Common words are replaced by their Italianate, musical equivalents - lente, subito - giving the writing a lush, alien tone. Distances are turned into "beats". Events "resolve". Music almost becomes an extra sense: things, people, ways are found and described through their tunes - a stall in a crowded market, rare treasure in the abandoned tunnels under London, the way back home after Chimes has struck. Here was a real barrier for me: I hear music, I enjoy music, but I don't understand the technical language.

It was, then, an absolute pleasure as - in my mind - the book slowly came together, with the background of the boy Simon gradually filled in and the nature of his quest becoming clear. Quite simply, he needs to learn who he is, what he has lost - and what he might become. And that learning is accompanied by the reader's growing sense of what is going on, almost as if one is sharing in the recovery of memory, the gathering sense of purpose of the character. It's simply brilliant.

Simon's discovery of himself is catalysed by his relationship with, his discovery of, a friend who also comes out of mystery. That developing friendship is at the heart of the book and it is a joy to read.

I don't want to gush. The book has flaws. Following the mysterious, allusive opening there is a large infodump somewhere around the middle, almost as though Smaill lost her nerve slightly and worried about the reader getting into the book. Yes, as I've said, some may find it difficult but once - as it were - you begin to hum along with the main theme, then you won't need a great deal of extra prompting. It is also quite a short book. The ending is, perhaps, a bit rushed: but then, it's also refreshing to see a story like this not padded out to the traditional trilogy.

So - not perfect, but a beguiling and immersive world, real characters trapped by a horrid religion/ philosophy and a wonderful, inventive way of telling a story that is perhaps the book's greatest strength, something different and breathtaking to read.

Review: Near Enemy by Adam Sternbergh

Near Enemy
Adam Sternbergh
Headline, 2015
Paperback, 306pp

I was sent a copy of this book through bookbridgr

I also bought a copy because I got a bit impatient. Such is life...

Following Shovel Ready, published last year, Sternbergh has returned to a wrecked near-future New York and his antihero Spademan.

Spademan is - and there's no evading this - a murderer.  He makes his living carrying out contract killings - no questions asked. Disposal of the bodies is easy: Spademan's an ex garbage collector for the city.

When did it all go wrong for him? Probably the same day it went very wrong for New York - when the dirty bomb took out Times Square, and Spademan's wife died.  Now the city is bankrupt and those who remain and who have any money use it renting the equipment they need to live in "the Limn" - a virtual reality which leaves their physical bodies decaying slowly in real life, tended only by nurses. Like the Nurse who features in this book, and whose clients seem to attract trouble in the Limn...

Add a subplot involving Persephone, the woman Spademan rescued in Shovel Ready but who's now being hunted by members of her father's corrupt church; a Mayoral election (even the corpse of New York provides rich pickings); the possibility that a terrorist attack in the Limn may be imminent, and you get a heady, if slightly bitter, mix, told in a laconic, noirish style - and we see here that Spademan may be consciously adopting that style, and why:

"Next morning. Sun comes knocking.
Check the clock again. 6 a.m.
I sit up. Bed's empty. Nurse is dressing in the doorway. Tugs her crepe-soled shoes on, over white stockings.
Morning, Spademan. You hungry?
I find my shirt. Tell Nurse.
I am. I know a place. You like waffles?
Who doesn't like waffles?
I have to admit. I'm really starting to warm up to this Nurse."

There's no shortage of graphic violence.  Spademan's New York is a dog-eat-dog place, and he's no saint.  But I think we do see a softer side here.  Not only has he a sort-of family to fight for, in place of seeking revenge for his wife's death, but we get some clues about his early life and the chances he missed - which now make him seek redemption by saving another.

An excellent sequel, easily as good as the original, and I think setting up the possibility of a further sequel.

Well worth a read, if you like alt-noir.

Review: Golden Son by Pierce Brown

Golden Son
Pierce Brown
Hodder & Stoughton, 2015
Hardback, 464 pages

I bought this book from Wallingford Bookshop and I absolutely loved it to bits. I enjoyed every word, and read more and more slowly as I approached the end, because I didn't want it to finish. ('Morning Star', the third and final part of the series, is due next year).

But that doesn't make for an easy review. Not only is 300 word of gush offputting, but this is a big, meaty, complex book which deserves a decent discussion - I hope I can do it credit.

'Golden Son' picks up several years after 'Red Rising ends.  Darrow, the lowly born Red who, in the previous book, infiltrated the ranks of the privileged Golds and stormed to victory in the Institute, has signed up to serve Nero, tyrannical governor of Mars - and father to the Jackal, who attempted to cheat his way to success at the Institute.  Nero seems to bear no ill will to Darrow for beating.  In the Society of the Golds, power and victory are their own justification.  But woe betide Darrow if he stumbles for even a moment...

Alongside Darrow's need to demonstrate assurance and military prowess as a Gold, he is also part of a rebellion led by the enigmatic Ares, aiming at the overthrow of the Golds. But Darrow has heard nothing from Ares for years, and is left to do the best he can, unsure of what, if any, role he is meant to serve in the rebellion.

And as if that isn't complicated enough, there's Darrow's ambiguous relationship with Mustang, Nero's daughter, who helped him defeat her brother in Red Rising - who he won't let himself get close to because of the memory of his wife Eo, executed by order of Nero.

While the obvious comparator for Red Rising would be The Hunger Games, this book reminded me in many ways of Frank Herbert's Dune, which used a similar background of warring noble families under a Sovereign, of space, treachery and power plays and also a universe where pity, kindness, fellowship and liberty are frowned on.  But, just as Red Rising is a better, more complex book than Hunger Games, so I actually think that Golden Son is better than Dune*, because in the character of Darrow, Brown gives it such heart.

Darrow is an outsider, not a noble: if his secret became known his 'friends' would turn on him at once. He is driven by hate - for those who killed his wife - and love - of her, and of what she taught him.  In the course of the book he learns of things that will make him both hate more, and love more and that puts pressure on him, as if his dual life wasn't enough. The book makes no bones about the fact that part of Darrow enjoys the strength he's got, the power and the glory that he earns. Part of him would make a good Gold. At the same time, he only has this power and glory because of Ares and the wars he fights for Nero, against other Golds, the sacrifices he demands of both Gold friends (there is a high body count) and of lower born Blues, Greys and Obsidians are really a sham, directed at a cause he doesn't believe in and intends to betray.  Out of such crooked timber, how can anything true be made?

Not only is this situation fascinating and Darrow a compelling protagonist, but the book is also very well written, Brown using language easily and naturally but to great effect - for example, describing an individual Gold in words that seem to echo the heroic cadences of Beowulf:

'With them, shorter than the rest but more glorious, is the Protean Knight in her golden gear'

or evoking the chaos and destruction of a space battle:

Fire and lightning rule space. Behemoths of metal belch missiles back and forth, silently pounding one another with all the weapons of man. The silence of it, so eerie, so strange. Great veils of flak explode around the ships, cloaking them in fury, almost like raw cotton tossed into the wind...'

Here he is making sly references to contemporary SF, thereby heightening the sense of reality of his universe:

'"He's hiding. Unless he teleported." He spits that bit of science fiction.'

'Railgun ordnance smashes into our hull, though we do not feel the reverberations here on the bridge. Our equipment does not spark. Wiring does not fall from overhead compartments...'

It isn't perfect.  At times I found myself wondering just how Darrow, raised at the bottom of the heap as a miner, would have been able to learn so much, so quickly.  (At one point he recognises, tattooed on the arms of a starship captain 'the Larmor formula. Maxwell's equations in curved space-time. Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory...')  More fundamentally, I still don't understand why all those Red miners are need to extract 'Helium 3' from under Mars - one would have thought that surface drill-rigs could do the job...?

But that's to quibble, and possibly to miss something deeper about the universe that Brown has created.  This future isn't a necessary or likely evolution of the society we live in. The books make very clear - Golden Son gives more details - that this is a very deliberately constructed Society, designed to afford its rulers particular advantages but at the same time trapping them in a cycle of rivalry and conflict.  All of the lesser roles in that world are as deliberately planned, with Red society, for example, designed to be very patriarchal and the soldier Obsidians manipulated via their shamans.  It is this that Darrow sets himself against - and one fears that the designers have foreseen and even require rebellion, as an essential part of the whole.  What Darrow is heading into with the third book, I can't even imagine, but I'm waiting eagerly for it...

----

*Publicists - there's your headline: "Better than Dune" - David, @bluebookballoon

Review: The Liar's Chair by Rebecca Whitney

The Liar's Chair
Rebecca Whitney
Mantle, 2015
Hardback, 224 pages

I was sent this book by Amazon as part of their Vine programme.

The chair belonged to teenage Rachel. When things got too bad, she'd hide in the airing cupboard in the corner of her bedroom, padlock the door form the inside, and sit on her chair.

Years later, as an adult, Rachel has her fears under control. She's married to David. They have worked hard, their TV production company is successful, and they have all they could want. Yet all of this is fragile.

Driving home one morning, Rachel does something terrible, something she tries to cover up. The stress of this, however, undermines her hard won self assurance and she begins to fall apart... or at least, that's how David might put it.

This book is in many ways a painful one to read. We're firmly with Rachel all the way, despite what she's done, and it's harrowing to see her begin to lose herself to guilt, fear and bullying. Whitney includes just enough backstory to help the reader understand how Rachel came to be as she is - it's less about specific events than about the atmosphere, the situation that surrounded her childhood.

The reader - any decent reader anyway - will want Rachel to turn around and defy her tormentors (whether in the 1970s flashbacks or the "now" parts of the story) - but that would be untrue to the reality of the mess she's in, I think.

Not that Rachel is a mere passive victim. She knows what's going on, and does what she can to protect herself, but she's under attack not only from her own past and actions but from her husband, whose behaviour in the present is pretty monstrous.

This was the only point where I felt that Whitney lost her touch slightly - we understand why Rachel is like she is, but David appears as something of a caricature of an abusive husband, with very little insight given about his past. And his rapid development from tyrannical husband and TV producer to local crime boss was a bit hard to swallow.

Setting that aside, this is an extremely readable and tension- laced psychological study with a real and developing sense of menace. Not a happy book, but a thrilling one.