#Review - From the Neck Up by Aliya Whiteley

Design by Julia Lloyd

From the Neck Up and other stories
Aliya Whiteley
Titan Books, 14 September 2021
Available as: PB, 301pp, e
Source: Advance PB copy
ISBN(PB): 9781789094756

I'm grateful to Titan Books for a free advance copy of From the Neck Up to consider for review.

From the Neck Up collects 16 of Whiteley's stories, originally published between 2014 and 2020. The longest ("Brushwork") is an 80 page near-novella, most though are shorter, between 10 and 20 pages. The themes are riotously diverse, but often concern - or are set among - environmental and societal collapse whose consequences are being explored. In many of the stories we're located in a sanctuary - literal or emotional - which has escaped the worst consequences of the catastrophe. 

That reminded me at times of Joan Aiken's stories in that, as did the skilful and even joyful juxtaposition of the weird and the normal. One can't, I think, fully appreciate the weird if it's presented in isolation, we need it to be interweaved with everyday life.

That's certainly true of the first story, "Brushwork", where we meet elderly Mel (many of the stories features older characters) who's working on a farm, tending melons in a greenhouse. Only gradually does Whiteley reveal the complexities of the setup; the catastrophe that causes Mel and her colleagues to be near prisoners, her background and the wrenching choice she was forced to make as things got worse  - and the extent to which she has, since then, been sheltered (though it might not seem like it) from the harsh world outside. But she won't be able to escape reality forever.

In "Many-Eyed Monsters"  the narrator is living an ordinary life until she begins to worry about something truly strange in her body. Initially trying to hide the problem, she's forced to accept that she is creating - or becoming - something new. Moving from unease, and the desire to suppress what is happening, she finds a sense of acceptance and solidarity. This story catches well, I think, the drive to try and contain the strange.

"Three Love Letters from an Unrepeatable Garden" describes not only an "unrepeatable" garden - one that can't be duplicated or, once lost, restored; its creator is gone - but seemingly one of those precious islands of beauty and normality (well, for certain values of "normal") left in a hostile world. That's why it needs protecting and nurturing. But if it's doomed anyway, might it not be justified to just, well, enjoy it before the end? Posing questions about the fragility of beauty and our duty to protect it, this one left me thinking hard.

Corwick, in "Corwick Grows", is one of those elusive islands amidst a wider world, always teasingly distant; the narrator has hunted for it but can't find the place until one day when they stumble into a remote farmhouse. Nothing will ever be the same again for them, or for Corwick - a place that seems to thrive on the imagination of its residents. Combining a calm acceptance of what is happening with a somewhat body-horror aesthetic, "Corwick Grows" suggests that some, at least, of those elusive places may be better left unfound.

"Loves of the Long Dead" takes an imaginative journey from Ancient Egypt to the abyss of the ocean to a modern research lab. When a spirit from the past seeks revenge, she becomes frustrated that time hasn't stood still and that the villain whom she hates no longer exists to suffer. Perhaps a substitute can be found...

In "Reflection, Refraction, Dispersion" the optical terms hint at some sort of visual phenomenon - the Effect - that is ill understood, indeed, whose nature and effects are argued and disagreed over but which seem to be dire (cancer? Suicide?) It is something to which Eliza, the narrator, was subject but about which she seems ambivalent. She does, though, want to understand and perhaps even re-experience it which leads her on a strange quest.

"Farleyton" is another of those islands of wholeness and order amidst a chaotic and sickening world. Many wish to travel there, lured by the stories of its wonders. Told in the voices of various groups - the enclave's guards, a travel agent facilitating migrants, workers seeking good jobs in the place, a girl en route to it - we see jarring and contrasting pictures, hinting that perhaps Farleyton is a different place to each, that perhaps it may not be able to be the same Heaven on Earth for all, that it may have limits, small print and abrupt endings. Trying to assemble a picture from the pieces given here is frustrating, suggesting truths that Whiteley avoids spelling out directly. One of my favourites in this volume.

"Into Glass" is a deeply weird story which opens with the unnamed narrator about to cut her sleeping lover with a scalpel. Only a small cut, the tiniest nick, blood from which she hopes will reveal something wonderful. It is an act that to her is deeply ominous - not just an assault, a violation of consent but a recapitulation of a dark history involving her parents and grandparent. But at the same it's a family inheritance, a gift. What to do? And what will happen? The story ponders the value of love - is it finite, can it be bled away? - as well as secrets. An achingly beautiful and sad story.

"Compel" posits an alien invasion, swift and sudden and complete, but not the normal death-ray wielding tripods, rather a glitch, an anomaly that leaves most humans literally speechless and lost. In face of this, Whiteley's narrator feels some duty to resist, but can only record, gradually losing coherence and the ability to tell what's happening - even as they start to grasp more fully the causes of the catastrophe.

"Chantress" is a fun story revolving around three women, the Chantress of the title, the Enchantress and the Disenchantress. Somehow unmoored from modern society - the Chantress has a mobile phone but signal is poor on the mountain - they seem to be acting out roles in a near fairy-story for the local villagers, but why, and where will it lead? Again, the mundane, human and normal are seen alongside the frankly weird.

"Blessings Erupt" is about Hope, a woman who has some kind of healing gift against the contamination caused in the near future by plastics and toxins. But it's a gift that takes its toll. Hope has the gratitude of so may whom she has saved, but she has become cynical about the whole process; are we to believe that she's now seeing through things to the truth, or has she herself become corrupted? In this story about a life drawing to its close we are also shown Hope's beginnings and left to wonder what version of the future is the truth. A moving and powerful story about community and responsibility.

"Star in the Spire" sees Sammie, travelling alone in the blighted waste of the future, find an oasis, a little patch of life and growth. But it also seems to contain death - there are some gruesome sights described. Whether, though, they represent a catastrophe, or a transformation, is very ambiguous.

In the titular story, "From the Neck Up", Megan is obsessed with decapitation and reality seems to meet her interest, offering a head if not on a platter, then on a bed. But despite being severed it seems to be a head with business of its own and not to be finished, not at all, with life. Veering from comedy as Megan tries to control the situation to a strangely moving depiction of the head's ongoing life, "From the Neck Up" was another of my favourites here, whether it's to be taken literally or as expressing something of Megan's (rather desperate) life and the changes she needs to make in it.

"The Tears of a Building Surveyor, and Other Stories" could be seen as the Walter Mitty-like fantasies of aging Violet - in a chaotic narrative of running away with a "chaperone", joining a nunnery, escaping a massacre and then becoming a clown - if it was not so touchingly and tenderly wrapped around glimpses of Violet's reality, of her life with Tom. The two ways of describing Violet's world are so different, yet so closely linked, that the reader needs, I think, to see them both as true to to unpick what each needs from the other. A beautiful, sad, and funny story.

"To the Farm" explores the potential darker consequences of artificial intelligence and both the limits, and unexpected graces, of love. Another very sad story (or it could be) leading up (as did "Brushwork") to a moment of letting go, of allowing for growth and change.

In the final story, "The Spoils" we return to a community living after some apocalypse (never made clear). They're an underground people, with a ritualised way of dealing with their world illustrated when a great beast - an Olme - is killed and divided between the community. Like a baffled Victorian explorer learning the customs of an unknown people, a lot doesn't make sense, even as it does. Again the story dwells on the different roles and lives of those who receive the body parts of the unfortunate Olme, and we might wonder why there is such a complicated routine here as there is no suggestion for example that they will all eat it. Some explanation is given when a daring member of the group decides to take her share to the surface, but story - both obscure and slightly menacing - leaves a great deal to the reader. A haunting story.

Altogether, there is a lot to think about bin these excellent stories. If you have read her Skein Island or Skyward Inn, you'll recognise some of the atmosphere, and themes, but the exploration of them across different fragments of story adds new depth (and enjoyment).

For more information about the book, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

The Echo Wife
Sarah Gailey
Hodder, 18 February 2021(HB), 8 July 2021(PB)
Available as: HB, 256pp, audio, e 
Source: Audio
ISBN(HB): 9781529354492

I listened to The Echo Wife as audio, completing it in the e-book as I got close to the end. Audio is the ideal medium for Evelyn's spiky, defensive story, Xe Sands' narration conveying the whole range of emotions from anger - so much anger! - to betrayal to grudging sympathy. The narration really takes flight to imply a whole world of unspoken truths festering just under the surface as Evelyn and the others here ignore awkward facts, look the other way, fail to understand things on purpose, and generally evade their way through the moral complexities of this twisty story.

Evelyn is a research scientist, a pioneer in the field of human cloning and especially, of "conditioning" the "specimens" to resemble - and act like - their originals. Gailey's writing is simply astonishing here, employing understatement and na clinical, precise register to show Evelyn and her co-workers apparently happy to accept all this entails: The creation of life.  Its manipulation. Its destruction when it doesn't come up to scratch, or when no longer required. A world of horror and suffering defined away in clipped, clinical language and then tidied away quickly. Evelyn doesn't need to think through the implications because these are simply not humans, are they? They are "specimens".

This isn't the only way in which Evelyn has learned to master her emotions. From her childhood, where she and her mother are at the mercy of a controlling and (it's implied, but never stated overtly) abusive father to her life with husband Nathan (the story opens just after their divorce) there is just so much not said. So much so that the silence, the passivity, actually gets quite LOUD, quite VIOLENT. Evelyn's determined not to be her father, afraid (though she won't admit it) that she will be. After all, wasn't she moulded by him (as she moulds her specimens?)

Questions recur. What makes us, us? What makes us, human? Answers are demanded as Evelyn is forced, after a catastrophe in her life, to cooperate with Martine, Nathan's new partner. Martine is all that Evelyn isn't. 

Compliant.

Obedient.

Demonstrative.

... willing to have a baby. 

Yet she's also, inescapably, a version of Evelyn, Nathan's idealisation of her. Again, what makes us, us? WHO makes us, us? 

Forced, for the sake of survival, to work together, the two women orbit one another, acting as two foci in a dialogue about freewill, humanity, selfhood. All of Evelyn's painfully acquired certainties will be challenged by Martine's sheer existence, her life an argument for other ways of seeing, other ways of being. It's a very claustrophobic piece. Evelyn and Martine - these two women, so different, so similar - endlessly fascinated me as they learned about each other and so, about life.

There are many bumps along the way. This is a world close to ours. It has Evelyn's marvellous cloning tech, but that's the only difference: women's existence, their participation, is still visibly on sufferance. (Evelyn knows she has to be better than any man, and resents manbaby Nathan, sloppy Nathan who never pays attention to his work and yet gets away with it.) There is the doctor who doesn't ask questions when a young girl is brought in with a broken wrist. There is the sense that, as Evelyn sees it, it's her, as a woman, who has the responsibility of organising everything for Nathan, of making plans and making things work - and then he goes and sulks because she burnt the eggs! 

For Evelyn, everything is about her legacy, her need to excel. We might wonder who, in her past, she is trying to impress? And just how far she will go, what she has to achieve, to do that? And who might get hurt?

There is just so much here, whether you see this as a classic SF novel - Evelyn an even more modern Prometheus, perhaps - as a study of living, of becoming, as a grim account of dominance and abuse or, possibly, as half a dozen other things. It is absorbing, accomplished, very sad in places and, in all, a terrific read. 

For more information about The Echo Wife, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Cover design by Lesley Worrell

Certain Dark Things
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Jo Fletcher Books, 7 September 2021
Available as: HB, 254pp, e, audio
ISBN:(HB): 9781529415605

I'm grateful to Jo Fletcher Books for an advance copy of Certain Dark Things to consider for review, and for inviting me to take place in the Social Media Blast accompanying publication.

Offering a truly original take on the vampire myth, Moreno-Garcia's republished novel Certain Dark Things imagines a world where the existence of vampires became known in the 1960s, leading different countries and cities to take different attitudes to them. Spain and Portugal were hostile, creating a wave of vampire emigration to more tolerant Mexico - however, Mexico City has been declared "vampire free' making existence there difficult for them. Moreover, in this world there are a variety of vampire subspecies, the native Mexican one being rather different form these European variants. In the resulting chaos and conflict, vampire politics and custom therefore plays a big part and makes it harder for All, fleeing the murder of her family, to find safety from her enemies.

Atl is as different as you can imagine from the traditional European aristocrat in a cloak with a castle in the mountains. Her ancestors were priestesses of the war goddess, fallen on harder times since the coming of colonialism but rising somewhat in fortune on the back of the drugs trade - until the arrival, again, of more ruthless Godoy vampire clan from Europe. But there's more to it than that. All is a spoiled younger daughter, not destined to lead her family and caught up in what is basically a gang war without the experience or, you might think, the common sense to survive. But she has two things on her side: a fierce desire for revenge, and Cualli, her fearless dog.

She has something else, as well, though it is not always welcome: the fascination, and growing devotion, of a human boy, Domingo, a homeless garbage-collector who lives in the tunnels under the city and dreams of the world he seems in his comic books. Of course this includes vampires, stories about which are popular in this world as in ours, and just as sensationalist. Perhaps Domingo's interest is initially piqued by curiosity, but he quickly becomes fascinated by Atl and by the dangerous world she inhabits, offering her what help he can. But he's no match for arrogant young Nick Godoy, or even for the human thugs who attend him. It seems a very uneven match, even before experienced vampire-hunting policewoman Ana takes an interest in the exponentially rising body-count on her doorstep.

All of this makes for an exciting, pacey and absorbing story taking place among the pulsing night clubs and neon-lit streets of modern Mexico City. Moreno-Garcia takes aim at some hoary myths about vampires while deftly constructing her own counter-mythology, taking account both of the colonial background of Mexico and of vampire tales and stories from other parts of the world. It is above all intelligent and believable, if you're willing to accept the premise of vampires, making the personal dilemmas of Atl and Domingo that much truer and sharper. 

Atl could consume Domingo. She needs to do so. She has killed before. So what is holding her back?

Domingo should run, putting as much space between him and Atl as he can. Why won't he?

Yes, there is a thread of romance here but it's complicated, illicit, taboo in vampire society. But Atl doesn't have much of that left. her family has been destroyed and Mexico City is pretty empty of allies. So she's pushed back on her own resources, needing to work out for herself what is right, what is necessary, both to survive and to be able to live with herself. It's no easier for Domingo, a resourceful young man who has already survived in a harsh world but is also in many respects näive and sheltered. 

Best of all (for the reader, not for Atl and Domingo) time is very short with enemies closing in and few places to hide. So whatever Atl and Domingo are going to do, they'd better do it quickly...

As a read, Certain Dark Things is exciting, tender, complex and always fun. I'd strongly recommend.

For more information about Certain Dark Things, see the publisher's website here - and remember to visit the participants in the Social Media Blast listed on the poster below. You can buy Certain Dark Things from your local bookshop or online from Bookshop dot org UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

 

#Review - The Art of Space Travel and other stories by Nina Allan

Type by Julia Lloyd
Image by Vince Haig

The Art of Space Travel and other stories
Nina Allan
Titan Books, 7 September 2021
Available as: PB, 464pp, e
Source: Advance PB copy
ISBN(PB): 9781789091755

I am grateful to Titan Books for a free advance copy of The Art of Space Travel to consider for review.

I'm always delighted to see a book by Nina Allan coming and The Art of Space Travel is a real blessing, collecting some fifteen years of her wonderful, closely examines, weird(ish) short stories. I really enjoy an authors' short story collection - it gives a glimpse into a body of their work, highlighting themes and concerns you might miss in a single story, even in a single novel. These fourteen stories give access to a backstage world, weaving together themes of art (music, film, painting), space travel (of course - but seen from the ground, according to those left behind), environmental collapse, encounters with the Other and alternate outcomes, sometimes dramatised by pairs of stories. So, one will read about the characters; see them off, as it were; have an opportunity to imaging what might have happened next; and then encounter them - directly or indirectly - in a later story, which gives a version of their fate, though necessarily, only one possible version of many. 

Amethyst is told in hindsight, the narrator recalling her childhood friend Angela from the days when they were growing up in an unnamed shabby seaside town. The town is interpreted through the lyrics of a local folk-rock group, Amethyst,  who sang of a  'Moon landing down on Silas Street' - setting up the story for an investigation of Silas Street and a connection to an incident which breaks up Angela's family.  This is an intriguing story, full of mood and possibility.

Heroes also tells us about growing up - Fin lives in a Sheffield suburb, liminal both in being outside the ring road and also potentially subject to future development. His fragmented family are on the fringes of the story, its centre being his friend Marten, a pigeon racing enthusiast with a mysterious past dramatised by the strange contents of his house and his relationship with the outsider nicknamed 'Bismarck'. Again, there are threads of possibility here and hints of a wider picture that we're left to imagine.

The idea of nestled stories within stories recurs a lot in Allan's writing (including novels) and A Thread of Truth uses the technique perfectly, following a young man, Adam, as he overcomes his fear of spiders. In so doing he meets the mysterious Jennie, who tells a ghost story in a remote house in Suffolk. That story itself is perfectly framed and teasingly vague as to its age and setting: could it refer to Jennie's forebears? To her? (A Thread of Truth, like several of stories here, also has a key moment focusing on a crack in a wall or the ground...)

Flying in the Face of God is about space travel, or rather about those left behind. Anita's best friend Rachel is undergoing the preparation for space travel. It's never said outright, but it is clear this is a one way trip, or at least that any return will only be in decades or centuries. The preparation is personally transformative and hard to bear both for those taking part and their family and friends. Anita explores her feelings about it, drawing on insights from Rachel, from her own grandmother and letters and notes left by her own mother, who died when an earlier iteration of the space launch was sabotaged (something referred to elsewhere in Allan's stories, I think!)

Flying in the Face of God seems to be set in a world suffering climate change - a pool outside the school Anita attended seems to have dried up in the drought - and a similar motif appears in Microcosmos where a family (mum Bella, dad Doug, daughter Melodie) are driving for hours to meet a mysterious relative. It's sweltering - forty degrees in the car - and on arrival they find Ballantine's house near a dried up lake. There is a sense of mystery and menace hanging over things - while Ballantine seems to be regarded as undesirable, they're still trying to persuade him to come back with them where it's 'safe'. Yet Bella doesn't trust Ballantine at all. It's something to do with the research he's carrying to in his remote cottage, but we never learn what that is. It's lucky she doesn't know he showed Ballantine how to use his microscope to spot the tiny creatures in a drop of water, or that he gave her a letter to pass on to Aunt Chantal... that letter hangs, a secret, in the last line of the story. We don't know if it will be delivered, or when, it's a message in a bottle, cast away to the future...

I really, really loved Fairy Skulls, a nice little story in which Vinnie's girlfriend persuades her to spend her inheritance from Aunt Jude on a tumbledown cottage in the wild country south of London and then brakes up with her. Faced with no alternative, Vinnie goes ahead with the move then finds something peculiar living in the cupboard under the stairs. I liked the matter-of-fact way that Vinnie accepts and deals with her problem; the delicate balance between potential "Borrowers" style whimsy and something more menacing (those things bite!) and the hints that Auntie may have been involved in some very strange, not to say gruesome, goings on. 

The Science of Chance is set, like other of Allan's stories, in Russia, or perhaps I should say an ex Soviet Republic with overtones of Russia? It's an alternate timeline where the 60s went differently. There was a nuclear strike, to begin with, but also a different politics, teased but not given in detail - a mark of these stories, which often tiptoe round the big things, focusing instead on their impact on ordinary people. Here, policewoman Nellie, who's trying to identify a non-verbal and apparently lost young girl discovered at the local railway station. A very straightforward story, yet one which eventually leads to a choice between two explanations - one potentially very weird indeed, linking the story in to unnerving vistas of the potentially fantastical, the other, much less strange. And on the way Allan takes us through fascinating permutations of personalities, lives and histories - which absorb from start to finish. As so often in this book, the everyday seems to arise from something stranger, bigger, deeper rooted. 

Marielena has a similar atmosphere. In an unnamed English city (possibly London, but I wasn't sure), Noah, a refugee from a distant country where politics has made him unwelcome, survives amidst the cruelties of the hostile environment. It's an impoverished life - not only in financial terms but even more in the sense of being observed, resented, on sufferance, suspected - but he gets by, communing somehow with the mysterious Marielena, until the day he takes pity on an even more unfortunate person, the homeless Mary, who is being persecuted by a gang of youths. From that act comes a knowing, an understanding of wider things that places the story in a distinctly fantastical context. But Allan, having set that scene, steps back. The story ends where it ends, with us aware that there may be tremendous events coming that may concern both Mary and Marielena, but that Noah's reality stays as it is.

The Art of Space Travel, after which the collection is named, perhaps echoes Flying in the Face of God, being another story where space travel is happening - or being attempted - elsewhere, but the concerns of the main protagonists are more domestic, more personal. Emily is Head of Housekeeping at the Edison Star Hotel, Heathrow, her life being lived between mother Moolie, succumbing to early onset dementia in her home nearby, and manager Benny, currently stressed by two VIP guests, astronauts from said space programme. There's a thread of conspiracy (Moolie's condition possibly having been brought on by exposure to contamination from an air accident whose investigation she was part of) but in the 2070s this is left mysterious, it's not a driver of plot leading to a revelation. Rather the personal relationships, amidst hints of wider history, are the focus of the story.

Neptune's Trident takes place in a world where a series of catastrophes has been blamed on some kind of intrusion into electronic systems, leading to 'the clampdown', an attempt to take back control from whatever alien influence was lurking. It's not working, though, and as Caitlin hopes against hope that her brother Morrie, lost with his submarine, will return, she sees things slide, her friend Steph succumbing to a mysterious illness. It's an uneasy, liminal story, showing humanity teetering on the brink of something, but exactly what - I wasn't sure.

Four Abstracts follows up one of the earlier stories in the book (I won't say which - it might take away the fun!) Isobel is trying to come to terms with the death of her artist friend Beck at a comparatively young age from a hereditary condition. (Women struck by disease or accident are a bit of a theme in this collection.) Exploring Beck's life and art and also, the mystery of why and how she died, Four Abstracts both draws on, and casts further light on, its partner story, giving a glimpse into a wider (and weirder) world than either alone.

The Common Tongue, the Present Tense, the Known is also a partner story, following up on Microcosmos. We see Melodie as an adult, having been sent as a teenager to live with 'the Severins in Strasbourg' in the face of growing environmental catastrophe. She has only faint memories of her parents (so in a sense, we know more, from the earlier story) but is still fixated on Ballantine whose lesson with that microscope shaped her career. There are answers given here to some of the puzzles from the earlier story, but new questions arise.

The Gift of Angels: an Introduction is a deliciously clever story, focussed on a writer of science fiction stories, the September Queen books, set on an itinerant space freighter. They are inspired by the fact that the writer, Vincent Colbert, is the son of the astronaut Jocelyn Tooker, mentioned in The Art of Space Travel as one of the crew on a one-way mission to Mars. That story referred in passing to the unfair judgement being cast at a mother leaving her young son behind but not to fathers doing the same, but in a sense The Gift of Angels explores precisely that gap: Vincent was brought up by his less than adequate father and The Gift seemed to me to be in many ways about that loss, that abandonment. Set in Paris where his parents met, it sees Vincent come to terms with the need to write about his mother, but there is much more there than that - like so may other stories in this book it muses on the place of art, (both Vincent's writing and the 1960s French SF film La Jetée, whose themes and history the story keeps returning to). A moving and intricate story.

The final story, A Princess of Mars: Svetlana Belkina and Tarkovsky's lost movie Aelita is the newest in the collection and genuinely blurs the line between reality and fiction - narrated by an "I" who might very well be Allan herself, it exudes a deep knowledge, and skill in analysing, 20th century SF and in particularly, Soviet SF films - being focussed in particular on the history of a never-was Tarkovsky movie, Aelita. I think that's where we cross the line into fiction, signalled by a reference to the narrator being in Paris 'to promote the September King'(!) - other than that, they are seen indirectly, mainly through glimpses of a lifetime engaging with those films, starting on a dream Saturday afternoon in the 70s or 80s when the only alternative on TV was Grandstand. Nevertheless, it's an affecting portrait of a life, illuminated by insights about the place of creators and the difference between them and their art which - in dialogue with the eponymous actress - develops into a real focus for this story.

I found this a really strong collection. There is a sort of thematic space allowed by fourteen stories and dozens of characters - by possibly alternate versions of the same timelines, by dialogue between different points of view, often separated by decades. It's a book that had me flipping backwards and forwards, checking ideas about how the stories were related and comparing the outlooks of the various protagonists. 

I'd strongly recommend.

For more information about The Art of Space Travel, see the Titan Books website here.

#Review - Radio Life by Derek B Miller

Radio Life
Derek B Miller
Jo Fletcher Books, 21 January 2021 (HB), 2 September 2021 (PB)

Available as: HB, PB, 477pp, audio, e

Source: Advance HB copy 

ISBN(PB): 9781529408614

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance copy of Radio Life to consider for review.

There's a lot I could say about Radio Life. Beginning with the basics, we are firmly in post-apocalyptic territory, though not a hopelessly bleak form of that as there is some organisation, there is trade, one may make a way of life. Some four hundred years from now (no-one is really sure, it was a pretty thorough apocalypse) a community calling itself The Commonwealth survives in the west of what is now the USA. Occupying the stadium from an Olympic Games held towards the end of the 21st century, they see themselves as seekers after the lost knowledge of "The Ancients", sending out "runners" and "raiders" to scavenge what they can from the ruins of the "Lost World". They store up knowledge in Archives, and work to understand what they've found - from musical scores to cryptic, and dead, electronics. The process of analysing these, lacking even basic knowledge, can seem bizarre, with both broad, top-down generalisations and shrewdly observed, detailed analysis.

Pitted against the Commonwealth are the Keepers, mysterious newcomers who believe that the old world is best left to itself. Surely it's dangerous to explore too far ('Trying to make the world better is what killed the Ancients') since this would only lead to a repeat of the earlier collapse - from which, this time, humanity might not survive?

The story is seen mostly through the eyes of Commonwealth people (citizens? members?) 

There is Elimisha, a young Runner on a routine journey across the towers of the Lost World who stumbles into danger - and upon a treasure that no-one knew existed.

Lilly, in her 70s, who is one of the greatest thinkers of the Commonwealth - indeed, her discoveries led to its system for categorising all knowledge under six headings: Geography, Entertainment, History,  Arts and Literature, Science and Nature, and Sports and Leisure

Teenage Alessandra is the daughter of Graham and Henry, husband and wife and the Commonwealth's two most celebrated Raiders (at the start of the book they return to the Stadium having found Knowledge under all six headings - an almost unparalleled feat). The dynamic between these three is central to the book: Henry and Graham's deep understanding of and communion with each other, their love for each other coupled with recognition of where their service with the Commonwealth might lead, Alessandra's urge to match them. 

It's Alessandra and Elimisha who perhaps most exemplify the Commonwealth's view of what it is and how it should be: stumbling on an incredible treasure of Knowledge ('Trove'), Elimisha quickly fixes her response to that in Commonwealth Protocols centred on the need, above all, to retrieve it and to protect it from others. This is now the central Archive of the Commonwealth and she is its Chief.

However, Elimisha is isolated, injured and trapped and can do nothing else but begin to analyse the information she has found, learning so much more about the world than any of her people, and inevitably meeting moral dilemmas in doing that. Throughout this book, I felt that Miller's depiction of the societies here - and in particular the Commonwealth - as being shaped, or perhaps I should say limited, by the information they held, was one of its great strengths. 

Take warfare, for example. In the course of this story, the Commonwealth goes to war, and understandably their attitude and approach to this is shaped by the texts they have available, by what information randomly came down to them from Before: descriptions of Hannibal's campaigns, and Thucydides' histories, apparently some limited knowledge about various Twentieth Century wars (but as we will see from Elimisha's horror when as he learns more of the truth, this is very partial). Isolated from any tradition of scholarship or commentary, will these undeniably very bright people make anything useful of that knowledge or will it mislead and confuse them? 

Similarly, when we come to the larger question apparently posed in this book - the great difference between Commonwealth and Keepers over whether to hunt for old knowledge or let it die - both factions are passionate about their point of view, but also very limited by not knowing what led to the catastrophe. It's hard to accord their dispute much respect when it is all based on speculation and generalities, but Miller helps us here by dropping the answer relatively early on, so we soon know the immediate cause. That might make the reader rather lose sympathy with one faction here, but it shouldn't - there is actually more going on in Radio Life than a simple conflict between an enlightened, civilising group and a bunch of destructive nihilists. To hint at this without being too spoilery: both of the societies here are limited by what they don't know, by what they don't see. Both are cramped by the biased and partial nature of what they do know. But isn't that always the way, for humanity? Isn't it just as true for us? What might we be missing which - in Miller's imagination - could lead us over the edge?

This is a very thoughtful, philosophical book, no less so for its arguments being dramatised in the conflict between the two societies and also in the internal politics of the Commonwealth (where firebrand Lilly often rails against the organisation and personnel she helped shape). Questions abound. Is all knowledge equally worthwhile? Are there truths which should be hidden, forgotten, or even suppressed? How to compare the value of a beautiful flower and a musical masterpiece? Which is more important? Can a society flourish if built on lies? 

Miller makes all these, and more, into important, alive and, above all, open questions (the answers found by the protagonists being partial, provisional and possibly wrong). 

The book is gloriously readable from its opening sentence ('Two riders trace the ridge of the sand sea, miles from the Commonwealth and the protecting walls of the Stadium') to the very end ('"Begin the Crossing" she says') and deeply involving - you care what happens to these people and their society! To that end, Miller hurls ideas, arguments and action at the reader, such an abundance of all three that I could imagine other writers deciding to make this a trilogy. There is one particular section, describing, in a few pages, epic events over a period of two years, which could have been a book itself, but rightly wasn't, I think. While more detail of what happens would be fun to read, the direction, the hard choices and the sacrifices have been made before this point, and they are what matters. The sheer density of material - the maelstrom of ideas we're exposed to - is part of the joy and challenge of Radio Life, and I loved it. I just loved it.

For more information about radio Life, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - All the Names Given by Raymond Antrobus

Artwork and design by
Phoebe Boswell

All the Names Given 
Raymond Antrobus
Picador, 2 September 2021
Available as: PB, 96pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy 
ISBN(PB): 9781529059502

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance copy of All the Names Given to consider for review.

Raymond Antrobus's new collection of poems follows up on The Perseverance, which I reviewed a couple of years ago when it was nominated for The Times Young Writer of the Year award (I was one of the judges for the award's Shadow Panel).

Some of the themes explored in All the Names Given - identity, (dis)ability, family - are similar, but there are also big differences. I felt that in reading All the Names Given, I wasn't actually experiencing a collection so much as a single whole work. A structural feature here underlies that - the separate poems are integrated by their own [Caption Poems], material which serves to comment on and support the transitions between the poems and sometimes even to invade them, introducing another voice alongside the poem itself. This idea, which Antrobus explains is inspired by the work of Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, both adds to the effect of the poems and calls attention to aspects of the collection, either setting up the reader for what is to come ('[sound of mirrors breaking inside mirrors]') or providing some formal space to absorb and reflect on what has just gone ('[             ]'). 

For me, it made reading the collection resemble the experience of a piece of classical music, with various themes and emotions evolving on different levels and different timescales both within single poems and through the book as a whole.

More important, perhaps, is that the themes and the form of the poems maps a sort of journey. The book opens with a welcome in the form of a caption '[sound of mouth and arms opening]' setting us up for a beginning, a thankful beginning 

'Give thanks to the wheels touching tarmac at JFK

Give thanks to the latches, handles, what we squeeze...

Give thanks to your name, Antrobus, to landings

and beginnings, your soul needs time to arrive.'

This untitled opening poem is one of several touching on the poet's name (from his English mother, referring to a village in Cheshire, actually not far from where I grew up). It's immediately paired in the book with respects paid to his Jamaican father in a dream conversation, 'The Acceptance', which calls to mind the title of the earlier collection 'The Perseverance'). There follows an account of visiting Antrobus itself - the pub, the Big House - in 'Antrobus or Land of Angels', a poem with so many gloriously quotable lines from it opening

'I can be fiendish, I can't be English, say ghosts'

to the wary response of the landlord in the pub

'The barman's eyes in the Antrobus Arms

become sharp gates when I claim to to be English'

To a defiant assertion of belonging - or at least origin

'My mother, born here

My grandfather, the local preacher'

to an immediate confusion

'Oh, well then, welcome, he says, or land your angels

(There are enigmas in my deafness).'

continuing to a joining-up of the two sides of Antrobus's heritage (the poet and the place

'Sir Edmund Antrobus, (3rd baronet)

slaver, beloved father

over-seer, owner of plantations

in Jamaica, British Guiana and St Kitts.'

(In a later poem we learn that the 4th baronet literally owned Stonehenge, this in a poem about Antrobus's grandmother ending with the moving lines

'how lasting their voices

inside us. How deeply known.')

I think that to get the best effect (or perhaps I should say the complete effect) from this book, you should read it through in one sitting, experiencing the poems as set out with their commentary, rather than dipping into it, the poems are still, read singly, starkly moving experiences and 'Antrobus or Land of Angels' is a gorgeous example, balancing or at least presenting so many contradictions. It's followed immediately by 'Language Signs' with further thoughts on that grandfather, that father ('How do I bring back men who couldn't speak, men lost in books, drinks, graves?') 

The closeness of these two poems is emphasised by another caption '[sound of connection across time]' leading into another praise poem 'On Touch'

'Salute the touches of teachers

dentists and therapists who untangle us...'

followed in succession by 'Her taste' (a nice association!) pondering Antrobus's mother's preference in men and then, in 'Text and image' the first introduction of Tabitha, who plays a greater and greater part in these poems. 'Text and Image' (the first one, on p14) is a sweet (in a good way) and slightly desperate love poem

'Tabitha; y haven't u told me u luv me

Raymond; I'm literally writing you love poems...'

(There is another 'Text and Image' (p33) which picks up the theme of being in a cinema - this time, in a dream, Raymond speaking - possibly answered by Tabitha ('Text and Image', p53) the visual element not being the painting she's working on.)

The story (is it a story? I think it's a story) then has a kind of back and to between thoughts own Antrobus's mother and his grandmother, his mother's comments on her scrapbook giving scenes form what sounds like a very full life, the thoughts on his grandmother taking a darker turn as it seems she and his father didn't get on: Tabitha's horrified reaction while 'sitting by the Mississippi', Antrobus's wondering where the story really starts - with which of the ancestors or trains of circumstance leading to now?

I am, I think, in danger of giving a running commentary on All the Names Given, or displaying a collection of bits and pieces, either of which would do a read disservice to this remarkable book and the lucid, taut language in which Antrobus expresses himself. Partly that's because having read, and re-read it, and reading it again as I write this review, I keep discovering marvellous new things and wanting to say "look!" 

Tabitha, art conservator, viewing with Antrobus an 1860 painting (by another Antrobus) 'Plantation Burial' and explaining the 'several kinds of black' used in it. His father's 'heartless sense of humour' which he believes he has inherited. Very personal episodes, when Antrobus comments on the risky and marginal lives of other Black and Deaf people, and a close escape with the police (he couldn't hear what they wanted).

The book is full of gems, moments of realisation, moments when Antrobus so skilfully makes us see (hear) - those captions used so subtly to set the mood or, in a couple of places, defiantly seize the page like protesters storming a stage ('The Royal Opera House (with Stage Captions)' is a wonderful poem whether as a standalone or as part of the wider story, as is the poem that follows it 'Horror Scenes as Black English Royal (Captioned)')

More, behind this, there is so much life here. Mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, explorations of what it is to be a son, courtship, a wedding, all seen with clarity, the book's captioning and story-ness allowing the same things to be on view from many different directions, complementing the complicated, contested and wonderfully human identities being examined and experienced. 

I think All the Names Given is even better than The Perseverance (which is itself very, very good) and I'd strongly recommend it.

For more information about All the Names Given, see the publisher's website here.

About Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus was born in London, Hackney to an English mother and Jamaican father, he is the author of To Sweeten Bitter and The Perseverance. In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre.

He is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, The Complete Works 3 and Jerwood

Compton. He is also one of the world's first recipients of an MA in Spoken Word education from Goldsmiths University. 

Other accolades include the Ted Hughes award, PBS Winter Choice, A Sunday Times Young Writer of the year award, The Guardian Poetry Book Of The Year 2018, as well as a shortlist for the Griffin Prize and Forward Prize. In 2018 he was awarded The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize (Judged by Ocean Vuong) for his poem 'Sound Machine'. Also in 2019, his poem ‘Jamaican British’ was added to the GCSE syllabus.

#BlogTour #Review - Black Reed Bay by Rod Reynolds

Black Reed Bay (Detective Casey Wray, 1)
Rod Reynolds
Orenda Books, 1 September 2021
Available as: PB, 367pp, e

ISBN(PB): 9781913193676
Source: Advance copy

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for an advance copy of Black Reed Bay to consider for review and to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in the book's blogtour which begins today, 1 September.

In Black Reed Bay, Rod Reynolds delivers a tricksy, atmospheric dark crime drama focusing on cop Casey Wray, a detective sergeant who - while the Job does eat her up - isn't the beached, desperate  stereotype of much detective fiction. Casey loves her work, is good at it, honest, hard working and seen as something of a star - having come into a sexist and backwards department, risen, reshaped the world around her and moved things forward.

Wray is a likeable and sympathetic central character. Her personality and attitude are conveyed in her thorough and determined attitude to a tricky case, that of missing Tina Grace. Tina called 911 late one night from swanky Ramona Beach, an enclave on one of the coastal barrier islands in New York State. She subsequently disappeared. Concern over Tina's whereabouts mounts when her cellphone goes dark and local residents' accounts of what they saw and heard that night contradict. In response, Casey gets stuck in, chasing down every lead, pressing for more resources and gradually - very gradually - unpeeling a disturbing backstory to Tina's, suggesting she may have been walking a dangerous path.

Oh, and Casey finds bodies. Lots of bodies.

I loved this book. The backchat between Casey and her partner Cullen is sharp, flitting between work and salacious gossip, their partnership complex and trusting. Casey's relationship with Lt Carletti, who's something of a mentor to her, is also complex - one senses something more could come of it but neither is making a move yet. And the atmosphere is thick, whether we're the spiteful, eerie marshlands separating the islands from the main, the isolated mansions of the self-regarding wealthy or the down-at-heel, hollowed out suburbs where the less fortunate live.

As is traditional in a police thriller, Casey is a guide, a sort of Virgil leading us through the various levels of this Inferno and interpreting it to us - her reactions showing us who is to be pitied, who to be trusted, who we should be wary of. (She doesn't always get it right). But perhaps that's not quite right because, at the same time, she's more than a guide, she's a player in a game whose rules we don't quite understand. It seems that, whatever happened to Tina, it wasn't isolated, it's part of a wider pattern and one that seems to be drawing Casey in. 

Black Reed Bay is, as I'd expect from Rod Reynolds, a complex, satisfying mystery with enough twists and turns to keep the reader guessing - but not so many as to be gratuitous. Most of all, by the time a shocking turnaround happens, we know everybody involved well enough to feel the force of events. What goes on here seem real, and I cared about it, and those caught up in it. Casey has some dark moments, especially in the final part of the book, and by then we understand just what they mean to her and what they have taken out of her.

Recommended for crime and thriller fans, those who just love a good read, and anyone caught up in Reynolds' previous books, especially Blood Red City.

For more about Black Reed Bay, see the Orenda Books website here - and also the stops on the blogtour, all listed on the poster below. You can buy Black Reed Bay from your local bookshop, or order online from Bookshop dot com UK, from Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.