#Review - Loki by Melvin Burgess

Loki
Melvin Burgess
Coronet, 17 November 2022
Available as: HB, 262pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN: 9781399701525

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

I am fascinated by mythology. The stories of ancient gods and heroes seem to have a staying power that has outlasted belief in them. Endlessly invented and reinvented, they clearly remain relevant today, immensely popular and indeed seem to be having a bit of a moment now, especially through feminist versions and as here, those which re-evaluate the villains of the pantheons. 

Villains are SO much more interesting than heroes, and Loki is a fascinating example, who's been under close scrutiny of late. Burgess's retelling takes that further, not just giving Loki's estimation of himself but also presenting the stories of Asgard, of Thor, Odin and Freya, from the trickster god's perspective. It's an interesting, not to say at times eye-popping experience. Like (I suspect) many people in the UK, my first encounters with the classic Greek and Norse myths were as a child, via retellings by Roger Lancelyn Green, versions designed to be OK for children and therefore missing out some of the more earthy aspects. In contrast Loki leaves little out, making full use of the mischievous god's full range. He (at times she) is one of the more entertaining and interesting mythical characters, allowing Burgess to fuse the separate Norse myths and legends and create a thematically satisfying narrative. That makes Loki a fluid and engaging read, rather than just a collection of episodes.

The setup here is that we - as modern humans - are being told this story by Loki from his deep prison. Like a celebrity giving an interview following a tabloid storm, he wants to put his side of things, to set the record straight. He's been traduced by the Asgard spin machine, his good deeds edited out, his crimes twisted and magnified. Loki acknowledges himself as a liar (indeed, the inventor of the lie) but promises that, this time, we're getting the truth. And a great deal of the story is uncomplimentary enough to him that we might accept this, although it's also, perhaps, a story spun and pitched to meet our modern sensibilities, showing Loki as the one who preached love, who always counselled peace, who urged (and performed) diversity and tolerance. We may therefore think we are being spun a tale, that he wants something from us. And indeed, as it eventually turns out, he does, though we're assured that is something that will benefit us, in the end. 

I'm not sure whether this is meant by Burgess to be a depiction of Loki as a being with a supreme ability to distort the truth, or as a genuinely wronged figure in the narrative that's presented. You will have to read the book and judge.

That reading was for me a fun and enthralling experience, the Norse myths being dismantled and reassembled with a very modern sensibility. Indeed some of the overtly "religiously" aspects are presented in what was for me, as a Christian, a very suggestive way - clearly, for all his confinement, Loki has a good knowledge of the modern work. Take for example Thor's passion, dying nailed to a tree before descending to the Underworld and arising again, bearing the scars of his experience. This was a very horrifying, but also moving, account, as much so for me as any Easter passion. Other elements touch on the modern understanding of gender fluidity, with one of the gods (I won't say who, because spoilers) challenging the rigid, patriarchal regime of Thor and Odin with their developing understanding of their own identity. 

Throughout, Loki takes pains to draw himself as the good guy, standing against the authoritarianism of Asgard and for freedom of conscience. He has been misunderstood, he seems to be saying, and the bad things attributed to him are often things that would have happened anyway, or else he was simply carrying out orders for the rest of the gods, and obviously regrets what happened - but what's done is done. 

That slipperiness makes Loki, for all the modern enjoyment of a morally grey character, hard, in the end, to actually like. We can empathise with him, yes, especially when some really awful things happen to him, but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say he is morally conflicted - Loki is always guided at the time, when push comes to shove, by what's best for Loki, even if he expresses sadness after. Mistakes were made, he seems to be saying, but it wasn't, really, my choice.

Overall, this is an exciting and deeply readable retelling. Loki himself is a complex and shrewd narrator whose role is framed with just enough meta-ness to make what he tells us relevant today, rather than being lost in a vaguely medieval Never-Never land. (References to razor-wire defences in Asgard and the like crop up, not as anachronisms but deliberate placings to show us this a story of the now, not the long-ago). It's therefore thought-provoking, but the nature of the central character is such that it's hard to relax with him, so to speak. Perhaps that's the point?

For more information about Loki, see the publisher's website here. Or you could read Runalong Womble's excellent take here.

#Review - The Hollows by Daniel Church

The Hollows
Daniel Church
Angry Robot, 8 November 2022
Available as: PB, 460pp, audio, e  
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781915202383

I'm grateful to Angry Robot for sending me a copy of The Hollows to consider for review.

What. A. Book!

The Hollows takes us to the remote Peak District town of Barsall as midwinter appraoches. For non UK readers, the Peak District is a hilly part of England that is often cut off by snow in winter, a region of beautiful countryside, remote farms and isolated inns.

The author makes full use of that remoteness. As the darkest time of the year approaches, folk horror merges with cosmic horror to create a unique threat which Barsall's resident police constable, Ellie Cheetham, must take on with no backup or support. All communications cut off and with perplexing hints that the terror she confronts may spread wider than just her own town, Ellie is stretched to the limits. And the threat isn't all supernatural, there is one very formidable, very antisocial family in Barsall that regards the season as an opportunity to put itself first - and settle some scores.

I loved the Hollows. It scores highly in so many ways. There are hints of what is to come, and desperate attempt to understand the threat. There's a grimly determined woman at the heart of it all, absolutely set on doing her duty to uphold the peace and protect the vulnerable. There are desperate fights and heartbreaking loss (warning - and I make no apology for spoilers - dogs are involved). There is a satisfying historical mystery aspect that accounts for what's happening. Above all, there's a race against time as it becomes clear what is at stake.

But it's not just all those themes. The writing here is just so tactile and satisfying, blending the high fantastical - glimpses of monsters through the drive snow, cryptic runes, accounts of horror in ancient church records - with the mundane - the personal tragedy that brought Ellie to Barsall, the more or less trustworthy backgrounds of the townsfolk who she will have to depend on, her friendships with Milly, the local doctor and with the no-nonsense vicar who spends her afternoons in the pub drinking whisky and reading paranormal romance. Church is able to turn the story on a sixpence, taking us in a moment from the cosiness of an empty bar, the fire banking down, a single lamp lit, and a glass of whisky on the table to a jarring, utterly incomprehensible threat; or from banter between work colleagues to a threatening house full off potential killers - which nonetheless contains a vulnerable child. He's equally good at conveying the terror of being in a white-out blizzard to the weirdness of a cave system stocked with... no, I won't go there. Spoilers!

I loved how in this book we go from the mode of a normal police procedural - a body is discovered on the hillside, the doctor summoned, photographs taken - to the eruption of the uncanny, via a rising need for improvisation, a rising sense of threat, from a frenzied car chase on bad winter roads to a jealous confrontation, the human inextricably mixed with the monstrous. The book never rests, never gives a moment for the reader to gather their thoughts, before moving us on to another situation, another high-stakes gamble with enemies alternately very human and very alien.

A thoroughly good read, ideal for the cold, dark, nights.

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

#Blogtour #Review - Suicide Thursday by Will Carver

Suicide Thursday
Will Carver
Orenda Books, 24 November 2022
Available as: PB, 276pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781914585388

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for sending me a copy of Suicide Thursday to consider for review, and to Anne at Random Things Tours for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Oh this is a wickedly sharp little book. Take care how you handle it or you may end up bleeding.

In Suicide Thursday, Will Carver returns to a familiar theme of his recent books - the clue is in the title, so the reader should consider themselves fairly warned, it won't be for all. And in this book, I think the subject is handled in an even more personal and, well, creepy vein than he has yet, hard though that may be to believe if you've read Nothing Important Happened Today or The Daves Next Door.

In Suicide Thursday there's no sinister grand scheme for glory, no greater cause, to direct the action. The story is pared down, simple and stark. Three friends, Eli, Mike and Jackie.

Eli is a sort-of failed writer. He churns out first chapters, but is unable to take his books any further. Comfortably off, but not so much that can afford to leave his cubicle-bound job in marketing, he buys an abandoned bagel workshop in trendy North London and sets up his library of first chapters, available for purchase to those who can't get started. By day, he endures the tedium of office life. By night, he unloads his frustrations each night to a therapist. Who doesn't exist.

Jackie, Eli's girlfriend, is by turns haunted by Catholic guilt at her strong sex drive, which drives her to regular Confession, busy indulging that drive with Eli (mostly), and concerned for her friends Eli and Mike.

Mike is... well, Mike is unemployed and spends his life sanding and polishing the floor of his flat.

The book includes Mike's and Jackie's perspectives, and we also see some other points of view and some mysterious and unsettling text messages, but Eli is at the centre of things. 

I think it would be fair to say that Eli is trying to make his life more meaningful. His chapters reflect aspects of his own life (often, very funnily). Conversely he frets and fusses over whether his actual life is following narrative logic, and whether he ought to nudge it so it does. Ought he, for example, to break up with Jackie so that a reconciliation can come in Act 3? Eli hungrily eyes up women who could facilitate that, with little success.

Jackie sees things through a different, simpler narrative lens - one involving potential wedding bells and a relaxation of her crushing guilt.

And Mike... well, Mike sands his floor.

The three weave their dance, the story moving forward and back around that Suicide Thursday, Carver never inviting the reader to judge these characters, they do enough of that for themselves, but making three flawed people sympathetic, in different ways. I love that his books, while going to dark places, frequently - as here - do so with compassion and empathy. They may judge themselves and each other  but the author isn't doing so (yes, I know, the author is writing them judging, but that's not the same, I don't think) making the navigation of this story something of a moral journey for us and in places therefore, a sort of self-condemnation. That sense is heightened because while more or less standalone, readers of Carver's other recent book will recognise in Suicide Thursday hooks, overlaps and references to the wider Carververse, suggesting that it takes place in the same world and that concerns and threats in that world (the perverse suicide cult, the baleful Beresford) are present here in the margins even if largely unseen.

As always, the writing is simple, direct and often questioning: absurdities of modern life are exposed and highlighted without being ridiculed and the author is perfectly comfortable drawing attention to the contradictions and inconsistencies of these characters, especially to their different ways of seeing the world, without telling is who is right or indeed, whether anyone is. The Carververse is painted in a rich palatte of moral grey shades and Suicide Thursday is no exception.

The book is also often very funny, indeed there are some almost slapstick situations as well as excruciatingly embarrassing ones. Mike literally varnishing himself into a corner is one, as is the trouble that Eli's wandering eye gets him into and the reaction he gets form one young woman.

All in all an excellent addition to this writer's output and I'm glad that, in contrast to Eli, he not only starts but finishes his work, giving us more to be entertained by and to think about.

For more information about Suicide Thursday, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Suicide Thursday from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Review - What Moves the Dead by T Kingfisher

What Moves the Dead
T Kingfisher
Titan Books, 18 October 2022 
Available as: PB, 192pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN (PB): 9781803360072

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of What Moves the Dead to consider for review.

What Moves the Dead takes us to Ruravia, a remote Central European country sometime in the 1890s. Alex Easton, a former soldier, has come to visit childhood friends Madeline and Roderick, with whom all is not well...

I completely loved this bizarre, fungus-steeped Gothic episode which echoes and completes Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, supplying an explanation and a great deal of background to that sinister story. Madeline and Roderick are the Ushers, and are central to this story, but while Kingfisher gives a plausible scenario explaining what is going on, this book is so much more than that.

Easton is, for example, a fascinating personality, Gallacian by nationality, a nation whose language has seven different sets of pronouns 'one of which is used only for God' and another which specifically applies to soldiers - creating a reality which the slightly buttoned up Dr Denton, an American also visiting the Ushers, has some trouble with. Easton is also a sufferer from tinnitus, and dwells in this story on the aftereffects of war on those soldiers who are lucky enough - or unlucky enough - to survive. Easton and Denton bond, somewhat, over the aftermath and pity of war: both have served. (Kingfisher surfaces something often, I think, hovering on the margins of Victorian fiction - think of Doctor Watson and his wounds from Afghanistan, for example).

With this small cast of characters (there are a couple more) Kingfisher has immense fun. The book is both deeply, scarily chilling and - often at the same time - very funny. It's also firmly rooted in a well-realised world, only partly based on evocations of the classics (as well as Poe, there are echoes of Conan Doyle and of course, Anthony Hope). 

All the familiar tropes are here - the isolated house, the mysterious wasting disease, the sense that something is being hidden, sleepwalking, the rational yet baffled outsider - yet the story has a heart and should bond those trappings and, when is all is finally revealed, a rather plausible if chilling explanation. It's quite different from those other horror - Kingfisher evokes an eerie reality closely tuned to the rhythms and growth of the natural world and indeed from the start there's both a fascination with that (conveyed especially though the eccentric wandering English naturalist Eugenia) and a sense of threat.

All in all, an entertaining and thought-provoking story, one I galloped through in a single day (even though I had another book on hand that I ought to have been finishing).

For more information about What Moves the Dead, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour - The Stars Undying by Emery Robin

The Stars Undying
Emery Robin
Orbit, 10 November 2022
Available as: PB, 516pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356519388  

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of The Stars Undying to consider for review, and to Tracy for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Gosh. What can I say about this one? The Stars Undying really got its teeth into me - it made me resent everyday intrusions (eating, sleeping...) that stopped me reading it.

An achievement, I think, the more so since you'd think a book self-proclaimedly inspired by the empires of Ancient Rome and Egypt (ie the story of Caesar, Mark Anthony and Cleopatra) is going to have to work hard to overcome the reader's assumption that they know what's coming. Some pressure, perhaps?

Well, there's no way Emery Robin lets that pressure show, or that The Stars Undying seems to be straining for effect. Rather, this beautifully written, exciting and sensual novel of rulers, religion, warfare, empire and artificial intelligence (really!) drew me in from the very start. It's a lowkey opening - we see Gracia, a young princess of the planet of Sayzet, fleeing her sister and escaping off planet - but the wiring is immersive and enthralling from there right though to the when Gracia... well, that would be a spoiler, but it's an amazing scene. Gracia's development though all her tribulations and challenges is fascinating, sometime horrifying and always unpredictable: at the beginning she may seem out of her depth, a victim, a loser, but there are depths to her where she finds the resolve to beguile great men - and women - and to plot her own path forward.

Also fascinating is Ceirran, the Caesar figure here, a restless protagonist - I'd hesitate to call anyone here a hero - Commander of the forces of Ceiao, general, politician, schemer, a man in a hurry - but so much more. Both of these, however, are made richer as characters by the complex cultural, religious and political background which Robin sketches - here's where the inspiration from Rome and Egypt really counts, but you also have to  recognise the Hellenistic layer in the background to early BCE Egypt, which Robin also references: the sweep of empires and the deaths of gods and conquerers has left the galaxy portrayed here richly textured, with Gracia, Ceirran and many others having to negotiate a treacherous landscape of historic animosities, debts and paradoxes. 

This is nowhere more true than in the capital city of Ceiao, where Ceirran, an outsider on the make, clashes with the descendants of priests and kings. He's aided by his close supporter, Captain Anita who is one of the most fascinating characters I've come across in science fiction or fantasy for a long time - able, cynical, full of contradictions, equally at home on the training field, speaking in Council for Ceirran or dancing in a scuzzy bar, she attracts and repels Gracia from the start, and the tension between them crackles from the pages of The Stars Undying.

While this is a novel characterised by sweeping distances - it's not bothered about covering billions of light years - towering themes (love, treachery, loss and vengeance to name but a few) - and often, a sensuality that simply grabs - it is also a book where the small things count. Details of conversations. The voices here - Gracia and Ceirran, yes, but who is speaking to whom, and why? And actions on the margins. All matter to the working of a complex and satisfying story that satisfies on many, many levels.

All in all, a brilliant book I'd have no hesitation in recommending (and I'm counting down the days till I can read a sequel!)

For more information about The Stars Undying, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Stars Undying from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Review - The World We Make by NK Jemisin

The World We Make (Great Cities, 2)
NK Jemisin
Orbit, 3 November 2022
Available as: HB, 352pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356512693

I'm grateful to Orbit for an advance copy of The World We Make to consider for review.

The World We Make concludes Jemisin's Great Cities sequence, the first part of which, The City We Became, was published in 2020. The author explains in the Acknowledgements why, in the end, this couldn't be a trilogy (basically, truth overtaking fiction) and why it was a tough book to write. However it is still, in my view, a brilliant accomplishment. Jemisin has - across two books - studied the essence of a confident yet wounded modern city - New York - through the lens of fantasy writing at its best. And it's fun to read too!

Jemisin's premise, if you haven't read the first book (you should!) is that "great" cities wake up. Past a certain point, they focus their essence into a human "avatar" (or in New York's case, seven of them - one for each borough and one for the whole. Yes, seven - if you want to know why not six read the first book). That has just happened for New York (there is a reason why it is so recent, which was one of my questions about The City We Became, though not something that particularly bothered me).

If that was all there is to it, we would not have far to go. But it's not. The Cities, NY especially, are under attack from a cosmic-horror style threat personified as The Woman in White and which has something of an affinity with gentrifying, authoritarian trends in the city. And, as becomes obvious here, in the wider multiverse. This threat was staved off somewhat in the previous book as the boroughs came together (mostly) but returns in The World We Made. Part of the meat of this book is the much closer detail we get about that threat and its motivations, which suggest some quite murky morality around the - what world shall I use? Ecology? - of the cities in the branching multiverse. 

That murkiness is reflected as Brooklyn, Bronca, Padmini (avatar of Queens), Manny and the rest seek wider help to defend their city, and find some of the other great World Cities less than supportive. I loved the way that Jemisin transforms a potential weakness of her metaphor - that a typical city contains millions, and will have had hundreds of years of history, so its avatar is surely going to be a babble of incoherent voices and intentions - into a hymn to the creativity, the creative destruction, even, of our great cities. They aren't, we are reminded, gentle things or. Making a cameo, London blithely admits to killing people and taking their stuff. But she has changed. All is movement and change here, good movement and change, in contrast to the stasis and bland sterility beloved of The Woman and her city.

This second book is, though, not all focussed on the comic menace or on supernatural (superurban?) struggle. The avatars are ordinary people too, and Jemisin's portrayal of their bickering, of who fancies who and of the pressures on some - pressures from family, from legacies of abuse or even just from work (Padmini's lost a job and has the immigration service after her) is very well done, indeed the human detail really drives this plot rather than the city-ness and creates a level of reality that the Woman finds hard to wholly comprehend (though she seems fascinated by it, I think).

That's lots else. Brooklyn, goaded beyond endurance by the corruption and racism of the city authorities, campaigns for Mayor - giving Jemisin scope for some satirical scenes but also opening up the team to wider attack from political extremists in a subplot that very much exposes the underbelly of US politics and society. Manny calls in allies, and we learn a bit more about his history and background - also rooted in the Black American experience. And Aislyn is faced with choices she can't duck over what the Woman is doing to her beloved Staten Island.

Less hectic, perhaps, than the first book, and more considered, The World We Make still rises to a heart thumping climax. It's vividly written and has a glorious sense of place, and above all, of engagement with the complex issues and messy compromises that make a real city a place worth living in and indeed, fighting for. Jemisin's writing is gorgeously inventive, and I felt that she truly inhabits her characters.

Finally, just look at that design from Lauren Panepinto. It's not just pretty - in the right conditions, it does things. This is a book you need to hold in your hand, not just have on your e-reader...

For more information about The World We Make, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - The Pain Tourist by Paul Cleave

The Pain Tourist

Paul Cleave

Orenda Books, 10 November 2022

Available as: PB 371pp, e   

Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781914585487

I'm grateful to Anne at Random Things Tours and to Karen at Orenda Books for sending me an advance copy of The Pain Tourist to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

The Pain Tourist plunges into immediate action as a peaceful suburban house in Christchurch, New Zealand is invaded by violent men. In heartbreaking scenes, a family is destroyed and an eleven year old boy left orphaned and struggling for his life. We see the police set about trying to solve the case, but the story then breaks and picks up nine years later as James Garrett begins to stir from a coma. In the faint hope that James may recall something to help identify the villains, even after all this time, DI Rebecca Kent is assigned to investigate. 

But Rebecca already has her hands full, with a possible renewed serial killer who seems to be taking more than a little interest in her personally. 

How much will she really be able to do? 

Meanwhile others are also watching James, wondering what he may recall...

In The Pain Tourist, Cleave gives us an utterly absorbing, accomplished attention-grabber of a novel, one where all the different threads compel and the whole is - well, addictive might be the right word? I adored Rebecca - a woman who's suffered and been passed over and who seems to be surrounded by men judging her performance as a detective based on her looks. Rebecca's ex-colleague Tate is also well drawn and has depth - he plays the part of the off-books maverick well, but not too outrageously as he's got his own concerns (a wife in a nursing home who's steadily deteriorating) to keep him from going too far off the rails. James himself is fascinating - a newly awoken man who was a boy of eleven when he fell asleep. He may have pointers to the crime, but due he go where they are to confront them? Already complicated for him, but he seems as well to have brought something else back from the dark - knowledge that he shouldn't have, which bears on Rebecca's other cases. Dangerous knowledge perhaps.

The story proceeds at great pace with jeopardy, false leads, misdirection and a string of further murders, as well as a nagging suspicion on Rebecca's part that crime scenes and evidence are being accessed by that mysterious "pain tourist" alluded to in the title. What do they want, and how are they getting in? The Pain Tourist also explores the toxic paraphenalia  of true crime - the souvenir hunters, the re-enactors, the obsessives...

A gorgeous book - if I can use that phrase of something that is inevitably very dark - one where the cast of characters stride onto the page as established individuals, trailing real dilemmas and problems, flawed and deeply human characters trying to cope as best they can with a far from perfect world - even before the murders start. 

This was the first of Cleave's books I'd read and I found it really very, very impressive.

For more information about The Pain Tourist, see the Orenda website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Pain Tourist from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Blogtour #Review - Blood of a Novice by Davis Ashura

Blood of a Novice (The Eternal Ephemera, Book One)
Davis Ashura
Available 8 November
Formats: e-book, audio
Sour ce: advance e-copy
ASIN(e): B0B86KPPM1

I'm grateful to Fantasy Book Critic for inviting me to take part ion the blogtour for Blood of a Novice, and for providing an advance e-copy to consider for review.

Blood of a Novice follows the early career of Cam Folde, a young man from a disreputable family (they're the town drunks) in a remote rural community a long way from anywhere.

Through a mixture of his own enterprising nature, some good luck (and then a dollop off bad luck) he receives enhancements to his magical nature. I should explain that in Cam's world (labelled 'The Salvation') everyone has, to a greater of lesser degree, what we might think of as supernatural powers (so perhaps the world 'magic' is not really appropriate). These powers derive both from innate nature and talent and also from absorbing natural 'ephemera', intense training and study and other means - to say too much would be spoilery. 

As such, the events early on are key to Cam's future, both establishing him as something of a chancer and showing how that luck he finds (or rather, the bad part) not only makes him a pariah in his community but also shapes his abilities in good and bad ways. Part of the result of this is a disability or perhaps an imbalance that will constrain his choices but also drive him to greater efforts in order to overcome it.

Cam's progress from his hometown reveals to us a wider world of good and evil, one influenced by South Asian mythology and stories. Ashura has written "As far as Blood of a Novice is concerned, this is the background of how it came to be. The philosophy and theology of the series started with a dream, which was weird. That isn't my thing. Anyway, the dream began with a question: "What is God?" That definitely isn't my thing, and I sure don't know the answer to that question. But at the time of the dream, I also didn't care. It was 2 AM, and I just wanted to go back to sleep. But sometimes when your mind is racing in the middle of the night, you can't sleep no matter what you want. This was one of those times, and in the end, I ended up imagining the theology of Blood of a Novice. Later on, I found out it was similar to the first three chapters of the Bhagavad Gita as translated by Eknath Easwaran."

Here we meet sages and divines (the story opens with a battle between two gods) and learn about the pathway to divinity - that honing of abilities and talents can take a young man or woman a long way. We see the deadly danger posed by rakshasas, human or animal-formed monsters that erupt into the world and contest with the sages and theeir novices, acolytes and other supporters for dominance.

It's a brilliantly depicted world, teeming with menace as much as with politics. As a young man from the wrong side of town, and one with a reputation for drunkenness as much as bad luck, Cam is unpopular with the young nobility who comprise the majority of the scholars at the academy which he eventually manages to join. Ashura makes this clear, but doesn't waste a great deal of time detailing how this plays out day to day - focussing instead on the big themes: Cam's (painful, slow) advancement and the eventual challenges and battles into which he's flung. 

Cam comes over as a thoughtful, if anguished, natural leader of the team, to which he's assigned and to whose successes he's key. He has plenty of regrets, but doesn't dwell too much on them, and very much looks to the future. There are though clouds in that direction, with Ashura dropping hints of something, some cause or plan, working its way out behind what we see.

While Cam is the focus of the novel, we see a little from other perspectives too, for example Weld, an arrogant young man to whom Cam takes an instant dislike (and who I suspect will prove to have more to him than we're allowed to see here - at least I hope so as I'l have liked him to play more of a part than he does) and one or two others besides. Weld is one of half a dozen or so Novices grouped with Cam in "Light Squad", who, with Cam's teachers, are the central characters of the story. Among the teachers my favourite characters was Sarai, a woman of some mystery with whom Cam had a previous encounter with which made something of an impression. Her exact history, status and intentions are though teasingly obscure, making her one of the most interesting figures here.

In all, Blood of a Novice is an extremely readable fantasy, using Cam's (in particular) attempts to progress in skill and power to illustrate the mythic and ethical basis for its world, as well as the dangers that world faces. There's plenty of action, and the magical basis of existence and life is taken for granted  providing skills and talents that can be exploited in different degree by everyone from the humblest fieldhand to the most powerful Sage. With some threatened disturbances to the even tenor of Cam's life looming by the end of the book it will be interesting to see how that plays out in succeeding volumes.

For more information about Blood of a Novice, see the other reviews on the tour already published or coming soon - Out of this World SFF, Fantasy Book Critic, Before We Go blog, Lena at Goodreads, Pages & Procrastination and FanFiAddict.

You can buy Blood of a Novice from Amazon here.

#Review - Bournville by Jonathan Coe

Bournville - A Novel in Seven Occasions

Jonathan Coe

Viking, 3 November 2022

Available as: HB, 368pp, audio, e

Source: Advance e-copy

ISBN(HB): 9780241517383

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Bournville via NetGalley.

'And all that caper...'

Coe's latest novel takes us on a trip though the past 75 years of British (well, English) life, using as stepping stones seven significant episodes from with VE Day in 1945 to its 75th anniversary just as the Covid-19 storm was gathering. En route we see the Coronation, the 1966 World Cup, the Investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales, his and Princess Diana's wedding (and later, her funeral) and other moments of the (allegedly) whole-nation-together-watching on TV sort. (The Investiture? Really? I was only 2 at the time so don't remember it, but did people really tune in the same way as for the others?) 

It is perhaps an irony that the book appears too late to add in the recent death and funeral of Queen Elizabeth II - surely the apotheosis of this kind of shared experience. I certainly read the part dealing with the funeral of Diana - with its evocation of the ever-thickening crowds and then the comment that 'the Queen had not even returned to London from Balmoral' in a different way to how I might a couple of months ago. A persistent problem, perhaps, with anything touching the British royal family is the abundance of potential meaning and there being just too many references - Coe intended I think to use Diana's marriage and funeral to make a point about the refusal of the Lambs to properly welcome Bridget, a woman marrying in who's not from a White British background ('families like this... they never really accept people from outside, do they?' ) but actually when that's more or less reflected in the ballads every single day it might seem just obvious).

Coe portrays both the immediate consumption, as it were, of these moments - families gathered around flickering monochrome TV or flatscreen panel or sat at bunting-decked tables in the street - and the weeks and months around them, following several generation of the Lamb family. It all starts with Sam and Doll Lamb and their daughter Mary in Bournville, a suburb of Birmingham dominated by the Cadbury's chocolate factory, in 1945. The book plugs into the wider Coeniverse, featuring characters from earlier novels, sometimes as walks-ons (I glimpsed a couple of Trotters!) and sometimes in more significant roles (David and Gill Foley and their father Thomas - as Coe points out in his Afterword, this book has a particularly close relationship to Expo 58, The Rain Before It Falls and Mr Wilder and Me). 

For me, that embedding gives the book wider resonance, drawing on established characters and filling in gaps in the chronology, though it made me ache for a family tree. There would definitely be a market (well, of me) for a Coe Companion. It goes some way to address what is otherwise an inevitable result of the episodic nature of the book, that its alighting on particular moments from decade to decade risks a sort of "1970s House" ness - you know, the reality series where a family move through a year in each episode, their technology, food and possessions being rudely updated each time.  Coe tells us for example that 'there is a new shop on the King's Road, apparently - she has read about it in the Sunday Times colour magazine - which is called Habitat...' and we know that now the 60s are Happening. Or a character will be proselytising the virtues of the Sinclair ZX81, demonstrating that the age of the home computer revolution are upon us. I'm not saying that these moments ring falsely - the ZX81 thing is part of fleshing out a character who others comes over as rather unsympathetic, for good reasons - just that with relatively little space for each episode, references like this seem a bit obvious, and can rather draw the oxygen from character development.  Similarly there is a sense of characters being placed to experience or expound something - nearly witnessing the birth of balti cooking for example, or set up to compare bland postwar English cooking with the spicier, smokier German version.

Bournville does, though, tackle these moments of change, or potential change, in another way. As they witness national celebrations and mourning, characters here are prone - as I think we all are - to read a significance into things, to look for turning points and moments of decision. Of course these are often overturned subsequently (so, in a sense, the glimpse of a future Utopia at VE Day, with the Attlee government waiting in the wings, is soon undone by an Establishment that its able to stage the Coronation - Geoffrey's delighted musing: this marked the resumption of normality, like 'like a breath of stale air...'). By the end of the book we're more inclined perhaps to accept that (as is repeatedly stated) 'Everything changes, and everything stays the same' - whether you take that as comforting, or bleak (the book allows for both points of view).

Given its episodic nature, again, different parts come at the reader in quite different ways. There are lots of stories, story arcs and characters and I think everyone will have their favourites. I enjoyed the family holiday in Wales (but my family used to take holidays in Wales in the early 70s, so maybe it's that) which is virtually a self-contained episode, albeit one revisited later with more understanding. 

The funniest was the "chocolate wars" episode in Brussels, intended, I think, as a hook to bring in a certain straw-haired journalist and later politician whose career is touched on briefly (''always under-prepared, always over-committed' who Coe lacerates further in his Author's Note. I don't think though this book is generally trying to be overtly funny - though there are some moments that will produce smiles, for example when Sam was 'entertained by the sound of his daughter [Mary] and Beethoven engaged in mortal combat' or when Mary is dismayed that she and her mother have been invited to a church service to celebrate VE Day: 'This was a dreadful turn of events' (she even tries to get out of it by offering to do the washing-up).

My favourite of all was Lorna's European travels in the Prologue - I felt that her concert tour, undertaken as covid-19 was beginning to close down the Continent ('It would break her heart if this weird little virus were to derail everyone's plans') had the same shrewd observation as much of Mr Wilder and Me. I could have read a whole book about Lorna and her bandmate Mark. 

I'm not sure if it's significant that the two bits of the book that struck me most are set outside England. Clearly one can read Bournville as a "condition of England" novel (England, not Britain or the UK, because the current of progress and reaction, of prejudice and enlightenment, that swirl here are portrayed in relation to England). But the most interesting themes are wider than England. It's not, I want to assure you, a Brexit novel in the same way as Middle England, though inevitably some of the same themes occur - like the transformation of the Cadbury factory to a visitor experience, which proceeds in the background of the book, a counterpoint perhaps to the Lamb family's love of James Bond films (those 'strange, adolescent, sadopatriotic fantasies'). And it does have a sense of hope. There are people here who change their minds. There is a refusal by some to buy into the national myth ('It's just that I think there's an idea that some people like to have about the war. That it was a political thing...') There vis also a clear-eyed recognition that if the past, the present and the future are all present at once, then there still 'comes a time when everybody has to pick a side' (Bridget, again).

To conclude, there is a great deal in Bournville and I enjoyed reading it. How far everything is completely digested or made coherent, I'm not sure, but then maybe it shouldn't be, if we're thinking about England. One strange thing that I have to add it that as I was reading the book at breakfast, the BBC morning programme covered the historical discovery, in and around Birmingham, of large boulders deposited by glaciers which were apparently important in the development of geology as a science. One of these was found when the Bournville chocolate factory was built. And where did we see characters in this book going for a drink win VE Night but... the Great Stone Inn!

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

Cover reveal - The Space Between Us by Doug Johnstone

Exciting News!

I've got something a bit different today...  read on to see the cover of the thrilling new novel coming next year from Doug Johnstone via Orenda Books - The Space Between Us is which is out on 16 March 2023.

The Book

But I'm not going to show it to you straight away. Oh no. You need to find out a bit first. let me introduce Lennox, Ava and Heather.

Lennox is a troubled teenager with no family. Ava is eight months pregnant and fleeing her abusive husband. Heather is a grieving mother and cancer sufferer. They don’t know each other, but when a meteor streaks over Edinburgh, all three suffer instant, catastrophic strokes... 

...only to wake up the following day in hospital, miraculously recovered. 

When news reaches them of an octopus-like creature washed up on the shore near where the meteor came to earth, Lennox senses that some extra-terrestrial force is at play. With the help of Ava, Heather and a journalist, Ewan, he rescues the creature they call 'Sandy' and goes on the run. 

But they aren’t the only ones with an interest in the alien … close behind are Ava’s husband, the police and a government unit which wants to capture the creature, at all costs. And Sandy’s arrival may have implications beyond anything anyone could imagine…

The Author

And did I mention that this is by DOUG JOHNSTONE? 

Doug Johnstone is the author of fourteen previous novels, most recently Black Hearts (2022). The Big Chill (2020) was longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and three of his books, A Dark Matter (2020), Breakers (2019) and The Jump (2015), have been shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year. 

He’s taught creative writing and been writer in residence at various institutions over the last decade, and has been an arts journalist for over twenty years. Doug is a songwriter and musician with six albums and three EPs released, and he plays drums for the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, a band of writers. He’s also co-founder of the Scotland Writers Football Club, and has a PhD in nuclear physics. 

The Space between Us is Doug’s first foray into science fiction. Follow Doug on Twitter @doug_johnstone and visit his website: dougjohnstone.com.

The City

As if all that isn't enough, it's set in EDINBURGH, a city I spent nearly eight years in when I was at University (it's complicated). Read Doug's novels and you'll walk the streets of Edinburgh, you really will...

But I sense you're getting impatient. Where is this cover then, Mr Blue Balloon, I hear you say. 

Well...

...wait...

...hang on...

...here it is!

I hope you agree that is just GORGEOUS. And that it does credit to what's described as a "breathless, adrenaline-soaked road trip anda meditation on communication, identity and connection to others and our environment … emotionally complex science fiction that sits alongside recent authors like Sue Burke, Tade Thompson, Nnedi Okorafor and Chris Beckett."

For more information about The Space Between Us, and to preorder a copy, see the Orenda Books website here.