Review - Sweet Harmony by Claire North

Cover design by Bekki Guyatt 

Sweet Harmony

Claire North

Orbit, 22 September 2020

Available as: e-book

Source: advance e-copy via Netgalley

ISBN: 9780356514772

I'm grateful to Orbit for an advance e-copy of Sweet Harmony.

Claire North is the master of the intriguing idea, planted into our otherwise normal world and interrogated from all angles. Also: of glorious prose, believable characters and much else, which I'll come to in a moment. In her new novella, she steps a short way into the future of medicine and hypothesises the ability too use "naneites" - programme machines at the molecular level - to protect and preserve life, affect appearance and ability, modify mood and make many many other changes. ('Dazzling Smile - no more sad mornings!', 'Voice of an Angel - 96% agree that this is the perfect voice for the perfect woman!')

All for a price.

Harmony Meads, a 29 year old London estate agent, is 'beautiful, successful and fits in perfectly'. She's an enthusiastic user of these "upgrades" as is everyone in her office. They're all choices that she's made ('This is Harmony Meads, aged nineteen, making a choice about her body, her life') but choices have consequences, whether from the effect of programming glitches ('If you experience jaundice or liver failure, please contact your healthcare provider') to debt and enforcement action ('The upgrade was £17.99 a month for the initial twelve month contract, rising to £35 a month at the end of the introductory period...')

North's portrayal of Harmony as an anxious, aspirational twentysomething, spending money she doesn't have (there are always more credit cards) to secure a future away from '****ing Bracknell', to keep up with the team at work, to have a life, is touching and sad. This isn't an SF utopia or dystopia. It's recognisably our world - the train from Waterloo to Reading, overworked hospitals, social care stretched to its limits and, especially, advertising pushed at desperate people ('...at the end of the day, she wanted to be in control. She hit "buy". That was the beginning.') Harmony's life includes work pressures from a boss who sees having pretty people as part of the "brand", an abusive boyfriend and an elderly mother who wants the best for her daughter but whose tentative sympathy when everything goes wrong is unbearable.

The story shows us where Harmony is coming from, her hopes, desires and dreams; the insidious spiral she's got into, having to scrimp and save to make minimal payments on all the upgrades she's taken out; and the spinning of her life into chaos when things go wrong, when she loses that control. The contracts Harmony's signed allow for punitive measures, withdrawing the benefits previously offered and then going further. In a nightmare of calls to customer service, attempts to scrape together money and to keep  up appearances, we have a world that is so familiar, so close to our own - the knife-edge between keeping everything in the air and seeing those plates begin to smash on the ground. North's vision of just how this technology might be used and abused is deeply plausible because it's rooted in just how people currently suffer when they lose a grip, even for a moment on their lives.

As I've come to expect from this author, Sweet Harmony doesn't just deliver a scary and convincing near future but also glorious, on-point writing. North describes 'skin the colour of city sunset' and 'The smell after rain, when all things come back to life' or in hospital  'old men shuffling the lock-kneed two-step to their ends'. Here's Harmony's friend Shelly. 'Her brilliant autumn-blonde hair flowed and curled around her face like frozen candlelight; her skin glowed like tungsten...' which is gorgeously vivid - but is then soured when we're informed that Shelly is so beautiful that 'all the boys assumed she was a tart, that there was no other reason to be that sensational save for the benefit of men...' In a world where you can constantly be upgraded, the neediness of those men, their desire to control women, assumes ever newer and crueller forms. 

The upgrades have other insidious effects and throughout the book, North is picking away at how corrupting it all is, how as well as the financial burden, life becomes a pretence with things we might take for granted (such as getting drunk) becoming just paid for options once one's life and responses are owned by a private corporation. There's a safety net where basic functions and health are still maintained but it's an affectless, joyless world lacking vibrancy and sensuality. 

That's the world which, in some form, Harmony spends most of this book trying to escape because in the end this isn't a book primarily about nightmare tech but about one life - and the roots of her discontent and ruinous debt habit are human roots, in family, society and place. And in the poisonous relationships and work pattens she finds herself. It's all about choices, choices made in circumstances we can't control and which are therefore hardly choices at all - are they?

Strongly recommended. 

For more about Sweet Harmony, see the Orbit website here.

#Blogtour #Review - The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North

Design by Steve Panton

The Pursuit of William Abbey
Claire North
Orbit, 14 November
HB, e, 420pp

I'm grateful to Orbit and especially to Nazia Khatun for a free advance reading copy of The Pursuit of William Abbey to consider for review and to Tracy Fenton at Compulsive Readers for inviting me to take part in the blogtour.

A new book by Claire North is always a very special event in my reading calendar, and William Abbey didn't disappoint.

In something of the same vein as the Flying Dutchman, this is a tale of a man cursed after an act of selfishness. William Abbey is a mediocre doctor in 19th century Africa, banished to the colonies after falling for the wrong girl. The sin that curses him is that, when he comes face to face with the lawless racket that is Empire, he is indifferent to an act of savagery. No more and no less indifferent than countless others - but it's Abbey who doesn't act at a particular moment when a boy, Langa, is lynched, Abbey who refuses to help him as he lies dying, and Abbey who Langa's mother curses. I took him as emblematic, perhaps, of the "nothing to do with me" attitude to colonialism and historical crimes.

Under the curse, Abbey suffers a strange, dual fate: everyone he loves is doomed to a terrible death, unless he outruns Langa's spirit. As the spirit comes closer, Abbey is able to read the truths in men's (and women's) hearts. When Langa is really close, Abbey can't help but proclaim those truths. When Langa reaches him, someone dies.

So the endless chase begins.

Langa is not quick, but he is relentless, crossing land and sea, mountain and desert. Abbey has no special resources save his ability to discern truths - but in a fevered world, building up to the Great War, this may be a sought after skill. Or it may be one that will just get William Abbey into an even worse heap of trouble.

Langa comes, he comes...

I loved this story. It is not a pleasant read: North doesn't spare us the realities of colonialism or war, or indeed of the grinding, chaotic lives of the poor (for example, the brutalities of the British in India or the hatreds and prejudices that set new immigrants to the USA against each other, instead of the system that keeps them all poor). More prosaically, Abbey isn't a sympathetic character or one it's easy to spend time in the head of. And Abbey's ability - his curse - perhaps his blessing - allows him, requires him, to tap into streams of truth variously banal, tragic, desperate and revealing. It is, if you will, an all-areas tour of 19th century politics and society. And that means, of course, our politics and society because we are not different people now, are we?

Here are revolutionaries and spies. Thieves and shamans. The poor and the very, very rich. Lovers and blackmailers. Ordinary people clinging on, and people whose way of life is being erased. North's imagination, demonstrated in her peopling of the book, is simply astounding as is her gradual, layer-by-layer portrayal of Abbey himself - presenting not only the naive young man who travels to Africa to be cursed, but the older, cynical operator after decades on the run. And, of course, the gradual process that turns one into the other.

It's a story, I think, of an awakening morality, a gathering empathy as Abbey goes from despair and a desire to be "cured" of his shadow - to "apologise", be "forgiven" and receive some kind of proxy absolution - to a deep appreciation of the ways of the world and a recognition of his part in it, not only in the death of Langa but in the system that produced that death. Meeting other bearers of the same terrible burden, he understands that some see it as a a blessing and actually seek it out.

The morality here is complex. North wants to show, I think, that merely feeling shame, regret, horror, at atrocity is not enough. Distancing oneself from vile events is not enough. (If Twitter had been invented in Abbey's time, I suspect his early travels would have been accompanied by a #NotAllEnglishmen hashtag...) But the search for an alternative is hard. Early on, Abbey hooks up with those who may be able to explain his condition, even cure it. But Langa still comes. Attempts to promote justice and the cause of the "people" don't go far. Sidetracking into personal revenge leads Abbey to the situation framed by the opening of the book, with him as a doctor in the First World War, meeting Sister Ellis, a young nurse at a field hospital - and it's her who, perhaps, brings some moral sense back to Abbey. Ellis herself is fascinating, a woman of humble origins who, like Abbey, fell for the wrong person and who's basically conned her way into the aristocratic club of the Nightingale nurses. Her background gives her, perhaps, a perspective that Abbey - for all his truth telling - has missed. But will it be enough to save him (whatever that means)?

This is a blistering book, a magnificent read, a book with real moral heart, burning with anger and freighted with inconvenient truths. It's a book that will continue to burn away in your mind long after you finish it, that will follow you, steadily, relentlessly, even if you try to leave it behind.

Very, very strongly recommended, and up there with North's best writing.

For more information about the book, see the Orbit website here.

Follow the tour at the blogs on the poster below!

And you can buy the book from your local bookshop, from Hive Books, which supports high street bookshops, from Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon .

Review - The Games House by Claire North

Cover by Lisa Marie Pompilio

The Games House
Claire North
Orbit, 30 May 2019
PB, 410pp

I am so grateful to Nazia at Orbit for sending me a free advance copy of this brilliant book to consider for review. I could kick myself that I hadn't read The Games House already - it has been available for a couple of years but as ebook only and I somehow missed that.

Now, I have the (physical) book in my hands and I can make amends.

"Everyone has heard of the Gameshouse. But few know all its secrets . . .

It is the place where fortunes can be made and lost though chess, backgammon – every game under the sun..."

The Games House is another audacious concept from North: a club where all may come to play games... but with a "Higher League", a select level to which one can only progress by invitation. And the games there are played with pieces on a real board - a board that contains empires, kingdoms, churches.

The coin turns, the game begins. The House is in Venice. In New York. In Tokyo. Walk in. Take a seat. make your move - but be careful what you stake. Players can become pieces and pieces will be played and used up.

The book is divided into three parts.

In the first - The Serpent - set in Renaissance Venice, Thene - a young woman of despised Jesish heritage and in a marriage to a worthless man who is eating up all her money - plays for the right to enter that higher League.  Pieces move on the board - real people, caught up in the mechanisms of the House. Some survive: others do not. It's a tense game which Thene cannot afford to lose if she's to escape her life. Thene plays with skill, accepting the sacrifices she must make. North's ability to sketch a convincing character matters here, Thene's game working through screeds of them but all are vital, breathing figures any of whom who could easily sustain a book of their own (I wanted to know more about all of them!)

The second story - The Thief - follows Remy Burke, a louche figure who could have walked out of a Somerset Maugham short story, in an unwelcome game staged in Siam, just before the Second World War. The background - featuring what are clearly spies, political factions and fugitives - would, again, provide enough colour in itself for a novel. But it's not the main point: the main point is the game that Remy's been tricked into, a desperate game of Hide and Seek where at stake is his very essence. North's description of the pursuit - overseen, as in the first story, by some kind of ambiguous spirit or actor above, but not totally removed from, the plot - is just masterful, whether describing Remy's sheer desperation, halting moments of tenderness when he is sheltered by a lonely widow - she is shunned, as a childless woman who has survived her husband and had spoken to nobody for seven months, or the man's sheer ingenuity in staying ahead and in the game.

In the final story, The Master, things take a rather different turn, arriving at the present day and an even more desperate game which begins to unsettle Presidents, Chairmen and financial combines. The stakes are if anything even higher - and the player one who may, perhaps, be able to give some answers.

Again, the coin turns...

I just loved this book. North has a slightly oblique style which can take a bit of getting used to (she'll include an overheard conversation to add atmosphere (yet which contains a point relevant later) or a chapter one sentence long, which, again, only slots into he story at the right time and place. And those unseen observers remain mysterious while also becoming very familiar.) But once you do, it's a book you can simply immerse in - in fact you have to, because you won't be able to leave it unfinished. In the end, I think, a very humane book, observing all manner of human folly and wrongness as well as little acts of goodness and courage, but not judging and not setting up heroes or villains. Especially not that, because, of course, it's all a game, isn't it?

Strongly recommended. VERY strongly. (And look at that pretty cover!)

Links

For more about the book, see the Orbit website here.

If you want to read my reviews of some of North's previous books, see links to Touch, The Sudden Appearance of Hope, The End of the Day and 84K.

To buy The Games House, try your local bookshop - including via Hive Books - or look at Blackwell's, Waterstones or Amazon.

Review - 84K by Claire North

84K
Claire North
Orbit, 24 May 2018
HB, 452pp

I'm grateful to Orbit for an advance copy of 84K.

Trying to sum up this book, and North's writing, in a discussion with a friend on Twitter recently, I said that she is a remarkable writer, doing extraordinary things. There's a sense in which case I ought perhaps to stop there because I find that - like many of the books I enjoy most - it's hard to say a more. A book can take you like that. The reading catches you so strongly that you can't uncouple and analyse it.

But I want to say more because I want to persuade you, my readers (yes, both of you) to try this book. In doing that I'll assume you haven't read North's work (although... why wouldn't you have...) and try to explain why it grabs me so much.

First, there's her language. More than any other I currently read, North is disassembling and reconstructing English as she goes along. Her books are full of half completed sentences, implied and finished in the reader's head rather than on the page. Sometimes, that is to catch the roughness and jumble of actually spoken language but sometimes it's...

It's hard to give an example because the way the words works is intimately wired into their layout on the page. Spaces, blank half lines, gaps, all matter. It must have been sheer murder to type because the shape is important, this isn't "content" than en e-reader can crunch or MS Word repaginate. So I'm afraid that if I try and quote some the blog sprites will munge it up and lose the effect. But try this (I have removed a character's name to avoid a spoiler)

'The police had an inventory of items removed from [ ]'s flat
      toothbrush hairbrush shoes bedside cup
      splatter evidence blood evidence fingerprints DNA not that
anyone would
      A confession has been received, and given the low estimate value of [ ]'s death, it is not considered necessary at this time to run any more tests on...'

Reading the book, the cumulative effect is almost theatrical, almost once of dance. The words are choreographed, organised, creating shape quite outside the literal meaning. And the literal meaning itself isn't the literal meaning, if that isn't too daft, the suggestiveness of the language doing more than that. Honestly I could drive myself round and round in circles trying to describe this, but you just have to read this, you really do. They're beautiful - both the meaning you take and also the sheer verve, the brilliance, with which North makes her words sing and dance.

If that was all, the book might be interesting but no more. It isn't all, though. There is a thrilling and angry story in this book. Set in the near future (maybe decades from now - global warming in in evidence through rising sea levels, but technology hasn't moved on much) this is a nightmarish world of rampant corporatism. Outsourcing totally out of control, the country is being devoured by the ever-present Company. Not only does it carry out most of the functions of Government, it buys and sponsors whole towns - we hear of Shawford by Budgetfood, the hometown of Theo Miller, our sort-of hero. We hear of how everything is now a matter of money, crime settled by the computation of an "indemnity" to be paid by the perpetrator. We hear how those who can't afford the indemnity are sent to the "patty line" to make restitution. We hear how, impossible to obtain ID being required to vote, the country has slipped out of being a democracy.

The "patties", mentioned in passing to begin with, occupy more and more of the focus of this story as the story reveals how their cheap labour is hollowing out the whole economy, leaving communities abandoned - outside the comfortable enclaves patrolled by the Company police - and whole swathes of the population marginalised, able only to express their despair by howling with rage in the night.

It's a nightmarish, dystopian vision, hard at times to bear - there is a market for everything, we're told, and any offences committed in driving those markets are easily wiped out if the Company will pay the indemnity - but, like the most hard-edged, disturbing destinies I'd venture that there is nothing described here that hasn't actually happened somewhere, sometime. I certainly found it scarily plausible.

Through this broken world, Theo takes a journey, on foot and by canal boat (the latter belonging to Neila, the most truly likeable characters here). North is cagey, to begin with, about where he's going and why, and indeed she dices Theo's story and tells it in thin slices, moving back and forward: it takes till almost the end of the book to work out what order things might have happened in, so I won't say anything more here because spoilers.

Who is Theo? He's an investigator with the Criminal Audit Office, one of the few remaining parts of the Government, and his role is to compute the price of crimes so that the appropriate indemnity can be levied and the patty line keep moving. And, if you were wondering, 84K is the price of a life. (Though I think that combined with the prominence in the book of the "19 Committee" there's also an allusion to another book in which individuals have become part of the machine). In the course of his work, Theo crosses paths with an old friend who knows a secret that could ruin him.

She wants something, and that drives the story in a satisfyingly thriller-y way - but behind this is a story of lives ruined, by a pitiless, profit-maximising system, yes, but also by more ordinary, human quirks and failures. Many of the behaviours exposed here - the sexism enabled and abetted by wealth and privilege, the greed, the seeing others as things to be used and then thrown out, the cowardice, the refusal, 20 years before, to see the way things were going - are not of course troubling new things to be found in a grim future but features of our world, now, things only held in check - if they are held in check - by fragile social norms. North's book is a scary warning, akin to Swift or Orwell, of where all that might lead.

Unlike North's recent books (The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, The Sudden Appearance of Hope, Touch, The End of the Day) there is nothing straightforwardly fantastical here, unless one takes the almost prophetic anger of The End of the Day, dialled up in this book to 11, as fulfilling that role. yes, the timeline is tricksy, and to a degree, the story is punctuated by Neila use of Tarot cards, but the world of 84K is probably too grim to be redeemed by a protagonist who explores successive different timelines or is forgotten when out of sight. Indeed, its grimness is the point - the "thing" about 84K is that future, beckoning us to, oh-so-gradually, give ourselves up to its marketing and its economic efficiency.

Put simply, this book just blew my mind. A remarkable writer, doing extraordinary things, and I think this is her best book yet.

I could say a lot more about it but I only really want to say two.

Buy this book.

Read this book.

Review: The End of the Day

Image from http://www.orbitbooks.net/

The End of the Day
Claire North
Orbit, 16th April 2017
HB, 403pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book.

This is a beautiful, haunting and rewarding book. It is also in some ways a provoking book (which to me is a good thing!) - and I think it may divide North's readers.

In concept, The End of the Day continues her recent series each of which takes a particular (fantastical) attribute and runs it for all it is worth - so Harry August is endlessly reborn as the same person, Hope Arden is forgotten as soon as you look away from her, the nameless narrator of Touch can occupy others' bodies. Each of those is a very smart, well written exploration of what those abilities - or curses - might mean.

This book superficially takes the same approach but is really rather different in two ways.

First, in The End of the Day, Charlie has no special talent, but he has a very special job. The Harbinger of Death,  he goes before the Pale Rider (if that's how you perceive Death: other Deaths are available) as either a warning (to those who might, for a time, evade their fate) or a courtesy (to those who can't).

Death comes for ideas as well as people, and Charlie always brings a gift.

The Death Charlie serves is a rather shifty character (even Death's gender varies with the observer). But Charlie himself is a real, breathing, human being, with a pension plan, health insurance and a back office ('Milton Keynes') who look after his schedule and pay his expenses (they're a bit on the stingy side). He was interviewed for the role, and his predecessor is still around to answer the odd question or give advice. So the central character here is unlike those earlier, gifted/ cursed protagonists - although you might think that his most unusual job could be seen as either a gift or a curse.

The second difference is that the earlier books had a considerable amount of thrillery plot, as Harry, Hope and... whoever... struggled with malign organisations, or with other, similarly gifted individuals and sought to propser or simply survive, making use of their talents or overcoming their limitations.

The End of the Day has much less of this, indeed almost nothing - while there are some attempts to manipulate Charlie and through him, his boss (what couldn't the modern state do were it to get Death on side?) these are much more things that happen to him that events in which he takes part. Beyond doing his job Charlie doesn't plan much or drive the story, rather his role is essentially as witness: to disasters such as the melting of the icecaps (one mission takes him to Greenland, 'out on the ice') or war in Syria and Iraq as well as to more intimately human tragedies or triumphs (an episode in Nigeria). So we get many, many little stories - a young woman and her grandfather evicted from their London flat to make way for property developers; a warlord in Belarus who's not ready to die; two women in Africa who love each other so much despite persecution; and so on. Charlie visits all these and many, many more and North winds the story back and forth, sometimes telling us what happened afterwards (or before), sometimes not.

There's a fairytale aspect to much of it, heightened by the way she introduces many chapters or episodes:

On the shores of the sea...
...in a land where all things grow...

or

In the land of sun...
...in a land of oil...
...on the edge of a lagoon where the city grows...

And also by the way the central conceit is taken seriously by all. From black-ops technicians in secret locations to border guards and police, nobody questions that Charlie is the Harbinger of Death, though many wonder that that means.

It may be like a fairytale, but that's not to say that the writing isn't pin-sharp, realistic and - in many places - unremitting as it faces some of the truly horrible ways people die: the description of bodies flung into a pit after a massacre will haunt me for a long time. This is not escapist writing, it reflects some truly grim events and feels very contemporary. As such it's fitting that we also get glimpses of the other Harbingers - of War, Pestilence and Famine - and their principals as they go about their work whether in refugee camps, Pentagon boardrooms, Whitehall clubs, UN forums or secure laboratories. We don't always know what they're about: possibly it's better that way.

We also hear snatches of conversation gathered from the air, as it were. It seems that Charlie somehow listens in on these wherever he goes: if he has a special talent, that's it. But they don't enable him to take any particular action, nor does he appear to want to - he just wants to do his job, and sometimes, the voices soothe (through the book Charlie's role takes more and more of a toll on him - witnesses are not always disinterested observers). So they're like a running commentary, sometimes germane to the story, sometimes apparently not. There's a theme of a ticking clock - perhaps time is running out, somehow? - and an alternating chatter: rat rat rat human human rat rat as the innocent are maimed and killed and treated as things. Only Charlie, it seems, wants to hold onto the idea that people - however degraded and wicked - remain people, as he maintains when visiting a seemingly gracious but deeply racist KKK leader.

It is in many ways a dark picture of humanity and a dark picture of our world, often showing people at their worst. And all these vignettes, while they build into a powerful impression of  terror, of seething destruction and accelerating loss and change, aren't redeemed by being made incidental to a hopeful plot, to Charlie's success in getting one over the forces of disintegration.

It is, then, a challenging book, one with a great deal of incident but not too bothered by plot and marked by a great deal of darkness.

There is some hope. The most positive thing in Charlie's life, as he witnesses loss, torture and disintegration is his relationship with Emmi, conducted when he's briefly at home between trips. This is described tenderly and North shows how it becomes increasingly important to him as other certainties flee and even Death - who he thought he could rely on - lets him down.

I enjoyed this book IMMENSELY. North manages both to build on her recent successes and to create something really new and different. While it might not be quite what everyone was expecting, I'm so glad this isn't only a book about someone with special abilities, but so much more.