Review - Mortedant's Peril by RJ Barker

Mortedant's Peril (The Trials of Irody Hasp, 1)

RJ Barker
Tor/ Pan Macmillan, 
Available as: HB, 432pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781035064274

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Mortedant's Peril to consider for review.

Meet Irody Hasp, Mortedant for hire.

In the city of Elbay, Mortedants aren't the power they used to be.

These celebrants - part confessor, part psychopomp - were once greatly respected for their ability to probe the last thoughts of the dead, reconciling lifelong quarrels, bringing peace to the dying... and locating hidden money and valuables. That last, however, has brought them down somewhat, as they're now suspected of profiting from a fraudulent trade. 

Hasp is a marginal figure even among this disdained group, shunned by his peers for his poor birth and questionable past. He scrapes a living. It's sufficient, however, for him to indulge his alchemical hobbies, probing the work of the spurriers, a more favoured trade, who create marvellous living devices. It's illegal for a Mortedant to engage in such work, so Hasp benefits from his obscurity.

Hasp's quiet life changes, though, when he's called out to attend to a city employee who has died suddenly.

Somebody doesn't want a Mortedant at this death, and pretty soon Hasp finds himself accused of murder and scheduled to hang (and worse - believe me, it is worse) - unless he can prove himself innocent in three days. With the city building up to its annual festival, nobody is interested in the troubles of a penniless Mortedant - except for his guard, Whisper, a woman of the sea-people, who he's been forced to accept (to prevent him fleeing injustice) and a young urchin, Mirial, who has her own reasons for sticking close to him.

Across those three days, Hasp must ransack the secrets of Elbay or suffer the consequences. 

Of course, nobody wants those secrets to come to light...

I loved this book. It has great - what's the right word? - verve. Elbay is a teeming, complex society, a city built on rigid social hierarchy but that also seems to be sitting on something older - older magic, older technology, a VERY old but curiously absent governor, the Roundhorn - and to conceal powers, barely held in check, that regularly scorch the ring of ground outside the walls. Hasp's explorations provide an excellent gazetteer. He really knows his way around, and Mirial knows hers even better. Clearly the first of a series, Mortedant's Peril shows us all sorts of locations and possibilities from the very highest point of the Dome to the depths of the citycore which I'm sure we'll learn more about in due course. It also details the convoluted social hierarchy, based both on wealth and on inherited distinctions, that keeps the poor in the lower tiers - and hints at strange, other-worldly powers. No, Elbay isn't your standard fantasy city. Nor is the society that flourishes inside. 

Hasp himself is an intriguing character. I started this book thoroughly disliking him. He is self-obsessed, arrogant, prone to dismiss everyone and everything around him as worthless, especially those outside Elbay (Hasp has never left the city) as barbarians - so Whisper is referred to in the earlier part of the book (by Hasp) as "it" until she gradually, grudgingly earns his trust until, when she's threatened and in danger he's beside himself. Hasp has, as becomes clear, though suffered loss and is perhaps still smarting from that (he'd never admit it) but he can and does change and shows himself brave, resourceful and determined.

It seems, after all, that there is more at stake than the life of one Mortedant, and Hasp's beloved Elbay (see the fuss he makes when he has to go beyond the walls, briefly) may itself be at risk.

More than just a series opener, Mortedant's Peril is a tense, gripping story of a race against time, as the chapters count down to Hasp's flaying and hanging. In his desperate search up and down Elbay's steep slopes there seems very little, really, that he can do to save his neck. Yet he carries on, refusing to give in.

This is, I'd say, a characteristically RJ Barker book, exploring a strange world through the eye of a flawed and marginalised character, taking the limitations of that (Hasp's poverty, his outcastness, his previous bad choices) and making them into real plusses.

Great fun, but more than that, Mortedant's Peril is fantasy with real heart.

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

#Review - The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston

The Dead Romantics
Ashley Poston
Harper Collins, 29 September 2022
Available as: PB, 345pp, e, audio
Source: Purchased/ audio subscription
ISBN(PB): 9780008566562

I came to The Dead Romantics having loved Poston's Once Upon a Con series of geek-themed fairytales, and it didn't disappoint - either in its similarities or in its differences.

The main similarity is perhaps that at the story is both fulfilling and referencing the romance genre, though creating a background to that which allows things to be seen from quite a different perspective. In Once Upon a Con that was the geek culture of fandoms, in The Dead Romantics it's... something else.  (The general no-nonsense affect of Florence Day does also I think make her a spiritual sister to Elle Wittimer or to Imogen Lovelace).

The main difference from the earlier books is the way that's done - here, Day is herself a romance writer, albeit a ghostwriter for renowned romance star Ann Nichols. So we get something of an "inside publishing" critique too, replete with scary editors, writers' block and even plagiarism.

Day left her little home town to make it in big in New York, where she's now flailing rather, her writing stymied by her conviction that romance is dead leaving her unable to kindle the flame that she needs to finish her latest novel - which she ought to do by tomorrow. In fact, as we learn when she's called back to said hometown, there is more to her departure from the place than appears at first sight. Poston delights in giving us Day's backstory, and explaining why she's estranged from her family of undertakers. The whole thing is an audacious mix of the incredible and of raw human emotion, and Poston carries it with complete success - by the midpoint of this novel, I was booing Florence's high school nemesis and screaming for her to recognise what's going on when her love interest turns up from the city.

Part of the reason she can't, that she's distracted, goes back to the events of ten years ago, and part is due to a more recent tragedy, and I don't want to spoil either, so all I will say is that Florence Day has one of the most complicated romantic lives you can imagine, as well as some peculiar talents that ought to make things easier but don't. And those distractions, those problems, she has to confront - well, they're literally matters of life and death, the barriers to happiness that you'd expect in romance being rather more unyielding here than in general.

Reader, I will not give away the ending. If you've got your genre right you may get a general sense of how things turn out - our maybe not. But I can say that it's a magnificent, satisfying and intricate story with bold and fun characters and a very down to earth sense of what is, at the end, important. 

A hilarious and rather moving read, showing that, in the midst of death, we are in life.

Recommended.

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

#Review - The Foxglove King by Hannah Whitten

The Foxglove King (The Nightshade Crown, Book One)
Hannah Whitten  
Orbit, 9 March 2023
Available as: HB, 466pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy and audio subscription
ISBN(HB): 9780356521237

I'm grateful to Orbit for an advance copy of The Foxglove King to consider for review.

In the city of Dellaire, the lower orders groan to support King, clergy and nobles who will have the best of everything for themselves.

In the city of Dellaire, bored, decadent aristocrats dose themselves with deadly poisons obtained form illicit death-dealers.

In the city of Dellaire, in vaults deep below the Citadel, a death cult guards the body of a cursed goddess.

And war is coming.

I loved the world building and sheer gothicness of Whitten's new novel, from the seedy docksides to the gilded chambers of the Citadel, all shot through with the odour of death. Woven into the narrative is a divine tragedy - it's certainly not a divine comedy - tracing the city's history and that of its religion in extracts from sacred texts. They describe a war between the gods, whose effects remain very real and very important centuries later. In practical terms, that war left the world contaminated with a substance called 'mortem", the very essence of death, which has to be managed and channelled by a special order of monks, the Presque Mort. 

Others are forbidden to meddle with it, although few have the talent in any case. One who does though is Lore, a young woman who is part spy, part poison trafficker and generally a rogue through and through. Towards the end of this book, in a crisis, Lore takes a momentous decision for reasons which are, she freely admits, completely selfish. That's basically Lore in a nutshell: you're not going to guilt her into doing the right thing for the greater good - she needs to be bribed, blackmailed or coerced, the latter being the method chosen early in the book by those who wish to use her.

Given that background and that character, I must admit that I was a little disappointed by what followed. Lore - basically a sewer rat from the bad part of town who's been working as a spy for one gang of traffickers, embedded (um, literally) with another - is introduced into the wealthy setting of the Citadel with orders to spy on a nobleman. What follows is a series of social and religious engagements, with plenty of conversation between Lore and a slew of nobles, but actually little in the way of action, apart from a couple of set piece events, for most of the middle part of the book. It's established early on that Lore is an experienced and accomplished spy. Also that she has dark abilities (in one memorable scene she raises a dead horse). Yet so much of the story is confined to mildly probing questions of those around her. Even when Lore makes some allies and her investigation switches up a gear, a great deal of time is spent in the library rather than in snooping or other more spy-y activity. Yes'm we get Lore's rather frustrated inner monologue, and there is a love triangle going on,  but I felt there was little in this section to advance the plot.

I must add that the book does lift in its final third, when a number of plot threads come together. There is action. There is hair-raising peril. There is dark magic. Also, multiple levels of betrayal, the revelation of hidden hands and one particular reveal about Lore herself and her role in things that I really hadn't seen coming. 

But still, I felt that this book could have been more. And that's not because of the difference between The Foxglove King and Whitten's previous novels - For the Wolf and For the Throne. I get that they are meant to be different - while those books are darkly romantic, tainted fairytales, and yes, I love that kind of thing, I also enjoy more conventional fantasy which The Foxglove King is albeit with a nice gothic edge. They're not meant to occupy the same genre space, and that's fine.

Still, if you enjoy a competent, cool heroine and a setting that has something of the night about it, this may well be just what you need to read.

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

#Review - Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune

Under the Whispering Door
TJ Klune
Pan Macmillan/ Tor, 28 October 2021
Available as: HB, 384pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529087970

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of Under the Whispering Door.

Price was dead, to begin with...

TJ Klune casts light and wisdom on the mysteries of life and death in this engaging new novel.

Wallace Price would not be anyone's idea of a sympathetic boss. Seen early on in Under the Whispering Door firing an unfortunate employee whose life problems are affecting her work, he is driven, unempathetic and demanding. So it's hardly surprising when, after his sudden death, only a handout of people attend Wallace's funeral. Wallace himself IS surprised by that: but more at having actually, you know, died. Basically he's having trouble accepting this whole "deceased" thing and so a Reaper has to be despatched to escort him to - well, we'll come to that.

Yes, there are overtones of everybody's favourite spooky Dickens novel here. Like Scrooge, Wallace wasn't always a work-obsessed misanthropist: like Scrooge he knew love, but it turned sour on him. But there are also differences. Wallace isn't quite the caricature that Scrooge is. And while Scrooge was offered visions of what may come - including the prospect of going to the grave unmourned and unsung - and time to amend his life, no such luxury is accorded Wallace. His time's up, and he's out.

The biggest difference, though, lies I think, in the dynamics of what happens after Wallace's death. In many respects, his life only begins then. Accompanied by reaper Mei (pronounced "May") whose first gig this is,  Wallace is led to a teashop, run by Hugo, also inhabited - haunted? - by Hugo's dead grandfather Nelson and dead dog Apollo. The teashop - Charon's Crossing - isn't some weird borderland thing, it's an actual, genuine teashop serving a range of infusions to the customers as well as home made scones and other baked goods. 

(I need to stop here to smile for a moment over what are clearly difference between the associations of "teashop" in the US and the UK. From the reaction Klune puts into Wallace's head, Over There it has clear overtones of aching hipsterdom, while this side of the Atlantic one thinks of crumbs, chintz and copper ornaments, also probably steamed up windows and rain).

Actually Charon's Crossing DOES have some weird borderline characteristics. It hosts The Door through which Wallace and his fellow deceased will eventually travel (to where? we never learn). It also holds those who need to spend time reconciling themselves with the fact of death, or with the way they spent their lives. And it provides a locus for all kinds of half-and-half entities to mingle with the living - such as those who rejected the idea of death entirely and lost themselves under the winnowing forces of the mundane world. 

Yes, there is some spooky stuff here, but it doesn't dominate and, honestly, it was a breath fo fresh air to read a novel with such a definite, unambiguous fantasy setting but which doesn't all turn on some threat to the nature of reality, or an evil plot by beings from Beyond to conquer the universe. Instead, we get tea and chat and honest, often painful, character development. I know that won't perhaps be everybody's cup of tea (pun intended) but it is done so very well here and really grabbed my attention and sympathy. At Charon's Crossing, the focus is on being, not doing. And - to let a bit of a spoiler slip - the being is especially focused on Wallace (who, is, of course, dead) and Hugo (very much alive), with a thread of romance between these very different men. And of course some definite obstacles in the way.

Quite how Klune orchestrates and explores this theme, I won't say any more about - first because it would be spoilery and secondly, because it would only clumsily sum up what's set out much better in the book, and why do that? But it does involve human loss, a vengeful ghost, a podcasting medium and a besmitten public health inspector, creating a darkly comic plot that surrounds the central romantic one, so there is a lot here to hold the attention.

What you need to do then, is, to put the kettle on; warm the teapot; cut yourself a slice of cake; settle down, and read Under the Whispering Door. You won't regret it...

For more information about Under the Whispering Door, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Cottingley Cuckoo by AJ Elwood

The Cottingley Cuckoo
AJ Elwood (Alison Littlewood)
Titan Books, 14 April 2021
Available as: PB, 368pp, e
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN (PB): 9781789096859

I'm grateful to Titan for an advance e-copy of The Cottingley Cuckoo via NetGalley to consider for review.

'I want to see my mum, just once, for a little while, I want to tell her that this can't be me; I'm not ready'

I've previously loved Elwood's horror novels, written as Alison Littlewood, and was intrigued to see this one, which moves onto slightly different ground

Rose is a young woman who has dropped out of university, at first to care for her dying mother but then to make a home with Paul (who her mother disapproved of). Now, although she seems to have dropped any idea of resuming her degree and has instead found work at the Sunnyside Care Home she still dreams of "getting out", living perhaps in 'a house in a forest, a turret reaching up amid the branches, a circular room lined with shelves where I'll keep my mother's books'. That's what Paul says he loves about her - that she "believes". But Rose is becoming increasingly obsessed with, her belief engaged by, one of her clients - the intimidating Mrs Favell, a woman who seems almost like a tourist at Sunnyside - and with the story, told in a batch of letters, which Favell lets her read.

That story takes us back to the 1920s, and to the nearby town of Cottingley where a couple of young girls (Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright) claimed to have photographed fairies - claims, and photographs, which were taken seriously in an age before Photoshop, including by the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself, a noted Spritualist and believer in the supernatural. Mrs Favell's letters (how did she get them?) tell of another family in Cottingley, the Fentons, one subject to a bizarre chain of misfortunes and inexplicable events, in which Lawrence Fenton tries without success to interest Sir Arthur. 

Gradually, Rose begins to suspect Charlotte Favell of being the Charlotte of the letters, impossible as it seems. And as Rose discovers herself unexpectedly pregnant, apparently cementing her future with Paul, she begins to see her life through the lens of the letters which Favell teasingly doles out, one at a time. Rose comes to believe that she is living through similar, fairy-haunted episodes to those described one hundred years before.

I have to say, I found this book just incredibly good, so powerful and so true. Elwood has captured, in the same story, two apparently very different narratives, deriving from very different times and manners. Rose is a wonderful, though sad, depiction of a young woman who just seems to have got lost. She's hardly over the grief of her mother's death - not over it, in fact - when Paul moves in on her. (I don't think we're meant to dislike Paul, really, but I found it hard to not regard him as a real snare for Rose.) Then Rose has the misfortune to cross paths with Mrs Favell, a clever, mysterious woman who certainly has secrets and perhaps, answers. There is, at the very least, a powerful sense of enchantment, perhaps a kind of Mesmerism, between the two.

And then - pregnancy, birth, the extreme stress of learning to live with a young child. 

O Rose. 

I so felt for Rose, struggling to come to terms with all this, with the doubts about everything - herself, her child. Newborns are hard work. So much about Rose, to me, seemed to be flashing warnings that she needed help, and it's here that Elwood really gets going, producing a glorious, emotionally rending and deeply ambiguous story that leaves you not knowing if Rose's suspicions about her son Alexander - she fears he is a changeling - are symptoms of her mental state, or insights generated by it, or perhaps both. 

All the themes that follow - life and death, the strange existence of a being that owes its whole basis to your care and nourishment, the grief of a mother whose daughter has gone from her and a daughter whose mother is dead - wrap around this. Rose's pregnancy is the time she needs, wants her mother most. The descriptions of scans, of the birth and its aftermath so cleverly and affectingly combine a matter-of -act, objective depiction of what happened with the gulf of unsatisfied feelings that lies beneath ('I realise they're waiting for me to do it - to be a mother')

You can read the story as one of obsession and delusion, or as one of violation and cruelty. It's full of opposites clinging to one another: the perception, hanging over from the Victorians, of fairies as dainty little beings of beauty and light, contrasting with folkloric amoral, cruel creatures. The desire to possess what one loves, distorting and eventually maiming or killing it. And much more. The narrative becomes tricksy, Rose perhaps a not completely reliable narrator, not even to herself - does she really not know what become of the fairytale books from among her mother's collection? ('Did they vanish into the air? ... Was the memory even true...?') Later Rose will have more serious doubts as gaps open up in her reality, prompting her to recall those whose brief stays in Fairyland lasted years in our time. 

This book is... oh, it's so sad, so human. Rose and Paul are, in a real sense, talking past one another. Of the two, Rose is I think the deeper, the more thoughtful, but she is suffering for it. Perhaps they might have been able to resolve that, but the baby comes along and shifts the dynamic. Rose suspects Paul of having messed with her pills to bring this about, a mystery that's never returned to but a sign either of basic mistrust on her part or of unforgivable duplicity on his - not a firm basis for a relationship either way. 

So this book is in a sense an unravelling, a disenchantment, at the same time as it explores all the ways that, and the extent to which, we wish to be enchanted, to believe, or perhaps, to find and possess someone who does themselves believe - with all that harm that will follow from that possession.

It is not a horror story. 

It is a horror story. 

It's just amazing.

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

Review - The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

The Midnight Library

Matt Haig

Canongate, 13 August 2020

Available as: HB, 304pp, e, audio

Source: Advance e-copy via Netgalley

ISBN: 9781786892706

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance e-copy of The Midnight Library via NetGalley.

Nora Seed, an ordinary woman living an ordinary life in the very ordinary town of Bedford, is in despair. ('Only the sertraline stopped her crying'). She has many regrets. She's lost her job, walked away from her own wedding, and rejected both success in a band and as a competitive swimmer ('She'd been the fastest fourteen-year old girl in the country at breaststroke...'). Now she decides to end her life but she finds it isn't that simple.

I loved the idea of this book as soon as I heard about it - a dying woman who, rather than vanishing into oblivion, finds herself in an in-between place, an infinite library where her possible lives are filed and she has the opportunity to consider what might have. No, it's not a new idea - it brought to mind the film A Matter of Life and Death, and even the ancient idea of Purgatory - but I think the fact it seems familiar just shows how intriguing, how compelling it really is. We'd all like, I think, the chance to sift over what-might-have beens, to look for The Moment when it all changed - and what better way than in a library?

The setup gives Haigh an opening to spin many stories. Nora finds herself sampling lives, dropped into the middle of things, alternative existences she might have lived if she'd gone a different way. It's fascinating but also panic inducing - she isn't the "her" of the alternate, she's still very much the "her" of her "root life" and hasn't lived as, say, the Olympic champion or the rock goddess. Yet she's still dropped in the deep end, about to give a motivational speech to a conference or the encore to a concert in sweaty, glittery San Paulo. Even in the most mundane of existences she might emerge from the Library out and about and not know where home is, or what job she does. This succession of existences is calculated to bring out the imposter syndrome in all of us, making even the most outwardly successful lives that Nora assumes into stressy, high-heartrate episodes and creating a sense of unease, of imitation, of fakery as though Nora is, literally, an interloper to herself.

Against this unsettling background, the book, as you'd expect, allows Nora a level of self-analysis, of coming to terms with past events. And as you might expect, Nora comes to understand that many of those regrets are misplaced - to know all is to forgive all, including oneself, and the added insight allowed by running through the alternates (combined with a teeny bit of omniscience from her guide through the library, her old school librarian Mrs Elm) lets her come to terms with a lot of past baggage. (No details, that would be too spoilery). Some authors might leave it there, with a relatively predictable message about acceptance - but Haig has, I'd say, a much deeper understanding and does much more than give us a succession of flickering lives for Nora from which she can choose the best.

Rather, as we see her friends, family and associates through the eyes of all the different Noras - women who have achieved, or not achieved different things and who therefore have very different outlooks and experiences. We get a more rounded picture of everyone, because all those people, too, are living different lives for each Nora. So there's her beloved, estranged gay brother, Joe, who in some timelines is alive, some dead. The father who pushed her into swimming, as a compensation for his own loss. Her mother, who 'treated her like a mistake in need of correction'. Ravi, her brother's best friend who's never forgiven her for pulling the plug on the band and trapping him in Bedford - a town which 'was a conveyor belt of despair' (ouch). Dan, her sometimes-husband (and sometimes not).

All of these characters gradually reveal themselves, with little digressions into their own pasts and families. They are often different from timeline to timeline but also, always the same. They impact on Nora and she impacts on them. It's not as simple and as trite as saying, oooh, look, Nora. Look at what happens without you, what those around you lose. Instead, we get a complex, many sided and always compassionate view of a whole group of people, the different (and overlapping) narratives making this book a sort of literal hologram, a dense and four dimensional rendering of all its characters. It's a rich, enjoyable reading experience with many moments of sad - or happy - recognition. 

It's also vividly, gorgeously written. At a particularly low point, when she seems to have no friends, Nora sees herself as 'antimatter, with added self-pity'. She reflects on how 'happy moments can turn into pain, given time' and considers her existence to be 'incomplete living and incomplete dying'. There's a sense - which we've all had I think though hopefully, most of us rarely and not for long - of separation, of distancing from life, a thing which, as I have said, is only heightened by Nora's serial immersion into versions of herself which aren't her. I have rarely seen as compelling a realisation of a character, or such sharp writing. And there is a great deal of humour here too ('In this life, she clearly had no taste.' 'Her dad belonged in a world of landlines') as well as an overall fascination with life, and with the wider world as seen by the various Noras: the whales off the coast of Australia, the raging fires around LA, which recur and recur. Self absorbed and inward-looking this is not.

In short, compelling, compassionate and a great read. I would recommend.

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

Review - Coming Up For Air by Sarah Leipciger

Coming Up For Air
Sarah Leipciger
Doubleday, 19 Mar 2020
Available as: HB, e, 320pp
Read as: e-copy via NetGalley
ISBN: 9780857526519

I'm grateful to the publisher and to NetGalley for a free advance e-copy of this book.

And now for something (for me) completely different.

Coming Up For Air tells three stories, taking place in late 19th century Paris, mid-20th century Norway and late20th/ early 21st century Canada.

We see a young woman - never named, she is literally referred to as L'Inconnue (the Unknown Woman) - travel to Paris and take up a post as companion to Madame Debord, a suspicious ('She may have been paranoid but she was still a Parisienne'), irascible older widow (older than L'Inconnue, that is, and by the judgement of the time, "old").

In Norway, Pieter Åkrehamn is a young child in the 1920s and later a grown man in the 40s and 50s. It becomes clear that he is narrating his life story - a story balanced between a love of the Northern seas and lakes, of swimming in the cold water until just before it begins to kill and between a constant, haunting grief.

And in Canada, Anouk grows up in the 80s, a girl with cystic fibrosis. Leipciger describes, not a tragedy bravely borne or any other cliche, but the day to day practical difficulties for her and for her parents. Again there is a fascination with the outdoors, with swimming now in the rivers and lakes, even the polluted Lake Toronto. (The chapters focussing on Anouk interleave with those on her mother, Nora, but these two sections are much closer to each other than the rest of the book).

Each story - and they are very different - is narrated with a crystal clear eye for detail ('the hard rainfall of a piano being played mezzo-forte', 'granite like the story of the Earth'), a studied appreciation of, and empathy for, the tiny events and incidents of everyday life. L'Inconnue's takes place over the shortest period but documents her growing up - coming to Paris as a "provincial", learning how to live there ('this was my first city, and it was Paris': there that sense here of Paris as more than a place, as a civilisation) becoming increasingly confident and self-assured, discovering love ('She had a beautiful potted belly, and if a hundred cakes would have given me a belly like that I would have eaten every one of them') but - not a spoiler as this is the first scene we encounter - throwing herself into the Seine in despair. Anouk's story parallels L'Inconnue's, we see her growing up, a happy child, through medical crises, finding her feet, weathering her parents' increasing distance, but, also, coming to a crisis point where her condition requires a lung transplant.

Bridging the two, Pieter's story spans the longest period and forms a critical bridge in the book though it also forms the shortest part of the book. Pieter's account is wrapped round a loss and is perhaps the most intense of the three, telling of a grief, almost while not addressing it. It was incredibly moving.

Three different stories yet they have some common themes. Both Pieter's and Anouk's stories touch on men - husbands, fathers - who seen self reliant and in control but who at critical moments are actually absent or absent-while-present: they don't know what to do, they freeze. It's Anouk's mother who deal with the dead deer, it's Pieter's wife who saves the house from fire (and who copes with the difficult child when he can't). These are significant moment but Leipciger doesn't make them simplistic turning points in the narrative or in relationships.

Similarly, the idea of water, of immersion, runs through all three narratives. For Anouk it's both a balm, helping her live with her condition and - if the warning signs are not heeded - a danger. The margin is slight, as we see also with Pieter when he swims out too far. And L'Inconnue too develops a fascination for the Seine before that final plunge.

And, of course, there is death. Actual deaths, as the loved are borne away, sometimes overtly marked - a joyous funeral in Canada - sometimes not, as when unclaimed corposes are exhibited in the Paris Morgue, visited by L'Inconnue and her lover - sometimes simply passed over, as with a boy who dies unseen. Deaths garnished with rumour and fancy. Deaths that afford life to others, as transplant donors or the inspiration for life saving innovations. Potential deaths, close escapes: the book explores that margin, that grey area, discussing the idea of resuscitation, the limited time when death can be averted, undone.

There's an idea behind this, I think, the symmetry of life and death - life as a brief interruption to death, rather than the other way round: 'Where we are, I think it's like a river and you're the flow. And every so often, out of the flow, you, me - all of us - we crawl up on to the bank and we do life... River is life and death both'.

At a time of uncertainty and indeed death, it's actually a rather uplifting thought to take from this very beautiful, absorbing book. I would strongly recommend.

For more information about Coming up for Air, including links to places where it can be bought, see the publisher's website here.

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.