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

Type by Julia Lloyd
Image by Vince Haig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd strongly recommend.

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

Review - Ruby by Nina Allan

Cover by Julia Lloyd

Ruby
Nina Allan
Titan Books, 6 October 2020
Available as: PB
Source: Advance PB copy
ISBN: 9781789091724

I'm really, really grateful to Titan Books for an advance copy of Ruby to consider for review.

Nina Allan is one of the authors who, when I see they have a new book coming, make me silently shout "YES!" (or sometimes not so silently). Her blending of the mundane and the fantastical, her referencing whole alternate worlds - sometimes bizarrely alien, sometimes only subtly different from ours - makes her books into wonderful, almost holographic puzzles, where the detail and the big picture contain the entirety of each other and every page is a joy to read.

So it is with Ruby. Told as a group of seven stories, this certainly IS the story of horror actress Ruby Castle even though at the same time, many of the stories say every little about her. Or seem to. Actually I think the less that's said, the more she may be present.

For example, I'm reasonably sure - though Allan doesn't say so - that one of the stories is actually one of Castle's films. It is a horror story, and the actress isn't mentioned - where would she be other than in plain sight? Alternatively, it may be that Castle's films are interacting with our world - which is to say, Allan's fictional world - there is a reference in that story to an escaped Nazi war criminal who features obliquely in another story seemingly set in Allan's "real world", one that mentions Castle's grandfather.

The stories can all the enjoyed in their own right and independently of the rest, but the more of them you read, the more links you'll see both in content (persons, events) and themes. Some are naturalistic and some contain (possible) elements of the supernatural - so for example The Lammas Worm is perhaps an (MR) Jamesian sort of horror, with a hinted at monster, but also establishes Castle's background and early years in a travelling show. The carnival life is a recurring theme, as it is in others of Allan's books (which have also I think explored the relationship between reality and films). Other, darker themes include the disappearance of children or young women. Some of these Arte explained or we can easily guess a link to the presence of predatory men, sometimes there may be other, more esoteric reasons.

Even where there is no death or disappearance, or it's hinted that the woman in question turned up again later, Allan often evokes a sense of menace, a feeling that something isn't right, an atmosphere of suspicion and misease. Indeed sometimes the manner of the "turning up" only fuels that unease, which is also underpinned by the timelines of the various pieces. Both between and within the stories there are jump cuts, flashbacks (and, in the case of one story set in 2029 onwards, forwards) and narratives in narratives. The result is, indeed, like a hall of mirrors, with events seen from different perspectives some (or all) of which may be distorted, and characters who keep secrets from each other. How unsettling it is for example to see a reunion between old friends after many years, but to have been told by one, the narrator, that he'd had an affair with the other's wife?

Reading over these last few paragraphs, I think I should emphasise that Allan's writing isn't all - indeed it is hardly at all - weird, shock horror stuff. Even when dealing with the eruption of the grotesque into real life, she writes carefully, restrainedly and, as a result, utterly convincingly. In London, a woman keeps meeting the ghost of her schoolfriend, missing some ten or twenty years. Two tourists witness a horror when stranded one night on a mountain: the next morning they reason it away and go on with their lives. A girl on a train discovers men who ought to be dead: she, too, simply accepts it as one of those things. The stories, even the shortest, tell us enough about what went before and what happens after (and sometimes other stories add to this) to give a sense of their characters' longer lives, of what sort of people they are where they came from, so these moments of strangeness never define the whole life or the person -  except, ironically, for Ruby who does commit an act that will frame the rest of her life.

Ruby is simply awesomely, jaw-droppingly good, and will be one of my top reads of 2020. Don't delay, get this on your TBR pile (and right at the top).

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

Review - The Dollmaker by Nina Allan

The Dollmaker
Nina Allan
Riverrun, 4 April 2019
HB, 416pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via Netgalley.

I really enjoyed Allan's last two books, The Rift and The Race, and I was eager to read The Dollmaker. Those books were twisty, substantial ostensible science fiction/ fantasy which invited the reader to wonder if what were - on the surface - fantastical stories should simply be taken as such, or whether the weird turns, contradictions and coincidences were (or also were) indicative of ruptured relationships and individuals' breakdowns. The answer wasn't clear, and that, perhaps, was one of the most satisfying things about them.

The Dollmaker presents, I think, the same choice, but from the other side of the genre fence. This is ostensibly a naturalistic, if increasingly odd, story which also acts as a framing narrative to a series of fantastical short stories (described as modern fairy tales) allegedly written by 'Ewa Chaplin' and translated from the Polish. However, the subjects and provenance of those stories seem to be coupled with the themes of the 'real world' story, something Allan's protagonist Andrew Garvie uneasily begins to realise.

Are we dealing with confirmation bias - the characters in The Dollmaker reporting on one book among many they've read that seems to reflect their own lives?

Or is there more?

To explain further, in this book we meet Andrew Garvie, the dollmaker of the title.

We meet him first as a small boy, later a small man. While we're introduced early to this interest in dolls (he is aged eight) and we might expect that to cause him trouble with a traditionalist father and cruel schoolmates, the fact of Andrew's stature and condition is in contrast something that only emerges slowly - indeed part of the unrolling impact of this book is his seeing himself reflected (and traduced, and distorted) in Chaplin's stories. The world 'dwarf' is often used in these, and this is only one of the ways in which the stories, many of them about people marked out - a girl with autism, a soldier who lost his legs in the Great War and, yes, people like Andrew - echo the 'real life' of The Dollmaker.

Garvie has, we learn, answered a personal ad in a dollmaking magazine:

INFORMATION WANTED ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF DOLLMAKER EWA CHAPLIN AND/ OR FRIENDSHIP, CORRESPONDENCE. PLEASE REPLY TO: BRAMBER WINTERS.

He is on his (leisurely) way across southern England to meet Winters at her home in Cornwall. The Dollmaker interleaves Garvie's travels and observations with Chaplin's fantastical stories (a young actress with a wealthy and older husband begins a relationship with a disabled ex soldier; a teacher struggles with her feelings when a gill with autism arrive sin her class; in a near future Britain, a theocracy has banned representations of humans and an artist is publicly tried for blasphemy; a country exists where Fae are as real a menace as rats, and treated in a similar way) and with Winters' letters to him. From them (and it's not clear whether he has received them all, or whether some were sent as he travelled) we learn about her early life. She has been twenty years in a hospital after some incident which (at first) she only uneasily alludes to.

It's clear that Garvie has become - what? Infatuated? Obsessed? - by Winters (again reflecting Chapman's stories). He sees himself as setting out to rescue her in some way, even though it's not clear she wants or needs to be rescued. There seems to be more going on here than a shared love of dolls and Allan teases a bit, drawing out the journey and making it a bit of an epic. Garvie presents as a somewhat old-fashioned character, regretting the turmoil of modern Reading (the English town, not the activity) or the state of architecture in post-war Exeter. Something about the reflections on these places, as well as his visits to lesser known towns off the tourist map and the leisurely nature of his journey (he takes days to do a trip you could surely manage by train in a day?) put me in mind of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day.

Garvie seems to be an unreliable narrator. He certainly is in terms of what he tells Bramber, for example not letting on that he's coming to find her but I sensed that a lot of what he tells us is mysterious or incomplete. What about Ursula's sudden disappearance? Or the twins he mentions several times but never explains? So by the point where - in the last quarter of the book - a single telephone call seems to cast doubt on other aspects of the story too, it almost begins to look as if Chaplin's fairy tales are more solid, more certain than real life itself (despite their themes of alternative universes and the way they trespass on reality). Perhaps this is similar to the way that Garvie sees his (assumed) relationship with Winters as totally real - while being quiet cold and unsympathetic to the very real troubles of his friend Clarence's autistic daughter, Jane.

It's a dense novel (in a good way!) which had me flicking backwards and forwards in my Kindle checking for repetitions, echoes, foreshadowings, for loose strands suddenly appearing in a different context and resolutions to things that seemed to stop midway. I think that in a sense the story here is like one of those 2D or 3D representations of a 4D object, the compression producing odd effects and conjunctions which have their own patterns and rhythms.

An excellent book, one I enjoyed a lot and would strongly recommend.

Hive Books | Blackwell's | Waterstones | Amazon 

Review - The Rift by Nina Allan

Image from titanbooks.com

The Rift
Nina Allan
Titan Books, 11 July 2017
PB, 418pp

I'm so grateful to Titan for an advance copy of this book, which was one of my most anticipated of 2017 after Allan's stunning The Race last year.

The books have some similarities. Like The Race, The Rift is complex in form - the story is told both through viewpoint narratives and through interpolated artefacts: letters, lists, newspaper articles, school essays, bits of stories, diaries. These aren't all written by the main characters, so for example we get a section from the diary of a specialist metallurgist who's consulted about an item of jewellery, giving a shrewd sidelight on one of the main characters.

Like The Race, this book centres on a disappearance: Julie, elder sister of Selena, goes missing from the North Cheshire village of Lymm in the mid 90s. Nearly 20 years later, she turns up again and the heart of the book is the section describing what happens then as Serena attempts to make sense of what happened.

It's a shifting, teasing story. There are issues of identity. Is it really Julie? She tells a fantastic story about what happened to her, but it's a very partial story. Apparently Julie stepped in a blink from the banks of Hatchmere, a lake in Delamere Forest some way from Lymm, to an alien planet, Tristane. But almost immediately this clarity begins to wash out. Julie poses two mysteries: the craziness of her story but also the fact that the account given hardly covers a few weeks of the time she was missing.

A lot has been missed out, one feels, is being hidden, even as Allan relishes the opportunity to sketch the geography, history and society of Tristane.  Indeed there's enough material there for whole volumes of a more conventional )and conventionally narrated) SF saga - the strange, mind eating parasites, the abandonment of travel to nearby planets, the thousands of years of history, the suspicion of a coverup - but I think making it into that would be waste: instead Allan presents this material in fragmentary form, scattered through the book, and it seems more real than any spacefaring epic I've read.

At the same time, the loss of Julie brings to a head a crisis in her family, making visible faultlines already there. Allan's writing is never more beautiful than picking apart the impact on father, mother, daughter - the guilt, the wondering what really happened, the dislocated lives, the need both to go on living and to not give up hope. In the course of this Allan explores - again almost in passing but never superficially, never without respect - the other lives touched, such as the teacher who befriended Julie, was hounded by the press and whose story ends up turned into a novel, extracts of which are quoted. There's a weird foreshadowing of this in a character introduced early on who seems to be going to play a significant part in the book but, after a tragedy, is barely heard of again. And yet, there are hints about him, echoes of him and his life in other parts of the book, other characters and other scenes. Somehow it is, I think, all part of a whole - something also glimpsed in the resonances between different parts of the story (such as Julie's using the word "temple" for Coventry Cathedral, inviting a comparison with her description of those in the Tristanian city of Firby.

Alongside Julie's and Selena's parents, there is also a focus on another tragic couple, Cally and Noah, with whom she seems to belong in Tristane (but is the Julie of Tristane the same person as the Julie of Earth? Is one dreaming the other and, if so, which is which?) Again, little is said explicitly about their situation though Allan is marvellous at implying things via a few words via behaviour such as Noah's endless nighttime expeditions.

It's an entrancing, audacious book. Somehow the games with language and setting reminded me of another book - M John Harrison's Viriconium. It's less in the subject matter or setting but more the way that Allan seems to create, almost, a body of myth in this book - a deposit of stories around a central theme but not all consonant, sometime contradicting one another but, by their separateness, actually supporting one another. (I note in passing that Harrison uses many placenames from the North West of England in those stories, Lymm included, and locates parts of at least one in Manchester).

It's also book that can't really be captured in a few words. The Rift put me in mind of a Kaleidoscope, perhaps, or of washing going round in a machine: all the colours and shapes are there but one can't quite see how they relate to each other. It works, though. I think, at a different level from a logical, unfolding story, those pieces assemble themselves, somehow. If you've ever tried to imagine a 4D object, you may see what I mean. You literally can't imagine the whole, but you can model it, capture it your mind at some other level. In the same way, this story comes together such that even the most improbable seeming details fit and make a mind of sense. In the same way, Selena's acceptance and rejection of Julie, and the response of Julie's mother Margery, and some of the other discoveries in this books, do click into place.

I see this as very much a 21st century equivalent to those stories of children being carried off by the fairies and returning years after, unable to explain where they've been, unable to be in the society they left, unable to go back. At the same time it's also very preoccupied with modern problems, with relations between parents and children/ teenagers, with shifts in loyalties and "growing up", with lonely people making their own worlds for themselves - or trying to.

Finally, is this book perhaps to some degree a comment on or response to Boneland, the recently published third part of Alan Garner's Weirdstone of Brisingamen trilogy? Both concern the aftermath of losing a sister, both look to the stars for explanation, both focus on the Cheshire meres and seem to speak of sacrifice, sacred landscape and mystery.

A magnificent achievement, and a book to go back to again and again, I think.

The Race by Nina Allan

Image from http://titanbooks.com

The Race
Nina Allan
Titan Books, 19 July 2016
PB, 444pp
Source: Advance copy kindly sent to me by the publisher.

Oh, but this book is good. How to review it though? I'm not sure I really know where to begin. I do know that saying too much about the structure would spoil things - there are things here that the reader needs to work out for herself. I also know that this is a book that is hard to pin down, and I may have drawn the wrong conclusions on some of it. For both these reasons I will have to be a bit vague in what follows, and I apologise in advance for that.

So, In The Race there are essentially five stories. In the first, we learn about Jenna, growing up in a crummy town called Sapphire. Sapphire is close to the Romney Marshes, long polluted by fracking, only it is not in England: Sapphire is in a place called Crimond. The town's tenuous prosperity is based on racing smartdogs - greyhounds genetically modified to communicate with their human "runners". Jenna's brother Del is involved in managing the dogs.

In what is clearly an alternate reality, Allan develops a narrative that is gripping and sulpherous, a kind of warped Brighton Rock. She dwells on the tawdry glamour of the dog track, the business of making hand sewn "gants" for the runners (this is Jenna's trade), drug dealing, kidnapping and the grim fate of superannuated dogs. At the same time we also learn the background of this world, the migrant race of "Hools' that both Jenna and Del come from and its language.

The following two stories step back from fantasy and focus on, respectively, Christy and Alex. Christy, first, grows up in Hastings. Like Jenna she has a missing mother and a dominant, unpredictable brother - though Derek is a terror compared to Del: again I thought of Pinky in Brighton Rock: "So long as Dad was in the house, I felt safe, only never quite" writes Christy. And indeed, Derek does terrible things, one related so matter of factly that it might break your heart. Much of this story is occupied with Christy's fears about just what he may have done, or be about to.

Alex is mentioned in that second story but comes into his own more in the third, named for him. His childhood - again, in Hastings - is marked by bullying and racism: "No-one in college called him n***** but there were still dozens of ways he felt he stood out, not because of the colour of his skin but because of the insults he'd been subjected to because of it." With both Alex's and Christy's stories Allan skewers, I think, the sense of being marginalised, made a victim, part of somebody else's story rather than writing one's own. And also - and how prescient is this? - the desperately think ice on which decent behaviour skates: "...he knew also that things could change around you in an instant, and that when they did it was always those who were different that were made to suffer."

Alex and, especially, Christy in these stories have a connection to Sapphire and Jenna's world. In some ways their situations and lives echo each other, despite Sapphire being part of a fantasy world (towards the end of her story Jenna travels to a London which is perfectly ordinary in some ways but with craters, caused by explosions in "the war" - a war also mentioned when veterans weep on hearing it mentioned). For the reasons given above, I won't say just what the connection is: as Allan explores it, more and more echoes arise between the two worlds until, by the end, I honestly wasn't sure which themes originated with who.

The final two stories ("Maree" and "Brock Island") essentially fit together as two episodes, decades apart, in the life of a woman, Maree. She clearly lives in Jenna's world, and we learn more about that war, which seems to have been against a South American country, Thalia: though the details are sparse and we seem to be at peace again, the experience weighs heavy on everyone. Terrible details are given almost casually: smartdogs were created to carry weapons through enemy lines - including nuclear weapons. Maree, who has been trained from an early age to use her rare talents in the service of a mysterious "programme", is on a voyage to Thalia - could it be that "Crimond" lost the war against Thalia? It hardly matters. Allan scatters enough uncertainty about the locations and names of her fictional countries to make it pointless to try and work out exactly what happened - as well as thinly disguised versions of France and Spain we also have England and Scotland mentioned here alongside "Crimond". And whales - great, island sized Atlantic whales, which are a danger to shipping rather than a hunted species. In these stories, one moment you think you understand the fictional world - say where the Internet is mentioned, it must be close to ours? - then the next we have steamships and tribes following the "old orthodoxy" which means human sacrifice to the whales.

And through it all, Maree on her voyage. If "Jenna" played on Graham Greene, "Maree" feels like a story by Conrad or Stephenson: an ill assorted collection of Western passengers on their by slow boat to the tropics, with rivalries, friendships and slightly bored, saloon-bound politics that you get - or got - in such cases.

The final story, while still rooted in Maree's life, also becomes more philosophical. "Words are what humans are, even more than flesh" she muses as she reviews her life - and as we learn what she has really been doing and what depends on it. At the same time, the structure I thought I'd worked out that tied all the stories together seemed I real doubt: as I read the last page I simply didn't know whether or not I'd been wrong all along - or whether it even mattered.

This book is simply breathtaking. Not only does Allan have deep it insight into her characters and their lives, she writes beautiful prose, and leaves the reader needing to think very deeply and very hard about her story.

Really, really good, certainly the best book I've read this year so far. Just superb.

For more information on the book see here. To buy it, try  your local bookshop (local bookshops are the best bookshops!) or here, here or here.

(Nina Allan also has a story in Drowned Worlds which I reviewed here).