Review - Bridge by Lauren Beukes

Bridge
Lauren Beukes
Penguin, 17 August 2023 
Available as: HB, PB, 432pp, audio, e  
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780718182823 (PB): 9781405923750

I'm grateful to the publisher for providing me with an advance e-copy of Bridge via Netgalley to consider for review.

Bridge is an absolute cracker of a novel from the author of The Shining Girls, Afterland and Broken Monsters. It had great resonance for me as an exploration of bereavement and also raises profound moral questions for its protagonists (at least one of whom doesn't come very well out of that test).

Bridget - Bridge - is the daughter of neuroscientist Jo, who has recently died of cancer. We see Bridge in the numbing coils of bereavement, wishing she'd spent more time with prickly Jo and astonished at what she didn't know about her mum. I felt this was well observed and written with real feeling, my mother having died several months ago it rang absolutely true to me that there could be discoveries in the loved one's paper, online activity and possessions.

My mother wasn't keeping such scary secrets though. Bridge, working with her friend Dom, soon discovers that her mother believed there were alternative versions of her in other worlds and that these could be accessed via a narcotic substance called "dreamworm". Taking us into a domain of obsession and paranoia, Beukes shows how this belief had taken over Jo's life, driving away her family and her lover and leading her to some very dangerous places indeed.

As it does Bridge. Across multiple universes, anything can happen, but it seems certain patterns recur - and Jo (and Bridge) repeatedly come up against Jo's brain cancer, against a stalkery vein of domestic abuse and coercive control, and also against a sinister cult that believes it knows all the answers and must control events at all costs. It's a tense novel, particularly in the way that things slowly - and them more quickly - escalate, Bridge throwing aside caution without realising that's what she is doing.

Fairly dancing along, this is a novel you'll want to read in a sitting, not least to spot the repeating patterns, the clues as to Jo's earlier life and discoveries, and to enjoy how Beukes conveys in her prose the subtly different natures of the various worlds she describes. I'm not sure I can convey just how well she does this, you'll have to read the book - it's almost as though you can breathe the different realies' atmospheres - the textures come right into the mind, almost like you had taken some of that "dreamworm". 

The characters also come over well. From staunch, non binary Dom, determined to back up their friend Bridge but perhaps getting in much, much deeper than they expected, to obsessed ex cop Amber who travels everywhere with her dog, Mr Floof II (Mr Floof I came to a bad end - it happens a lot to dogs in this story) to selfish, messy Caden who has a legend all of his own, Beukes flawlessly inhabits them all, conveying their essence, even evoking sympathy for some pretty nasty people.

Bridge really is, as the subtitle states, a novel of suspense - but also one of big ideas, raising questions not only about our responsibilities to those parallel selves but also to our relatives and friends. Bridge wants to find her mother, but how much harm is she prepared to inflict to do that? How much collateral damage is acceptable?

Also dipping a toe into the sewers of Internet obsession and delusion, with some hilarious scenes in a support group for a non-existent  conditions, Bridge entertains throughout - and ends on a note of genuine uncertainty leading me to hope that a sequel might be in the works.

Strongly recommended.

(CW for domestic violence, abuse and coercive control).

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

#Blogtour #Review - A Master of Djinn by P Djèlí Clark

A Master of Djinn
P Djèlí Clark
Orbit, 19 August 2021
Available as: PB, 416pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy 
ISBN(PB): 9780356516875

I'm grateful to Orbit for a free advance copy of A Master of Djinn to consider for review, and to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers for inviting me onto the book's blogtour.

I found A Master of Djinn a very clever, very satisfying story on many levels. Taking us back to the fantastical Egypt of short stories A Dead Djinn in Cairo and The Haunting of Tram Car 015, A Master of Djinn is a full length novel set in a world where supernatural spirits mingle freely with humans. In Egypt, these are, naturally, the djinn whose tales feature so much Middle Eastern folklore. In other parts of the world they may be other entities - goblins, for example, in Germany. And in some places, they are not welcome at all: the United Kingdom, for example, which as a result has suffered reverses and is in danger of losing what remains of its Empire.

In Cairo, Fatma el-Sha’arawi is the youngest woman working for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, charged with keeping a lid on the exuberance of the magical. Fatma is a glorious character, favouring sharp suits and never at a loss for a quip even in the face of the gravest danger. She's saved the universe before, and is the ideal person to call in to deal with the mass murder, apparently by magical means, of a secret society led by the reclusive British aristocrat and industrialist, Lord Worthington. Worthington's secret was dedicated to the retrieval of artefacts related to  Al-Jahiz, the mystic who, fifty years before, opened up a route to the spiritual dimension from which the djinn and other magical beings proceed. As a pretender to Al-Jahiz's legacy emerges, stirring up the Cairo mob and alleging collusion with foreign interests, it becomes imperative to solve the murder before Worthington's finds collection can be put to a sinister use...

P Djèlí Clark's ambitious story takes this intriguing premise and runs with it with great gusto, building on scraps of history, mythology and folktale to give us an immediately recognisable and believable world. There is Cairo the crossroads of East and West, where a dilettante aristocracy, obsessed with the past, may encounter more than he expects; a teeming world of djinn working in the city alongside humans, running bookshops, developing gambling habits, tricking marks with the old three wishes dodge; there are ancient Egyptian gods, holdovers from the past but still with some power; haughty angels who seem to have their own distinct plans; and much more.

He also gives us, in Fatma, an engaging and self-possessed protagonist, very much going her own way (especially when girlfriend Siri is on the scene) but not above misjudgements, as when she's teamed up with rookie Hadia - Fatma very much prefers to work alone and finds it hard to make the accommodations she needs to when mentoring a partner. I enjoyed the relationship between the two, which could have become clichéd but instead develops into something real, warm and alive.

Set against a background of the European powers drifting into war - the book features a peace conference brokered by Egypt and a walk on by nobody less than Kaiser Bill himself - the story is skilfully pitched to reflect on 20th century Great Power relationships and their colonial implications without being bound by them, rather it shows other paths that might be taken and leaves us to speculate how these might influence the future (including our future). It doesn't lack villains, whether megalomaniac humans or haughty djinn, and the fun isn't so much in the revelations of who they are (I spotted one fairly early on) as in how the ramified power politics between will unwind, what the effect will be on wider society - and who will die. All of that keeps the reader guessing, with plenty of twists and turns, perilous episodes and ingenious revelations. It is, basically, fun from start to finish and I hope to be able to read more in this world soon.

For more information about A Master of Djinn, see the Orbit website here and be sure to catch all the stops on the blog tour - listed on the poster below. You can buy A Master of Djinn from your local bookshop, or online from Bookshop dot com, from Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon. 

Review - The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The Doors of Eden

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Macmillan, 20 August 2020

Available as: HB, 608pp, e, audio

Read as: Advance e-copy

ISBN: 9781509865888

I'm grateful to Macmillan for a free advance e-copy of The Doors of Eden via NetGalley.

Well, 2020 - whatever else - is turning out too be a cracker of a year for books. And for me, The Doors of Eden is one of its highlights so far. 

How to describe it, though? Especially without strewing spoilers around? That's a very hard problem...

The Doors of Eden is a wonderful, classic, classy, piece of SFF, spinning its readers' heads with a host of parallel Earths in each of which evolution has proceeded differently. They're introduced by a scholarly writer, Professor Ruth Emerson of the University of California, whose opus, Other Edens: Speculative Evolution and Intelligence is frequently quoted. As Other Edens makes clear, this isn't just about minor changes to the timeline where things are a little different, it's about the points where different history gave us vastly different sentient life. The speculation supporting this is compelling, from the closer timelines - an Earth where Neanderthals survived but we didn't - to those rather different. An Earth overcrowded by hundreds of billions of rat/ weasel creatures. Worlds of intelligent fish or sentient silverfish or horseshoe crabs. 

The Doors of Eden is also a compelling, believable and slick thriller, with plenty of intrigue and peril, initially following the attempts of an MI5 team comprising Julian Sabreur ('no young Sean Connery or even Roger Moore') and his analyst Alison Mitchell ('Matchbox') to foil an attempt by far Right thugs on the life of an ex GCHQ scientist, Dr Kay Amal Khan. We're soon in a world of hoodlums, shady "security" companies, well-connected financiers milking Government contracts. We may not be quite sure what's going on, but it's clear, in this part of the narrative, who's on the side of the devils: watch out for how they talk about Dr Khan, who's a transwoman - the villains reliably refer to her as "he" and there's a moment where this causes them enough operational confusion that she slips past their watchers. Dr Khan herself is a bit of a wildcard: one of the foremost world experts on... something, potentially available to either side as an asset but to what exact purpose?

The existence of these other Earths begins to be revealed when two young women, Lee (Lisa Pryor, short for Lisa Chandrapraisar) and Mal (short for Elsinore Mallory 'because she came from a particular social stratum where that was perfectly acceptable. However, she never forgave them for it') stumble into trouble on Dartmoor. Four years on from that terrifying event, Lee finds herself caught up in the machinations between MI5 and its opponents (there are several factions). The story of Lee and Mal is at one level a romance - we see Lee's sense of loss and confusion. Tchaikovsky is really, really good on the psychological impact on her of what happened: the pain, anger and guilt. The whole setup may be fantastical, but her reactions are deeply, convincingly real and they drive what she does through the book, for good and ill. (For that matter he's also really good on the little details of their relationship before The Thing that Happened, the ways they work each other out, understand each other, fox their families about what's really going on between. The way that Lee, missing Mal, was 'terrified that Mal would suddenly remember she was white and posh').

There is another romance here too, between Alison and Julian. Kind of: I wasn't actually clear whether it went anywhere, partly due to lots of that old-fashioned British reserve keeping them apart (though again, that seems to make things even more real). It's also partly due to the structure that Tchaikovsky adopts, one where there's a capability to see alternate outcomes so that words like "real" become moot. And partly, it's a delicacy to the writing which leaves us to imagine a lot - in the same way for example that detail of that Dartmoor episode, past a certain point, is left hazy. Far from diminishing the horror, this, combined with the car crash that Lee has made of her life only heightens the sense of terror and mystery.

What else does Tchaikovsky do well here? 

How long have you got? 

What about the way he vividly depicts his different societies - variously composed of birdlike creatures, rat-weasels, Neanderthals and many others. They all feel real, based on the real circumstances that gave rise to them, with communications, technology and culture (with the rat-weasels for example, status is all about claiming space in their crowded world, whether through bulky clothing or overpowering colognes). 

What about the deft interweaving of the different strands of story - many of them seemingly contradictory (but you're in safe hands here, just go with the story)?

Or the shady, only hinted at, nexus of IT, quantum mechanics and Very Hard Maths that underlies events?

Or that certain type of privileged, entitled person, who, confronted with the very Apocalypse itself, plans primarily to make themselves some gain at everyone else's expense. (A repellent characters done very well, this one).

I'd have to say though that for me, the aspect of this book I found most beguiling was the sheer mastery and even beauty of the prose. There are so many examples I could quote. It's smart ('she had borrowed hope at a ruinous interest rate'), often funny, sharply observed. It's never less than engaging, frequently compelling and, in some moments, simply brilliant. There are allusions to classic SF (motes in a god's eye, the stars beginning to go out, an on-point Doctor Who reference to The Girl who Stayed and The Girl Who Came Back) and a general sense of playing with genre, trying on metaphors from role playing games, films ('It's a million to one long shot, and only these two desperate lesbians can save the world') and meme, a book that injects a sense of fun even into the darkest moments ('not that you ever need an excuse to slap a fascist').  

This is a book to immerse oneself in, to live and breathe, not just to read. 

It's one I'd strongly recommend.

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

Review - Agency by William Gibson

Agency
William Gibson
Viking, 23 January 2020
HB, 416pp

'Observe, orient, decide, act'.

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

Sequel to Gibson's The Peripheral, Agency is a book that can be read as a standalone, although that leaves the reader with a  a job of catching up to do. Still, we are brought up to speed pretty quickly.

The book takes place across three alternate timelines - our world, albeit in 2136, and two versions of 2016, including one where the results of the UK's Brexit referendum and of the US's presidential election were different. With its events taking place in San Franciso, the latter timeline gives some quiet signs of hope in the US: a mural celebrating "the President's" courage, for example ('Her opponent loomed behind her, as he once actually had'). We don't see the outcome in the UK in this scenario. But Gibsons insists that people are generally no happier, not knowing what they've been saved from - and the "jackpot", a horrible future featuring decades of catastrophe, is still coming. Nothing immediately hangs on the difference in political outcomes and we don't see the longterm effects. Rather the conflict that motivates the book takes place under the radar and at a more personal level.

Gibson's conceit is that "our" timeline is the "real" one from which the others are "stubs", branches formed when somebody in "our" world communicates back to inhabitants in the distant past.. How such communication is possible isn't explained (I think that's where reading The Peripheral, which I hadn't, may help) but Gibson uses the idea with gusto, having the inhabitants of 2136 London intervene in 2016 for a variety of reasons - one is malicious and enjoys causing trouble, others see it as a hobby, while our main protagonists - a Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer and her sidekick, Netherton - seek to help. In particular, they're trying to prevent alt-2016 perishing in a nuclear war, and therefore seek traction in that world. (This is challenged by an indignant resident of one of the other timelines as simply colonialism)

At the other end of this process is Verity Jane, a young woman renowned in the tech world as the "app whisperer" and in the tabloids as Stetson Howell's ex. Howell is a powerful force in tech and having broken ups with him, Verity is of great interest to social media. When the book opens she's just about to take a new job evaluating an AI personal assistant for startup Tulpagenics - something that will change her life for ever.

The AI, Eunice*, becomes key to this story and the relationship between it - her - and Verity both touching and intriguing. As chapters alternate between San Francisco and London, we gradually see a more complete picture of what's going on, but to achieve that you need to get your head round some complicated setups involving tele-presencing between the two timelines (and occasionally, all three).

So you can have a character (generally Netherton) living in 2136 London but virtually occupying a drone in 2016 alt-San Francisco, interacting with the inhabitants there and observing that reality through a game-like interface while occasionally exchanging words with someone with him in the (2136) - the conversation also including other characters who are effectively dialled in to the events, from one or other of the timelines. I found it really confusing at times ('...his phone's feed provided by her device's camera. She couldn't see him, though he could show her what he was seeing'), and the descriptions of what was being seen on that virtual display sometimes took a lot of effort to interpret.

There is also a lot of tech speak. 'She's an intermittently hierarchical array, complexly coterminous' for example, or 'a locus of clonic indeterminacy' or 'competitive control areas'. The book is in one sense a lot of extended conversations, undertaken as characters run for their lives. But, new words to learn! At least now I know what "noetic" means.

I realise this may sound as if I didn't like the book. That's not so at all. I really enjoyed Agency and look forward to reading more Gibson. The stuff above doesn't really hold up the narrative or make the essentials hard to follow. And he has some mind-bending concepts - see the character who has had her animated tattoos removed and installed into the hide of an indoor yurt, so that as she sleeps she's surrounded by moving animal figures. Or the idea of an electronic privacy filter created by a circle of dancing bots swirling shawls made of a smart fabric. And there is some really smart, even beautiful use of language here ('Her eyes and chartreuse lips seemed to float there, a disembodied Cheshire goth...', '"...something like Uber," Eunice said, "but for following people"', 'that horror movie feel of any unoccupied cam feed').

Above all, the characters feel real, part of a community, a family, at home ion their places - whether that's Verity sofa-surfing in San Francisco or Netherton with his wife Rainey and his son of even Lowbeer in her preposterous mobile situation room. The book feels deep, these characters care for each other, they have history and have made compromises and they know better to raise certain issues or to do certain things, and Gibson communicates all this subtly, he shows it, for which I can forgive him any amount of tech speak and mind-bending multi-way situations.

It was great fun. But do read The Peripheral first.

For more about the book, including links to buy, see the Penguin website here.

*Untethered Noetic Irregular Support System

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.

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