#Blogtour #Review - Upstairs at the Beresford by Will Carver

Upstairs at the Beresford
Will Carver
Orenda Books, 9 November2023 
Available as: PB, 276pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781914585920

I'm grateful to Anne Cater for for inviting me to join the blogtour for Upstairs at the Beresford and for getting me an advance copy to read.

Upstairs at the Beresford is a kind-of prequel to Carver's The Beresford (can it really be two whole years since that came out?)

I say "kind-of" because, as with the other books which are set in what might be called the Carververse, while one can see repeated elements (characters, events, businesses) there isn't I think a "continuity" as one might normally define it - a shared set of events and a consistent set of facts - rather there is a sort of "moral" continuity. So I'm not sure that it makes sense to say that events of Upstairs precede those of The Beresford in a temporal sense, but they do come before, in a kind of moral, developmental (or perhaps better, decline-y)sense.

Put simply, it's revealed here that the Beresford itself - that institution to be found on the edge of any town, where drifting members of humanity find themselves tested, and often failing - is a sort of sulphurous experiment, a gambit, as it were, by the powers of darkness, to gather in more souls and not only more souls but the best souls (imagine offering your soul to the Devil and being told that no, it's not up to scratch! What a humiliation!)

The experiment, the gambit, described here, precedes the one seen in The Beresford which is now shown as simply another iteration of the same shell game. In Upstairs, the Beresford is more a hotel than the suite of apartments we saw in the earlier book, something that presents both opportunities to the management (the monthly sales conferences that it host are a good opportunity to gather product) and risks (such as potential for publicity). This both explains a bit more about what is going on in The Beresford and raises questions about where things are ultimately bound.

In particular this book isn't I think answering the question of what was going on when saw that little glimpse upstairs in the previous book, rather it's telling a story of its own. Carver portrays an ensemble of residents and visitors who represent humanity with its strengths and weaknesses: the family with an abusive husband, his wife desperately turning tricks during the day to raise money to get out with her son; the loved-up young couple living as cheaply as they can while they save for their own place; the cabaret singer who's so achingly cool it almost hurts; the raffish salesman in town for that conference; and of course Carol, the manager, who's bound to the place by some strange bargain of her own, and is adept at clearing up dead bodies, the debris of orgies, and the remnants of whatever it is happens each month down in the basement.

Together these characters - and there are others - form a strong cast, a group around whom Carver can illustrate and explore the foibles, failings and quiet triumphs of humanity. Triumphs? They are here. It would be tempting to characterise the Carververse as a dark, hopeless place but that would be wrong. His books - and Upstairs at the Beresford is particularly good at this - are unsparing of humanity's blushes, they pull no punches, but they are celebratory too - of human resilience, kindness, loyalty and especially, love. (When rarely, they are found).

We still, of course, metaphorically get to visit that crossroads from time to time - you know, the one where the Devil (or one of His minions, Old Nick is a busy chap) strikes a deal, giving the customer what he or she really, really wants for consideration of a single soul. We don't visit it for real, there are no excursions to a windswept heath or remote junction, but still the book takes us there, showing - and discussing - those who have made the journey before and pondering who may be along next, and why.

I've previously referred to these books as "moral noir" which is perhaps a bit silly because noir is all moral noir, but I was trying to make the point that for all the bloodshed and suffering here (and be warned there is plenty) the key events are, well, moral, internal, they are choices and lack or choices, responses to constraints and tight corners and above all, they derive form a calculus of self vs everyone else. Convincingly portrayed as it is - and the setting here really does draw on in - the real landscape is mental, ethical. 

Reading - and I assume writing - about this brings a sense of clarity, I think, which marks Carver's writing out as not only having real heft and importance but also as bracingly good in itself (despite the darkness billowing all around).

So - welcome to Hotel Beresford. You can leave whenever you want to. 

No, really, you can...

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

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

#Review - The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

The Echo Wife
Sarah Gailey
Hodder, 18 February 2021(HB), 8 July 2021(PB)
Available as: HB, 256pp, audio, e 
Source: Audio
ISBN(HB): 9781529354492

I listened to The Echo Wife as audio, completing it in the e-book as I got close to the end. Audio is the ideal medium for Evelyn's spiky, defensive story, Xe Sands' narration conveying the whole range of emotions from anger - so much anger! - to betrayal to grudging sympathy. The narration really takes flight to imply a whole world of unspoken truths festering just under the surface as Evelyn and the others here ignore awkward facts, look the other way, fail to understand things on purpose, and generally evade their way through the moral complexities of this twisty story.

Evelyn is a research scientist, a pioneer in the field of human cloning and especially, of "conditioning" the "specimens" to resemble - and act like - their originals. Gailey's writing is simply astonishing here, employing understatement and na clinical, precise register to show Evelyn and her co-workers apparently happy to accept all this entails: The creation of life.  Its manipulation. Its destruction when it doesn't come up to scratch, or when no longer required. A world of horror and suffering defined away in clipped, clinical language and then tidied away quickly. Evelyn doesn't need to think through the implications because these are simply not humans, are they? They are "specimens".

This isn't the only way in which Evelyn has learned to master her emotions. From her childhood, where she and her mother are at the mercy of a controlling and (it's implied, but never stated overtly) abusive father to her life with husband Nathan (the story opens just after their divorce) there is just so much not said. So much so that the silence, the passivity, actually gets quite LOUD, quite VIOLENT. Evelyn's determined not to be her father, afraid (though she won't admit it) that she will be. After all, wasn't she moulded by him (as she moulds her specimens?)

Questions recur. What makes us, us? What makes us, human? Answers are demanded as Evelyn is forced, after a catastrophe in her life, to cooperate with Martine, Nathan's new partner. Martine is all that Evelyn isn't. 

Compliant.

Obedient.

Demonstrative.

... willing to have a baby. 

Yet she's also, inescapably, a version of Evelyn, Nathan's idealisation of her. Again, what makes us, us? WHO makes us, us? 

Forced, for the sake of survival, to work together, the two women orbit one another, acting as two foci in a dialogue about freewill, humanity, selfhood. All of Evelyn's painfully acquired certainties will be challenged by Martine's sheer existence, her life an argument for other ways of seeing, other ways of being. It's a very claustrophobic piece. Evelyn and Martine - these two women, so different, so similar - endlessly fascinated me as they learned about each other and so, about life.

There are many bumps along the way. This is a world close to ours. It has Evelyn's marvellous cloning tech, but that's the only difference: women's existence, their participation, is still visibly on sufferance. (Evelyn knows she has to be better than any man, and resents manbaby Nathan, sloppy Nathan who never pays attention to his work and yet gets away with it.) There is the doctor who doesn't ask questions when a young girl is brought in with a broken wrist. There is the sense that, as Evelyn sees it, it's her, as a woman, who has the responsibility of organising everything for Nathan, of making plans and making things work - and then he goes and sulks because she burnt the eggs! 

For Evelyn, everything is about her legacy, her need to excel. We might wonder who, in her past, she is trying to impress? And just how far she will go, what she has to achieve, to do that? And who might get hurt?

There is just so much here, whether you see this as a classic SF novel - Evelyn an even more modern Prometheus, perhaps - as a study of living, of becoming, as a grim account of dominance and abuse or, possibly, as half a dozen other things. It is absorbing, accomplished, very sad in places and, in all, a terrific read. 

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

Review - Our Child of the Stars by Stephen Cox

Cover by www.leonickolls.co.uk

Our Child of the Stars
Stephen Cox
Jo Fletcher Books, 24 January 2019
HB, 483pp

Today I'm joining the blogtour for Our Child of the Stars, published on Thursday. I'm grateful to Jo Fletcher Books for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley - and indeed for a finished hardback copy too which is a real work of beauty.  If you can, take yourself to a bookshop and hold it in your hands! And then buy it, obviously.

I'd been looking forward to the book, based on advance "noise", and there was a extra layer of intrigue because of it being Cox's first book. That always raises the possibility of something a little different. I mean, obviously some aspiring authors will want to write, say, another space opera (or whatever) in line with all the previous space operas, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I've found that, in contrast, some debut authors produce books that are a little different (and not just in the "X meets Y" sense).

Cox's IS one of those, and the result is amazing. While this is firmly a SF novel - Aliens! Spaceships! - for much of the book that aspect is almost incidental. Allow yourself to suspend disbelief in a crashed alien spacecraft and a Government cover-up (and patently, lots of people do) and you have a story of a frightened, injured child and the woman and man who will do anything to protect him. And, eventually, of the others they gather around them to help.

The sheer verve with which Cox portrays these three - especially Cory, the alien child who wants so much to learn and experience the world and to put behind him the dreadful things that have happened - is a joy be read. After introducing the story with Cory's joyful Hallowe'en, Cox turns to Molly and Gene's background. It's the 1960s, they're a bit counter-cultural, stranded in hyper-conformist middle America under, I think, the Nixon administration with the Vietnam War in the background and the Cold War behind that. Molly finds Gene and Gene finds Molly, but it's not all roses. She suffers depression after a miscarriage and struggles with drink. He... can't cope and looks elsewhere. The effects of this are a major theme, sensitively handled, not just a hook so that their acceptance of the alien boy they call Cory is plausible.

That happens after an event called Meteor Day, bringing death and destruction to Amber Grove but also astounding new evidence of extraterrestrial life. The cover-up follows, something Cox makes very believable. I said above "Allow yourself to suspend disbelief", but remember, this is the late 60s we're talking about. In that period and running into the 70s such things were in the air (something expressed much batter than I can in the Hookland Guide, see https://hookland.wordpress.com/about/). The spectacular conspiracy sketched here, involving the President's Chief Scientific Adviser, the FBI, the CIA and more is actually very convincingly done, pitting the Myers against the apparatus of the State in defence of a child they fear will be treated as a monster. It's not only the US Government that pays attention - they need to worry about criminals, the Russians and inquisitive neighbours, too.

As all this develops, Cox succeeds in portraying the alien - the child - at the centre of everything as an inquisitive and hopeful, if very lonely and scared, little boy. Yes, you could see ET vibes here if you wanted but I think that by providing a substitute family for Cory - even as he mourns the death of his mother and his playmates and wishes for the return of "Cory people" to him - the central theme of love and acceptance is built into the heart of this book. And heart is the right word, this story has a great deal of it, dwelling on themes of motherhood, fatherhood and love that had tears in my eyes several times.

There is, also, a more conventional SF post going on in the background, which perhaps had John Wyndham-esque overtones (the disaster of Meteor Day is never really accounted for, nor a couple of other events which suggests a sequel in the works) but that felt, at times, a little optional to me in what is really a very human story. I said I hoped for something new and different, and the book delivers that, but it also does a very old thing in showing us ourselves through the eyes of a helpless and vulnerable stranger come to challenge and affirm our humanity.

(And if that last sentence feels as though it could have been written over Christmas you shouldn't be surprised. It may be early but this would make a great present for 2019 if you're the ultra organised type).

A great SF story, a great story of humanity, full of action but also of heart. Strongly recommended.

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

I really meant what I said about about holding this book in your hands in a shop! But if you want to skip that you can buy from Hive here - supporting local bookshops - or from Waterstone's, Blackwell's or Amazon.