Red Rising
Pierce Brown
Hodder, 2014
Paperback, 282 pages
Bought from my local independent bookshop.
I find it endlessly surprising and fascinating how, in a world of Twitter and blogs, I now find books to read. "Red Rising" is a good example. I somehow managed to miss this book despite it getting lots of praise
when it appeared earlier this year, but finally picked it up last week in
anticipation of the sequel which is due early in 2015.
I only did that because I saw Liz of Liz Loves Books claiming on Twitter that she'd been proselytising in a local bookshop, urging complete strangers to buy the book. It's always good seeing that kind of passion, and she also mentioned that there is a sequel coming, so I asked if I should give it a try...
Before I go any further, I should warn you, if you haven't read the book, that below THERE ARE SPOILERS. I could review this book briefly but I really want to discuss it in more detail because at actually made me think. So, proceed on that basis.
At first, I did wonder what all the fuss was about. The setting - a pitiless,
hierarchical society that keeps its most downtrodden, the "reds",
slaving in the mines of Mars - is well drawn, but it didn't seem anything
special. We're introduced to Darrow, the main protagonist, one of the reds, who toils in atrocious conditions to produce the minerals that are needed to make Mars habitable. If they strain every muscle and meet their quote, they may get a little more food to share, a few more comforts, and Darrow shows himself bold - almost reckless - in straining to achieve this. It's all a con, of course, and we pretty soon see that things are rigged to set the different miners against each other and keep the elite - the "golds" on top at all times.
Darrow suffers, having done nothing wrong: his wife is killed and is sentenced to death. He has no choices but to die or to join a vaguely sketched rebellion. The rebels want him to infiltrate the Golds' (the ruling caste) elite academy, the Institute, where the cosseted sons and daughters of the rulers are toughened up and turned into future commanders. The idea is, I think, that Darrow will rise and use his position in the hierarchy to bring down the system.
More about that below, but first I just want to say how brilliantly written and compelling Browns' subsequent narrative is. Forming the final two thirds or so of the book, this is essentially the story of a war, both between the aspiring Golds and between Darrow and them (and the system they're all trapped in). Quite simply this part of the narrative rises to a whole new level. Forget the improbability that Darrow would even get so far, or the scientific implausibility of aspects of the book (mining for helium-3, for example). The writing simply sweeps all before it. Darrow is drawn with great mastery; he is among enemies on all kinds of levels. The stakes are high for him - discovery will lead to a cruel death, not only for him but for his family and clan. For the sons and daughters of the Golds, losing means disgrace, but nothing more: think The Apprentice with swords.
Or does it? Things may not be quite that simple and - as becomes clear - things are rigged at all levels. The world of the Golds is supposed to me "meritocratic", that is, to let the best rise in order to preserve the order of Society: but as we know, power corrupts and those who have it aren't willing to let their own offspring go under.
That brings in a whole level of complications which Darrow must overcome if he is to win - and survive. But the setting he's in brings more. It's awkward, but he discovers that the Golds aren't all monsters: and perhaps some of the things he has to do and more monstrous than anything which has been done to him. How is he to pursue his mission - and his revenge? - amongst this?
I was impressed by Brown's command of the realities of the situation here. Darrow is bound to be compromised. For example, he falls for a girl, one of the other competitors, who turns out to have close connections to the worst of his enemies. He discovers that another is also a Red is disguise - and has to kill him. (Shades, perhaps, of GK Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday in which the Central Council of Anarchists is entirely composed of police infiltrators. I have a hunch that many of the most powerful Golds may be disguised Reds, and that this may even be winked at as a means to recruit the strongest, most driven new talent as a counterweight to the corruption caused by ingrained privilege).
The story of what happens in those "games" is, in short a lesson in power and a lesson in division: the structure of the mines is repeated at
all levels, with friend set against friend, brother against brother (and
sister). It's a compelling springboard for the second and third
volumes in the trilogy, where I hope to see some of the paradoxes of
Darrow's rebellion explored - quite simply, "change will not come from
above" and I don't see how command of a starship, or a fleet, is going to allow him to topple the rule of the Golds and bring his fellow Reds up form the mines.
I wonder how long it will take him to learn that?
Or whether
he will manage to avoid the dead end and achieve what he really wants?
Whatever, this is a trilogy where decisions matter, where there are real consequences and you can feel the reality of the choices.
I am so glad that I listened to Liz and got this book!
I like talking about books, reading books, buying books, dusting books... er, just being with books.
22 December 2014
20 December 2014
Review: Nunslinger by Stark Holborn
Nunslinger
Stark Holborn
Stark Holborn
Hodder, December 2014
Paperback, 614 pages
I was sent this book by the publisher through Bookbridgr.
I've never been a great reader of Westerns, and I'd find it hard to say what attracted me to this book in the first place, but I'm really glad I tried it.
Set in 1864, against a background of the US Civil War, this is the story of Sister Thomas Josephine, a nun sent on the dangerous journey West to join a convent in Sacramento. When the waggon train she is travelling with is attacked, she is abducted by the notorious outlaw Abraham C Muir. The two are a mismatched pair, but as they bicker their way through the wilderness, a real friendship seems to form between them. Will it survive brushes with the law, hunger and cold, and the rapacious spirit of greed abroad in the Frontier towns?
Forced by circumstances to take up arms, Thomas Josephine finds her beliefs challenged and is forced to take up arms. As the "Six-gun Sister" she becomes a terror across the west - and has a bounty set upon her head. With every shooting, every encounter with law or army (whether North or South) it seems less likely she will be able to find peace and security as she wishes, still less the life of prayer and good works that she has been trained for.
The book was fun to read, has a relentless, page-turning rhythm and, as the blurb promises, serves up cliff-hanger after cliff-hanger. Perhaps a little too much so - it's not long before the reader knows full well that Thomas Josephine will escape (more or less) intact from every dire situation. While this diminishes the tension somewhat, Holborn has set out a broad enough canvas that he's continually able to find something to surprise with and as the book draws to its climax we begin to learn what has really been going on and how what seem like random, picaresque adventures have something of a guiding hand behind them.
This isn't a book for the squeamish: there's a great deal of violence (visited on both guilty and innocent alike) and the most pleasant seeming of characters can turn rapidly bad. Thomas Josephine is at the centre of things, both morally and in terms of action, struggling to keep her vision alive, to walk in right paths and to escape the notoriety that has engulfed her (girls in the towns she passes through are soon playing at being the Sister). How far she achieves this is unclear, but the ending feels right for the spirit of the book.
3 December 2014
Review: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
The Book of Strange New Things
Michel Faber
I bought this book from our local independent bookshop.
I have been looking forward to reading more Michel Faber for years and years.
Like his last book, The Fire Gospel, published in 2009, "Strange New Things" has an ostensibly religious theme. Peter is a missionary, recruited by the inscrutable USIC organisation, a private company or foundation carrying out space exploration. We never learn what the initials stand for, or much else about USIC, except that it seems to have very deep pockets, having bought out NASA's former assets following a worldwide financial crash. USIC send Peter to a far planet to minister to the planets's indigenous people. It isn't immediately clear why USIC wants a missionary - though we do learn eventually that it's not a "Bible in one hand, gun in the other" situation: the Oasans (or at least, some of them) have demanded a replacement for Peter's predecessor. They are keen to hear more of the Book of Strange New Things (which is what they call the Bible). Again, we are (eventually) told why, but for much of the book it's a puzzle; Peter seems to have just too easy a time as a missionary with his willing and receptive flock and a supportive "employer" (the crew on Oasis are ordered to give him pretty much whatever he wants).
In other ways, he doesn't have such a good time. The crew are cooperative, but emotionally distant. Peter seems abstracted, continually forgetting what he has been told or done. Due to his forgetfulness, we're sometimes placed into situations cold, adding to the sense of weirdness that Faber skilfully applies to his alien planet - as if rain that gently explores one's body, or a featureless planet where the only landmarks seem to be regular, predictable storms weren't odd enough already. Mysteries abound - why did the Oasans (who are friendly and happy to trade with the humans) up sticks and move their settlement 50 miles away from close to the human base?
On Earth, where Peter's wife, Bea, is left behind, things are even worse. A string of disasters unfolds - earthquakes, tsunamis, more financial collapse, food shortages - which we only hear of secondhand through her messages to him. (No answer is given as to whether these disasters are somehow related). There are also personal crises and tragedies. The USIC people at the base seem to be screened from these, and show little interest when Peter tries to tell them: but he also loses interest quickly, absorbed by his work among the Oasans - which takes him away for weeks at a time from the machine that mediates between him and Bea. (And why is this device limited to text messages? Why won't cameras work on Oasis?)
So a gulf grows between husband and wife, with Bea's messages increasingly perplexed, angry and despairing and Peter's increasingly cold. He appears, in fact, very much a cold fish altogether and of the two it is Bea I found easier to relate to, Bea who I wanted to hear more about, Bea who is, frankly, more interesting. She appears both more active than Peter - we hear a lot about the people she is helping, the difficulties in her daily life, the plans she is making. Peter, in contrast, mooches off to stay with his congregation without even considering that he might need to take supplies with him. Frankly, he appears selfish. Not a likeable protagonist at all - yet an interesting one. I don't think I was ever sure whether he is desperately sad but suppressing his feelings in order to serve God; whether he is really as shallow as he seems; or whether he is playing a manipulative part (from snatches of information about Peter's earlier life this seems distinctly likely).
It's an intriguing book, a great slab of what comes over as very realist SF. We hear almost nothing of how the spacecraft can reach Oasis; as I said above, the disasters are never explained and while the alien civilisation is imagined very well there's almost no context, no setting: we have no idea where Oasis is. There is a here and a there. Oasis and Earth, that's all. Is it even a new planet? The description of the journey, the limited communications, constrained information, did make me wonder if the whole thing was an elaborate hoax, set up in a warehouse somewhere on Earth. But the Oasans don't really fit that idea, even before one considers their bizarre language, represented in the book by its own symbols.
It isn't always an easy read. One block for many will be Peter's (and Bea's) evangelicalism. What is Peter actually doing on Oasis and what does he think he'll achieve? I'm a Christian, but not that kind of Christian. I found myself wanting to shake him and ask "Look at what you're losing! Look at all you could be doing at home on Earth! What is the point?"
Peter's mindset is more alien to me, frankly, than that of the "alien" Oasans. So Faber has aleady created distance there. I think it's brave of him to write something that uses religion as a motivating factor like this given how secular society is now. Like "the Crimson Petal and the White" there is a sense of Victorian-ness about the outlook. (Of course, The Fire Gospel also took religion seriousness, and Under the Skin set up an encounter with aliens that was in many ways a diabolical inversion of Peter's gentle preaching).
There's so much more I could say about the book - from its sheer physical beauty (the white dustjacket, with gold embossed patterns and the title also embossed on the board cover, resembles a wedding or baptism Bible) to its length (plenty to get stuck into but the pages fly by) to the enigmatic hints about Peter's and Bea's troubled early life - but I will I think just end up gushing. This book simply bowled me over, and you should read it, if you like strange new things - and who doesn't?
Michel Faber
Canongate, October 2014
Hardback, 584 pages
I bought this book from our local independent bookshop.
I have been looking forward to reading more Michel Faber for years and years.
Like his last book, The Fire Gospel, published in 2009, "Strange New Things" has an ostensibly religious theme. Peter is a missionary, recruited by the inscrutable USIC organisation, a private company or foundation carrying out space exploration. We never learn what the initials stand for, or much else about USIC, except that it seems to have very deep pockets, having bought out NASA's former assets following a worldwide financial crash. USIC send Peter to a far planet to minister to the planets's indigenous people. It isn't immediately clear why USIC wants a missionary - though we do learn eventually that it's not a "Bible in one hand, gun in the other" situation: the Oasans (or at least, some of them) have demanded a replacement for Peter's predecessor. They are keen to hear more of the Book of Strange New Things (which is what they call the Bible). Again, we are (eventually) told why, but for much of the book it's a puzzle; Peter seems to have just too easy a time as a missionary with his willing and receptive flock and a supportive "employer" (the crew on Oasis are ordered to give him pretty much whatever he wants).
In other ways, he doesn't have such a good time. The crew are cooperative, but emotionally distant. Peter seems abstracted, continually forgetting what he has been told or done. Due to his forgetfulness, we're sometimes placed into situations cold, adding to the sense of weirdness that Faber skilfully applies to his alien planet - as if rain that gently explores one's body, or a featureless planet where the only landmarks seem to be regular, predictable storms weren't odd enough already. Mysteries abound - why did the Oasans (who are friendly and happy to trade with the humans) up sticks and move their settlement 50 miles away from close to the human base?
On Earth, where Peter's wife, Bea, is left behind, things are even worse. A string of disasters unfolds - earthquakes, tsunamis, more financial collapse, food shortages - which we only hear of secondhand through her messages to him. (No answer is given as to whether these disasters are somehow related). There are also personal crises and tragedies. The USIC people at the base seem to be screened from these, and show little interest when Peter tries to tell them: but he also loses interest quickly, absorbed by his work among the Oasans - which takes him away for weeks at a time from the machine that mediates between him and Bea. (And why is this device limited to text messages? Why won't cameras work on Oasis?)
So a gulf grows between husband and wife, with Bea's messages increasingly perplexed, angry and despairing and Peter's increasingly cold. He appears, in fact, very much a cold fish altogether and of the two it is Bea I found easier to relate to, Bea who I wanted to hear more about, Bea who is, frankly, more interesting. She appears both more active than Peter - we hear a lot about the people she is helping, the difficulties in her daily life, the plans she is making. Peter, in contrast, mooches off to stay with his congregation without even considering that he might need to take supplies with him. Frankly, he appears selfish. Not a likeable protagonist at all - yet an interesting one. I don't think I was ever sure whether he is desperately sad but suppressing his feelings in order to serve God; whether he is really as shallow as he seems; or whether he is playing a manipulative part (from snatches of information about Peter's earlier life this seems distinctly likely).
It's an intriguing book, a great slab of what comes over as very realist SF. We hear almost nothing of how the spacecraft can reach Oasis; as I said above, the disasters are never explained and while the alien civilisation is imagined very well there's almost no context, no setting: we have no idea where Oasis is. There is a here and a there. Oasis and Earth, that's all. Is it even a new planet? The description of the journey, the limited communications, constrained information, did make me wonder if the whole thing was an elaborate hoax, set up in a warehouse somewhere on Earth. But the Oasans don't really fit that idea, even before one considers their bizarre language, represented in the book by its own symbols.
It isn't always an easy read. One block for many will be Peter's (and Bea's) evangelicalism. What is Peter actually doing on Oasis and what does he think he'll achieve? I'm a Christian, but not that kind of Christian. I found myself wanting to shake him and ask "Look at what you're losing! Look at all you could be doing at home on Earth! What is the point?"
Peter's mindset is more alien to me, frankly, than that of the "alien" Oasans. So Faber has aleady created distance there. I think it's brave of him to write something that uses religion as a motivating factor like this given how secular society is now. Like "the Crimson Petal and the White" there is a sense of Victorian-ness about the outlook. (Of course, The Fire Gospel also took religion seriousness, and Under the Skin set up an encounter with aliens that was in many ways a diabolical inversion of Peter's gentle preaching).
There's so much more I could say about the book - from its sheer physical beauty (the white dustjacket, with gold embossed patterns and the title also embossed on the board cover, resembles a wedding or baptism Bible) to its length (plenty to get stuck into but the pages fly by) to the enigmatic hints about Peter's and Bea's troubled early life - but I will I think just end up gushing. This book simply bowled me over, and you should read it, if you like strange new things - and who doesn't?
23 November 2014
Review: Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch
I bought this book from Waterstones
Foxglove Summer
Ben Aaronovitch
Gollancz, October 2014
Hardback, 394 pages (Waterstones edition with extra short story)
In this fifth Peter Grant book, Aaronovitch is
on top form, as is Peter. Two girls have gone missing in Herefordshire,
and Grant heads out of the city to investigate any Folly-related
aspects of the case. It's a refreshing change from London, for us and
him, and a nice departure in a sub-genre where - implicitly or
explicitly - serious business ends at the M25.
So, here, while Peter is very much "of London" and the strapline on the cover - "Two missing children. One lost copper" - hints that he may be out of his depth - he isn't fazed by being in the countryside, and instead shows the same professional approach to policing (natural and supernatural) as in the previous books, getting himself attached first to the missing girls' families as a liaison officer and then working methodically as part of the enquiry. I always enjoy Aaronovitch's refreshing alternative to the "lone gun" stereotype of crime fiction (or for that matter, the "lone wand" model of supernatural fiction!)
As a reader of Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins series (about a vicar who investigates mysteries in her role as diocesan exorcist) which are set in the same area, I did wonder if there'd be any crossover... and indeed, at one point Grant is told he should talk to the local vicar... but, probably wisely, this doesn't go any further (Ben/ Phil - maybe though, one day, we could have short story...?)
The book is to some degree also fairly standalone within its series, with little need to have read the previous books (though Beverley Brook does turn up to help Peter). Given events in Broken Homes, Lesley Sharp is off the scene and Nightingale is tied up at the Folly. So there's not much development of the ongoing "faceless man" theme (though we do finally discover what actually happended at Ettersburg).
In all, a good addition to the series, broadening its range and showing that Aaronovitch still has a great deal to do with these characters - it's far from running out of steam (indeed the climax rather depends on it).
So, here, while Peter is very much "of London" and the strapline on the cover - "Two missing children. One lost copper" - hints that he may be out of his depth - he isn't fazed by being in the countryside, and instead shows the same professional approach to policing (natural and supernatural) as in the previous books, getting himself attached first to the missing girls' families as a liaison officer and then working methodically as part of the enquiry. I always enjoy Aaronovitch's refreshing alternative to the "lone gun" stereotype of crime fiction (or for that matter, the "lone wand" model of supernatural fiction!)
As a reader of Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins series (about a vicar who investigates mysteries in her role as diocesan exorcist) which are set in the same area, I did wonder if there'd be any crossover... and indeed, at one point Grant is told he should talk to the local vicar... but, probably wisely, this doesn't go any further (Ben/ Phil - maybe though, one day, we could have short story...?)
The book is to some degree also fairly standalone within its series, with little need to have read the previous books (though Beverley Brook does turn up to help Peter). Given events in Broken Homes, Lesley Sharp is off the scene and Nightingale is tied up at the Folly. So there's not much development of the ongoing "faceless man" theme (though we do finally discover what actually happended at Ettersburg).
In all, a good addition to the series, broadening its range and showing that Aaronovitch still has a great deal to do with these characters - it's far from running out of steam (indeed the climax rather depends on it).
15 November 2014
Review: Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans
I was sent a copy of this book for review by Amazon Vine.
Crooked Heart
Lissa Evans
Doubleday, November 2014
Hardback, 288 pages
I loved Lissa Evans' previous novel, Their Finest Hour and a Half. Like that book, "Crooked Heart" is set in Britain during the darkest days of the Second World War - and again, it follows the lives of ordinary people through that time, against the background of the London Blitz. Evans is good at describing the lives of people caught up in, or affected by, terrible events but without, directly, addressing those events: a refreshing approach, I find.
Ten year old Noel has been brought up in Highgate by his eccentric (though rather wonderful sounding) godmother, Mattie. She was a suffragette, and brings him up in a take-nothing-for-granted, fight -for-what-you-believe-in fashion. However, as war comes, bringing changes such as the erection of an anti-aircraft battery nearby on the Heath, Mattie becomes stranger and stranger - and one day, Noel finds himself quite alone. he has to leave his home and move in with his stuffy uncle and aunt (there is a slight frisson about just who Noel really is) before being evacuated from London to St Albans and placed in the care of Vee.
Vee is something of a chancer: she is already struggling to keep her family together - a useless lump of a son and a Starkadder-like mother who had a nasty shock years before and never speaks who Vee runs herself ragged keeping fed and clean. Hard enough at the best of times, but a nightmare in wartime when you can queue for an hour at the fishmonger only to find that all the hake is gone at the end of it.
Noel and Vee are an ill assorted pair; it's clear Vee has taken him on for the sake of the ten shillings a week provided to foster parents, and for his ration book - while Noel is all closed in on himself, missing his godmother. The book shows very movingly, though, how the two grow together and begin to support one another, at first of necessity, but later - as things get darker and darker with an edge of real menace - from real affection and feeling.
The wartime background to this book isn't quite the one we're familiar with from countless cheery, we-can-take-it films and history books. Yes, we CAN "take it": everyone, it seems, is "on the take", stealing or creaming off what they can, some just to make ends meet, others with profit in mind. There are scams to avoid the call up, thefts by air raid wardens from empty homes, dodgy dealings with stolen fuel, fake charity collections, false identities... with the ceaseless bombing, queueing and shortages becoming almost like the weather, just something going on out there, to be accepted with a shrug.
That background does, though, suddenly loom terrifying close, demanding a response from both Vee and Noel. This all feels very real to me - people aren't heroes, at least not most of the time. And when they are, it's in the most unlikely ways.
A wonderful book.
Crooked Heart
Lissa Evans
Doubleday, November 2014
Hardback, 288 pages
I loved Lissa Evans' previous novel, Their Finest Hour and a Half. Like that book, "Crooked Heart" is set in Britain during the darkest days of the Second World War - and again, it follows the lives of ordinary people through that time, against the background of the London Blitz. Evans is good at describing the lives of people caught up in, or affected by, terrible events but without, directly, addressing those events: a refreshing approach, I find.
Ten year old Noel has been brought up in Highgate by his eccentric (though rather wonderful sounding) godmother, Mattie. She was a suffragette, and brings him up in a take-nothing-for-granted, fight -for-what-you-believe-in fashion. However, as war comes, bringing changes such as the erection of an anti-aircraft battery nearby on the Heath, Mattie becomes stranger and stranger - and one day, Noel finds himself quite alone. he has to leave his home and move in with his stuffy uncle and aunt (there is a slight frisson about just who Noel really is) before being evacuated from London to St Albans and placed in the care of Vee.
Vee is something of a chancer: she is already struggling to keep her family together - a useless lump of a son and a Starkadder-like mother who had a nasty shock years before and never speaks who Vee runs herself ragged keeping fed and clean. Hard enough at the best of times, but a nightmare in wartime when you can queue for an hour at the fishmonger only to find that all the hake is gone at the end of it.
Noel and Vee are an ill assorted pair; it's clear Vee has taken him on for the sake of the ten shillings a week provided to foster parents, and for his ration book - while Noel is all closed in on himself, missing his godmother. The book shows very movingly, though, how the two grow together and begin to support one another, at first of necessity, but later - as things get darker and darker with an edge of real menace - from real affection and feeling.
The wartime background to this book isn't quite the one we're familiar with from countless cheery, we-can-take-it films and history books. Yes, we CAN "take it": everyone, it seems, is "on the take", stealing or creaming off what they can, some just to make ends meet, others with profit in mind. There are scams to avoid the call up, thefts by air raid wardens from empty homes, dodgy dealings with stolen fuel, fake charity collections, false identities... with the ceaseless bombing, queueing and shortages becoming almost like the weather, just something going on out there, to be accepted with a shrug.
That background does, though, suddenly loom terrifying close, demanding a response from both Vee and Noel. This all feels very real to me - people aren't heroes, at least not most of the time. And when they are, it's in the most unlikely ways.
A wonderful book.
9 November 2014
Review: Dark Tides by Chris Ewan
Source: I bought this book at Blackwell's
Dark Tides
Chris Ewan
Faber & Faber, October 2014
Hardback, 448 pages
Presumably aimed at the Hallowe'en market, this book follows events taking placed among a group of six friends on 31 October - Hop-tu-Naa on the Isle of Man which we're told is the local version of Hallowe'en. Early on, we get a glimpse of a mother determined to inculcate the local traditions in her daughter, though I couldn't for the life of me see much difference (or any, really) between these and the wider trick-or-treating of the English speaking world.
What is different here is the private rite of the six friends, who adopt the habit of a yearly dare on that night itself, taking turns to specify what is to be done. Of course, the dares become more complicated - and more dangerous - and they become especially personal to Claire, whose mother vanished years before on Hop-tu-Naa. Is Claire's desire to know what happened that night deluding her about the dangers she is running, or will solving that mystery save her as things begin to take a deadly turn?
Ewan doesn't tell his story sequentially: while all the action takes place on - or around - a Hop-tu-Naa, they aren't presented in order. While that maintains the mystery to a degree - we don't know all of what Claire knows till the very end - it inevitably lessens some of the tension since we can keep checking what the date is and inferring that she will escape more or less unscathed from the current hazard...
Until that last Hop-tu-Naa, of course...
This is a pacey and engaging thriller, where the real mystery is less what has happened (though that features) but what will happen, who, if anyone, will survive and how damaged they will be if they do. Definitely one to be read on a dark winter's evening, and I suspect it wouldn't get the wholehearted endorsement of the Manx Tourist Board.
Dark Tides
Chris Ewan
Faber & Faber, October 2014
Hardback, 448 pages
Presumably aimed at the Hallowe'en market, this book follows events taking placed among a group of six friends on 31 October - Hop-tu-Naa on the Isle of Man which we're told is the local version of Hallowe'en. Early on, we get a glimpse of a mother determined to inculcate the local traditions in her daughter, though I couldn't for the life of me see much difference (or any, really) between these and the wider trick-or-treating of the English speaking world.
What is different here is the private rite of the six friends, who adopt the habit of a yearly dare on that night itself, taking turns to specify what is to be done. Of course, the dares become more complicated - and more dangerous - and they become especially personal to Claire, whose mother vanished years before on Hop-tu-Naa. Is Claire's desire to know what happened that night deluding her about the dangers she is running, or will solving that mystery save her as things begin to take a deadly turn?
Ewan doesn't tell his story sequentially: while all the action takes place on - or around - a Hop-tu-Naa, they aren't presented in order. While that maintains the mystery to a degree - we don't know all of what Claire knows till the very end - it inevitably lessens some of the tension since we can keep checking what the date is and inferring that she will escape more or less unscathed from the current hazard...
Until that last Hop-tu-Naa, of course...
This is a pacey and engaging thriller, where the real mystery is less what has happened (though that features) but what will happen, who, if anyone, will survive and how damaged they will be if they do. Definitely one to be read on a dark winter's evening, and I suspect it wouldn't get the wholehearted endorsement of the Manx Tourist Board.
2 November 2014
Review: A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar
A Man Lies Dreaming
Lavie Tidhar
Hodder & Stoughton, 23 October 2014
Hardback, 288 pages
Source: Purchased from my local independent bookshop
In this book, as with his earlier Osama, Tidhar plays games with an alternate version of a real monster. This brilliant, haunting book raises many questions about guilt, evil and redemption but gives few answers, instead, it leaves the reader to ponder.
In another time and place, it is November 1939. Down-at-heel German émigré Wolf is a Chandleresque private eye living in squalid Soho among prostitutes and posturing Blackshirts. In this reality, The Nazis never came to power in Germany, but fled when the Communists took over. Wolf once was a Somebody, now he is a nobody, eking out a living as his old comrades prosper.
And, as befits a Chandleresque fantasy, one day, a dame walks in to Wolf's shabby office, a dame with a problem.
We soon learn that Wolf, too, has a problem - his client is Jewish, but he is an anti-semite, indeed, an ex-leader among anti-semites. So slternating between his diary entries and third person narration, we see him struggle with this case, a case he is forced to take on to stay alive in that very cold winter, but a case with which he becomes strangely absorbed.
The questions, of course, come straight away. Wolf, in the manner of PIs in Chandlerseque novels, is warned off, attacked, arrested, released and beaten again. He - the real Wolf, the man who rose to power - was an evil monster, so this must be deserved, surely? Yet the Wolf of the story, while vile, isn't that monster, is he? He took the first steps to monsterdom but never made it to the summit. Instead, here, in a swipe I think at current times, we see other monsters - Mosley and his followers - speaking of a country being "swamped" by foreigners, while Wolf sees the nationalist rhetoric turned against him and his Germans. We see American agents, proponents of "regime change". We see a murderer, watching from the shadows and killing those same prostitutes whom Wolf despises, but never harms.
If you're the sort of reader who has to have "sympathetic" characters, don't even start this, you simply won't get it. Nobody in London, 1939 - except perhaps one or two minor characters - is "sympathetic". They live in a tainted world, where the night has eyes, and all choices are bad ones.
Yet there are sympathetic characters in the book. Interleaved with Wolf's story are fragments of lives in the camps, where Shomer, a writer of Yiddish pulp tales, labours for his tormentors. Is Shomer dreaming Wolf? Yes, to a degree, though of course the detail of Wolf's life, the politics of 1939 England, the life Wolf lives is beyond what a Shomer would know. is Wolf, perhaps, dreaming Shomer, as he - Wolf - haunts a 1939 that seems to foretell 2014, with ghostly outlines of modern London and ghastly, hate filled rhetoric from a vile and bigoted politics.
How to write about the Holocaust? Tidhar asks this question explicitly and returns to it in his endnotes (which meticulously document what's true both in the camp narrative and in Wolf's life). Like this, is his answer. Compellingly, vividly, keeping those big questions of guilt, memory, good and evil in clear sight but never supplying glib answers.
It's an enthralling book, filled with violence, depravity, lots of graphic sex, humour (Wolf runs into his old friend Leni Riefenstahl, who's starring in a film about a little bar in a war-torn North Africa: "We'll always have Nuremburg" she sighs) but above all with intelligence and an unflinching view of history - both what it was and what it might be.
By far and away the best book I've read this year, confirming Tidhar, in my view, as a towering writer not just (just?) of fantasy but of literature.
Lavie Tidhar
Hodder & Stoughton, 23 October 2014
Hardback, 288 pages
Source: Purchased from my local independent bookshop
In this book, as with his earlier Osama, Tidhar plays games with an alternate version of a real monster. This brilliant, haunting book raises many questions about guilt, evil and redemption but gives few answers, instead, it leaves the reader to ponder.
In another time and place, it is November 1939. Down-at-heel German émigré Wolf is a Chandleresque private eye living in squalid Soho among prostitutes and posturing Blackshirts. In this reality, The Nazis never came to power in Germany, but fled when the Communists took over. Wolf once was a Somebody, now he is a nobody, eking out a living as his old comrades prosper.
And, as befits a Chandleresque fantasy, one day, a dame walks in to Wolf's shabby office, a dame with a problem.
We soon learn that Wolf, too, has a problem - his client is Jewish, but he is an anti-semite, indeed, an ex-leader among anti-semites. So slternating between his diary entries and third person narration, we see him struggle with this case, a case he is forced to take on to stay alive in that very cold winter, but a case with which he becomes strangely absorbed.
The questions, of course, come straight away. Wolf, in the manner of PIs in Chandlerseque novels, is warned off, attacked, arrested, released and beaten again. He - the real Wolf, the man who rose to power - was an evil monster, so this must be deserved, surely? Yet the Wolf of the story, while vile, isn't that monster, is he? He took the first steps to monsterdom but never made it to the summit. Instead, here, in a swipe I think at current times, we see other monsters - Mosley and his followers - speaking of a country being "swamped" by foreigners, while Wolf sees the nationalist rhetoric turned against him and his Germans. We see American agents, proponents of "regime change". We see a murderer, watching from the shadows and killing those same prostitutes whom Wolf despises, but never harms.
If you're the sort of reader who has to have "sympathetic" characters, don't even start this, you simply won't get it. Nobody in London, 1939 - except perhaps one or two minor characters - is "sympathetic". They live in a tainted world, where the night has eyes, and all choices are bad ones.
Yet there are sympathetic characters in the book. Interleaved with Wolf's story are fragments of lives in the camps, where Shomer, a writer of Yiddish pulp tales, labours for his tormentors. Is Shomer dreaming Wolf? Yes, to a degree, though of course the detail of Wolf's life, the politics of 1939 England, the life Wolf lives is beyond what a Shomer would know. is Wolf, perhaps, dreaming Shomer, as he - Wolf - haunts a 1939 that seems to foretell 2014, with ghostly outlines of modern London and ghastly, hate filled rhetoric from a vile and bigoted politics.
How to write about the Holocaust? Tidhar asks this question explicitly and returns to it in his endnotes (which meticulously document what's true both in the camp narrative and in Wolf's life). Like this, is his answer. Compellingly, vividly, keeping those big questions of guilt, memory, good and evil in clear sight but never supplying glib answers.
It's an enthralling book, filled with violence, depravity, lots of graphic sex, humour (Wolf runs into his old friend Leni Riefenstahl, who's starring in a film about a little bar in a war-torn North Africa: "We'll always have Nuremburg" she sighs) but above all with intelligence and an unflinching view of history - both what it was and what it might be.
By far and away the best book I've read this year, confirming Tidhar, in my view, as a towering writer not just (just?) of fantasy but of literature.
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